One day in April 1941, Sir Hastings Ismay was discussing their mutual boss with a fellow general who considered him too subservient to the prime minister. “Pug” was impenitent, saying that he thought Churchill such a wonderful man that “if the PM came in and said he’d like to wipe his boots on me, I’d lie down and let him do it”.
From May 1940 to July 1945, although Ismay held several job titles, he was most importantly Churchill’s military chief of staff. Born in 1887, he did an apprenticeship as an Indian army cavalryman and spent most of his subsequent career as a functionary, first on the prewar Committee of Imperial Defence, then with Churchill; in 1947 as the viceroy Lord Mountbatten’s chief of staff through the partition of India; and finally as the first secretary-general of Nato (1952-57).
Knighted in 1940, Ismay was a great public servant, driven by an almost obsessive sense of duty. Unlike many British grandees, especially the army chief Alan Brooke, he understood the vital importance of getting on with the Americans and never condescended to them. His supposed resemblance to a certain sort of dog earned him his affectionate nickname at a young age.
He handled Churchill brilliantly, enduring his irrationality, sometimes abuse, at the cost of several breakdowns precipitated by exhaustion. The general himself described his experience as well as any man could, in a 1944 letter to his half-American wife, at a time when he was being battered by the service chiefs of staff as well as by Britain’s leader:
“Things have been about as difficult, and delicate, as they have ever been. Whatever job the post-war years have in store for me, nothing will induce me to continue to be a go-between, and a mirror of other people’s opinions, or to be vested with a certain amount of authority but no executive responsibility. It has been a very hard five years, and the hardest part has been the necessity of keeping my ‘place’ and my temper, and the prohibition against forming my own view, and fighting my own battles.”
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At one point he told his secretary: “I can’t take any more of this” — Churchill’s intemperance, that is — “I’ve told the prime minister I am going to resign.” He withdrew his letter, of course, and “the Master” said sorry — sort of. But his role as peacemaker, especially between British and American warlords, was never less than stressful. Ismay became the British soldier whom Eisenhower trusted more than any other, as is testified by their many exchanges of personal letters.
John Kiszely, a distinguished soldier, has performed an important service by writing this book, which should resurrect the reputation of Ismay, today almost forgotten, as one of the critical figures in the British war machine. His emollience caused Churchill more than once to shout “appeaser!” at him. The Tory MP Brendan Bracken described Ismay as “Winston’s nannie”, and once sought to silence him by saying: “Shut up, you chutney-eating general!”
The prime minister spent more time alone with Ismay than with any other person outside his family, and the general went to his grave without disclosing much of what was said between the two. He told Harold Nicolson of Churchill: “When things are going well, he is good; when things are going badly, he is superb; but when things are going half-well, he is hell on earth.”
When VE Day came King George VI joked that there should be a photograph of himself, Ismay and the cabinet secretary Lord Bridges, as the only three important British figures who had kept their jobs since 1939. Churchill said to his chief of staff as he left Downing Street after his election defeat, “We’ve had a damn good gallop for five and a half years,” but Ismay’s verdict might have been more equivocal.
For all the general’s workaholic habits, he was no ascetic. Intensely clubbable, he loved food, wine, racing and parties. Rich through his wife, he owned a substantial estate and took his own butler to Paris for the Nato job. There is speculation that he conducted an affair with his wartime personal assistant Joan Bright, who for some time lodged in his London flat after being bombed out of her own. There is no evidence, however, beyond affectionate letters: “God bless you, darling … Much love Pug.”
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He was prone to occasional lapses of judgment, of which the most notable was a proposal, supposedly approved by Churchill, that he should parachute into France during the 1940 German blitzkrieg and fight with the British Army. Mature reflection caused him to drop this crazy notion. Kiszely also suggests that Ismay may have erred in failing to ring alarm bells about Mountbatten’s disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942.
A fascinating part of this biography addresses the general’s key role behind Mountbatten, in managing Indian independence. He went into the job with an exaggerated respect for the viceroy’s powers, and also perhaps for his own. There was never a good, bloodless way for the British to quit India. The two men could claim no higher achievement than a least bad exit, without much honour or glory.
Ismay, like many others, learnt that Mountbatten’s conceit considerably exceeded his intelligence, although his showmanship had real value. He recoiled from Mountbatten’s curiously callous insouciance in the face of communal violence, writing to his wife: “There is human misery on a colossal scale around me — and millions are bereaved, destitute, homeless and worst of all desperately anxious and almost hopeless about their future.” And it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry on reading that while the chief of staff was working 17 hours a day on the partition of India, Churchill blithely dispatched to him for correction and comment drafts of the first volume of his memoirs. His sleepwalking former aide somehow made time to comply.
The author inflicts one disappointment on readers, by asserting here that Ismay, as secretary-general of Nato, never delivered the famous line attributed to him — that the organisation’s job was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. Nonetheless the general made a remarkable contribution to transforming the Nato treaty into a working military alliance.
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Britain was fortunate to have such men as Ismay in the wartime corridors of power, and it is tragic that they exist no longer. A considerable part of his success must have derived from decades of experience close to the summits of power, such as no modern general or bureaucrat can acquire. Moreover, almost all 21st-century politicians treat officials with an indifference trending towards contempt, which drives out men and women of quality, and cripples the effective operation of government.
Ismay died in 1965 loaded with honours having seldom, if ever, committed an indiscretion. He was not gifted with the highest intelligence — Kiszely writes that “there was much about Ismay that was quite ordinary”. But he had a calm common sense and profound decency that made him a great servant of the Greatest Englishman.
Max Hastings’ latest book is Operation Biting: The 1942 Parachute Assault to Capture Hitler’s Radar (William Collins, £25, pp384)
General Hastings “Pug” Ismay: Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat by John Kiszely (Hurst, £35, pp424). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
