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That's the Explorers Podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to history of the Second World War, episode 90, The British Empire, Part 5, Army of Empire.

This week, a big thank you goes out to Mark for the donation to the podcast.

Donations are just one way you can support the podcast. You can find out about all available

options over at History of the Second World War.com slash members. During the First World War,

the British Army had been forced to drastically expand. Before the war had started, the British army was a small

professional army built around the needs of empire. While this structure worked well in smaller

colonial conflicts around the world, when met by the demands of a European continental war,

the entire structure had to change. Of first, it was massively increased in size through

volunteers, then later through the

implementation of a military draft. After the war was over in 1918, it then once again rapidly

decreased in size, to be more in line with what it had been before 1914. In many ways,

the British Army settled back into a role that it knew how to execute quite well and how to interact with the

challenges that it faced, maintaining and defending imperial holdings around the world.

There were more of those than ever before in 1918 with the introduction of the mandate system,

and budgets were tight, but at least the commitments were familiar.

Unlike some other armies that launched directly into studies of the

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