by Richard Mead
The last few days were spent in farewells, first to 46 and 78 Divisions in the British sector, both of which had been under Dick’s command for a long time. The Austrian Government gave a dinner in his honour on 14 May, the first such event to be held in the Federal Chancellery since the end of the War. Figl made a speech expressing his regret at Dick’s departure, after which he presented him with a crystal vase and invited him to consider himself a Freeman (Ehrenbürger) of the country. On the following day Dick, the Macks and the Wintertons were entertained to lunch by President and Mrs Renner at their house.
That afternoon Dick’s successor, James Steele, who had also followed him as chief of staff at Middle East Command, arrived in time for a quick briefing and on the next day Dick flew out from Schwechat. Mack reported to Bevin after his departure:
General McCreery had an exceptional position in Austria. Of the four forces of occupation there is no doubt that the British are the most popular and have been from the moment of their entry when they impressed even the stolid Carinthians by their good behaviour and correctness. But General McCreery’s position here did not rest solely, or even mainly, on the behaviour of the troops under his command and on the fact that he had been the Commander of the conquering Eighth Army during the final stages of the campaign in Italy. He is the happy possessor of those personal qualities which make an universal appeal and I have no hesitation in saying that he made a stronger appeal to the hearts and minds of the Austrians than any of the other three commanders. The Austrian Government’s distress on hearing that he was leaving was very genuine. They regarded him as a friend whom they respected and trusted, and I think it will be a long time before his name is forgotten in Austria.8
Chapter 26
The Rhine Army
When telling Dick of his new appointment Brooke never revealed that he had originally intended him to succeed Nye as VCIGS. The proposal had been scotched by Montgomery, who told Brooke that he would have Dick removed the moment he himself became CIGS, insisting on a nominee of his own. He asked for de Guingand, but when Brooke refused to take Montgomery’s former chief of staff, the two men agreed on a compromise candidate, Frank Simpson.1 Whether this key role in the War Office, where he had never served previously, would have played to Dick’s skills and experience is a matter for conjecture. What is clear is that he and Montgomery would never have got on. Montgomery’s views on cavalrymen had not changed: he still regarded them essentially as amateurs, interested more in sport than in soldiering. Moreover, he had not forgotten that Dick had stood up to him in North Africa in 1942. Dick, for his part, had never been an admirer of Montgomery and deplored his showmanship. All of this would have made the relationship, necessarily a close one, very difficult.
Almost as significantly, when Brooke proposed that Dick should instead succeed Montgomery in Germany, Montgomery vetoed his assuming the full role of C-in-C, Military Governor of the British Zone and Allied Control Commissioner. He insisted that this should go instead to someone of equivalent stature to himself, who would not only be responsible for the political and civil aspects of the job, but also act as a tri-service C-in-C, whilst Dick would be one of three subordinate commanders as GOC-in-C of the British Army of the Rhine. With no field marshals available, the only candidate was Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas, who had previously been commanding the British Air Forces of Occupation. Douglas had wanted to retire, but reluctantly accepted the appointment following pressure from Montgomery and Tedder, now the Chief of the Air Staff.
There is no doubt that Douglas, who had held senior command in the RAF with considerable success since early in the War and had recent experience of Germany, was well qualified for the role. If anyone was better qualified, however, it was Dick. He had grappled with politico-military issues over the last year with great success, was exceptionally well versed in the problems of dealing with a civilian population in the aftermath of war and, just as importantly, had deep experience of handling relations with the Americans, the French and, most particularly, the Russians. An opportunity was lost here, entirely due to Montgomery’s prejudice and his jealousy in terms of his own reputation.
Dick in the meantime was blissfully unaware of this background and probably not unhappy to be back in an exclusively military role. BAOR was one of the largest and most important field formations in the Army. It had been born of 21st Army Group in August 1945 as the occupation force for the British Zone in Germany. This consisted of the modern states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony and North-Rhine Westphalia and the city of Hamburg, but excluded two pieces of territory under US control around the cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. It bordered on the Russian Zone to the east, the American and French Zones to the south, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west and Denmark to the north. Strategically it was highly important as it included the whole of the Ruhr, still Germany’s industrial heartland, and it blocked the Russians from the North Sea.
Initially the organization of BAOR had followed the wartime model, with a corps district occupying each of the three German states, deploying divisions and smaller formations as desired. By the time Dick arrived on 26 June 1946, after nearly six weeks’ leave, this had already changed considerably. VIII Corps District in Schleswig-Holstein had been disbanded two months earlier, its place taken by Hamburg District, which was garrisoned by a number of units grouped into two sub-areas. XXX Corps District was shortly to go the same way, leaving only I Corps District, which covered North-Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Of the ten divisions which had been part of BAOR on its formation, one had already been disbanded and six were to follow before the end of the year. Only 7 Armoured, 5 and 53 Divisions remained, all under I Corps District.
There were further complications. Each of Denmark, Norway and Belgium maintained contingents in the British Zone. Dick did not exercise direct command over these, which were still subject to their national governments, but he had oversight on the understanding that the GOC-in-C BAOR would assume responsibility for them in the event of hostilities. He visited them all regularly, maintaining close relationships with their commanders. The same applied to British Troops Berlin, which operated under the direct auspices of the Control Commission.
HQ BAOR was located in Bad Oeynhausen, some 50 miles south-west of Hanover, approximately in the centre of the British zone and with good autobahn connections to north and south and an all-weather airfield 15 miles away at Bückeberg. Dick brought with him only his personal staff in the shape of Crankshaw, Abraham and Paget, together with his batman, Corporal Roberts, his groom, Corporal Plumtree, and Squadron Sergeant Major Watson, who would run the household. Abraham left after a year to attend the Staff College and was replaced by Archie Clowes, whilst Paget was succeeded in the early months by George Brown. All of these, together with an infantry company to provide guards, lived in and around Dick’s large house at Kostedt, about 5 miles from the HQ on a wide bend of the River Weser and surrounded by lakes. It had been expropriated from the owner, who lived in a farmhouse nearby.
Dick inherited the senior staff at BAOR. The chief of staff was Arthur ‘Pop’ Dowler and the chief administrative officer was Nevil Brownjohn, but both were to be posted elsewhere during Dick’s first six months. He was particularly sorry to lose Dowler, but delighted that his replacement was Bill Stratton. The replacement for Brownjohn was Edric ‘Dricky’ Bastyan, whom Dick had known performing the same role for Leese in 1944, before being taken away by the latter to South-East Asia with the rest of the senior Eighth Army staff: he turned out to be very good. Operationally Dick’s most senior subordinate was Ivor Thomas, the GOC of I Corps, with whom Dick found it much more difficult to build a relationship. Thomas had been a tough divisional commander during the War, who had tended to take a more relaxed view of casualties than most of his British colleagues and was commonly known by his troops as ‘Butcher’. To his fellow officers, and possibly because his attitude might have seemed somewhat Germanic, he was called ‘Von Thoma’, the name o
f a former commander of the Afrika Corps. On the other hand Dick found Sholto Douglas, his own immediate superior, very easy to get on with, whilst Douglas’s deputy and eventual successor, Brian Robertson, was an old friend who had been Alexander’s principle administrative officer. He also established good relationships with his opposite numbers in the Royal Navy and the RAF.
Both Germany itself and the nature of Dick’s job there were very different from Austria. The country and the people were, if anything, in even worse shape, with both food and fuel very scarce. Whereas Austria was treated from the outset as having been liberated, a policy which contributed enormously to the friendly attitude of the population, Germany was emphatically being occupied as a defeated nation and its inhabitants were still in a state of shock. The ban on fraternization for the troops had been relaxed before Dick’s arrival, but he himself met very few Germans in either an official or an informal capacity during the time he was there. Government was in the hands of the British element of the Control Commission for Germany, with its HQ at Lübbekke not far from Bad Oeynhausen, but the substantially military members of the CCG’s original personnel had now been largely replaced by British civil servants and, at a local level, increasingly by Germans. Dick had a single civil responsibility, the confirmation of death sentences arising out of the trials of concentration camp guards.2
The fact that the reconstruction of the country and the wellbeing of its people were no longer his concern meant that Dick could now focus almost exclusively on the efficiency of his army. BAOR was, initially at least, much bigger than BTA and much more widely spread out, so Dick had to cover significant distances to visit all the formations and units under his command, let alone those of the other nations represented in the British zone. His preferred mode of transport remained the Mercedes, which he had brought with him from Austria, but he had other cars, including a Rolls Bentley for prestige purposes and a Humber staff car for more mundane use. Once again he enjoyed the use of his own train, possibly even more luxurious than the Austrian version. For air travel he had lost the Expeditor, but instead flew in an Avro Anson, a twin-engined aircraft with the same passenger capacity, or in one of his two ‘whizzers’.
BAOR was effectively being run down throughout Dick’s tenure. This was to be expected. The United Kingdom was bankrupt after the War and could not afford the cost of keeping a large army doing very little in Germany. Whilst the Russians were proving very difficult to deal with, few people in 1946 or even 1947, and certainly not Dick, thought that they represented a serious threat. The German population was docile and there was no sign of civil disturbance. With the army beginning to look more and more like a static garrison, Dick’s major concern was to maintain it at the highest possible level of efficiency, at the same time both reducing it in line with government directives and absorbing thousands of National Servicemen3 to replace those officers and men who had retired or been demobilized.
By the spring of 1948 I Corps District had been disbanded, as had 5 Division, whilst 7 Armoured Division had been folded into the new Hanover District. 53 Division had been renumbered as 2 Division and was effectively the only large field formation still configured as for war, with three infantry brigades and a full complement of divisional troops. The only completely new formation to arrive in the British zone, and a welcome one at that, was 2 (later renumbered 16) Parachute Brigade, constituted as a brigade group with its own artillery and engineers.
With this almost constant reorganization in progress Dick spent a significant proportion of his time on tour in the British zone, meeting the commanders and their staffs, holding conferences, visiting individual units and attending exercises. Unlike in Austria, however, he found himself having to go back to the UK at least once a month. Most of the visits involved meetings at the War Office, but Dick was also required to attend regular conferences held by Montgomery for senior officers from across the Army, with representatives present from the other services and the Commonwealth. Such trips made it easier for him to fit it other non-military obligations, including meetings of the Grand Military Race Committee and the Hurlingham Polo Association, but most had at least a quasi-military purpose. The main event on one such occasion was the taking of the salute at a passing out parade at the RAC Centre at Bovington, for which Abraham arranged an official War Office car to take Dick from Stowell and back. About a half an hour from their destination the car came to a complete halt and it transpired that it had run out of fuel. Abraham went off to get help, but returned to find Dick had disappeared. He had commandeered a baker’s van, which in due course drove onto the parade ground at Bovington, where a guard of honour was drawn up. The Centre Sergeant Major let loose some choice expletives at the driver, only to come to a spluttering halt when out stepped a red-hatted and heavily bemedalled general! Extraordinarily, Dick never took Abraham to task over this serious lapse in efficiency.
Another reason to visit the UK was for regimental functions, obviously those of the 12th Lancers, but also of two other regiments. In the late autumn of 1946 Dick became the Honorary Colonel of the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (Sharpshooters). Although the two component parts of the regiment had seen out the War in north-west Europe, they had both served in North Africa and 4 CLY had fought under him in X Corps in late 1943, so he was delighted to renew this association. He was also approached in early 1947 to take on the colonelcy of the 14th/20th Hussars from his friend and former commander at 2 Cavalry Brigade, John Hurndall. The regiment had reason to be grateful to him for its inclusion in the last battle in the Po Valley, without which it would have ended the War with no battle honours at all. His first inclination was to say no, on the grounds that it was already known he would be wanted as Colonel of the 12th Lancers in due course. However Harry Arkwright, now Director RAC at the War Office, wrote to tell him that Birdwood had been promised that job for life and as the old field marshal was showing no sign of imminent demise, the Military Secretary thought he should take on the Hussars. Dick changed his mind and never regretted it, becoming intimately involved with the regiment, which for the first few months was in BAOR. The other role which Dick assumed at much the same time was that of Representative Colonel Commandant of the Cavalry Wing of the RAC, which was to cause him some grief years later.
Very early on it became apparent that Montgomery’s policy was for the training of new recruits to be carried out in Germany, rather than at depots in the UK. Dick was initially opposed to this, believing that BAOR would quickly cease to be an operational command and become instead a huge basic training organization. The argument came to a head when Montgomery paid a visit to the British zone in August 1947 in company with Lou Lyne, now Director of Staff Duties at the War Office. There were some vigorous and not always cordial debates not only at Bad Oeynhausen and Kostedt, where Montgomery was staying, but also, as remembered by Abraham, in the back of the car. Inevitably in the end Montgomery prevailed and once it was decided Dick threw himself into implementing the policy with vigour. In particular a BAOR Training Centre was set up at Bad Lippspringe to absorb the new recruits and give them basic training before they were sent to their new units for further instruction.
Not for the first time, Dick found that his major problem was morale. Questions were increasingly raised about the whole purpose of the Army in Germany, many of the National Servicemen resenting their conscription in peacetime, while a lot of those who had fought in the War were still waiting for demobilization and the pre-war regulars were querying their continuing commitment to a military career. As in Austria there were solutions in the shape of good welfare and entertainment facilities and plenty of activity. To help with the latter Dick initiated Operation Woodpecker, tree-felling competitions which had been so successful in Styria and Carinthia, and insisted on a constant programme of military training, but also on instruction in specific technical trades for those leaving the army at the end of their period of service. He also encouraged and took a personal interest in the holding of military tattoo
s, both in the British zone and in Berlin, a showcase for the Army which impressed the other occupying forces and the locals and acted as an attractive diversion for all involved.
There was one issue he had not encountered in Austria, the high incidence in BAOR of venereal disease. Dick realized that it would be unproductive to tackle this from a moral perspective and that the only way for it to be addressed was through the imposition of military discipline. During his tours of the British zone, he called meetings of the officers of every unit he visited at which he told them that he regarded VD as being tantamount to a self-inflicted wound. He ordered that all ranks should be regularly examined for VD and treated if affected, that a unit with high VD figures would be regarded as having disobeyed orders and that the COs and officers concerned would have their leave stopped until these figures had reached the very low levels he felt were acceptable. The results were extraordinary: within months VD was no longer a problem.
Even if it was not appropriate to the VD issue, Dick did not ignore the moral welfare of his army. The newly appointed Bishop to the Armed Forces, Cuthbert Bardsley,4 recalled meeting him for the first time:
I was ushered into his presence and I am bound to say that at first sight I regarded him as someone very formidable. Before long he asked me somewhat abruptly, ‘Bishop, what do you think of the morale of the men out here?’ I replied that I did not think it was very high. He said, ‘I agree. What do you suggest?’ I said ‘Well I think the best way forward is for a series of lectures to be given on the Christian Faith.’ Then I added, somewhat fearfully, that the best way of implementing this was to start at the top. There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘I agree. What do you suggest?’ I said that I thought it would be very good if he could call together all his senior officers for a three-day conference on the Christian Faith. He said he quite agreed, and I then said, ‘Well, general, I am sure it would be a good thing if you were to come yourself’, and his final word was ‘I agree.’
