The Times Great Military Lives: Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries. Ian Brunskill
we deplore the murder and mayhem imposed by Kenya’s Mau-Mau or by communist insurgents seeking to overthrow colonial administrations or their perceived proxies in South East Asia. ‘One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter’ loses none of its truth through having become a cliché. A number of the individuals whose obituaries appear here experienced conflict in several of the forms described, maintaining their reputations for success only when they adapted to change.
Change in the manner in which command is exercised has been equally dramatic. At Waterloo, where this book begins, Wellington commanded in the saddle from where he could oversee events only to the limit of visibility, while inspiring his soldiers by his overt presence. During the war for the Falklands, Admiral Fieldhouse commanded from his bunker deep below the London suburb of Northwood, from where he had access to the latest electronic and satellite intelligence, one-to-one communication with commanders at sea and eventually ashore, and with the British War Cabinet through the filter of the Service Chiefs of Staff.
The most significant aspect of the evolution of command is the extent to which political control may be applied to a commander in the field or at sea, affecting his strategic and even tactical decisions. He may jib at such restrictions, but the international nature of today’s world demands he should be kept alert to political intentions and reservations. From Kitchener’s ‘press conference’ after Omdurman (‘Get out of my way, you drunken swabs’) to to-day, the military commander has had to take increasing account of a pervasive, influential and technically proficient media. This raises the issue of whether one individual might any longer be able to make a critical impact on the outcome of a battle or campaign. The answer is ‘probably yes, but to a lesser extent than formerly’.
These obituaries have been selected from those published in The Times that illustrate high command in war, long experience of armed conflict or preparation for such responsibility. Success or failure has played a smaller part than impact or influence on events at the time and in consequence on the course of history. Some who held high command also pioneered or exploited a significant aspect of war – of which Admirals Dönitz and Horton are examples for submarine warfare and Generals Guderian and Patton for fast-moving armoured penetration and encirclement. We have also included Giuseppe Garibaldi as an exponent of irregular warfare and General Walter Walker as an expert on its suppression. Chiefs Cetywayo and Sitting Bull are here for their prowess as leaders of warrior nations, their courage and methods of warfare beset and eventually defeated by technology.
Objections over omissions and even some inclusions are inevitable, but a balance of different aspects of warfare, geography and nationality had to be struck. A few who might have qualified had no obituary in The Times; otherwise Admiral Thomas Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, (1775–1860) would be here. While a long extract from Wellington’s obituary is included, the death of his great adversary, Napoleon, occurred too early and at a time when The Times had not yet developed its obituary coverage. Lord Kitchener is omitted because his obituary appeared in full in Great Lives, published in 2005. Sadly, no woman could be found to match the criteria for inclusion.
In addition to the conduct of war, its reporting in newspapers and recording in obituaries of the participants have also evolved. News of the victory of Waterloo had to be galloped to and sailed across the Channel while only fifty years later William Russell had his reports on the failings of the staff and administrative services in the Crimea telegraphed to The Times for publication next day – and with little or no censorship imposed upon his copy. Such journalistic freedom, although doubtless available, was seldom exercised in the obituaries of the period. Lord Raglan, who died aged sixty-six while in command of the British Army in the Crimea, whose obituary we include, was unsuited by age and lack of command experience for the responsibilities he held, something recognised by the press and public alike. Yet his obituary concentrates chiefly on his gentlemanly personal qualities, making only the briefest genuflexion towards the awareness of his shortcomings as a field commander at the very end – and without venturing to suggest what they were.
Such courteous restraint shows signs of fraying at the edges as time wore on. First World War commanders are spared some frank criticism possibly out of consideration of the appalling circumstances they faced as well as in the interests of ‘good taste’. Examples are the obituaries of Jellicoe, Beatty and Fisher whose controversies are gently alluded to but not clearly explained. The obituaries of commanders who died soon after their famous deeds tend to reflect current public perception rather than their true worth. Rommel who died in October 1944 before the end of the war in Europe was in sight is granted only grudging praise for his generalship. The treatment – in terms of detail and scope – of the lives and achievements of the selected individuals over the period shows little consistency. One is left to conclude that as much depended on the whim of the Editor of The Times as on the stature of the subject.
Some instances of contrasting coverage lack explanation – for example over 7,000 words for General Ulysses S. Grant against only 1,200 for his strategic equal General Robert E. Lee cannot be wholly attributed to Grant’s subsequent unexciting performance as his country’s eighteenth president. Astonishingly broad coverage was afforded to the Italian soldier-patriot General Giuseppe Garibaldi, over two issues of The Times on June 3rd and 5th 1882, seemingly reflecting the extent to which this romantic – not to say romanticised – figure had been taken into the bosom of Victorian Britain. In marked contrast, the hero of the native American people – Chief Sitting Bull, whose Prairie Sioux tribes took part in the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn – is dismissed in less than a thousand words, as is General ‘Schneller Heinz’ Guderian, the leading German exponent of armoured warfare in the Second World War. In several instance, for example, Wellington, Grant, Garibaldi, Moltke, MacMahon and Eisenhower, the extreme length of the published obituaries have obliged us to include only selected extracts in the book.
Political bias occasionally shows its hand. The obituary for Cetywayo – in a tract of breath-taking Victorian humbug – seeks to portray as a villain the Chief who sought only to protect his tribal lands from annexation and his proud Zulu nation from conquest. In an instance of ‘political correctness’, the lugubrious Field Marshal Paul von Hinden-burg is accorded generous accolades as ‘Father of the Fatherland’ on the occasion of his death a bare eighteen months after being obliged to install Hitler as German Chancellor, causing widespread alarm across Europe. That for General Douglas MacArthur concentrates dispro-portionately on the Korean War and the terms of his removal, at the expense of the strategic vision of his Pacific campaign and his personal courage.
In order to provide a balanced perspective when an obituary lacks historical or strategic context, appears to fall short of the credit a subject is due, omits mention of important events or glosses over a controversy with which the subject was associated, my naval colleague – Rear-Admiral Guy Liardet – and I have added our comments. Explanations have been added when the writer of the obituary assumed the reader’s familiarity with the role of persons mentioned only by name or with then recent but now largely forgotten events. Occasionally, touches of light-heartedness have been added to lift an otherwise over-solemn account.
A search for a common element or thread in the lives of those included often reveals a humble or relatively humble background, although this is by no means always so; hardship in the formative years – resulting in an enduring code of self-discipline – and most significant of all, a strong sense of public service, one that eschews personal profit or honours. Former tanner General Ulysses S. Grant, Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim – second son of a minor nobleman, as a boy obliged to speak a different European language each weekday-Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, born in Ceylon, his father a junior infantry officer, entered a Victorian Navy ‘penniless and forlorn’ as he was fond of saying and the peasant, former cavalry sergeant Georgi Zhukov are the more obvious examples. There are exceptions: Earl Beatty combined privilege with an intense ambition.
The variation in the language of the obituaries over one and a half centuries illuminates the changes in public attitude to the great and perhaps not-so-good and in the fashion of writing structure, punctuation and use of words. In the 19th and early 20th century examples, failings are not so much left to be read between the lines as approached in the manner of ‘grandmother’s footsteps’, with the stalker seemingly losing