Michael Arnold - Hollow Heroes: An Unvarnished Look at the Wartime Careers of Churchill, Montgomery and Mountbatten

Published in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2015 by
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Copyright 2015 Michael Arnold

ISBN: 978-1-61200-273-6
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INTRODUCTIONAN UNHOLY TRINITY

Legends are persistent, and delusions tenacious.

BASIL LIDDELL HART, The German Generals Talk

T o describe Sir Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Lord Louis Mountbatten as hollow heroes may at first sight seem absurd because they had all emerged from World War II with glittering reputationsthey were a veritable triumvirate in the pantheon of British World War II leaders. The truth may come as a shock because none of them were heroes of truly solid integrity. In each case there was an unsavoury, hollow core hidden beneath their surface image, an essence that was ignored in what was in the national interests in time of war and for some time thereafter, largely due to acceptance of convention. Concealed amongst these hidden agendas were murky and distasteful dealings, acts of contrivance, and in a number of cases outright lies. All three were men of huge egos with massive personal ambitions and who had little or no time for anyone else.

Whilst carrying out research for one of my earlier books, The Sacrifice of Singapore: Churchills Biggest Blunder,each wrote their own self-serving versions of events, the former going so far as to state that history would be kind to him because he would be writing the history.

The expression that truth is the first casualty of war was originally attributed to the 5th-century BC Greek dramatist Aeschylus and was repeated at about the same time by the Chinese general Sun Tzu; the Prussian military authority Carl von Clausewitz also alluded to it. However, all three of them were referring to the use of truth as a deception strategy or military tactic against an enemy, whereas the more recent comment from American senator Hiram Johnson was an allusion to elected government officials deliberately misleading their own peoples in order to disguise unpalatable facts and avoid a popular backlash. The three individuals to be examined here were not so much guilty on that scorealthough there were instances when that accusation could legitimately be mountedbut in frequently acting dishonestly in order to advance or promote their own careers. These actions were either to the detriment of their peers, or involved the deliberate and unnecessary sacrifices of many lives. Thus, this was not in the traditional sense truth being a casualty of war but the deliberate use of lies (the opposite of truth) to safeguard and/or advance their own positions or reputations.

All three could be said to have had a good waran expression frequently used to describe how senior commanders had advanced their ca-reersbut how many of the ordinary wartime soldier or sailors who survived would ever have used this phrase about their own experiences? How many army privates or able seamen would have felt anything other than total relief when it was all over? It is an issue that regularly emerges here; although it is an angle that is often lost in the afterglow of victory, it is one that should be kept in mind when the truth behind the heroic images of these three is examined.

Mountbatten did not write his own account, but according to one of his biographers, Philip Ziegler, he took care to ensure that Zieglers account fell into line with what Mountbatten wanted. Ziegler wrote of him:

His vanity, though child-like, was monstrous, his ambition unbridled. The truth, in his hands, was swiftly converted from what it was, to what it should have been. He sought to re-write history with cavalier indifference to the facts to magnify his own achievements.

Despite this apparent condemnation, Zieglers admiration was such that he confessed to having a note pinned above his desk reading, Remember that, after all, he was a great man. It is difficult to understand how any biographer can even profess impartiality if, having made such a damning assessment, he still admits to being constrained by such a self-imposed caveat.

Both Churchill and Mountbatten had a propensity for self-aggrandisement on such a scale that, if not actually dishonest, certainly manufactured and distorted facts; and, of course, a war was the ideal stage for each of them. Churchill and Mountbatten both came from backgrounds of distinct social privilege. Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a direct descendent of the Duke of Marlborough. Mountbatten was born at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle, the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg who was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and Mountbatten himself was a second cousin of King George VI.

Montgomery was a different case altogether, one where the illusion of an enormous ego seems in fact to have been a cover for insecurity and an inferiority complex; the apparently aggressive personality being a compensating mechanism. He was a general of reasonable competence who, through cleverly concealed opportunism, managed to beguile the world into believing he was a genius by manipulation of facts and consistent self-promotion. This will be examined later in greater detail and many of the classic symptoms of an inferiority complexthe fear of making mistakes, a tendency to be rude and aggressive, excessive seeking of attention, the criticism of others, for exampleare documented and so completely characteristic of Montgomery that the hypothesis seems quite rational. Indeed this interpretation has already been put forward before, Antony Beevor in his book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy saying that Montgomery suffered from a breathtaking conceit that almost certainly stemmed from some sort of inferiority complex. It is time that the reality behind the public image of the British military genius of World War II, largely contrived by Montgomery himself and fanned by an adoring British media, was put into a context of dispassionate reality. Free of emotion and the constraints of convention we shall see someone who was a capable military commander but not much more. Montgomery is under scrutiny here to evaluate his actual performance against his own claim to greatness.

Churchill and Montgomery had loveless childhoods, and although such parental attitudes may not have been much worse than the norm for a certain strata of society in 19th- and early 20th-century England, it seems likely that the experience left its mark, each of them in their different ways evolving into self-centred individuals of ruthless ambition. Mountbattens childhood by comparison seems to have been fairly happy, although even at a young age he showed self-confidence way beyond his years, a trait that along with his increasing vanity would cause him to be detested by those with whom he worked in government.