D-Day anniversary

Isn’t it great when you see a comments thread that makes you feel that your work might still be needed?

Wully

Hat tip to Dr James Beach of Salford, who sent me this example of a contemporary remembrance of the high command in the Great War. Shame about the spelling, and getting the wrong king, but never mind: there are more details about William Robertson, the only soldier to rise all the way from private to field marshal, here.

It put me in mind of another echo of Robertson, during the Second World War. This is from John Kennedy (DMO at the War Office)’s memoirs, The Business of War (London, Hutchinson, 1957), 254. The moment is half way through July 1942. The Americans General George Marshall and Harry Hopkins were on their way to London to discuss Anglo-American strategy:

In a telegram which Dill had sent us just before Marshall’s arival, he mentioned that Marshall had been studying Sir William Robertson’s Soldiers and Statesmen, and that he had sent him a copy of Volume I of this work, in which he had marked Chapter 3. We looked it up, and found that this is the chapter in which Robertson emphasizes the importance of concentration upon the decisive point, and in which he states his view that the Dardanelles attack was an unjustifiable diversion of effort from the Western Front. The Americans had evidently drawn the deduction that, in July 1942, France was the decisive front, and that new operations elsewhere [ie an invasion of NW Africa] must, therefore, be wrong. In this same chapter, Robertson also lays stres on the duty of Service advisers to state their opinions whether asked for them or not. The Dardanelles Commission had supported this view when they pointed out that Mr Churchill had obtained the support of the service chiefs to a lesser extent than he himself had imagined, because they had not spoken out.

Brooke told me, on 18th July, that he had discussed this telegram with Churchill, whose hackles were up over the reference to the Dardanelles. He had said to Brooke that he would make short work of Marshall if he tried to lay down the law on the lines advocated by Robertson. One of my officers told me he had been unable to get a copy of Soldiers and Statesmen from any of the libraries – there had been a run on it by Ministers, who were said to be waling about with copies under their arms.

Whether Robertson would actually have been in favour of a cross Channel invasion in 1942 is another matter. He’d have been in the same position as Brooke (and Dill before him) of lacking the military resources, and as a former Quartermaster General and Chief of Staff of the BEF, he’d also have known the importance of logistics. Only once the Atlantic seemed secure would he have been keen to risk his neck in France, I think.

Snow and the blitz

A freak weather event stops London’s transport system, and the blitz is brought out as a stick with which to beat TfL. ‘Not even the Blitz stopped London’s buses running…’ proclaimed newspapers such as the Daily Mail (although it illustrates its article with a picture of a bus blown to bits by a German bomb, which seems rather to contradict its case). Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the TfL spokesman has just made the mistake of trying to introduce an element of rational thought into the mindless rescitation of the myth – London, he pointed out, was a very large city, so of course bombing didn’t stop the transport network completely – just in those areas that were worst hit. Snow and ice, on the other hand, hit the whole network at once, so were actually far more likely to cause it to shut down completely. Good luck with trying to get that point across, when the Prime Minister is also busily trying to mobilise the Second World War to help him out of a political hole.

Teaching Bomber Command and the Western Front

It’s been a bit of a shock to the system returning to teaching as well as researching and writing after a year on sabbatical. Hence the even more erratic than usual posting. Because I’ve come back half-way through the teaching year, I’ve had to offer two new one semester courses. I’m teaching one on Bomber Command, and one on the British Army on the Western Front. I’ve been blogging (also intermittently) about the former – but please bear in mind if you visit that the purpose of this site is teaching. Whilst it is a bit of a slog writing two new lectures a week, both courses are helping me to think about my current writing, and as ever, when you try to explain something you think you know, you realise how much you still have to learn.

Next year, I’ll probably go back to teaching my existing full year courses, but I’ve begun to wonder whether there’d be some mileage in turning these two one semester units into a full year course – in which the first half would focus on the BEF 1914-18, and the second on Bomber Command. The two raise many of the same issues – British ways in warfare; command, leadership, management and control in modern war; attitudes to technology and its effect on war; the representation and mythologisation of the armed forces, war and combat – areas that I think I will continue working on for some time. Or are these two too obvious? Should I be teaching a combined course on the Royal Navy 1914-1918 and the RAF 1939-1945?