The Times Great Military Lives: Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

FOREWORD WILLIAM HAGUE

INTRODUCTION Major-General Michael Tillotson

WELLINGTON

RAGLAN

GRANT

LEE

GARIBALDI

SITTING BULL

MOLTKE

MACMAHON

CETYWAYO

TOGO

ROBERTS

HINDENBURG

LUDENDORFF

FISHER

FOCH

HAIG

JELLICOE

BEATTY

SCHEER

ATATÜRK

ALLENBY

TRENCHARD

MANNERHEIM

RUNDSTEDT

GUDERIAN

WAVELL

ALANBROOKE

AUCHINLECK

CUNNINGHAM

HORTON

DÖNITZ

ROMMEL

MONTGOMERY

EISENHOWER

PATTON

KESSELRING

MACARTHUR

NIMITZ

MANSTEIN

ROKOSSOVSKY

ZHUKOV

DOWDING

GALLAND

HARRIS

SLIM

WINGATE

RIDGWAY

GORSHKOV

WALKER

FIELDHOUSE

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD WILLIAM HAGUE

Politicians should always be very careful when commenting on military matters. My own hero, William Pitt the Younger, was right to say that ‘I distrust extremely any ideas of my own on military subjects’, despite the fact that he was the longest serving war leader in the modern history of Britain. Even he, a statesman who built the great international coalitions against revolutionary France, found that as a man who had never seen a battlefield, his second-guessing of generals from Downing Street could lead to disaster.

This magnificent collection of obituaries of great military leaders from The Times offers plenty of reminders of just how tense the relations between generals and political leaders can be in wartime: Lord Alanbrooke, one of Britain’s best Second World War Generals, is quoted as saying of Winston Churchill, ‘He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I would not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth’.

Yet some of these impressive men of war went on to become the political leaders of their nations, from the Duke of Wellington and Ulysses S Grant, through to Paul von Hindenburg – his ‘iron mask and rock-firm figure became an inalienable possession of the nation’ – and Dwight D Eisenhower. Others used the immense stature gained from victory in war to intrude into politics whenever they fancied: I much enjoyed reading of Montgomery’s ‘trenchant contributions’ to debates in the House of Lords in his old age, ‘delivered from somewhere near the exact centre of the Conservative benches but often turning his own front bench colleagues pale with apprehension.’

For all of us who love reading history, these assessments of such pivotal figures are full of fascination, covering as they do the full sweep of military history over the last two hundred years. It is impossible to read them without reflecting on the inability of most of these extraordinary people to foretell even the immediate future. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher is something of an exception with his prediction in 1910 that ‘war will come in 1914 and Jellicoe will command the Grand Fleet’, but it is more telling that Hindenburg initially retired in 1911 believing that he would never have the chance to serve in wartime and MacArthur confidently informed President Truman in 1950 that the Chinese were unlikely to intervene in Korea with any force. The sharp turns taken by history are often a shock to the most brilliant of minds.

These men’s minds were, however, well attuned to combining the pursuit of an overall strategy with the rapid taking of decisions under extreme pressure: abilities which distinguish the mind suited to executive command from one better devoted to campaigning or commentating. This above all is why we politicians must treat these figures with reverence, as a reading of the pages devoted to Britain’s military leaders in the First World War shows well. For there we find Allenby winning the war against Turkey over a vast area of the Middle East with a strategy of which ‘the original conception, the patience in preparation, the rapidity and audacity in execution, prove that [he] was a true master of war’.

There too is Admiral Beatty, boldly and suddenly taking his battle-cruisers into the Heligoland Bight to achieve victory when a more cautious leader would have held back, and then his colleague Jellicoe, whose command of the Fleet gave him, according to Churchill, responsibilities on a different scale from all others: ‘the only man on either side who could lose the War in an afternoon’. It is just as well, as his obituary writer notes with approval, that his life had moulded him specifically for such duty, particularly as ‘he did not know in earlier years the softening influences of money or friends in high places’.

Obituaries are necessarily history as it was seen and understood at certain moments, and are often kinder than the subsequent judgement of later decades, but they have the advantage of dealing with the whole life of an individual whom we are used to reading about only at the peak of their career. Many of us will have read of the brilliance of Marshal Zhukov as he led the Soviet armies in the destruction of the Third Reich; we may have overlooked the fact that both Stalin and Krushchev rubbished his achievements and that he had to wait until 1965 before he could appear in public at a military parade and receive a ‘special burst of applause’.

Whether hailed or derided by their contemporaries, these are the stories of great men. Many of them, of course, would have considered themselves such at the time. When Montgomery was asked to name the three greatest generals in history, he replied ‘the other two were Alexander the Great and Napoleon’. So as we enjoy their lives afresh, with all their fascination and inspiration, we can be sure they would have wanted and expected us to do so.

INTRODUCTION Major-General Michael Tillotson

THIS COLLECTION OF great military lives spanning the decades from Waterloo to the South Atlantic campaign of 1982 reflects dramatic changes in the scale and much of the nature of war. It begins during the era when national armies or navies marched or sailed out to fight the army or navy of an adversary – in a manner advanced only in magnitude from when David challenged Goliath on behalf of his tribe – the outcome of the battle determining the politics of the matter, possibly for decades. Conflicts then expanded dimensionally, economically and socially to a point where the whole engine of the state became engaged, as with the Civil War in the United States – arguably the first modern industrial war.

Despite the speed of his defeats of Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, Field Marshal von Moltke warned Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890 that the next war might last between seven and thirty years. He argued that the resources of modern states were so great that none would accept defeat in one campaign or major battle as fair cause for capitulation, but would fight on. He was right in the sense that the war that began in 1914 was not finally concluded until 1945. The scale of manpower involvement in land warfare increased dramatically in the years up to 1914, with the German General Staff planning to use the younger reservists – 23 to 28- year olds – to provide the strength required to envelop the French left flank under the Schlieffen Plan. Forewarned, the French looked to their younger reserves, while Britain founded the Territorial Army.

At the outset of the twentieth century the advent of the submarine, the torpedo and the mine upset the supremacy of the line-of-battle fleet that had persisted from the age of sail well into the age of steam. Naval commanders in this collection were therefore confronted with unprecedented challenges in their conduct of maritime operations. Nuclear powered attack and ballistic missile submarines, for the first time true submersibles – as they do not have to ‘come up for air’ – have now added a new dimension to naval warfare.

The two most significant additions to the established disciplines of war on land and sea are those of air power and the means of acquiring intelligence. In the First World War, air power was a welcome ‘add-on’ for observation, supporting fire and keeping the enemy air force from interfering with surface operations. In the course of a mere twenty years it had developed into a battle-winning or losing factor, as demonstrated in the 1940 German blitzkrieg in France, the extraordinary success of the Japanese expansionist campaign after Pearl Harbour and the critical advantage of the virtually complete Allied air-superiority over northern France in 1944.

In the field of intelligence acquisition, air reconnaissance allowed surface commanders to see the other side of the hill and over the horizon in a time scale within which they could react with profit. The targeting of aerial reconnaissance and subsequent assault onto an enemy’s dispositions, deployments, industrial capacity and surface communications has been enhanced by being able to intercept and decode his strategic and tactical signal traffic. ‘We had an ally,’ crowed Ludendorff’s Deputy Chief of Operations after victory at Tannenberg, ‘The enemy. We knew all the enemy’s plans.’ He had had the daily intercepts of the Russian wireless messages decoded by a German professor of mathematics. The most quantum leap of all is being able to overhear an enemy’s political and strategic discussions and plans, lifting intelligence to a level remote from travellers’ tales and dependence on reports from agents, who could see or hear only one fragment of the plot and who might be working for the enemy.

After the two World Wars, revulsion of the prospect of more carnage and devastation led to ‘limited wars’, limited by geography and objective, such as were fought by the United Nations in Korea and by the United Kingdom against Argentina for the Falkland Islands, yet with the spectre of superpower conflict still hovering ominously in the background, imposing its own constraints on national manoeuvre and aspiration.

Throughout this era of change has lain the menace of ‘undeclared’ war, where there is no formal understanding between adversaries, no acknowledged code for the treatment of prisoners or the wounded and the civilian population is utilized – often ruthlessly – as a place of refuge, a source of support and supply or, worst of all, as hostages upon which atrocities are committed in order to apply restraint or to exact revenge. There is nothing new here and methods vary only with the terrain and the weaponry available to the antagonists. While we might applaud examples like the Spanish guerrilla attacks on the outposts of Napoleon’s armies in the Iberian Peninsula and Tito’s partisans against the Axis occupiers of Yugoslavia, we deplore the murder and mayhem imposed by Kenya’s Mau-Mau or by communist insurgents seeking to overthrow colonial administrations or their perceived proxies in South East Asia. ‘One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ loses none of its truth through having become a cliché. A number of the individuals whose obituaries appear here experienced conflict in several of the forms described, maintaining their reputations for success only when they adapted to change.

Change in the manner in which command is exercised has been equally dramatic. At Waterloo, where this book begins, Wellington commanded in the saddle from where he could oversee events only to the limit of visibility, while inspiring his soldiers by his overt presence. During the war for the Falklands, Admiral Fieldhouse commanded from his bunker deep below the London suburb of Northwood, from where he had access to the latest electronic and satellite intelligence, one-to-one communication with commanders at sea and eventually ashore, and with the British War Cabinet through the filter of the Service Chiefs of Staff.

The most significant aspect of the evolution of command is the extent to which political control may be applied to a commander in the field or at sea, affecting his strategic and even tactical decisions. He may jib at such restrictions, but the international nature of today’s world demands he should be kept alert to political intentions and reservations. From Kitchener’s ‘press conference’ after Omdurman (‘Get out of my way, you drunken swabs’) to to-day, the military commander has had to take increasing account of a pervasive, influential and technically proficient media. This raises the issue of whether one individual might any longer be able to make a critical impact on the outcome of a battle or campaign. The answer is ‘probably yes, but to a lesser extent than formerly’.

These obituaries have been selected from those published in The Times that illustrate high command in war, long experience of armed conflict or preparation for such responsibility. Success or failure has played a smaller part than impact or influence on events at the time and in consequence on the course of history. Some who held high command also pioneered or exploited a significant aspect of war – of which Admirals Dönitz and Horton are examples for submarine warfare and Generals Guderian and Patton for fast-moving armoured penetration and encirclement. We have also included Giuseppe Garibaldi as an exponent of irregular warfare and General Walter Walker as an expert on its suppression. Chiefs Cetywayo and Sitting Bull are here for their prowess as leaders of warrior nations, their courage and methods of warfare beset and eventually defeated by technology.

Objections over omissions and even some inclusions are inevitable, but a balance of different aspects of warfare, geography and nationality had to be struck. A few who might have qualified had no obituary in The Times; otherwise Admiral Thomas Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, (1775–1860) would be here. While a long extract from Wellington’s obituary is included, the death of his great adversary, Napoleon, occurred too early and at a time when The Times had not yet developed its obituary coverage. Lord Kitchener is omitted because his obituary appeared in full in Great Lives, published in 2005. Sadly, no woman could be found to match the criteria for inclusion.

In addition to the conduct of war, its reporting in newspapers and recording in obituaries of the participants have also evolved. News of the victory of Waterloo had to be galloped to and sailed across the Channel while only fifty years later William Russell had his reports on the failings of the staff and administrative services in the Crimea telegraphed to The Times for publication next day – and with little or no censorship imposed upon his copy. Such journalistic freedom, although doubtless available, was seldom exercised in the obituaries of the period. Lord Raglan, who died aged sixty-six while in command of the British Army in the Crimea, whose obituary we include, was unsuited by age and lack of command experience for the responsibilities he held, something recognised by the press and public alike. Yet his obituary concentrates chiefly on his gentlemanly personal qualities, making only the briefest genuflexion towards the awareness of his shortcomings as a field commander at the very end – and without venturing to suggest what they were.

Such courteous restraint shows signs of fraying at the edges as time wore on. First World War commanders are spared some frank criticism possibly out of consideration of the appalling circumstances they faced as well as in the interests of ‘good taste’. Examples are the obituaries of Jellicoe, Beatty and Fisher whose controversies are gently alluded to but not clearly explained. The obituaries of commanders who died soon after their famous deeds tend to reflect current public perception rather than their true worth. Rommel who died in October 1944 before the end of the war in Europe was in sight is granted only grudging praise for his generalship. The treatment – in terms of detail and scope – of the lives and achievements of the selected individuals over the period shows little consistency. One is left to conclude that as much depended on the whim of the Editor of The Times as on the stature of the subject.

Some instances of contrasting coverage lack explanation – for example over 7,000 words for General Ulysses S. Grant against only 1,200 for his strategic equal General Robert E. Lee cannot be wholly attributed to Grant’s subsequent unexciting performance as his country’s eighteenth president. Astonishingly broad coverage was afforded to the Italian soldier-patriot General Giuseppe Garibaldi, over two issues of The Times on June 3rd and 5th 1882, seemingly reflecting the extent to which this romantic – not to say romanticised – figure had been taken into the bosom of Victorian Britain. In marked contrast, the hero of the native American people – Chief Sitting Bull, whose Prairie Sioux tribes took part in the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn – is dismissed in less than a thousand words, as is General ‘Schneller Heinz’ Guderian, the leading German exponent of armoured warfare in the Second World War. In several instance, for example, Wellington, Grant, Garibaldi, Moltke, MacMahon and Eisenhower, the extreme length of the published obituaries have obliged us to include only selected extracts in the book.

Political bias occasionally shows its hand. The obituary for Cetywayo – in a tract of breath-taking Victorian humbug – seeks to portray as a villain the Chief who sought only to protect his tribal lands from annexation and his proud Zulu nation from conquest. In an instance of ‘political correctness’, the lugubrious Field Marshal Paul von Hinden-burg is accorded generous accolades as ‘Father of the Fatherland’ on the occasion of his death a bare eighteen months after being obliged to install Hitler as German Chancellor, causing widespread alarm across Europe. That for General Douglas MacArthur concentrates dispro-portionately on the Korean War and the terms of his removal, at the expense of the strategic vision of his Pacific campaign and his personal courage.

In order to provide a balanced perspective when an obituary lacks historical or strategic context, appears to fall short of the credit a subject is due, omits mention of important events or glosses over a controversy with which the subject was associated, my naval colleague – Rear-Admiral Guy Liardet – and I have added our comments. Explanations have been added when the writer of the obituary assumed the reader’s familiarity with the role of persons mentioned only by name or with then recent but now largely forgotten events. Occasionally, touches of light-heartedness have been added to lift an otherwise over-solemn account.

A search for a common element or thread in the lives of those included often reveals a humble or relatively humble background, although this is by no means always so; hardship in the formative years – resulting in an enduring code of self-discipline – and most significant of all, a strong sense of public service, one that eschews personal profit or honours. Former tanner General Ulysses S. Grant, Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim – second son of a minor nobleman, as a boy obliged to speak a different European language each weekday-Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, born in Ceylon, his father a junior infantry officer, entered a Victorian Navy ‘penniless and forlorn’ as he was fond of saying and the peasant, former cavalry sergeant Georgi Zhukov are the more obvious examples. There are exceptions: Earl Beatty combined privilege with an intense ambition.

The variation in the language of the obituaries over one and a half centuries illuminates the changes in public attitude to the great and perhaps not-so-good and in the fashion of writing structure, punctuation and use of words. In the 19th and early 20th century examples, failings are not so much left to be read between the lines as approached in the manner of ‘grandmother’s footsteps’, with the stalker seemingly losing nerve at the last moment, leaving grandmother to reach her final destination without being openly caught out. Sentences of inordinate length, spattered with commas, colons and dashes with the generous impartiality of grape-shot were commonplace in that period. Some obituary writers had apparently never received an introduction to the paragraph, resulting in difficult-to-digest long, descending barrels of words. In the latter instances only, paragraphs have been imposed but otherwise the obituaries have been taken directly from The Times, retaining the original punctuation and spelling.

The sequence in which to present the obituaries allowed several options. The convenience of alphabetical order lacked imagination, while a chronology based on achievement of fame or the order of birth or death threw up awkward anomalies. Consequently, those associated with some great historical event, such as the two World Wars, have been grouped together and individuals whose names will be for ever linked – Jellicoe with Beatty over the Battle of Jutland and MacArthur with Nimitz in the war in the Pacific are put in immediate succession – all, it is hoped, without losing the possibility of a serendipitous moment as the reader casually turns the page. These lives are a part of history and their study an aid to its understanding.

WELLINGTON

Strategist and inspirational commander-in-chief

15TH SEPTEMBER 1852

This extract taken from The Times of 15th September 1852 describes The Duke of Wellington’s conduct of the war in the Iberian Peninsula. Appreciations of his command during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and as Prime Minister 1828–1830 appear in the concluding commentary.

ENGLAND WAS NOW at the commencement of her greatest war. The system of small expeditions and insignificant diversions, though not yet conclusively abandoned, was soon superseded by the glories of a visible contest; and in a short time it was known and felt by a great majority of the nation that on the field of the Peninsula England was fairly pitted against France, and playing her own chosen part in the European struggle. But these convictions were not prevalent enough at the outset to facilitate in any material degree the duties of the Ministry or the work of the General; on the contrary, so complicated were the embarrassments attending the prosecution of the war on the scale required, that to surmount them demanded little less wisdom or patience than the conduct of the actual campaign. In the first instance the British nation had been extravagantly excited by the successful insurrections of the Spaniards, and the events of our experimental campaign in Portugal had so inspirited the public mind that even the evacuation of that kingdom by the French was considered, as we have seen, in the light of an imperfect result. When, however, these conditions of the struggle were rapidly exchanged for the total discomfiture of the patriots, the recapture of Madrid, and the precipitate retreat of the British army, with the loss of its commander and the salvation of little but its honour, popular opinion veered quickly towards its customary point, and it was loudly proclaimed that the French Emperor was invincible by land, and that a contest with his legions on that element must inevitably prove ruinous to Britain. But the Government of the day, originally receiving its impulse from public feeling, had gradually acquired independent convictions on this mighty question, and was now prepared to maintain the interests of the nation against the clamours of the nation itself. Accordingly, at the commencement of the year 1809, when the prospects of Spanish independence were at their very gloomiest point, the British Cabinet had proposed and concluded a comprehensive treaty of alliance with the Provisional Administration of Spain; and it was now resolved that the contest in the Peninsula should be continued on a scale more effectual than before, and that the principal, instead of the secondary, part should be borne by England. Yet this decision was not taken without much hesitation and considerable resistance; and it was clear to all observant spectators that, though the opinions of the Government, rather than those of the Opposition, might preponderate in the public mind, their ascendancy was not so complete but that the first incidents of failure, loss, or difficulty, would be turned to serious account against the promoters and conductors of the war.