The Making Of The British Army (62 page)

But above all by 1945 it was the organization
for
war – the whole staff system from War Office to brigade headquarters, which had advanced so much during the First World War and then withered so perilously in the following two decades, that had become so impressively, and permanently, tuned. No army, no matter how good its fighting men and its supporting arms and services, could prevail against a first-class enemy such as the Germans and Japanese if its staffwork was not equally first rate; and if that lesson of 1914–18 had been half-forgotten in the prevailing atmosphere of ‘never again’ in the 1920s and 1930s, from Alamein onwards the ‘never again’ applied more to the army’s resolve not to allow itself to forget that lesson a second time.

One thing had not been resolved, however: the position and role of what would become known as ‘Special Forces’ (SF). In Burma, Major-General Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindits’ (from
chinthe
, the mythical, elusive beasts of the jungle whose statues guard the Burmese temples) had operated deep behind the Japanese lines. Resupplied by air, they had kept alive the offensive spirit when the rest of Slim’s 14th Army had been either on the defensive or regrouping and retraining. They were not SF in today’s sense of small, élite teams working on missions of strategic effect (the Special Air Service); rather, they were selected units, specially equipped and trained, fighting the enemy conventionally but beyond the front line.
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There were two Chindit expeditions: the first, in brigade strength (some 3,000 men) marched over 1,000 miles during its three-month jungle sojourn beginning in February 1943, losing over a quarter of its number in the process; the second, the following year, consisted of
20,000 British, Indian and Commonwealth troops and was even more controversial in its conception; Wingate himself was killed during its course. Slim had been far from convinced, even before the first expedition, that the Chindits’ tactical or even strategic gains would be worth the diversion of men and materiel from the main effort, and in
Defeat into Victory
he gives his decided opinion: ‘They did not give, militarily, a worth-while return for the resources in men, materiel, and the time that they absorbed,’ he wrote, concluding that ‘The rush to form special forces arose from confused thinking on what were, or were not, normal operations of war.’ Indeed, Slim believed that ‘any well-trained infantry battalion should be able to do what a commando could do; in the Fourteenth Army they could and did’. And this indeed became the basis of the army’s post-war development, with units moving relatively seamlessly between roles every half-dozen years or so – parachuting excepted, which in fact Slim specifically excluded from his ‘normal operations’ on practical grounds of training expense.

But Slim’s dislike of‘private armies’, as many of the ad hoc forces had come to be known – a dislike shared by most senior officers, including Montgomery, who would take over from Brooke as CIGS in 1946 – extended only to the ‘over-classification’ of the normal operations of war and the consequent large-scale diversion of resources. In the same paragraph on ‘misnamed special forces’ Slim argued for a more acute capability:

This specification is almost exactly that of the SAS today. Founded originally by the then Lieutenant David Stirling, a Scots Guards officer, the SAS were originally intended for raiding and sabotage deep behind enemy lines in North Africa. The name ‘Special Air Service’ was meant as a deception, and their first mission, by parachute in November 1941,
was a disaster, only twenty-two out of the sixty-two troopers getting away – and these only with the help of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), whose job was vehicle-borne reconnaissance. Shortly afterwards, however, Stirling redeemed his concept by using the LRDG to take his men into an attack on three German airfields, destroying sixty-one aircraft without a single casualty. The SAS had almost by accident discovered its modus operandi, and thereafter quickly gained regimental status, with a second regiment formed by Stirling’s brother Bill. By 1945 they were operating extensively in Italy with the partisans, having also helped train the French resistance before D-Day. Soon after the war ended, nevertheless, the SAS was disbanded – only to be reformed in 1947 for the Malayan Emergency.

After his electoral defeat at the end of July 1945, with Hitler dead and the capitulation of the Japanese only a fortnight away, Winston Churchill wrote a final note of thanks to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke: ‘Our story in this war is a good one, and this will be recognized as time goes on.’

The British army’s story in the Second World War was in fact by no means a brilliant one, but in the end it was indeed good enough – and at times it was glorious. It had fought the war with the burden of the Somme weighing on the shoulders of senior officers and politicians alike; for eighteen months it had shouldered that burden without allies save for the imperial and dominion forces; and it had had to overcome its initial gruelling setbacks and humiliations while fighting in three continents. In his compendium of the army’s experience from the end of the Boer War to its involvement in the Balkans,
Britain’s Army in the Twentieth Century
(1999), Field Marshal Lord Carver writes of the balancing act entailed in trying to be ready for multifarious commitments:

Like Wellington himself, the army has always been a conservative creature; even in the Second World War its collective instincts had
remained strategically, tactically and for the most part technically cautious – although there was some brilliant improvisation at times.
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But as in 1918, in the Second World War the army had in the end prevailed: it had beaten the Germans (and the Japanese). And it had done so without the debilitating losses of the First. Although 144,000 killed was a bad enough count, it was less than a fifth of the 1914–18 figure. In part this was because only on rare occasions – Alamein and D-Day the prime examples – were commanders at every level prepared to drive home attacks almost regardless of cost; in part it was greater skill; and in part it was luck.

The British soldier could not match the fanaticism of the Japanese or the indoctrinated aggression of the German in battle, but he would, in the words of one historian, ‘fight with unflinching doggedness while absolutely necessary and then break off for tea’. However, side by side with the Americans (and Canadians), who did not of course drink tea, the British army had fought its way from Normandy to the Baltic – and side by side with troops from the Empire, who did drink tea, from Imphal to Rangoon. It was, after all, in Montgomery’s tent on Lüneburg Heath that on 4 May 1945 the ‘Instrument of Surrender of all German Armed Forces in Holland, in Northwest Germany including all Islands, and in Denmark’ was signed. There can be no arguing with victory.

How, though, in the demobilization that was sure to follow victory, would the British army’s hard-won capability be maintained?

SINCE 1949 LEIGHTON HOUSE, A HANDSOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY MANSION
in 50 acres of parkland on the edge of the little Wiltshire town of Westbury, has been home to the Regular Commissions Board, which was set up to select officers commissioned in wartime for full-time (regular) commissions, and entrants for Sandhurst, in the post-war army. But not all the ‘War Office selection boards’ that had been hastily established to select those wartime temporary officers could be disbanded immediately, for although the army in August 1945 was not much smaller at 2.9 million men than it had been in November 1918, the political situation militated against the same wholesale demobilization. The new Labour government under the premiership of Clement Attlee (Churchill’s deputy in the wartime coalition) had expected that it would soon be ‘business as usual’ for the army, with a return to voluntary recruiting; but the peace of 1945 was quite unlike that of 1918, or 1815, or even 1715. The imperial situation was far shakier, in part because of a surge in nationalism, in India especially, and in part because of the spread of Communism in Asia – allied to the uncertainty of how difficult it would be to recolonize territory lost to the Japanese in 1941. And in Europe the enemy had been replaced by an even more powerful threat: the Red Army.

The wartime conscription act could not be prolonged indefinitely,
however, and so in July 1947 Attlee’s government took the unprecedented step of passing an Act of Parliament providing for conscription in peacetime.
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There was to be one year’s compulsory military service for all fit males aged 18, with a call-out liability for the following six years. This, it was calculated, would produce an active army of 305,000. However, Montgomery, who took over from Brooke as CIGS in the middle of 1946, wanted to plan for the contingency of having to field an army which mirrored that of 1944 against the new Soviet threat, and so the period of ‘National Service’, as it was comfortingly called, was soon extended to eighteen months, with the reserve liability reduced to three and a half years during which the reservist would be on the paper strength of a TA unit. But even this increase was not enough, and in 1950, by which time Montgomery had in turn been replaced as CIGS by Slim, the period with the colours was increased to two years, generating an army of nearly 400,000, a little over half of which was regular. By 1952 it had increased again to 442,000, including eight battalions of Gurkhas transferred to the British establishment after Indian independence in 1948.

Yet even with this unprecedentedly high number of troops in ‘peacetime’ the army was soon overstretched. With the breakdown of negotiations over the future of Germany, Stalin’s encouragement of a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) was hastily converted from a non-operational occupation force of roughly two divisions to an operational army of five divisions under the improvised direction of the new Western European Union comprising Britain, France and the Benelux countries. After 1949 and the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) there was a more formal military structure resembling that of 1944–5, with Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and Montgomery as his deputy. NATO’s object, as its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay (who as General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay had been military secretary to Churchill’s war cabinet), memorably put it, was ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’.

But war with Communism broke out further away than anticipated – in Korea, on 25 June 1950, where the withdrawal of the US
occupation force the year before had emboldened the North Korean Communists, inspired by the success in China of Mao Tse-tung’s ‘People’s Liberation Army’ against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops, to launch a surprise attack across the border between North and South Korea, the 38th parallel.
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The UN Security Council, in its first test of the Cold War and in the absence of a Russian veto (the Russians were boycotting the Council in protest at its inclusion of Chinese Nationalist representation), passed a resolution authorizing intervention, and a US-led force under General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the occupation forces in Japan, was hastily assembled. A Commonwealth brigade, the 27th (later redesignated 28th), consisting of two British battalions from Hong Kong together with an Australian and a Canadian battalion and a New Zealand artillery regiment, was sent at once; it would eventually be incorporated into a Commonwealth Division that also included the 29th Brigade of three battalions and an armoured regiment, sent from Britain in December, and a third (Canadian) brigade. In October China threw its weight behind the North Koreans, its army supported by Russian pilots and jet aircraft in Chinese colours. The fighting, always fierce and almost always confused, ebbed and flowed along the whole length of the peninsula for three years.