The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  It does seem that all Corps commanders should be able to handle an Armoured Division and that these proposals are really for helping in training. The Corps Staff of a mixed Corps of Armoured and Motorised Divisions surely need not be entirely Royal Armoured Corps Staff. In fact, by forming these Armoured Corps Headquarters there does appear to be a danger of retarding the spreading throughout the Army of a tactical doctrine for handling Armoured Divisions.1

  Martel was almost certainly motivated by his continuing desire to get operational control of all the armoured formations, whilst Dick believed strongly that the only possible solution to success in armoured warfare was a proper balance of all arms, and particularly the mix of armour and infantry. In the event, it was not Dick’s view which counted, but Brooke’s, and the C-in-C was strongly opposed to Martel’s idea, supported by Montgomery and others. The result was a watered-down version which Martel described as a bad compromise. Three Armoured Group HQs were formed, one in each of Northern, Eastern and South Eastern Commands, their role being to advise the respective GOC-in-Cs on the organization, manning, training and deployment of their armoured formations, but not to have any direct operational control themselves. The new Armoured Group Commanders retained their existing rank of major general. Dick himself was appointed to 2 Armoured Group,2 based in South Eastern Command and responsible for overseeing his old 8 Armoured Division, 5 Canadian Armoured Division and 25 and 31 Army Tank Brigades, with a watching brief as well over Guards Armoured Division and 34 Army Tank Brigade in Southern Command.

  Dick held his final conference on Bumper on 8 October, writing to Lettice that day: ‘Everyone is still very pleased with themselves, I hope they won’t think they are too good, but this morning I told them how much we all had still to learn! I don’t think my new job is going to be very exciting, this winter it will purely be a training job… We have found a new home for our “Group H.Q.” south of Dorking. A hideous Victorian house, but fairly comfortable.’ Trashurst, as the house was called, turned out to be very suitable for the small HQ which Dick set up with Harry Arkwright later that month. There was no suggestion of Lettice and the family coming to live nearby, indeed at almost the same time they moved into what was to be their home until shortly before the end of the War, College House at Stanton St John, north-east of Oxford. This was close to her sister Helen at Stratton Audley, very convenient for the boys’ preparatory school, Cothill, near Abingdon, and not too far from Eton, where Michael was due to start in 1942. Runwick was let for the long term and one of the consequences of these changes was that it was no longer possible to keep on Eldred, who had been with Dick, as soldier and civilian, for more than 20 years. He went off to work in a factory in Grantham to Dick’s regret, even though Eldred had driven him mad on many occasions.

  Dick found himself reporting directly to the GOC-in-C South-Eastern Command, Bernard Paget. In mid-November, however, a number of changes at the top of the army were announced. Brooke was to replace Dill as CIGS, whilst Paget would succeed him as C-in-C Home Forces. Relieving Paget would be Montgomery, until then GOC of XII Corps, which now brought Dick into regular contact with a man he would come to know well during 1942 and 1943. Martel was initially firmly in the picture, but in December he went to Egypt to learn more about Operation Crusader, which had been mounted during the previous month by the newly formed Eighth Army and had, after some potentially disastrous reverses, eventually succeeded in driving the Axis forces out of Cyrenaica.

  Dick’s activities in his new role followed much the pattern that he had expected, with a heavy emphasis on training. He had confidence in Charles Norman, his successor at 8 Armoured Division, an old friend with whose tactical ideas he was in general agreement and who needed the minimum of supervision. Only just arrived in the UK, 5 Canadian Armoured Division required more attention. The very small size of the regular Canadian peacetime army meant that it lacked the backbone of professional soldiers who still filled the most important positions in its British counterparts, but what it lacked in experience it made up for in enthusiasm and Dick soon formed a good working relationship with the Canadian Corps Commanders, Andrew MacNaughton and his successor Henry Crerar, and grew to admire their men. He also saw a lot of Oliver Leese at Guards Armoured Division. He had known him from afar at school and rather better at Staff College, where Leese had been in the Senior Division when Dick arrived. Their relationship was always good and Dick was also able to use his remit with Guards Armoured to continue his association with Alexander, in whose Southern Command it was located.

  Dick, as so often, found himself constantly on the move, visiting Bovington to inspect the AFV School and to see demonstrations of new tanks, watching combined services landing craft exercises in Scotland, lecturing to other HQs on the use of armour, visiting public schools to encourage their pupils to apply to join the RAC and holding innumerable TEWTs. He saw a great deal of Montgomery, particularly just before and after the many exercises which were held in South-Eastern Command. Dick tended to be exasperated by the sheer length of the GOC-in-C’s summing up in the conference held after each exercise, although he was compelled to admit after one of them that it had been a tour de force. He was particularly irked on one particular occasion by Montgomery using his material without an appropriate attribution. ‘I made out some notes for Gen. “Monte” [sic]’, he wrote to Lettice, ‘and he gave them out almost word for word at a big conference yesterday, which he held on last week’s exercise! All the audience listened to his words of wisdom, & thought how much he knew about armoured divisions.’

  Towards the end of January 1942 Martel returned from his visit to the Middle East and Dick, who still respected his views although he did not always agree with them, was keen to hear his findings. Martel had not been at all happy with what he heard about Operation Crusader. The strategic objective of Norrie’s XXX Corps, the capture of the important Axis airfield at Sidi Rezegh, had been correct, but 7 Armoured Division’s formations had been dispersed and, whilst 7 Armoured Brigade and the Support Group had captured the objective, 22 Armoured Brigade had been detached and had suffered badly in a battle with Axis armour, as had the independent 4 Armoured Brigade. The lack of concentration had meant that the division was driven away from Sidi Rezegh with considerable loss and it was only Rommel’s decision to dash for the Egyptian frontier, where he had been repulsed, which saved the situation. The only way in which 4 Armoured Brigade, equipped with American Stuart light tanks, had found itself able to engage the enemy was to charge, as the range and penetration of its guns was so poor and its only advantage lay in speed.

  Martel came back with a few positive conclusions, notably that Norrie’s command function had worked well, but overall he was critical. ‘As regards tactics in detail,’ he later wrote, ‘there had not been enough co-operation between the tanks and other arms. In fact the division needed a larger proportion of these arms. There were cases of tanks charging home like cavalry in bygone days and being shot to pieces in the process by artillery. A careful plan and artillery support was needed at every stage.’3 He was clearly now much closer to Dick’s point of view and the upshot was a radical reorganization of the armoured divisions in Home Forces, the initial work on which started at the end of February, although it was not concluded until May. There were two important changes. The first was that one of the two armoured brigades was replaced by a lorried infantry brigade, reducing the tank establishment from 340 to 201. The second was that the support group was abolished and, in its place the artillery and engineers were put under their own HQs, the former commanded by a brigadier, whereas the senior gunner hitherto had been a colonel acting in an advisory capacity. There were further changes made as the war progressed, but they were minor and the new structure would in essence remain in place for the duration.

  Just as Martel left Egypt to return to England, events in Libya took a serious turn for the worse. On 21 January Rommel launched the Axis forces back into Cyrenaica. The initial blow fell on 1 Armoured Division,
which had arrived relatively recently, but had temporarily lost Lumsden, its GOC since early November, who had been wounded in the post-Crusader advance. His replacement, Frank Messervy, barely had time to get to know his division. The Support Group was overrun, whilst neither the tanks nor the tactics of 2 Armoured Brigade proved a match for the Germans and it was forced to retire after heavy losses. Eighth Army made an undignified retreat to the Gazala Line, where it dug in.

  Churchill was taken aback by this reverse, putting enormous pressure on Auchinleck, the C-in-C Middle East, to strike back, an impossible task given that his forces were in general disarray and that his only available armoured division was no longer an effective fighting force. Brooke was gravely concerned about the performance of the armour in the desert. On the very day of Rommel’s attack he wrote to Auchinleck: ‘I am worried… that you have not got a first-class armoured force officer on your staff…There is a colossal amount of work for him in the re-equipping and reforming of your armoured divisions and army tank brigades, and in the provision of general advice on armoured matters.’4 Brooke saw Martel for a report on his visit five days later and on 4 February he wrote to Auchinleck again: ‘I do hope that you will reconsider the advisability of appointing an armoured forces major-general on similar lines to your chief gunner and sapper.’5 On February 14 Auchinleck responded, asking for a major general AFV (armoured fighting vehicles) to be sent if one could be spared. One could and it was to be Dick.

  Dick was notified on 24 February that he was probably to go to GHQ Middle East, but it was 20 March before he departed. On 3 March he was briefed by Brooke, who warned him that ‘he might have a difficult furrow to plough,’6 but there was still much unfinished business to resolve at 2 Armoured Group before he could finally leave the country. For Dick it was not an ideal time, as Lettice was expecting another baby in the summer, but he was keen to get close to the action. Except for three months in the summer of 1943 and a brief visit in early 1945, he would be overseas for the rest of the war.

  The journey to Cairo took a week by a very circuitous route. Having parted from Lettice on 20 March at Waterloo,7 Dick left Poole Harbour on a BOAC Boeing 314 flying boat in the company, among others, of Lord Beaverbrook, who was on his way to the United States. The plane called at Foynes in the West of Ireland and then Lisbon, where the party, all in civilian dress, motored out to Estoril for a bath and lunch at the Park Hotel. The next stop was Bathurst in The Gambia, whence Beaverbook and the flying boat flew off across the Atlantic, whilst Dick and some of the other passengers changed to a conventional aeroplane. Their route took them via Freetown in Sierra Leone and Marshal in Liberia to Takoradi and Accra in the Gold Coast and thence on the ‘reinforcement route’ via Kano and Maiduguri in Nigeria and El Fasher and Khartoum in the Sudan, reaching Cairo on the afternoon of 27 March, where Dick was met by his new GSO1, Bill Liardet.8 It had been an exhausting journey, but he had managed to fend off airsickness with frequent pills.

  Auchinleck was away at the front when Dick arrived, so he reported instead to the Chief of Staff, General Corbett. Corbett, like Auchinleck himself an Indian Army officer, was an unimpressive man and Dick wrote in his diary that he was ‘not v. struck by him’. The good news was that the director of military training was his old friend and fellow whipper-in from Staff College, John Harding, with whom he had an excellent relationship – just as well as the two would have to work closely together. Also away from Cairo at the time was another Staff College contemporary, Eric ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, who had been employed by Auchinleck as a senior staff officer, albeit with an unspecified role. It was partly to counteract what Brooke saw as Chink’s influence that Dick had been sent to Egypt. The CIGS later wrote of his concerns about Auchinleck: ‘I was beginning to be suspicious that “Chink” Dorman-Smith, one of his staff officers, was beginning to exercise far too much influence on him. Dorman-Smith had a most fertile brain, continually producing new ideas, some of which (not many) were good and the rest useless.’9 There had been no love lost between Dick and Chink at Camberley and the seeds were now about to be sown for conflict between them.

  It was several days before Auchinleck returned to Cairo, during which Dick ploughed through the copious files he had inherited and visited some of the armoured formations and units located around Cairo. His initial meeting with the C-in-C on 3 April went well, Dick writing to Lettice subsequently: ‘There is no doubt he is a fine man. He was friendly. I am dining with him tonight.’ This was in fact not their first meeting as Dick had been introduced to Auchinleck by Alexander at a dinner in April 1939. Auchinleck suggested that Dick should go up to the front immediately and he left on the following day.

  Dick spent a week on the move, travelling initially to meet Brian Robertson, the deputy adjutant and quartermaster general at Eighth Army’s Rear HQ at Buq Buq, not far from Sollum where he had spent much time in 1936. From there he moved on to the Main HQ at Gambut and then to Norrie’s XXX Corps HQ behind the Gazala Line. On the following day he saw 4 Armoured Brigade and Messervy’s 7 Armoured Division, before travelling across the desert to XIII Corps to meet its commander, ‘Strafer’ Gott, with whom he was favourably impressed. He spent nearly two days with the now recovered Lumsden at 1 Armoured Division before returning to Gambut for a meeting with Neil Ritchie, the Army commander. Having inspected the tank replacement centre there, he went on to look at the RAC transit camp at Mersa Matruh, eventually arriving back in Cairo on the evening of his seventh day away.

  Dick had learnt a lot during this trip. Two significant changes had occurred within the armoured divisions in the Western Desert, one good, the other of dubious value. On the positive side, the formations were now partially equipped with the new American M3 Lee/Grant tank. This was much better armoured than the Crusader and, more importantly, its main armament was an excellent 75mm gun, which was capable of firing not only armour-piercing shells at a velocity which could penetrate the armour of most German and Italian tanks, but also high explosive shells, which were able to destroy the formidable German 88mm anti-tank guns from a safe distance. Mechanically it was also far more reliable than the British Crusader, which was just as well as one of Dick’s responsibilities was to provide an adequate supply of tanks fit for battle to the units on the front. It had one disadvantage, that the gun was mounted in a sponson on the right-hand side of the vehicle, giving it a limited traverse and making a ‘hull down’ position more difficult.

  The other change was equally significant, but its value was a matter of debate. As in the UK the organization of the armoured divisions had changed. The common factors were the demise of the support group and the exchange of a motorized infantry brigade for the second armoured brigade. However, whereas in the UK the artillery and engineers had become divisional troops, in the Middle East they had been allocated to the two brigades. The top divisional gunner and sapper were still advisers, not commanders, and the brigades were brigade groups, effectively ‘all arms’ mini-divisions themselves. The limited supply of Lee/Grants meant that in four of the brigade groups in the theatre the armoured regiments still employed one squadron of Stuarts to two of Lee/Grants, whilst in the remaining two there was one squadron of Lee/Grants and two of Crusaders.

  Dick was never persuaded of the value of brigade groups, except in a wholly independent form. In a divisional context he felt that their presence encouraged the dispersal of force, believing that the whole division was the more effective weapon to deploy. As the campaign developed, this would become a significant issue.

  GHQ Middle East was responsible not only for Eighth Army in the Western Desert, but also for Tenth Army in Persia and Iraq, the object of Dick’s next visit. In the spring of 1942 there was considerable concern about any further advance that summer by the Germans into the Soviet Union, threatening the Caucasus and, much more significantly from the British perspective, the oilfields of the Persian Gulf. A large force had been assembled to defend the area, both British and Russian, and the former included 252 Indian
Armoured Brigade Group. Dick met the Army commander, General Quinan, in Cairo for a briefing on 16 April and left eleven days later, flying to Habbaniya in Iraq and then driving on to Baghdad and Mosul, where the armoured brigade was located. There he inspected the units, which included the 14th/20th Hussars, and was taken to see the lay of the land. He moved on to Kirkuk before returning to Baghdad, where there were discussions about a number of topics, one decision being to enhance the army’s armoured capability by bringing the HQ of 31 Indian Armoured Division from India to take over 252 Armoured Brigade and an as yet unspecified motor brigade.

  Back in Cairo a week after he had left, Dick found numerous issues on his desk, the most pressing of which was the painfully slow expansion of armour in the theatre. In the late summer of 1941 it had been decided to convert 1 Cavalry Division to armour. The division’s Household Cavalry and yeomanry regiments had come out to Palestine with all their horses at the beginning of 1940, but found that there was no chance of employment for them in their traditional role. From the units 10 Armoured Division had been formed, but the conversion was still not complete, due largely to the lack of tanks, the priority for which remained with the front-line divisions. There was as yet no motor brigade and the divisional troops were thin on the ground, with a total absence of artillery. Dick thought that the human element was good, but progress towards creating a full division remained frustrating.

  Dick’s other concerns were training, in conjunction with John Harding, and liaison with his opposite numbers in the various services. There were also various tactical theories being advanced on how to deploy the armour most effectively, most of which he could not support. One of the more bizarre of these was the ‘cow-pat’ theory, which posited the establishment of a number of supply bases located forward of the Gazala Line but south of the Axis forces, in which strong armoured forces would be based, supported by infantry and artillery. These, the theory held, would draw the enemy out from his fixed defences, whereupon he could be destroyed. Dick, supported by the Director of Military Intelligence Freddie de Guingand playing the role of the enemy, demonstrated in a war game that this would result in the Axis being able to concentrate overwhelming force against each individual base, wiping them out one by one. It was precisely the sort of dispersal of strength which Dick deplored.