Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
In former days, being incorrectly dressed would have been a treasonable offence.
Monty would have recognised elements of our dress from his own service in the trenches. This was the late 20th century, yet we still wore puttees around our ankles: pieces of flannelette cloth that would have been familiar to those who fought in the Boer War. These neatly complemented our Directly Moulded Sole (DMS) short combat boots, which were comfortable but made of compressed cardboard. These had only been introduced in 1958 so were a comparatively new addition to our fighting prowess. The compressed cardboard construction had an obvious flaw: when it rained they soaked up water like a sponge. A Daily Express Magazine article a couple of years later on ‘the boot that nearly lost us the Falklands War’ was not wholly inaccurate. Every other army in the world was wearing combat high boots.
My brief sojourn at Sandhurst was not the shortest course available. That was reserved for professional officers (a curious paradigm in that it might have contrasted with the notion that the remainder of us were unprofessional officers). Professional officers were those who had already completed training for a profession before joining the army. There were men of the cloth, doctors, nurses, lawyers and veterinary surgeons: they only did four weeks training. This really was only enough time to get to grips with the correct end of a rifle barrel and the right way to put on their pieces of flannelette. This course was fondly known as the ‘Vicars and Tarts’ course.
In the days of the Cold War, we often mused why doctors joined the army when they would be dealing only with blisters and venereal disease. As my career progressed, army doctors would indeed earn their pay dealing with the trauma of the battlefields they would subsequently confront with alarming regularity. But that was to be in the future. In the interim, it remained their lot to dole out condoms when a battalion exercised overseas. They were always conveniently positioned at the Guard Room as the soldiers exited an overseas camp to sample the local delights.
Soldiers have always been up for some ‘horizontal refreshment’. Field Marshal Montgomery (when a mere major general) nearly ended his career prematurely with an edict that condoms – and recognised brothels – should be used to prevent VD during the Phoney War with Germany of 1939. The complaints from the assembled chaplains of Monty’s so-called obscene language went right to the top of the army and Viscount Alanbrooke (who we will meet later) came to his rescue. Monty later reflected that his written order had caused VD to cease, although given the strictures of medical-in-confidence abided to by the medical fraternity I reckon Montgomery was in boastful territory on that one. Monty returned to the VD charge later in the war, chastising the New Zealander, General Freyberg (a VC winner from the First World War) about the health of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Freyberg is reputed to have replied, ‘If they can’t f***, they can’t fight.’ Not much has changed.
I leave the army as it seeks to implement ‘Army 2020’. This does not mean that the army will be left with only 2,020 soldiers. There are still seven years left to bring the figure down to 82,000 regulars and increase (if they find the funding) the TA to 30,000. The army has been reducing in size ever since the Korean War in 1952. At least the modern soldier no longer wears puttees.
The height of my incompetence at Sandhurst came on the one day when I was actually well turned out with good shoes, and no fluff. But the system was not to be outdone – this was not enough: it was raining and 8 o’clock in the morning. I was told to present myself at the 10pm ‘show clean’ parade and ‘show good weather’. Thankfully, I did not have to show sunny weather, as a raw December evening would have presented me with insurmountable problems.
Show clean parades were always preceded in the early evening by cleaning parades. This communal activity occurred for about two hours when the officer cadets collectively bulled their shoes, or buffed their Sam Browne leather belts. It meant there was no time for studying tactics manuals – a slight flaw when, within a year, I would be off to fight in the Falklands campaign. Sandhurst, as the instructors will tell you, is not an academy for tactics – it uses infantry tactics as a basis to teach or refine leadership.
Upon graduating from Sandhurst, young officers would go to their arm or branch of service, such as the artillery or infantry, for their special-to-arm training. For the infantry, this is the Platoon Commanders Battle Course (PCBC). I did rather well on that course, as did six of the seven Parachute Regiment officers who attended with me, as by 1983 – having already completed three years of service – the six had already fought a war. In the 1980s and 1990s, officers on Short Service Commissions did not do their special-to-arm training until they were shown to be serious about the army, and had an intention to convert to a longer commission. Only full-career officers were deemed to have a need to be competent. The army has now changed this. Due to duty of care considerations, it is deemed imprudent for you to be killed when you don’t know what you are doing.
We caught up and recovered from our perpetual tiredness by sleeping through the central lectures on battles, warfare and the history of warfare that were held in the Churchill Hall. There are very few officer cadets in the history of the Sandhurst Academy with a complete set of notes from any given military history lecture. This was a shame, as I might have learnt at an early age about those things that perplex later in one’s career. For instance, that concepts such as fear, honour and interest as related to us by Thucydides (in his classic book on the Peloponnesian War that should be required reading for all future military students) remain as relevant today as they were in the ancient world when seeking to understand why wars are fought. And that ‘tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat’, according to the ancient Chinese military general, Sun Tzu. All that would have to wait. The current instructors at Sandhurst, who sit in on lectures at the Churchill Hall, inform me that to overcome the problem of fatigue and prevent sleeping among officer cadets, a simple solution has been devised. The heating is turned down or off: the shivering assembled students can do no other than stay awake.
I was to join the Parachute Regiment. I had already been selected while at university. Each regiment of the British army looks for differing qualities in its officers. The Parachute Regiment, a regiment that believes its place to be in the ‘van of battle’, looks for a warrior leader (or at least I did when I went back to sit on boards to select officer cadets of the required quality), with intellect, who can triumph in adversity. A cavalry colleague of mine once told me that having sat on various selection boards, he believed that he had now got his system down to a fine art and actually only needed to ask one succinct question: ‘With whom does your mother hunt?’
Each regiment has its own flavour and particular social and cultural register given the subtle differences to which I have alluded. One is not better than the other – they are merely different. I know this to be true, for I had the temerity as a staff college student to do my research paper on ‘The Social and Educational Origins of the British Officer Corps in the Age of Meritocracy’, and to have my paper marked by a furious Guards lieutenant colonel. My top tip for youngsters wanting to join as an officer is: if you want to be a general do not join the Pioneer Corps. If you do want to be a general, joining the infantry, cavalry, artillery or engineers improves your prospects immeasurably.
The most meritocratic organisation in the British army is the Parachute Regiment. This is a proven fact. My own studies showed that 50 per cent of Parachute Regiment officers were from public schools and 50 per cent from grammar/comprehensive schools. We have everything from Old Etonians (one of the four officer cadets joining the regiment in my intake was indeed from ‘Slough Grammar’, the sobriquet for the toffs’ school) to those who went to (the generic) ‘Workington Comprehensive’. There was no hidden agenda in my interest in this subject; for me, it was a follow-on from a ‘War and Society’ course I had completed at Lancaster University (and where I first theoretically met the Prussian military theorist, Clausewitz) under the wonderful Professor John Gooch. This was back in the days when, in the university student lavatories, there would invariably be graffiti above a toilet roll holder of hard wax paper that told us: ‘Sociology degree – please take one’. With the passage of time, and changes in society (very close to what ‘War and Society’ was about – we no longer purchase our commissions), I gather that the modern equivalent is ‘Media Studies Degree: please take one’. Does anyone do sociology these days?