Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  After a short period at a crammer, Brooke entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, but only just, coming sixty-fifth out of seventy-two in the entrance exam (he passed out seventeenth). Had he done any better he would have qualified for a commission in the Royal Engineers, and he would probably not have wound up on the General Staff after the Great War. Lack of success at a crucial moment in life can sometimes prove invaluable later on, however frustrating it might seem at the time. As well as being fluent in French and German, Brooke was soon expert in gunnery. After four years in Ireland with the Royal Field Artillery, he served in India for six years after 1906, showing an aptitude for military life and a natural propensity to command. The outbreak of the Great War found him on honeymoon, having married ‘the beautiful, affectionate, vague, happy-go-lucky’ Janey Richardson, to whom he had been engaged–secretly, due to lack of money–for six years.

  Brooke began the Great War as a lieutenant in command of an ammunition column of the Royal Horse Artillery on the Western Front, and ended it as a lieutenant-colonel. He fought on the Somme and was afterwards appointed to serve in Major-General Sir Ivor Maxse’s 18th Division, then as chief artillery Staff officer to the Canadian Corps, where he co-invented the ‘creeping barrage’, the method by which enemy machine-gun posts were bombarded just as troops attacked them, with the process moving steadily forward as further ground was gained. It was said that fewer casualties were suffered in those units to which Brooke was attached than in similar engagements.14 Like Marshall, Brooke had had a good war, and he was selected for the very first post-war course at the Staff College at Camberley.

  Winston Churchill was fascinated by strategy, tactics and soldiering all his life. When he wasn’t actually fighting wars, he was generally thinking and writing about them. He had played with toy soldiers as a child, joined the Army Class at Harrow aged fourteen, and entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst (on his third attempt) at nineteen. Five hours a day there were devoted to the subjects of Fortifications, Tactics, Topography, Military Law and Military Administration. This involved studying the theoretical and practical side of military engineering, explosives, field guns and ammunition, the penetration of projectiles against defensive structures, the construction of obstacles and stockades, fields of fire, the tactical use of defensive positions, bivouacking, water purification, the importance of terrain in determining tactics, the optimum combination of artillery, cavalry and infantry, the measurement of slopes and embankments, cartography, recruitment, pay and allowances, quartermastering, and the movement of men, horses and equipment.15

  Yet this was not enough for the young Winston, who recalled in his autobiography My Early Life that no sooner had Lord Randolph Churchill instructed his bookseller to send his son any books he might require for his studies than the cadet ordered Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hamley’s Operations of War, Prince Kraft zu Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen’s Letters on Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery, and Infantry Fire Tactics by an author named Mayne, ‘together with a number of histories dealing with the American Civil, Franco-German and Russo-Turkish wars, which were then our latest and best specimens of wars. I soon had a small military library which invested the regular instruction with some kind of background.’16 When invited to dinner at the Staff College at Camberley, Churchill was able to talk to the top military experts in Britain about ‘divisions, army corps and even whole armies; of bases, supplies, and lines of communication and railway strategy. This was thrilling.’

  His early studies imparted to Churchill a thrill that never left him, not as a war correspondent in Cuba, nor during his time with the Malakand Field Force on the North-west Frontier of India, especially not during the Sudanese campaign in 1898. He continued to read widely and voraciously on the subject of grand strategy, and wrote about Marlborough’s wars, the American Civil War, the River War in the Sudan and several other conflicts with the self-assurance of an expert military historian. Long before the Great War broke out in 1914, in which he was to have a leading role in the creation of British grand strategy, Churchill had immersed himself in the subject, and even the staggering reverse represented by the Dardanelles disaster in 1915 failed to dent his ardour for it. During the inter-war period, his ‘wilderness years’, Churchill stayed avidly abreast of all the new technological and intellectual developments regarding military equipment and strategic thinking. By the time Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939–he was appointed first lord of the Admiralty that same day–Churchill was supremely confident of his ability to discuss grand strategy with the General Staff as much more than an interested and occasionally inspired amateur: he saw himself as their equal.

  Once asked which department he disliked more, the Foreign Office or the Treasury, Churchill replied: ‘The War Office.’17 It had been the River War that had left him convinced that the Army’s bureaucracy was inefficient and also that the Army General Staff were incompetent, something that was regularly confirmed for him by contact with both in the Boer War and subsequent conflicts. In his book about the Great War, The World Crisis, Churchill indicted the General Staff for having narrow vision and rigid minds. He was angered by how long technical innovations, such as the tank, took to gain acceptance, and described Staff officers as men ‘whose nerves were much stronger than their imaginations’ and whose sang-froid in the face of catastrophe was ‘almost indistinguishable from insensitivity’. During the Second World War, Churchill also believed the War Office to be generally ‘hidebound, devoid of imagination, extravagant of manpower and slow’.18 The scene was thus set for titanic clashes with its senior serving officer, Sir Alan Brooke, who was infuriated by his criticisms and sought to refute them at every opportunity.

  Lord Halifax, who sat in several Cabinets with Churchill, found the Prime Minister’s working methods ‘exhausting for anybody who doesn’t happen to work that way; discursive discussions, jumping like a water bird from stone to stone where the current takes you’. He blamed Churchill’s ‘overwhelming self-centredness, which with all his gifts of imagination make him quite impervious to other people’s feelings’.19 Although this certainly had an element of truth to it, Colonel Aubertin Mallaby, the Deputy Director of Military Operations at the War Office, pointed out that with the Prime Minister:

  every single thing in the life of each day was an integral part of a work pattern. There was no question of times on duty and times off, no curtain coming down and dividing work from leisure. There was fun and talk and food and drink and films but all these fitted naturally into the very long working day. The only real respite from work was a few hours’ sleep.20

  By complete contrast with Churchill, Marshall and Brooke, Franklin Roosevelt did not seem to have any strongly held or closely thought-out views on grand strategy when the United States entered the Second World War, except the understanding that his country needed a vastly larger army, navy and air force as soon as possible. Apart from a profound love and knowledge of the US Navy that he contracted while its assistant secretary from 1913 to 1920, military affairs had not affected his career. It was perhaps this very absence of any overarching theory of grand strategy that made it possible for him to hold the ring so effectively during the hard-fought contests between the other three principals of this book.

  An eighth-generation American of Dutch origin, Franklin Roosevelt was–like his fifth cousin President Teddy Roosevelt–‘of impeccable New York stock, with many generations of prosperity behind them. Insofar as there is an American aristocracy…both Roosevelts clearly belonged to it.’21 After qualifying as a barrister in 1907, Franklin became a New York state senator from 1910 to 1913 before being appointed assistant secretary of the Navy by Woodrow Wilson. He had been impatient for America’s involvement in the Great War long before her declaration in April 1917, and since the Navy Secretary, Josephus Daniels, was a ‘good-natured, paunchy, puritanical, languid North Carolina newspaper publisher with no maritime background but pacifist and internationalist leanings’, it was largely le
ft to Roosevelt to prepare the department for war, which he did with gusto, and somehow without alienating Daniels.22 He enjoyed reminding people that his cousin Teddy–who had also been assistant secretary of the Navy–was the man who had ordered Admiral Dewey to attack Manila during the Spanish–American War and was the father of modern American maritime power.

  From the age of sixteen Franklin Roosevelt was an admirer of the works of the American historian and geo-strategist Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, with whom he corresponded until Mahan’s death in 1914, and insofar as he can be said to have had views on grand strategy they derived from Mahan’s belief in the overwhelming influence of sea power on world history. Mahan had also been a friend and teacher of Teddy Roosevelt, but influenced his cousin almost as profoundly. (Nonetheless, Franklin was convinced that the development of air power meant that Mahan was wrong to claim that the Philippines could not be defended from Japanese attack. In the event the dead admiral would be proved right and the living President wrong.)23

  A talented sailor who loved the sea, was never seasick, knew how to rig and change sail in all conditions, Franklin Roosevelt had to be persuaded by his father to attend Harvard rather than the Naval Academy at Annapolis and by President Wilson not to leave his Administration to join the Navy in 1917. ‘No American president’, writes his biographer, ‘came to office with as much knowledge of ships, the sea, and sea power and strategy as did FDR. In his first two terms as president he spent an average of forty-five days per year at sea, his preferred escape from the political hothouse of Washington.’24 Yet the Commander-in-Chief’s fascination with the Navy did not develop into a similar interest in America’s Army and Air Force or, per se, in military strategy during a war that, after all, turned out not to be decided by sea power in the Mahan tradition.

  Where Roosevelt did have an acute strategic sense that was to serve his country well in the Second World War was in his appreciation that air power was going to be far more important than it had been in any previous conflict. At the time of the Munich Agreement in 1938 he had instinctively understood the need massively to increase the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), instituting a plan to build 15,000 planes a year. At the time of the fall of France twenty months later, he announced that this should be increased to 50,000, a proposal which Hitler greeted with incredulity but which ultimately, and especially after Pearl Harbor, the United States massively exceeded. (In the Willow Run factory in Detroit alone, Ford built more than eight thousand B-24 Liberator bombers in the last sixteen months of the war.)

  Roosevelt’s appreciation of the central importance of air power to future operations came at the right moment. Many of the hardest-fought engagements of the war were finally decided by which side had superiority in the air, and Operation Overlord could not have been launched without complete domination of the skies. (As we shall see, whereas the Allies launched more than 13,000 sorties over the invasion areas on D-Day, the Luftwaffe managed only 319.) Although Roosevelt’s contribution to the planning of individual campaigns was minimal, his political sense of when it was right for the Allies to return to France was pitch-perfect, and his insistence on a greatly expanded American air force proved invaluable.

  Roosevelt was the Democratic Party’s candidate for vice-president in 1920, running on the ticket of Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. It was no fault of his that they lost by sixteen million votes to nine million; Woodrow Wilson’s brand of liberalism and League of Nations internationalism was by then no longer popular. It was the following August that Roosevelt was stricken by poliomyelitis, leaving him paralysed from the waist down for life. The next thirty-five months were spent in semi-recovery, before he established himself firmly as a coming man at the Democratic convention of 1924, with a scintillating speech nominating Governor Al Smith for presidential candidate, albeit unsuccessfully. He later served as governor of New York between 1928 and 1932, and defeated Herbert Hoover in the presidential elections of November 1932.

  Concentrating on the economic, political and legal aspects of his self-proclaimed New Deal to ameliorate the still-debilitating impact of the Great Depression, Roosevelt had little time to consider grand strategy, and since in the 1930s the United States was under no conceivable military threat, there was no reason for him to. Roosevelt had to face the rise of Hitler in his first Administration, although this did not require him to think too deeply about grand strategy either, because Nazi Germany still posed little direct threat to the United States. The Japanese had already invaded China by the time Roosevelt arrived at the White House, yet beyond criticizing their presence there it was eight years before his Administration took effective action against Japan, by imposing oil and other embargoes. It was not America’s duty to act as the world’s policeman in the 1930s, a role only thrust upon it in the following decade, and there seemed to be no need for him to master grand strategy or keep abreast of military developments as Churchill, Marshall and Brooke did–at least until 7 December 1941.

  Just as the crisis of Churchill’s life had come in 1915 over the Gallipoli débâcle, and Roosevelt’s when he was incapacitated by polio in 1921, so the crisis in Brooke’s came in April 1925 when his adored wife Janey was killed in a car crash while he was at the wheel of their Bentley. Swerving on a wet road to avoid a bicyclist who had turned in front of him unexpectedly, the open-topped car skidded and overturned. Brooke broke his leg and several ribs, but Janey snapped her vertebra and died a few days later, having contracted pneumonia after an operation to save her from paralysis. Their young daughter and son were left motherless, and two years later Brooke–who used to drive too fast and blamed himself for the accident–wrote: ‘I very much wish I could have finished myself off at the same time.’25

  Several diverse people in a position to know, such as Brooke’s biographer General Sir David Fraser, his subordinate General Sir Bernard Paget, Lord Mountbatten and the historian Nigel Nicolson, have seen in the death of Janey the moment when Brooke developed, as Paget put it, ‘two distinctive personalities’. One was Brooke the soldier: ‘ruthless, decisive, short-tempered to the point of rudeness, remote and in his military life, lonely’. Then there was Brooke the man: ‘emotional to the point of sentiment, a lover of nature (especially birds), a family man with deep roots in the past and a sense of responsibility for the future, an easy comradeship with all those who share in his loves and beliefs’.26 Mountbatten believed that because of his sorrow Brooke ‘never let drop the façade which he had created and behind which he hid his kind-heartedness and sensitiveness–perhaps deeming them weaknesses’.

  Brooke’s emotional defence mechanism was ‘to immerse myself as soon as possible in work, and to let absorption in my profession smother pangs of memory’. Whether it worked emotionally is doubtful–Brooke became withdrawn and distant, and scarcely smiled for four years–but it certainly worked professionally. After instructing at Camberley from 1923 to 1926, where he met men such as the sixth Viscount Gort, John Dill and Bernard Freyberg, whose fates were to intertwine closely with his for good and ill, he became one of the first students at the prestigious Imperial Defence College (now the Royal College of Defence Studies), where he later returned for two years as an instructor. Dill was Army instructor there from 1926 to 1928. It was an elite organization intended for the senior officers of all three services as well as a few civil servants, and completion of the year-long course allowed one to put ‘idc’ after one’s name in the service lists. Among other students were Claude Auchinleck, Admiral Tovey, Canada’s General McNaughton and Air Chief Marshal Peirse.27 Alumni were both conscious of their exclusive status and loyal to Dill, their ‘headmaster’.

  From 1929 to 1932 Brooke commanded the Royal School of Artillery at Larkhill in Wiltshire and in 1934 he took over an infantry brigade. He became a major-general in 1935, after which he was appointed director of military training and shortly thereafter the commander of the British Mobile (that is, armoured) Division. This varied peacetime military experience on top of his wartime su
ccess implied that he was being groomed for the top. Away from work, Brooke managed to indulge his passions for ornithology and angling–as solitary occupations as it is possible to have–and he was to become one of the greatest nonprofessional authorities on birds of all kinds. ‘The indefatigable ornithologist is ready to spend hours motionless in a hide,’ wrote the Times reviewer of Brooke’s biography in 1982, ‘and is possessed to a high degree of the gift of identifying an object precisely and then never losing sight of it.’28 Brooke’s zeal for bird-watching was all-encompassing: in 1944 he persuaded the RAF to reprieve an island off the Norfolk coast as a bomb-testing area because the roseate tern nested there, and close to D-Day he broke off a conversation with a member of his staff about landing preparations to talk about a photograph he had taken of a marsh tit. At the end of a long meeting at the War Office in August 1943, Brooke asked his director of military operations to stay behind. After everyone had left, he shut the door, opened a drawer in his desk and took out a book, saying: ‘Have you read this? It is most remarkable.’ It was Edgar Percival Chance’s The Truth about the Cuckoo.29 (After the war, the historian Kenneth Rose asked Brooke whether he had ever been tempted to take Churchill bird-watching with him. ‘God forbid!’ the field marshal replied. As Lady Soames has pointed out, ‘Can you imagine Papa ever wanting to go bird-watching?’) Brooke’s ability to relax–through ornithology, bird-photography and fishing–was, according to his deputy CIGS Sir Ronald Weeks, ‘his saving, for he was always highly strung’.