Ian Brunskill - The Times Great Military Lives - Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries

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 nerve at the last moment, leaving grandmother to reach her final destination without being openly caught out. Sentences of inordinate length, spattered with commas, colons and dashes with the generous impartiality of grape-shot were commonplace in that period. Some obituary writers had apparently never received an introduction to the paragraph, resulting in difficult-to-digest long, descending barrels of words. In the latter instances only, paragraphs have been imposed but otherwise the obituaries have been taken directly from The Times , retaining the original punctuation and spelling.

The sequence in which to present the obituaries allowed several options. The convenience of alphabetical order lacked imagination, while a chronology based on achievement of fame or the order of birth or death threw up awkward anomalies. Consequently, those associated with some great historical event, such as the two World Wars, have been grouped together and individuals whose names will be for ever linked – Jellicoe with Beatty over the Battle of Jutland and MacArthur with Nimitz in the war in the Pacific are put in immediate succession – all, it is hoped, without losing the possibility of a serendipitous moment as the reader casually turns the page. These lives are a part of history and their study an aid to its understanding.

Strategist and inspirational commander-in-chief

15TH SEPTEMBER 1852

This extract taken from The Times of 15th September 1852 describes The Duke of Wellington’s conduct of the war in the Iberian Peninsula. Appreciations of his command during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and as Prime Minister 1828–1830 appear in the concluding commentary.

ENGLAND WAS NOW at the commencement of her greatest war. The system of small expeditions and insignificant diversions, though not yet conclusively abandoned, was soon superseded by the glories of a visible contest; and in a short time it was known and felt by a great majority of the nation that on the field of the Peninsula England was fairly pitted against France, and playing her own chosen part in the European struggle. But these convictions were not prevalent enough at the outset to facilitate in any material degree the duties of the Ministry or the work of the General; on the contrary, so complicated were the embarrassments attending the prosecution of the war on the scale required, that to surmount them demanded little less wisdom or patience than the conduct of the actual campaign. In the first instance the British nation had been extravagantly excited by the successful insurrections of the Spaniards, and the events of our experimental campaign in Portugal had so inspirited the public mind that even the evacuation of that kingdom by the French was considered, as we have seen, in the light of an imperfect result. When, however, these conditions of the struggle were rapidly exchanged for the total discomfiture of the patriots, the recapture of Madrid, and the precipitate retreat of the British army, with the loss of its commander and the salvation of little but its honour, popular opinion veered quickly towards its customary point, and it was loudly proclaimed that the French Emperor was invincible by land, and that a contest with his legions on that element must inevitably prove ruinous to Britain. But the Government of the day, originally receiving its impulse from public feeling, had gradually acquired independent convictions on this mighty question, and was now prepared to maintain the interests of the nation against the clamours of the nation itself. Accordingly, at the commencement of the year 1809, when the prospects of Spanish independence were at their very gloomiest point, the British Cabinet had proposed and concluded a comprehensive treaty of alliance with the Provisional Administration of Spain; and it was now resolved that the contest in the Peninsula should be continued on a scale more effectual than before, and that the principal, instead of the secondary, part should be borne by England. Yet this decision was not taken without much hesitation and considerable resistance; and it was clear to all observant spectators that, though the opinions of the Government, rather than those of the Opposition, might preponderate in the public mind, their ascendancy was not so complete but that the first incidents of failure, loss, or difficulty, would be turned to serious account against the promoters and conductors of the war.