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Blame It on Matron

Usually, when I discover a second-hand bookshop, I confine my browsing to one or two familiar categories. Military history is not one of them, nor is psychology. So it was by sheer fluke that I recently came upon Norman Dixon’s book among tottering piles of volumes. The title, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, jumped out at me. Who could resist it?

On the way home I wondered why I had found the title so appealing, and why I had felt a shiver of schadenfreude as I handed over my fiver.

Like all children who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, I was taught that our side could do no wrong. At school we read comic strips in which square-jawed Spitfire pilots sent Messerschmitts spinning to earth in flames. Black-faced British commandos burst into enemy bunkers where German officers with contorted faces had time only to yell ‘Donner und Blitzen! ’ before being mown down by tommy-guns. We were thrilled, too, to discover that our gloomy old Classics master had been at the siege of Kut in 1915. He had survived, he told us, by eating rats and reading Homer’s Iliad – in Greek, of course.

My favourite picture book was Glorious Battles of English History. Victories were glorious, but defeats were often more glorious still. In our family – military on both sides, with more than its quota of wounded, dead and decorated heroes – a phrase like ‘military incompetence’ was not just an oxymoron, it was an incendiary device. To suggest that Singapore, Dresden or Hiroshima might have been mistakes was an impertinence bordering on treason. How could I talk, when I hadn’t been there? I began to feel ashamed that I had not managed myself to go over the top at Passchendaele, and I worried how I would have acquitted myself. ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for

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Usually, when I discover a second-hand bookshop, I confine my browsing to one or two familiar categories. Military history is not one of them, nor is psychology. So it was by sheer fluke that I recently came upon Norman Dixon’s book among tottering piles of volumes. The title, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, jumped out at me. Who could resist it?

On the way home I wondered why I had found the title so appealing, and why I had felt a shiver of schadenfreude as I handed over my fiver. Like all children who grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, I was taught that our side could do no wrong. At school we read comic strips in which square-jawed Spitfire pilots sent Messerschmitts spinning to earth in flames. Black-faced British commandos burst into enemy bunkers where German officers with contorted faces had time only to yell ‘Donner und Blitzen! ’ before being mown down by tommy-guns. We were thrilled, too, to discover that our gloomy old Classics master had been at the siege of Kut in 1915. He had survived, he told us, by eating rats and reading Homer’s Iliad – in Greek, of course. My favourite picture book was Glorious Battles of English History. Victories were glorious, but defeats were often more glorious still. In our family – military on both sides, with more than its quota of wounded, dead and decorated heroes – a phrase like ‘military incompetence’ was not just an oxymoron, it was an incendiary device. To suggest that Singapore, Dresden or Hiroshima might have been mistakes was an impertinence bordering on treason. How could I talk, when I hadn’t been there? I began to feel ashamed that I had not managed myself to go over the top at Passchendaele, and I worried how I would have acquitted myself. ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ said Samuel Johnson. Too right. I developed a defensive antipathy to all things military. Brasso and Blanco became my special hates. I took refuge in the belief that most military leaders – apart, of course, from the dashing Alexander of Macedon – were bull-headed and stupid, and that anyone with brains would give the army a wide berth. Then, at my grandmother’s house, I was introduced to General Sir Richard O’Connor. He was short and thoughtful, and he talked to me as if I were an equal. Overnight, my prejudices underwent a savage revision. Norman Dixon’s book, bought on impulse, was a revelation. It contained a whole chapter on the fiasco of Kut, more than justifying my old teacher’s lugubrious mien. Another analysed, in pages terrible to read, the fall of Singapore. And there were two laudatory mentions of my grandmother’s friend General O’Connor, confirming his reputation as one of the great commanders of his time. Dixon’s theme is the psychological battleground over which soldiers (and, a fortiori, generals) must fight. Incompetence, Dixon says, is the result of an inability to manage the inner conflict between the dictates of conscience and the need to show real aggression when you are subjected to extreme outside pressure, the ‘fog of war’. Prey to their own anxieties, bad commanders become too cautious or not cautious enough. They strike out blindly, or they freeze. His book begins by describing famous military blunders, from the Crimean War (‘the worst managed campaign in British military history’) to Arnhem. Dixon was struck by the similarity of the apparently senseless actions – or inactions – of the men in charge. From this ‘hairline crack’ he developed a hypothesis based on the conviction that something deeper than bad judgement, or bad luck, was at work. Why did a man as charming and intelligent as Major-General Sir Charles Townshend show such wanton disregard for his men’s lives? Nearly 40,000 men died as a result of his foray through Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) which ended at the siege of Kut. Why, faced with insurrection in Kabul in 1842, did the courteous Major-General Elphinstone do nothing for so long that his eventual retreat ensured the death by frostbite or at the hands of Afghan tribesmen of almost his entire force of 4,500 and thousands more camp followers? At the fall of Singapore in 1942 nearly 140,000 men were killed or captured and vast amounts of matériel were lost. Why did the commander, the ‘brilliant’ Lieutenant-General Percival, ignore the pleas of subordinates and superiors to prepare a defence against the approaching Japanese army, insisting that defence would be ‘bad for the morale of troops and civilians’? Dixon knows something of the military mind: he was ten years in the Royal Engineers, where he worked in bomb disposal and was wounded, ‘largely due to my own incompetence’. Leaving the army in 1950, he took up psychology and rose to become Professor of Psychology at University College, London. The aim of his book is to scotch the idea that military incompetence is due to stupidity – the ‘bloody fool’ theory. Bad generals are not stupid, he says. What they lack is imagination, flexibility and independence of mind. A closer inspection of blundering commanders reveals men of precarious self-esteem, jealous, obstinate, dishonest, vain, subservient and short on moral courage – all symptoms of the ‘weak ego’. General Percival, says Dixon, may have been unsure of his masculinity and, like the factory worker who refuses to wear ear plugs, refused to take defensive measures because defence is not ‘manly’; it was not the morale of his troops that was imperilled, but Percival’s own. These traits are typical of the ‘authoritarian’ personality. Authoritarians, Dixon explains, are autocrats gone wrong. Although giving every appearance of being in command, they operate out of weakness, not strength. And what makes an authoritarian? Why, potty training, of course. At this point, I confess, I thought the author had lost the plot. But I was in too deep to pull back. The product of strict mothers and status-conscious fathers, authoritarians are frigid, frustrated, self-absorbed, superstitious and racist. At prep school the officer classes would be deprived of their (dominating) mothers, and subjected to the ministrations of the headmaster with his cane, and of the matron with her clipboard charting the morning’s bowel movement. (Anyone remember?) What better training for the anal retentive! At public school they would be immersed in militarism: the emphasis on sport and muscular Christianity, on amateurism and the hierarchy, on absolute obedience. Only a small minority of incompetents make it to the top. The big question is how they get there. In the old days, patronage might have accounted for it. Today, a more subtle answer is required, and Dixon provides it. Authoritarians are naturally attracted to the armed forces. It is the place they feel safest. Drill and ceremonial, obsessive cleaning and polishing, strict authority – ‘bull’, in short – serve the military purpose of making fighting forces cohesive. But militarism also magnifies the weaknesses of weak egos, and favours the type. What is more, these weak egos are driven to seek promotion – not by a healthy wish to succeed but by a neurotic compulsion to bolster self-esteem. They are like people who climb mountains to cure a fear of heights. And the result is the same: above a certain level they are reduced to frozen immobility. Outrageously, but intriguingly, Dixon draws on the personalities of Nazi monsters to illustrate his theme. He finds in Townshend of Kut the same kind of vanity as in Hermann Goering. The private obsessions of Field Marshal Lord Haig resembled those of Heinrich Himmler: both had timetable mania and both suffered psychosomatic disorders. Both men presided over mass slaughter, one ‘legitimately’ on the battlefield, the other criminally in the gas ovens. You would not guess from all this that Dixon is a witty writer. But he has a nice line in irony, and he writes well. Describing the army’s painful conversion from horses to tanks, he notes that Field Marshal Montgomery-Massingberd, chief of the Imperial General Staff, responded to Hitler’s rearmament in the 1930s by indenting for a tenfold increase in the budget for motor fuel – and for the same multiple increase in the (much bigger) budget for hay. Since its publication in 1976 Dixon’s book has been quoted by management gurus and got on to the reading lists of bodies such as the Royal Air Force’s leadership training centre. But how will his theory stand up in future? Dixon predicted that military blunders would continue to occur, even though the cost of war – not least the cost of weaponry – would keep going up, and the price of military failure with it. Military thinking might have become more sophisticated, but there are more niches now for incompetents to fill as staffs become larger and battlefield control more remote. War has changed, too. One kind of personality is needed to manage nuclear deterrence, quite another to run military peacekeeping missions among civilians, as Iraq today reminds us. Wars run by committees of politicians and generals are particularly likely to go wrong, according to Dixon. Committees, he says, foster an illusion of invulnerability, under-estimation of the enemy, disregard of contradictory intelligence, and an unquestioned belief in the morality of the group which allows its members to ‘overlook the ethical consequences of their decision’. Sounds familiar? It is possible that Dixon, like Freud, over-elaborated his theory in order to make it fit, and I suspect there is a certain amount of circular reasoning. But, as with Freud, the real meat is in the case studies. For myself, I was pleased to see my youthful distrust of militarism so thoroughly vindicated. But the further I read, the less smug I felt. By the time I had finished this fascinating book, I was finding my own character defects on every page. I was positively psycho-hypochondriac. Now at least I know that, even if I might not actually have run away, I would most certainly not have made a general. Dixon, disarming to the end, says the same of himself. Hats off to him!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Christian Tyler 2006


About the contributor

As a writer of non-fiction, Christian Tyler has been rude about psychoanalysis for most of his career. Now he is having to eat his words: he is attempting to write a novel.

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