Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  When Hanway Cumming joined 91st Brigade he found that his brigade major was Captain R. N. O’Connor of the Scottish Rifles (the future General Sir Richard O’Connor of Western Desert fame), who had been in his company when he was an instructor at Sandhurst. He got on well with Herbert Watts, the divisional commander, and found the staff ‘very capable and helpful and assisted the divisional staff in making the divisional machine “go on oiled wheels”’. However, Cumming was sacked by one of Watts’s successors after a sharp difference of opinion during the attack on Croisilles in April 1917. He was lucky to be appointed commandant of the Machine-Gun School at Grantham, retaining his rank, suggesting that he had been reported on as exhausted rather than incompetent, and in February 1918 he was sent back to command a brigade in France.

  Officers returning from England designated for brigade or battalion command were often held in a pool at the base, in a practice not dissimilar to (though infinitely more comfortable than) the retention of drafts at Etaples until they were posted to battalions. It was not until he reached France on his return in early 1918 that Cumming was told that he was to command 110th Brigade of 21st Division, and he had some difficulty in finding out where it was. He eventually arrived at Longavesnes, behind the Cambrai sector, to meet the divisional commander, Soarer Campbell, who told him that the division was understrength and overextended, largely as a consequence of the reduction of brigades from four battalions to three because of a shortage of manpower. The division’s command structure provides a fine example of the state of the army’s upper echelons at this stage of the war. Campbell, its commander, we know already. Cumming himself was a pre-war regular, a company commander in 1914 and battalion commander in 1916. The other two brigades in the division, 62nd and 64th, were commanded by brigadier generals G. H. Gater and T. Headlam. Whereas Tommy Headlam was a regular with a conventional career path, George Gater was a civilian when war broke out:

  he had never thought of soldiering before the war, but had joined up as soon as it started and worked his way up to his present rank. He was a first-class Brigade Commander, very able and quick; indeed, it was difficult to imagine him in any other capacity.74

  By 1918, then, brigadiers came from the full span of the old, new and territorial armies, and although the system favoured pre-war regulars there were some extraordinary examples of the rise of the gifted amateur. Perhaps the most striking case of the dramatic rise of a regular is that of Roland Boys Bradford. He joined the regular army from the territorials in 1914 and was a second lieutenant on the outbreak of war. He won a Victoria Cross commanding 9/Durham Light Infantry on the Somme, and became a brigadier general in November 1917. Bradford enjoyed his new rank for only three weeks, and was killed at Cambrai. Aged only twenty-five, he was the youngest British brigade commander in either world war. Two of his brothers were also killed, one, George, winning a posthumous VC in the raid on Zeebrugge in 1918. More common were cases like that of Arthur Johnson, commissioned into the Worcestershire Regiment in 1903 but still, with the glacial promotion after the Boer War, a very senior lieutenant in 1914. He shot up swiftly, with a longish tour in the key job of brigade major, to get his brigade in September 1917. Johnson was badly wounded only two days after assuming command, took no further part in the war, and retired as a colonel in 1937.

  Some of the amateur soldiers did just as well. Arthur Hubback, an architect, late of the Malay States Volunteer Rifles and the London Regiment, commanded 2nd Brigade in 1st Division as early as March 1916. A. C. Lowe, late of the Honourable Artillery Company, Britain’s oldest volunteer unit, was killed at Ypres as commander royal artillery of 66th Division in November 1917. Ralph Husey, a former trooper in the Yeomanry, later commissioned into the London Rifle Brigade, had earned a bar to his DSO, when commanding a battalion in March 1918: ‘He used a rifle himself at close range and inflicted many casualties on the enemy.’ He did not live long enough to enjoy his brigade, for he was mortally wounded on the Chemin des Dames in May 1918. But as far as combat commands were concerned brigadier was the amateur’s ceiling, and divisional commanders were chosen from an all-regular pool.

  Some contemporaries, and too many historians, alleged that the BEF was commanded by cavalry generals. ‘The Army Chiefs were mostly horsemen,’ maintained Lloyd George, while A. J. P. Taylor announced that ‘most British generals were cavalry men’ and Robert Graves went further to opine: ‘All our generals were cavalrymen …’.75 The official historian Sir James Edmonds, neither considering the important issue of how long generals spent in command, nor taking much trouble over his maths, wrote that ‘of the nine generals who commanded Armies, five were cavalrymen, three [actually four, and one with two tours as an army commander] infantrymen and one was a gunner’.

  So what is the truth? Both commanders in chief were certainly cavalry officers. But the spread is much wider amongst army commanders. Haig commanded 1st Army for most of 1915, but handed it over to Charles Monro, an infantryman, and he passed it on, in September 1916, to Henry Horne, a gunner, who commanded it thereafter. Horace Smith-Dorrien, an infantryman, was commander of 2nd Army for the first four months of its existence, and handed it over to Plumer, another infantryman, who commanded it for the rest of the war. Third Army was formed in July 1915 under Monro, who passed it on late that October to Allenby, a cavalryman. When Allenby was moved on in the wake of the Arras battle in the spring of 1917, Julian Byng, a fellow cavalryman, took over and led 3rd Army for the rest of the war. Fourth Army was commanded by Rawlinson, an infantryman, for most of its existence. Fifth Army was headed by Hubert Gough, a cavalryman, in 1916–17, briefly by Rawlinson in 1918, and then by the cavalryman William Birdwood at the end of the war. In short, both 2nd and 4th Armies were always commanded by infantrymen; 1st Army was commanded by a cavalryman for only one year of its three-year life; and both 3rd and 5th Armies were predominantly commanded by cavalrymen, although the latter was only in existence for the second half of the war. If we look at this in rough terms of ‘months in command of armies’, then cavalrymen commanded armies for about one-third of the time.

  The spread is even wider at the corps level. Andy Simpson’s painstaking work identifies forty-seven corps commanders on the Western Front. Of these 60 percent came from the infantry; 19 percent from the cavalry; 17 percent from the artillery and 4 percent from the engineers. Although cavalry officers were indeed over-represented, he suggests that if time in command is considered then the cavalry officers in his more detailed sample of nineteen corps commanders actually commanded for less time than their peers and therefore ‘can be assumed to have been (on average) less influential as corps commanders’.76 There is not yet a study of comparable quality for divisional commanders, but in November 1918 the proportion originating in the infantry was far higher than this, with just five cavalrymen commanding infantry divisions. In short, although there were more cavalry major generals and above than would have been the case if command appointments had been allocated simply on the proportion of officers in the pre-war army, the disproportion was not excessive. Though we now have more detailed statistics than were available to John Terraine when he first wrote on this issue in 1980, it is impossible to deny the truth of his assertion that: ‘The overwhelming majority of generals actually handling troops in battle came, as one might expect, from the arm which produced the overwhelming majority of those troops, the infantry.’77

  And what is the alleged predominance of cavalry officers meant to prove? Edmonds, himself an engineer, saw in ‘the cavalry spirit’ what he termed ‘pressure for haste and to expectation of gain of ground incompatible with siege warfare in the field by men who had to struggle over shell-pocked ground and through deep mud’.78 This may be a fair comment on Allenby’s handling of the latter stages of Arras, though it bears no relation to 3rd Army’s very careful artillery preparation for the battle, the most sophisticated employed by the British army to that date. And it may indeed be a justified criticism of much of Gough’s conduct of Third Ypres. Bu
t it is an odd judgment on Byng, whose army produced the plan for Cambrai, the world’s first large-scale tank battle.

  Nor is it a complaint that can be levelled against Birdwood, who made his reputation commanding Australians, who were often critical of Pommy generals but took ‘Birdy’ to their hearts. The much-decorated Adrian Carton de Wiart recounts a frequently-told story:

  General Birdwood … passed an Australian soldier who took no notice of him … the officer told him it was his G.O.C. General Birdwood. This elicited the reply ‘Well,

  why the—doesn’t he wear a feather in his tail like any other bird would?’79

  And in neither his tactical methods nor his personal appearance did he have much in common with the popular image of the cavalry officer. Rowland Feilding saw him in September 1918.

  The newspapers have always made such a hero of him that I was prepared to be disappointed: but he certainly has a clear eye and a talking manner with both officers and men: and he talked sound common sense in his address to the Brigade, which is more than one always hears on these occasions.

  In appearance he is straight and upright, and he has far less ‘red tab’ about him than the most junior member of his staff. He does not even wear a ‘red hat’. Moreover, he is evidently not punctilious about his clothing, for the spikes of his belt were missing, and the latter was done up anyhow …

  So huge is the scale on which this war is being fought that it’s a great event to see one’s Army Commander.80

  It is more likely that it has simply become a gratuitous calumny to refer to an unsuccessful or unpopular general as a cavalry officer. Siegfried Sassoon gives us a vignette of Rawlinson ‘as he squelched among the brown tents in his boots and spurs’ in mid-1916, which induces us to forget that Rawlinson was actually an infantry officer.81 Finally, the success of cavalry officers such as Campbell and Bethell in command of infantry divisions suggests that an officer’s arm of origin mattered far less than his ability to find practical solutions for the myriad problems of trench warfare.

  Another great myth is that generals were always remote from their men and free from their risks. Although Lloyd George cannot be blamed for starting this hare, he hallooed it on its way with more gusto than honesty, as was his way. His War Memoirs frankly accuse generals of reluctance to risk their skins, an odd kettle-blackening exercise for someone of Lloyd George’s lack of physical courage. More recently, John Prescott’s foreword to a good study of the Hull Pals described how: ‘Senior officers well behind the enemy lines seldom felt the conditions of horror, or the bitter consequences of their orders, ignored the growing list of casualties and enforced a brutal discipline which saw the shooting of shell-shocked soldiers.’82

  It is abundantly clear that British generals of the First World War were more likely to be killed in action than those of the Second. The term ‘general’ was technically wider in the first war, because brigadier generals had become brigadiers tout court by the second. But even if we start with major generals then the toll on the Western Front is very heavy indeed. Of the first seven divisional commanders to go out to France, Hubert Hamilton was killed and Samuel Lomax mortally wounded in October 1914, and Tommy Capper (a great proponent of the offensive spirit, whose death surprised no-one) was mortally wounded in September 1915. Reginald Tompson was downcast to hear of Capper’s death, but agreed that ‘the ambition of his life was to be killed in action, which is some consolation. A braver man & a better general never walked.’83 In contrast, one British divisional commander (the admirable Tom Rennie of 51st Highland) was killed in North-West Europe in the Second World War, and another two in other theatres. Nine British divisions were committed at Loos, six in the first attack and three in subsequent manoeuvres: three divisional commanders – Capper, Frederick Wing and George Thesiger – were killed. Loos was a bad time for red tabs: Brigadier General Bruce was captured when his position was overrun on 25 September, Brigadier General Nickalls was killed on the 26th, Capper died on the 27th, Thesiger was killed and Brigadier General Pereira was wounded on the 27th, Wing was killed on 2 October and another brigadier was wounded the following day. On 3 October Wully Robertson, French’s CGS, felt obliged to warn senior commanders that:

  Three divisional commanders have been killed in action during the past week. These are losses which the army can ill afford, and the Field Marshal Commanding in Chief desires to draw attention to the necessity of guarding against a tendency by senior officers such as Corps and Division Commanders to take up positions too far forward when fighting is in progress.84

  This slowed but did not end the haemorrhage. Edward Ingorville-Williams fell on the Somme and Robert Broadwood in Flanders. Edward Feetham died during the German March offensive, and Louis Lipsett was killed, like so many of his soldiers, during the bloody fighting of the last Hundred Days. The Canadians and Australians each lost a major general, Malcolm Mercer and William Holmes respectively. If we add brigadier generals, then the total for general officers killed or died of wounds received on the Western Front is no less than fifty-eight. There is no accurate figure for the number of generals of all ranks wounded, though it is probably more than 300, and includes some spectacular examples like Tom Bridges (major in 1914 and temporary major general three years later), who lost a leg at Passchendaele while characteristically trudging through the mud when it was ‘raining old iron’.

  Around 70 percent of soldiers killed on the Western Front were the victims of indirect fire, that is, of the fragments or blast effect of shells or trench mortar bombs. But in the case of generals killed in action, where the cause of death is known, thirty-four were killed by shellfire and twenty-two by small-arms fire. The generals who died were actually more likely to be killed by small-arms fire than the men they commanded, which says much about their proximity to the front. Thus, on 21 September 1917, Brigadier General Frank Maxwell, who had won his VC at Koorn Spruit in 1900, ‘whilst superintending consolidation, was killed by a sniper at 40 yards range. A born leader, he had always been regardless of personal safety, and was at the time sitting on the front of the parapet, watching wiring.’85 Major General Lipsett was hit in the face by a burst of machine-gun fire while walking in front of his line on 14 October 1918, and Brigadier General Lumsden was killed on 4 June 1918, probably by rifle fire and certainly in the front line.

  Amongst all the British generals in the war no less than ten held the Victoria Cross, the nation’s highest award for gallantry; 126 held the DSO, twenty with one bar denoting a second award, two with two bars and one with three. There were just three Military Crosses (scarcely surprising, as it was only available for junior officers and warrant officers and was not introduced till December 1914), one Albert Medal, and one Distinguished Conduct Medal won while serving in the ranks in South Africa. Much can be said about the generals of the First World War, but they were certainly not physical cowards.

  Many generals came from military families and had relatives at the front. Walter Congreve lost his boy Billy on the Somme: Stanhope thought him ‘the best staff officer of any that I have met in France’. Congreve was at a conference when the bleak news arrived, but he declined to stand down, affirmed that ‘He was a good soldier,’ and carried on. Herbert Lawrence lost both his sons on the Western Front. Allenby had departed to command in the Middle East by the time his only son Michael was killed, and the grief nearly broke even this iron man. The death of close friends and relatives sent rings of sorrow rippling into higher headquarters. ‘Poor Sandy Wingate was killed yesterday fighting his trench-mortar battery at one of the most dangerous parts of the line,’ lamented Charteris from GHQ on 19 October 1915.

  He and I were friends from the age of 10 onwards … He was doing well. It is the best of the nation who are called to die. He was one of the best. Only one name on a list of the killed – but a name I have had in my mind from my earliest youth – the name of a dear friend of my whole life.86

  Generals were not just in danger from German shells and bullets but from
their own superiors. Even the very senior were not safe from being ‘degummed’ (from the French dégommé, unstuck), or, in reference to the town to which unsuccessful commanders were posted in the Boer War, ‘Stellenbosched’. Horace Smith-Dorrien was dismissed as commander of 2nd Army during Second Ypres, ostensibly because, in French’s words, he had ‘failed to get a real “grasp”’ of the situation, and his messages were all ‘wordy, “windy” and unintelligible’.87 In fact French’s dislike of Smith-Dorrien went back before the war. French was a flamboyant cavalryman and Lothario, and Smith-Dorrien a strait-laced, happily-married infantryman. When Smith-Dorrien arrived in France in August 1914 to replace Lieutenant General Sir James Grierson who had died of a heart attack on his way to the concentration area, French was not pleased to see him. He had asked for Plumer instead, and was irritated to hear that Smith-Dorrien had been asked to correspond personally with the king. Although most historians regard Smith-Dorrien’s decision to stand and fight at Le Cateau on 26 August that year as the right one, French, in private, thought that he had endangered the army by fighting instead of continuing the retreat.

  French himself was replaced in December 1915, and Haig’s leaking of papers on the handling of the reserves at Loos played its part in bringing him down. It is unlikely that Haig himself would have survived beyond the winter of 1917 had a suitable alternative been available. Lloyd George sent the South African premier Jan Smuts and the Secretary of the War Cabinet Maurice Hankey on a visit to see who might take over, but they reported that there was no obvious candidate. However, French, now commander in chief of home forces, was bitterly resentful of the role that Haig had played in his own downfall, and lost no opportunity to intrigue against him. When the Germans attacked in March 1918 there was the customary search for a scapegoat, and French, just back from a War Cabinet meeting, confided to his diary: ‘Expressed myself very strongly as to the necessity for an immediate investigation into the question of adequate command … As regards the Chief Command I expressed the strong conviction that Haig should be replaced by Plumer.’88 Not all Haig’s critics took the view that the moment was ripe. General Sir Henry Wilson, Britain’s senior representative on the Allied Supreme War Council, told Lloyd George that ‘the Government would not get anyone to fight a defensive battle better than Haig, and that the time to get rid of him was when the German attack was over.’89 In the event Haig dismissed Gough, whose 5th Army had been most heavily bruised by the attack. He is said to have admitted that somebody would have to go, and believed that the army could stand Sir Hubert’s loss better than his own.