I’ve just learnt that the new German government is preparing to put a former Bundeswehr general (he used to command a tank brigade) in charge of the country’s COVID-19 Crisis Staff. As a fairly well known military historian, it has been my good (or bad?) fortune to meet quite some generals in many of the world’s countries where I was invited to speak. Germany included. So when my editor, Andreas Rosenfelder, asked me to do a short article about generals—a sort of Jungian analysis of the architype, I suppose—I jumped at the opportunity.
Some members of the species I met were polite, thoughtful, soft-spoken and possessed of a fine sense of humor. As, for example, the late Colin Powell, who during the first Gulf War served as Chief of the Joint Chief of Staffs and later became President Bush Jr.’s secretary of state, did. Others, who in this essay will remain unnamed, were unpleasant and even offensive. At least one was a real bastard. Perhaps that was because, at the time we met, he had just been told that, contrary to his expectations, the post he was then holding would be his last. Too much of a roughneck, not sufficiently good as a diplomat, people said. Understandably, he was in a bad mood.
To generalize from this, on day X you are a great man. With thousands and even tens of thousands of soldiers obeying your orders and a staff that laughs at every joke you make. One general told me that, before he was promoted, he did not know what a good sense of humor he had. If you live on base, on day X+1 everyone can watch you as, having retired, you are evicted from your nice government-owned quarters. Trailed by your wife, you find yourself carrying your belongings to a waiting van. Some onlookers, especially those who took your place, enjoy the spectacle. But for you it is not fun.
Generals I met tended to have several things in common. First, they had big egos—they have to. Second, many of them look down on their civilian opposite numbers. In Germany in the bad old days before 1945, General Staff officers sometimes referred to the foreign ministry as The Idiot House. Not always without reason, I should add. One former Israeli general, a bona fide genius in fields such as math, computers and operations research, told me more or less the same about the Knesset of which, following his retirement, he was briefly a member. Only to run for his life as soon as he could.
Third, though there are exceptions (with, at their head, Helmut von Moltke Sr.) very few generals are scholarly types. I even suspect that the reason why some of them embarked on a military career was precisely because they thought, often mistakenly, that it would not involve them in much reading and writing. Some went so far as to express their contempt for scribblers such as myself. But not all. I vividly remember an evening I spent at Camberley, England, the base where the British Army’s Staff College was located. It being dark and foggy, like some figure out of a Brothers Grimm tale I lost my way. Blindly, I wandered about the base until I saw a light. I went up, and knocked at the door. It opened and I found myself standing in front of the commander of the Army’s officer education system, General Sir Charles Waters.
It was winter and, instead of shoes, he was wearing white socks. He recognized me and asked me to come in. He sat me down, gave me a glass of sherry, and pointed to the eight books he was reading at the same time—if memory serves me right, most of them about nonmilitary subjects. Then he told me that his next job would be that of commander in chief, British Army, Northern Ireland (I think this was in 1989, and the struggle with the IRA terrorists was still ongoing). In this post, he said, he would try to make sure that as few people as possible would die. On both sides. I thought then, and think now, that it was a very sensible approach indeed. As became clear some years later when, during the watch of another British general I knew, Sir Rupert Smith, a peace agreement was signed.
Fourth, given how rapidly complex modern technology changes, generals are used—as they have to be–to dealing with things they do not understand. Is that the reason why Germany’s new government is considering General Carsten Breuer for the job? Makes you wonder.
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There are also a few female generals. A close friend of mine, himself a former general, prefers them to male ones. Why? Because some of them have nice legs. Much better than beer bellies, he says
Here are some other considerations that people may find interesting.
First, generals are used to move from one job to another (starting with Napoleon, in all modern armies, officers, to gain promotion, are rotated between commanding units, staff work, and training).
Second, they tend to be good organizers. As, for example, Leslie Groves, the general who ran the Manhattan Project, was.
Third, they tend to be very hard workers. As a rule modern armies, with the American one at their head, do not tolerate layabouts. If there is no work to be done, sure as hell they will create it. Neither Kutusov, who commanded the Tsar’s armies against Napoleon in 1812, nor “Pere” Joffre, who saved France from the 1914 German invasion, would have made it today.
Fourth generals, assigned to a civilian job, may do very well. As, for example, Dwight Eisenhower did. Or take two of my own country’s generals, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. Rabin played a crucial part in the great Israeli victory of June 1967; later he became a good prime minister. Sharon was perhaps the greatest warrior Israel ever produced, and he too turned out to be a good and courageous prime minister. By contrast Ehud Barak, a protégé of Rabin’s and a superb soldier (special forces), made a less than mediocre one.
Finally, never forget that generals have the hardest job of all. To wit, sending men to their death. America’s general George Patton was not exactly known for his delicate feelings. Yet on one occasion, visiting the wounded in hospital, he broke down and said that, if only he had been a better general, these poor people would not have been where they were. Even if the story is fake, which it may well be, still it shows what being a general is really like.
Briefly, generals are a tribe of their own. There is no saying what a general may do; in that respect they are much like the rest of us. To repeat, I do not know why the German Government chose General Breuer for the job. So all I can say is, good luck.