When Lord Mountbatten was appointed to the principal command in Burma there were not wanting those to greet the news with scandalised incredulity. “A sailor to direct military operations,” they bleated, “even if they do look like amphibious? Who’s ever heard of such a thing? They’ll be giving Tooey Spaatz command of a battle-cruiser squadron next, and sending ‘Monty’ to take over Bomber Command from Harris. This craze for interchangeability is being carried too far; no man is versatile enough to exercise command outside the range of his own personal training and experience, and its sheer folly to let him try.”
The criticism is comprehensible, but lacked final validity in losing sight of the fact that, great as the local Commander’s authority might be, in actual fact it was strictly delimited. For ultimate responsibility rested with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, acting on behalf of the President and Commander-in- Chief of the forces of the United States and the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of Great Britain. Save in a purely parochial sense, versatility had been bridled; the charge lay, not on one, but on many shoulders; an evolution in the quondam pattern of command that war’s manifold complexities and vastly swollen girth had inevitably dictated.
For it was not always thus. With primitive early communities, the man raised on the shield to the dignity of chieftainship was selected to uphold the burden of leadership and command by virtue of his possession of those very qualities of versatility—the rightful attributes of the all-around warrior- statesman—which had marked him out for elevation above his associates. His protean- ism, his outstanding superiority in each of the several roles he combined in himself, constituted the very grounds for his upraising over his fellows. A triune who united in himself all the functions of a triumvirate, if he failed successfully to discharge his multiplex responsibilities, his dominance was shortlived and his end a swift descent into abject ignominy.
“ . . . but yesterday a King
And armed with Kings to strive,”
the morrow found him suspect, shorn of power, outcast, and reviled even for deeds that once had won him rapturous acclaim. For the leader being once distrusted, all his deeds, good or ill, tell against him.
The tradition of personal leadership that Homer once defined in the couplet
“Multiplicity of authority is not a good thing,
Let us have a single authority and a single King,”
was one that long persisted.
Take, for example, the instance of Themistocles, victor in the classic sea-action of Salamis (B.C. 480). Raised in the military tradition and so experienced in the niceties of policy-moulding and administration as to have achieved the leadership of the Athenian Republic, it was only a matter of chance that found him in control of the fleet off Cape Sunium, rather than taking the place of Leonides at the head of the Spartans at Thermopylae. Moreover, it is a reasonably safe conjecture that, had the roles of Leonides and Themistocles been reversed, the result would in no wise have differed. Both men had mastered the whole art of war, and the clement on which they fought, be it land or water, was equally familiar.
William of Normandy, with a predatory eye on the throne of England, faced the prospect of a contested sea-passage before he could attempt to make good his claim. Experienced only in the “robber baron” type of land-warfare which had served to lift him from obscurity to his Dukedom, he was frankly doubtful of his chances if forced to a sea-action in which his opponent would have all the advantage. For King Harold, a descendant of the hardy Norsemen, was as at home in the command of the fleet as he was in the control of his Housecarles and Thegns. It was only Harold’s absence in the North of England—where he fought the bloody and costly battle of Stamford Bridge against Tostig and that formidable Viking leader Harald Sigurdson -that brought William the Bastard venturing into the English Channel at all. Luck was with him, for his was an untrammelled passage and an unopposed landing, while lime was afforded him to establish himself firmly at a good base, between Hastings and Pevensey. With well- rested troops that had suffered no casualties, the Norman invader now possessed an enormous advantage over an antagonist whose weary and depleted forces had been even further debilitated by the forced march which brought the vanguard over two hundred miles to the scene of action in under five days. In the ensuing battle, although in skill the leaders were as evenly matched as any two men could be, victory went, almost inevitably, to the fresher troops. Good fortune having spared the Norman that test he would have been unlikely to have survived, he was free to exploit his adventitious advantage in the type of contest in which he was at least his opponent’s equal. For once the man of greater all-round ability went down before the blows of an inferior talent.
In England’s Edward III we have an example of the leader, possessed of outstanding gifts of civil governance and administration, who was equally at home in warfare on land or sea. In virtually uninterrupted enmity with France, throughout his reign, at the battle of Sluys (June 24, 1340) he achieved a victory over Philip of Valois which gave him command of the Channel and ensured that what turned out to be the Hundred Years’ War should be consistently fought out on the soil of France- Incidentally, as an example of how the English King thought with equal facility in terms of sea and land warfare, it is to be noted that the reconnaissance of the French fleet, at anchor in the Eede estuary, was carried out, not by the lighter and swifter craft under Edward’s command, but by a party of mounted knights. Landed for the purpose, they were again mustered to their respective vessels when their task had been accomplished. From the outset of the sea- encounter Edward took the initiative resolutely in his hands; and in the missile-fight that developed, the bow speedily demonstrated its infinite superiority over the slower and less accurate arbalest. But the real work was done by the boarding parties, who—working, their way inwards from the enemy left wing—assailed each successive vessel as though it were a fort. In effect, this is exactly what it was—a static floating fort; the French having pusillanimously sacrificed the power of manoeuver to the delusive claims of solidarity by lashing their vessels together, side by side. This early anticipation of the “Maginot complex” inevitably brought about the disaster that attends upon a supine defence. And thereafter the gold “nobles” issued by Edward’s Mint bore an effigy of the King standing defiantly in the waist of his ship, with the red cross on a white field of St. George flying at the stern,* the lions of England and the lilies of France challengingly emblazoned on his shield.1
Six years and two months after Sluys, Edward, on the field of Creçy, was demonstrating that, master of sea-fighting as he was, he could apply his talents with equal success to war on land. An offensive-defensive, vastly aided by the deadly bow that had wrought such execution at Sluys, crumpled and put to rout a superior force that, at the outset of the clash, had appeared to have the whole game in its hands.
With the Elizabethans land or sea lighting all came in the day’s work and there was short shrift for the Commander who failed to hold his own, with equal facility, in either. Drake, who started life as a cabin-boy, and ended with a division of the fleet that brought ruin to Medina Sidonia’s proud Armada, accompanied the veteran John Norreys2 on the land campaign in Portugal and Spain of 1589. (Incidentally, on retirement from active adventuring, Drake devoted himself to administrative work in the public service, sitting as Member of Parliament for Plymouth, and busying himself in the organisation of the city’s water supply.) Frobisher, who had accompanied Drake’s sea venture to the West Indies of 1585, died of a wound taken in the land operation of the siege of Crozon, near Brest. Howard of Effingham, who commanded the English armament against the Spanish invasion fleet, was sufficiently eminent as a land-commander to be entrusted with the suppression of the Earl of Essex’s wild attempt to raise the country in rebellion against the Queen and her councillors. Raleigh, as a youth, had fought in the Hugenot cause at Jarnac and Moncontour; and his subsequent adventuring at sea was liberally interspersed with a mort of land fighting. Of this type of work his audacious capture of Fayal and the magnificent impudence with which he “singed the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz, offer only two examples. With it all, he found time very admirably to administer his estates in Ireland—the original European home of tobacco and potatoes— and to write his masterly Discourse of Warre, and get down some thirteen hundred folio pages of his History of the World.
With men of such abounding capabilities the platform on which they fought—stable earth or unstable water—made no sort of difference. And since tactics were happily unencumbered—and therefore uncomplicated—with all the lumber, gear and gadgets with which “factory-warfare” has so be-devilled the modern clash of arms, their guiding principles could be applied, with equal facility, on land or sea.
The Elizabethan was undoubtedly an era of great Captains; but where leadership in peace and command in war were concerned, already there were signs of a definite dichotomy. Policy was no longer in the hands of the men who had to implement it; the politician had appeared on the scene; a phenomenon on which the world had remarkably scant reason to congratulate itself. For to be a success in politics demands first-class abilities and a second-rate mind: integrity—the rock on which, in the military leader, all else is founded-—has little scope in the council chamber where expedience invariably sits enthroned at the head of the table. So must it always be so long as “words are the daughters of earth and actions are the sons of heaven.”
But the grand old tradition of supreme pre-eminence was not quite dead; and one of the last and most notable examples of superb duality—tripersonality would be an even better term—is to be found in Robert Blake; thrown into prominence by the upheaval of the Royalist-Parliamentary wars and the strains and stresses of the Protectorate that followed.
At the outbreak of the struggle between King and Parliament Blake was a quiet, sober merchant of Bridgewater in Somerset. As taciturn and laconic as his colleague, the hickory-faced, tobacco-chewing George Monck, Blake soon proved his aptitude for the profession of arms by his indomitable showing at the siege of Bristol, and by holding on to Lyme against every effort on the part of the Royalists to bring him to submission. Subsequently, his obstinate twelve- month defence of Taunton proved the turning point of the war. Incidentally, his reply to the Royalist demand for surrender, “These are to let you know that as we neither fear your menaces nor accept your proffer, so we wish you to desist from all overtures of the like nature,” is almost as uncompromising as McAuliffe’s rejection of the Germans’ summons at Bastogne in the one word, “Nuts.”
But the outcome of the struggle, if it left Cromwell triumphant at home, none the less found him dangerously menaced abroad by the Dutch; and in possession of a fleet in sad need of reorganisation and wholesale refit. With faulty and mouldering vessels and disgruntled crews, the task of rehabilitation was no easy one; and Blake’s acceptance of it was in itself an act of high courage. That he fulfilled it so successfully is a tribute alike to his firmness and to his real genius for administration. And little as he might guess it, he was perfecting the weapon that he himself was destined to employ with such deadly and far-reaching skill.
In 1649 the Lord Protector took the daring step of appointing Blake “our General at Sea”; although the anterior qualifications of his nominee for so exacting a role would appear to have been distinctly nebulous. The experiment, however, was justified with exemplary speed. A stern disciplinarian, unsparing of himself as he was of others, he soon embued the fleet with something of his own high spirit of service. Thereafter, the rough handling he gave the hostile armament under Prince Rupert—another sea- land Commander, but scarcely of his antagonist’s calibre -operating from Lisbon, gave his ships’ crews a confidence in him that subsequent events served only the more surely to consolidate.
In his long struggle with the Dutch for maritime supremacy, Cromwell used his fleet as an instrument of foreign policy, deliberately bargaining with the armament he could deploy. And the keenest weapon to his hand was Robert Blake. Throughout the whole of 1652 a fierce contest for the domination of “the narrow Seas” was fought out between Tromp, De Ruyter and De Witt, and “our General at Sea”; but in the three- day running fight from Dover to Calais, which marked the February of 1655 Blake— though himself grievously wounded scored a victory over Tromp which the Dutch Administration never quite succeeded in making good.
It was Blake, too, who first realised the importance to the British of control of the Mediterranean; as he was amongst the earliest to appreciate “the true significance of the Gibraltar defile” to a maritime Power with overseas possessions situated east of Suez.
Blake’s last action was as daring as any he had ever undertaken an attack on Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands, with the object of cutting out the heavily-laden treasure ships at refuge in the harbour. Like his assault on the Royalist stronghold in the Channel Islands in 1651, it was an amphibious enterprise of infinite difficulty. So much so, indeed, that a contemporary recorded that “the whole action was so miraculous that all men who knew the place wondered that any sober men, with whatsoever courage endowed, would ever have undertaken it.” When triumph finally crowned audacity, “the Spaniards comforted themselves with the belief that they were devils and no men who had destroyed them in such a manner. So much,” the memorialist concludes, “a strong resolution of bold and courageous men can bring to pass, that no resistance and advantage of ground can disappoint them.”
Blake, the “gifted amateur” in excelsis, had possessed himself- of treasure worth nearly two million sterling. But in the doing it this swart, squat, homely-featured but great-hearted man of Somerset had taken a mortal hurt; and he died—with as little emotion as he had displayed in living -as his ship rounded the point and entered Plymouth Harbour.
The Restoration brought to prominence another Admiral-General in the person of James Duke of York; an individual whose inadequacy as a Sovereign has somewhat served to obscure his ability in war and his outstanding gifts as an administrator; in which last-named capacity he won the unqualified approval of Mr. Secretary Samuel Pepys. And the immortal diarist was by no means easy to please when it came to a Departmental Head for his beloved Navy Board. II James was outmatched by Orange William in the land-actions of Aughrim and the Boyne, his intrepid conduct of affairs at the battle of Solebay, in the Dutch War of 1672, turned a threatened disaster into a hard-won victory.
It was in the same fiercely-contested action, incidentally, that Ensign John Churchill- serving temporarily as a Marine —laid the foundation of that military renown that was to bring him the admiration of all Europe, not excluding his vanquished enemies, the French, and the title of 1st Duke of Marlborough.
The 18th century witnessed a sharp decline in the “all purpose” leader; the age of “specialisation” had dawned, and men who, previously, might well have assumed the responsibilities of tripersonality, yielded to the current trend towards confinement within a rigidly delimited groove with ever-increasing submission. Despite the fact that its fundamentals had undergone no change, war’s bulk had sensibly increased, as its mechanism had become considerably more complicated. In so doing, it had appreciably diminished the ability of its practitioners to cope on a sufficiently comprehensive scale with its ever-expanding demands.
Furthermore, the old days of relatively small communities, ruled and led by “the man raised on a shield,” had given place to large national groups, governed, theoretically, by an hereditary Monarch or an elected President; whose nominal power was, in actual fact, exercised by a council of “advisers” chosen from the leaders of one or other political faction. Power, having first undergone devolution and then experienced departmentalising, was passing from the executive to the administration; policy was no longer determined by the men whose obligation it was to implement it at the sword’s point. Democracy, the exchange of governance by a single Monarch for “the rule of a score of little Kings,” was replacing the absolute rule of the individual leader, the secular three-in-one and one-in-three -possibly from sheer want of triunes big enough to keep pace with the ever-increasing burden of governance.
Here and there the old tradition lingered, but with results that unhappily tended to reinforce the demand for specialisation and rigid departmentalism.
Admiral Vernon, for example, assumed virtual control of the woefully mismanaged expedition to Cartagena; and the outcome of his ill-devised activities was to “strew the Spanish Main with British Corpses”; endow the Virginian home of Lawrence Washington with a new name, and widow seven-tenths of the wives of that stout-hearted Massachusetts contingent, live hundred strong, who had lent their endeavours so loyally to the venture.
Pepperell had possessed the necessary assurance and strength of character to keep the conduct of affairs strictly in his own hands at the first assault of Louisburg in 1745. But there can be little doubt that Commodore Peter Warren’s tactful subordination and unostentatious aid contributed generously to the triumph of arms won by the Kittery merchant-warrior, whose gnawing military ambition was combined with a shrewd political sense and administrative gifts beyond the ordinary. But the second collapse of Louisburg in 1758 was brought about by the joint efforts of Admiral Hardy and Major-General Jeffery Amherst. Co-operation had taken the place of undisputed individual command. In the same way, Wolfe’s conquest of Quebec was as much attributable to the fertility of resource displayed by Admiral Saunders as to the rather bemused tenacity with which the military Commander pegged away at his objective. Divided responsibility had not militated against co-operation in the face of the enemy; and although official integration of the two lighting services was the last thing the Army and Navy would have looked upon with favour, collaboration could be forced upon them by the exigency of events, even if, much loo frequently, mutual jealousy and suspicion went far to stultify their efforts to work harmoniously as a team.
Conversely, the expedition to Toulon in 1793, commanded by the arrogant and overbearing Lord Hood, afforded a striking example of the ineptitude of which an accomplished sea-lighter could be capable when it came to the conduct of operations on terra firma. Its outcome offered a potent vindication to the popular contemporary theory that, in an age of growing specialisation and a more complicated pattern of warfare,3 the cobbler should stick to his last and not assume responsibility for the conduct of affairs quite obviously outside his provenance.
The didacticism of this particular school of thought was to experience a salutary setback with the amphibious operations for the capture, successively, of Corsica, in 1793, and Minorca, in 1798. Hut in the particular instances the operations had been entrusted to the accomplished hands of General Sir Charles Stuart, perhaps the last great triune to cast the glow of his fascinating personality over the dusty pages of the history books.
A veteran battalion-commander of the American War of Independence—of which, ethically, he thoroughly disapproved, although the sanctity of his oath of obedience to the Sovereign drove him to participate in it—Stuart’s assignment to both missions was vehemently urged by the Naval Commander in the Mediterranean, that canny but uncompromising old sea-dog, Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent. Crusty as he might be, he had fallen a willing victim—as had many men of even more obdurate temper—to Stuart’s effortless, ineffable charm; and his faith in the soldier’s ability was unshakeablc. It was not long to await substantiation; for Stuart, in command of a very modest combined armament—every man in which would have gone to hades for him, at the drop of a hat— brought the numerically superior French garrison in Corsica to complete subjection in something less than five weeks of campaigning. The going, under a broiling sun, had been strenuous and incessant; the fighting severe and constant. Yet so well had Stuart laid his plans and so selflessly had everyone— soldier, sailor and marine alike—contributed to the common cause, that casualties totalled less than a hundred. As Colonel (subsequently General Sir) John Moore put it— anticipating the later mot of an even greater man!—“Never was so much done by so few in the same space of time.”
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Stuart’s innate faculty of leadership is to be found in the docility displayed throughout the whole venture by his Naval coadjutor—Captain Horatio Nelson, at no time a ductile subordinate, and a seaman ever determined to stand up for the rights and privileges of the Service he so admirably represented. But for once in his life he had met a leader to whom he gladly yielded mastery; and their relationship throughout could scarcely have been more cordial.
It was on the heels of Nelson’s spectacular victory of the Nile that Stuart brought off his second coup—the capture of Minorca, by a combination of bluff and tactical genius that brought him a bag of 5,000 of the enemy without the loss of a solitary man or the expenditure of a single cartridge.
Alas! that Stuart was very distinctly persona non grata with perhaps the most egregious dolt of a War-Secretary with which the British Administration has ever been afflicted.4 The Scotsman’s radiant charm and dazzling gifts were entirely lost on a pettifogging lawyer whom the skulduggery of party politics had elevated into a position he did nothing to adorn and everything to defame. And thus the country lost the services of a man described by the British Army’s most reliable historian as one who “might have achieved the work later achieved by Wellington, not less brilliantly and thoroughly, and be now accounted the greatest British Commander since Marlborough.”
With his mastery of land-warfare and his understanding of the “mechanics” of sea- warfare- an apprehension Wellington lacked only in slightly less degree than his great opponent, Napoleon Bonaparte—it may well be thought that, given the chance to prove his worth, Stuart would have taken rank as the best “all rounder” since the days of Blake.
The French Revolutionary Wars and their aftermath of Napoleonic imperialism, saw the first harnessing of a whole population to the purpose of conflict. War ceased to be the business of the highly-trained professional warrior and became everybody’s business— not to its advantage or to that of the world in general. Equally, the American War of Secession exhibited the first armed struggle in which matériel threatened to exert a greater influence on the course of events than the men who fought it out in the field.
Steam propulsion at sea, improved navigational and signalling aids, the torpedo and the submarine; breach-loading, rifled cannon, the soldier’s magazine-fed, high-velocity weapon of precision in place of the old vicarious musket; the machine gun, the aeroplane, the tank—all added their individual quota to the ever-expanding collective dependence of war on the expensive and encumbering by-products of industrialism. Bellona ceased to be the mistress of Vulcan and degenerated into his hand-maiden.
And, as more and more ingenuities were devised to counteract more and more death-dealing lumber, the consequence was more and more “specialisation.” And with specialism, inevitably there came the grooving of minds along certain little circumscribed ruts; the gunnery-expert and the sub-mariner might have been creatures of different worlds; the man in the tank gazed at the man on a horse with the sort of expression he would have turned on a Creçy archer, complete with bow and arrow.
It is, of course, highly questionable if Wellington, of his own volition, would have undertaken to fight a Heel lo victory: Nelson, in command of an army, might well have found himself “all at sea” in a grimly unfamiliar sense of the term. Hut although both men would have been at a serious disadvantage, the old tradition of the omnicompetence of “the man on the shield” was not quite dead, and it is impossible to conceive that two leaders of such experience and resource would have entirely failed.
But with the second decade of the 20th century “specialisation” had been carried to such lengths that a battalion machine-gun Officer could not be trusted to take a rifle company into action. The average Gunner knew as much about the technique of Infantry “infiltration” as a Jersey heifer does about snipe shooting.
Fortunately for all concerned, the most recent war witnessed a slow but thorough reorientation of outlook and approach; and ultimately a degree of integration within and between the Services, as between the Allies, was attained which very closely approximated to the ideal of a team solidly and steadfastly pulling as one man on the rope.
The wheel had come full circle. Gone were the days when nations were of a size to yield their destiny to the direction of a single man, omnicompetent in peace as in every phase of war—which in itself had taken on a magnitude and complexity beyond the power of any one man to comprehend or control. In place of the erstwhile secular three-in-one and one-in-three had come a pyramidal framework of authority diffusing and delegating responsibility right the way down from the narrow apex to the broad base. If policy remained in war time the responsibility of those civilian heads of government whose mishandling of it has brought war about, that is no more than one of the many paradoxes in which democracy abounds. (Everything, including democracy, has the defects of its own qualities: even a needle is not sharp at both ends.) And if dangers lurk in making war by committee, it is as well to bear in mind that the autocrat can blunder as easily and as fatally as a sederunt of political and Service chiefs. One has only to recall the “inspirational strategy” of that synthetic “man on the shield,” Adolf Hitler, to be assured of that.
But, in a military sense, all-round and perfectly mortised integration should not be mistaken for wholesale amalgamation; nor should it be regarded as an inevitable first step towards it. For to consolidate the respective sea-land-air formations in one vast, amorphous “all-service” corps would be to create a Frankenstein monster of such ponderous mobility and bureaucratic inflexibility that paralysis would supervene, while pallid little fonctionnaires wrote minutes and wasted hours. Furthermore to demolish, even to impair, the individual identity of each branch of the Fighting Services would be lo destroy more—in essential esprit de corps, justifiable self-respect and invaluable character-building tradition —than a robot-perfectionism of standardisation would ever gain.
Sterile centralisation and immaculate stream-lining end in a monolithic monstrosity of control which is the death of individuality; a quality still “beyond the price of rubies.” For individuality is a thing of the spirit. And in the unrelenting crucible of war, as in all else, “it is the spirit which quickeneth.”
*The present-day White Ensign of the British Navy displays the same device.
1. Edward’s war-fleet, composed, in the main, of course, of impressed merchant-vessels, being craft of from two to three hundred tons burden, with a single square sail and, possibly a jib-foresail, carried a comparatively small crew to “work the ship.” They, like the pilot and the sailing-master, fell under the King’s command in the same way as the fighting-man.
2. Or Norris, an admirable fighting leader and as fine a trainer of raw troops as Baron von Steuben or Sir John Moore.
3. Apart from the many improvements in the revolutionary innovation of fore and aft rig, Kempenfelt’s New and Improved Method of Signalling had enormously speeded up, as it laid largely extended the scope, of the tactical manoeuver of warships; while the increasing weight of metal and variety of shot fired was fast rendering gunnery a cryptic science into which the uninitiated sought to intervene at their peril.
4. Henry Dundas; subsequently “kicked upstairs” and endowed with the title of Viscount Melville and Baron Dunira.