General ‘Boy': The Life of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning

by Richard Mead

  It was three days before Boy took over formally from Pownall, partly because Christmas intervened with a round of parties. Mountbatten’s nephew, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN, was staying at the King’s Pavilion on leave from his ship, HMS Whelp, and Boy was invited to dinner there on Christmas Eve. It turned out to be a chaotic occasion, as the cook got drunk and served the meal back to front, but nobody appeared to mind. When sobriety returned there was much to do, not least to get to know all the main personalities. The most senior of these was the Deputy Supreme Commander, the American Lieutenant General Raymond A. Wheeler, universally known as ‘Speck’, a thoroughly competent administrator who was both liked and admired by his British colleagues.

  Others who were important to Boy were his immediate subordinates, the Deputy COS, Fuller, and the Assistant COS, Wildman-Lushington, the latter succeeded by Major General Brian Kimmins in April 1945. The man to whom Boy really warmed was Wheeler’s successor as Principal Administrative Officer, Major General Reginald ‘Jack’ Denning, who became the closest friend he had made since the death of Nigel Norman. The one service chief whom he had not met on his travels was the Air C-in-C. At the time of his arrival the position was held temporarily by Air Marshal Sir Guy Garrod, but he would be replaced by Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park in February 1945. There were also numerous Chinese, French and Dutch generals, ‘but what they all do’, Boy wrote to Daphne, ‘I really don’t know.’2

  Boy had brought four members of his personal staff with him, his Military Assistant Eddie Newberry, now promoted to major, his American ADC Captain Jim Collins, and his longstanding batman and driver, Johnson and Johannides. He found that he desperately needed a competent senior staff officer and requested as his GSO1 Geordie Gordon Lennox, who had been commanding 5th Battalion Grenadiers Guards with great distinction in Tunisia and Italy for two years and who needed a rest from action. Gordon Lennox arrived in February 1945 and made an immediate impact. Boy’s GSO2 was Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, Geoffrey Sherman, a Royal Marine who subsequently took over from Gordon Lennox in late 1945. Last but by no means least was Maureen Luschwitz, an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (India), who joined him as his Personal Assistant after holding the same position with Garrod and in due course took over Newberry’s job. She worked for him in various incarnations for nearly ten years and in due course became a close friend of the family.

  In one way, the choice of Boy as Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff was an extraordinary one. He was, without question, the most senior staff officer in the British Army during the war who had never attended Staff College. What Brooke had appreciated, from Boy’s work at 1 Airborne Division in 1942, was that he was nevertheless very well organized, yet would not let himself be dominated, and this is exactly what Mountbatten needed. Mountbatten, apart from being a forceful character, had a propensity to get involved in minutiae. In one of his first letters from Kandy, Boy told Daphne that he was having difficulty ‘persuading Dickie to hand over all the details to me instead of going into every detail himself which causes despondency and alarm and overworks him hopelessly.’3

  Boy described HQ SACSEA as ‘a very curious setup’. By the end of 1944 it had become a large and complex structure and dealt with a multiplicity of issues, interservice, inter-allied and inter-theatre. It was the ultimate planning authority for military campaigns and was deeply concerned with political questions, particularly in liberated territories. Boy proposed ‘to take charge of all staff detail so that he [Mountbatten] can have plenty of time to get around and see the troops and make big decisions.’4 His solution to taking control was to hold his own Chief of Staff’s meeting every morning. Some of those who visited Kandy and attended this meeting regarded it as an extraordinary circus, but it was necessary to satisfy Mountbatten that progress was being made on all fronts and to keep him fully briefed, although at arms length on everything except matters of strategy and principle.

  Boy had been asked by Brooke, who had been sceptical about Mountbatten’s appointment and remained dubious about both his judgement and his military ability, to make regular reports to him and some of these were mildly critical of Mountbatten’s need to be involved with everything, however small. On the whole Boy admired, liked and worked well with the Supreme Commander, although he found him tiring to deal with and on occasion difficult to keep under control. Though there were times, particularly initially, when both of them were away from Kandy together, Mountbatten preferred that Boy should be there whenever he himself was on his travels. This suited Boy, as it allowed him to get on with his business without interference.

  Boy’s first report to Brooke, written on Christmas Day 1944, was unequivocally upbeat about what he had seen. ‘There is very little wrong with the discipline and morale of the troops in South-East Asia Command. In fact I was much impressed. There is no doubt that all ranks feel that they have got the measure of the Jap, and that the only problems are terrain, maintenance and resources of the right type. … Oliver Leese appears to be settling down well and the Army and Corps Commanders are good. The same applies to Divisional Commanders … I am convinced they are adequate for the task.’5 His only complaint was that 44 Indian Airborne Division was not yet ready for operations. He asked subsequently for Walch, whom he continued to rate highly as a staff officer, to be sent out as Head of Airborne Operations at HQ SACSEA, to help speed things up and provide an airborne input into future plans.

  In early January Boy flew up to meet Leese in Barrackpore – a journey which took the whole day from Kandy, starting with a three hour drive to Colombo –in an attempt to improve the poor relationship between the two HQs. Leese had been critical of the organization at Kandy, writing of Boy’s arrival ‘I am glad to get him out here, but I doubt if he can straighten out all the tangle at his end.’6 There was friction, too, between ALFSEA and Fourteenth Army, the latter resenting the fact that Leese’s staff officers, imported by him from Eighth Army, should tell it constantly how things had been done so much better in the Western Desert and Italy. These tensions were to come to a head some months later.

  Leese paid a return visit to Kandy on 9 January. There was one serious operational issue on the agenda, the scarcity of aircraft available to support Slim in his drive on Mandalay and Rangoon. Slim was almost entirely reliant on air supply, as his overland lines of communication were very long and difficult. Now, just as the advance into Central Burma gathered momentum, three squadrons of US transport aircraft were withdrawn on the request of General Wedemeyer, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chief of Staff, to support the Chinese in China itself. This could have had potentially disastrous consequences for any attempt to take Rangoon before the monsoon arrived in May. The situation was so serious that Mountbatten promised Leese that he would send Boy to London to make representations to the Chiefs of Staff. On 12 January Boy set off by plane.

  Just after he left there was an exchange of signals with Whitehall, where the Chiefs of Staff considered that Boy’s visit was unnecessary. Mountbatten persisted on the grounds that Boy was by then well on his way, asking that at least he should meet Brooke. In the event Boy arrived back in England on 16 January and was invited to attend the Chiefs of Staff meeting on 17 January, where he made urgent representations for the replacement of the aircraft. He was entirely successful. The Americans were persuaded to instruct Wedemeyer to return temporarily two of the three squadrons, which he did on 1 February, whilst one RAF squadron was sent to India from Italy and another from the UK. In due course two more squadrons were formed in India itself to replace the American aircraft.

  Boy had been allowed some leave, as it was thought unlikely that he would be back for some time. He took five days at Menabilly with the family, but bemoaned the fact that it was too short for him to do all he wanted and to get back into ‘routes’. Daphne reported to Tod: ‘He likes Kandy and is thoroughly interested in his new job, and says that our 14th Army in Burma are wonderful and a higher class altogether than anything we have got in Europe … I th
ink he looks upon the war in Europe as a side-show now.’7 On 25 January he left again, arriving back in Kandy three days later. He was not to see Daphne and the children for nearly eighteen months.

  After such a disruptive start, Boy welcomed a few weeks on the spot to bring some order to his new job. Although he found Mountbatten personally good to work for, the demands placed on him were great and the transition from commander to senior staff officer difficult at first. ‘Sometimes feel like applying for a new job … unending meetings…’ he wrote to Daphne.8 He was also exasperated at having to entertain all the visitors who arrived in Kandy with great frequency but, true to form, he never showed his frustrations in public. He was certainly being appreciated and not just by Mountbatten. Slim wrote later: ‘His advent was like a breath of fresh air to us and he made the Headquarters a much more likeable place.’9 Boy continued to demand very high standards of his own staff and as usual could seem formidable, abrupt and even cold to those who did not know him well. His staff were devoted to him and those who managed to penetrate the seemingly arrogant exterior tended to like what they saw. Major J. H. Money, who arrived in Kandy early in 1945 to draft Mountbatten’s Report on SEAC from its formation onwards, wrote much later: ‘I was much impressed by Browning – a handsome man always impeccably dressed in uniforms which were said to have been designed by Daphne du Maurier,10 a person of few words, a good judge of men, rather stern,11 and a stickler for discipline. He was ready to help with information and advice whenever I approached him.’12

  Outside work Boy’s main priority was to find permanent accommodation and he soon located a suitable bungalow called Malabar House, which was up on a hill with a view over the lake. It required a great deal of work before it met his requirements, but this was handled by Jim Collins ‘with the help apparently of most of the Wren officers here!’13 Possibly the fact that Wrens were all fans of Daphne’s contributed to their enthusiasm. Boy moved eventually in early March, sharing the bungalow very harmoniously with Denning and Desmond Harrison, the Engineer-in Chief. The only disadvantage was the building’s proximity to the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, whose priests were apt to start banging drums early in the morning!

  Boy continued to travel within the theatre. On 20 February he flew up to New Delhi for meetings at GHQ India. India was outside SEAC, except for those areas in which ALFSEA formations were operational, but it remained both the main base and the recruiting and training ground, so relationships with India Command were of vital importance. It helped that the C-in-C, General Auchinleck, was on good terms with Mountbatten, whilst Swayne, the Chief of the General Staff, had been known to Boy for many years, initially as a fellow battalion CO in the Cairo Brigade in 1936, then as a divisional commander in 1941 and CGS Home Forces in 1942. After leaving New Delhi, Boy went on to Barrackpore for a Commanders-in-Chief’s conference before returning to Kandy.

  He was only back for just over a week before leaving again, this time to accompany Mountbatten to China. They flew initially to Monywa on the Chindwin to see Slim and then to Myitkyina to meet the American Lieutenant General Dan Sultan, the Commander of Northern Combat Area Command (NCAC), a largely Chinese formation driving down into Burma from the north. They then left for Kunming, where they saw Claire Chennault, the commander of the US Fourteenth Air Force. On the afternoon of 7 March they landed at Chungking, where Chiang Kai-shek was waiting to meet them at their house, an unusual honour. After two days of meetings, Mountbatten and Boy flew back over the ‘Hump’ to Jorhat and then went their separate ways, Boy returning to Myitkyina to inspect the Chinese divisions there, before flying on to Lashio to see the newly reopened Burma Road and then south to visit 36 Division, the only British formation serving in NCAC. On 13 March he was off again, first to see the situation around Mandalay, which fell shortly afterwards, and then to meet Christison in the Arakan. After stop-offs in Calcutta and New Delhi, it was an exhausted Boy who arrived back in Kandy on 18 March.

  It was apparent by now that Mountbatten had become highly reliant on his new Chief of Staff, the more so when the ‘Hapgift’,14 one of Mountbatten’s two Dakotas in which Boy was flying, was reported missing on its first leg from Jorhat. It proved to be a false alarm but Mountbatten wrote subsequently: ‘It wasn’t until I was faced with the prospect of your having been extinguished that I realized how very much you had come to mean to me in these last few weeks and what a tremendous difference you have made to the whole command. I could not even begin to think of the name of anybody who could in any way replace you.’15 Boy certainly seemed to have the measure of how to handle the Supreme Commander by now. He explained to Daphne how Mountbatten ‘never for one moment stops talking. Me maintains a masterly silence during the torrent of words and every now and then puts in a dampening remark which silences him for sufficient time to get in a few well chosen remarks which are essential and to the point!’16

  As usual, Boy was giving everything to his job and this and the climate were starting to take something of a toll on his health, even leading to a mild recurrence of ‘me tum’. He realized that he was smoking and drinking too much and although he managed to reduce both he felt increasingly tired, yet often unable to sleep. He was off on his travels again only ten days after his long trip, back to New Delhi before going on to see Eric Down at 44 Indian Airborne Division, and then, in mid-April, to the Arakan, Calcutta and yet again to Delhi, where among others he met Hollinghurst, now AOC Base Air Forces South-East Asia. Every so often he was able to get up for a day or two in the hills, where at least the temperature and humidity were much lower, but the tempo at SACSEA was rising as the campaign in Burma approached its climax.

  Chapter 24

  Victory (May–November 1945)

  ‘Well we’ve got Rangoon and beaten the monsoon by about an acid drop,’ wrote Boy to Daphne on 4 May 1945. Mountbatten was in bed with an extended bout of dysentery at the time, albeit ‘distressingly hearty’, and so Boy had to take the salute on his behalf at the Victory Parade in Kandy on 8 May for the joint celebration of the fall of Rangoon and VE-Day. There were considerable festivities that night, during which Gordon Lennox played the piano and Boy performed his Cossack dance, leaving him very stiff on the following day.

  Rangoon had been entered following a seaborne landing, with a parachute drop at Elephant Point by 50 Indian Parachute Brigade, which particularly delighted Boy. The landing had been proposed by Slim, just in case Fourteenth Army became bogged down by the weather in its advance from the north, and was strongly supported by Mountbatten, against some resistance from Leese. The relationship between the Supreme Commander and the C-in-C ALFSEA had in fact been showing signs of deterioration and matters were about to come to a head.

  The problem had manifested itself initially two months earlier with a mild case of lese-majesty, in which Leese had referred to HQ SACSEA as the ‘other HQ’, which was not considered by Mountbatten as adequately reflecting ALFSEA’s subordinate position. Boy had warned Brooke about the situation in a letter at the end of March, also pointing out that Leese was not getting on with his fellow C-in-Cs and ascribing his attitude to fancying himself as a second Montgomery, but lacking the necessary talent. HQ ALFSEA became increasingly inclined to take decisions which did not fall within its remit and to try to keep Kandy at arm’s length, which infuriated Boy. ‘The worst trial in we lives here’, he wrote to Daphne on 19 April, ‘am Oliver Leese and his HQ. There am no doubt about it that he is tricky and dishonest with overwhelming ambition – the combination makes it almost impossible to deal with him … . All very surprising and disappointing.’ He enjoined Daphne to keep it to herself ‘as no whisper must get about to destroy the outward harmony of the proceedings.’

  Shortly before the fall of Rangoon, a sharp exchange of signals took place between Mountbatten and Leese over the activities of the Civil Affairs Service (Burma). Leese was responsible for the administration of Burma through CAS(B), but Mountbatten had overall accountability for policy. The latter therefore felt that
he had every right to ask questions regarding the organization’s activities, but Leese interpreted this as dissatisfaction with his exercise of command and asked that the valuable time of his staff should not be wasted by such enquiries. Mountbatten then made it clear that he could ask for information from a subordinate whenever he wished and expected loyalty from Leese in return. He subsequently reported the reprimand to Brooke. Swayne, who was back in England from New Delhi in mid-March, also told Brooke that he thought that trouble was brewing between the Supreme Commander and his land forces C-in-C.

  What brought matters to a climax was Leese’s inept handling of Slim. Boy had himself met the commander of Fourteenth Army during his long trip to China and Burma in March and had noticed that he was showing signs of tiredness. This was unsurprising, as Slim had been in almost continuous action for over a year, but Boy reported his concerns to Leese on his way back to Kandy. Leese flew immediately to see Slim, who confirmed that he would like four month’s leave after the capture of Rangoon. Leese was surprised at the request, which suggested to him that Slim was exhausted and almost certainly needed replacing. On 3 May, the day after Rangoon was entered by Allied troops, he visited Kandy for a meeting with Mountbatten, described by the latter as ‘a very important and not too easy interview.’1 Leese proposed that Fourteenth Army should be withdrawn to India to plan Operation ‘Zipper’, the invasion of Malaya, and placed under Christison, who had experience in amphibious operations, whilst Slim would be left to mop up in Burma in command of a new Twelfth Army. Mountbatten was far from convinced, but authorized Leese to sound out Slim.