The Making Of The British Army (2 page)

And in gratitude to
Sir John Keegan,
who taught a great many of us their history

Reviews for
The Making Of The British Army

‘A romantic history of the British Army that stirs the blood.’
Charles Moore,
Daily Telegraph

An important book, because it shows how history has not just shaped the Army, its traditions and its ethos, but also how it has formed British strategy, for better and for worse.’
Antony Beevor,
The Times

‘Lucid, absorbing … Mallinson combines a professional’s feel for his subject with a populist touch.’
Christopher Sylvester,
Daily Express

‘Fascinating … clear and concise … important. It is hard to see this book being bettered in the near future.’
Simon Heffer,
Daily Telegraph

‘A compelling history of the British Army.’
Emmanuelle Smith,
FT

‘Thought-provoking and endlessly entertaining.’
Trevor Royal,
The Herald (Scotland)

‘Whether he is unpicking the close stitching of a battle or lyricising the hero of the book, the common soldier, his touch and judgment are compelling.’
David Edelsten,
The Field

‘Mallinson is surely right to stress the one enduring quality of the British Army: ‘operational resilience’.
Saul David,
Spectator

An admirable introduction to an always controversial subject.’
M R D Foot,
Literary Review

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.co.uk

All civilizations owe their origins to the warrior; their cultures nurture the warriors who defend them, and the differences between them will make those of one very different in externals from those of another.

Sir John Keegan,
A History of Warfare

I came to write this book first and foremost as a soldier of thirty-five years. How and why ‘my’ army had become what it was – extraordinarily capable in spite of its small size – occupied me more and more. A soldier lives daily with his heritage – the uniforms, the pictures on the walls, the names of things, how people talk, what they do, and how they do it; never more so than on operations. And when you live with your history day in, day out, for thirty-five years you begin to see it in a different way from what is sometimes written in the history books, for certain things gain in significance, while others become mere ‘noise’. So I began ‘jobbing back’ into history to try to understand what it was in our past that made us tick today. And when I made a link in the past I found that it immediately demanded I reach back even further, for there was never the equivalent of a military ‘big bang’ when suddenly the elements of the army were created. Indeed, even in the mists of the Dark Ages there are things that resonate in the modern army. Certainly I cannot believe that, say, Alfred’s victory over the Danes at Ethandune on the downs overlooking the present-day battle-training area of Salisbury Plain is entirely unconnected with the spirit of that training.

So where to begin the story of the making of the British army? The Anglo-Saxon
fyrd
was a levy of free farmers assembled for a definite and short period, for the crops had to be sown and the harvest gathered. The Vikings with whom they battled were no better trained, however. The Normans were altogether better organized, but a single Roman legion would have routed William at Hastings, as it would any of the medieval peasant armies that fought in the Wars of the Roses, or the innumerable clan wars north of the border. Henry V’s magnificent longbowmen would have found the Roman
testudo
hard to crack. And even gunpowder would not have dismayed a legion too much before the end of the sixteenth century, for muskets and artillery were then crude and cumbersome. The point was that Roman soldiers were professionals: the legions trained full-time. For twelve hundred years and more, neither England nor Scotland had a standing army; and without a standing army there could be no continuity. So a study of
the
British army is therefore best begun at the point from which there is unbroken continuity: the seventeenth century, at the restoration of Charles II to the thrones of England and Scotland, when events at last forced a standing army on the nation.

The next question is what to leave out, which almost every soldier I have spoken to about the book has asked. In a way everything matters, and the army has seen so much action. Conversely, however, it has never been monolithic: what happened in one part of the army, in one regiment perhaps, dramatic though it may have been, did not always change the overall picture. What matters are those people and events in the past that have made the army what it is today – an army emerging from a long and bruising campaign in Iraq, and fighting another in Afghanistan. I am not writing
the
history of the army; I am trying to explain its present in terms of its past.

There are of course different ways of doing this, but I felt that a continuous narrative would give the reader the best sense of the sweep of time, and therefore of the extraordinary way in which the army has advanced and retreated in size and efficiency over the years. It also puts into context some of the heroic actions that have imprinted themselves indelibly on the army’s collective mind. And since any history of the British army is a part of the nation’s story, it seems best to describe it from the perspective of Britain’s history, which is not to say solely from the perspective of the history of these islands: try writing the history of the world without the British army. Of the 192 member states of the
United Nations, the army has fought in or with well over half of these states or their predecessor polities.

Today only the United States and Britain (and possibly France) are capable of mounting independent operations of any scale overseas. This is not solely because of their armies’ capabilities: overseas campaigns are joint operations, involving army, navy and air force. Nor is it just a matter of size: there are many larger armed forces than Britain’s. The Indian army alone has five times the number of troops in Britain’s three services put together (and as many again in the reserve). Even the Japanese army, or ‘Ground Self-Defense Force’ as constitutionally it has to be called, has some 40,000 more troops than the British. It is the range and balance of capabilities within a nation’s armed forces that determine whether or not they are able to mount an independent campaign far from home. A force must be able to acquire intelligence on the enemy; manœuvre against him; bring fire support to bear (from land, sea and air); protect against the enemy’s own fire; and sustain itself. And when all these capabilities are lined up, a further capability – to command them – becomes key, for as Montgomery’s American counterpart in Normandy, Omar Bradley, said, ‘Congress can make a general, but only communications can make him a commander.’

But ‘Congress and communications’ alone do not make a good general. ‘Generalship’ is a separate ingredient. When I was military attaché in Rome, an impressive Alpini brigadier once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I thought for a moment, then answered that there wouldn’t be much debate about the top five, but for the rest … He stopped me, and with a sigh said: ‘The point is, we don’t have a single one. How do you think that makes an Italian officer feel?’

Generalship does indeed breed generalship. Sir David Richards, who in August 2009 became the new chief of the general staff, led NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2006 during the Taleban offensive which looked as if it might succeed; giving evidence to the House of Commons defence committee afterwards, he described how he would retire to his office and ‘have a conversation with Slim and Templer’. Field Marshals Slim and Templer had died in 1970 and 1979 respectively. They had both, however, been singularly successful fighting off the back foot east of Suez, and by extension had things to say about taking the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan today. When good generalship is a tradition, it becomes sustaining. Indeed, the same is
true all the way down – to individual regiments, to the serjeants’ mess, and to the most junior soldier. When asked why the Rifle Brigade had fought so well in the defence of Calais in 1940, their commanding officer replied simply, ‘The regiment had always fought well, and we were among friends.’

The army’s experience of mastering these various capabilities, the ‘functions in combat’ (manœuvre, fire, communications, logistics, etc.), and generalship is an important part of this book. But
The Making of the British Army
is first and foremost a human story, for the old adage has much truth: navies and air forces are about manning equipment, whereas armies are about equipping men. And this is why military operations, as opposed to air or naval, are less ‘scientific’, for the human factor is an elusive one. Other armies have fielded technically more able men than the British, men more ideologically driven, more combative (and certainly more brutal): for example, Max Hastings in his 1984 book
Overlord
argues that man-for-man the Germans were by far the best of the six armies in Normandy forty years earlier. But no army has so consistently fielded such all-round good soldiers –
regular
soldiers, certainly – as the British. Raymond Seitz, the former US ambassador in London, an anglophile but not an over-sentimental one, observes in his memoir
Over Here:
‘I know nothing kinder than an English nurse nor braver than a British soldier.’

There is another element in the making of the British army that is common to all armies, and that is the unique nature of war itself, and consequently of soldiering. The centurion in St Matthew’s Gospel who says, ‘For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh,’ is saying that he is a man apart. Shakespeare’s vision of the soldier in
As You Like It
is also of a man apart – ‘Full of strange oaths … Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.’

The relationship between the warrior and society, between war and civilization, is intimately and personally explored in a little book called
Fusilier
by the late Reverend Professor John McManners, sometime Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, fellow and chaplain of All Souls, and alumnus of the theological college in which I was studying before I decided to join the army. In 1945 Jack McManners was a temporary major in the Royal Northumberland
Fusiliers, one of the toughest infantry regiments the army has ever mustered. He had joined straight from Oxford in 1939 with a first in history, and was soon in action with the grenade and the bayonet in North Africa. Indeed, he was in action more or less continuously until the end of the war. In 2002 he turned his lifetime’s ‘recollections and reflections’ on the war into
Fusilier
, in which he writes: