Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [144]
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