Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality in our senior commander: honesty. In other words, after blaming vainglorious politicians for precipitating us into war without adequate preparation or resources, it is reasonable to ask, how capable are our generals of admitting their own mistakes?
Their persistence in two failed strategies — the application of Northern Ireland peace-keeping tactics to Basra and the dispersal of troops among forward posts in Helmand — does not suggest any culture of mea culpa, and ruthless self-examination has not been a distinguishing feature of the annual lectures delivered by the Chiefs of the Defence Staff to the Royal United Services Institute in the past decade. Yet, as is apparent from this new, timely biography of our most defeated and most successful commander of modern times, Field Marshal William Slim, a capacity for acknowledging past failure is vital to secure future success.
Writing of his first unsuccessful operation in North Africa in 1940, Slim confessed:
Like so many generals whose plans have gone wrong I could find plenty of excuses but only one reason — myself. When two courses of action were open to me, I had not chosen, as a good commander should, the bolder. I had taken counsel of my fears.
Later, when driven out of Burma by the Japanese in 1943, he wrote unsparingly of himself:
The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory — for that is his duty. He has no other comparable to it.
George MacDonald Fraser of Flashman fame, who served under Slim described him as having ‘the head of a general but the heart of a private’.
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