Commando General

by Richard B Mead

  Accordingly, on 3 January 1938, Bob reported for duty at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham.

  Chapter 6

  Gas

  When Bob read the joining instructions for his attachment to the School of Military Engineering, he found to his dismay that the term of his appointment was for three years.1 This did not go down at all well with Angie, who had assumed that his postings would be confined to Central London and Windsor, on which grounds they had purchased Heron’s Brook. The house was now put up for sale, and they decided that Bob should start by living in the Royal Engineers officers’ mess. Angie then arrived to begin looking for a house to rent and they moved temporarily to a hotel near Maidstone, before taking the Friary, near Aylesford, a former Carmelite house, which Bob described as ‘strangely beautiful but unbelievably uncomfortable’.2

  Bob’s role at the school was primarily to instruct War Office civilians, who worked not only in Whitehall but also at a number of establishments around the country, on how best to take precautions against bombing attacks, both chemical and high explosive. However, he was also expected to instruct Royal Engineer officers how to retaliate in kind in the event of such attacks. He found that he got on very well with the Chief Instructor, Lieutenant Colonel K. N. Crawford, and the other two instructors. He did, however, cause some consternation on his first morning when, crossing the parade ground in shiny field boots and a Royal Horse Guards’ cap, he was mistaken by the Guard Commander for the Engineer-in-Chief, who was expected imminently on an inspection tour. The Guard was turned out and arms were presented, only for the Guard Commander to discover his mistake. In the confusion which followed, the arrival of the distinguished inspecting officer only minutes later was completely missed!

  Bob quickly settled down to his work, cheerfully gassing his students much as he had been gassed himself. Angie, on the other hand, was initially somewhat at sea in a garrison town, an environment she had not experienced before. In particular, it was traditional to drop calling cards on all the other married officers and their wives, a custom completely unknown in the Household Brigade. Before long, however, they had become part of the local military community and also invited friends to stay for weekends, notwithstanding the fact that Angie was pregnant again. Their first son, Joseph William Peter Laycock, was born in London on 7 July 1938.

  This was the summer of the Sudeten Crisis and the subsequent Munich Agreement, during which the War Office was rather belatedly gearing up for what was seen by some, and certainly by Bob, as an inevitable war. At just this time a Colonel Douglas from the War Office rang to say that he would like to visit the school to see what was going on. Bob had been warned about the possibility of this visit by a fellow instructor who was just going off on holiday but who asked that he should be contacted in the event that Douglas called, as he wished to escort him personally. All Bob’s attempts to locate this officer failed and Douglas refused to delay his visit, so Bob had to accompany him, arranging for good measure a demonstration of how to extinguish an incendiary bomb. Douglas was highly impressed, said that he was looking for a GSO3 in his branch at the War Office and asked if Bob was interested. By now somewhat bored with giving the same lectures and demonstrations over and over again, Bob said that he would welcome the move, on which Douglas applied for his transfer. On the return of Bob’s fellow instructor from holiday, it turned out that he knew all about the War Office job and was hoping for it himself. Bob tried to get his posting changed, but Douglas was immoveable, and Bob was ordered to report to Whitehall forthwith. The lease on the Friary was surrendered and Bob, Angie and the children took up temporary residence at 86 Chester Square, which was owned by the same landlord, before moving to a larger house at 56 Rutland Gate, which belonged to their friend Ralph Cobbold.

  In the War Office Bob found himself in sub-department TO3, which was one of three in the Department of Training and Organization (TO) and specifically responsible for defence against gas. TO was headed by Brigadier Kenneth Loch, and TO3 consisted of Colonel Douglas, a single GSO2 and Bob, the three of whom sat in a large room with four other officers, creating bedlam when all were on the phone at the same time, as happened only too often. However, part of the job was to advise the War Department contractors’ factories on their arrangements in the event of bombing, and Bob was delighted when he was ordered to tour as many of them as possible. His social connections meant that he had friends scattered throughout the country, so he would ring and ask if he could stay, by day visiting factories, in which he had always been interested, and by night enjoying his friends’ hospitality. One of the factories, which he visited whilst staying with his brother-in-law Toby Greenall, who had just succeeded his father as Lord Daresbury, was manufacturing a product which was so highly secret that supposedly not even its employees were aware of what it was. However, when Bob, dressed in civilian clothes to maintain the deception, asked a taxi driver to take him there, the response was, ‘Oh, you want the place where they make that stinking mustard gas, do you?’3

  Back in London in the early months of 1939, Bob’s workload increased significantly, so much so that he was unable to get away with Angie for winter sports in Gstaad. The prospect of remaining for too long in Whitehall started to become distinctly unappealing.

  Bob was delighted when Antony Head was also posted to the War Office, in his case as Secretary to the War Office Selection Board, vetting applications for emergency commissions. However, whilst Head was kept very busy in the summer of 1939 as events in Europe began to look serious, for the first time since he had arrived at the War Office Bob found that he had very little work to do and was thus delighted to be able to go on leave to Scotland with the whole family in mid-August. His parents had taken an estate at Loch Torridon for stalking, shooting and fishing, and Rosemary was also there. This idyllic interlude was all too short, as on 24 August, the day after the signing of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Bob received a telegram for the War Office requiring his immediate return. He caught the train that afternoon and Angie also returned to London the following day, leaving the children with Bob’s parents.

  Bob was at the War Office on 3 September, when Neville Chamberlain announced to the British people that the country was again at war with Germany. Shortly afterwards there was an air raid warning and, in accordance with instructions, all the staff took to the shelter below the War Office building. After the ‘All Clear’ Bob returned to his office to find the telephone ringing. On the line was an officer from Aldershot Command, who said he had heard that London had been subjected to a bombing raid and asked how extensive the damage was. Bob replied that, if the scene from his window was anything to go by, then the much vaunted destructive capabilities of the Luftwaffe had been much exaggerated!

  Bob now feared that he would be doomed to office work for the foreseeable future, when what he craved was active service. A day or so later, however, whilst his colleagues were out to lunch, an officer from the Staff Duties branch appeared, looking very flustered. He had been charged with staffing up the GHQ of the British Expeditionary Force, which was then forming at Camberley prior to going to France, and was short of a GSO3 who specialized in chemical warfare. Bob told him that he knew of just such a man, a certain Captain Laycock of the Blues. The officer said that he doubted if the commanding officer of the Blues would be prepared to release one of his officers for such a job, but Bob assured him that he knew the CO and would speak to him personally. Thanking him profusely, the officer then dashed off to the Military Secretary’s office to arrange the transfer, without ever enquiring about the identity of the man who had solved his problem. Colonel Douglas, when he found out, was predictably furious, but by that time the cogs had been set in motion and GHQ BEF had priority for staff, which he was unable to have overruled.

  The First Echelon of GHQ BEF formed at the Staff College, with officers messing in the Royal Military College. Extraordinarily, the C-in-C had only been chosen on the very day that war was declared. General the Visc
ount Gort had been serving as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but had fallen out with Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Secretary of State for War, who was keen to see him go elsewhere. Most had expected Lieutenant General Sir John Dill, the GOC-in-C of Aldershot Command, to be given the job, but he was instead subordinated to Gort as one of the two corps commanders, the other being Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, whilst General Sir Edmund Ironside, although completely unsuited to the role, was appointed CIGS. As the BEF’s Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, was only appointed on the same day as Gort, and as most of the officers were strangers to each other, it was remarkable that the First Echelon was in a fit state to leave for France, but it duly entrained at Farnborough for Southampton on 12 September.

  Bob was still a very junior cog in the organization, as a GSO3 Chemical Warfare within the Operations branch of GHQ. The GSO1 was his old friend from Winterbourne Gunner, Lieutenant Colonel Pennycook, described by Bob as ‘tall, thin, reticent, gentle and sensitive’,4 whilst the GSO2, Major Davis, was ‘short, fat, jovial, and as tough as they come’.5 They were to make an effective and happy team. They sailed from Southampton in one of a small fleet of cross-Channel steamers and landed the following day at a port whose name was supposedly secret, but which Bob instantly recognized from yachting trips as Cherbourg. That night they boarded a train for an undisclosed destination, whose identity became clear when French railway officials chalked the words ‘Le Mans’ on each of the carriages. GHQ and Dill’s I Corps HQ both established themselves there temporarily until a more permanent location could be found closer to the Belgian frontier. A few days later Bob was ordered to accompany Colonel Hubert Rance, the Chief Signals Office, on a reconnaissance to find suitable premises in the area of Arras. The emphasis was on dispersal, this being thought likely to mitigate the impact of any bombing campaign, with the result that GHQ was scattered over an area of about 20 square miles in at least fifteen different villages, making inter-branch communication exceptionally difficult, especially initially, when nobody knew where anybody else was.

  Bob was initially located in Noyelle-Vion, about ten miles west of Arras, alongside Q Maintenance, the Military Secretary and his staff and the Camp Commandant’s department. He was reluctant to leave as an excellent mess with a French cook had been set up, but he was required to join Pennycook and Davis at Wanquetin, a few miles closer to Arras, where he was billeted in a farm just outside the village. The farmer, his wife, attractive daughter and young son were very welcoming, and the accommodation was reasonably comfortable, other than the sanitary arrangements, which were distinctly primitive. Bob bought a tin bath and amazed his hosts by performing his daily ablutions in it, but there was nothing he could do about the earth closet in a wooden shed at the end of the garden!

  Bob had two concerns of an even more personal nature than his accommodation, the first being the emergency Budget introduced by the Government, which had included a significant rise in income tax. One of the conclusions he reached was that he could no longer afford the subscriptions to his many clubs and he resigned from all of them other than the Turf Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron, provoking ‘furious letters’6 from White’s and the Hurlingham. Angie had moved into a small cottage which they had bought in Hawthorn Hill, between Bracknell and Maidenhead, but they could not afford a gardener. His other worry was the lack of letters from Angie. The postal arrangements of the BEF were totally chaotic at first and it was not until 14 October, over a month after he had arrived in France, that he received seventeen letters in one delivery; but even then, the first six which Angie had written did not appear for another ten days.

  The arrival of the Second Echelon produced not only a competent driver – his first had only driven tractors before and had some difficulty in distinguishing between the accelerator and brake pedals – but also a soldier servant. The RASC driver, Private Birks, was a fervent socialist, but once he realized that Bob was not only prepared to listen to his views but even sympathized with some of them, they got on very well during the long drives around the BEF which they had to undertake. The soldier servant was a Cameron Highlander called Kavanagh, a former miner whose accent Bob found close to unintelligible, but who managed mysteriously to make himself understood to the French family. He was particularly good with their young son, the two of them playing with a clockwork train bought by Bob. Pressing or cleaning Bob’s uniform remained beyond him, but Bob wrote to Angie that ‘he manages to produce comforts for me in a wholly miraculous way and always refuses to tell me how he procured them.’7

  Bob’s role as GSO3 Chemical Warfare was to go round the BEF to advise its formations and units on the precautions which should be taken against gas attacks. One such visit was to Gort’s own chateau, during which he inspected the cellar and pronounced it suitable, only to be told by the C-in-C that he had absolutely no intention of using it! His duties also included some flying, in order to judge how the British lines might be affected by a gas attack from the air. On one occasion he was aloft in a De Havilland Tiger Moth when the aircraft was fired upon by the AA batteries below. There had been some high level reconnaissance by the Germans, but the aircraft should have been easily identifiable. Roundly cursing the gunners below, Bob and the pilot frantically fired Very flares until the shooting stopped.

  The French liaison officer attached to the Operations branch was a charming soldier who had fought in the Great War and with whom Bob became very friendly. The pair enjoyed drinking brandy late into the night and, on one of these occasions, Bob was dismayed to hear the Frenchman say that he believed that the French Army was rotten to the core and that, if nothing happened before the following summer, it would desert in large numbers to get in the harvest or, if the Germans attacked, would prove to be no match for them. He had an opportunity to find out more when he was ordered to go to the French GQG (Grand Quartier General) to find out how Britain’s ally was approaching the question of gas, staying during his visit with the Senior British Liaison Officer, Major General Sir Richard Howard-Vyse, a former officer and future Colonel of the Blues. Bob was impressed by the seeming efficiency of GQG, which had not seen the same need for dispersal as the British. On the other hand, he was appalled by an encounter with a large contingent of French troops on his return journey, finding them ‘slovenly, dirty, disconsolate, ill turned out, ill equipped and lethargic’8 and with very poor transport.

  Having conveyed these impressions to his brother officers in the mess, Bob found himself summoned by the senior Royal Engineer officer at GHQ , Colonel C. G. Woolner, to receive a severe dressing down. Woolner had overheard what he had said and told Bob that, although the French had looked scruffy in the Great War they had always fought with great determination, and that Bob’s views would be highly damaging to morale. In short, he was minded to have him returned ignominiously to England. Bob apologized, saying the he believed that the GHQ officers were capable of making up their own minds and that he had been careful only to voice his opinion once the mess waiters had left the room. Woolner said that he was prepared to forget the incident, but that if he heard such defeatist talk again he would have Bob sent home with an adverse report. As it happened, he was indeed shortly to be posted back, but in quite different circumstances.

  A report written by Bob had found its way to the GSO1 Staff Duties at GHQ , Lieutenant Colonel Viscount Bridgeman, who was very complimentary about it. Some days later he summoned Bob to see him, telling him that he thought he was wasted in his current job. Bridgeman then asked whether Bob had been to Staff College, as he had been asked by the Army Council to nominate a limited number of GHQ officers to attend the next course at Camberley, which would begin in January 1940. Bob replied that he had not, but would be delighted to do so, and Bridgeman submitted his name as one of about forty from the BEF.

  At thirty-two, Bob was actually getting close to the age limit for peacetime attendance at the Staff College, and there is no evidence that he had ever been considered as a potential c
andidate. This might have been because it was not generally considered part of the career path of an officer in the Household Cavalry, due to its focus on ceremonial. There had been examples of Staff College attendance in the Blues, of which Howard-Vyse was one, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Bob himself had been unusual in seeking an outside attachment, most of his brother officers remaining in regimental service until their early resignation or retirement due to age.

  He was thus delighted to have the opportunity, recognizing that the magic letters ‘psc’ after his name could be a key to further advancement. Not having taken the exam, as he wrote to Angie, he believed that nomination was a feather in his cap. This might well have been true at that time, but before long all wartime attendees at the three staff colleges, at Camberley, Quetta and Haifa, would enter solely on the basis of a nomination.

  His posting came through in late November. However, as Bob and the other attendees from the BEF were not required at Camberley until early January, the War Office decided that they should be taken on a conducted tour of all the services which supported a field army, and this began at the end of the month. Bob found it very interesting, albeit extremely hectic. The group, under the guidance of Lieutenant Colonel Milford, an instructor from Camberley, started at the Base Port and then moved forward along the lines of communication through the various formations until it arrived at the front line units. Milford told the wouldbe students that they were ‘about as idle, inefficient, conceited, empty headed and useless a collection of officers as one could expect to meet in a century’9 and that, unless they mended their ways, he doubted that many would complete the Staff College course. The dislike engendered by this harangue gradually turned, however, to respect, and the tour turned out to be of real benefit.