Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  Generals, he maintained, were too old and tended to circulate between senior appointments. For instance, General Sir Cyril Deverill, just appointed to Eastern Command, had ‘commanded both a brigade and a division in France, and since the war has commanded a division and an Indian district, and has also been QMG and CGS in India. It is seventeen years ago that he reached the rank of divisional commander and every subsequent appointment has carried him upwards.’40 Kennedy was not to know it, but Deverill went on to be promoted field marshal and appointed CIGS in 1936. The reforming Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, reckoned that, at sixty-four, Deverill was past his best, and moved him on after twenty months in post.

  The inter-war army was hamstrung by glacially slow promotion: in 1937 Robert Bridgeman found himself still a regimental captain at the age of forty-one, and it was ‘nineteen years but a few weeks from the day I took over my first company to the day I handed over my last’.41 Small wonder that, as one subaltern observed in 1925, officers ‘live on in hopes of either another war or a recurrence of the Black Plague’.42 Spike Mays enlisted in the Royals in 1924 and found his officers very much of the traditional stamp, though there was little remoteness. The regiment was still mounted, and at morning stables Lieutenant Whittle mucked out with the men: he ‘commanded from us solid admiration and respect for a real man, which developed to that unsentimental affection known only to soldiers.’ Mays maintained that ‘Cavalry officers were the best in the world … They always inspired confidence and respect in their men, although in some cases courage exceeded wit and knowledge … There was friendliness as well as discipline, and both were sure and certain.’43

  What was less sure and certain was how the army would react to the challenge of another world war. This time there was to be no delay in introducing conscription, which came into force on 3 September 1939, but the army itself, peaking at 2,920,000 in 1945, would never reach the size it had in the First World War, when it stood just below 3,900,000 between August 1917 and March 1918. Part of the reason for the difference was the huge size of the RAF at 950,000 strong in 1945 from just 144,000 when it came into being in April 1918. The army was always handicapped by the fact that it was regarded as the least attractive of the services, and the sort of men who had volunteered so enthusiastically in 1914 found the RAF or the navy more enticing in 1939–40. In July 1942 the army established the General Service Corps scheme, enabling recruits to be properly assessed: only 6 per cent seemed to be potential officers. At the beginning of the war there were some 14,000 regular officers and up to 19,000 Territorials, and just under a quarter of a million officers were commissioned during the war, the higher officer-to-man proportion reflecting the burgeoning of technical posts that were deemed to require commissioned rank. But it was to be true that, exactly as had been the case in the First World War, most of the army’s officers were drawn from men who had been civilians when the conflict began.

  To start with, the selection process, and the logic that underpinned it, had echoes of 1914. General Sir John Dill, then at Aldershot Command and CIGS from May 1940 to December 1941, told Field Marshal Montgomery-Massingberd that ‘men will follow and work better for some lad who is a gentleman than they will for a more experienced WO. It has always been so.’ Anthony Eden, secretary of state for war in 1940, thought that the best officers would have received the traditional education of an English gentleman. In 1940 he ruled against following the RAF’s example of giving direct commissions to Polish officers, arguing that ‘The officer in the Royal Air Force Squadron is first a technician and a commander only second; the army officer must be a leader first and a technician only second.’44

  Accordingly, at the beginning of the war the potential officer was reported on by his CO and then generally interviewed by his divisional or district commander, a process that tended to encourage the selection of men from traditional officer-producing backgrounds. Adam Stainton was a Wykehamist who reported for military service in September 1939, enlisted into the Oxfordhsire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry – and was then told to go away till summoned. He read history at Christ Church, Oxford until, having become ‘extremely restless’ at the prospect of invasion, he accepted an invitation to meet an officer recruiting for the Brigade of Guards. ‘We met in a civilised way over the luncheon table,’ he recalled, ‘and probably the Coldstreamer’s main object was not so much to assess our military potential as to see whether we could wield a knife and fork adequately.’ He reported for duty at the Guards Depot, then at Caterham in Surrey, in January 1940, and found himself in the potential officers’ ‘Brigade Squad’, ‘which I thought was a pity, as it would have been the only time in our service when we could have mingled with ordinary soldiers on completely equal terms’. After two months he was sent to Sandhurst, which had by then been redesignated 161 Infantry Officer Cadet Training Unit, and was a second lieutenant in the Scots Guards by the end of the year. He was serving in Italy in the autumn of 1943 when his father wrote to say that his call-up papers, promised in September 1940, had at last arrived.45

  Robin Schaefli had been in the OTC at Whitgift School, and when called up into the Essex Regiment in August 1940 he found that half his platoon were classified as potential officers because they had obtained Certificate A through the OTC. Basic training was a great leveller, but

  Very much as I had hoped, I enjoyed the whole process no end … Some just objected to uniforms, uniformity and being told exactly what to do and when to do it. I never minded any of this, and even more enjoyed the other side of the coin – living and working hard with a crowd of others, such as I had never known before, who soon became a team and worked up a wonderful spirit. Whatever the hardship or discomfort, someone always saw the funny side and we had a good laugh. I found that in all kinds of circumstances throughout the war.

  In his case there was no formal selection process, and ‘We potential officers were, if proved good enough in the ranks, waiting for the call to one of the Officer Cadet Training Units (OCTUs) situated mostly in peacetime holiday resorts.’ Schlaefli’s time at the depot came and went, and with one other exception all his comrades were posted away, and ‘we were sent to join the platoon of men for whom there was no posting – those with crime records, psychiatric disorders and flat feet.’ Eventually they were both sent to OCTUs, and he concluded that the delay had been caused by his unusual surname and the fact that his comrade was ‘suspect because, his father having been a correspondent of The Times in Tienstin and his mother a White Russian, he could have been some sort of Red mole’.46 Norman Craig, called up into the Welch Regiment in May 1940, failed the first fence when his company commander told him, ‘Your platoon sergeant doesn’t think you are good enough for a stripe – how do you expect me to recommend you for a commission? … When you can convince Sergeant Bull that you are worth a stripe, I might think again.’ He completed his basic training, earned the elusive stripe, and was then interviewed by the second in command of his battalion and the RSM. When he admitted to reading poetry the latter looked at him with ‘undisguised contempt’, and asked if he played any games. He replied that he had played rugger for the battalion, ‘and that raised my stock a little’. The major then asked if his father had any money ‘What I mean … is that if you got into a scrape would he help you out with a fiver?’ A few weeks later Craig was told to get ready to leave for an OCTU.47

  That year Command Interview Boards were set up, and by 1941 most candidates passed through them. Each had a permanent president, with two field officers brought in for the day. Gerald Kersh, though writing with tongue in cheek, tells how he found the board’s obstacles easy to circumnavigate. When he announced that he was a journalist, the president pounced:

  ‘What do you think of layout?’ he asked me.

  I suspected a trap. I fenced: ‘It depends what you mean by layout?’

  The Brigadier said: ‘I mean to say’ – and his face contorted in a spasm of distaste – ‘I mean to say this business of using all
this different kind of type; big type, little type, all this different kind of type. What do you think about it?’

  I said ‘I think it is absolutely disgusting, sir.’

  ‘So do I. To my mind, Mr Kersh, good material doesn’t need layout. Poppycock!’

  ‘How right you are, sir!’ I cried with fervour, clapping my hands in ecstasy, ‘how very right! And how well you put it!’

  ‘Good wine needs no bush, does it?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir – no bush at all, sir.’

  He told the board that although he wrote for the Daily Mirror he never read it, but took The Times instead, and, if given fifty pounds and a fortnight’s holiday, he would go on ‘a nice long walking tour’ – in Wales. He left feeling that ‘His Majesty’s Commission was as good as in my pocket.’ On his way back to the Guards Depot on the train, though, he concluded that being an officer would separate him from his fellow soldiers, and later asked his CSM to remove him from the list of potential officers. ‘Some people are worse than bloody women,’ groaned Sergeant Major ‘Iron’ Duke. ‘Don’t make their minds up. Are you sure now? All right. I’ll tell Captain The Lord Hugh Kennedy.’48

  Boards like this were less than successful. By 1942 up to half the men they sent up to OCTUs failed. Too many of those who passed, subsequently broke down under stress; several of those who failed maintained that they had been rejected because of snobbery, and by mid-1941 complaints resulted in the secretary of state receiving up to thirty parliamentary questions a week.49 From April 1942 a new system of officer selection was introduced, and it remains in use, with modifications, to the present day. The War Office Selection Board (WOSB, universally pronounced ‘Wozbee’) embodied the belief that leadership was not an inherited quality, and was based on principles enunciated in J. Simmoneit’s 1922 book Wehrpsychologie, which had become the basis for officer selection in the German army. Each board consisted of a permanent president supported by experienced regimental officers, a psychiatrist (inevitably known as the ‘trick cyclist’) and a psychologist. Over three days candidates underwent a mixture of individual tests, ‘leaderless tasks’, ‘group tasks’, went over an assault course, were interviewed by the psychiatrist (Gerald Kersh remembered an unedifying conversation as to whether writers saw mankind ‘looking down, or at least looking on from some place apart’), discussed current affairs and talked on a nominated subject.50 Duncan Leitch Torrance was delighted when asked to talk about a horseshoe, because his father was a vet and they had discussed this very subject on his last leave: he passed, notwithstanding an officer’s smug reservations about the state of his PT vest. Geoffrey Picot, who had been unhappy as a lance corporal clerk in the Pay Corps, attended a WOSB at Winchester, had the usual difficulties with the psychiatrist (he thought most words in the word association test seemed to concern either war or sex) and was told that although he was ‘too slow, too sleepy, too weak, too soft, too dreamy and so forth’ to be a field artillery officer, he would do well enough in the anti-aircraft branch, and was accordingly sent off to the OCTU at Llandrindod Wells in February 1943.51

  Despite the objectivity of WOSBs, it is not surprising that 34 per cent of officers commissioned during the war had attended public schools, for the self-confidence acquired by those who had made their way through the monitorial system could be a real help where group tasks were concerned. Many public school boys who served their time in the ranks commented on the fact that they found, like Adam Stainton, ‘the constant chasing around and the total lack of privacy of the barrack room easier to endure than did a recruit straight from home’. He certainly found Caterham food a good deal better than that served at Winchester College.52 Overall, WOSBs had a good effect, for they encouraged men who might not normally have thought of themselves as officers to apply for commissions, and did much to persuade unsuccessful candidates that there were objective reasons for their rejection, and it was not all down to old school ties or funny handshakes.

  Having passed a WOSB the potential officer then went on to a four-month course at an OCTU, sometimes going to a pre-OCTU first to be brought up to standard, often in infantry training, the essential basis for so much of what was taught. OCTUs themselves were a mixed bag. They were special-to-arm. In 1940, for instance, the Royal Artillery ran: 121 OCTU at Aldershot, 122 OCTU at Larkhill, 123 OCTU at Catterick, 124 OCTU (AA) at Llandrindod Wells, 125 OCTU at Ilkley, and 133 OCTU (AA) at Shrivenham. Robin Schaefli went off to 166 OCTU on the Isle of Man to be turned into an infantry officer, and thoroughly enjoyed it. ‘I had never been anywhere so lovely before,’ he wrote, ‘and was able to cover the length and breadth of it either on training exercises, when we took turns to pretend to be officers; or on Saturday afternoons to play rugger against other service teams in Castletown, Peel or Ramsey.’53 Norman Craig, also in the infantry, went to 163 OCTU, in a requisitioned holiday camp at Heysham Towers near Morecambe:

  The cadets came from a wide variety of regiments and were readily distinguishable by their headgear. The Guards contingent, consisting of a few foot-stamping sergeants and one erstwhile warrant officer of frightening dignity and military omniscience, wore smart round caps with the peaks almost touching their noses. A group of former tank men with dour faces and unsteady legs, had black berets pulled well over the right ear. A handful of pale-faced and long-haired intellectuals from rifle regiments, still dazed by their rejection from a motorised infantry OCTU, wore green side-caps perched very straight on their heads. The ebullient Scots sported their motley range of bonnets and tartan glengarries in any way they chose. The remaining cadets from the miscellaneous county regiments made do with standard forage caps, balanced at varying angles and each with a distinctive badge. Only the shining white capband was worn by everyone, to denote our new-found status and common objective.54

  It was generally agreed, though, that there was far too much drill, and that in consequence men relearnt what they had already mastered. In 1941 one newly commissioned officer argued that ‘the cadets were treated like peacetime recruits, i.e. they were assumed to be stupid and unwilling learners who required to be driven to work.’ He might have been pleased to hear that Sir Ronald Adam, the adjutant general, agreed in 1942 that there was too much emphasis ‘on training the cadet to be the perfect private soldier’.55 Geoffrey Picot was turned into a satisfactory anti-aircraft gunner, but warned that his stick drill, the process by which he transferred his swagger stick from ‘under the left armpit … [to] the right hand and held horizontal to the ground’ was worryingly poor. No sooner had he been commissioned than he was told that there was not now much need for anti-aircraft officers, but a huge demand for infantry platoon commanders: after another course, this time on the Isle of Man, he joined the Hampshire Regiment, and arrived in Normandy on D+2. Having survived the North West Europe campaign, he concluded that ‘the infantryman is the king of warriors … The comradeship that arises is very special. It is the brotherhood of those who have mastered themselves and served their team.’56 From the middle of 1942 there was an increase in the time spent on tactics, but the fact that so much training was carried out in the context of individual arms did little to make officers more comfortable with the combined arms tactics that were so fundamental to success in battle.

  Nevertheless, the experience of Stuart Hills shows how well the system was working by mid-war. He left Tonbridge School in July 1942, and found that his headmaster had written on his final report ‘If I was back in the army as in the last war as a company commander, I should like Hills with me as a platoon commander, especially in a tight corner.’ He was soon called up, and reported to the Royal Armoured Corps’ 30th Primary Training Wing at Bovingdon Camp in Dorset on 20th August. Conditions were ‘fairly Spartan,’ but ‘the former public schoolboys among us had perhaps become more used to the privations and discomfort of boarding life’, and the school OTC had conveyed some ‘rudimentary military knowledge’. That October he moved on to the nearby 58th Training Regiment to be turned into an RAC crewman, first lea
rning to drive tanks and then to fire their guns. He passed WOSB in March 1943, attended pre-OCTU at Alma Barracks in Blackdown, and then went on to Sandhurst, which had become the 100 RAC OCTU in 1942 when 161 Infantry OCTU had migrated to Mons Barracks in Aldershot:

  Sandhurst was to be my finishing school. We started by going over some old ground – general military training, driving and maintenance, gunnery and wireless. But then I moved on to more specialised training on the latest tanks, which in my case were Churchills, and to a week’s battle training in Wales. This was the toughest week I had so far spent in the army. It poured with rain and the wind blew a gale the whole time. We camped out for four nights in one of the bleakest spots on the Welsh mountains, with one blanket each, sodden boots and clothes, and had to do all our own cooking. We had to get up every morning at 4 a.m. and did exercises the whole day with live ammunition, and at times it was extremely dangerous. However, our troop sustained no casualties, which was unique.

  Geoffrey Picot, who had a very similar experience in Snowdonia, wrote that ‘in my eight months of frontline fighting, I was never once as severely physically tested as on that battle course.’57

  Stuart Hills received his emergency commission in the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry in January 1944. The regiment had returned home from the Middle East the previous month to prepare for the invasion of Europe, having lost two commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel ‘Flash’ Kellett MP and his successor, Lieutenant Colonel Donny Player. Amongst Hills’ brother officers was Keith Douglas, one of the war’s most talented poets, described by another officer as having ‘a grudge against the world in general and particularly of those of his fellow yeomanry officers who had been with the Regiment before the war and consisted of wealthy landed gentry … he was a complete individualist, intolerant of military convention and discipline’. For all Douglas’s apparent resentment of ‘that assumption of superiority, that dandyism, individuality and disregard of the duller military conventions that made the regiment sometimes unpopular, but always discussed and admired’, he wrote with real feeling about ‘this gentle, obsolescent breed of heroes’.