Great Military Commanders: Marlborough, Wellington and Slim
Saul David
Copyright 2012 by Saul David
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First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd
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Table of Contents
The ‘Beau Ideal’ of a Military Commander
Since 1066, Britain has produced some fine generals: the soldier-kings Edward I, Henry II, Edward III, Robert the Bruce and Henry V; in the 17th Century Oliver Cromwell and George Monck; James Wolfe and John Moore who fell in battle at Quebec and Corunna respectively; the great 19th Century commanders Garnet Wolseley, Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts and Horatio Kitchener; Douglas Haig (yes, even him), Herbert Plumer and Edmund Allenby of the First World War, and Alan Cunningham and Bernard Montgomery of Alamein in the Second – the list goes on.
But three stand out, and for different reasons: John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, victor over the seemingly unbeatable French at Blenheim, who was as comfortable with grand strategy as he was tinkering with the nuts and bolts of military logistics; Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, a supreme organizer and master of the defensive action, who defeated Napoleon, one of the military greats, in his final battle at Waterloo; and Bill (later Viscount) Slim, the son of a shopkeeper, who turned the tide against the all-conquering Japanese in Burma in 1944, and rose to the very top of the British Army. Of these three towering figures, who deserves the accolade of ‘the greatest’?
To help make that decision it is worth considering the qualities that Carl von Clausewitz, the celebrated Prussian military theorist, considered indispensable in a great commander. Clausewitz, who fought in the Napoleonic wars, was convinced that normal decision-making is almost impossible during the stress of combat. ‘It is,’ he wrote in his 19th Century treatise On War, ‘an exceptional man who keeps his power of quick decision intact if he has never been through this experience before.’
Thus did Clausewitz stress the importance of intuition and steadiness. In his view, there is rarely enough time in the heat of battle for the deliberations of a council of war; for better or worse the commander must arrive at the most logical decision under the circumstances and then execute it resolutely. He must, in Clausewitz’s words, ‘stand firm like a rock’ once his decision has been made.
Clausewitz listed the essential requirements of a military genius as follows: the intellectual ability to process large amounts of information quickly; moral courage; determination; a balanced temperament; and an understanding of humanity. Together, he argued, these qualities produce a commander with the intangible qualities of leadership and coup d’oeil, the ability to recognize the decisive moment in a fight and to act accordingly. There is no better example of the latter quality than the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 when Napoleon chose just the right moment to launch his attack on the Prätzen Heights which the Russians had denuded to strengthen their own assault on his vulnerable left: any sooner and the heights would have been too strongly defended; any later and his left would have been overwhelmed. As it was, he took the heights and split the Russian line in two.
Clausewitz’s ideal commander was one who personally commanded on the battlefield. And yet, ironically, a general’s brilliance in battle – where he is used to making quick, clear decisions based on experience and intuition – is often a handicap when he is given strategic responsibility. The same qualities that enabled Napoleon to win the battle of Austerlitz were his downfall when applied to strategic considerations (such as the invasion of Russia), where sober calculations often bring greater rewards than quick reactions, intuition and guts. In other words, few generals display the same talent as tacticians (fighting battles) as they do as strategists and grand strategists (planning campaigns and implementing political decisions). With that thought in mind, let us consider the careers of our three British generals in chronological order – Marlborough, Wellington and Slim – whilst reflecting on the uncanny coincidence that they were born at intervals of almost exactly 120 years.
Chapter One:
Duke of Marlborough
1650-1722
‘There has been,’ wrote a recent biographer of the Duke, ‘no more successful English soldier than the 1st Duke of Marlborough. During the War of the Spanish Succession, he won all his battles, and triumphed at every siege. Moreover, Marlborough was simultaneously in charge of overall allied strategy and, as Ambassador-Extraordinary, of high diplomacy. The finer details of military administration, operations and logistics again fell to him. No other British general has ever been burdened with such all-pervading responsibilities.’
Born John Churchill on 26 May 1650, the son of Winston Churchill, a West Country gentleman impoverished after supporting Charles I, the future duke was brought up in modest circumstances. With the Restoration, his father was knighted and given a post at court. However, he died a debtor, and the experience of poverty marked Marlborough. In 1665 his sister Arabella was appointed a maid of honour to the wife of the king’s brother, the Duke of York. Arabella soon became the duke’s mistress, bearing him four children, and was able to use her influence to wangle her brother the post of page in the duke’s household. It was the duke who arranged for young Churchill, in 1667, to receive a commission without purchase in the First Foot Guards.
A year later, possibly to nip in the bud his burgeoning relationship with his beautiful cousin (and the King’s mistress) Barbara Castlemaine [1] he was posted to the English garrison at Tangiers (a North African colony that had been, along with Bombay in India, part of the marriage contract between Charles II and his Portuguese wife Catherine of Braganza). Churchill left no record of this period, but we know from other sources that his time in the colony would not have been easy. Tangiers lies to the west of the Pillar of Hercules, on the stormy Atlantic coast, and is dominated by high ground that enabled the Moorish factions who controlled Morocco in the seventeenth century to overlook the town. Despite improving the outer defences by building two rings of forts (1663–9), the English were under constant attack and conditions within the garrison were grim: pay was intermittent, food was poor and disease was rife. Mutinies were frequent, and some soldiers even deserted to the Moors, where slavery awaited them.
Frequent were the skirmishes below the city walls, and it was probably here that Churchill received his baptism of fire. A fellow officer wrote: ‘[The Moors] lodge their ambushes within our very lines, and sometimes they killed our men as they passed to discover, which they continually do without any other danger than hazarding a few shots, whilst they leap over the lines and run into the fields of their own country. This insecurity makes men all the more shy in passing about the fields.’
[1] If that was the case, the ruse did not work as Churchill later had an illegitimate daughter by Castlemaine.
***
Churchill saw his next action at sea, helping to blockade the Barbary pirates at Algiers in 1670 and, two years later, fighting against the Dutch at the naval battle of Sole Bay, an action for which he received a double jump in promotion. In 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, he returned to land to fight alongside the French in the Netherlands, taking part in the assault on a key outwork of Maastricht that prompted the Dutch to capitulate. He distinguished himself during this battle by saving the life of the British commander (and bastard son of King Charles II), the Duke of Monmouth.
A year later, commanding a battalion in the British Brigade of the French Army, Churchill won the admiration of the great Marshal Turenne, perhaps the finest soldier of his age, for the part he played in the defeat of the Austrians at Enzheim. ‘It was from Turenne,’ wrote a biographer of the future duke, ‘that Churchill learnt the importance of infantry firepower; the effectiveness of employing artillery throughout a battle, rather than as a mere prelude; and the desirability of seeking decisive battle, rather than following convention and marching from siege to static siege.’
Shortly before his promotion to full colonel in 1678, Churchill married Sarah Jenyns, the girlhood crush of the Duke of York’s younger daughter (and future Queen) Anne. The two women’s association was to have, in turn, good and bad consequences for Churchill’s army career. He prospered after Charles I’s victory over the Exclusionists in 1681 (these anti-Catholics were trying to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from succeeding his brother as king), becoming a baron in the Scots peerage and colonel of the Royal Dragoons. When the Duke of York succeeded his brother as James II in 1685, Churchill was given an English peerage and, later that year, played a leading role in crushing the rebellion led by his former commander, the ultra-Protestant Duke of Monmouth, at the Battle of Sedgemoor. His stock had never been higher and, in recognition of this, he was promoted to major-general.
Three years later, when a second attempt was made to usurp James II by his son-in-law William of Orange, Churchill was again a trusted senior army commander. Only this time he sided with the invaders. Why? Because he – along with many other senior military and political figures – was opposed to James II’s policy of Catholic toleration, particularly his Catholicization of the Irish Army (which, Churchill assumed, would soon be followed by the expulsion of Protestants from the English Army). ‘Like most of the professional soldiers involved in [the plot],’ wrote a biographer, ‘Churchill relied primarily upon his army pay, and so the much-feared purge of the English army after the Irish model would strike at his fundamental interests.’ He was, moreover, ‘sincere in his commitments to Anglicanism’ and was convinced that James’s religious policies would end in disaster.
The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 gave Parliament a statutory control over the army that continues to this day; but it also left the army of 1689 – or what remained of it after mass desertions and an order to disband – in a state of chaos. With a new war brewing against France in the Low Countries, and Jacobite rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, the newly crowned William III did not have the luxury of being able to dissolve the army and start from scratch (as Charles II had done). Instead he selected Churchill – newly promoted in the peerage to the earldom of Marlborough – to reform and strengthen the military. For William III, who was naturally suspicious of those like Marlborough who had switched horse in mid-stream, it was a question of needs must. He ‘felt keenly that no English politician or soldier was to be fully trusted but he did not possess enough Dutchmen or Germans to officer all the new regiments of the English army’.
In 1689, Marlborough was dispatched to command the 8,000 English soldiers serving with the Dutch in Flanders. For three months, before battle was joined, he drilled his men tirelessly, and spared no effort to secure adequate uniforms, arms and equipment. The Dutch commander, the Prince of Waldeck, was amazed by the transformation, informing William in July that he could not ‘sufficiently praise the English’, and that ‘Monsieur Milord Marlbrouck and the Colonels have shown that their application has had a good effect’.
At the Battle of Walcourt, in late August, the English infantry took the brunt of the French attack, before Marlborough personally led a spirited cavalry charge that won the day. Waldeck reported to William that Marlborough had, ‘in spite of his youth’ (he was thirty-nine), displayed greater military aptitude than most generals achieve in a lifetime.
Marlborough was given his first independent command in 1690 when he led a successful amphibious operation that captured the key Jacobite ports of Cork and Kinsale. But his flourishing career came to a sudden, grinding halt in 1692 when he was correctly suspected of communicating with the exiled court of James II. Dismissed from all his posts he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. But not for long because, as luck would have it, the documentary evidence against him was shown to be a forgery, while the actual letters that he wrote to his former patron were never discovered.
Though he was publicly forgiven in 1695 (when William allowed him to ‘kiss hands’), a further three years elapsed before he was restored to his army rank and place in the privy council, by which time the Nine Years War with France had been concluded by the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697). It was as if William, unconvinced that the French King Louis XIV would keep the peace, was looking ahead to the next war and had identified Marlborough as the man best equipped to continue the fight.
The War of the Spanish Succession duly broke out in September 1701 – with a Grand Alliance of England, Austria and Holland fighting to prevent France from uniting its crown with that of Spain – and would last for thirteen years. Even before it began, Marlborough had been appointed commander of all English troops in Holland and ambassador-plenipotentiary. After William III’s death in March 1702, Queen Anne promoted Marlborough to captain-general of her army and master-general of the Ordnance (with direct control over the infantry, cavalry and artillery). Marlborough was also confirmed in his ambassadorial role to Holland, and soon after was made deputy commander of the Dutch Army. No general since Cromwell had enjoyed such a combination of diplomatic and military authority. ‘In the context of 1944,’ wrote his most recent biographer, ‘he would have been Eisenhower, Montgomery and Brooke rolled into one.’