The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

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  Copyright © Richard Mead 2012

  9781783408931

  The right of Richard Mead to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 - The McCreerys and the McAdams

  Chapter 2 - Childhood and Schooldays

  Chapter 3 - The Western Front

  Chapter 4 - Disaster and Triumph

  Chapter 5 - Peace and Tragedy

  Chapter 6 - The Adjutant

  Chapter 7 - Lettice

  Chapter 8 - Staff Officer

  Chapter 9 - The Colonel

  Chapter 10 - Alex

  Chapter 11 - The Somme and the Seine

  Chapter 12 - Q and Bumper

  Chapter 13 - Adviser

  Chapter 14 - Crisis in the Desert

  Chapter 15 - Chief of Staff

  Chapter 16 - Victory in Tunis

  Chapter 17 - Avalanche

  Chapter 18 - River and Mountain

  Chapter 19 - The Winter Line

  Chapter 20 - The Tiber Valley

  Chapter 21 - Army Commander

  Chaper 22 - The Old Steeplechaser

  Chapter 23 - The Last Battle

  Chapter 24 - Aftermath

  Chapter 25 - High Commissioner

  Chapter 26 - The Rhine Army

  Chapter 27 - Winding Down

  Chapter 28 - Indian Summer

  Chapter 29 - Finale

  Chapter 30 - Postscript

  Appendix I - Hugh’s Little Ambush

  Appendix II - The Refusal at the Ditch

  Abbreviations

  Acknowledgements

  Sources and Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  Arguably the most famous of Great Britain’s armies in the Second World War was the Eighth, but to the layman it is frequently associated exclusively with the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 and the subsequent advance to Tunis. It is often forgotten that the army was formed twelve months before El Alamein and that it remained in the field until the end of the War in Europe, by which time it had also slogged its way across Sicily and up Italy from the toe to the Alps. The final seven months of its existence were among the most successful, whilst its last battle was even more decisive than El Alamein. During this period it was commanded by one of the outstanding British generals of the War, Sir Richard McCreery.

  Dick McCreery is much less well known to history than some of Eighth Army’s other commanders, most notably Field Marshal Montgomery. He does of course feature in many military histories and in the published diaries, memoirs and biographies of those who were around him at the time, but it was his lot to achieve high command in a campaign which was seen at the time as a sideshow. Whereas from July 1943 until June 1944 Italy was the only place on land where the British and Americans were fighting the Germans, after the liberation of Rome it became of secondary importance as the campaign in north-west Europe gained pace. Although Churchill himself strove to promote its potential, he was unable to counter the view of the Americans, strongly supported by Stalin, that the focus of their energy should be on the direct route into Germany, whilst the campaign in the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ should be left to atrophy.

  McCreery’s contribution to the War was not limited to the Italian campaign, in which he fought from the landings at Salerno to the capitulation of the German armies. He also served in France in 1940 in the period immediately after Dunkirk when the British were attempting to shore up their French allies, raised one of the new armoured divisions in the UK, acted as adviser on armoured vehicles to General Auchinleck, the C-in-C Middle East, and was then appointed Chief of Staff to General Alexander, Auchinleck’s successor. In the last role he was believed by many to have suggested the solution to victory at the Battle of El Alamein. His immediate post-war career was equally distinguished, as C-in-C and High Commissioner in Austria, followed by command of the British Army of the Rhine and then appointment as British Representative on the Military Staff Committee of the United Nations. At the end of 1949 however, at the age of only 51, McCreery resigned his commission and retired from public life, to the dismay of many of his friends and admirers.

  As one of the most important British army officers during the War and its immediate aftermath, I had thought for some time that Dick McCreery deserved a closer look. My initial soundings aroused the same response: why had no one thought of doing this before? In fact someone had. In 1973 General Sir Richard McCreery: A Portrait was privately published, written by Major General John Strawson, an experienced historian who had himself served under McCreery in Italy. General Strawson’s book is impossible to get hold of through normal commercial channels and, although I had long known of it, I had not read it before embarking on my research. It was commissioned by McCreery’s widow, Lettice, for the benefit of his children and grandchildren and, in Strawson’s words, ‘does not pretend to be a survey of Dick McCreery’s life, but rather a portrait of his character, illustrated by incidents from his life.’ Strawson accepted at the time that a proper biography remained to be written. When I approached the McCreery family they readily agreed with me that one was long overdue.

  I was delighted to find that the family had retained a considerable amount of relevant material. I was hopeful that there would be some letters and other documents. I was not expecting to find that McCreery had kept a pocket diary, recording what he did on nearly every day from the beginning of 1921 to two days before his untimely death in 1967. The diary was for the most part a chronicle of events rather than an expression of opinions, but it provided a wonderful framework to his story. It was complemented from time to time by letters, as McCreery was a tireless correspondent, writing to his mother and maternal grandmother during the Great War and, following his marriage, to Lettice several times a week whenever he was away, although inevitably the wartime letters were very circumspect due to censorship and offered relatively little of value on the military side. I was also delighted to discover that John Strawson had handed over to Lettice a large file of both letters and completed questionnaires from those whose help he had sought nearly forty
years ago. As none of his respondents were still available for interview, this was like finding buried treasure.

  I then learnt that McCreery had begun to write his military memoirs, with a view to having them published. He completed drafts of three chapters and submitted these to an authors’ agent in 1966, only to receive a most discouraging response, but he resumed working on it shortly before his death in the following year. He also wrote a contemporary account of his part in the forlorn attempt to stem the German advance south of the Somme in 1940 and, very much later in 1959, a long article for his regiment’s magazine entitled ‘Reflections of a Chief of Staff’, which covered his wartime service in North Africa.

  There was thus a wealth of material available and an opportunity not only to consider the man himself, but also to revisit through his own eyes some of the important events with which he had been associated.

  There was more to Dick McCreery than his military career. Apart from his family he had two passions. One was gardening. He left behind new lawns, flower beds and shrubberies wherever he was posted for more than a few months and improved the already fine garden which his mother had created at Stowell Hill. From 1939 onwards his choice of diary was that of the Royal Horticultural Society and I like to think that, when things were not going well, he took some comfort from the RHS’s suggestions for each week. At the height of the crisis at Salerno, for instance, the advice in the diary to ‘Sow an early maturing Cauliflower in a cold frame’ may have provided a momentary reminder of a gentler world whilst he was writing just below it, ‘We are in for a very tough fight before our reinforcements arrive.’

  McCreery’s other passion was for equestrian sport. He learned to ride at a very early age and, following the Great War, became one of the finest horsemen of his generation, competing at the highest level at polo, steeplechasing and skill-at-arms competitions and taking every opportunity to hunt. His membership of a cavalry regiment, where such activities were expected of the officers, facilitated this enormously, and it was as a cavalryman that his contemporaries thought of him during the 1920s and 30s. The six years of the Second World War were to prove that he was much more than that, but somehow the cavalry spirit imbued whatever he did and he would often use equestrian analogies to demonstrate a point. He was, nevertheless, level-headed rather than impetuous, more of an Oliver Cromwell than a Prince Rupert.

  The cavalry arm had a lean time on the Western Front during the Great War, although it was to act for a few weeks in its traditional role at both the beginning and the end of the long campaign. Between the wars there was much debate about its function, but mechanization became inevitable and Dick’s regiment, the 12th Lancers, was one of the first two to give up its horses. Dick embraced the new order and became an expert in armoured warfare, but his own use of tanks and armoured cars reflected to some extent his cavalry background. In the fighting to destroy the Germans in the Po Valley in 1945, the release of his main armoured formation through the gap created by his infantry and into the open spaces beyond was a textbook cavalry manoeuvre.

  There were other members of cavalry regiments who went on to great heights in the Army after the War, but they all had been commissioned after 1918 and had thus seen mechanization come relatively early in their military careers, whereas Dick McCreery’s generation was the last actually to fight on horseback in the traditional role. He himself, regardless of his high appointments and the breadth of his military experience, remained at heart always a 12th Lancer. He was the only member of the cavalry arm after 1918 to lead a British army in wartime and, for this reason at least, does indeed deserve to be called the last great cavalryman.

  Prologue

  The flat plain spread out 5,000 feet below the Auster, which flew alone along the front. There was little danger from enemy aircraft as Allied air superiority was nearly complete and friendly fighters would not be far away. If it slipped much further to the north, on the other hand, the plane would attract heavy anti-aircraft fire, so the pilot was flying as circumspect a course as possible.

  Sitting next to him the general looked out of the window of the ‘whizzer’. In the clear winter sunshine he could see the problem very clearly. There was one road leading directly to the great river which represented the last barrier to victory, but it ran down the middle of a narrow strip of dry land little more than two miles wide, with the huge lake and a flooded area on its right and another large flooded area on its left. For the enemy it was a highly defensible position and for him an immense problem.

  The key was the lake and its adjacent floods. Not for the first time he thought of the strange amphibious vehicles which he had recently seen in training. If he possessed a springboard for a brigade of infantry mounted in these, he would be able to attack behind the enemy’s line and turn his left flank. Speaking through the intercom over the noise of the plane he asked the pilot to fly towards the coast. Within a few minutes he could see what he wanted, a small wedge of land on the southern shore of the lake. If he could put his troops across the intervening river and onto that strip, he would have his springboard.

  Turning to his pilot, the general signalled to him to return to base. His mind was now absolutely clear on the plan. Success would secure control of the final battlefield and bring an end to a very long and arduous campaign. Failure was not an option.

  Chapter 1

  The McCreerys and the McAdams

  The origins of the McCreerys almost certainly lie in Scotland, the name being a corruption of the Gaelic Mac Ruaidhri, meaning the son of a powerful ruler. The branch of the clan from which Dick McCreery was descended had left its original domicile for Ireland many generations before he was born, possibly even arriving there as part of the seventeenth-century ‘Plantation of Ulster’, the colonization of the six counties of Northern Ireland by Protestants from England and Scotland. The family’s history in its new location is obscure, but Dick’s paternal great-grandfather, Samuel McCreery, was born in about 1791 and he married his wife, Mary, in 1819. He farmed at Killyclogher Farm, near Omagh in County Tyrone, where the couple produced three sons and a daughter, the youngest son being Dick’s grandfather, Andrew Buchanan McCreery, who was born in 1831.

  Ireland in the 1840s was a deeply unhappy country. The economy was very largely agricultural, the staple crop being the potato – introduced in the seventeenth century, it had proved to be notoriously unreliable, a situation which was exacerbated when the potato blight arrived in the country. Long before 1845, when the Great Famine caused by the blight began, the choice for much of the population was to starve or to leave and an enormous percentage took the latter option. By the early 1840s the flow of emigrants had become a flood and the favoured destination was the United States. In the New World they found themselves popular, largely because of their willingness to work hard in occupations which the increasingly affluent Americans disdained, the men in the construction of new roads, canals and later railways, the women in service in private households.

  The circumstances of the Protestant farmers of Ulster were generally more favourable than those of the native Catholic Irish, but Killyclogher Farm could not sustain all the sons of the McCreery family. Like so many of their countrymen, Andrew and his brother James, some five years older, probably saw little future in a country which offered for the landless a very hard and unrewarding life in contrast to the prospects presented by the United States, and thus it was to America that they sailed in 1846, when Andrew was only 14 or 15. Like most of their compatriots they began their new life in the north-east, working initially as shop assistants in Hamilton Easter & Co’s department store in Baltimore,1 but the discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew Andrew westwards in the following year with tens of thousands of others. There are different accounts of how he travelled, one saying that he worked his passage as a teamster, driving supplies for the miners, another suggesting that he sailed around Cape Horn. As one of the ‘Forty-niners’, he was always proud of his membership of the Society of California Pioneers
, open only to those who had who arrived and settled in the Golden State before 1850.

  Andrew certainly embodied the pioneer spirit. At first he took on menial jobs, such as sweeping out saloons at night, and saving most of the money he earned. Showing the first signs of commercial acumen, once he had accumulated enough he decided not to pan or dig for gold himself, but instead to provide goods and services at a profit to those who did. This appears to have included at one point cornering the market for candles. By the time the Gold Rush ended he had amassed enough capital to make some real-estate investments in San Francisco, which would become the foundations of a considerable fortune. Andrew specialized in waterfront lots on which he would build houses and commercial properties to rent or sell and which, as the bay was reclaimed, became steadily more valuable. One of his early acquisitions was 211 Sansome Street in the centre of the city, which was to become his principal town residence, whilst 114 Sansome Street would later serve as the headquarters of the McCreery Estate Company. Other major properties were Central Park at Eighth and Market Streets, which he offered to the City – only to be refused – and the Western Union Building at Pine and Montgomery Streets. Considered by those who knew him to be very clever but mildly eccentric, even as a much older man he used to collect all the rents himself with horse and buggy.

  Andrew’s growing prominence in the business community resulted in him being amongst the twenty-two leading businessmen invited to become founding shareholders of the Bank of California in 1864. The bank’s financing of silver mining operations on the Comstock led to it generating huge profits in its early years – through this and his real-estate activities Andrew became a very wealthy man. He also moved in the upper echelons of San Francisco society, becoming a life member of the San Francisco Art Association, a member of the Burlingame Club in San Mateo and of the Bohemian Club. As a philanthropist he founded one of the first libraries in the city and endowed a bed at Lane Hospital, later to become part of Stanford University.