Major General John Strawson - If by Chance

Chaos umpire sits,

And by decision more embroils the fray

By which he reigns: next him high arbiter

Chance governs all.

JOHN MILTON

Those of us who have been privileged to take part in a full-scale battle will probably agree with Milton. During the battles conduct we will have been conscious that chaos reigned and that chance played a goodly part in the game. All the clear, precise orders which we have received from our immediately superior commanders and which we have passed on in appropriately modified form to our immediate subordinates will have gone for nothing. We have discovered all too soon what von MoltkeHe maintains that an official despatch would be almost unrecognizable to the soldier who had taken part in an operation as an accurate description of what had happened to him. He discovers that the day when his company spent hours hanging about in reserve without any idea of what was happening, he was being poured in as a reinforcement. Similarly, the tank crewman finds that on that unhappy morning when all but two tanks of his squadron were knocked out, he was part of a great armoured breakthrough.

The El Alamein battle lasted for twelve days, Cassino for more than four months. Both have been described as decisive. What did they decide?

The battle of El Alamein brought about the retirement of Rommels Panzerarmee. It enabled Churchill to ring the church bells for what was essentially a British victory. It confirmed Montgomerys mastery of a battle of attrition. It gave new hope and spirit to the British people and their soldiers. Together with the Allied landings in North-west Africa which followed hard upon it, it made possible the defeat of all Axis forces in North Africa and the establishment of Allied control of the Mediterranean. It was a stepping-stone to ultimate victory, the first of a series of battles which slowly but surely brought the war to the gates, and then to the heart of Germany. Compared in purely numerical terms with what was happening at Stalingrad, El Alamein was puny. But for the British it was all-important. It was the turning-point of their fortunes, the redemption of all that Churchill had been striving for, and from that time forth, as the Prime Minister subsequently recorded, victory was to be the order of the day. We will take a longer look at El Alamein in Chapter 8, and see in particular how chance played its part in the battle, but for now we may record what Nigel Hamilton in his new biography of Montgomery had to say about it:

Alamein was crucial to the morale of the free world. No one who lived in Britain, the Commonwealth or even the occupied countries of Europe would ever forget the moment when the news of Rommels defeat came through. From civilians in factories to resistance workers in Occupied Europe, the sense of a change in the fortunes of democracy was palpable. Alamein thus became a symbol for the free world, and the enslaved

In this respect El Alamein has been properly described as a decisive battle. Can this also be said of Cassino? Not in the same sense, for the taking of Cassino did not lead to any instant strategic success. Even the subsequent fall of Rome was overshadowed by the invasion of Normandy two days later, and indeed the Italian campaign dragged on for almost another year. Yet, like Alamein, as a symbol Cassino was decisive. So costly in human life and suffering, wrote Majdalany, it was in the end little more than a victory of the human spirit: an elegy for the common soldier: a memorial to the definitive horror of war and the curiously perverse paradoxical nobility of battle. We will take a further look at Cassino, too, when we consider the battle for Rome, which showed how General Mark Clarks eye on the main chance frustrated Alexanders opportunity to destroy the German 10th Army after the breakout from Anzio.

What determines the outcome of a battle? The influences are almost too numerous to catalogue. The cause, political stakes, time, terrain, numerical odds, weapons, weather, intelligence, courage and calibre of soldier, skill, resolution, health, even whim of commander, clarity of direction, opportunities seized or forgone, tactics, administrative resources and their use, morale all these play their part. But there is also chance. And chance is a thing of many parts. We have ninety chances in our favour and not ten against, the Emperor Napoleon confidently declared at 8 a.m. on 18 June 1815 while breakfasting with Soult and others of his staff at Le Caillou. But he was about to throw away many of the chances in his favour. Some years before Napoleon had said, Give me lucky generals, yet his choice of generals for his last battle was about as unlucky as it could have been. Later in Chapter 3, we will see how this came about.

Thus one aspect of chance is that of opportunity, a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Neglect it, and everything goes wrong. At Salamanca in July 1812 Wellington was quick to see when Marmont had over-extended his army, seized his opportunity and triumphed. Lord Cardigan, on the other hand, when presented with the chance of a lifetime to exploit the Heavy Brigades success at Balaklava, sat on his horse and did nothing. Had he acted, as he was being urged to do by his subordinates, not only would he have brought off a great coup, but the ill-fated charge of his Light Brigade would not have taken place, thus robbing us of a glorious page in military history and a memorable poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Closely allied to opportunity is the business of taking a chance, a risk, as James Wolfe did in scaling the Heights of Abraham and shattering Montcalms army; or Napoleon in his bold, brilliant style at Austerlitz, risking all by storming the Austro-Russian centre and gaining a crushing victory.