THE ROYAL GREEN JACKETS
And Former Regiments
The Formation and Origins of the Regiment
On 1st January 1966 The Royal Green Jackets was formed as a single Large Regiment. Its creation followed logically from the composition of The Green Jackets Brigade in 1958, which grouped together three former single-battalion infantry regiments:
The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
(43rd & 52nd)
The King's Royal Rifle Corps
The Rifle Brigade
It was no accident that these particular regiments,
each having had such a distinguished record in the past, should have
progressively, voluntarily and successfully come together, avoiding the
stresses which often accompany amalgamations, because they shared a large
measure of their history and their traditions. They, and The Royal Green
Jackets as their heir, lay claim to being the innovators who developed
much of the new thinking in the British infantry in the fields of tactics,
training, equipment and man-management from the mid-eighteenth century
onwards.
The leadership
of such distinguished officers as Henri Bouquet, Francis de Rottenburg,
Coote Manningham and Sir John Moore generated a succession of advanced
ideas later to be adopted as ideals by the rest of the Army: open-order
tactics and mobility in place of rigid drills and ponderous movement,
camouflage and concealment in place of serried ranks of red coats,
individual marksmanship in place of massed musket fire, and intelligence
and self-reliance in place of blind obedience instilled by the fear of
brutal punishment. The following pages will trace these themes as they
record the stories of four regiments whose fortunes were often closely
linked to the point where they fuse together in The Royal Green Jackets of
today.