Finest Years (37 page)

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.

Until late in 1942, Eighth Army in North Africa was poorly supported by the RAF. Air force leadership was institutionally hostile to providing ‘flying artillery' for soldiers, and only sluggishly evolved liaison techniques such as the Luftwaffe had practised since 1939. Churchill strongly defended the RAF's right to an independent strategic function, asserting that it would be disastrous to turn the air force into ‘
a mere handmaid
of the Army'. But it proved mistaken to permit the airmen such generous latitude in determining their own priorities. Close air support for ground forces was slow to mature.

One of the most damaging errors of aircraft production policy was ‘
the tendency to bridge over
waiting periods for new types delayed in development by means of “stop-gap” orders for older types', in the words of an official historian. ‘Three aircraft especially, the Battle, the Blenheim and Whitley, were repeatedly ordered long after the replacement date originally set for them had arrived.' There was a mistaken belief that it must be better to provide the RAF with any aircraft than none. Yet Battles and Blenheims, especially, added nothing to British combat power, and merely provided coffins for the unfortunate aircrew obliged to fly them in 1940—41. Whitley bombers remained in production until mid-1943, even though the
RAF latterly ceased to sacrifice them over Germany. Better planes were coming. Aircraft design proved one of Britain's real successes in the second half of the war. But in 1942 there were still pathetically few of the new Mosquito and Lancaster bombers, or of upgraded models of the Spitfire and Hurricane. Almost all the latest types were deployed at British airfields, rather than in support of the army's battles in the Middle and Far East.

‘
In all its branches
, the German war machine appeared to have a better and tighter control than our army,' wrote Alan Moorehead. ‘One of the senior British generals said to the war correspondents…“We are still amateurs. The Germans are professionals.” ' This was an extraordinary admission in mid-1942. The army's performance improved during the latter part of that year. But, to prevail over the Germans, British—and American—forces continued to require a handsome superiority of men, tanks and air support.

There remained one great unmentionable, even in those newspapers most critical of Britain's military performance: the notion that, man for man, the British soldier might be a less determined fighter than his German adversary. The ‘tommy' was perceived—sometimes rightly—as the victim of his superiors' incompetence, rather than as the bearer of any personal responsibility for failures of British arms. In private, however, and among ministers and senior officers, this issue was frequently discussed. George Marshall deplored the manner in which Churchill spoke of the army's Other Ranks as ‘the dull mass', a phrase which reflected the prime minister's limited comprehension of them. There was an embarrassing moment at Downing Street when following a cabinet meeting Randolph Churchill joined a discussion about the army, and shouted: ‘
Father, the trouble is
your soldiers won't fight.' Churchill once observed of his son: ‘
I love Randolph
, but I don't like him.' It was astonishing that, in the midst of debates about great matters, he indulged his son's presence, and expected others to do so. On this occasion, however, Randolph's intervention might have been hyperbolic, but was to the point. Many British officers perceived their citizen soldiers as lacking the will and commitment routinely displayed by the
Germans and Japanese. Underlying the conduct of Churchill's wartime commanders was a fundamental nervousness about what their men would, or would not, do on the battlefield.

Churchill understood that if British troops were to overcome Germans, they must become significantly nastier. This represented a change of view. In 1940 he favoured civility towards the enemy, reproaching Duff Cooper as Minister of Information for mocking the Italians: ‘It is a well-known rule of war policy to praise the courage of your opponent, which enhances your own victory when gained.' Likewise in January 1942 he declared his admiration for Rommel on the floor of the House of Commons: ‘
a very daring and skilful
opponent…and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general'. Progressively, however, the prime minister came to think it mistaken to suggest that Axis soldiers were honourable foes. Such courtesies encouraged British troops to surrender too readily. As the war matured, Churchill deplored newspaper reports of chivalrous German behaviour: ‘
These beastly Huns
are murdering people wholesale in Europe and have committed the most frightful atrocities in Russia, and it would be entirely in accordance with their technique to win a reputation for treating British and American soldiers with humanity on exceptional and well-advertised occasions.'

In the spring and summer of 1942, Churchill was right to believe that the British Army's performance in North Africa was inadequate. Many of his outbursts about the soldiers' failures, which so distressed Brooke and his colleagues, were justified. It remains debatable whether remedies were available, when positions of military responsibility must perforce be filled from the existing pool of regular officers. Most were captives of the culture to which they had been bred. Its fundamental flaw was that it required only moderate effort, sacrifice and achievement, and produced only a small number of leaders and units capable of matching the skill and determination of their enemies. The army's institutional weakness would be overcome only when vastly superior Allied resources became available on the battlefield.

The secretary of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee one day took Leo Amery aside in the Commons smoking room. He told the India Secretary there was deep restlessness among MPs, ‘
because they did not feel
that there was anyone inside the Cabinet who stood for the Conservative point of view at all'. This was largely true. Almost everything about Britain's wartime domestic policies seemed socialistic. Centralisation, planning, rationing and regulation were fundamental to mobilisation of the nation's resources, to fair distribution of food, fuel, clothing. Every British citizen cursed wartime bureaucracy, transport shortages, queues, the relentlessly dispiriting influence of the blackout, the food and privileges still available to those with money to pay for them. But the country was, for the most part, notably well administered. For this the prime minister deserved full credit, for putting the right men in charge.