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In 1956 a military biography became a publishing sensation in the United Kingdom with the first edition of 20,000 selling out almost immediately. This was unusual, as only nine years after the war the public appetite for books on the recent war remained limited. It was even more unusual given ...
God Save the King!Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had a special place in the hearts of every serviceman and woman of this country. This isn’t mere sentimentality, but a fact hard rooted in our constitution. All servicemen and women owe their loyalty not to a particular group or class, or to ...
Have you ever wondered about the history of a building or a place as you rush past, busy with life, and have never had the opportunity to stop and investigate it further? Millions of people walking through the U.K.’s towns, cities and landscapes every single day of the year pass buildings or ...
The British Army was catastrophically unprepared for war in 1939. But it wasn’t just the Army that was unprepared. Despite a last-minute rush to re-arm, so too was the whole country. In Britain a deep-seated passivity had set in following the end the Great War. This belied the reality that in ...
Even the most sketchily educated Briton today will nevertheless recognise in the murky depths of their consciousness the name of that great British general of World War Two, Montgomery of Alamein. To an older generation perhaps another name resonates equally and perhaps more strongly, the name ...
Book Reviews
There have been many accounts of the disasters followed by the triumph of the Burma campaign in the Far East war, but few with the detail and perceptive analysis of A War of Empires. Robert Lyman is of course a noted authority on the history of the region, and his biography of Bill Slim is a model of how such studies should be constructed. Here the reader is taken through the entire campaign from start to finish with a particularly good introduction setting out the political and military background of all the players. As an ex-professional soldier, Lyman is well placed to understand the military aspects of the war but is also fully cognisant of the political imperatives which, at least in a democracy, dictate the limits of military action. The humiliating attempt at the defence of and then the scuttle from an underfunded and ill-equipped Burma is well covered as is the incompetent Arakan caper of 1943. The author is severely critical of Archibald Wavell, Noel Irwin and Wilfrid Lloyd, and the evidence he cites and the conclusions he draws have forced at least this reviewer to re-examine his own perceptions of Wavell.It is refreshing to find some compassion for John ‘Jackie’ Smyth, blamed by many as having been solely responsible for the Sittang bridge disaster. Those of us who consider Wingate to have been a dangerous lunatic would be well advised to read Lyman’s succinct assessment of the man and his methods, which shows that many of Wingate’s ideas were sound, even if their execution was not. The lessons learned from fighting the Japanese and their application to the re-vamped training methods instituted by Claude Auchinleck to prepare the Indian Army for its return to the fray is well covered as is the obstruction caused by the unfortunate attitude of Churchill to consider the Indian army as nothing more than a ‘band of potential mutineers’. The book is perhaps more sympathetic to the motivation of those prisoners who chose to join ‘Netaji’s’ Indian National Army (that sided with Japan), than were those prisoners who withstood appalling brutality when refusing to join (including one subedar major of a Gurkha battalion who was beheaded), but the circumstances have been assessed in more detail than has been seen elsewhere.The contribution of Auchinleck, unfairly sacked by Churchill and traduced by Montgomery, in rebuilding the army and of Slim in leading it are fully acknowledged, as is the prodigious logistic effort involved. The sequence of events and the battles in the subsequent victorious return to Burma are masterfully described, and where he finds ‘official histories’ in error Lyman says so and shows how. One of the major problems, perhaps the greatest problem next to the Japanese, was that the Far East in general and Burma in particular was bottom of the Allied priority for equipment, shipping, aircraft and manpower, much having to be improvised in India or on the battlefield.One of the most helpful aspects of this book is the way in which the author describes the interplay between the various allies, all with the same ultimate aim – to defeat the Japanese – but all with their own differing agenda and coming at the common aim from different directions. The misconceptions, suspicions, cultural clashes and pure mutual ignorance all made coordination and concentration of effort very difficult and sometimes impossible, a prime example being the description of the relationship between Joseph Stillwell and Generalissimo Chiang.Slim is rightly lauded for his far seeing and perceptive assessments of what was possible and what was not, and for his drive and leadership throughout – he will surely be recognised by future historians as being far and away the best British general of the Second World War. Each of the important battles is illustrated by a clear and unambiguous map, and the plates are well chosen.A War of Empires is meticulously sourced, a delight to read and will surely be the definitive account of this, the most harrowing campaign of the Second World War.
Gordon Corrigan is a historian and writer, and author of The Second World War: A Military History.
Gordon Corrigan is a historian and writer, and author of The Second World War: A Military History.
This is a superb and highly readable account of the development of the often tumultuous relationships between Britain’s political and military leaders over 31-years, starting with Sarajevo in 1914 and ending with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Britain and its empire was at war for nine years of these three decades. In addition to the extraordinary story of the two world wars, intrinsically fascinating in and of itself, is the story, at the heart of Prior’s engaging account, of how Britain’s government on the one hand and its armed forces on the other engaged with each other – at both the ‘grand strategic’ and the ‘military strategic’ levels of war – to fight, and to plan how to fight. Georges Clemenceau warned us that war is too important to be left to the generals. He was right. The successful prosecution of war in a democracy requires a partnership between politicians and soldiers. What is required is a way of working together, secured through negotiation, debate and the systems and structures of power adapted from their peacetime uses to achieve wartime purposes. Both the political legislative and the military executive need to work out how to rub along, so as to achieve the outcomes of which both are desirous. As Prior brilliantly emphasises, in a democracy the story of these often fractious relationships – think Lloyd George v. Haig over manpower in 1917/18 and Churchill v. Wavell in 1940/41 over the strategy for the Middle East – was of how the two sides negotiated with each other to plan for, and secure, victory.The final sentence in this quite excellent book is that ‘Democracies at war can be fearsome.’ Yet that fearsomeness could look very bloody. Unanimity with regard to the question of ‘how should we fight?’ took several years to achieve in the Second World War (and arguably was never achieved in the Great War) and many mistakes were made (some very stupid indeed), and lives lost, along the way. What was achieved, nevertheless, was a modus vivendi of sorts that allowed the politicians and the soldiers to work together, reasonably amicably, to achieve an agreed outcome – in the case of the Second World War, final victory over Germany, Italy and Japan. In the early years of the Second, the soldiers had to give way to political needs, and do what it could in the circumstances. One example was the political determination to send troops from North Africa to support Greece in 1941, to the extent of making Cyrenaica extremely vulnerable to German attack. The armed forces, stretched as they were, accepted the need to make a political gesture even at the same time as recognising that from a purely military perspective it was sheer folly. And so it proved. At the same time, the politicians were forced to recognise that as the result of long years of political neglect and economic parsimony the British Army was far from ready for war in 1939, and required several years and as many defeats (and American equipment) to get its act together.The story that Prior superbly weaves is one in which the daily negotiations between politicians and generals – akin to squabbling parents who otherwise are determined to do the best for their children – was ever changing, the engagement involving competing visions of what was required to fight and to win; competing conceptions of strategy; competing appreciations of what could be achieved by the use of military force; competing personalities and, let it be said, the clash of some titanic personalities. All of this needed to be undertaken in the absence, in both 1914-16 and 1939-1942 of any clear view by soldiers of how to fight the type of war they were being confronted with. In both cases, 1914 and 1939, the type of war into which the British Army was thrown was unexpected. This was discombobulating, both for soldiers and politicians. The soldiers, egregiously ill-prepared for both wars, were shocked when the enemy out-smarted them in battle. The politicians, with notoriously short memories, couldn’t understand why it was that with vast sums of money now spent on the army, it wasn’t able to achieve the results it so desired. The answer, as Prior explains, was that it needed to learn how to fight. This takes time. It was only with the methodical though unflamboyant approach of Montgomery at the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, mirroring exactly the techniques developed in the Hundred Days battles of late 1918, that the tide began to turn.During the Great War the challenge of finding a way of managing the generals in the field was never satisfactorily solved. In the Second World War the answer was found in the creation of an effective relationship between the Chiefs of Staff and the Prime Minister and his War Cabinet. In the Great War the role of CIGS in the Army (Robertson and then Wilson) played nothing like that exercised by General Alan Brooke in the Second World War when the entire apparatus of planning for, and executing war became far more systematised and sophisticated. The relationship was always dynamic. In the Great War the politicians decided it was the army in the field and its commander (French and then Haig) who by their execution of military strategy forced a response from London about grand strategy. The tail wagged the dog, in other words. Because a decisive victory in France appeared unlikely in 1915, for example, alternative grand strategies were dreamt up to compensate. Gallipoli was one result. Something of a modus vivendi between her political and her military leaders was created in the Second, where at the grand strategic level an effective dialogue (which isn’t to say that they got everything right) was maintained. It needs to be remembered too that in the Second World War these political-military relationships were coloured by a dimension that did not exist in the First, namely the need to align Britain’s strategic interests, purpose and actions with those of the United States and, to a lesser extent, the USSR.That Britain ultimately made an effective and successful partnership between politicians and soldiers, seen most explicitly in the personalities of Churchill and Brooke, lies at the heart of this engaging book.At 696 pages of text one might think that this is a ‘big book’, but think of it another way: with 31 years to consider, it amounts to just over 22 pages a year, so it’s not very long at all. I couldn’t put it down, and neither will you.
Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945, by Robin Prior is out now and published by Yale University Press.Robert Lyman is the author of A War of Empires.
Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914-1945, by Robin Prior is out now and published by Yale University Press.Robert Lyman is the author of A War of Empires.
Supremacy at SeaThe Second World War can be seen as a succession of phases, or campaign events, each of which in terms of timeline and effect had its own impact on the course and outcome of the war. The two big turning points in the Second World War both occurred in 1941. The first was Hitler’s turn to the east, with the start of Operation Barbarossa on Sunday 22 June. The second was Japan’s attack on Malaya and the Philippines on 8 December (7 December in terms of the US time zone), attacks that occurred at the same time as the coup de main assault on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. In terms of the great turning-point battles in the Second World War, when the tide of war changed irreversibly and dramatically against those who initially held the upper hand, I usually plump for four. The first was arguably at Midway in June 1942 when the US Navy successfully challenged Japanese dominance in the Pacific (the others being Stalingrad, El Alamein and the great battle of Imphal & Kohima).In the Central Pacific, the subject of Evan Mawdsley’s excellent book, the naval equivalent of Kohima took place. Early to mid-1944 truly was a period in which Japanese military failure became embarrassingly apparent, in both Tokyo and Washington. In 1942 the US Navy had six aircraft carriers operating in the Pacific, of which four were lost in operations against the Imperial Japanese Navy. Less than two years later the two remaining carriers of the pre-war US Navy had been joined by no less than 16 new fast carriers, of which seven were the enormous 27,200-ton ‘Essex’ class carriers and nine were the 10,000-ton ‘Independence’ class light carriers. The seeds of this expansion had been laid in the years immediately before the war, when a prescient US government recognised, notwithstanding widespread domestic isolationist instincts, that the rumblings of war across the globe would sooner or later have implications for America. By January 1944 the USN boasted a maritime supremacy that to this day has never been matched by any other world power. These carriers had been joined by a new fleet of fast battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, bristling with anti-aircraft guns and sophisticated radar, crewed by the results of a massive increase in manpower. The number of enlisted personnel in the USN rose from 111,000 in 1939 to 2,808,000 by 1944.The extraordinary increase in the size and fighting power of the US Navy, as well as the rapidity of this change, was an astonishing feat. The story of how the USA transformed itself for war is a huge drama in and of itself. The speed of the building up of the new Navy was astonishing: ships destined for completion in the three Navy Yards in 1944 and 1945 were delivered in late 1942, as the entire nation turned itself into an industrial powerhouse to defeat its enemies and support its friends. This wasn’t just about industrial potential but also about the overwhelming power of human will. America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor and in seemingly one great expression of national will joined the fighting forces, When the communications officer of USS Hornet, one of the four carriers to be lost in 1942 found himself swimming for his life following the sinking of his ship he recalled, four days later, a conversation in the water. “Are you going to re-enlist?” “God damn yes – on the new HORNET.” Millions of ordinary men and women (though the only women allowed to sail in combat were 11,000 female nurses) volunteered in huge numbers, or allowed themselves to be allocated through the conscription process to one of the services without demur.The Navy divided the Pacific into North, Central and South. Mawdsley’s book focuses exclusively on the operations in the Central Pacific (Micronesia), north of the equator, between January and August 1944. This set of battles led an advance across the Pacific ‘extraordinary in its depth and decisive in its outcome.’ To considerable Japanese losses not a single US surface warship was lost and less than 100-men. It was a campaign immense in its planning, execution and outcome. Mawdsley deftly presents this dramatic story with plenty of detailed description about how the navy delivered its operational tasks, as well as the men who made it all happen, which adds much helpful depth to the story. This is an excellent exposition of the campaign that made the US Navy the extraordinary fighting machine that it remains to this day.
Supremacy at Sea: Task Force 58 and the Central Pacific Victory by Evan Mawdsley is published by Yale University Press.
Supremacy at Sea: Task Force 58 and the Central Pacific Victory by Evan Mawdsley is published by Yale University Press.
The British Army ended the First World War well trained, well led, well equipped and capable of engaging in all arms intensive warfare. Of all the players, on both sides, this army was unquestionably the most capable of deployment against a first class enemy anywhere in the world. Twenty years later it found itself with very much the same equipment, but with very much less of it, and devoid of either the ability or the means to fight a war in Europe against an enemy which had absorbed the lessons of 1918 but which the British had forgotten. It was the British Army that saw to the defeat of the German Army on the battlefield, and whatever German myth later averred, it was the British Army that forced that victory on the Western Front, not the French or the Americans. And yet, in 1939 and 1940 the British were roundly defeated in France and Belgium, Greece, Crete and in North Africa. In this important and almost heart-rending book the authors describe how and why the victors of 1918 were allowed to become incapable of fighting intensive warfare a mere two decades later.In the first part of the book the authors describe the build up to the First War, and their explanation of the so called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ is much more accurate than many accounts by others. The authors then go on to show how the British government had, albeit reluctantly, accepted a continental commitment in 1914 and had despatched an expeditionary force to Belgium, described then and later as the finest body of troops ever to leave these shores.The next part shows how and why by the time the Second World War came along the British were incapable, not only of deterring war, but of fighting it: The ‘ten year rule’; the reluctance of governments to spend on defence; the political refusal to contemplate another war in Europe and the reluctance of the public to contemplate another bloodletting like that of the First War; the inability to experiment or to develop tanks and armoured vehicles; the seeming impossibility of reconciling the twin requirements of imperial policing and any commitment to land operations in Europe with the assets available; the myth of the ‘bomber will always get through’ and the absence of any consistent war fighting doctrine, all are lucidly explained.Much of the fault is shown to lie with politicians, and surely the most disgraceful example of political interference was the sacking of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), by the leaving of a note on his desk by the very dubious Secretary of State for War, Leslie Horeb-Elisha. The generals are not spared, however. Despite restrictions on funding and refusal by governments to accept that another war was looming generals could have spoken out, although it does have to be recognised that in a democracy the civil power is paramount.From the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 successive British governments have seized on the supposed opportunities offered by the ‘Peace Dividend’ and an assumption that war in Europe had been banished for ever. Policies such as ‘An army smaller but better’ (or smaller but bitter as we who were in it said), ‘Front Line First’, stripping out the logistic units without which no army can hope to fight, and similar fatuous cries have left today’s British Army unable to field more than a single division and that for only a limited time. Many of our tanks are to be mothballed, we have no replacement vehicle readily available for armoured infantry, and the Chief of the General Staff has been sacked for suggesting that yet another reduction in the size of the army is unwise. Now another war in Europe has arrived. We are at war by proxy and if Ukraine does not win then we may have to fight it ourselves – and unless there is a very rapid – and expensive – uplift in our military capacity we may be doomed to watch a Russian victory.This is a most timely book. and should be read by every student at the Staff College, who will of course already be the converted. More importantly it should be compulsory reading by every politician.
Gordon Corrigan is a historian and writer, and author of The Second World War: A Military History.
Gordon Corrigan is a historian and writer, and author of The Second World War: A Military History.
Jack Bowsher has set out in this book – his first – to reprise the role of armour in the Burma campaign. He has achieved much more, however, as this excellent book is an accessible study of the campaign as a whole. It has much to recommend it. The fruit of lots of good research in the archives for primary sources, as well as in books for the memoirs of men who served in tanks in the Far East, Bowsher has produced not merely a good summary of the campaign, seen through the gun sights of a Stuart, Valentine, Lee, Grant or Sherman tank, but a rattling good story as well. The memoirs of the time from tankmen are limited, but he’s managed to get hold of them all, using them to provide really excellent accounts of the fighting, including the only real tank on tank action of the war, at Tamu in March 1944. The book is written with some panache as well. Bowsher isn’t reluctant to hide his opinions and they’re pretty rational. This certainly doesn’t feel like his first book. He writes with the tautness of a literary veteran, keeping his arguments tight, his sentences short and with an eye on ensuring that his observations about the campaign and its key personalities are judiciously mixed with a series of brilliant first-hand stories of men who were there. It really is, as James Holland says in his introduction, ‘Superbly researched and compellingly told.’
The only criticism is that there is not much – or enough – about Japanese armour, but this is a very minor quibble, given the insignificant role that armour played in Japanese tactics, a major failing in their way of war.
The very good news is that this foray into writing military history has energised Bowsher to write another book, being published (I hope) by Chiselbury in 2025. The subject? He’s going to develop Chapter 13 – Thunder Run to on Meiktila – into a full blown account of the 1945 campaign. Bravo. 2025 is the 80th anniversary of Slim’s last great campaign in the Far East, one in which the Burma Area Army of General Kimura was savaged by a triumphant 14th Army led, from the front, by tanks of both British and Indian Armies. I, for one, can’t get enough of them, and look forward to Bowsher’s next instalment with eagerness. So should you.
Forgotten Armour: Tank Warfare in Burma, by Jack Bowsher is out now and published by Chiselbury.Robert Lyman is the author of A War of Empires.Author Interviews
Robert Lyman, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in?I have been a voracious devourer of history since a child, reading everything I could from an early age, before studying history at O and A level and at university. I am not exclusively a military historian, in that my interests range widely. I studied Australian, Chinese and European History at school and the Medieval Church for my first degree. The Reformation and the theological arguments that framed the debate between the medieval church and Protestantism retain an enduring interest for me. My first manuscript (fortunately, never published, because it was, in retrospect, not very good), written whilst I was an undergraduate, was on the English church between c.400 and the death of Elizabeth in 1603. This was undoubtedly influenced by my tutors at York in the 1980s, who included Claire Cross and John Bossy. The positive influences of excellent teachers run deep! I am also intensely interested in international affairs – the subject of my second degree – but also in military technology and war studies (the subjects of my third and fourth degrees). The military history dimension comes from my twenty-years in uniform in the British Army, and being immersed in this stuff every day. I need to mention the quality of some of the teaching I received in the army, beginning with men like John Keegan, David Chandler, Ian Beckett, Richard Holmes and other such luminaries at Sandhurst, Cranfield and Staff College, which encouraged me to dive deeper into the subject. My PhD – on Field Marshal Bill Slim, began at Staff College in 1996. Can you tell us a little more about how you research? Has the process changed over the years?I study in concentric circles, beginning with the widest possible reading around my subject area. A feature of my books is the extensive context about the period and subject, to ensure that the events I end up describing and analysing can be understood properly. I then start homing in my subject, refining and questioning as I go. Talking to friends and colleagues and debating issues as the research develops is also a good way of working out what is important and what is not: the challenge is to avoid going down into rabbit warrens and studying aspects of a subject that doesn’t contribute much to the final story. The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?Yes, it’s true, but we mustn’t forget that the further we get from an event in history the more objective analysts like me (for that is what historians are) can be, unconstrained by the baggage of victory or victimhood. The curse of modern history telling, however, is the prevalence of the preachers among us, who use the platform they have to engage in ahistorical victimhood. These people, and there are far too many of them, are not in my view proper historians, as they use history as a means of presenting a modern political or ideological perspective quite alien to the people of the time about which they write.Are there any historians who helped shaped your career? Similarly, can you recommend three history books which budding historians should read?The book that first got me interested in the modern history of the British Army was General Sir David Fraser’s And We Shall Shock Them, which I read when it was pressed into my hands on first publication in 1983. It tells the story of the transformation of the British Army during the Second World War. That led me to Field Marshal Bill Slim’s stupendous Defeat into Victory, undoubtedly the best general’s book of the Second World War. Another book I read as a young officer was Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin, influencing me profoundly as an historian. These three books – which I heartily recommend – have led me to a writing career that straddles fascism in Europe and the war against Japan in the Far East.If you could meet any figure from history, who would it be and why? Also, if you could witness any event throughout history, what would it be?I would love to have met Oliver Cromwell, a much maligned and misunderstood leader, but of course I’d love to sit down and chat with Bill Slim. One event in history? There are lots. I’d have loved to have watched the Light Brigade undertake its bloody charge at Balaclava in October 1854. As General Bosquet observed, C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie.’ It would have been fabulous to observe the coronation of Elizabeth 1 in 1558, the execution of Charles I and the ramming of the Normandie Gates at St Nazaire by HMS Campbelltown in 1942.If you could add any period or subject to the history curriculum, what would it be?I don’t think that any particular time or period of history is necessarily important, although I am a firm believer in understanding our own national history. Human beings are tied to time and place, and our origins are an important component of who we are, and who we consider ourselves to be. I am not an exponent of exceptionalism, but I do believe in the importance of identity. What is important is understanding how to interpret what history tells us about who we are, and where we come from. To do that we need the tools to analyse history, as well as knowing the events of the past. The two are inseparable.If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?The advice to myself would be to always evaluate every side of an argument. I have gone off half cock before, and always regretted it. I’m now very careful to evaluate all aspects of an issue before coming to judgement.Can I extend the question to suggest advice for others? That’s simple. Read more. There is no substitute for reading as extensively as you can manage. Read widely, and don’t stop reading. Don’t read one book on a subject, but several, to get different perspectives and perhaps conflicting analysis. I have read over 100 books a year since I was 10 or 11, and apart from the problem of over-accumulation, its one vice that shouldn’t have too many negative consequences. As a writer, reading also allows me to observe through first hand experience, what good (and bad) writing can look like. Can you tell us a little bit more about the project you are currently working on?I’m busy with a range of projects at the moment. My ‘big book on Burma’ is being published in November. A War of Empires is a military history of the Burma Campaign that tells the story of the Far East between December 1941 and August 1942. I attempt to weave the strategic, operational and tactical stories together, to try to answer the question as to why the Allied forces involved did so badly in 1942, and yet managed to turn the tide against the Japanese in 1945. Its been a subject that has intrigued me for many years.I’m also writing a short account of Operation Jericho, to tighten some of the arguments I made about MI6 and the RAF about the Mosquito raid on Amiens Jail in 1944 in my 2014 book The Jail Busters.
Patrick Bishop and Robert Lyman discuss Operation Jubilee, the subject of Patrick’s new book, costing over 6,000 men, mostly Canadian. Louis Mountbatten played a key role in planning the operation, and it was claimed that lessons were learned for D-Day nearly two years later. You’ve written a range of detailed accounts of military adventures before, most of which from what I recall weren’t complete disasters. What prompted you to have a look at the Dieppe raid?It was actually Daniel Crewe at Penguin Random House who suggested the subject. I was intrigued as it provided an opportunity to anatomise a notorious disaster. I’ve always been interested in wartime decision making and this was an ideal subject for study. No-one wants a blunder yet they recur with appalling regularity in time of war. The inexorability with which a bad decision is made and then compounded by successive bad decisions, even when it is increasingly clear that catastrophe is looming is one of the big themes of the book. Incidentally Max Hastings remarked to me the other day that he had tended to avoid subjects where there were no redeeming features to the story. I think there were some uplifting aspects to Jubilee, notably the incredible heroism of the troops.Did you find anything new, or requiring a new historical assessment, during your research?I did in the sense that I came across numerous other raid proposals floating around at the time that Dieppe was gestating that carried even greater risks. One was Op Imperator which proposed landing an armoured column in he Pas de Calais which would then proceed to Paris, shoot up various military headquarters then return to the Channel to be shipped home. Completely mad and thank God it was eventually vetoed.One of the standout features of your depiction of the raid, both in its planning and execution, was the array of egos involved. How much did competing and conflicting ambitions contribute to the outcome?Yes, there is a full set of massively self-regarding players in the story, led by Mountbatten. I think it was less a case of competition among them than Mountbatten’s burning desire to boost his reputation and that of Combined Operations, both of which were waning at the time, in order to ensure his future prospects and his place in history.Was there a single overriding reason why Operation Jubilee was such an unmitigated disaster, or was it a cluster of failures that unhappily coalesced? I think the latter – a perfect storm of circumstances, bad decisions, a terrible plan and the driving force of external political considerations – notably the necessity to appease the Americans and the Soviets who were pressing for the opening of a Second Front.Do you think that, despite what appears to have been a shockingly ill-prepared and planned operation, was anything learned from it that influenced Operation Torch a few months later? Was Operation Overlord won on the beaches of Dieppe?
Not really. The claim that Jubilee was somehow a ‘rehearsal for D-Day’ was loudly trumpeted by Mountbatten and his team as well as others after the raid failed. He claimed until his dying day that it had always been intended as an experiment to test the feasibility of capturing a French port intact as the central element in the eventual invasion of North Western Europe. This, he maintained, justified the whole affair and the lessons learned meant that many lives were say when D-Day finally dawned. I don’t believe this. For one thing there is nothing at all in the voluminous orders which lays out a methodology for observing and reporting what is going on and measuring the success or otherwise of various parts of the operation. This would surely be the case if Jubilee was intended as some kind of military experiment. The claim that the experience of Dieppe contributed greatly to the successful planning for Overlord also fails to stand up to close examination.Most of the ‘lessons learned’ published in the post operational report were statements of the obvious and would have emerged from an afternoon-long junior staff college exercise of the problems of mounting a major amphibious operation. They did not need a bloody debacle to reveal themselves.You pick up on the discovery by the Canadian historian David O’Keefe that the early commando raids included in their objectives the capture of German coding machines and codes. What do you think of his argument that it was the exclusive reason (though secret) for the Dieppe raid? I’m afraid I don’t buy that. ‘Pinch’ operations to grab Enigma machines and code books were routinely bolted on to the plans of all big raids at this period. The acquisition of naval and military intelligence material is clearly stated repeatedly in the orders so there was no great mystery about that aspect of Jubilee – though of course Enigma is not mentioned by name. Ian Fleming’s special intelligence gathering 30 Assault Unit were present but they did not get ashore. However, it seems to me incredible that such a huge operation for this stage of the British war would be mounted simply as camouflage for this aim. What strikes me as a clinching argument against O’Keefe’s thesis is that if it was true, Mountbatten would surely have employed it in his tireless campaign to justify the raid. The Ultra Secret was known to the general public from 1974 with the publication of F.W.Winterbotham’s book of the same name. If seizing Enigma material had been the sole or even a major driver of the raid, surely Mountbatten – who was very much alive for a further five years afterwards – would have seized on it in his defence.Why was it that Mountbatten, Montgomery and others were allowed to side step responsibility for a poorly conceived plan after the event?This is what happens in wartime. There is little to be gained from too close investigation of a disaster though Churchill made attempts to get to the bottom of who was responsible, without much success due to Mountbatten’s energetic track-covering. There is often much to be lost by sacking people unless they have proved to be completely useless, which Monty and Mountbatten certainly were not. The war still has to be fought so the great imperative is to press on and leave history to apportion blame.
The Canadians suffered terribly in the operation – how much did this affect relations between Canada and Britain?Good question. Much less than you might imagine. The Canadian government and its top commanders in Britain knew all about the operation and had approved it. McNaughton and Crerar had both pressed for Canadian troops to be used, even though they had no hand in the original plan. Later they did contribute but failed to modify it to increase fire support or insist on other measures to lessen the odds against their men. So they shared a degree of responsibility for the disaster and were consequently reluctant to play the blame game afterwards. Instead, they recast the story as one of incredible Canadian heroism, which indeed it was, as well as backing the narrative that it was a painful but necessary preparation for D-Day.What you are planning to write next?I’m working on a book on the liberation of Paris, seen through the eyes of a dozen or so participants on all sides of the story.Patrick Bishop is the author of Fighter Boys: The Pilots Behind the Battle of Britain and 3 PARA: Afghanistan 2006. Operation Jubilee, Dieppe 1942: The Folly & The Sacrifice is his latest book.Robert Lyman is a historian and writer, and author of A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain 1941-45.
Mountbatten inspecting sailors in February 1942
Canadian dead on Blue beach.
Patrick Bishop is the author of Fighter Boys: The Pilots Behind the Battle of Britain and 3 PARA: Afghanistan 2006. Operation Jubilee, Dieppe 1942: The Folly & The Sacrifice is his latest book.Robert Lyman is a historian and writer, and author of A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain 1941-45.Do you think Bill Slim’s ideas surrounding courage and morale can be applied to modern-day warfare?Absolutely. They’re timeless. All soldiers need to be motivated to fight. Napoleon described ‘the moral to the physical as three is to one’. To be motivated, soldiers need to believe in the cause in which they’re fighting, and they need to be well led. It’s the job of leaders to do this. Leaders help create a sense of oneness and unity in military units that enables tough jobs to be undertaken. Personal courage, high morale, small-unit cohesion, training and professionalism are all essential ingredients in successful armies. Slim knew this, as he had seen the low morale in the British and Indian Armies in Burma and India in 1942 and 19453, and knew that to create the conditions for military success he had to increase the men’s morale. The more they trained, the harder they trained, and the better were their officers and equipment, morale improved. With higher morale came the knowledge, indeed the belief, that they could defeat the Japanese. They went on to do precisely this. At Kohima and Imphal in 1944 and Burma in 1945.Which of Slim’s broadcasts resonates with you the most and why?Well, the first two take some beating! The first, on courage, equates this virtue with being a good person. Slim always framed his conversations about fighting the Japanese as one between good and evil: in order to conquer evil, one needed to be good, because it is moral courage which enables sacrifice to be entertained. Its fascinating concept, deeply rooted in the Christian structure of our thinking about warfare. The second, about morale, deftly explains how it was that he was able to rebuild the British and Indian Armies in the Far East to allow them to fight and defeat the Japanese. All armies need, he argued, to be build on a triumvirate of principles; spiritual, mental and material. He describes these in far more detail in his masterful account of the war, Defeat into Victory, published in 1956.How do you think the principles of leadership have changed since Slim and WW2?Honestly, I don’t think they have. What has changed is the nature of the soldier, and indeed the culture and society which produces both our soldiers and officers. Soldiers are perhaps more demanding of intelligent leadership: they certainly wont accept it solely because an officer wears the rank. Officers have to live their leadership, in order for real followership to be created. This is the big think that Slim championed. Leaders are only such if they have willing followers.What do you feel should be the most important value in the British Army today?The same virtues that characterised Slim’s army in WW2. Selfless command is the critical underpinning of real leadership. It is sacrificial, putting the men and their achievement of the team’s military tasks before anything else. This was always Slim’s yardstick for assessing the morale of a unit. If the officers lived for their men it was obvious to anyone looking in. If the officers were concerned only for themselves, the unit was dangerously holed below the waterline, because the men weren’t being led properly or effectively.Do you think the British Commonwealth will change now that the leadership has been passed to Charles?No, I don’t think that it will make any difference. Soldiers are loyal to the crown, whomsoever wears it. All the traditions of duty, loyalty and service remain bound up in the character of military service in Britain’s army, and the loyalty it owes the crown is merely an expression of this.
Courage and Other Broadcasts by Field Marshal Sir William Slim, with an introduction by Robert Lyman, is out now and is published by Sharpe Books.
Courage and Other Broadcasts by Field Marshal Sir William Slim, with an introduction by Robert Lyman, is out now and is published by Sharpe Books.