The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (50 page)

For all his formidable reputation, he could be a puckish sort—particularly when discussing his origins. Sometimes he would insist he was Devonshire English (which was true). At others, he would claim to be Irish, or at least Anglo-Irish (which was also true), and certainly he always took an especial interest in Irish regiments. Templer once told Nikita Krushchev that while the Irish were Catholics who hated Protestant Englishmen, he
was a Protestant Irishman who was chief of the British Imperial General Staff. In truth he was the English-born son of an Anglo-Irish father who served in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Both sides of his family had Anglo-Irish blood and military traditions.

He was dispatched to boarding school at ten, was an enthusiastic boy scout (he would later try to win the hearts and minds of young Malays with scouting), and was in the Officer Training Corps in Wellington College. He loved OTC but loathed the school—he later refused to become its governor—and in comparison a life in the trenches seemed a jolly prospect. He took an appointment at Sandhurst, which had dramatically shortened its training program to six months; “nobody failed at that stage of the First World War [1916] because we were so badly needed as cannon fodder.”
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A month before he was eighteen, he was a second lieutenant with the Royal Irish Fusiliers, though he wouldn't be posted to France until he was nineteen.

He survived the war, had his share of modest adventures, including retrieving a drunken Irishman from no man's land, and when he was stricken with diphtheria in March 1918, he cleverly switched the tag on his toe so that he was sent to “American Ladies Hospital” rather than a dreary old field hospital. Templer liked telling such stories against himself (including how he lasted only ten days as an intelligence officer) and treated his First World War experiences with grim humor. But one image in particular—of panicked, pitifully whinnying, “wounded horses . . . tripping over barbed wire, and treading on their own guts”
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—gave him nightmares until the day he died.

After the war he was sent on anti-Bolshevik duty with the Royal Irish Fusiliers in Persia, where he had a mostly merry time except for an altercation with a hot-headed Persian that left him with a broken collar bone (badly set by a drunken doctor). Then it was on to Mesopotamia for a bit of counterinsurgency, which, he recalled later, had all the excitement of war with little of the danger. His tour of the Middle East ended with rather unpleasant constabulary duties—he had to witness hangings—in Egypt.

His regiment survived the creation of the Irish Free State, and back in England he became an accomplished sportsman—not just with horse and gun (he was a champion shooter and bayonet fighter), but as a hurdler for the army track team, which in due course led to his winning a spot on the 1924 British Olympic team, though he ended up as a reserve hurdler and did not run. He enjoyed an active social life (the Irishman in him liked having a good time) though he was a stickler about regimental history, traditions, form and uniform (he was that sort too), until his battalion of Fusiliers was reposted to Egypt. Here too, his duties were rather leisurely; so leisurely that he took leave to get married in 1926, before returning to his rounds of polo, shooting, and drinks (and, to be fair, maneuvers and courses, including one in aerial reconnaissance). A polo injury immobilized him long enough to pass the exams for Staff College.

He entered the college in 1928. It was a two-year course and he was the youngest in his class. Among his instructors was future field marshal Bernard Montgomery. When he graduated he joined a new regiment, the Loyals, as it was the only way for him to be promoted to captain. He performed the usual rounds of a young officer—including encountering a bête noir commanding officer who wanted him retired for chronic ill health (for all his athleticism, Templer was accident- and sickness-prone)—until in 1935 he was posted to Palestine. He thought it an unfortunate, filthy, overtaxed wasteland. He was unimpressed by the Jewish settlers, though the Zionists
were rather more impressed with him, hoping at one point to convince him to become Chief of Staff of a Jewish army. Still, he found patrolling against Arab terrorists quite fun, even if he only spent about six months doing it before being ordered back to Old Blighty.

Templer's most important posting in the years leading up to the Second World War was as an intelligence officer in the War Office. It was a job that mixed cocktail diplomacy with the building of an intelligence network—duties he carried into France with the British Expeditionary Force in September 1939, where he proved equally adept at confusing the Germans about British troop movements and helping British agents—who might be exposed after the German blitzkrieg through Belgium, Holland, and France—to escape. In 1940, he was evacuated at Dunkirk and set the task of raising the 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment.

Templer spent much of 1940–43 organizing England's defenses against a German invasion and rising to become the youngest lieutenant-general in the army. All that was very well, but he wanted a field command where he could see action. In the summer of 1943, he got it with command of the First Division of the British Army, then in North Africa, soon to be transferred to Italy. Italy was a slogging campaign, and Templer—who was highly regarded for his informative, lively, to-the-point briefings—saw plenty of fighting at Monte Camino and Anzio. The fighting men knew he was there, as he made a point of lightning visits to the units under his command. He might have inspired his men, but he was less inspired by them, concluding that the British soldier of the First World War was made of sterner stuff than the British soldier of the Second. He was a demanding officer, took an interest in everything—from church parades to tactics—kept up the standards of an officer and a gentleman by never talking shop in the mess, and got things done through his combination of bon vivant diplomacy and iron-hard character. He proved the last quality when his back was broken: On 5 August 1944, he was driving a jeep (he usually insisted on driving himself), when a truck carrying a piano swerved off the road and into a land mine, shooting a wheel (and chunks of piano) into Templer's back, smashing him against the steering wheel. He was invalided to England and didn't emerge from his plaster until November.

Though not yet cleared for anything more taxing than administrative duties, he managed to land a job with the SOE, Special Operations Executive, which had the remit to, in Churchill's famous words, “set Europe ablaze”
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through its saboteurs. But whatever its excitements—Templer expanded its operations into Germany—he wanted a return to the field.
Instead, he was posted to Montgomery's headquarters as director of civil affairs and military government. Rather than leading troops into battle, he was charged with governing the British-occupied zone of Germany, which, if anything, was a more daunting responsibility: requiring him to create order out of chaos, an economy out of ruins, and a ready supply of food to stave off famine. Templer managed it, and later confessed it “was more exciting than commanding a division in battle.”
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He also gained notoriety as the man in charge when the British sacked future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer as mayor of Cologne.

Templer's reward for a job well done in Germany was to be appointed, in succession: director of Military Intelligence; vice chief of the Imperial General Staff (first under Montgomery, then under General Sir William Slim, hero of the Burma Campaign); and general officer commanding Eastern Command. Churchill, however, gave him the appointment that made his name: in 1952 Templer became High Commissioner of Malaya. The previous high commissioner had been assassinated, and the colony was in the throes of a Communist insurrection. Templer's job was to defeat the Communists and guide Malaya to a pro-Western (especially pro-British, given British economic interests in the rubber plantations and tin mines) independence. “If you pull it off,” Churchill told him, “it will be a great feat.”
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In his two years in the Malayan Federation Templer laid the groundwork for victory. His method was to make surprise inspections and send a rocket up dozy performers. He was direct, energetic, and—to his enemies—rude, ready not only to ask the awkward question but to demand an immediate righting of obvious shortcomings. He liked going out and seeing things himself and even accompanied a platoon of Gurkhas on a jungle patrol. If he ever found troops at target practice, he joined in (he was a crack shot).

On the military side, he was an innovator in the use of helicopters for jungle warfare. On the political side, he believed his service in Palestine and his Anglo-Irish background helped, giving him insight into the difficulties of uniting a country divided by race and religion—though the Malay, Chinese, Indian Tamil, aboriginal, British, Eurasian, and Iban headhunter populations offered rather more exotic contrasts (Templer used the Ibans as military scouts and later formed them into a ranger regiment to “out-bandit the bandits”
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).

Such diversity sometimes impinged on his ability to chew out the natives effectively; as when he chastised villagers whose home guard had collapsed, telling them they were a weak lot of bastards and that they would find he was an even bigger bastard—which in the words of his translator came out that Templer's father, like the villagers' fathers, had not been married to his mother when he was born.

Templer worked on trying to integrate the police and military forces, and he informed the British residents of Malaya that they had an especial duty to do volunteer work and demonstrate their long-term stakes in the country. His background in intelligence—crucial to penetrating and disrupting the Communist cadres—was useful as well.

Templer was a hard man and knew that hard military measures had to be taken: the Communists had to be hammered. But he also knew that winning Malayan “hearts and minds”—not just among waverers, but with propaganda directed at the insurgents themselves—was essential if the insurgency was to be well and truly doused. His “hearts and minds” campaign had the usual ambitious and plentiful programs of public uplift and good works in schools, “new villages,” and many other ventures. It included his wife's work setting up Women's Institutes (she even taught herself Malay) and writing a collection of Malayan fables after Templer complained that Malayan children had no fairy stories. Then there was his own leadership of the Malayan scouting movement. But his hearts and minds campaign was no namby-pamby affair—it couldn't be with Templer in charge, as witnessed when he tore into the residents of a town where a district officer, an engineer, and several policemen had been ambushed and killed while trying to repair the town's water supply: