Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [210]
The prime minister was undeterred. He pressed Maitland Wilson to land on Rhodes anyway. The general, not one of his country’s great military thinkers but compliant to Churchill’s wishes, earmarked 4th Indian Division to execute Accolade. Then, however, it was decided that the Indians were needed in Italy. Maitland Wilson’s cupboard was left almost bare of fighting units. He cabled Eisenhower on August 31: “Any enterprise against Rhodes or Crete except an unopposed walk-in is now impossible.” The prime minister disagreed. The Germans were everywhere in retreat. On the Eastern Front, they had just suffered devastating defeat at Kursk. They had been expelled from Sicily. Italy was about to quit the war. On every front, Ultra signal decrypts revealed German commanders bewailing their flagging strength in the face of Allied dominance. Surely, in such circumstances, even small forces boldly handled could crush the residual German presence in the Aegean. While operations in the eastern Mediterranean were to be conducted on a modest scale, they held special lustre in the prime minister’s eyes, because speed, dash and a touch of piracy might yield an exclusively British triumph.
Urged on by London, Maitland Wilson resurrected Accolade, with such ragbag forces as he could scrape together. On September 9, the prime minister greeted news of the blossoming of his cherished project with a notation: “Good. This is a time to play high777. Improvise and dare.” Four days later, he cabled Maitland Wilson: “The capture of Rhodes by you at this time with Italian aid would be a fine contribution to the general war. Can you improvise the necessary garrison? … What is your total ration strength? This is the time to think of Clive and Peterborough, and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar …” The prime minister’s reference to “ration strength” was, of course, a goad designed to remind the C-in-C of the vast number of men under his command, scattered across hundreds of thousands of square miles, and mostly employed on logistical or garrison tasks. Churchill’s stirring appeal to the memory of historic imperial triumphs ignored the fact that now Maitland Wilson’s troops would face the German army.
A fundamental doctrinal divide persisted throughout the war: the British liked minor operations, while the Americans, with the marginal exception of MacArthur, did not. U.S. strategic thinking, like that of the Germans and Russians, was dominated by a belief in concentration of force. The U.S. Army undertook very few raids such as the British, and Churchill in particular, loved—Vaasgo, Bruneval, St.-Nazaire, Bardia, Dieppe and many more. Special forces absorbed a dismayingly high proportion of Britain’s most ardent warriors, volunteers attracted by the prospect of early independent action rather than deferred encounters within the straitjacket of a military hierarchy. Brooke deplored the proliferation of army and marine commando units. He believed, probably rightly, that their functions778 could have been as well performed by regular units specially trained for specific tasks. The mushroom growth of British special forces reflected the prime minister’s conviction that war should, as far as possible, entertain its participants and showcase feats of daring to inspire the populace. In this, elite “private armies” fulfilled their purpose. But they ill-served the wider interests of the British Army, which was chronically short of good infantrymen for the big battlefields. Too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of marginal strategic value.
Operations in the Mediterranean since 1940 had inspired the creation of a range of exotic units which basked in the prime minister’s support and were led by social grandees or inspired eccentrics, often both. The Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Squadron (SBS), Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), Popski’s Private Army, Special Interrogation Group and their kin provided much pleasure to the adventurous spirits who filled their ranks, and inflicted