Professor John McManners' 'Fusilier'

A first-class autobiography and memoir of war

I have Brigadier Allan Mallinson to thank for introducing me to John ‘Jack’ McManners’ brilliant account of his war service, Fusilier, Recollections and Reflections, published in 2002. I was not acquainted with this book some five years later when I was writing my account of the battle of Tobruk, and I wish I had.

The book is beautifully written, as one would expect from a man who was to become a professor of history at the Universities of Tasmania, Sydney, Leicester and Oxford. His specialism was the history of the Church and other aspects of religious life in 18th century France. He was Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1984. After retirement he served as Fellow and Chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford from 1964 to 2001.

He died in 2006.

The book is a mixture of the prosaic and the comedic. McManners has a lovely eye for both the ordinary, in respect of events and personalities, and of the absurd. Its this which enables the book to rollick along. Its a pity it isn’t better known.

The son of a vicar of working class (mining) origins in County Durham, McManners joined the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in 1939 and served as a regimental officer in North Africa. His battalion, a Vickers medium machine-gun battalion, was a divisional asset in 1941-1943, fighting throughout the siege of Tobruk in 1941, surviving Rommel’s counterattack into Egypt in 1942 and then fighting through the slogging match of El Alamein.

Recruit training was a about introducing him to his regimental family, as much as it was about teaching him the finer points of drill, minor tactics or the Vickers machine-gun.

There were two subjects concerning morale and discipline on which our NCOs were eloquent. They drummed into us the simple essentials of regimental history — the Northumberland Fusiliers' battle honours, why we wear red and white roses in our hats on St George's Day, the meaning of the regimental motto, 'Quo fata vocant'. They did this with genuine solemnity — no four-letter adjectives, no bolshy asides. We were all serious about it, too: amid the discomforts and futilities of so much that we were doing, we wanted to belong, we were offering our loyalty to our local regiment as we gave our loyalty to Newcastle United football team (or Sunderland or Middlesbrough according to home address). In 1939 we didn't think of dying for our country, just about stopping Hitler; but we wanted to identify with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers; more and more, the regiment became a tangible intermediary for patriotism, even, in the last resort, something we might die for. Economising governments have trampled on local ties and the Northumberland Fusiliers are no more. If ever we need a large conscript army again, we will regret having destroyed the allegiances of local pride.

These earthy sons of mining stock got on well with their antipodean cousins in Tobruk.

The Australians regarded themselves as the best fighters in the world. They were. This was not by dint of discipline, to which they were recalcitrant; they were held together by 'mateship', refusing to let each other down. Nor was it by organisation; their deficiencies in this respect were atoned for by initiative and reckless improvisation. At night patrolling they had no equals. The Fusiliers got on well with them and were accepted as honorary Australians, not starchy Brits or stuck-up Poms. Later, when we were in defensive positions on the 'Blue Line', an Australian unit we had for our neighbours used to lift mines to get the explosives out to go fishing. At night they would send out a foraging party to raid the DID, the big ration dump, where tins of goodies we rarely saw were stashed away. After one of these raids, they would always send some one across to give us a share. But our regular officers found them hard to take. Dick Hensman never quite got over his encounter with a bronzed character in shorts and boots and nothing else except his identity tags on a tarry string round his neck, who offered to buy his cap badge: 'Name your price, Squire'.

Not one to leave the big issues to the big men, on the serious matter of military tactics, despite only being ‘a mere captain’, McManners was disappointed that Monty adopted his ‘straight up the middle, hey-diddle diddle’ approach at El Alamein. He thought that the 8th Army could have done better.

In these feverish weeks before the battle, our horizon of speculation was dominated by General Montgomery: for the first time, 8th Army had a brilliant self-publicist at its head. The officers' mess disliked him, and whatever the fusiliers thought they certainly had the dour north east hatred of show-offs. To them, Monty's Australian hat and many badges were a pain in the posterior. I was with Tubby at the assembly of officers (lieutenant colonel and above) when Monty told us his battle plan and ordered us to inform all our men. I can't remember more than a phrase or two but he made it clear that the days of 'Jock columns' and hit-and-run raids were over. And that he was not going to use the standard turning movement round the flanks. We would fight a set-piece old-fashioned battle driving through the enemy line at the coast (here, the key unit against us was the Italian 'Young Fascists': 'Soon, they won't be feeling as young as they were before'). In fact, in the actual battle he tried to break through on a wider front and had to add new drives when the original ones were held up. At the time, mere captain though I was, I disliked the plan, since it ignored the fact that for the first time in the Desert War we enjoyed air superiority. Relays of planes from the Egyptian airfields had just smashed Rommel's turning move from the south against our semicircle of dug-in tanks at Alam Halfa — Forbes and I had seen the area afterwards, littered with the tail fins of the bombs and burnt-out vehicles. Had we gone round the south with our massive air cover, the enemy might have been broken more easily than by the 'soldiers' battle' that was launched, with its renewed onslaughts on different axes of attack and its heavy losses.

A lovely anecdote recognised the superb mix of professional pragmatism that existed at the heart of a well-run infantry battalion. No starchy nonsense here that unnecessarily inconvenienced the troops. The visit of the King was a case in point.

There was one great day, doubly great for an adjutant, during our sojourn at Suani Ben Adam, the King's visit to Tripoli to pay tribute to his soldiers who had evicted Rommel from Africa. This was on 25 June 1943, with the whole 1st Armoured Division lining one side of the Suani—Aziza road while King George VI was driven slowly along, stopping to talk to each commanding officer. A disgruntled letter writer in the Daily Telegraph some years ago described how 'battle weary troops ordered to line the route for hours in the hot African sun' ignored the order to cheer and greeted the royal car 'with a deafening silence'. This may have been so with other units for all I know; if so, it just shows the superiority of the organisation of 1 RNF. The news of the royal visit reached us with a lot of bumph about timings, which Forbes dismissed with scepticism. We did our own thing. The day before I was at a meeting allocating the various stretches of road and, having noted our sector, I was on location long before dawn the next morning with the RSM and a task force. We pegged in the sand three parallel rows of string with knots at precise intervals, exactly calculated so that each man stood on his knot. Behind, among the palm trees, we marked out company rest areas, with tea-brewing stations and latrine points. Like every other unit we had to march into position hours beforehand, but once every man had been stationed on his knot, we fell out in the shade. A cloud of fragrant tobacco smoke floated agreeably among the palm fronds. We heard noise drawing nearer — at least some people were cheering — then Ken Rosenvinge who had been lurking in his jeep on a track parallel to the road, swept up: estimated time of arrival, fifteen minutes. Forbes waited judiciously, then nodded to the RSM. Without even a shouted order, the fusiliers glided into position like ghosts. I suppose we stood a whole ten minutes in that 'hot African sun'.

Brilliant. Perfect leadership from the CO of a battalion who knew what was important and what was not.