Field Marshals with
their dates of promotion: Edmund Ironside (1940), Lord Gort VC (1943), John
Dill (1941), Alan Brooke (1944), Archibald Wavell (1943), Harold Alexander
(1944), Claude Auchinleck (1946), Bernard Montgomery (1944), Henry Maitland
Wilson (1944), Bill Slim (1949).
During the Second World War, the British Army was commanded
by a succession of 10 soldiers who in time became Field Marshals. They were all
brave and talented men but only three (Brooke, Montgomery and Slim) ended the
war with their military reputations more or less intact. Operating at the
highest levels of military strategy, coping with shortages of equipment and men
and faced with a highly competent enemy, these commanders’ qualities were
stretched to their limit. Churchill was a very demanding Prime Minister and
Minister of Defence, full of often impractical bright ideas, interfering,
driving to distraction, cajoling, prodding although never finally over-ruling
professional advice unlike his megalomaniacal adversary Adolf Hitler and
reluctant ally Joseph Stalin, whose interventions were sometimes disastrous.
These 10 soldiers had rather different characters (the only
thing they seemed to have in common was that all 10 sported clipped army
moustaches!). 8 of the 10 came from
relatively patrician backgrounds, often with an army service tradition. Only
Slim and Dill were outsiders on that count, being respectively the son of a
failed Bristol ironmonger, starting life as a clerk and the son of a County Armagh
bank manager. Strikingly, 5 of the 10 were from Ulster or were scions of
leading Irish Protestant Ascendancy families (Gort, Dill, Brooke, Alexander and
Montgomery). I group their contributions broadly chronologically.
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| Edmund ironside |
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| Lord Gort |
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| John Dill |
Ironside, a 6ft
4in Scot inevitably known as “Tiny”, succeeded Gort as Chief of the Imperial
General Staff (CIGS) and thus head of the Army at the outbreak of War in
September 1939. He was appointed by Neville Chamberlain in time for the “Phoney
War” and Narvik; almost the first thing Churchill did when he took over just
before the Fall of France in May 1940 was to replace Ironside with Dill.
Ironside had been very critical of the French (and earlier the Polish) Army and
predicted their failure. He was thought defeatist and was effectively air-brushed
out of history and in retirement was avoided by the Army establishment.
Gort was in command of the BEF in France, facing the overwhelming German Blitzkrieg and got some credit for protecting his flank well when the Belgians suddenly surrendered. His BEF was successfully evacuated (without its equipment) at Dunkirk. Churchill wryly remarked that “Wars are not won by evacuations” and Gort was not much used thereafter though he was a doughty Governor of Malta, which held out heroically against Axis onslaughts.
Gort was in command of the BEF in France, facing the overwhelming German Blitzkrieg and got some credit for protecting his flank well when the Belgians suddenly surrendered. His BEF was successfully evacuated (without its equipment) at Dunkirk. Churchill wryly remarked that “Wars are not won by evacuations” and Gort was not much used thereafter though he was a doughty Governor of Malta, which held out heroically against Axis onslaughts.
Dill was CIGS
during the dark 1940-41 period when Britain’s fortunes were at their nadir.
There were setbacks in Greece and the only successes were against the unmartial
Italians in Libya and Abyssinia. Churchill came to rate Dill poorly as an old
fashioned and unimaginative “brass-hat” (Brooke thought highly of Dill) and in
1941, after Pearl Harbor, Dill was replaced by Brooke and sent to Washington as
Britain’s representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Dill was a
great success as a military diplomat; his calm and polite manner was
appreciated by the Americans and he sold crucial British military assessments
to the Americans very effectively. Dill attended most of the wartime
conferences but died of the insidious condition of aplastic anaemia in 1944. As
a measure of the high regard he earned in The States, he remains the only
non-American to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.
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| Archibald Wavell |
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| Claude Auchinleck |
Wavell took over Auchinleck’s duties as C-in-C India and in
December 1941 the war with Japan started, inflicting grievous losses on the
British Empire including the fall of Singapore and the sinking of several
capital ships. Wavell built up India’s defences and in 1943 was appointed
Viceroy (despite Churchill’s earlier reservations), passing on his military
duties to the returned Auchinleck. He was unable to resolve the inter-communal
tensions and was replaced by Mountbatten in 1947. Wavell was a cultivated
scholar, a fluent Russian speaker (a Wykehamist too) and published valued
military handbooks pre-War, as well as a popular anthology of poetry Other Men’s Flowers in 1944. He was
lionised in London by diarist Chips Channon MP and his circle. His deployment
of limited military resources was exemplary.
His successor Auchinleck,
whose career had mainly been in India, was equally unlucky. The Western Desert
see-saw conflict at first allowed Auchinleck to relieve Tobruk and push back
the Germans. Rommel was no longer invincible but he counter-attacked, Tobruk
fell, while the British and Commonwealth army retreated to the defensive
redoubt of El Alamein, ground chosen by Auchinleck. Attempts at a break-out
failed and Auchinleck’s poor choices of senior subordinates together with some
tactical errors undermined Churchill and Brooke’s confidence in him. He was
replaced as C-in-C by Alexander and the 8th Army came under the
command of Montgomery. After almost a year, Auchinleck returned to the command
of the Indian Army, supported Slim in Burma, opposed Partition and retired to
the UK in 1948, before ending his years in Morocco. Auchinleck’s Indian
background precluded him from strong affection from the Army establishment,
especially from Montgomery, with whom he long had a bitter feud.
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| Harold Alexander |
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| Bernard Montgomery |
The talents of Auchinleck’s successor Alexander are more elusive. He had performed well as a corps
commander at Dunkirk but his personal contribution to victory in the
Mediterranean theatre was not obvious. Brooke thought his military imagination
was limited and Montgomery dismissed him as “incompetent”. The Americans liked
his reserved style but other generals did the fighting. He became Supreme
Commander of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, as a sop to the British, and
as such he “presided over” the expulsion of the Germans from North Africa in
1943, the invasion of Sicily and the bruising Italian Campaign until December
1944. He was unable to control the mercurial US General Mark Clark, who
eventually succeeded him.
Alexander was a popular Governor-General of Canada from 1946
to 1952 when he joined Churchill’s (a great fan) Cabinet as Minister of Defence
until retiring in 1954. Alexander had a languid patrician manner and was an
officer of the old school.
Montgomery became
the most well-known, if not the most liked, British general of the War. The son
of an Anglican bishop who lived years in Tasmania, he was neglected and
mistreated by his mother with whom he had a total breach: he declined to attend
her funeral in 1949 saying he was “too busy”. By the start of WW2, Montgomery
(“Monty”) commanded an army corps at Dunkirk, later being reprimanded for
criticising Gort and beginning his feud with Auchinleck. He trained his troops
hard but he was only second choice (first choice was killed in an air crash)
for commander of the 8th Army in Egypt in 1942. Monty threw himself
into his task with great energy, carefully training his men in mine-clearing
and other skills; his presence and confidence galvanised his Army and morale soared.
Building up a marked superiority in men and material, Monty struck at El
Alamein in October 1942, eventually putting the Afrika Korps to flight (Rommel himself was ill in Germany). This
was the first substantial British land victory of the War: Churchill allowed
the church bells, silent for 3 years, to peal throughout the land.
The Axis
forces in Africa eventually surrendered and Monty helped plan and execute the
invasion of Sicily, upsetting US Generals Patton and Bradley with his
arrogance, before moving into mainland Italy. In 1944 he led the British and
Canadian Divisions on D-Day, securing their bridgeheads but he got bogged down
on the advance to Caen; a Plan B lured the Germans into the Falaise Pocket and
their army was destroyed by the Americans, British and Canadians. Monty took
his army north through Belgium and the Netherlands but an uncharacteristically
poorly planned paratroop operation at Arnhem was a failure; ULTRA intercept
warnings that there were German armoured units in the area were ignored. Monty
helped the Americans to repulse the German offensive in the Ardennes, pushed on
to the Ruhr and took the surrender of German forces in North Germany at Lüneburg
Heath on 4 May 1945.
A good general is one who wins battles and Monty won many.
The Americans found him insufferable, boastful and egotistical. After the War
he was CIGS for 2 years but his lack of strategic vision and tact let him down.
He was more suited to his next job as Inspector-General for NATO. In 1958 he
published his Memoirs, causing great offence to Eisenhower, whose military
talents he disparaged, and inevitably to Auchinleck, who threatened a libel
action before Monty printed an apology. Monty sounded off on many subjects in
his retirement, supporting apartheid,
deploring homosexuality and criticising US strategy in Vietnam; a fine general
but a flawed man.
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| Henry Maitland Wilson |
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| Bill Slim |
Wilson is quickly
summarised. A vigorous type (known as “Jumbo”), Wilson was probably
over-promoted. He had success against the Italians in 1940, but got involved in
several “side-shows” later, notably a forlorn attempt to shore up Greece
(wasting 4 divisions), a hard-fought campaign to dislodge the Vichy French from
Syria and Lebanon – where Israeli hero Moshe Dayan lost an eye - then a panicky
fight to overthrow Rashid Ali’s pro-Axis regime in Iraq. He succeeded Alexander
as the Middle East Supremo. Wilson was a sound officer but not a high-flyer; he
succeeded Dill in 1944 as the British representative on the Washington Joint
Chiefs of Staff Committee and was well regarded.
Slim was one of
the great successes of the War. Commissioned into the Indian Army. He was
involved in minor campaigns in Ethiopia and Iraq before turning his attention
to Burma in March 1942, already invaded by the Japanese. The British and Indian
formations, after failing to hold the Arakan front, had to retreat eventually
back to India. Slim worked out a flexible, light-weight strategy whereby his
units could survive in self-contained “boxes” even if surrounded. In 1944, his
“forgotten”14th Army stemmed a Japanese attack at Imphal and Kohima,
where the enemy suffered huge casualties and were routed. Moving back to Burma,
Slim seized the town of Meiktila in 1945 cutting off large numbers of Japanese,
who were in full flight. It was a classic victory and soon Burma and Malaya
were liberated. Self-effacing Slim became the first CIGS (1949-52) from the Indian Army
and then a notably successful Governor- General of Australia (1953-59). Slim is
rather an unsung hero.
Leaving the best to last, undoubtedly the most effective
British soldier of the Second World War was Alan
Brooke.
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| Alan Brooke |
Succeeding Dill in December 1941, he was CIGS from then
until the end of the war in summer 1945. He, through Churchill, had to appoint
or dismiss commanding officers. He had to formulate military strategies and
persuade American and Russian allies to accept them. The buck stopped with
Brooke for every offensive and every retreat. He had to manage Churchill, an
insensitive boss, an egotist and yet a genius. Together they created a highly
efficient military machine; Brooke took his responsibilities calmly with
intellectual integrity. His diaries are a vital source of information on the
daily wartime struggle for survival, and are a counter to some of Churchill’s
more grandiloquent claims for his own ideas; Brooke and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff ran the war and ran it rationally and finally brought the Nation to
victory. His and their contribution was truly immense.
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| Churchill, the demanding Supremo |
SMD
17.10.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013
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