Abstract
Since 2000 David French has published four important books on the British army. This latest one is a general account covering the quarter century following the Second World War. Its central and important point is indisputably correct – the story of the army, contrary to accounts which celebrate its supposed success in counter-insurgency, is essentially the story of a force designed to fight in a potentially nuclear war in Europe. It is the story of an army which adapted to new demands which the author rightly insists were political and economic as much as strictly military. Most of the chapters are concerned with these issues, which he correctly notes have been neglected. But French has powerful pages on the realities of counter-insurgency, the targeting of civilians, the maintenance of the rule of law by changing the law, and the lack of success in many cases of these efforts. It looks ever more remarkable that British officers felt confident enough to boast of what they took to be a British USP to increasingly irritated US officers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The book is based very largely on papers in the National Archives, as the voluminous notes testify. While one couldn’t say the book sees the army as from Whitehall, but it is more concerned with policy than with a description of and explanation of the nature of the British army. Indeed it assumes more knowledge of the army, its equipment, its structures, and its ethos, than exists in the literature. It is a besetting problem of even the very best accounts of the forces, perhaps because they are faithful to the documents they depend on, that they can overdo negative judgements. The quality of soldiers is never good enough, officers are not educated deeply enough or come from restricted social strata, and so on (although it is not a surprise that, even in the late 1960s, Sandhurst cadets were almost as likely to come from public schools as all other schools, it is surprising that in 1952 nearly half of all national service officers came from London and a mere seven adjacent counties – p. 61). In this account it is repeatedly suggested that the army was never well-equipped enough. But the implicit standard for what would count as well-equipped is not set out, nor is there comparison with other forces, nor indeed an account of the obviously massive re-equipment which took place. What needs explanation is, for example, the fact that front-line forces had new Centurion tanks in the early 1950s, not that the Comet tank (an excellent tank which saw service only in the last weeks of the war) was still in use in home and Territorial formations. Doubtless lots of army documents, and Treasury papers too, talked of shortage of money, but it is necessary to bear in mind that in the years covered by this book defence expenditure went well over 10% of GDP and was never less than 5%, averaging over 7%. Furthermore, the economy was growing strongly, by both earlier and later standards.
One of the astonishing points that comes out of the book is that for all the money and personnel invested in the army, the number of fighting formations seems to have been very small indeed. Without Indian troops Britain found it very difficult to have a world military role. Yet the army went to extraordinary lengths to try to create a (small) strategic reserve which could travel by air over vast distances, using stopovers and overflight rights of uncertain stability, long after Suez. The book is quite invaluable in raising these and many other crucial points, setting out a vision of what French calls a ‘Potemkin Army’. This is an extraordinarily powerful conclusion but it demands a richer explanation than lack of money or competence, one which goes into more detail into the extraordinary politics of warfare in the Cold War.