September 26, 2013

Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999

Page 37

From Brandon R. Sanders – ([email protected])

I have been in a debate with friends at a dinner party who believed unbiased Churchill admirers might agree that Churchill’s success was owed to a lucky roll of the dice more than any superior leadership qualities he possessed over others. Churchill was a very young man when he ran the Admiralty during World War I, while men of similar age were being slaughtered in France. They believe that the pool of men who offered greatness after WW1 was of such a diluted state that men like Churchill had a free rein to mark their spots.

The shadows of the “Lost Generation” lay across the postwar Europe. A settled, secure way of life had been destroyed. The way was clear for great changes, since the German guns made so many vacancies in the seats of power. Someone of Churchill’s age and calibre was now rare, and a long, empty void followed that Churchill filled by default.

I think I defended against this hypothesis well enough, but I ask: do they have any argument? Was Churchill lucky enough to have no one of similar talent looking over his shoulder because of the horrors of WW1?

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From: Scott Palmer – ([email protected])

The question is impossible to answer. Great achievements depend both on personal qualities and circumstances. We can never know what might have been achieved by those who fell in the Great War, many of whom were men of remarkable ability. Your friends’ argument brings to mind an old “Saturday Night Live” skit which argued that World War II would have gone differently “if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly,” like Superman.

From Mark A. Gallmeier – ([email protected])

Churchill was 39 in 1914, not very young. Young Churchill the soldier had already campaigned and survived in India, the Sudan and South Africa (a casualty-intensive event for its time) by 1901. Death had many more chances to claim him than his peers. Following his dismissal from the Admiralty, Churchill went back to the Army in France in late 1915 and served nearly a year. So your friends’ theory collides with the facts. WW1 was his fourth war, or fifth counting Cuba where he was a correspondent. While WW1 certainly claimed many, Churchill was well established as a first rank politician long before it started. The dominant post-WWl political personalities, such as Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and John Simon, had all entered politics long before WW1. Eden was a veteran of the war, as was Attlee. The WW1 generation didn’t start coming to the first rank of power en masse until the 1940s and 1950s. Most of them were under-secretaries during WW2.

Simple arithmetic shows this: A young subaltern of 21 in 1917 + 20 years was 41 in 1937, when Eden became Foreign Secretary. Here’s the leading edge of the WW1 generation Bell Curve: +30 years = 1947 (Attlee is Prime Minister) and +40 years = 1957 (Eden has resigned in the wake of Suez). Certainly “lack of greatness” is a hallmark of the latter two decades. Look back to the barbed wire of the German trenches and I agree you’ll find the bodies of the men who should have sat where Attlee and Eden sat in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Churchill’s leadership and administrative talents were recognized even by his most hostile opponents, and long before WW1. Churchill’s selection by Chamberlain as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 was like being chosen as U.S. Secretary of Defense, since the Navy was the vital British service.

When I think of all the young regimental officers and soldiers wasted by Haig from the Somme forward, the later impact on Parliament’s back benches is obvious. The bravest, most energetic and patriotic spirits were dead and most seats were occupied by the “Second Eleven.” Kitchener’s Armies (slaughtered in Haig’s offensives of 1916 and 1917) were filled with volunteers of “yeomanry” class, the middle class, and the prewar “Territorials” (same classes). Here were the Conservative and Liberal parties’ backbones. The loss of 800,000 such men had a decisive impact both directly and indirectly via the effect on surviving relatives’ opinions and the subsequent climate of opinion and politics.

I think this demographic disaster cleared the way both for Labour directly (their first government came on a two-fifths minority) and also left the two older parties in “shell shock.” This affected Churchill’s political standing from the mid-1920s onwards. His talents, tempered by his known Victorian and Imperial predilections, were no longer wanted. The “Wilderness Years” were not entirely self-imposed. If Churchill hadn’t broken with the elites over India and Edward VIII he would have over other issues, including German rearmament.

I think your friends’ talent-drain theory had more direct impact on the British Army in the mid-1920s and later. Here’s one place where Churchill’s famous impatience compounded the problem. When one looks at the string of mediocrities (Gort, Ironside, Auchinleck, Percival, Wavell and so on) who filled the regimental and higher levels in WW2, and also the general staff, the impact of the WW1 trench holocaust on Army leadership is obvious. Germany, with a large martial class, didn’t suffer from this as much since its base population pool of officers was much larger. The USA, with a small volunteer professional army like Britain’s, was in the war just long enough to blood the officer corps and weed out the weaklings, a kind of military “natural selection.” But for the British Army WWI was like being hit by the “Dinosaur Killer.” Fit, unfit and all in between went into the charnel house.

Consider what would have happened to Americans like Patton, Bradley, MacArthur, Lightning Joe Collins, Howland Smith, Matthew Ridgeway and a host of others, had the United States been in WWI as long as Britain. All of them were noteworthy “Leaders From the Front.” How many British “Leaders From the Front” died at the Somme and after? How many of the USA’s topflight WW2 leaders would have survived a similar four years in the trenches?

Consider also the effects on the vital non-commissioned officer (sergeants) leadership, who don’t get the historical recognition generals do; but they were the men who actually trained and led the following generations of soldiers. Without them a situation arises similar to medical students trying to train themselves without experienced doctor-professors to supervise. The actuarial tables would have scythed through them also, leaving the United States with second-raters like the British had following WWI. The string of morale-based catastrophes that fell on the British Army in 1942 (Singapore, Tobruk, Burma) was a delayed Trench Effect.

I believe Churchill’s impatience compounded the problem thusly: Faced in 1940 with a low will to fight in his Army, the Prime Minister responded with his “Commando” policy, creating “nimble, lightly armed” raiders. The Commandos certainly performed sensational exploits at the Lofoten Islands (although the level of resistance didn’t warrant their skills), Dieppe, the Balkans and at St. Nazaire, where they did the Royal Marines’ job for them (destroying the only Atlantic drydock capable of handling large German warships). But the price tag was to drain the entire Army of men whose martial instincts would have made them squad leaders and platoon sergeants in “line” battalions and instead send them for service as private soldiers in the Commandos.

Elite units like Commandos look for volunteers with physical stamina, aggressiveness, initiative and above par intelligence (among the soldier population). These traits also describe the ideal infantry sergeant. Just one “Commando” contained 470 enlisted men: 470 potential squad leaders and platoon sergeants. There were at least ten “Commandoes.”

Now consider this communique to Churchill from Wavell at Singapore in early 1942: “He [Percival] should however have quite enough to deal with enemy who have landed if the troops can be made to act with sufficient vigour and determination. “(The Second World War, The Hinge of Fate, p88, emphasis mine.) That transmission documents a systemic crisis in low level leadership. Making the troops “act with sufficient vigour and determination” is sergeants’ business.

Now look at 4700 potential top flight small unit leaders segregated off in a few “nimble, lightly armed” units. How did they get there and who put them there? Were they as productive as lightly armed private soldiers as they would have been as sergeants making ten other heavily armed men at Singapore, Burma and Tobruk “act with sufficient vigour and determination”? A few months later 50,000 fully supplied British and Imperial troops surrendered at Tobruk to 25,000 Germans and Italians at the tether of their supply line. Here again is a lack of “sufficient vigour and determination.”

Meanwhile Auchinleck was trying to run the Desert War from an office in Cairo. Here’s yet another deficit of “sufficient vigour and determination.” All the truly great generals of WW2, like Rommel, von Manstein, MacArthur, Montgomery, Alexander, Wingate, Slim, Stilwell, Patton and Bradley routinely led from the front—not the rear headquarters. Patton saw his chief supply officer (the Third Army G-4) exactly twice in ten months in the European Theater of Operations. Rommel was similarly incommunicado with his Afrika Korps Quartermaster. These two are a great contrast to people like Wavell and Auchinleck, who saw their supply officers twice a day at staff meetings and again in the evening at the officers’ mess.

So the Trench Effect, at both the bottom and top levels of the British Army, was very pronounced. Churchill in this instance compounded the problem by taking away what quality remained. It was not his finest hour.

From Simon Riordan – ([email protected])

Auchinleck and Wavell were mediocrities? Really. What then were the Italians when Wavell infiltrated two divisions behind them and took out an Italian army five times more numerous? I guess your Tobruk reference is to the second siege, when the Middle East had been stripped of resources precisely because the Japanese had attacked in the East. As for the other Far East losses, where would you have sent the best and worst troops if you were Churchill? To Africa, where there was a war, or to garrison towns? As for Gort, he practically invented Blitzkrieg in 1918. It worked.

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