Leadership in War extract

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Preface

he theme of the present work is the decisive effect on history exerted by individual human leadership. The background, in sharp contrast, lies in the profound political, social and technological changes that took place in the world between the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945.

The civilian and military leaders portrayed in this book have been chosen because they offer a rich diversity of personal character, national culture and style of command; and because their careers encompass limited war, coalition war and total war, as well as campaigns of brilliant manoeuvre and campaigns of bloody attrition.

For the historian, with his priceless gift of hindsight, it is fascinating to study these men locked in struggle with great events, in moments of clear-sightedness and self-delusion, of despair or unbreakable resolve. And for the leaders of today, in whatever walk of life, there is much to learn from the examples of the leaders of the past.

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CHAPTER 1

Crusader with a Blunt Sword

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Abraham Lincoln and the Failing Generals

he American Civil War marked the first time in modern history that a democracy waged a great war, because the successive French revolutionary régimes after 1789 can hardly be called democracies in the modern sense.

President Abraham Lincoln was in consequence the first democratic politician to bear the unrelenting strains of national leadership in time of war. He had to grapple with the novel problem of bridging the gap between popular hopes of quick victory and sombre military reality, given that, to begin with, the fighting capability on both sides was roughly matched. He had to learn how best to harmonise his own leadership as a civilian president and constitutional commander-in-chief with the leadership of military commanders in the field.

Moreover, he was the first leader of a democracy to have to answer fundamental questions about the conduct of war. How far should the war be handed over to the generals to run? How far should politicians take strategic decisions? And how should military strategy be related to the political objectives of the war? These were questions that would challenge the minds of later statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Roosevelt and Churchill. But for Lincoln the questions presented a far more daunting challenge – partly because of their sheer novelty at that time, but largely because this was a civil war, and not a conflict with an external enemy. As President of the United States, Lincoln had set himself the supreme task of national re-unification after the secession of the slave-owning states of the South: a task demanding shrewd judgement, rare skill at political manoeuvre, and a steely will to succeed.

Even geography itself rendered the civil war unique in the history of conflict.

Between the existing States of the Union and the Pacific lay the so-called ‘territories’ in the course of being settled, and otherwise vast spaces only lightly populated by Indian (Native American) tribes. To the north lay Canada, a selfgoverning part of the British Empire, and a friendly neighbour; to the south lay See Maps 1, 2.

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LEADERSHIP IN WAR: FROM LINCOLN TO CHURCHILL Mexico, not so reliably friendly but hardly a major military threat. To the east lay the Atlantic Ocean, a 3,000-mile-wide moat safely policed by the Royal Navy.

Thanks to this continental isolation, the United States needed neither alliances nor an active foreign policy of the European kind. As a result, the state apparatuses long evolved in Europe for promoting national interests – including the planning and conducting of wars – were quite absent in America.

And Lincoln himself mirrored this American mental and institutional unpreparedness for conflict on the grand scale. *

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A lawyer by profession, he was rooted in small-town life and politics.1 He had been elected to the presidency on a supremely domestic issue, that of slavery and the future of the Union. Now this intensely civilian figure found himself the supreme war leader in the first ‘modern’ war – ‘modern’ because it was the first to combine ideological passion with mass military manpower and the products of the Industrial Revolution like the railway, the steamship and the telegraph.

As Clausewitz points out, the scope and intensity of a war is proportionate to the cause for which it is fought. A European so-called ‘Cabinet War’, like the Prussian and Austrian quarrel in 1866 over predominance within Germany, means a limited war; limited both in time and in scope. Once the armies have fought a battle or two and one side has lost, there follows a conference, a deal and a peace treaty. But the blazing fire of the American Civil War was fuelled by two irreconcilable but passionately-held views of America’s future; two irreconcilable economic interests; and two irreconcilable convictions about constitutional right and wrong. The key question at issue lay in the possible extension of the Southern institution of slavery to the so-called ‘territories’ well to the west of the Mississippi: areas of new settlement which in time were sure to become fully-fledged states.

To the existing northern states of the Union, such an extension of slavery was abhorrent; and, worse, a potential bridgehead for the extension of slavery into all states. To the Southern slave-owning states, it would be a breach of the Constitution to deny the western territories the option to become slave states if they so wished.

Moreover, such a denial could pave the way for a general attack on slavery as an institution. In other words, southerners believed that their plantation economy, worth $4 billion of investment, and their way of life lay under threat from the Yankees of the industrialising states of the north.

In 1858 Lincoln himself had starkly summed up the issue at stake: ‘A House divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

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LEADERSHIP IN WAR: FROM LINCOLN TO CHURCHILL formal authorisation to Haig ‘To carry out the plans for which he has prepared’.

So the offensive was ultimately Lloyd George’s own responsibility as War Premier, a responsibility which he dodged in his memoirs.

Just the same, it was Haig’s own military choice to locate his offensive at Ypres. *

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When the Third Battle of Ypres was closed down after three months of struggle, Haig’s troops had only reached the village of Passchendaele, an objective for the first day. Therefore, in terms of the ambitious strategic aims which Haig himself had laid down, his offensive must be accounted a complete failure.

Nonetheless, in the course of the battle there were moments when a breakthrough seemed very near. In September, a month of dry weather in a wet summer, three set-piece onslaughts each time blasted on by some 1,300 guns and howitzers, brought Haig’s army within sight of green fields and the German rear areas. It is worth remembering that in Normandy in 1944 it took the British and American armies nearly two months of hard slogging before they broke the German front and were able to begin a headlong pursuit. When does the willpower to keep an offensive going in order to break the enemy become sheer blind obstinacy? In the case of Third Ypres, that turning-point surely came when Haig insisted on attacking into November against the advice of his army commanders.

Yet Haig’s onslaught, strategically abortive though it was, still inflicted serious damage on the German army, as Ludendorff himself well recognised: The army had come victoriously through 1917 [by knocking Russia out of the war]; but it had become apparent that the holding of the western front could no longer be counted on, in view of the enormous quantity of material of all kinds which the Entente had at their disposal ... Against the weight of the enemy’s material the troops no longer displayed their old stubbornness; they thought with horror of fresh defensive battles ...13 *

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Lloyd George’s gravest charge against Haig as a leader (and one often repeated by other critics) was that in his offensives a ‘lost generation’ of young Britons was needlessly and callously slaughtered. This slander on Haig has come to dominate the national memory of the war. Many people seem to think that the United Kingdom lost a million men or even more on the Western Front in 1914–18, whereas the true figure is 513,000.14 Were Britain’s losses in fact much larger than those of her allies or the enemy?

Great War casualty records offer a massive problem in themselves: a source of 90

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STRATEGIC COWARD: LLOYD GEORGE endless statistical dispute. Comparisons between opposing sides in the same battle are particularly difficult because of different systems of recording and classifying casualties. Haig’s critics have always unhesitatingly opted for those guesstimates which show significantly higher British losses than German. Yet a battle on the Western Front did not consist of just one side attacking in the open against a defence ensconced in trenches, but of attack and counter-attack, bombardment and counter-bombardment. It is therefore probable that losses on both sides on the Somme and at Third Ypres would have been roughly equal, give or take a few thousand in totals numbering hundreds of thousands.

What is certain is that in terms of the percentage of the national male population between the ages of 15 and 49 killed on all fronts during the Great War, Britain got off much more lightly than the other belligerents: 6.7 per cent of the age group against Germany’s and Austria’s 10 per cent, and France’s 12.5 per cent.15 Britain’s total loss was also smaller in proportion to national population than America suffered during the civil war. On the quite exceptional day of 1 July 1916 the total of killed, wounded and missing amounted to about 30 per cent of British troops engaged. That compares with Confederate losses of 28 per cent at Antietam and at Gettysburg, and Bonaparte’s losses of 44 per cent at the Battle of Aspern in 1809.

The harsh truth, though never accepted by Lloyd George, was that a war against a powerful and determined opponent cannot be waged and won except at the cost of colossal casualties. There are no quick, cheap victories except in a ‘cabinet war’ for limited political aims, or between one efficient army and one incompetent army, as in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 or the Franco-German war of 1940. A conflict between belligerents broadly equal in combat power inevitably means a protracted war of attrition. This was true of the American Civil War – true as well of the titanic contest between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941–45, when the siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad far surpassed the Somme and Third Ypres in loss of life and in the sheer horror and terror of the experience.

In all wars, a broad balance in combat power between sides will lead to a stalemate.

Notes

1. A.J.P. Taylor, England 1914–1945 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966), pp.192–3.

2. Ibid., p.189.

3. War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 2 Vols (London, Odhams Press, 1938).

4. Op. cit., Vol I, p.75.

5. Op. and vol. cit., p.77.

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CHAPTER 17

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Spellbinder and Fantasist Adolf Hitler

itler, like Bonaparte, ended up a titanic failure, with all his vast ambitions unrealised and all his conquests undone. But, unlike Bonaparte, he has not been so fortunate as to attract a posthumous myth in which all his political and strategic errors are explained away or blamed on others, and in which he is credited with an enlightened political vision which he never had. The Napoleonic legend was of course readily marketable in the age of nineteenth-century romanticism. Suitably packaged by his admirers, Bonaparte could be made to look like a military genius, even though he ended his career on St Helena and not in Buckingham Palace. He could be made to appear a child of the Enlightenment: a progressive ruler who swept away the ancien régime all over Europe, providing paved footways, street lighting and constitutions. The intellectuals and poets of Europe, and not just of France, were on his side, or at least on the side of the Napoleon of myth.

In contrast, Hitler’s memory is today only celebrated by skin-headed losers in Europe’s lower classes. In the history of ideas he stands for the past: for the romantic glorying of the nation and the nation-state, for a belief in a ‘master race’ destined to rule over all racial inferiors. What could now be more quaintly outmoded than Hitler’s folksy claptrap about blood and earth as the essence of tribal identity? In any case, by the time the last shot was fired in Europe in May 1945, the Nazi world-view had been utterly discredited by the revelation of the moral and physical enormity of ‘the Final Solution’. The future belonged either to communism or to western capitalist democracy. There is yet another reason why Hitler, unlike Bonaparte, has not become a mythical hero: it is that Hitler had the appearance and manners of a waiter, and the personal life and tastes of a lowermiddle-class clerk. His table talk exceeded Mr Pooter’s for yawn-inducing banality and, whereas Bonaparte had sipped Chambertin and Churchill had relished his brandy and Havana cigars, Hitler had gobbled chocolate cake. These sad characteristics render him in retrospect a misfit in any gallery of national leaders in war.

See Maps 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32.

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SPELLBINDER AND FANTASIST: HITLER Nonetheless, he exerted in his lifetime an extraordinary personal spell. An early adherent, Putzi Hanfstaengl, himself an educated, cultured man, describes the effect of Hitler’s oratory on a beer-cellar meeting in the 1920s: I looked round at the audience. Where was the nondescript crowd I had seen only an hour before? What was suddenly holding these people...? The hubbub and the mug-clattering had stopped, and they were drinking in every word. Only a few yards away was a young woman, her eyes fastened on the speaker. Transfixed as though in some devotional ecstasy she had ceased to be herself, and was completely under the spell of Hitler’s despotic faith in Germany’s future greatness.1

Unlike Bonaparte’s or Lincoln’s oratory, which now lies dead on the page, Hitler at a Nuremberg Rally can be conjured up on film delivering one of his wellrehearsed spontaneous tirades, together with cutaways to the rapt faces of his devout audience. If leadership is at base quite simply the psychological power to persuade other human beings to follow where the leader goes, then Hitler possessed this power in full measure. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production, has testified to this; so too have the generals, including Rommel, who would go to Hitler to warn of impending defeat, and come away believing that victory was still possible.

The tragedy for Germany and Europe lay in the mismatch of such psychological power to a shallow mind and the ideas of an arrested adolescent dreamer. *

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During and just after the Second World War it was the widely-held belief that Hitler had been implementing step by step a grand design of territorial expansion originally sketched in his early days as a street politician: first the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936; then Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938; Czechoslovakia in March 1939; Poland in September 1939, and finally the Soviet Union in 1941. Yet when Professor A.J.P. Taylor examined the evidence for this supposed programme, such as Hitler’s early table-talk and a speech to assembled generals in 1937, he concluded that such utterances amounted to no more than rhetoric for a particular political purpose at a particular moment. Moreover, Taylor demonstrated that the occupations of Austria in 1938 and the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, far from being triggered by Hitler, had been actually precipitated by internal political happenings in those countries. Hitler had merely exploited the opportunity.

Yet there is no inherent contradiction between such opportunism and the longterm pursuit of national expansion: the one is tactical, and the other strategic. There 243

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VICTORY AT ALL COSTS: CHURCHILL You ask, ‘What is our aim?’ I can answer in one word: ‘Victory’ – victory at all cost, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival...

In the six weeks that followed this Churchillian trumpet call to the House of Commons the course of events made it brutally clear just how long and how hard must be that road. On the Western Front military disasters crowded one upon another: the surrender of the Dutch army, overwhelmed in five days despite widespread defensive inundations; a German breakthrough of the French front on the Meuse and an advance of the panzer divisions to the Channel coast, so cutting off and destroying the Allied Northern Army Group; the hazardous evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk by the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy; the renewed German offensive into the heart of France by 104 divisions against 49 weak French divisions and 1 British; the entry of Italy into the war on Germany’s side; the fall of Paris; the final disintegration of the French army; and then on 25 June the signing of an armistice with Germany by a new French government under the aged Marshal Pétain.

The fall of France plunged Churchill and his countrymen into a truly desperate plight. Britain no longer had a great Continental ally with a mass army, but instead faced the might of Nazi Germany and her ally Fascist Italy alone except for the small forces contributed by the loyal countries of the British Empire.1 Moreover, that empire was now confronting a triple threat across its global sprawl – not only from Germany and Italy, but also from a third potential enemy, Japan. If Japan were to become a belligerent, neither the United Kingdom nor the rest of the British Empire possessed the military and naval resources to beat off three great enemies simultaneously. And, worst of all, the very island of England was now directly menaced by onslaught by the Luftwaffe from airfields in France and the Low Countries, and even by invasion from across the Channel.

This was the worst storm of war in British history. To steer the nation safely through called for supreme qualities of leadership in the man at the helm: Winston Spencer Churchill. *

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His image – scowling bulldog features ornamented by a cigar like a gun barrel and topped by a square-crowned bowler hat as worn in the Victorian hunting field – called to mind a traditional English country gentleman standing four-square on his acres, jealous of his independence, and in no way intimidated by trumpery foreign despots. Winston Churchill had indeed been born in Blenheim Palace, the splendid mansion built by his ancestor, John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, whose victories had thwarted the ambitions of Louis XIV. It did not matter that the British people of the 1940s were themselves overwhelmingly working-class or lower263

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LEADERSHIP IN WAR: FROM LINCOLN TO CHURCHILL middle-class, and dwelling in vast conurbations. Rather, the social and cultural contrasts between the British people and their new leader served to enhance Churchill’s mystique as a leader. The families clustering round their wireless sets to listen to his wartime broadcasts relished his orotund language, the fruity cadences of which owed much to Gibbon and Macaulay. They were delighted by his comic mispronunciations of German words, so that ‘the Nazis’ became ‘the Narzees’ and the Gestapo (Hitler’s dreaded secret police) became ‘the Jesta-po’.

Above all, the British nation recognised that Churchill was a born warrior: a pugilist who itched to land the heaviest possible punches on Hitler and his chum Mussolini. And so the nation gave him their trust, believing that his leadership would bring them safely through the storm.

Yet the bulldog public image concealed a very different kind of man: highly emotional, easily moved to tears; the victim of waves of a deep depression that he called ‘his black dog’. Churchill was a romantic through and through: a rapt admirer of the great men of history and their heroic deeds. He found inspiration in his own ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough (whose biography he had written in the 1930s), and in Bonaparte (or rather for him ‘the great Napoleon’), whose biography too he had been preparing to write when the outbreak of war took him from his study at Chartwell to the boardroom of the Admiralty.

Back in the early 1900s, when Winston’s career had hardly started, a government colleague, Charles Masterman, had divined how important were emotion and symbol in his mental workings: ‘he is in the Greek sense a Rhetorician, the slave of words which his mind forms about ideas. He sets ideas to Rhetoric as musicians set theirs to music.’ Liddell Hart, the military commentator, remarked many years later that it was ‘very noticeable that Churchill’s mind was apt to focus on a phrase, while Lloyd George seized on a point and followed on to the next point ...’2 In 1910, when Winston was Home Secretary in the Liberal government, a perceptive journalist, Charles Gardiner, wrote of him in The Daily News: He is always unconsciously playing a part – a heroic part. And he is his most astonished spectator. He sees himself moving through the smoke of battle – triumphant, terrible, his brow clothed in thunder, his legions looking to him for victory, and not looking in vain. He thinks of Napoleon; he thinks of his great ancestor. Thus did they bear themselves; thus in this awful and rugged crisis will he bear himself. It is not make-believe; it is not insincerity; it is that in this fervid and picturesque imagination there are always great deeds afoot, with himself cast by destiny in the Agamemnon role.3

To this grand sense of history and of his own historic role must be added his sheer force of will – that fundamental quality of a great leader. Force of will sustained 264

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VICTORY AT ALL COSTS: CHURCHILL him, a man in his late sixties, through five years of huge responsibilities and desperate anxieties; through the batterings of defeat and disappointment; through the crushing strains of work and of world travel in storm-tossed ships or freezing aircraft. Yet in compensation, he also experienced the complete personal fulfilment that came from running Britain’s war. *

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Yet what the British people could not know was that Churchill was playing a far weaker strategic hand than any of his predecessors in earlier major conflicts. His ancestor the Duke of Marlborough had dominated the alliance against Louis XIV because Britain was the alliance’s richest and most commercially successful state.

William Pitt (Earl of Chatham) in the Seven Years’ War, William Pitt the Younger in the wars of the French Revolution, and even Lloyd George in the Great War, had all been leaders of a Britain economically strong enough to sustain a major conflict out of its own resources or because its creditworthiness enabled it to borrow on the grand scale.

But none of this was the case with Churchill or the Britain which he led.

On 21 August 1940, just when the Battle of Britain was approaching its crisis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir John Simon) warned the Cabinet that the total cost of munitions, raw materials and industrial equipment to be bought in North America over the next twelve months would amount to $3,200 million, while our total remaining gold and dollar reserves came to less than $2,000 million.4 Britain would therefore exhaust her reserves by December 1940, unable any longer to pay for the dollar goods – oil, foodstuffs, raw materials, technology – on which her war effort, indeed her national life itself, depended. So even if Britain could survive the immediate threat of a German invasion she would be unable to carry on the war much beyond New Year 1941.

As Churchill bleakly perceived, Britain’s only hope of salvation must lie in rescue by the United States of America, the English-speaking democracy across the Atlantic. While national self-interest played its part in the increasing American support to Britain from 1940 through 1941, it was nonetheless Churchill who convinced Roosevelt that Britain was worth backing. It was Churchill’s personal diplomacy that successfully fostered a relationship which a clumsier politician might easily have blighted. From the moment he became prime minister in May 1940 until the Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 finally booted the United States into the war, Churchill set out to draw the United States step by step into a working alliance with Britain. Here he displayed all the patience, the diplomatic skill, the sense of timing, the tenacity in pursuit of a long-term object that had characterised his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.

He had begun a personal correspondence with President Roosevelt even while 265