Sublime

Gates told the assembled cadets that the “greatest challenge facing your Army, and frankly, my main worry” was the “personnel bureaucracy that awaits . . . often cited as [one of the] primary factors causing promising officers to leave the Army just as they are best positioned to have a positive impact on the institution.

fullscrew: a full Corporal in the Army. grunt: an infantryman. mod plod: a nickname for an officer in the Ministry of Defence Police. club swinger: the PE trainer. fang farrier: a dentist. pusser’s issue: a label for any equipment issued by the Service, a corruption of the word ‘purser’. Anything done unimaginatively or ‘by the book’ is done in a p

If you met Lewis in the street, you might guess that he was a lawyer or a kindly geography teacher. In fact, he was one of the most efficiently deadly men in the British services.

Conner also interacted with his men on a daily basis as he made his rounds through the post on a horse named Old Bill. As Eisenhower put it, Conner “never abandoned the position—and no senior officer ever should—of being an instructor.” Once, Conner encountered some Puerto Rican soldiers on a work detail who did not know how to use a scythe to cut

At the start, the situation had been complicated by the fact that the so-called Cloak and Dagger boys, under the control of a mysterious Colonel Grand and the Foreign Office, were involved in this adventure. But it had now been decided that they should break away from the War Office and go off on their own. This left Colonel Holland with a very-muc

Eisenhower is partially to blame. On December 23, 1943, Ike told Marshall that he wanted only generals with combat experience for OVERLORD. Yet he assigned V Corps to his old friend Gee Gerow despite the fact that Gerow had none. And Gerow proceeded to make the mistakes of a greenhorn.

The distinguished British military writer Sir Max Hastings draws a compelling contrast between Ike and Monty. Eisenhower was less genial than he appeared, wrote Hastings. “Yet the Abilene boy who grew up in classically humble rural American circumstances, the poker-player who retained a lifelong enthusiasm for dime Western novels, always behaved in

“People, Ideas, and Hardware. ‘In that order!’ the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.”

The Special Night Squads, deployed in Palestine, included many of the features Gubbins advocated: intelligence, initiative, deception, and strong leadership.