Alec Bishop – How it really was

‘Hunting for Democracy’ (continued)

2 April 2013

I wrote previously on this blog about Colonel Eric Grimley, a British Kreis Resident Officer (KRO) in occupied Germany. He was a keen sportsman and wrote an article for the Shooting Times in 1965 on his earlier experiences, with the title ‘I hunted for democracy.’

Colonel Grimley was not alone in his belief that a shared interest in hunting encouraged mutual trust between British and Germans. General Gordon Macready, one of four British Regional Commissioners appointed in May 1946, responsible for all aspects of local and regional government in what is now the German Land, or region, of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), described in his memoirs how he worked together with the German ‘Prime Minister’ of his region, the social democrat Hinrich Wilhelm Kopf:

‘Co-operation with such a man was always pleasant, and on many occasions I enjoyed an excellent day’s sport with him. Inviting the Prime Minister to a shoot was always a matter of some delicacy. The control of all shooting and fishing had been taken over by the Allies, and no German was allowed to possess a firearm of any kind. Sporting guns and rifles had been collected immediately after the end of hostilities and in some localities the Allied military had senselessly destroyed piles of valuable sporting weapons by driving tanks over them. However, many remained and were kept under lock and key. When inviting Herr Kopf to a shoot, or accepting an invitation from him, I handed him one of his own guns which had fortunately been preserved, and gave him a ration of ammunition. The balance of the latter and the former were returned at the end of the shoot. We were glad when some months later, German high officials, estate owners and others who were vouched for by Military Government were allowed to resume possession of their guns.’

Hunting was a popular activity among many British army officers in the first half of the twentieth century. Here are two more examples from my researches among senior British army officers in occupied Germany:

General Alec Bishop wrote in his memoirs about life as a young British officer in India in the 1920s:

‘The big game shooting was first class, and included tiger, bison, wild boar, sambhur, cheetah and spotted deer. Serving officers could obtain … a licence entitling them to shoot one bison, one sambhur and four spotted deer in a season. The shooting of tiger and wild boar was not restricted … Life was very pleasant in those days for young officers serving in India. We were in fact a very privileged body of young men.’

General Brian Horrocks remembered his school holiday trips, before the First World War, to Gibraltar, where his father was serving as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps:

‘The Gibraltar of those days was a small boy’s paradise, much more so than today, as we had free access to Spain. Life consisted of bathing, hunting with the Calpe hounds, cricket matches, race meetings and children’s parties – all great fun.’

What did hunting symbolise and mean for men such as these, when they found themselves in occupied Germany at the end of the war? Here are a few suggestions:

– Hunting wild animals (perhaps paradoxically) symbolised peace. It was what army officers did during peace time, when they were not at war.
– Hunting, in occupied Germany, therefore meant that the war was over and they could (at last) return to activities they associated with life in peacetime.
– Inviting the former enemy to accompany them symbolised reconciliation as well as peace. It symbolised mutual trust.
– It showed they were now on the same side. Weapons confiscated earlier were reissued and used against a common enemy (the animals they hunted together).

But it was not that simple. British officers tried, on some occasions, to justify hunting as a way of solving the new problems they faced in peacetime. For example, I came across a brief article in the British Zone Review in November 1945, with the headline:

‘Troops are hunting game as a military operation’

‘Operation Butcher’…is probably the biggest hunt ever organised. It is designed to kill as much wild pig, deer and other livestock as possible and thus supplement the meagre larder of the Germans. It is being treated as a military operation.’

The war was over. Their job as army officers had been completed. But they now faced new problems, such as shortages of food among the German population, which they did not know how to solve. They had won the war but did not know how to win the peace. So they justified hunting on the basis that it alleviated food shortages. By calling it ‘Operation Butcher’ they went about it as if it were a military operation – trying to use the methods of war to solve the problems of peace.

Of course ‘Operation Butcher’ was only one of many things the British did in occupied Germany. The practical effect of hunting on alleviating food shortages was minimal. The solution which worked in the end was to increase the volume of food imports from the USA and Canada (see my earlier posts on Bread Rationing in Britain).

Then as now, hunting (at least in Britain) was an elite activity. It created mutual trust and reconciliation between some members of a British elite of senior army officers and German administrators. In some rural areas, as Colonel Grimley described in his article, this would extend to local farmers, but Germans living in poor conditions in the big cities were no more likely than British people at home to react favourably to stories of British officers out hunting, while they went short of food.

References

Lt-General Sir Gordon Macready, In the Wake of the Great (London: William Clowes and Sons Ltd, 1965)

Alec Bishop, Look Back with Pleasure (Beckley, Sussex: unpublished, 1971)

Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks, A Full Life (London: Leo Cooper, 1974)

British Zone Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, Saturday 10 November 1945

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop

19th May 2008

Last week I wrote about Major General Sir Alec Bishop and quoted some extracts from his unpublished memoirs Look Back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

It is intriguing how, when the war was over, career officers, such as General Bishop, approached their work of civil administration, in a country whose people they had fought against for years and defeated in battle.

Some, such as Field Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation in Germany, appeared to relish the task, whilst others, such as the second Military Governor, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Sholto Douglas, appeared to be deeply unhappy with it. Douglas, for example relates in his memoirs that it was "the unhappiest period of my entire official life" and towards the end of his year in office, in the summer of 1947, he "found all too often that the questions that came to my mind about what we were doing appeared to be insoluble … I found myself wondering quite often why I, an Air Force officer, should be trying to solve problems which should have been in the hands of the politicians."

Alec Bishop appeared to have no such doubts as to the ability to army officers to manage the tasks of civilian administration and was critical of the civilians who followed them. He related in his memoirs how:

"In the early days of the Occupation, the Services had, as already mentioned, entered whole heartedly into the tasks of helping the Germans to reconstruct their shattered and chaotic economy, and to build up a democratically elected system of government. The Labour Government which came to office in Britain after the 1945 election found it at first difficult to believe that Army officers would be capable of, or even interested in helping the Germans in such tasks as the reconstruction of political parties and trade unions, and underestimated the strong desire of those who had fought during the five years of war to turn to constructive work. It was therefore decided by the politicians that Military Government should be ‘civilianised’ as rapidly as possible. The speed with which this was carried out hampered the contribution which Britain was making to the reconstruction of German life."

According to Bishop, it was difficult to recruit suitably qualified staff to work in the civilian Control Commission:

"One outcome of the recruitment difficulties was that some of those who were appointed to the Control Commission were not suitable or qualified to fulfil the responsibilities entrusted to them"

With his strong commitment to the British Empire, he added: "If more of the highly experienced members of the I.C.S. [Indian Civil Service] who were retiring from India at that time could have been invited to come and serve for a spell with us in Germany, it would have solved many of our problems."

I wonder if he knew of an ironic comment attributed to Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, referring to the tendency of some of the British to treat Germany as if it were part of the British Empire, that "the only thing he regretted about India getting back its independence was that, no doubt, all the Indian Civil Service would turn up in Germany."

One of the most remarkable stories Bishop told occurred later, in June 1949, when he was regional commissioner for the heavily industrialised area of North Rhine Westphalia, and had to carry out the British policy of dismantling German factories in order to pay reparations to the Allies. The dismantling of weapons factories was not in dispute, but as Bishop said: "…the inclusion of plant which were not designed for the production of armaments aroused the most violent reaction from all sections of the German population."

In his memoirs he wrote that the crisis came to a head in June 1949, with opposition by workers to the dismantling of synthetic oil plants at Bergkamen and Dortmund. The troops responsible for maintaining security in these areas were Belgian, (though under Bishop’s command as Regional Commissioner), and were placed on alert.

Bishop decided to appeal directly to the German population and make a statement to be broadcast on the radio. In the statement, he said that the dismantling decision had been taken jointly by the American, British and French governments, and further resistance would result in the use of force, which he hoped and prayed would be unnecessary.

He told the same story, in more vivid terms than those he had used in his memoirs, in a BBC TV programme first broadcast in November 1981, not long before he died on 15th May 1984. (Zone of Occupation: Germany under the British, programme 4, Make Germany Pay). More recently, in September 2005, the same material was used in a BBC Radio programme introduced by Charles Wheeler (Germany: Misery to Miracle). In the programme, Alec Bishop could be heard saying:

"I thought that it was almost certain that force would have to be used, in other words that some of them would have to be shot. So I went to the Cologne broadcasting station and said I wished to take over broadcasting straight away and broadcast a message, which I did. In this message I said that I understood their feelings, but that if they insisted in opposing this by force, which had been ordained by the four allies, there was no doubt that they would get hurt and I said that there are other ways of dealing with this than using force. And I promise you if you will let up on this that I will do everything I can to find you alternative work And I said finally: don’t you think (in a voice still shaking with emotion) that you’ve killed enough of us, and we’ve killed enough of you during the war. And they called it off."

Major General Sir Alec Bishop

12th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop was one of the most senior British officers in Germany after the war. I’ve recently read his unpublished memoirs Look back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

General Bishop was posted to Germany in June 1945, one month after the end of the war, and left five and a half years later on New Year’s Eve 1950, which makes him one of the longer serving senior officers. His first position was head of the ‘Public Relations and Information Services Control’ division of British Military Government, generally known by its acronym, PRISC. In 1946 he was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to Sir Brian Robertson, then Deputy Military Governor, and from 1948 – 1950 he was Regional Commissioner for North Rhine Westphalia, by far the largest Land, or region, in the British Zone of Occupation.

His memoirs are easy to read with a wealth of interesting stories and anecdotes, which reinforce many of the themes I’ve written about in this blog. There are also a few surprises.

The first thing that surprised me was that nothing in his earlier life, as a career soldier, would appear to have prepared him for his role in Germany after the war, but it was a job he performed diligently and, apparently, with pleasure.

He was born in 1897, and so would have been 48 years old when he first went to Germany. In the preface to his memoirs, dated November 1971, he places himself firmly in the tradition of the British Empire:

"This book is about a life mostly spent in the service of the British Empire. Although it is fashionable at the present time to decry this period of our history, the author hopes that his story may make some contribution towards a better understanding of our successes and failures, and of the joys and sorrows which came our way."

At the age of 12 his father gave him a copy of Baden Powell’s book Scouting for Boys and he wrote that this book "excited my imagination, and I set about forming a Boy Scout Patrol among the other village boys, making myself, of course, the Patrol Leader!"

His father had not served in the army, (except as a local volunteer during the First World War), but "most of my forbears on my Mother’s side had been soldiers" dating back to the "Parliamentary Wars of the seventeenth century," and it was assumed that he too "would follow the profession of arms."

He gained a scholarship to Sandhurst in the autumn of 1914 and two years later was posted to Mesopotamia, (as Iraq was then known, at a time when it was still part of the Turkish empire), in charge of a company of 500 men. He wrote that the main reason the British were there was "to safeguard the supply of oil from the Persian oilfields."

In January 1917 he took part in the offensive which was to lead to the capture of Baghdad on 17th March. Shortly after he was lightly wounded in action, after a engagement in which the company commander was killed and he took over command. After three weeks in hospital he re-joined his regiment and again took over command of the company, still only 19 years old. By the end of the war, in November 1918, he had taken part in the defeat of the Turkish troops by the British army under General Allenby and fought his way through Palestine to Damascus.

Between the wars he spent some time in India and then became a staff officer in the Colonial Office in London, working for the Inspector General of the African Colonial Forces. During this time he travelled extensively in Africa, inspecting the troops, and summed up his time there as follows: "many of the people in Britain and in other countries who take a delight in condemning the period of British Colonial rule in Africa and Asia had no part in its creation and administration, nor did they experience the devotion and idealism of the British administrators. I feel no doubt that when an authoritative history of our Colonial Empire comes to be written, the part played by the British officials who administered it in establishing and maintaining law and order, in holding the interests of the people above all else and in educating and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course will become fully evident."

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in Tanganyika, where he organised the arrest of German settlers, which was done in response to concerns they would "form themselves into commandos and take to the bush." He spent the rest of the war in various positions, both in Africa and as a staff officer at the War Office in London. For the last three months of the war, he was Deputy Director of the Political Warfare Executive, (PWE), deputising for the director, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was ill at the time. Presumably it was this which led to him taking charge of Information Services in Germany. Apparently he had no choice in the matter, as his appointment was negotiated between his boss, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, and Sir William Strang, political adviser to the Military Governor, Field Marshal Montgomery.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the First Impressions of Germany after the war, of other British officers, diplomats, administrators and journalists. General Bishop writes in very similar terms:

Firstly shock at the scale of the devastation he found in Germany:

"It is very difficult for anyone who did not see the situation in Germany when the war came to an end to realise what it was like. The first impression was of the appalling destruction which had been caused by the Allies’ bombing. Very few towns had escaped wide-spread destruction. In some of the Ruhr towns such as Duisburg, over eighty per cent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, under which lay the bodies of thousands of casualties. Water mains and sewers were disrupted, the main railway and road bridges destroyed, and those who remained alive were sheltering in the cellars under the ruins. Even those factories and mines which had escaped destruction were closed. All normal movement and civilised living had been brought to a standstill. To add to the confusion, bands of released prisoners of war and displaced person who had been brought to Germany to provide labour for the factories and farms were roaming the countryside in search of food, and sometimes to pay off old scores. The machinery of Government and of Police at all levels had collapsed. The situation was summed up by Mr Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Secretary, in a speech he made in the House of Commons in July, 1945 when he described Germany as ‘without law, without a Constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal, without a singe institution to grapple with the situation."

Secondly, the unquestioned assumption that something had to be done about this, both to help the German people, and because this was in Britain’s own self-interest, to prevent the spread of both disease, and communism.

(I wonder how general this fear of communism was immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, and to what extent General Bishop was projecting back accepted wisdom at the time he was writing his memoirs in 1971, after years of the Cold War).

"No one who saw this situation could doubt that drastic measures would have to be taken by the Occupying Forces to help the German people to deal with it. Without vigorous help and support it was inevitable that epidemics would spread throughout the country, endangering the health of the Occupying Forces and of the whole of Western Europe. It was also clear that unless the German people were helped to transform the conditions then existing into a situation which would provide a bearable if modest standard of living it would be impossible to prevent the spread of communism throughout the whole country."

Thirdly, how difficult he felt it was, for those who were not there in person, to understand what conditions in Germany at the end of the war were really like:

"In the light of the ‘economic miracle’ which subsequently occurred in Western Germany, the situation described above must seem to belong to an age of fantasy; it was however very real in 1945."

And, finally, the remarkable way in which, according to Major Bishop, the British army changed from fighting the enemy one day, to helping the same people with the task of reconstruction the next:

"Our mainstay in those early days was the British Army of occupation, which had so recently been devoting all its energies to the defeat and destruction of the enemy, and now turned with an equal enthusiasm from the destruction of war to the reconstruction of peace. Commanders and men alike worked with great energy and enthusiasm at every task of reconstruction which came to their hand."