King's Royal Rifle Corps

• 1. Introduction

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  The King's Royal Rifle Corps was born in the forests of North America, conceived not in London or Edinburgh but in the colonies themselves, where the old rules of European warfare were proving useless. The year was 1756. A year earlier, General Edward Braddock had led British regulars into the Pennsylvania wilderness and suffered a catastrophic defeat. His men, trained to fight in open fields in neat lines, were ambushed and cut to pieces by an enemy who knew the trees. Parliament took notice. Before Christmas 1755, royal approval and funds were granted for something entirely new. The regiment would carry that date as its traditional birthday: Christmas Day.

  What Parliament actually authorised was radical. A special act passed on the 4th of March 1756 created four battalions of a thousand men each. Crucially, foreigners could serve. Swiss and German forest-fighting experts, American colonists, and volunteers from other British regiments were all recruited together. It was the first time foreign officers were commissioned as officers of the British Army. The regiment that emerged from this experiment would serve for more than two hundred years, across every corner of the British Empire, and its story is a thread running through some of the most consequential moments in military history.

• 2. A Regiment Like No Other

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  Jacques Prevost, a Swiss soldier and adventurer and a friend of the Duke of Cumberland, was the man credited with proposing the new regiment. The Duke was the King's third son and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, and Prevost had his ear. Prevost's argument was simple: the regulars Braddock had brought to America in 1755 did not understand forest warfare. A new kind of soldier was needed.

  The regiment was designed as a hybrid: part colonial corps, part foreign legion. Officers came not from the American colonies but from England, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany. The enlisted men were required to be Protestants, a deliberate choice given that the enemy was predominantly Catholic France. In total, the regiment mustered 101 officers, 240 non-commissioned officers, and 4,160 enlisted men. They were raised on Governors Island, New York.

  Parliament voted the sum of £81,000 for the purpose, and to supply experienced officers, it passed the Commissions to Foreign Protestants Act 1756. About fifty officers' commissions went to Germans and Swiss, though none could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel. The Earl of Loudoun, as commander-in-chief of the Forces in North America, was appointed colonel-in-chief. The regiment was originally numbered the 62nd, then renumbered the 60th (Royal American) Regiment in February 1757 when two other foot regiments were struck from the rolls after their surrender at Fort Oswego.

• 3. Henry Bouquet and Forest War

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  Henry Bouquet, a Swiss citizen, was among the distinguished foreign officers given a commission in the 60th Royal Americans, and he became the clearest expression of what the regiment was meant to be. Bouquet commanded the 1st Battalion. His ideas on tactics, training, and the treatment of soldiers were well ahead of their time. He introduced the rifle informally and pushed for practical clothing better suited to bush-fighting. These innovations would only be accepted as standard in the British Army many years later.

  Elements of the regiment fought at Louisbourg in June 1758, at the Cape Sable Campaign in September 1758, and at Quebec in September 1759. At Quebec, General James Wolfe is said to have granted the 60th its motto: Celer et Audax, Latin for Swift and Bold. The Montreal Campaign, running from July to September 1760, finally secured Canada from France.

  Pontiac's War in 1763 posed a different kind of challenge. Where the earlier battles had followed recognisable European patterns, the frontier conflict that erupted after the fall of New France was guerrilla warfare in its rawest form. Several outlying garrisons, including Fort Michilimackinac, fell to indigenous forces early in the conflict. A detachment then fought under Bouquet's leadership at the Battle of Bushy Run in August 1763, a victory that helped relieve besieged Fort Pitt. To reward the foreign soldiers for their loyalty, Parliament passed the American Protestant Soldier Naturalization Act 1762, offering British citizenship to officers, engineers, and soldiers who had served or would serve for two years.

• 4. Empire and Evolution

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  After the Napoleonic Wars, the regiment's identity was reshaped through a series of name changes. In 1815, it became The Duke of York's Own Rifle Corps. In 1830 it took the name it would carry for more than a century: the King's Royal Rifle Corps. The Rifle Depot at Winchester was established as the regiment's headquarters in 1858.

  The regiment fought in the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882, and Private Frederick Corbett was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions at Kafr Dowar, Egypt, on the 5th of August 1882. That honour was later rescinded when Corbett was convicted of embezzlement, theft, and being absent without leave. During the Second Boer War, the regiment was deployed from the outset and played a significant role at Talana Hill. Lieutenant Frederick Roberts and Lieutenant Llewelyn Alberic Emilius Price-Davies were both awarded the Victoria Cross during that conflict.

  The regiment also sent around a hundred cadets to serve in South Africa under the City Imperial Volunteers in 1900, when the commanding officer, Colonel Freeman Croft-Wills, persuaded the War Office to accept them. Four cadets were killed in action. King Edward VII later granted the cadet battalion the battle honour 'South Africa 1900-1902,' making it the only cadet unit in the United Kingdom to hold such a distinction. The announcement was made personally by King George V, then Prince of Wales, when he distributed prizes at the Guildhall in London.

  In 1926, the KRRC was reorganised as one of the first mechanised infantry regiments in the British Army, a shift that pointed toward how it would be deployed in the next great conflict.

• 5. North Africa and the Desert War

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  When the Second World War began, the 1st Battalion deployed to North Africa under the initial command of Lieutenant Colonel William Gott. It fought as part of the pivot group within the 7th Armoured Division at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in November 1941, a brutal engagement that would define the Western Desert Campaign's character. Rifleman John Beeley was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions during Operation Crusader in North Africa in late 1941.

  The 2nd Battalion's war took a different and darker turn. Commanded initially by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wilson, it landed in France in May 1940 as part of the 30th Infantry Brigade. Under Lieutenant Colonel Euan Miller it was deployed to the defence of Calais, where the brigade slowed the German advance and gave time for the Dunkirk evacuation to proceed. The battalion was lost in that defence. It was reformed in the summer of 1940 under Lieutenant Colonel George Erskine, attached to the 22nd Armoured Brigade, and went on to fight at the Battle of Gazala in May 1942 and the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942.

  The reformed 2nd Battalion followed the war to its end. Under Lieutenant Colonel W. Heathcote-Amory, it took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 and the subsequent campaign in North-West Europe, leaving the 1st Division six days after VE Day. Two officers of particular note served with the battalion in that final campaign: Roland Gibbs and Edwin Bramall, names that would carry weight in British military life long after the war was over.

• 6. Amalgamation and Legacy

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  In 1958, the KRRC was grouped with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Rifle Brigade to form the Green Jackets Brigade, an administrative arrangement that marked the beginning of the end for the regiment as a separate entity. The KRRC was re-titled the 2nd Green Jackets, the King's Royal Rifle Corps. In 1966, the three regiments were formally amalgamated into the Royal Green Jackets, and the KRRC became the 2nd Battalion of that regiment.

  The lineage continued to shift. When the 1st Battalion of the Royal Green Jackets was disbanded in 1992, the KRRC battalion was redesignated the 1st Battalion. In 2007, that battalion became the 2nd Battalion, The Rifles, the large regiment that now carries forward the traditions of all three Green Jackets regiments.

  The regiment's history and collections are held at the Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum, based at Peninsula Barracks in Winchester, the city that had been the regiment's headquarters since 1858. The 1st Cadet Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps still exists, with companies in Paddington, Westminster, Camden, and Putney, and its cadets are still called riflemen, a small but tangible continuation of a regiment whose origins lay in the forests of colonial America more than two and a half centuries ago.