The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Setting Europe Ablaze—and Sacking Konrad Adenauer

  Templer’s most important posting in the years leading up to the Second World War was as an intelligence officer in the War Office. It was a job that mixed cocktail diplomacy with the building of an intelligence network—duties he carried into France with the British Expeditionary Force in September 1939, where he proved equally adept at confusing the Germans about British troop movements and helping British agents—who might be exposed after the German blitzkrieg through Belgium, Holland, and France—to escape. In 1940, he was evacuated at Dunkirk and set the task of raising the 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment.

  Templer vs. JFK’s Father

  “I did not mince my words about Britain’s terrible unpreparedness, about the cowardly attitude of the French army on the right of the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] which I had observed with my own eyes at close range, or about the uncivilized behavior of the [German] Stuka pilots herding the Belgian, Dutch and French refugees up and down the roads.... [American ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph] Kennedy said to me, ‘Young man, England will be invaded in a few weeks’ time and your country will have its neck wrung by Hitler like a chicken.’ I got up and told him exactly what I thought of him in most undiplomatic language.... I have no doubt it was relayed on to 10 Downing Street quickly. I have often wondered whether it was from this incident that Churchill coined his famous phrase ‘some chicken . . . some neck.’”

  Templer quoted in John Cloake, Templer: Tiger of Malaya (Harrap, 1985), pp. 81–82

  Templer spent much of 1940–43 organizing England’s defenses against a German invasion and rising to become the youngest lieutenant-general in the army. All that was very well, but he wanted a field command where he could see action. In the summer of 1943, he got it with command of the First Division of the British Army, then in North Africa, soon to be transferred to Italy. Italy was a slogging campaign, and Templer—who was highly regarded for his informative, lively, to-the-point briefings—saw plenty of fighting at Monte Camino and Anzio. The fighting men knew he was there, as he made a point of lightning visits to the units under his command. He might have inspired his men, but he was less inspired by them, concluding that the British soldier of the First World War was made of sterner stuff than the British soldier of the Second. He was a demanding officer, took an interest in everything—from church parades to tactics—kept up the standards of an officer and a gentleman by never talking shop in the mess, and got things done through his combination of bon vivant diplomacy and iron-hard character. He proved the last quality when his back was broken: On 5 August 1944, he was driving a jeep (he usually insisted on driving himself), when a truck carrying a piano swerved off the road and into a land mine, shooting a wheel (and chunks of piano) into Templer’s back, smashing him against the steering wheel. He was invalided to England and didn’t emerge from his plaster until November.

  Though not yet cleared for anything more taxing than administrative duties, he managed to land a job with the SOE, Special Operations Executive, which had the remit to, in Churchill’s famous words, “set Europe ablaze”4 through its saboteurs. But whatever its excitements—Templer expanded its operations into Germany—he wanted a return to the field. Instead, he was posted to Montgomery’s headquarters as director of civil affairs and military government. Rather than leading troops into battle, he was charged with governing the British-occupied zone of Germany, which, if anything, was a more daunting responsibility: requiring him to create order out of chaos, an economy out of ruins, and a ready supply of food to stave off famine. Templer managed it, and later confessed it “was more exciting than commanding a division in battle.”5 He also gained notoriety as the man in charge when the British sacked future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer as mayor of Cologne.

  Bulldog Drummond at War

  Among Templer’s staff officers with the Royal Sussex was Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Fairlie, former officer of the Scots Guards (1918–24), former British army heavyweight boxing champion, fellow member of the 1924 Olympic team (bobsled), and the model for the character Bulldog Drummond. Fairlie was a journalist, screenwriter, and author in his own right, and in fact occasionally collaborated with Drummond’s creator, “Sapper”—Herman Cyril McNeile—and as his officially designated successor took over writing the Drummond books after Sapper’s death. During the war he trained commandos, himself parachuted into France to fight beside the Maquis, and won the Croix de Guerre and a Bronze Star.

  Templer’s reward for a job well done in Germany was to be appointed, in succession: director of Military Intelligence; vice chief of the Imperial General Staff (first under Montgomery, then under General Sir William Slim, hero of the Burma Campaign); and general officer commanding Eastern Command. Churchill, however, gave him the appointment that made his name: in 1952 Templer became High Commissioner of Malaya. The previous high commissioner had been assassinated, and the colony was in the throes of a Communist insurrection. Templer’s job was to defeat the Communists and guide Malaya to a pro-Western (especially pro-British, given British economic interests in the rubber plantations and tin mines) independence. “If you pull it off,” Churchill told him, “it will be a great feat.”6

  The Tiger of Malaya

  In his two years in the Malayan Federation Templer laid the groundwork for victory. His method was to make surprise inspections and send a rocket up dozy performers. He was direct, energetic, and—to his enemies—rude, ready not only to ask the awkward question but to demand an immediate righting of obvious shortcomings. He liked going out and seeing things himself and even accompanied a platoon of Gurkhas on a jungle patrol. If he ever found troops at target practice, he joined in (he was a crack shot).

  On the military side, he was an innovator in the use of helicopters for jungle warfare. On the political side, he believed his service in Palestine and his Anglo-Irish background helped, giving him insight into the difficulties of uniting a country divided by race and religion—though the Malay, Chinese, Indian Tamil, aboriginal, British, Eurasian, and Iban headhunter populations offered rather more exotic contrasts (Templer used the Ibans as military scouts and later formed them into a ranger regiment to “out-bandit the bandits”7).

  Such diversity sometimes impinged on his ability to chew out the natives effectively; as when he chastised villagers whose home guard had collapsed, telling them they were a weak lot of bastards and that they would find he was an even bigger bastard—which in the words of his translator came out that Templer’s father, like the villagers’ fathers, had not been married to his mother when he was born.

  Templer worked on trying to integrate the police and military forces, and he informed the British residents of Malaya that they had an especial duty to do volunteer work and demonstrate their long-term stakes in the country. His background in intelligence—crucial to penetrating and disrupting the Communist cadres—was useful as well.

  Hearts and Minds (the Original Malayan Version)

  “The shooting side of this business is only 25 percent of the trouble; the other 75 percent is getting the people of this country behind us. . . . The answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people.”

  General Sir Gerald Templer, High Commissioner and Director of Operations, Malaya, 1952, quoted in David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 212

  Templer was a hard man and knew that hard military measures had to be taken: the Communists had to be hammered. But he also knew that winning Malayan “hearts and minds”—not just among waverers, but with propaganda directed at the insurgents themselves—was essential if the insurgency was to be well and truly doused. His “hearts and minds” campaign had the usual ambitious and plentiful programs of public uplift and good works in schools, “new villages,” and many other ventures. It included his wife’s work setting up Women’s Institutes (she even taught herself Malay) and writing a collection of Malayan fables after Templ
er complained that Malayan children had no fairy stories. Then there was his own leadership of the Malayan scouting movement. But his hearts and minds campaign was no namby-pamby affair—it couldn’t be with Templer in charge, as witnessed when he tore into the residents of a town where a district officer, an engineer, and several policemen had been ambushed and killed while trying to repair the town’s water supply:You want everything done for you, but you are not prepared to assume the responsibility of citizenship. I want law and order, so that I can get on with many things which are good for this country. Why should it be impossible to do these good things? Because people like you are cowards? Do you think that under a communist regime you will be able to live a happy family life? . . . I shall have to take extremely unpleasant steps.... It does not amuse me to punish innocent people, but many of you are not innocent. You have information which you are too cowardly to give.8

  Ever wary of overconfidence, Templer was nevertheless sure by 1953 that the Communists—who had retreated deep into the jungle—were in dire straits. In 1954, just before he left Malaya, he characteristically warned that the fight was not yet over: “In fact, I’ll shoot the bastard who says this emergency is over.”9 But he was confident enough to promise the country its first national elections; and though the emergency was not officially ended until 1960, Templer had put the country well on the road to independence (1957) and victory over the Communists.

  And from the Heavens Spoke Templer

  “The first day the whole thing put the fear of God into the inhabitants of Kuala Lumpur, who heard a voice repeating over and over again the words ‘World Communism is doomed’ from thousands of feet up in the air above the clouds. And as they couldn’t see where the voice was coming from, they thought it was all very spooky.”

  Templer on his strategy of aerial propaganda—broadcast from planes—quoted in John Cloake, Templer: Tiger of Malaya (Harrap, 1985), p. 239

  He came home to become chief of the Imperial General Staff (1955–58), field marshal (1956), and a roving military diplomat. After his retirement Templer devoted himself to establishing the excellent National Army Museum in London, serving as a trustee for other worthy ventures (such as preserving historic churches), doing business as chairman of the British Metal Corporation (among other company work), and indulging his interests in art (his views were soundly traditionalist) and wine. He became Constable of the Tower of London in 1965, Her Majesty’s Lieutenant for Greater London in 1966, and in 1970 made the newspapers for, in his dressing gown and waving a sword stick, helping the police capture a burglar. Templer’s honors, duties, colonelcies, and exploits (with a sword stick and without) stacked up until his death in 1979. He died of lung cancer, but went out the Templer way—after drinking a pink gin.

  Part VIII

  RECESSIONAL

  Chapter 27

  WINSTON CHURCHILL’S LAMENT

  “‘I have worked very hard all my life, and I have achieved a great deal—in the end to achieve NOTHING,’ the last word falling with somber emphasis. And since his greatest aspirations were for a powerful British Empire and Commonwealth in a peaceful world, what he said was, by his own definition, also historically correct.”

  —Winston Churchill to Anthony Montague Brown, his private secretary from 1952 to 19651

  On 10 November 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech marking the victory at the Battle of El Alamein. It is known as “The End of the Beginning” speech: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” An oft-quoted line from this speech, now tinged with irony, touches directly on the future of the British Empire: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Less often quoted is this line: “I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarch, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth. Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.”

  That British imperial rock of salvation survived big and impressive for a brief moment after the Second World War—and then various nationalist, anti-colonialist forces took hammers and sickles and pangas to hack it to pieces. On 18 June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, Churchill braced Britain for a battle that was, for the moment, to leave the British Empire fighting alone against National Socialist Germany, its then-ally Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. He said, “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire.... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” It might very well have been Britain’s finest hour, but the Empire, far from lasting a thousand years, began dissolving almost immediately after the war’s end: the Commonwealth is largely inconsequential and Christian civilization is, to put it mildly, not what it once was.

  Churchill’s life was a thoroughly imperial one. As a young cavalry officer he served with the Malakand Field Force, fighting on the Northwest Frontier of India. He rode in what is often considered the last great cavalry charge of the British army, with the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. In the Boer War in South Africa he fought, was captured by the enemy, and made a dramatic escape. He drafted strategies at the Admiralty and served in the trenches in World War I. He enlisted Lawrence of Arabia to help him design the post-Great War borders of the liberated territories of the Ottoman Empire. He fought to keep India within the Empire between the wars, was the rhetorical leader of the victorious Anglo-American alliance in World War II, and worked to consolidate the unity of the English-speaking peoples as a postwar power bloc. But for Churchill all these achievements rang hollow. Britain’s imperial greatness, which had made all the rest possible, was gone: India given over to partition and slaughter, Suez transformed from a headquarters of British military might into a site of humiliation at the hands of a petty pan-Arabist dictator, Africa left prey to tribalism and corruption. Britain’s imperial vigor was sapped, replaced by a sybaritic swinging London and a stultifying corporatist, “I’m all right, Jack,” welfare state. Churchill was far from a Puritan killjoy (quite the reverse) and he had himself helped enact a limited welfare state (albeit in part for imperial purposes: “If the British people will have a great Empire . . . [it would not be] upon the shoulders of stunted millions crowded together in the slums of cities”2) but this was not the future he had fought for or envisioned for his country.

  An Imperial Life

  Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome, a beautiful American heiress who always seemed to Churchill “a fairy princess,”3 as indeed she seemed to a great many young Englishmen. Winston was, famously, not much of a student, and his father, despairing of his prospects, decided that a young man who liked nothing better than playing with toy soldiers was fit only for cannon fodder. Winston crammed his way into Sandhurst where he excelled, graduating eighth in his class and proving “that I could learn quickly enough the things that mattered”4—things like horsemanship, field fortifications, tactics, and military history.

  As a young officer, he was given leave to cover the Cuban rebellion against Spain as a war correspondent, granted the leisure in India to educate himself (reading Gibbon and Macaulay and parliamentary speeches from his father’s time in Parliament), and permitted to combine active service with journalistic dispatches, which he then turned into books. Churchill proved as unafraid to criticize his superiors in print as he was unafraid of the bullets, spears, and swords of the enemy in the field. As he noted in The Story of the Malakand Field Force, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”5

  It was a swashbuckling life, a “roving commission,”
as he called it, and it propelled him into Parliament at the age of twenty-five. Like his father, Churchill was a Tory, but a maverick one, and in 1904 he joined the Liberals over the issue of free trade (he was in favor of it and opposed to imperial tariffs). He was rewarded with ministerial office in 1905, declining a position at the Treasury in order to take a more junior position as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies. It was not dull numbers that motivated him but the vast questions of empire, including winning the Boers’ happy consent to British rule by granting their republics their own constitutions and large dollops of self-government.

  Like most British imperialists, his actions and beliefs were circumscribed by prudence and economy, but they were also guided by principles, which occasionally had to be modified and trimmed, but were constant. One of these was justice. For all his attachment to the superiority of the British race, he believed that superiority could only be justified by “bearing peace, civilization, and good government.”6 His attitude towards the non-white peoples of the Empire was generally paternal. Like most Englishmen he had an admiration for the fighting qualities of Muslims (though he saw their religion as ignorant and fanatical) and credited their loyalty in British India compared to the vexatious Hindus (whose religion he disparaged as decadent and immoral, with child weddings and widow-burnings and untouchables and whatnot).7 He did not care much for the Chinese, but rather liked Africans (his first choice for a command in World War I was in East Africa), even if he regarded them (as many settlers did) as overgrown children, and was astonished, horrified, and saddened at the Mau-Mau rebellion among the Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s. If he uttered racist remarks about non-white peoples, he could be rather cutting about whites as well, including the Boers (though he learned to admire their courage and stubborn spirit of independence) and Germans (“the Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet”8), not to mention those who embraced the murderous doctrines of the Bolsheviks and the IRA.