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General Hastings ‘Pug’ ISMAY
Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat
A New Biography
by John Kiszely
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There were many distinguished men and women who served the great cause that was the Second World War but few have remained household names. They have been kept in the shadows, eclipsed by Churchill’s extraordinary wartime leadership and eternal self-publicists like ‘Monty’ and Mountbatten. This wonderful biography by the distinguished former Scots Guardsman, John Kiszely, is the story of the life of General Hastings Ismay, wartime chief staff officer to Churchill and the first Secretary General of NATO. As a historical record of our nation’s ‘finest hour’, it is gripping and beautifully researched, as a study of a human being at the centre of momentous events, quite compelling.
Awarded the DSO for his leadership leading the Camel Corps against Mullah Mohammad Abdullah in Somaliland in 1919, Ismay rejoined his Indian Army regiment, on the North-west Frontier. Kiszely recounts an incident in India that portrays Ismay’s moral courage, the human attribute that outweighs its physical trait. One of his regiment’s Indian officers applied for membership of the rarefied Rawalpindi Club and was blackballed. Ismay gathered his fellow officers together and said, ‘Look chaps, we’re all resigning from the club tonight, I’m dammed if I’ll belong to a club where a brother officer is blackballed’. He won the day.
After attending the Staff College at Quetta, it was clear that Ismay was ‘an officer of exceptional merit’. But merit in itself does not guarantee the highest reaches of the Army. As Kiszely points out, Ismay studied every aspect of his profession. He attended the RAF Staff College at Andover in 1924, his grasp of air power seen as slightly eccentric then, but vital to our war effort some 15 years later. Ambitious young officers in the British Army would do well to study Ismay’s apprenticeship in the profession of arms. And perhaps, more importantly, Ismay’s ability to read people and pour a liberal amount of soothing oil on fractured relationships as inter-Service rivalry worsened in the late 30s and at the outbreak of war. As an aside, Field Marshal Lord Guthrie wrote in his memoirs that he would often keep quiet during heated discussions but offer to summarise the discussion and then use the opportunity to press home his own opinion. It was a ploy Ismay used throughout his career as he mastered the corridors of power.
For a variety of reasons Ismay was never to have a command appointment. His talent for staff work and ability to apply himself to the most complex of problems were too much in demand. He caught Churchill’s eye who appointed him as his chief staff officer. Throughout the war, Ismay was at the heart of decision-making, reporting directly to Churchill as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. They got on well. Churchill’s mercurial brilliance had to be balanced by Ismay’s calmness and composure.
Kiszely has peppered his biography with wonderful anecdotes. There was the famous exchange, now perhaps forgotten, between Weygand, the French Minister of War, and Churchill, where Weygand urged Churchill to commit all our fighter aircraft to France. Churchill refused. He knew when the decisive moment would not be the battle to save France, but the Battle of Britain. Ismay was to remark that it was ‘the greatest decision Winston took during the war’.
The early years of the war before Britain had even approached ‘the end of the beginning’ were unnerving and fraught. Churchill firing off bursts of verbal machine-gun fire, ‘if we lose Egypt, blood will flow, I will have firing parties and shoot the generals’. Kiszely conveys the tension with pace and admirable balance. For example, the loss of Singapore in February 1942 was an unmitigated disaster. Ismay, as a former Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, should have known that Singapore’s defences all faced a sea-borne attack. The Japanese bounced through the Malayan Jungle taking Singapore within days. Churchill berated Ismay, ‘you must have known the position, why didn’t you tell me?’
It’s a myth to think the ‘broad sunlit uplands’ were within our grasp after Pearl Harbor and the Americans entered the war. There was goodwill but also some distrust between the high commands of both countries. Once again, Ismay had to wheel out the oil can to smooth things over. He became a trusted and close friend of Eisenhower who was to become the Supreme Allied Commander on D-Day. Ismay’s workload would have felled most men and it nearly did for him. Kiszely, again, never loses sight of the human story in his biography of Ismay, without which the book would lose a lot of its strength. This was particularly true during ‘the year of destiny’ that was 1944. Ismay’s word portrait of Stalin at the various Allied conferences is haunting. He was in no doubt that Stalin was a terrifying and murderous man behind his ‘Uncle Joe’ mask. And like Putin, quietly spoken.
Given the confusion and shambles of the High Command structure in the Falklands campaign and in Afghanistan, it’s surprising that we failed to learn from Ismay’s ‘handling machine’ that converted thought into action. It’s a constant theme in this excellent biography where the reader is left with the feeling that no one has paid much attention to institutional memory, the same old mistakes.....
By the end of the war, Ismay had more than filled ‘the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’. But the transition from war to peace and Indian independence with its controversial partition still needed men and women of experience and judgement. As Ismay wrote, ‘the idea of emerging from my newfound retirement and getting involved in the last chapter of British rule in India was singularly unattractive. On the other hand, I owed so much to India that it was my bounden duty to lend a hand’. And it was some hand, he leant to Mountbatten, as his chief of staff. Ismay saw that Mountbatten was undoubtedly a man of charisma and energy but one whose political and strategic judgement were rarely sound; witness his decision to divide the Indian Army on ethnic grounds. The partition of India into the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan led to human misery, mayhem and murder on a huge scale, a failing invariably downplayed by Mountbatten.
The last chapter of Ismay’s life was as important as any. He was to become the first Secretary General of NATO, then comprising 14 nations (32 today). Ismay had to tread carefully and deploy all his skills of tact and diplomacy, not helped by Monty who in a speech about nuclear weapons said, ‘I would use the weapons first and ask afterwards’.
There’s a quote about Ismay who reputedly said, ‘The primary purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’. Kiszely is quite right to nail this as a highly unlikely remark for Ismay to have made. Kiszely knows the character of the man.
The final word should go to Eisenhower who said of Ismay, ‘his name may be forgotten; but the contribution he made to winning the war was equal to many whose names became household words’.
Kiszely’s book Anatomy of a Campaign, the British Fiasco in Norway (reviewed: Autumn 2017) was first-rate. This latest book is outstanding and is in the front rank of biographies, military or otherwise.
Paul de Zulueta
Hurst Publishing
www.hurstpublishers.com |
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