The Perfect Officer: Lessons in Leadership

By Henrik Bering

The Perfect Officer focuses on the careers of a group of brilliant officers from the Napoleonic Wars and up to our own times: what they did right, what they did wrong, and what lessons they drew from their experiences. The book’s recurring theme is the importance of imagination, and it demonstrates how these men were constantly inspired by each other and borrowed each other’s ideas. A number of these lessons are equally applicable in the civilian sphere, with one notable difference: If a business leader errs, he may lose his position or his investment. An officer risks losing his life and the lives of the men entrusted to his command.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781680534436

Book preview

Introduction

In search of ways to improve his game, today’s young officer would do well to follow Napoleon’s advice: In his Maxim no. LXXIII, the emperor encouraged his subordinates to peruse again and again the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Prince Eugene, and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.

Close scrutiny of the memoirs of eminent officers will play a central part in such efforts: Here, in auto-biographical form, old soldiers explore the weight of command, present their notions of leadership and explain their decisions; they demonstrate how strategy translates into battlefield reality or how reforms are pushed through, thus acting as sources of inspiration, caution or comfort for later generations.

Memoirs can be as diverse as, say, those of the surgeon-in-chief of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Baron Larrey, struggling to establish the first field ambulance service; or Sherman giving his reasons for laying waste to Georgia; or Heinz Guderian detailing the bureaucratic infighting involved in turning the Wehrmacht into a mechanized army.

They also serve a number of other purposes, such as settling old scores and badmouthing rivals, and explaining why things did not turn out quite as planned. Or, as in the case of the Alanbrooke Diaries, they fulfill a therapeutic purpose: They are the Field Marshal’s way of letting off steam after his daily battles to rein in Churchill’s fertile brain.

Memoirs do come with a warning, however. The temptation to gild the lily is always present. One of the worst sinners is World War II’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whose vanity prevented him from ever admitting a mistake. Rather than helping his reputation, his memoirs damaged it, by reminding everyone what a right royal pain Monty could be.

As our only – if imperfect – guide to the future remains the past, the following pages will provide case studies of a number of prominent officers from the three world wars – the Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II plus the post-1945 period – based on their own words and those of their biographers. We will examine the environment, political and geographical, in which they had to perform, the developments in tactics and technology they represent, and the ways they were inspired by each other, all part of an attempt to determine what they did right, what they did wrong, and what lessons they drew from their experiences.

Unfortunately, great soldiers are not always found on the side of the angels. This applied in the American Civil War, and it applied in World War II in Europe, where some of the best generals were found on the losing sides.

The book will further examine how, with varying degrees of success, different armies have tackled the challenge of ensuring that their best qualified people rise to the top, all the while keeping in mind the important caveat that the experiences gained within different armies may not universally transferrable: Thus an individual, who is regarded as a model officer by one country or system of government, may not be acceptable in another.

After all, we in the West don’t attack through mine fields by pushing infantry across them as the Soviets did in World War II, or practice Kamikaze missions like the Japanese. Or, when engaging in urban warfare, do what the Russians did to Grozny in 1999, ringing the city with artillery, tanks, and rocket stations and let fly. New was their use of fuel air explosives, which form an aerosol cloud that gets into every cranny of a building and ignites, crushing everyone inside. Aleppo and Mariupol have followed. As Stalin’s ghost might have put it, No city. No city warfare.

Some of our candidates are all-rounders and will tick several boxes: Wellington, for instance, proved skillful at conducting both offensive and defensive operations in Portugal and Spain, receiving excellent intelligence from local guerillas.

In 1815, as commander of the Anglo-Allied army consisting of British, Dutch, Hanoverians and Brunswickers, Wellington also demonstrated his worth as a coalition manager by coordinating with the Prussians and gaining the trust of Prussian Field Marshal von Blücher, whose last-minute support enabled Wellington to win the most crucial battle of his day at Waterloo.

Or consider the great commanders from World War II, Manstein, Slim, and Zhukov, who all at different stages had to master both defense and offense.

Some bring more specialized skill sets to the table: As Eliot Cohen has noted in Supreme Command, Generals fit for one type of operations fail dismally in another. The slashing commander may lack the talents of his more stolid brethren for conducting a defense or those of his more tactical colleagues for handling allies.

Take for instance a slash-and-burn commander like the French cavalry general Count de Lasalle who famously noted that a hussar who isn’t dead by the age of thirty is a blackguard. Transferred from the Peninsular War to the front in Germany to take command of the light cavalry division, he was asked if he intended to go via Paris: Yes, it’s the shortest way. I shall arrive at 5 a.m.; I shall order a pair of boots; I shall make my wife pregnant; and I shall depart. He was killed in the Battle of Wagram at the age of thirty-three.

One could not imagine this type of officer changing places with, say, a patient, live-to-fight-another-day commander like Michael Kutuzov whose scorched earth retreat sucked the French Army in deeper and deeper, even to the point of abandoning Moscow and then let the vastness of Russia finish the job. Or possessing the amounts of self-control required by a coalition manager like Eisenhower in handling the outsize egos of Patton and Montgomery in World War II.

Guts and resolution, of course, are essential. Men must be judged in the testing moments of their lives. Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others, Churchill noted. In judging a man’s character, a British World War II brigadier subjected him to what he called his Tiger Test: If attacked by a ferocious Bengal tiger, would the fellow stand his ground beside you, or would he turn tail?

But courage assumes many forms: They range from the get-back-in-the saddle battle-scarred stubbornness of old von Blücher, who suffered his share of defeats, but always returned to the fray, to the ebullience of Napoleon’s Count de Marbot, whose memoirs are a delightful romp, but to today’s soldier are about as instructive as The Three Musketeers.

We have the masochistic musings on the purifying effects of war and pain presented in Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel and his essay On Pain – Jünger, though only a junior officer, is included here because of the Nazis’ subsequent elevation of the Stormtrooper as the model soldier – and we have Hal Moore calmly issuing orders when under heavy fire from North Vietnamese regulars in the Ia Drang Valley.

And, not to forget, the magnificent contempt exhibited by Matt Ridgway emptying his bladder in full view of the Wehrmacht in Normandy: It of course helps if you believe you are invulnerable.

Some officers are remembered primarily for their ideas: Clausewitz never quite had the career he dreamt of – he did not make field marshal – but by distilling the essence of Napoleonic warfare, he taught his readers to think about war in the abstract and has been considered the top philosopher on war ever since.

Subsequent epochs produced thinkers of a more practical bent, coming up with ideas for employing new technology: Moltke the Elder on trains, J. F. C. Fuller on tanks, John Warden on precision bombing. As Fuller once put it, Why should not battles be won in the study? Are not most straight and worthwhile things conceived in an armchair?

Of these three, Moltke as chief of the Prussian General Staff registers both as an innovative thinker and as the man upon whom it fell to oversee the implementation of his own ideas in the war against the French. He may not have thought much of the professional skills of the American soldiers in the Civil War, but he did think Grant’s use of railroads in getting his troops to the battlefield merited close study.

But brainiacs don’t always make it to the very top: Because of his prima donna airs, Fuller was sidetracked, and Colonel Warden was regarded as a little too high maintenance by the higher-ups.

Certain characteristics tend to reoccur in successful commanders, such as good judgement, common sense, the ability to delegate and a willingness to look after their subordinates. Many share a well-developed sense of theater and self-promotion, useful qualities if you want men to follow you: That goes for Napoleon, Nelson, and Patton.

And some are extremely well read: Following his own advice, Napoleon carried his travel library with him on his campaigns. Marine Corps General James Mattis has a library of some 6,000 volumes. In Call Sign Chaos he writes: If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.

Healthy reading habits will also produce the magpie mindset that Napoleon sought to encourage in his officers: When writing his training manual for soldiers, Fuller was greatly inspired by Sir John Moore’s notion of the intelligent officer. In the aftermath of World War I, while the Brits were sluggish in their efforts to follow up on Fuller’s ideas about the use of tanks, in Germany a group of up-and-coming officers – Manstein, Guderian, and Rommel — were busy scouring Fuller’s writings for new ideas and turn them into reality. And so was Zhukov in the Soviet Union.

In our own day, Colonel Warden channeled Fuller’s idea of the decisive headshot in his air campaign against the Iraqis. And in his fight against the Zarqawi network in Iraq, General McChrystal drew heavily on his reading of British naval history and used Nelson, a naval hero who died two centuries ago, as his leadership model.

Bookishness, however, has often been frowned upon by their brawnier colleagues. Fuller was once reported to his regiment’s doctor by worried colleagues for his odd reading habit. Brains and brawn always cohabited uneasily.

Most important, besides character and sound judgment, the most successful officers share one additional characteristic: imagination. Imagination is perhaps not the quality most often associated with the military mind. In fiction and in films, it is almost a given that the man in charge is a moron, whether he be a British Colonel Blimp type, a Prussian Junker with his monocle tightly screwed into his eye socket, or a war-crazed Marine general, on whose flat-top crewcut butterflies will crash-land.

But war is essentially creation in reverse: As much ingenuity and imagination goes into destroying as in building, and here, imagination is morally neutral – it can be used for good or for evil. For good, as when Colonel Warden in the Gulf War found a way of paralyzing Iraq’s nerve centers, thereby limiting battlefield and civilian deaths.

For evil, when for very little money, Osama bin Laden unleashed his attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, costing the West billions in war expenses and internal security arrangements.

Thus the trick is not only using your imagination to figure out what you want to do to your enemy, but as importantly, what he might want to do to you: In short, you need to be able to imagine what your enemy imagines.

In its report, the 9/11 Commission concluded that the American security agencies had failed to connect the dots, between terrorists taking flying lessons, but showing no interest in the landing part, and that the most important failure [regarding the attacks] was one of imagination.

Needless to say, imagination will be the recurring theme of this book.

Chapter I

What The Job Demands, What The Culture Discourages

Military establishments cherish heroes that confirm their self-image, and as the embodiment of British cool, Sir John Moore has few rivals. Hailed as the perfect officer by William Pitt and as an Achilles without the heel by his biographer Carola Oman, Moore was one of Britain’s most accomplished commanders during the Napoleonic Wars, and he has a timeless quality about him. Having risen in the army ranks due to ability rather than wealth, he served in the hotspots of the wars against the French: in the West Indies, in Egypt, in Sicily, and on the Iberian Peninsula.

With his direct and unaffected manner, he was the very opposite of a show-off like the Navy’s Sir Sydney Smith, who had blocked Napoleon’s advance at Acre and who was busy promoting himself as a second Nelson. Reporting home on the Battle of Alexandria, Smith turned up at the Admiralty decked out in a Turkish outfit, complete with turban, shawl, and two pistols in his girdle. Smith was long on daring, but short on judgment. Moore had both. Needless to say, the two of them did not get along.

In the British effort to drive the French out of Egypt, where Napoleon had left his army to fend for itself after Nelson had destroyed the French fleet in Abukir Bay, General Moore was sent to coordinate with the Ottoman army in Jaffa; his equanimity was deemed to have a calming effect on the volatile Orientals.

In the ensuing Battle of Alexandria, the reserve under Moore bore the brunt of the French onslaught and stood firm despite running out of ammunition, confirming Moore’s image as a man impossible to alarm. The surrender of the garrisons of Cairo and Alexandria marked the definitive end of the French adventure in Egypt.

Not only could Moore fight. His reputation as a trainer of men was established as commander of the Light Brigade at Shorncliffe Camp on the Kentish coast, whence he directed defense preparations against the force Napoleon had assembled across the Channel during the 1803-1805 invasion scare.

Moore did not share the enthusiasm for Prussian tactics shown by Sir David Dundas, the Army’s adjutant-general, whose drill manual boiled the Prussian method down to eighteen maneuvers, to which Moore referred dismissively as those damned eighteen maneuvers. Prussian precision maneuvers might look fine on the parade ground, but on the battlefield, they were outdated.

What Moore sought was not a new drill, but a new discipline, a new spirit that should make of the whole a living organism to replace a mechanical instrument. Thus the much looser light-infantry tactics that became known as Sir John Moore’s system required not so much men of stature as it requires them to be intelligent, hardy and active. In his view, the point was to encourage to the utmost the initiative of the individual, treating soldiers as men and not as machines.

I hold in detestation and abhorrence all Button and Buckle officers. A well-read and humane man, he was sparing in his use of the lash. Of the 52nd, there is not a better regiment, and there is none where there is less punishment, he proudly noted. Moore’s reform initiatives led British historian David Chandler to call him the father of modern British infantry.

What was to be his final assignment was with the British expeditionary force on the Iberian Peninsula, an ill-planned and ill-led venture. Moore had to take over after its commander was recalled. The efforts of the Spanish allies had collapsed, but in a daring move, designed to lure Napoleon north, Moore attacked his line of communication, forcing the French emperor to move against him personally, but managing to give him the slip. In disgust Napoleon left it to Marshal Soult to take over the chase.

A retreat is considered the trickiest and most depressing maneuver a commander can undertake. After untold sufferings in the Spanish winter and casualties of 3,000 dead and 500 wounded that had to be left behind, Moore managed to get his force into position to be extracted by the navy. But first they had to make a stand to beat off their French pursuers, which they successfully did in the Battle of Corunna. Moore, however, was among the casualties. A French cannonball smashed his shoulder, and he was buried in his cloak in one of the bastions.

Moore’s death was mourned in Britain like Wolfe’s before Quebec. His diversion had upset Napoleon’s schemes in Spain and a planned thrust against Portugal. Wellington paid tribute to Moore after Waterloo for having saved the British army, allowing it to fight another day, much like Dunkirk in our own time. Throughout the conflict, he had kept promoting Moore’s protégés.

As a result of Moore’s system, which stressed the effectiveness of aimed fire, the French suffered great losses, particularly among officers: The English were the only troops who were perfectly practiced in the use of small arms whence their firing was much more accurate than that of any other infantry, a Frenchman wrote. Another grumbled about the killing power of the rifle: It was an unsuitable weapon for the French soldier, and would only have suited phlegmatic, patient assassins.

Of all the jobs in the world, then as now, the wartime officer’s is the most dangerous and demanding, physically and emotionally. It is his job to get men to do something they would rather not, i.e., expose themselves to mortal danger. He must care about his subordinates, yet he cannot afford to identify too closely with them individually, as the mission always comes first. In return, the men need to know that he will not expend their lives frivolously. Needless to say, and as John Moore’s example starkly demonstrates, he must be willing to lay down his own life.

On the plus side, as Moore’s career also illustrates, the job can also be one of the most challenging intellectually. Clausewitz, distilling the lessons of the Napoleonic Wars in On War, pointed out that In war, everything is simple, but the most simple thing is difficult to perform, since the other side gets a say, too. Thus Clausewitz wished to expose the error in believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war. The German Army’s manual from 1936, Truppenführung, goes further: War is an art, a free creative activity resting on scientific foundations. It makes the highest demands on a man’s entire personality.

All of which highlights the importance of officer selection, which according to Mark Moyar’s book A Question of Command should be a top priority. ‘The perfect officer’ is what every military organization wishes to produce, but since we are dealing with fallible human beings, he remains a noble aspirational, but ever elusive ideal – brilliance in one area can coexist with severe deficiencies in another. Even the sainted Moore eventually ran out of luck, a quality Napoleon deemed essential in a commander.

In the real world, the qualities promotion boards should be focusing on are intuition and an ability to improvise, characteristics associated with a free and independent mind. A commander must be able to enter his opponent’s brain and foresee his next move, and to calculate risk. Thus he must possess the ability to foresee all the things that might go wrong in an operation, but without becoming paralyzed by it. As World War II’s Field Marshal Slim points out, his must be a controlled imagination. Hamlet types need not apply.

He must have sufficient self-confidence to trust his own on-the-spot judgement when issued an ill-conceived or out-of-date order: The commanders we revere are invariably the ones who have broken the rules. Thus, Nelson spoke of the need for an officer to use his head when given an order that runs counter to the overall mission: To serve my King, and to destroy the French, I consider the great order of all, from which the little ones spring; and if one of these little orders militate against it (for who can tell exactly at a distance?) I go back and obey the great order and object.

The ability to delegate and willingness to trust his subordinates is crucial. According to British naval historian John Sugden, Nelson’s leadership was consensual: Before battles, he held conferences in his cabin, where he talked various scenarios through with his captains. If contact was lost through fog or gun smoke, they knew his mind. Indeed, at Trafalgar one of his band of brothers, Cuthbert Collingwood, complained, I wish Nelson would stop signaling. We all know what we have to do.

What further characterizes a great commander is the ability to keep calm under stressful circumstances, the ability to tune out irrelevant information and to keep functioning when things go wrong, to recover from setbacks and to regroup. It was famously remarked about Napoleon’s Marshal Masséna that his mental faculties redoubled amid the roar of the cannon.

Superior generalship explains why Napoleon’s armies for so long could terrify the rest of Europe, and why the resource-poor South in the American Civil War held out against the industrial North for four years before finally surrendering. The same goes for the Wehrmacht’s performance in World War II; it took five-and-a-half years to smash the German juggernaut. Fortunately, as the war progressed, Hitler’s constant interventions and overrulings of his generals ended up being an Allied asset.

Counterinsurgency wars pose even greater demands in terms of creativity and adaptability. As Moyar demonstrates in his book, good conventional commanders do not necessarily make good counterinsurgency commanders. In the Peninsular War, Napoleon’s marshals Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the finest conventional commanders of their day, had to fight both British and Spanish regular forces and merciless guerillas and proved incapable of the task, showing for the first time that Napoleon was not invincible.

Similarly, generals Grant and Sheridan had triumphed in their Civil War battles, but in the immediate post-Civil War years they proved themselves to be less than skillful in handling the South. Sheridan’s frustration comes through in his statement that if he owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell. Because of their mailed-fist approach to force and their lack of empathy for legitimate Reconstruction grievances, Moyar says, resentment kept seething among the Southern elites.

On paper, our list of requirements may look perfectly self-evident, were it not for the fact that though occasionally paying lip service to them, traditionally, militaries have been actively discouraging some of these very virtues, thereby stymying the preferment of the best and the brightest. Back in the mid-1970s, the British psychologist Norman Dixon caused a stir with his book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by suggesting that the characteristics which are required in a war leader, i.e., an open mind and an ability to cope with uncertainty, tended to be the exact opposite of what he found among men tempted by an army career: These were often immature and insecure individuals drawn to the army’s offer of a well-ordered and controlled existence.

Thus, he viewed military organizations as conformist, anti-intellectual, and reactionary institutions, institutions that attract and then reinforce the very characteristics that will prove antithetical to competent military performance. He found it ironic that one of the most conservative of professions should be called on to engage in activities that require the very obverse of conservative mental traits.

Dixon denied having any subversive intent. His purpose was not to mock the profession, but to study failure and its originators because the price of their mistakes can be so terrifyingly high. For devotees of the military to take exception to the study of military incompetence is as unjustified as it would be for admirers of teeth to complain about a book on dental caries, he wrote.

Whereupon he proceeded to reel off a massive list of hopeless commanders: General Braddock in the War of Independence ordering his troops not to hide behinds tress when ambushed by French-led Indians, because seeking cover was an unprofessional and cowardly thing to do. Lord Elphinstone, who after the Kabul uprising naively accepted Afghan promises of free passage for his army out of the country and saw his entire force wiped out as a result. Or Lord Raglan, who with moon faced complacency let his troops rot in the Crimean winter for want of firewood, blankets, and greatcoats. In his whole life, Raglan had read only one book, The Count of Monte Cristo, which was of little use in the Crimea.

The American Civil War had already demonstrated that frontal attacks over open ground are a bad idea, but in the Second Boer War, we find generals Methuen and Buller foolishly ordering them against Boer marksmen hiding in narrow trenches, with disastrous consequences. At Colenso, Buller had forbidden his own troops to dig trenches and foxholes on aesthetic grounds, as this would disturb the pleasant terrain and soil their uniforms. Lord Roberts, who replaced Buller as commander-in-chief, castigated his fellow officers for obsessing with order and regularity while neglecting to encourage individuality and imagination.

That the Brits had learned little from their experience against the Boers became obvious in World War I, where attacks across open country were still the order of the day. The set procedure adhered to by Field Marshal Haig consisted of a massive bombardment, followed by a brief pause, followed by the infantry attack. This allowed the German machine gunners just enough time to emerge from their dugouts and greet the oncoming infantry. Not until 1917 did the Brits start experimenting with the rolling barrage.

Despite a bad start, to Dixon, World War II represented a major advance in military competence and in the determination not to spend men’s lives frivolously. Still, the war afforded plenty of examples of cockups, such as the Norwegian campaign, the failure to acquire sufficient intelligence before the German Ardennes offensive, or the ill-considered parachute drop at Arnhem. In