You may recall that Alan Brooke was frustrated by Alexander’s lack of strategic vision in the North African and Italian campaigns in the Second World War (Trials and Tribulations). Was he being unfair?
I turned to Nigel Nicolson’s 1973 biography Alex, The Life of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis. He sought Alex’s consent to the book in February 1969 and received it, planning to meet him for the first of many talks that autumn. Unfortunately Alex died in the summer. However, he had served under Alex in North Africa and most important of all is a good writer, interviewer and researcher.
But I digress. Is there any merit in Alan Brooke’s criticism? Nicolson admires Alex and makes much of his good qualities but being an honest writer makes this charmingly expressed assessment.
“Alexander’s was not a brilliant mind. It was too deeply nurtured in tradition, too stable for intellectual adventurousness. Some of his friends have remarked with affectionate admiration that all through his life he remained at heart a subaltern. His attitude was intensely practical. He could see the foreground very clearly, the middle-ground better than most, the distance only hazily. He was a pilot not a navigator.”
In 1926 Alex was thirty-four and a full Colonel but he had not been to Staff College. After the war he went to the Baltic, improbably commanding a German army against the Bolsheviks. When he got back he failed the entry exam. By 1926 he had really left it too late. The officers attending Staff College, in those days, were Captains and the instructors Majors or temporary Lieutenant-Colonels. However, he sat the exam again and passed. He was reduced to the rank of Major while attending the college and paid as such, which he thought mean. Among his instructors were Alan Brooke, Montgomery and Paget (later General Sir Bernard Paget) soldiers with whom he would be reunited in WW II.
Nicolson’s biography is most enjoyable and will, I hope, have more unexpected aperçus into Alex’s life as an unconventional soldier.
Wedding of Colonel The Hon. Harold R. Alexander (later Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis) to Lady Margaret Bingham, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Lucan, at the Guards’ Chapel Wellington Barracks, 14th October 1931.
In May 2002 we were staying with a cousin in Kent who was a neighbour of Nigel Nicolson’s. She invited him to view the azaleas which he said were better than those at Sissinghurst and I do not think he was merely being polite, though he was a very polite man.
I asked him to sign my copy of his biography of Earl Alexander and he told me he had interviewed various of Alexander’s generals, including Harding, Templer and Montgomery. They had all been critical of Alexander and said they had to tell him what to do.Montgomery had been “scathing”. Nigel himself said it was difficult to criticise a general who had won all his battles.
Nigel made it clear he thought Montgomery was” a horrible man”. Alexander was a gentleman; Montgomery, by implication, was not. Even Mountbatten, of all people, had commented to Nigel about Montgomery’s immense arrogance.
Naturally I found this fascinating and made a note shortly afterwards of what he said. I am glad of the opportunity to pass it on to a wider audience.
For what it is worth, I think one of Alexander’s principal skills was to deal with a lot of self opinionated, strong minded characters and to keep them working together, rather like Eisenhower.