War is prodigal in “lessons”. But although the emphasis on their relative importance has a trick of varying with the aftermath of each campaign, fundamentally their range undergoes remarkably little alteration. As the outcome of the experiences of the most recent conflict, particular stress has been given to the need for the closest integration of all three branches of the Fighting Services. The prevalent demand is that the Navy, Army and Air Force should not only preserve the working partnership achieved—-at some pains—during the war, but persistently seek an ever closer co-ordination.
Few will question the essential wisdom of such a recommendation, since it is a process which can easily be pursued without threat to the three Services’ respective identities, or danger to their purely individual functions. Moreover, it would be completely to ignore the lessons of history to pretend that the problem is a new one. It is simply that having regard for the manner in which warfare has developed, the need to arrive at a practical modus vivendi is exceptionally acute, particularly with the two great English-speaking peoples, whose war-time commitments invariably involve them in innumerable amphibious operations.
Study of past British “conjoint enterprises,” as they were termed, leads to the conclusion that what they chiefly lacked was any real element of co-operation between the Services concerned in them. Consultations between the Naval Officer, with whom the over-all responsibility usually resided, and the Military Commander, whose troops were designed to carry the ultimate stage of the venture to a successful conclusion, were perfunctory at their best. At their worst, they afforded a demonstration of the degree of mutual obstruction attainable by men hopelessly at cross-purposes through sheer lack of a common denominator of sympathetic understanding, upon which to found their respective approaches to a problem which, individually, they were, as a rule, quite incapable of solving. Sometimes the blame rested squarely on the shoulders of the man in the scarlet jacket. Far more often, it must be regretfully affirmed, the culpability resided with the Naval Officer to whom, in many instances, the soldier was subordinate.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the lust for booty was the prime cause of the most violent of all differences of opinion -—booty, and the preferable method of setting about its acquisition. Thus one 18th century Military Commander was constrained to write to his wife, “My lord St. Vincent has been playing the pirate; and my brave men have suffered for it. This thirst for wealth in the Navy will in the end reduce the finest navy in the world to a wretched herd of formidable pirates. May Heaven avert it.”
It should be borne in mind, however, that prize-money and plunder—in which the civil Treasury also possessed a strong vested interest—were the traditional rewards for hazardous service to which the man-at-arms, on sea or land, looked forward avidly long after he had ceased to be a hired mercenary, fighting in the hope of substantial gain, and had become a recognised, if ill-requited, servant of the State. And, having regard for the fact that, in both Services the scanty pay of both officer and man alike was often six months to a couple of years in arrear, and when secured could only be realised at a heavy discount, the individual’s preoccupation with the problem of supplementing his starve-crow wage is perfectly comprehensible. Often, however, his own over-anxiety was the cause of his own undoing.
Thus when, in 1655, Oliver Cromwell sent his filibustering expedition to the West Indies, the men set out, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, “big with the expectation of gold tied up in bags.” But upon the arrival of the armament at St. Domingo, the Civil Commissioners accompanying the expedition as representatives of the Treasury had the temerity to forbid all private plunder. Both the Naval Commander, Vice-Admiral William Penn—father of the famous Quaker—and General Venables, protested vigorously; and there was a tremendous rumpus, in which all ranks participated, to the hopeless detriment of discipline, until the unpopular ruling had been modified. Unhappily, however, naval and military plans were so reprehensibly ill- concerted that the land attack on St. Domingo failed ignominiously. Defrauded of his expected plunder by what he was pleased to call the soldier’s criminal blundering, Penn broke the sword of the peccant column- leader over his head, as a preliminary to degrading him to the status of “an abject pioneer”; an unwarrantably arbitrary proceeding at which the hapless Venables might protest but which he was powerless to remedy. Thereafter, the relatively profitless capture of Jamaica left the expedition no option but to make its way sullenly back to England, its pockets as empty of loot as its heart was full of bitter wrath and disappointment. A Court of Enquiry attributed the failure of the enterprise to Robert Venables—or rather, to the mischievous interference of Mrs. Venables; and one stern realist adjured the Lord Protector never again to permit a wife to accompany her husband on active service! (To some of us who have endured the misery of soldiering in a small outlying station rendered almost hysterical by the baneful influence of the wrong type of “Colonel’s lady”, the recommendation is thoroughly comprehensible and in every way to be commended!)
On another occasion the Commodore and the Military Commander came to an agreement to combine against the execrated Civil Commissary. Clapping the Treasury representative between decks, they set a Sergeant’s guard over him with strict instructions that he should be denied all access to pens, ink and paper. Deprived of his own particular weapons, it was thought, the Commissioner would be without means of issuing obstructive orders. In the outcome, since it was discovered that no stores, guns or ammunition could be landed save on the civil representative’s authority, a compromise had to be arrived at before operations could begin at all. Eventually the expedition returned home with all parties thoroughly dissatisfied with their respective share of the spoils.
Again, with Admiral Vernon’s ill-fated expedition to Cartagena, of 1740, behind a political top-dressing the real object of the enterprise was profitable plunder; and dissension speedily arose as to the best means of securing it. Vernon, a brusque, hectoring martinet, prepared to take any risks that promised a handsome return, was accompanied by the much more squeamish Lord Cathcart, in command of the troops; and had the latter lived to reach the theatre of war, the struggle as to the policy to be pursued would undoubtedly have been Homeric. Unhappily, Cathcart’s attempt to cure an acute form of dysentry by swallowing heroic doses of Epsom Salts proved homeopathically unsound. With his demise the military command passed to Brigadier-General Wentworth, a well-meaning but invertebrate individual whom Vernon’s bullying self- assertion soon reduced to a condition of virtual paralysis. Being unable boldly to stand up to his domineering coadjutor, yet finding it impossible wholly to yield to him, Wentworth pursued a disspirited middle course which put a premium on disaster. In the outcome, frustrated as much by their own maladroitness as by their opponents’ skill, and mercilessly ravaged by the terrifying scourge of “Yellow Jack”, what was left of the armament trailed feebly homeward; having done little more than inspire Lawrence Washington with the determination to rename his Virginian property “Mount Vernon,” and “Strew the Spanish Main with English corpses.”
A far better spirit of co-operative goodwill animated the 1745 expedition to Louis- bourg, however, and, in consequence, the enterprise was crowned with unequivocal success. The rough-and-ready force from Massachusetts and Connecticut led against the French stronghold by Peppered, the military-minded merchant of Kittery, may have' lacked the smooth efficiency of disciplined troops; but there was nothing wanting in its courage, its enterprise, or its resource. And outrageous as he might find the Provincials’ harum-scarum methods, the Royal Navy’s representative, Commodore Peter Warren, kept such mental reservations as he may have harboured well under his own cocked hat; supporting the land forces with every means at his command. As a result a harmony and accord swiftly came into being which ended in a most admirably contrived “combined op,” justly described by David Hartley in the British House of Commons as “as mettled an enterprise as any in our history.”
Alas, that such felicitous conditions should so rarely have enjoyed repetition!
The Seven Years’ War—like the conflict against the Gallic Republic and Napoleonic Empire which, in due course, succeeded it— was notable for a plethora of niggling little tip-and-run amphibious expeditions against the French Atlantic coast, whose ostensible purpose was to “divert” enemy troops from the principal theatre of war in Germany and Flanders. Unquestionably the French were diverted, if scarcely in the sense intended! For this method of “breaking French windows with English guineas,” as it was mordantly described, was rarely visited with more than ephemeral success, and far more often met with condign failure. Nor is the reason for frustration far to seek. Never envisaged in the terms of the “combined op” they were, their activation was entirely wanting in that spirit of close co-operation, that sympathy with and understanding of “the other man’s job,” only by whose cultivation can this, the most difficult of warlike enterprises, be brought to a satisfactory conclusion.
The 1757 expedition to Rochefort, in the Basque Roads, for example, was an almost perfect example of how not to set about things. Landed to assail a fortress whose real strength no one had deemed it necessary to ascertain, the Officer Commanding the troops—after a week of aimless nibbling at the outer works—was informed by Admiral Hawke that lack of stores necessitated the immediate return of the fleet to its home port. Only a complete absence of joint planning can account for the Navy’s lack of apprehension of the time required to reduce to submission even the most modestly fortified permanent works; although it is only fair to add that the Military Commander seized upon the excuse proffered him to abandon the project with an alacrity he had at no time exhibited in its prosecution. As a contemporary wit summed it up;
“We went, we saw, were seen—like Valiant Men Sailed up the Bay, and then—sailed back again!”
It was the old, old story of each Service setting about the job without the slightest sympathy or understanding of what “the other fellow” had to contribute towards its success; and only too ready to carp and criticise difficulties it made no effort to comprehend. If Dumas père was not yet alive to give his Trois Mousquelaires their immortal motto of “All for one, and one for all,” at least it had long been inscribed on the roll of history.
In the following year a project aimed at the reduction of the harbour works at Cherbourg, after meeting with some small initial success, ended in something perilously close to disaster. For the rearguard, covering the re-embarkation of the main body across an open beach, came under the musketry and artillery fire of heavy enemy reinforcements. Ultimately, the survivors had to swim for it under a positive hail of shot, which exacted a toll of seven hundred and fifty officers and men, killed and wounded; with many prisoners left in French hands.
If for nothing else, however, the action is notable for a truly remarkable exhibition of the traditional “British phlegm,” when the Quartermaster-General—a certain Colonel Clark—was observed, in the thick of the action, to be in earnest perusal of the pages of the official Gazette—presumably in the fond hope of discovering his name in the list of Half-Yearly Promotions!
Away on the other side of the ocean, however, the balance was successfully redressed by the second capture of Louisbourg,— returned to the French, under the terms of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in redemption of Antwerp, that “dagger pointing straight at England’s heart.” Working in perfect co-operation, “Old Billy Wryneck”—as his men had dubbed Admiral Boscawen—and Jeffrey Amherst, with James Wolfe as his Second-in-Command, had set about the reduction of the strongly re-fortified “Dunkirk of the West” in a thoroughly professional and business-like manner. Joint-planning set its stamp on every move; and success was therefore virtually assured from the outset. No wonder the return of the combined armament to Boston was greeted with such overflowing manifestations of enthusiasm that Amherst was constrained to write to the Secretary of State in England, “I could not prevent the men being quite filled with rum by the inhabitants.”
But in European waters matters pursued a bungling, mutually recriminatory course which clearly argued an entire absence of those factors making for constructive accord, so helpfully present during the operations at Louisbourg.
An attempt to snatch the Gallic stronghold at Belle Isle, so strenuously coveted as a temporary refuge and repair base for the fleet engaged in the weary task of blockading the enemy coast, although successful, was committed to almost every risk to which such an enterprise can be exposed. Attempts were made to land troops on unreconnoitered beaches, whose sharply shelving slopes were quick to exact casualties by drowning. A dead-lee shore drove the fleet to up-anchor and seek refuge from a heavy westerly gale before a tithe of the needful stores and ammunition had been put ashore, or the necessary reinforcements landed for the support of the original beach-head. When the worst threatened, Admiral Keppel did his belated best to come to the support of the troops; but a little more joint-planning at the outset, before action with the enemy had been joined, would have saved a terrible aftermath of anxiety and distress, and the toll of many a brave man’s life wantonly thrown away.
Another striking example of the criminous folly of dispatching these hastily-improvised amphibious enterprises to the French Atlantic coast on the eve of the autumnal equinox—when fierce westerly gales were a virtual certainty—was that of the expedition for the support of the dwindling Royalist forces in Britanny, of 1795. Possessing little more than the clothing, arms and equipment they stood up in, five thousand men, including two thousand cavalry, were landed on the desolate Isle d’Yeu, at the mouth of the Loire. Leaving a bare seven days’ provisions behind them, the escorting squadron thereupon sailed away, for the good and sufficient reason that, with the weather patently worsening, it was unsafe for them to remain close in off-shore. For six weeks the unfortunate soldiery remained cut off from all succour, with fast-diminishing rations, no sort of shelter, and not so much as a single candle between them. With the ultimate order for the troops’ evacuation, the Admiral found himself confronted with a positively appalling dilemma. If he took the soldiers on board without the balance of the supplies that had been landed, he might well be driven to sea with more mouths than he could feed. On the other hand, were he to take the supplies on board first, he might be compelled to up-anchor before the troops could be embarked; in which case the men would be left on the island to starve. Eventually, by skilled seamanship and good management, the Navy contrived to get the men and a sufficiency of stores on board, and bring the grossly overcrowded vessels home. But those six weeks of futile, debilitating inactivity had seen no less than five and forty men die of exposure and over five hundred horses perish of sheer starvation.
As Lord Cochrane was to prove—and as John Paul Jones had already demonstrated —in a general sense sporadic attacks on a hostile coast are best left to the Navy solus; for a single frigate, under a daring and resolute commander, can immobilise more troops than an expedition of ten or fifteen thousand men, with infinitely less risk, and at far smaller cost.
It was—and remains—a different matter when an amphibious venture was directed against an island stronghold; when a powerful fleet could be interposed between the isolated defenders and the nearest source of reinforcement. Given skilled preliminary joint-planning and the subsequent close co-operation between the Services, and this sort of project could well prove a triumphant success; as events in the Mediterranean in 1794 were most convincingly to demonstrate.
With the outbreak, in 1793, of the war with Republican France, a Royalist counterrevolution placed the important base of Toulon in British hands. But by the end of the year the stronghold had again passed under republican sway; a dénouement as much attributable to dissensions between the British naval and military commanders as to the genius of that rising young artillery officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Napoleon Bonaparte.
Driven from Toulon, the British armament was invited by the Corsican patriot, General Paoli, to help his compatriots in the task of throwing off the hated yoke of the French. Since Admiral Hood persisted in laying down the law about operations whose range and implications were clearly beyond his competence, a steady succession of cowed and disgruntled military commanders made their way back to England, leaving behind them operations which languished on the brink of incontinent collapse.
At length, sensing vaguely that the Mediterranean command, as constituted, was fruitful of nothing but frustration, the British Government with belated wisdom transferred Hood to more suitable work elsewhere; replacing him, in command of the Naval element, by that promising young fire-eater, Captain Horatio Nelson. The post of Lieutenant-General in Corsica and the Mediterranean was awarded to Charles Stuart, fourth son of that Earl of Bute whose loyal, if misguided, friendship for the youthful George III had ended in the Scotsman’s self-imposed exile in the political wilderness.
Stuart himself was no favourite of the Administration; but his unassailable integrity, his outstanding professional ability and, above all, his genius for getting contrary elements to work harmoniously together, marked him out as pre-eminently suited for the command of an operation incorporating all branches of the Fighting Services. For Stuart was endowed with a tact, an inexhaustible fund of patience and a radiant personal charm such as had not been in evidence since the days of the great Duke of Marlborough. At the same time he could take a remarkably firm stand, particularly with ineptly meddling politicians. (“I am determined to be guided by your instructions,” he wrote to the egregious Henry Dundas, Secretary for Colonies and War, “so long as they are within reach of my comprehension!”)
For that matter, no greater tribute to Stuart’s powers of conciliation could be offered than the complete surrender to the charm of his personality made by that temperamental, prickly little bundle of professional competence and personal vanity, Captain Horatio Nelson. In no time the twain were sworn friends; and joint-planning for the subjugation of the French garrison in Corsica was matured in happiest concert.
Calvi was the only Corsican fortress held by the enemy in any strength. But it was a formidable stronghold, perched up some nine hundred feet on a ridge of rocky hills forming a peninsula difficult of access in itself, and protected by four formidable outworks, armed with an ample artillery. But all these defences could be dominated by the heights overlooking them; rocky crags so difficult of approach, however, that the French did not even bother to picket them. Yet it was of these very heights that Stuart determined to possess himself, confident that fire brought to bear from them would swiftly bring the Calvi garrison to surrender.
The task of man-handling the guns up the precipitous screes was stupendous; but Stuart’s genius for animating an enthusiastic team spirit soon had sailors, soldiers and marines vying with each other to complete the batteries and haul their armament into position. Stuart himself was everywhere; snatching a few hours’ sleep in a corner of one of the earthworks and sharing the “salt horse” and hard biscuit that was served out for the general ration. “No man in this expedition,” Nelson wrote, “has undergone the fatigues of the General.” But they were amply rewarded when Calvi, with its numerically superior garrison, hauled down its flag after little more than five weeks’ resistance. British casualties, despite several desperate assualts on the works, totalled no more than a hundred; although the severity of the toil, carried out in blazing heat, temporarily relegated a large number of the rank and file to the sick list . This is hardly matter for surprise, since, as Colonel John Moore noted in his diary, “There was never so much work done by so few men in the same space of time.” And never was work better co-ordinated in a “combined op” which, on a miniature scale, can advance legitimate claim to rank as classic.
But in 1798, after three years’ unemployment, Stuart was destined to achieve an even more astoundingly successful stroke.
With Malta in enemy hands, there arose the urgent need for a new naval base in the Western Mediterranean, both to relieve the pressure on, and reinforce the safeguard embodied in, the Rock of Gibraltar. Minorca, held by the Spaniards, at that time in alliance with the French, was the obvious choice; and Admiral the Earl of St. Vincent gave it as his considered opinion that the island’s capture was perfectly feasible provided that plans were properly concerted between Army and Navy. To ensure this, he pressed so insistently for Charles Stuart’s appointment to the command of the troops as practically to make it a condition of his own participation in the enterprise. “The loss [from this theatre of war] of General Charles Stuart, whom I believe to be the best Generali we have, is not to be repaired,” he wrote; “and the more I reflect on the services expected of the troops, the more important I think it for him to be at their head. . . . The British will go to hell for him, and he is the only man who can handle the foreigners,” i.e. the Minorquin auxiliaries and other assorted allies.
St. Vincent, at the height of his reclame and power, was not a man lightly to be gainsaid. So despite Stuart’s continued unpopularity with the Administration, the command of the projected expedition to Minorca was confided to his care.
It was with real eagerness that Stuart set his face eastwards. With Nelson’s stupendous victory of the Nile, Bonaparte was cut off in Egypt; while the whole of the Continent was seething with revolt against the corruption and malignant misgovernment of the French Directory. Thus the conquest of Minorca would enable a shrewd blow to be launched against that “soft under-belly of Europe” where Gallic suzerainty was at its most vulnerable. In effect, it was Stuart’s design to inaugurate in Italy in 1798 that peninsular war which, ten years later, was to be initiated by Wellington in Portugal and Spain.
Minorca, with its rough and mountainous terrain, was defended by a garrison of a little over 5,000 men, distributed between two formidable strongholds, Port Mahon, on the east coast, and Ciudadella, on the western shore. The two towns were some fifty miles apart, and connected by a single road that passed through the village of Mercadel, a little south-west of Addaya Bay, an inlet on the northern coastline.
Owing to the usual leakage of information, the Spaniards were fully apprised of the enterprise against them, and all preparations had been made to resist a landing. As the transports and their escorting frigates wore in towards Addaya Bay, alarm signals were seen to be flying in all directions. But a diversion by elements of the fleet enabled Stuart to hoist out the boats and land an advance party of 800 men, who scrambled ashore under the cover of the frigates’ supporting guns. The same steady protective fire helped materially to disperse a body of 2,000 Spaniards, hastily concentrated with a view to hurling the invaders into the sea before the beach-head could be reinforced.
With his bridge-head firmly established, and the sailors and marines eagerly cooperating in the arduous task of landing the necessary stores and ammunition, Stuart proceeded swiftly to the occupation of Mercadel; thus separating the two garrisons and blocking the only road by which communication could be maintained between them.
It was a grim haul to bring up the needful ammunition and provisions to Mercadel, over vilely broken-up country and along tracks that would have been the despair of the most nimble-footed goat that ever caracolled on the ledge of a precipice. But the job was done; and a contingent of 250 bluejackets and marines actually volunteered to drag the battalion guns to wheresoever they might be wanted.
Ascertaining that the garrison at Fort Mahon had been severely drained to strengthen that of Ciudadella, Stuart promptly sent off a contingent of redcoats under Colonel Paget to demand the fortress’s immediate surrender. With the white sails of Commodore Duckworth’s ubiquitous frigates looming up threateningly from the sea and Paget’s scarlet-coated linesmen crowning the heights above them, the Spaniards—feeling rather like the nut between the two jaws of the crackers—lost no time in hauling down their flag. Fort Mahon had capitulated without the expenditure of a single cartridge.
Meanwhile, intelligence reached the Commodore that four Spanish craft had put off from Majorca and were heading—presumably with reinforcements—for Minorca. Duckworth, without waiting for his shore- party of sailors and marines, chased off in immediate pursuit; and in a brisk little action he effectually dispersed the threatening danger. During his Naval coadjutor’s temporary absence, Stuart busied himself in concentrating the whole of his armament in front of Ciudadella; a marine contingent and six light guns from the fleet helping to swell his unimpressive battle array.
Stuart, who knew himself to be hopelessly outgunned by the heavier metal of the Ciudadella defences, resolved to elaborate a colossal bluff, in the hope of achieving by guile that victory of which a direct appeal to arms might so easily rob him. Throwing up the most elaborate fieldworks, extending very nearly four miles in length and furnished with platforms and embrazures to take the very heaviest ordnance, he so manoeuvered and deployed his three thousand troops that—like a stage army—there seemed virtually no end to them. Then, pat upon this elaborate demonstration, he sent the Spanish Governor a peremptory summons to surrender. That individual, having taken council of his fears, agreed to haul down his flag without more ado, providing that transport to the nearest Spanish port was provided for his shivering garrison. Minorca was in Stuart’s pocket; and although, since the consolidation of the original beach-head, something like fifteen hundred prisoners had been taken, not a single shot had been fired and British casualties were nil!
It was a feat achieved by an admixture of most careful joint-planning, swift enterprise, and faculty for bluffing which bordered on the sublime, and, above all, upon the unselfish and wholehearted co-operation of all ranks and all branches of the two Services concerned.
The moral was plain for any man to see; and although it was sadly overlooked in later times—as at the Dardanelles in 1915— in more recent years it can surely be affirmed that it has attained to the significance of a principle.