by Max Hastings
Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador in London516, once observed to Hugh Dalton that he found British soldiers unfailingly stiff and formal, unlike their counterparts in the other services. The army, he suggested, lacked the Royal Navy’s and RAF’s collective self-confidence. This was so. General Pownall wrote after the Far East disasters:
Our [career officers] regard [war]517 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 and 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. 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, antitank 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 Gezira 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 supplies518, 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 practises 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.”519 Since shipping shortages constrained all Allied operations, waste of matériel 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 heavily 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 from distribution in the Middle East and 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,520” 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 Great 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 prewar 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 it521 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.”
Harold Macmillan saw the wartime army at close quarters, and thought little of most of its senior officers. He accused both the British and U.S. Chiefs of Staff of surrounding themselves with a host of acolytes “too stupid to be employed in any operational capacity.”522 Observing that one British commander was “a bit wooden,” Macmillan continued:
These British administrative generals523, 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 Admiralty’s execution of Adm. 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 shooting524, from the Napoleonic Wars through the twentieth century, the conduct of British naval officers in the face of the enemy almost invariably reflected their 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 precedent525. The then CIGS answered sharply that such a view was anachronistic.
Dill could justly argue 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 battles by heroic posturing. But the prime minister was surely right 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 Neil526 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 northwest 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 desert527 was an exaggerated confidence in manoeuvre and an inadequate focus on firepower. Until 1944, successive models of tank and antitank guns lacked penetrative capacity. It was extraordinary that, even after several years’ experience of modern armoured warfare, British- and American-made 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 dear528 with the panoply 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. Both nations adopted a deliberate policy of compensating through quantity for well-recognised deficiencies of tank 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 one hundred 6-pounder antitank guns or six times that number of 2-pounders, it opted for the latter. By winter, Moscow was telling London not to bother sending any further 2-pounders to Russia, because the Red Army found them useless—as did Auchinleck’s units in the desert. Only late in 1942 did 6-pounders become available in substantial numbers. The War Office struggled in vain to match the superb German 88mm dual-purpose antiaircraft and antitank gun, which accounted for 40 percent of British tanks destroyed in North Africa against 38 percent 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 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. Prewar 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 submachine 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 Sten guns 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.”529 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. “In all its branches, the German war machine530 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.”531 Churchill once observed of his son: “I love Randolph, but I don’t like him.”532 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 it 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 opponent533 … 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 Huns534 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 at a time when positions of military responsibility had perforce to be filled from the existing pool of regular officers. Most were captives of the culture to which they had been bred. Its funda
mental 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.
At home among the civilians, wartime unity was a considerable reality. The majority of the British people remained staunch. Yet class tensions ran deep. Significant groups, above all factory workers, displayed disaffection. Sections of Britain’s industrial workforce perceived no contradiction between supporting Churchill and the crusade against Nazism while sustaining the class struggle which had raged since the beginning of the century. Strikes were officially outlawed for the duration by the government’s March 1941 Essential Work Order, but legislation failed to prevent wildcat stoppages, above all in coal pits, shipyards and aircraft plants, often in support of absurd or avaricious demands. At the depth of the Depression, in 1932, just 48,000 working days were lost to strikes in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding industries. In 1939, by contrast, 332,000 days were lost; in 1940, 163,000; 1941, 556,000; 1942, 526,000; 1943, 635,000; 1944, 1,048,000; and 1945, 528,000. This was a better record than that achieved in 1917, when stoppages in the same industries cost three million days of production. Nonetheless, it suggests a less than fulsome commitment to the war effort in some factories, also manifested by dockyard workers who, to the disgust of ships’ crews, were guilty of systematic pilferage, including on occasion lifeboat rations.