Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Churchill spent much of the first half of the war searching in mounting desperation for commanders capable of winning victories on land. Throughout his own long experience of war, he had been impressed by many heroes, but few British generals. In his 1932 work Great Contemporaries, he painted an unsympathetic portrait of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, principal conductor of the nation’s armies through the World War I bloodbath in France and Flanders:

  He presents to me in those red years the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation: entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.

  Churchill was determined that no British army in ‘his’ war would be commanded by another such officer. Every general between 1939 and 1945 carried into battle an acute awareness of the animosity of the British people, and of their prime minister, towards the alleged ‘butchers’ of 1914—18. In this baggage, indeed, may be found a source of the caution characteristic of their campaigns. Yet Britain’s military limitations went much deeper than mere generalship. It might have been profitable for Churchill to divert some of the hours he devoted to scanning the countenances and records of commanders, instead to addressing the institutional culture of the British Army. John Kennedy expressed the War Office’s bafflement: ‘We manage by terrific efforts to pile up resources at the necessary places and then the business seems to go wrong, for lack of generalship and junior leadership and bad tactics and lack of concentration of force at decisive points.’

  Clausewitz laid down principles, rooted in his experience of the Napoleonic wars, when he perceived all European armies as possessing approximately the same quality of weapons, training and potential. Thus, the Prussian believed that outcomes were determined by relative mass, and by the respective skills of rival commanders. If this was true in the early nineteenth century, it certainly was not in the Second World War, when Allied and Axis armies displayed widely differing levels of ability and commitment. Superior weapons systems deployed by one side or the other sometimes produced decisive effects. Clausewitz distinguished three elements of war—policy, strategy and tactics. Churchill addressed himself with the keenest attention to the first two, but neglected the third, or rather allowed his commanders to do so.

  Britain could take pride in its distaste for militarism. But its inability to deploy effective armies until a late stage of the Second World War was a grievous handicap. Even competent British officers found it hard to extract from their forces performances good enough to beat the Germans or Japanese, who seemed to the prime minister to try much harder. Conversely, Axis troops sometimes achieved more, especially in defence, than indifferent generalship by local commanders entitled Hitler or Hirohito to expect. Rommel, who in 1941—42 became a British obsession, was a fine leader and tactician, but his neglect of logistics contributed much to his own difficulties in North Africa. His triumphs over the British reflected the institutional superiority of his little German force as much as his own inspired opportunism. The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, an exceptionally perceptive eye-witness, wrote from the desert in August 1942, in an assessment laid before British readers while the war was still being fought: ‘Rommel was an abler general than any on the British side, and for this one reason—because the German army was an abler army than the British army. Rommel was merely the expression of that abler German army.’

  This seems to identify a fundamental Allied difficulty. Eighth Army’s defeats in North Africa in 1941—42, almost invariably by German troops inferior in numbers and armoured strength, certainly reflected inadequate generalship. But they were also the consequence of shortcomings of method and determination. The British public was increasingly conscious of these. Glasgow secretary Pam Ashford wrote on 24 June 1942: ‘There is a general feeling that there is something wrong with our Forces…Mrs Muir thought it was our generals who were not equal to the German generals, they get out-manoeuvred every time.’ Young laboratory technician and former soldier Edward Stebbing wrote: ‘The feeling is growing that we are having our present reverses in Libya and the Far East not merely because of inferiority in numbers and equipment, but also because the enemy are really too clever for us, or rather that we are too stupid for the enemy.’

  Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador in London, once observed to Hugh Dalton that he found British soldiers unfailingly stiff and formal, unlike their counterparts of the other services. The army, he suggested, lacked the Royal Navy’s and RAF’s collective self-confidence. This was so. Gen. Pownall wrote after the Far East disasters:

  Our [career officers] regard [war] as an upsetting, rather exhausting and distinctly dangerous interlude in the happier, more comfortable and more desirable days of peace-soldiering…We need…a tougher Army, based on a tougher nation, an Army which is regarded by the people as an honourable profession to which only the best can gain admittance; one which is prepared and proud to live hard, not soft, in peace. One whose traditions are not based on purely regimental history but on the history of the whole British Army; where the competition is in efficiency, not in games or pipe-blowing and band concerts…Training must be harder, exercises must not be timed to suit meal-times. Infantry shouldn’t be allowed to say that they are tired…We must cultivate mobility of mind as well as of body, i.e. imagination; and cut out the great hampering ‘tail’ which holds back rather than aids the ‘teeth’.

  The regimental system was sometimes an inspirational force, but often also, as was implied by Pownall’s remarks, a source of parochialism, an impediment to the cohesion of larger formations. German, American and Russian professional soldiers thought in divisions; the British always of the regiment, the cherished ‘military family’. Until the end of the war, the dead hand of centralised, top-down command methods, together with lack of a fighting doctrine common to the entire army, hampered operations in the field. Eighth Army’s techniques for the recovery of disabled vehicles from the battlefield—a vital skill in maximising combat power—lagged badly behind those of the Afrika Korps. British armoured units, imbued with a cavalry ethos, remained childishly wedded to independent action. In the desert, as in the Crimea a century earlier, British cavalry charged—and were destroyed. This, when since 1940 the Germans had almost daily demonstrated the importance of coordinating tanks, anti-tank guns and infantry in close mutual support.

  British unit as well as army leadership left much to be desired. On the battlefield, local elements seldom displayed initiative, especially if outflanked. Troops engaged in heavy fighting sometimes displayed resolution, but sometimes also collapsed, withdrew or surrendered more readily than their commanders thought acceptable. The sybaritic lifestyle of the vast rear headquarters nexus around Cairo shocked many visitors, especially Americans but also including British ministers Oliver Lyttelton and Harold Macmillan. Here, indeed, was a new manifestation of the ‘château generalship’ condemned by critics of the British Army in the First World War, and this time focused upon Shepheard’s hotel and the Gezireh club.

  Sloth and corruption flourished in the workshops and bases of the rear areas, where tens of thousands of British soldiers indifferent to the progress of the war were allowed to pursue their own lazy routines, selling stores, fuel and even trucks for private profit. ‘Petrol, food, NAAFI supplies, vehicle engines, tools, tyres, clothing—all rich booty—were pouring into Egypt, free for all who dared,’ wrote a disgusted colonel responsible for a network of ordnance depots, who was as unimpressed by the lack of ‘grip’ in high places as by the systemic laziness and corruption he perceived throughout the rear areas of Middle East Command. It was a serious indictment of the army that such prac
tices were never checked. Even at the end of 1943, Harold Macmillan complained of the then Middle East C-in-C, Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland-Wilson, that ‘The Augean stables are still uncleaned.’ Since shipping shortages constrained all Allied operations, waste of material and supplies transported at such cost to theatres of war was a self-inflicted handicap. The Allies provided their soldiers with amenities and comforts quite unknown to their enemies. These became an acceptable burden in the years of victory, but bore hardly upon the war effort in those of defeat.

  Throughout the conflict, in Britain’s media there was debate about the army’s equipment deficiencies, tactics and commanders. The government vacillated about how far to allow criticism to go. In December 1941, Tom Wintringham wrote an article for Picture Post entitled ‘What has Happened in Libya?’ He attacked the army’s leadership, tanks and guns. As a result, Picture Post was briefly banned both from distribution in the Middle East and from British Council offices worldwide. Few people doubted that what Wintringham said was true. The difficulty was to reconcile expression of realities with the need to sustain the morale of men risking their lives on the battlefield equipped with these same inadequate weapons, and sometimes led by indifferent officers.

  In March 1942 the popular columnist John Gordon delivered a withering blast against Britain’s service chiefs in Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. They were, he said, men who had achieved high rank merely by staying on in uniform in pursuit of ‘cushy billets’ after the last war ended in 1918, while their betters earned civilian livings. ‘All this,’ noted a general who read Gordon’s rant, ‘has a devastating effect on army morale. When soldiers are in a tight corner, how can they be expected to fight if they have been led to believe that their leaders are men of straw?’

  Brooke, Alexander and others believed that some of the army’s difficulties derived from the fact that its best potential leaders, who should have been the generals of World War II, had been killed in the earlier Kaiser’s war. It may be of marginal significance that the German army husbanded the lives of promising junior officers with more care than did the British, at least until the 1918 campaigns, but it seems mistaken to make too much of this. The core issue was that Germany’s military culture was more impressive. That of the pre-war British Army militated against recruitment and promotion of clever, imaginative, ruthless commanders, capable of handling large forces—or even of ensuring that they were equipped with weapons to match those of the enemy. All too many senior officers were indeed men who had chosen military careers because they lacked sufficient talent and energy to succeed in civilian life. Brooke privately agreed with much of what John Gordon wrote. His own fits of melancholy were often prompted by reflections on the unfitness of the British Army to engage the Wehrmacht: ‘We are going to lose this war unless we control it very differently and fight it with more determination…It is all desperately depressing…Half our Corps and Divisional Commanders are totally unfit for their appointments, and yet if I were to sack them I could find no better! They lack character, imagination, drive and powers of leadership.’

  When some 1,600 army officers of various ranks in Home Forces were relieved in 1942, in an attempt to introduce new blood, cynics observed that their replacements seemed socially and professionally indistinguishable from those they supplanted. Churchill attempted one lunge towards altering the social ethos at the top of the army: when he made up his mind to sack Dill as CIGS, he dallied with appointing as his successor Gen. Sir Archibald Nye. Nye’s virtue—in the eyes of politicians, anyway—was that as the son of a sergeant-major he could not be denounced as a ‘toff ’. Eventually, however, Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded that Nye lacked the experience and gifts to be given the top job, and merely promoted him to become Brooke’s deputy.

  Harold Macmillan saw the wartime army at close quarters, and thought little of most of its senior officers. He accused both the British and US chiefs of staff of surrounding themselves with a host of acolytes ‘too stupid to be employed in any operational capacity’. Observing that one British commander was ‘a bit wooden’, Macmillan continued:

  These British administrative generals, whose only experience of the world is a military mess at Aldershot or Poona, are a curiously narrow minded lot. They seem to go all over the world without observing anything in it—except their fellow-officers and their wives…and the various Services clubs in London, Cairo, Bombay, etc., but they are honourable, hard-working, sober, clean about the house and so on. At the end of their careers, they are just fit to be secretaries of golf clubs. War, of course, is their great moment. In their hearts (if they were honest with themselves) they must pray for its prolongation.

  This was harsh, but not unjust. Churchill was imbued with a belief that the execution of Admiral Sir John Byng in 1757, for failing to relieve Minorca, had a salutary effect on the subsequent performance of the Royal Navy. He was right. Following Byng’s shooting, from the Napoleonic wars through the twentieth century, the conduct of British naval officers in the face of the enemy almost invariably reflected an understanding that while they might be forgiven for losing a battle, they would receive no mercy if they flinched from fighting one. After the sacking of General Sir Alan Cunningham in Libya, Churchill muttered to Dill about the virtues of the Byng precedent. The then CIGS answered sharply that such a view was anachronistic.

  Dill was right, that displays of tigerish zeal such as the prime minister wanted were inappropriate to a modern battlefield, and frequently precipitated disasters. Neither Marlborough nor Wellington won his battles by heroic posturing. But the prime minister was surely correct to believe that generals should fear disgrace if they failed. The British Army’s instinctive social sympathy for its losers was inappropriate to a struggle of national survival. Even the ruthless Brooke anguished over the dismissal of Ritchie, a conspicuous failure as Eighth Army commander in Libya: ‘I am devoted to Neil and hate to think of the disappointment this will mean to him.’ Some middle-ranking officers who proved notoriously unsuccessful in battle continued to be found employment: Ritchie was later allowed to command a corps in north-west Europe—without distinction. It would have been more appropriate to consign proven losers to professional oblivion, as the Americans often did. But this was not the British way, nor even Brooke’s.

  Fundamental to many defeats in the desert was an exaggerated confidence in manoeuvre, an inadequate focus on firepower. Until 1944, successive models of tank and anti-tank guns lacked penetrative capacity. It was extraordinary that, even after several years’ experience of modern armoured warfare, British—and Americanmade fighting vehicles continued to be inferior to those of the Germans. Back in 1917, in the first flush of his own enthusiasm for tanks, Churchill had written to his former battalion second-in-command Archie Sinclair, urging him to forsake any thought of a life with the cavalry, and to become instead an armoured officer: ‘Arm yourself therefore my dear with the panoply of modern science of war…Embark in the chariots of war and slay the malignants with the arms of precision.’ Yet a world war later, Churchill was unsuccessful in ensuring that the British Army deployed armour capable of matching that of its principal enemy. From 1941 onwards the British usually deployed more tanks than the Germans in the desert, sometimes dramatically more. Yet the Afrika Korps inflicted devastating attrition, by exploiting its superior weapons and tactics.

  Again and again MPs raised this issue in the Commons, yet it proved beyond military ingenuity or industrial skill to remedy. American tanks were notably better than British, but they too were outmatched by those of the Germans. Until almost the end of the war, both nations adopted a deliberate policy of compensating by tank quantity for wellrecognised deficiencies of quality. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this failure in explaining defeats.

  Nor was the problem of inadequate weapons restricted to tanks. In 1941, when the War Office was offered a choice of either 100 sixpounder anti-tank guns or six times that number of two-pounders, it opted for the latter. By
that winter Moscow was telling London not to bother sending any further two-pounders to Russia, because the Red Army found them useless—as did Auchinleck’s units in the desert. Only late in 1942 did six-pounders become available in substantial numbers. The War Office struggled in vain to match the superb German 88mm dual-purpose anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun, which accounted for 40 per cent of British tanks destroyed in North Africa, against 38 per cent which fell to Rommel’s panzers.

  British tank and military-vehicle design and production were nonstandardised and dispersed among a ragbag of manufacturers. Given that the RAF and the Royal Navy exploited technical innovations with striking success, the failure of Britain’s ground forces to do so, certainly until 1944, must be blamed on the army’s own procurement chiefs. It was always short of four-wheel-drive trucks. Mechanical serviceability rates were low. Pre-war procurement officers, influenced by the experience of colonial war, had a visceral dislike for platoon automatic weapons, which they considered wasteful of ammunition. The War Office of the 1920s dismissed Thompson sub-machine guns as ‘gangster weapons’, but in 1940 found itself hastening to import as many as it could buy from the Americans. Only in 1943—44 did British Stens become widely available. Infantry tactics were unimaginative, especially in attack. British artillery, always superb, was the only real success story.