In Praise of Tommy Atkins

Saturday, June 26, marked Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom. It’s intended as a day of tribute to the men and women of the army, navy, air force, all those who preserve the security of this nation, all those who have been prepared to sacrifice themselves on its behalf.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said recently that supporting our Armed Forces isn’t just a government responsibility – it’s a social responsibility. This is a sentiment I fully agree with. My family has a long connection with the military. My great-grandfather served in the army throughout the First World War, to begin with as a subaltern, rising to the rank of Major. He was wounded at the Somme in 1916 and won a Military Cross for his part in the Battle of Passchendale in 1917. My grandfather served with the British Indian Army both before and during the Second World War, first in what was then the Malay States, afterwards in India and Burma. My great-uncle was with the Fleet Air Arm.

So, yes, I am delighted to support our Armed Forces, not just for this historic link but for the selfless way they carry out their duty in the present day. They go where they are told to go; that’s what service people do. As far as I am concerned they are beyond criticism.

What is not beyond criticism is the actions of politicians, the way in which politicians have used and abused the armed forces. The last administration sent our forces on a series of campaigns, ill-conceived and badly executed, without proper thought given to long-term strategy; without proper thought given, so far as I can see, to any kind of strategy.

Our people are now involved in a hopeless war in Afghanistan, a place where over three hundred have died, sometimes because they were starved of resources by the government that sent them there. The war-mongering Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown thought to do it all on the cheap, expecting maximum effort for minimum cost. What was cheap for them was dear for others.

This makes me so angry, this commitment in lives to a worthless cause and a wholly unwinnable war. But I came to praise our warriors not to bury Caesar, as much as I would like to bury Caesar, as much as I would love to bury Caesar. Politicians are nothing; Labour politicians are nothing. Our soldiers are something. They will always be worthy if respect.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's "Tommy this", an' "Tommy that", an' "Chuck him out,
the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's "Tommy this", an' "Tommy that", an' anything you please
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Least We Forget

It’s now seventy years since the successful conclusion of Operation Dynamo, during which thousands of Allied troops, trapped in and around the French port of Dunkirk by the advancing German army, were rescued and brought back to England. The effort of the ‘little ships’, the pleasure boats and private vessels which played such a vital part in saving so many, has entered into folk memory. A story about some of these boats returning to France was shown on the BBC News recently.

It’s as well to remember, though, that there was another dimension to the success of Operation Dynamo that is not perhaps mentioned quite as often as it should be – namely the selfless courage of the men who were left behind, the rearguard that slowed the German advance on Dunkirk.

Last month The Daily Telegraph told the story of Private Bert Evans, the only living survivor of the Wormhoudt Massacre. On 26 May Private Evans, serving with what was left of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, took up position in the village of Wormhoudt. His company was joined by units of the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery. Their orders were simple: they were there to buy time.

This was no idle sacrifice; for every hour the German advance was delayed the more men could be lifted from the beaches. Under assault from advance units of SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Panzer Division, they managed to hold out for two crucial days, only surrendering after they ran out of ammunition.

No sooner had they been taken prisoner than a number were machine-gunned in the village square. The rest were crowded into a tiny nearby barn, a hundred men in all, and killed by a combination of stick grenades and machine-gun fire. The few badly-wounded survivors, Private Evans included, were later picked up and cared for by units of the regular German army.

At the south-west end of the Dunkirk perimeter the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolks, along with the 8th Lancashire Fusiliers, had been ordered to hold the line at the villages of Le Cornet Malo, Riez du Vinage and Le Paradis for as long as possible. Leading the attack the SS Totenkopf Division suffered serious casualties. The Norfolks, cut off in and around a farmhouse at Le Paradise, were reduced to ninety-nine men. On 27 May, now running out of ammunition, they were ordered to surrender by their commanding officer. The captives, the majority of whom were wounded, were marched down a road off the Rue du Paradis to a prepared position where they were machine-gunned. The survivors were bayoneted. Two men survived the carnage, rescued by French civilians.

When Private Evans was interviewed by The Telegraph he said of himself and his comrades that he thanked God that they did their duty. They all did their duty, the Warwicks, the Cheshires, the Norfolks, the Royal Artillery and all of the others, all played a part in ensuring that their comrades would live to fight again. They, too, are worth remembering.

The Great Wolfe

History is always made by those who are prepared to hazard the bold moves, the risk takers of all kinds. In the annals of British military history there was perhaps none bolder than General James Wolfe, the two-hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of whose death and transfiguration fell earlier this month. The attack on the French stronghold of Quebec, after a totally unconventional amphibious assault, opposed by all of his colonels, was an achievement of strategic brilliance. It brought an end to Anglo-French imperial rivalry in the Americas, with an outright victory for the British. There was, however, an irony in this victory: for in being rid of the French, of fear of the French and their murderous Indian allies, the Americans no longer needed the British. Canada may have begun, but America was lost.

Even so, Wolfe’s victory was not fleeting. He was indirectly one of the founding fathers of the United States, a contention that some might dispute. But what is beyond dispute is the simple fact that Wolfe, by his victory on the Plains of Abraham, established a lasting Anglo-Saxon hegemony in North America. Yes, there have been disputes between England and America since, at one stage breaking into outright war, but a common ancestry, a common language, shared commercial interests and shared legal values have meant that genuine community of inertest developed between the two nations. In the late 1890s when Bismarck was asked in an interview what he thought would have the greatest impact on the course of the coming century he replied without hesitation, “The fact that North America speaks English.”

And so it was. If it had not been for North America, for the United States, Anglo-Saxon democracy, threatened in turns by Nazism and Communism, may very well have perished from the earth. This, to my mind, is the true and lasting legacy of the Seven Years War, the true and lasting legacy of James Wolfe.

Douglas Haig-a Great Soldier

The role of Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig during the First World War continues to be a matter of abiding controversy that I do not suppose will ever be settled one way or the other, though I have a feeling that the pendulum is beginning to swing in his favour.

I have long been of the view that only the English could have developed such a negative view of arguably one of the nation's greatest commanders. His contribution in defeating the Germans was widely recognised at the time, by both the people of Britain and a number of foreign observers, including General Pershing.

It was several years later when the true extent of the sacrifice involved in winning the Great War began to sink in that a new mood of hostility and revisionism began to emerge. This developed over the years, finding popular expression in Joan Littlewoods’s stage production of Oh, What a Lovely War, as well as support in several academic monographs. The whole campaign of vilification seemed to be based on the assumption that Haig sacrificed men unnecessarily; that battles were fought simply for reasons of attrition, and nothing besides; that there was somehow another, less bloody, road to victory that Haig and his colleagues did not take.

But wars cannot be won without confronting the main enemy army in battle; and this, sad to say, is inevitably a gruesome process. Consider the example of U. S Grant, who in his campaign from the Wilderness to Petersburg in 1864 and 1865 was arguably responsible for the death of more Americans than any other man in history. At one battle alone, Cold Harbour in the early summer of 1864, the Union losses, as a proportion of the total strength of the Army of the Potomac, were as great as some of the battle losses on the western front. Grant could have taken the same road as McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and so many others before him and retreated back to his start line; but he pushed on to Richmond and victory.

Likewise, in the Second World War, Georgy Zhukov, the greatest of all the Soviet commanders, sustained losses at Stalingrad and Kursk quite as dreadful as those at the Somme and Passchendale. What other way was there of defeating the Germans?

Haig, like all other commanders at the time, began without really knowing what the new warfare, the great battle of men and materials, was really about: heavy prolonged artillery barrages were followed by unsupported and uncoordinated assaults on enemy positions, with the inevitable consequences in casualties.

However, by 1918, Haig had moved through a sharp learning curve, turning the British Army into one of the best in the world, a remarkable achievement when one considers that the country had little in the way of a military tradition, and in 1914 was only able to field four 'contemptible' divisions in France. In the final offensive of 1918 Haig, in carefully co-ordinating a creeping artillery barrage with measured and discreet infantry attacks, was able to advance in relentless stages against the German positions, covering more ground than the rest of the Allied armies. It was this that broke the back of the German army and assured victory.