The Southland Times THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 1942. Army Leadership and Reform

Southland Times, Issue 24827, 20 August 1942, Page 4

The Southland Times THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 1942. Army Leadership and Reform

THE Army shake-up in the Middle East followed so closely upon Mr Churchill’s visit to Cairo that there is bound to be a connection between the two events. It will be remembered that the Prime Minister has spoken more than once in the highest terms of General Auchinleck. He has also declared, with blunt emphasis, that he will not hesitate to protect the service chiefs from criticism, which, (he implied) was generally hasty or ill-informed; The removal of- General Auchinleck therefore seems to mean that Mr Churchill’s confidence in his abilities was not fully justified, and that the criticism was not quite as illinformed as it appeared to be after the Prime Minister ■ had dealt with it in the House of Commons. It did not require any profound knowledge of military matters to be able to detect a certain risk in the appointment of an infantry officer to command an army which had to face an enemy led by a brilliant expert in mechanized warfare. General Auchinleck was able to retrieve the situation in Egypt when Rommel was almost at the gates of Alexandria; but the fact remains that Libya was lost and the entire Middle East placed in grave danger while the supreme command was in his hands. It cannot have been easy for Mr Churchill to acknowledge his mistake (for it was. he who selected General Auchinleck to replace General Wavell); and he deserves credit for the decision to seek a better leadership, even though in doing so his earlier judgment stands against him, and will not be overlooked by parliamentary critics. General Alexander is a soldiei 1 with a reputation that has grown rapidly in the present war, though, as The Daily Mail has pointed out, he is no more an expert .in mechanized warfare than was General Auchinleck. Liddell Hart bracketed General Alexander with Sir Alan Brooke as one of the two commanders “who, by common consent, proved outstanding successes, of the campaign in France.” His fighting withdrawal in Burma, an operation made terribly - difficult by the smallness of the forces under his command, made him a still more impressive figure. Mr Churchill has not always been fortunate in his appointments; but it is hard to see where, under present conditions, he could have found a better man for the big job to be done in Egypt. 'Hie phrase “under present conditions” is intended to emphasize an important qualification. It is easy to believe that, if only the right man can be found, all other military problems will automatically be solved. But General Alexander is a product of the system which so far has failed to bring the needed results on the field of battle. He will command some of the best fighting men in the world, an army of seasoned veterans in which any leader can have the fullest confidence. Yet it is an army which retains too many administrative and technical features that are obviously obsolescent. Staff Methods

The revelation that British communications were still cumbersome and slow (weighted with the formalities of code and indirect reception) came as an unpleasant shock to those who believed that the lessons of France must surely have been assimilated by the General Staff. It is only too plain that Army organization retains many of the features which overload battalion and divisional staffs with a mass of administrative detail. Mr Churchill may have made an improvement by selecting General Alexander for a responsible and difficult position. But he will not obtain the best results until he turns his attention to the War Office', that citadel of privilege and military conservatism. The battles of this war have shown that reform of the most stringent kind is the first step to be taken dn the hard road to victory. It is all very well to speak (as Lieutenant-General Puttick did on Tuesday) of a “noisy minority” which indulges too freely in criticism. This is not the Army’s war. It is the people’s war. The civilian of today may be the soldier of tomorrow. If he is too old, or in other ways ineligible for sei-vice, he must help to pay the tremendous bill which is keeping the Army ready for action. His brothers, sons and friends lose most of their civil privileges when they enter camp—above all, they lose the right to speak out against weaknesses of method which directly influence their own future. “The public knows more about the Army than many think,” said General Puttick. It does indeed. There is, for instance, the small matter of a Home Guardsman’s bayonet, and of the solemn inquiry which followed its loss during field exercises. While such things are possible the “noisy minority” will continue to be critical, and the silent majority will wonder if there may not after all be some connection between ponderous methods of organization and the lost battles of Malaya and Libya. There is now to be a medical re-examina-tion of all Grade 2 personnel in the New Zealand Military Forces. It is expected that this step (a wise one) will “be of value to those responsible for carrying into effect the general policy of employing fit men in fighting jobs instead of leaving them in clerical and other posts . . .” But why not go a stage further? Why not examine the “clerical and other posts” to discover how many of them are really necessary, and how far the staff system can be purged of functions which slow up the combatant units in training and in action? The German and Japanese war machines are stream-lined for battle. There is encouraging evidence that the United States Army has also learned to dispense with iterating de-

tails. Until this example is followed in British countries it will take more than the appointment of new generals to give the Army an irresistible ~ _