Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [143]
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