These are the British

by Drew Middleton

When World War II ended, the "military families," which for generations had sent sons into the local county regiments, found that the second war, following the terrible blood-letting of the first, had almost wiped them out. Perhaps one son in three or four survived. And he, surveying the post-war Army and the post-war world, was disinclined to follow tradition and devote the remainder of his working life to the service. He might gladly have served another twenty years in the "old" Army with its horses and hunting, its tours of duty in India, its social importance. But now tanks and armored cars had replaced the horses, India was gone, and a bunch of shirking Bolshies from the Labor Party were running things. Above all, the two wars had swept away many of the private fortunes with which young officers eked out their miserable pay and allowances. So the survivor of the military family became a personnel manager in a Midlands factory, and elderly men said to elderly wives: "Do you know that for the first time since '91 there's no Fenwick serving with the Loamshires?"

But the Second World War also raised to officer rank thousands of young men whose social and educational background would not have been considered suitable for commissioned rank in peacetime. They came from the state's secondary schools, from technical colleges, or from the ranks, and they did remarkably well. Many of them are still serving as officers.

At the war's end many of them remained in the service. I was always interested during the maneuvers of the British Army of the Rhine to find how many of the young officers in the infantry and tank regiments had served in the ranks or had come to the Army with a sound education and a proletarian accent from one of the state schools. The technical branches of the Army, such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, draw an increasing number of their officers from the noncommissioned officers and from among the graduates of technical schools.

Nowhere is the middle class's ability to assimilate new groups and thus perpetuate itself more striking than in the Army. The officers from the ranks or from a state school assume the social coloration of the established officer class. Manners, accent, turns of phrase, and dress alter to conform with those of the old officer class. At present the new group is in a minority. There naturally are many members of the old officer class still serving. With the return of prosperity the upper middle class has resumed the tradition of sending its sons into the Army as a matter of course.

The general officers of the old school, which in this case means the old public school, vehemently defend the middle class as the only proper breeding-ground for service officers. They assert that only men from a certain class, by which they mean their own, and from a certain background, by which they mean a public school, will accept the responsibility and provide the leadership necessary in war. A general told me: "It's really very simple. Men who drop their h's won't follow an officer who also drops his h's. They don't think he'll take care of them as well as some young pipsqueak six months out of Eton but with the correct accent."

This will strike Americans as ridiculous. Certainly it ignores the high quality of leadership exercised by sergeant pilots of the RAF Bomber Command. But the general cannot be dismissed as unrealistic. The correct accent does count in Britain. The public-school boy has been trained to look after others. The idea of an officer class may offend us as contradictory to democratic equality. But it can and does work. Nowhere in the world is the officer caste better treated than in the proletarian society of Soviet Russia.

The Army and the Navy will continue to assimilate into the commissioned ranks of their services an increasing number of men of working-class origin. Science's invasion of the military art, long established but tremendously accelerated since 1945, makes it inevitable that the sharp young technician, "without an h to his name" as the middle class says, will continue to rise to commissioned rank. It also seems relatively certain that as he rises he will assume some of the social patina of the middle class.

The old conception of military leadership as a prerogative of the aristocracy died hard. It took the blunders and casualties of the Crimean War, the Boer War, and the First World War to kill it. During World War II the British services produced a large number of outstanding leaders: Alexander, Brooke, Dill, Montgomery, Slim, Wavell, Leese, Horrocks in the Army, Cunningham, Fraser, Vian, Mountbatten in the Navy, Portal, Harris, Tedder, Slessor, Bowhill in the RAF. With the exception of Alexander and Mountbatten, all were products of the old middle class. But in a changing Britain the authority of this class in the field it made particularly its own is being undermined both by new techniques of war and by the shifts in internal power which have occurred in Britain since 1940.

Those officers and ex-officers who recognize this are not greatly concerned for the survival of their class leadership; most are convinced that it will survive. They are concerned, however, lest in this rapidly changing century the traditions that their class perpetuated and, in some cases, changed into fetishes should perish. Regimental traditions, some of which stretch back three centuries into military history, will, they insist, be as important in the era of guided missiles as they were in the days of the matchlock.

It is argued that the sense of continuity, the conviction that men before them have faced perils as great and have survived and won is essential if Britain is to continue as a military power. The composition of the Army, Navy, and Air Force officer groups may change. But the new men will have to rely quite as much on the service and regimental traditions as did the men who fought at Minden, Waterloo, or Le Cateau.