Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
and I love history. And if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
So many celebrities have seen distinguished military service in their time that it would be
easy just to do a channel about their experiences, to the stars in service. It's not that celebrities
suffer more than common soldiers, it's that their fame can help to illustrate the suffering of war.
And one startling example of that occurred during the Great War, when four of who would become the
world's most famous movie stars served in the same famed British regiment, and their experience
says much about the horror of that war. It is history; that deserves to be remembered.
Facing the rising demands of defending its vast empire, in 1859 Jonathan Peel,
the British Secretary of State for War, authorized local counties to form a voluntary Rifle Corps
which would serve as a Ready Reserve for the army. The movement was popularized by the poem
Rifleman Form written by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1859. “Storm, storm, rifleman form! Ready,
be ready against the storm! Rifleman, rifleman, rifleman form!” According to a report in April of
1862, the volunteer force had a strength of over a hundred sixty two thousand.
One such unit that was formed was the London Scottish Rifle Volunteers,
formed in 1859 from a meeting of Scottish residents of the City of London. In 1909,
the Volunteer Force was reorganized as the Territorial Force, and designated as that
force that would defend the home islands in time of war, freeing the Regular Army for service
overseas. But when the Great War started, units of the Territorial Force were given the option
of serving overseas as well. The 1st Battalion of the London Scottish was the very first infantry
battalion of the Territorial Force to join the British Expeditionary Force fighting in France,
and one of the first soldiers to go with it, was Private Ronald Colman.
Artillery had been a critical component of warfare for centuries, but the nature of the threat of
artillery changed in the Great War when industrial might, and the limits of static warfare,
resulted in more and larger guns. Some sections of the Front average more than 100 artillery
pieces per mile. A well-trained crew could fire an artillery piece about every two seconds,
firing ever larger, and more explosive shells. In the barrage before one battle in 1917,
the British Army fired three and a half million artillery shells, and as many as 60 million
were fired at the Battle of Verdun. Private Coleman was the victim of one such shell,
receiving shrapnel wounds in the ankle and knee, in the fabled Flanders Field. The wound
would cause him to limp the rest of his life, but he was able to cover that, as a unique,
sort of jaunty walk that became characteristic of the swathe leading man who starred in dozens
of Hollywood films. Known for the titular role in 1926, Beau Geste, and the starring
role in Frank Capra's 1937 masterwork, Lost Horizon. Coleman was three times nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Actor, winning for his role in the film, A Double Life, in 1947.
Already an established actor, 27 year-old Claude Rains said of himself when he enlisted in the
London Scottish in 1916, “I was not heroic, I just knew I'd be ashamed of myself if I did not”. One
of the true terrors of the Great War was the use of chemical weapons. While such weapons had been
used in previous Wars, their first widespread use was on the battlefields of the First World War.
Although it could be deadly, killing nearly a hundred thousand troops during the war,
poison gas was used more as a terror weapon with the goal of demoralizing and injuring troops,
and gas shells were often mixed with explosive shells during barrages. In November of 1916,
Private Rains was caught in one such attack, becoming one of the nearly 180,000 British
casualties of poison gas during the war. As a result, he lost most of his vision in his right
eye, and his vocal cords were paralyzed. His eyesight never returned, but his voice did come
back albeit with a lower huskier quality that was the hallmark of the star of 1933, the Invisible
Man. A Tony Award winner, he was four times nominated for Academy Awards for Best Supporting
Actor, and perhaps best known for his role as Captain Renault in the classic movie, Casablanca.
Herbert Marshall was an established stage actor when he enlisted in the London Scottish in June
of 1916, spending ten months in the trenches in what he called, “Terrific boredom”. While
sharpshooter's have been playing a role in war since the introduction of the firearm, and
telescopic scopes were being attached to rifles as early as the Crimean War, snipers had not been
developed into a professional arm of armies until the Great War. At the outset of the War, only
German soldiers were outfitted with scope equipped rifles, and the Germans developed a reputation for
deadly accuracy, partly because Germany was able to manufacture higher quality lenses for the rifle
scopes. Private Marshall was a victim of one such sniper, struck in the knee during an offensive in
the French city of Arras. After several surgeries to try to repair his leg, it had to be amputated
at the hip. He learned to walk with a very square shoulder gait, and the use of a prosthetic
leg was hardly noticeable for the popular actor, who graced more than a hundred film,
and TV roles. Notably starring opposite Marlena Dietrich in, The Letter, in 1940, and in an Alfred
Hitchcock's 1930 film, Murder, and 1940 film, Foreign Correspondent. Although modern viewers may
know him best for his character role as Inspector Shiraz, in the 1958 horror classic, The Fly.
Although admitting that he felt no, “call to duty” as so many who enlisted, Basil Rathbone
nonetheless joined the London Scottish regiment in March of 1916, completing officers training camp,
and being commissioned a Second Lieutenant. While concealment had always been some part
of military tactics, the proximity of trenches, and the use of aerial reconnaissance, made it a
central part of military doctrine during the Great War, when the French slang word, camouflage, first
came into widespread use. An intelligence officer, Rathbone was tasked with sneaking through No-Man's
Land at night, to try to gather information on enemy trenches, and defensive works. Frustrated
by their inability to gather good information while “fooling around in the dark'', he suggested
camouflaging his group as foliage, and gathering information during the day. Dressed in leaves,
with their face and hands darkened with soot, they crept ever so slowly across the battlefield, and
were able to surprise and kill a German soldier, and gather information from papers in his pockets,
before him being spotted, and having to flee home under machine-gun fire. All four of his group
made it back to their lines okay, and Rathbone earned the Military Cross for the daring raid.
Such an adventure was perhaps fitting for the star of adventure films such as Captain Blood,
The Adventures of Marco Polo, The Mark of Zorro, and famously, the 1938 film, The Adventures of
Robin Hood opposite Errol Flynn, and co-starring fellow London Scottish veteran, Claude Rains.
And he was, of course, most famous for his many films playing the iconic role of Sherlock Holmes.
The London Scottish served throughout the Great War, both on the Western Front and in Palestine.
In all, 1,542 members of the regiment lost their lives in the Great War. That four of the most
famous actors of their era, combining for hundreds of iconic film roles in some of the most important
films of their day, and winning a combined, one Academy Award, nine Academy Award nominations,
two Tony Awards, and seven stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, all served in the same British
regiment in the First World War, is testament to a time when the entire world was at war,
and everybody was expected to contribute. And while we remember them for their iconic
film roles, their film personalities cannot be separated from their experiences in the War,
Rains husky voice, Marshalls square-shouldered stance, Coleman's jaunty walk, all trademarks
of their characters were actually responses to the wounds they received during the war.
While, for example, Hollywood was able to successfully hide the fact that Herbert Marshall
used a prosthetic leg, he suffered from ghost pain his entire life, and severe pain from the straps
that were used to hold on the prosthetic; and during the Second World War, he counseled other
war amputees. But perhaps their successful film careers had more to do with their war experience
than even that, because war inevitably changes a person. As Ronald Coleman later said of his war
experience, “We went out...strangers came back. It was the War that made an actor out of me,
that's all I was good for when I came back, acting. I wasn't my own man anymore”.
I’m the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this episode of my series, 5 minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes long, and if you did enjoy then please
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