Hills faced one of the challenges common to young officers in that most of the men under his command were veterans and he was not. Three of the four other men in his tank had served in the desert, as had the sergeants commanding the other two tanks in his troop. Had Hills known it at the time, he might have gained comfort from the fact that Arthur Reddish, the machine-gunner and co-driver in his tank, wrote: ‘Lieutenant Stuart Hills was straight from Sandhurst and would be facing his baptism of fire, but we had no worries on that score. He had shown enough during the training period to convince us desert veterans that we had a good tank commander. He was quietly confident and fearless but tolerant and a good sportsman.’ Their amphibious Sherman tank sank on its way to the beach on D-Day, and eventually they got ashore with ‘one tin hat, my revolver and the clothes we stood up in, provoking the jovial beachmaster to say ‘This will swing the balance in Montgomery’s favour; there’ll be consternation in Berlin.’ Hills fought in Normandy, the pursuit into Belgium, through the Siegfried Line and on to Bremen, earning an MC on the way but losing many of his comrades, from Keith Douglas in Normandy to Denis Elmore – ‘who had shared so much of my life at Tonbridge and in the war over the last eight years’ – killed in the very last weeks.58
Although procedures for officer selection and training were better in the Second World War than in the First, with the introduction of the WOSB marking a significant point of departure, they took too long to evolve. In both wars the British army was indelibly marked by the fact that it grew from a small peacetime force into a massive national army, and did so without adequate preparation, either for the demands that this would impose on its officer corps, or for expanding that corps to meet the challenges of a war of national survival. The leadership ethos of the peacetime army, stressing the importance of the paternal care exercised by an officer for his men, was passed on into the wartime army with a fair degree of success, even though a large amount of officers no longer came from traditional backgrounds. Failings often reflected weaknesses in training rather than personal inadequacy. In particular, the army’s painfully slow development, in both wars, of a properly thought-through combined arms tactical doctrine meant that young officers often found themselves ill-prepared to meet the test of battle. This should have come as no surprise, for a steady flow of doctrine publications had emphasised the importance of common understanding. As the future Field Marshal Lord Chetwode remarked at an Aldershot Command conference in 1923: ‘if an army is to succeed, everyone in it must know the action other people on their right and left, or in front of or behind them, will take under certain circumstances. It is fatal not to work to a common doctrine.’59 Yet Geoffrey Picot, in his first battle as a platoon commander in Normandy, with all the benefits of two distinct bursts of officer training, found himself in ‘the direst situation of my life’, because his commanding officer, ‘seemingly fearless’, and waving his revolver, gave all sorts of encouragement, ‘But why doesn’t he give me some orders? There are six mortars some way down the road. Doesn’t he want me to fire them at the enemy? Why doesn’t he tell me where the enemy are?’60
Doug Proctor, an experienced infantry section commander, argued that character was ultimately an officer’s most important attribute:
During my six years in army service I knew many officers – some good – some bad. The most obvious difference between them was not in their tactical awareness as one might expect, but in the relationships they had with their soldiers. No matter how tactically aware an officer may be, it counts for little unless he can command the trust, loyalty and respect of his men and is able to inspire them. The good officers, without exception, enjoyed that trust, loyalty and respect.61
Robert Bridgeman, who had left the army in 1937 and been recalled in 1939, had become a major general and in mid-1944 was made deputy adjutant general. His tasks included reviewing courts martial, and interviewing
young officers who had committed no crime but had been reported on as unsuitable for commissioned rank, usually, I imagine, because they were incapable of making up their minds. I cannot recall anything I hated so much as these interviews … In he came, nearly always a nice-looking young chap with no personality. I never saw one who I thought deserved his commission back … Fortunately there were very few who availed themselves of what can only have been a forlorn hope. There must have been many more who accepted the verdict and in their hearts knew that it was right, but compared with the thousands who passed through the OCTUs and gained commissions, it is a wonder so few fell by the wayside.62
A good deal of received wisdom, encapsulated in what we may call the ‘Tommy is no soldier’ argument, suggests that the officer leadership was patchy in both world wars, and that much of this was the fault of the pre-war officer corps, ‘a conservative rural elite who saw the army as a refuge from the industrial world’, that promoted new officers in its own image.63 It is more accurate to see failures as systemic, embodying doctrinal uncertainty (which itself had spin-offs into the procurement of weapons and equipment, especially in the Second World War), endemic under-funding, especially in the inter-war years, and, again most marked in the Second World War, the growing tendency to put the least intelligent and vigorous recruits into the infantry. There is also room for confronting the legend of inadequacy head-on. Sidney Jary, whose account of a platoon commander’s life in North West Europe in 1944–45 is one of the best personal narratives of the war, argued that
Over the past twenty years it has been the custom of some of our younger military writers to extol the professional ability of the Wehrmacht whilst decrying that of our own fighting arms, particularly our armour and infantry. This has perplexed me because it runs contrary to my own experience. My 18 Platoon were better soldiers than any we fought. So was ‘D’ Company and the whole of 4th Battalion, The Somerset Light Infantry. Admittedly it was a good battalion, but I find it hard to believe that it was unique.64
No testimony should stand alone, and alongside this we might cite the much-quoted report by Lieutenant Colonel A. J. D. Turner, CO of 6/Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in Normandy in June 1944, maintaining that his battalion was so ravaged as to be unable to remain in the line. The battalion’s shattered state reflected the fact that in fourteen days it had lost 23 officers and 350 soldiers, one company had lost every officer and another had only one left. The report whizzed up the chain of command like a distress rocket, and Montgomery was not pleased: the battalion was disbanded and used to provide drafts for other units. However, its author, who already had an MC, went on to earn a DSO and was eventually to command a brigade. Whatever Montgomery’s view at the time, it is clear that the experienced officers who made decisions about Turner’s subsequent career did not find his attitude surprising. Most armies would have found a casualty rate like this, amounting to the turnover of three-quarters of the strength of the rifle companies, no less crippling.
This is perhaps the place to leave these temporary gentlemen. Whatever their social background or the inadequacies of their training, they did not flinch from the risk their job entailed. Indeed, knowledge of the risks dissuaded some men, who might have made good officers, from accepting promotion and the danger that came with it. During the First World War 37,452 officers and 664,958 other ranks were killed, with officers making up 5.63 per cent of the dead. Although unit establishments varied greatly, and much depended upon casualties and the rate at which they were replaced, the average infantry battalion might expect to go into battle with 25 officers and 650 men, with officers constituting 3.7 per cent of the unit. In both world wars officer casualties were proportionately greater than those of the men they commanded, and in many cases the ratio was very much higher. On the first day of the Somme, with battalions in good strength, and officers constituting around 3.3 per cent, of the attacking force, they made up 5.16 per cent of the dead and 4.27 per cent of all casualties.65 Charles Farrell wrote his memoirs in angry response to a Spectator article which maintained that in Normandy and Italy whole ??
?formations had to be pulled out of the front line because they were unwilling to fight.’ He noted that in the First World War the Scots Guards had 111 officers and 2,730 other ranks killed, officer dead making up 3.87 per cent of the total. In the Second World War, though, the regiment lost 98 officers to 943 men, with the officers constituting 9.4 per cent of the dead.66 Geoffrey Picot assessed that 1/Hampshires ‘was effectively twice wiped out’ between 6 June and 17 November 1944, and Sidney Jary found himself the only officer in his battalion to emerge unscathed from Normandy to north Germany.67
CHAPTER 9
SANDHURST: SERVE TO LEAD
DURING THE POST-WAR period, the army was tugged in two directions. What was left of Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group became the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), settling down in north Germany to take on many of the characteristics of a new imperial garrison. Across the rest of the world, old imperial commitments remained, although a gradual process of withdrawal, accompanied by a series of counter-insurgency campaigns, eventually saw the evacuation of all but the tiniest of outposts like Gibraltar and the Falklands. In the process there was one largish conventional war, in Korea from 1950 to 1953, and another smaller one in the Falklands in 1982. The army’s commitment to Northern Ireland (Operation Banner) lasted from 1969 to 2007, making it the longest campaign in British military history. With the collapse of communism and the end of the bipolar world, the army found itself increasingly engaged in the ‘expeditionary warfare’ that has come to characterise the last decade of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. Conscription ended in 1945 but was rapidly reimposed, as National Service, in 1947, and lasted till 1960, initially for a period of eighteen months, and then for two years. All of this took place against a back-cloth of relative economic decline and substantial social change.
As far as officer recruiting was concerned, although the army had reverted to type after 1918, it could not do so as completely after 1945. Regional WOSBs were closed, and a single Regular Commissions Board was established at Leighton Park, near Westbury in Wiltshire. Its procedures were firmly based on those used at wartime WOSBs. Its remit was gradually broadened to include the selection of all officers; university graduates were initially selected by a less demanding system. With a new title of Army Officer Selection Board (AOSB), it now selects Territorial as well as regular officers: the latter attend the board for four days and the former for a long, and very busy, weekend. Potential officers have to attend a two-day briefing before attempting the main board. Pass rates vary between boards but currently run at around 55 per cent.
In 1947 Sandhurst and Woolwich were merged into a single institution for training regular officers, its name, properly spelt without a comma, now ‘The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst’ with the motto ‘Serve to Lead’. Its two-year course, no longer fee-paying, included both military and academic subjects. There were two intakes a year, and officer cadets, the term that had replaced the traditional ‘gentleman cadets’, went on to play a substantial part in the running of the academy by constituting the ‘cadet government’ in their final term. When I taught there in the 1970s there were half-serious suggestions that the academy resembled a public school at which the Corps had got rather out of hand, and there is no doubt that the rigidly controlled first term, when ‘the imperatives of the institution govern the timetable of the cadets’ lives’, was at least as much about the transmission of attitudes and values as about specifically military training.1 In his 1970 study of organisational response to change, M. Garnier maintained that it was precisely because of its structure – there were then three colleges, Old, New, and Victory, which were not unlike boarding houses – that public school attitudes retained their dominant hold on the British army. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a significant proportion of Sandhurst cadets came from public schools, which educated about 6 per cent of the population. Antony Beevor, a regular army officer before he became a best-selling historian, suggested that: ‘The public school, with its mores and hierarchical system, has always been a natural preparation for army life.’2 General Sir Mike Jackson, CGS 2003–6, was the son of an officer who had been commissioned from the ranks of the Household Cavalry into the Royal Army Service Corps during the war. He had been educated at the independent Stamford School, where ‘my experience in the C[ombined] C[adet] F[orce] had a considerable influence in demonstrating the pleasures of soldiering.’ He went to Sandhurst in January 1962, and thought that its colleges were indeed like boarding school houses. Like all his generation he remembered ‘the legendary Jackie Lord’, the academy sergeant major: ‘I will call you Sir and you will call me Sir because I am a warrant officer. But there’s one difference: you will mean it and I most certainly won’t.’3
Until the early 1970s university graduates, whether they joined the army on graduation or had enjoyed paid ‘university cadetships’, needed to do only a brief familiarisation course at Sandhurst, a process which did not stop one of them, General Sir Roger Wheeler, from becoming Chief of the General Staff. Cadets destined for National Service or short-service commissions in the artillery or Royal Armoured Corps, were trained at Mons barracks in Aldershot, now called Mons Officer Cadet School. Cadets destined for similar commissions in other arms went to Eaton Hall OCS, on the Duke of Westminster’s Cheshire estate. Eaton Hall closed when National Service ended, and in 1972 Mons moved to Sandhurst, initially as a college in its own right – part of an academy that offered a variety of courses, depending on whether they were designed for short-service officers, officers who hoped for full careers, graduates or non-graduates. A period of wearying change ended with the adoption in 1992 of a standard, year-long commissioning course, with all those who passed (regardless of gender or academic background) being granted short service commissions, extendable into regular commissions if their reports warranted it.
Ostensibly the structure laid down in 1947 and developed since would appear to have created a meritocracy, where the only route to a commission in the regular army was by way of taking scientifically based tests and going on to complete formalised professional training. But in 1988 R. G. L. von Zugbach, himself a former regular officer, argued that the process reflected ‘the dominance of an established cultural pattern’. The candidates’ mess at Westbury was ‘a replica of the sort of officers’ mess to be found anywhere, where the British army serves’. Meals were taken at ‘officers’ mess timings’, with dinner at 8.00 p.m., and the journals available in the ante-room were, like Country Life, Horse and Hound and Tatler, ‘the ‘specialised literature’ of the upper middle-classes’.4 He went on to observe that, although detailed records of the social class of applicants were hard to obtain, over the period 1973–77, 54 per cent of applicants had parents with higher professional/managerial backgrounds (19 per cent were service officers), 11 per cent came from lower professional/managerial and administrative backgrounds, 21 per cent from clerical, salesmen and small shop owners (2 per cent were service other ranks), and 14 per cent from skilled manual backgrounds. No candidates had unskilled manual backgrounds. Zugbach argued that pass rates suggested that the system was not biased against applicants from working-class backgrounds, for the ‘skilled manual’ group actually achieved a higher success rate than any other, from the small percentage whose fathers were serving other ranks. The ‘dearth of candidates’ from this background reflected the fact that a boy from a lower middle-or working-class background would generally have little information on serving as an army officer, and would not be drawn to an army career. Antony Beevor, writing in 1990, argued that
the egalitarian ethos prevalent in most state schools … has run counter to all notions of elitism. Several schools have apparently given this as their reason for refusing to provide reports on army candidates. Those from the state sector are also deterred by their ignorance of army life. Most public schoolboys obtain a much better idea through relatives or friends and are less put off by the army’s class mystique – a phenomenon which by no
w owes rather more to cinematic cliché than contemporary reality.5
It was in great measure to attract grammar school boys that in 1953 the army established its own sixth-form college at Welbeck Abbey in north Nottinghamshire with the specific aim of getting more officers into the technical corps. For many years Welbeck’s former pupils went to Sandhurst without attending RCB, but in the period examined by Zugbach, some 14.3 per cent of them were back-squadded (that is, put down a term) while there, while the average for all cadets was 9.59 per cent. Although Welbexians were not wholly confined to the technical arms on commissioning, in 1973–7 they made up over half the candidates destined for the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, half of those for the Royal Signals, and 1.1 per cent of those going to the cavalry. Zugbach concluded that although Welbexians outnumbered the products of any other single academic institution, their prospects were unquestionably the poorest. In 2005 Welbeck moved to Woodhouse in Leicestershire, and became the Defence Services Sixth Form College, gaining pupils destined for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force in 2004 and the defence civil service in 2005. Those destined for the army are now required to pass the AOSB, and the early evidence suggests that this produces better results at Sandhurst.