Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to the improvement of his estate at Patshull, work begun by his elder brother, who had consulted Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.¹⁶

      Temporary rank was linked to a specific appointment, but, unlike local rank which was generally unpaid, brought its holder the appropriate pay. The London Gazette solemnly deprived Winston Churchill of the temporary lieutenant colonelcy he had been granted in early 1916 to command 6/Royal Scots Fusiliers, and when he returned to politics that summer he reverted to major in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. The rules could be very hard. Colonel Charles MacGregor was promoted to temporary major-general to serve as quartermaster-general in India in 1881, bypassing the appointment of brigadier. Although he held the post for four years, and was knighted in the process, he gave it up before seniority had yet made him a major general and so crashed back to colonel, and although he made a dignified protest, the system would not budge. Already mortally ill, he set off home. A Gazette of 18 February 1887 duly promoted him to major general, with seniority backdated to 22 January, but he had died at Cairo on 5 February and never knew of it.

      The two world wars saw a huge expansion of local and temporary rank with the Second World War seeing the creation of a ‘war substantive’ rank which was precisely what its name suggests. The youngest British brigadier general in the First World War was Roland Boys Bradford, killed outside Bourlon Wood in 1917 at the age of 24, still only a substantive captain. The youngest major general of the war was the notoriously testy Keppel Bethell, described by one of his staff officers as ‘the most insubordinate man I have ever met’. He gained the temporary rank in March 1918 but never rose above substantive captain during the whole war, becoming temporary major in 1915, brevet major in 1916, and brevet lieutenant colonel in 1917. At that time promotion to full colonel came after four years as a lieutenant colonel and Bethell duly became a colonel in 1921, though it took him till 1930, six years before he retired, to get his second star back.

      In 1944 Michael Carver took over 4th Armoured Brigade in Normandy, becoming, at the age of thirty, the youngest British brigade commander of the war. He had been commissioned into the Royal Tank Corps in 1935 and took command of 1st Royal Tank Regiment in 1942: his driver remembered him as a ‘young, serious and very professional soldier, devoid of messes and batmen’.¹⁷ Carver later made no secret of the fact that ‘my attitude to politics and inherited privilege was … left of centre.’¹⁸ One of his first acts was ‘to rid myself of the encumbrance of my second-in-command, who served no useful purpose’.¹⁹ He then decided that the commanding officer of his brigade’s motor battalion, 2/King’s Royal Rifle Corps had ‘lost his grip’, and decided to replace him.²⁰ Rightly sensing trouble, he asked another senior officer from the same regiment to visit the battalion to double-check, and then duly sacked the commanding officer. When Carver proposed to lead an attack with the Royal Scots Greys, his divisional commander objected ‘Couldn’t you send a less well-known regiment?’ Undaunted, he moved on to unseat another commanding officer, Sandy Cameron of 3rd County of London Yeomanry, an experienced warrior with bars to both his DSO and MC. ‘He greatly resented the decision,’ admitted Carver, ‘but 20 years later wrote me a charming letter admitting that I had been right.’

      Carver was fortunate in gaining a temporary lieutenant-colonelcy after the war, to work for ‘a dull, characterless gunner … a dead loss’.²¹ He did not get command of a brigade again until 1960, sixteen years after commanding one in battle. But he was more fortunate than Peter Young, just four days younger, who led a Commando brigade in Burma in early 1945. Young did not become a lieutenant colonel again till 1953, when he went off to command a regiment in the Arab Legion. He left the army in 1959, still a lieutenant colonel, granted the honorary rank of brigadier on his retirement to run the military history department at Sandhurst, where he became this author’s first boss.

      The army still grants temporary and local rank. The former is often awarded to an officer beginning an appointment in the course of which he will get promoted in the normal way of things, but there are times when temporary rank may reflect a wholly exceptional circumstance. In December 2007 Colonel Richard Iron was made a temporary brigadier to serve alongside the Iraqi army, helping develop its counter-insurgency plan for Basra. The British army’s run-down in Basra was primarily dictated by the political requirement to minimise casualties. Iron became a unrepentantly controversial figure. He was close to senior Iraqi officers who felt that they had received insufficient help, and he later suggested that the British had deviated from the principles of counter-insurgency that they, of all people, should have understood. He reverted to colonel on his return in 2008, and the following spring was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, which has a proprietary interest in this award. Local rank usually reflects a short term expedient. For instance, when 4th Armoured Brigade was preparing to deploy for the first Gulf War, its established ‘Transition To War’ posts were immediately filled by the grant of local rank.²²

      CHAPTER 6

      WEEKEND WARRIORS

      THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN the (full-time) regular army and (part-time) volunteer and auxiliary forces has been long, for there was a militia long before there were regulars. This has been a complex (and often unedifying) association, with militia units being ‘embodied’ for occasional full-time service in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Territorial Army being merged, lock, stock, and barrel into ‘a single integrated national army’ in 1940. Two of the most irritating acronyms in my own time were STABs (‘Stupid TA Bastards’) and ARABs (‘Arrogant Regular Army Bastards’). The Reserve Forces Act 1996 made it much easier than before to mobilise reservists in situations short of major war, and 13,510 were called up between the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and 1 June 2007. They served in a wide variety of posts, from deputy brigade commanders to private soldiers, sometimes absorbed within regular units, and sometimes serving in composite TA companies.

      There were more triumphs than disasters. 1/Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment took a slice of Territorials with it to Al Amarah in 2004. Charlie Curry, a regular captain, describes the integration of a multiple (half-platoon) of Scots Territorials into his company:

      We had ownership of them from the start of their mobilisation and they were trained centrally by the battle group prior to deployment. We had teething problems as we whittled down those not physically or mentally tough enough for the job in hand … What remained was a very well motivated multiple commanded by Sgt Steve Cornhill and supported by Cpl Steve Marsh and LCpl Sven Wentzel. These regs would assist in the integration of the multiple on ops, and eventually step back to allow the TA ranks to take the leash. It is worthy of note that other TA soldiers wound up in company HQ and in other multiples within the company. One such individual was Cpl ‘H’ Hogarth who went into the company signals detachment and manned the ops room throughout the tour … he was a fantastic operator, could effectively run the ops room alone, and could fix anything he turned his hand to – a top lad.¹

      A regular Royal Armoured Corps NCO in the same battle group was also impressed by the Territorials he served alongside. ‘At the beginning I thought that because they were part-timers I would be better than them,’ he wrote, ‘but they soon changed my mind. I would honestly work in any environment with them again, and I made some really good mates.’²

      The regular army could not have fought either world war without a massive influx of non-regulars, with the TA, with all its strengths and weaknesses, taking the strain before the ponderous engine of conscription could cut in. In terms of Britain’s long-term relationship with her defenders, locally recruited auxiliary forces have always been more visible than regulars, who are either away campaigning or mewed up in barracks that have become increasingly forbidding. For most of the army’s history, there were more auxiliaries than regulars actually stationed in Britain. In 1935 Lieutenant Colonel J. K. Dunlop wrote that

      In СКАЧАТЬ