Content provided in partnership with

The Men In Charge - Commanding Officers - Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001 by George Evans

Commanding Officers. David Miller. John Murray. [pound]22.50. ISBN 0-7195-5989-8.

Successful commanding officers, as was said of one of Wellington's ablest battalion commanders in the Peninsular War, have a genius for war. Call it luck if you like but there is more to it than that. They have flair as well as courage, an inbuilt instinct as it were to be in the right place and to do the right thing at the right time. In this very readable, well-ordered book, David Miller, a retired colonel with thirty-six years service behind him, is concerned not with the high command but with the units which do the actual fighting, the warship, the infantry battalion and the airforce squadron.

Most Popular Articles in News: The Ten Best Laptop bags; Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market; GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD; Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...; THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY; More »

Command in time of war is a lonely outpost. Leadership, like courage is hard to define but the basic requirement of, say, the commanding officer of an infantry battalion, is that he should be good at his job, able to command respect and obedience and to inspire confidence in his men. Many leaders, as the author demonstrates, have achieved fame for one brief moment of glory but of equal merit though less famous are those who keep going when the odds are stacked against them. It required special qualities to take a battalion forward time after time for a spell in the trenches in the First World War or to lead a battalion of American marines in the last war in yet another landing in the Pacific, knowing that the Japanese would have to be killed to the last man before the position could be taken.

Ability and experience count for more than age. The average age of commanding officers in the British army in 1914 was in the late forties but one of the most respected and successful commanding officers of the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment was only twenty-five when he was killed in action in 1916. Wing-Commander Guy Gibson was twenty-four when he raised and led the famous Dambuster squadron in the last war.

There are stirring examples of triumph as well as disaster, of honour as well as infamy in this book which ranges widely across two centuries of greater and lesser wars from Waterloo to the present day. When the German pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, was cornered by the Royal Navy at the mouth of the River Plate in December 1939, her commander Captain Hans Langsdorff, having first ensured the safety of his crew who were interned in Argentina, scuttled his ship and shot himself. 'I can now only prove by my death' he wrote in a letter intended for Hitler, 'that the men of the fighting services of the Third Reich are ready to die for the honour of the flag. I am happy to pay with my life for any possible reflection on the honour of the flag. I shall face my fate with firm faith in the cause and the future of the nation and of my Fuhrer. Captain Ariizumi of the Imperial Japanese Navy, one of the most brutal and wantonly cruel officers of the war, ordered surviving passengers and crew of a Dutch ship to aba ndon their boats and board his submarine where they were beheaded, clubbed to death or simply pushed overboard. When Japan surrendered he shot himself rather than face capture by the Americans. His devotion to the Emperor was absolute. If there was anything to be ashamed of in the actions of his ship, he wrote, 'I will purify it by spilling my human blood. The source of a flourishing nation is the superiority of its people ... Be tenacious and ferocious'.

There is, as the author rightly says, no single blueprint for command. The exercise of it varies not only from one individual to another but from one nation to another. He makes the point in a brief survey of some of the better-known senior leaders in the last war. Montgomery emerges from it as brash and self-important but essentially cautious, Rommel as bold and thrusting. Eisenhower is seen as homely, modest and more at home as a coalition leader than as a field commander. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, later Lord Alan-brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) for most of the war was less charitable. In his secret wartime diary which was recently published nearly forty years after his death, he said of Eisenhower 'As a general he is hopeless! He knows little if anything about military matters!'. Of General Marshall he wrote 'I know the limitations of his brain. Strategically I doubt if he can see the end of his nose'.

Such brutal candour is rare but it is not unknown. Disraeli took an equally poor view of the generals engaged in the Anglo-Afghan war more than a century ago. They wre, he believed, with a few exceptions 'utterly worthless'.

The Men In Charge - Commanding Officers - Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001 by George Evans

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in News

Most Popular Publications in News