Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [142]
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