I accept from the outset that more experienced researchers at The National Archives (TNA) who frequent this forum may not find this post useful but I post it to try to help those even greener than me who are planning a research visit. Firstly, while units in combat were more likely to have their war diaries digitised, and therefore downloadable, home units and command papers I was interested in, were never digitised. My comments may or may not be relevant to the other regional commands.
I wanted to find out all the non American units based at a site in Western Command area in WW2. I went armed with about two year’s intense internet search work and a proposed timeline, but incomplete. I needed to fill the timeline. It was easy to justify the timeline by pulling the war diaries of the units I had identified, but how do you find out who was in a location when you have no information?
The relevant regional command was in control of most, if not all troops in its area. I tried using the Western Command (G) or general files. These war diary entries were just that, a diary of the war in WC. It was a list of events such as submarine sightings, and a long list of air raids, damage and later in the war Italian and German POW escapes, often with names. Rarely were UK units or army camp locations mentioned.
WC (A) or adjutant files were far more useful. Most helpful was a monthly list of new units being mobilised or demobilised in the command each month. Here some caveats. WC stretched from S Wales to Carlisle and most of the Midlands. The geographical knowledge of the diary compiler can mislead, as can the names a military camp is called by the compiler, the local military and the local population.
I thought I had solved the missing gap timeline as I saw the names of units given for what I thought was my location in the gap period. However the officer in Chester (WC HQ) used the name of the local large town to record these units location. The problem was, there were three large army camps around the town and the diary was not specific. I only proved the unreliability by losing an hour’s research time and reading the unit diaries that did exist and finding their actual location. Sadly, diaries do not exist for every unit and especially units at company level. Battalion unit commanders are just as guilty of mixing up the official camp name and the local civilian names.
Orders of battle records exist in the WC records for WC commanded units, but these only appeared to list unit names and not locations.
I did not have time to use many of the other available WC papers held by chaplains, provost, royal engineers, quartermasters (QM) etc., but a trawl through these may yet reveal unit names as a result of site visits by the file holder. For instance Donnington (Shropshire) store was mentioned by the WC QM as a result of a site visit following a fire. There is probably more local material I think in these “tactical” day to day lower rank central files.
I hope this helps.
FoAM
Researching the history of home based British Units and their locations in WW2
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