Francis Wilfred de Guingand, always known as Freddie, was born in London on 28 February 1900 into a family which had strong French roots, but which had become thoroughly English. His father was in the business of the manufacture and sale of briar pipes, and the family was comfortably off. This allowed Freddie to be privately educated at Ampleforth, where he developed a love of sailing, encouraged by his father, who was an enthusiastic yachtsman. Freddie’s first choice of career was thus, unsurprisingly, the Royal Navy. The medical examination, however, ruined his hopes when it was discovered that he was colour blind, so he turned to the Army instead. He entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, as a cadet in 1918, passing in fifteenth, which said something for his intellect. His choice of regiment was the West Yorkshires, on the strength of their sponsoring the OTC at Ampleforth. He was commissioned on 17 December 1919 and immediately joined the second battalion in India.
Freddie did not enjoy his early days as a regimental officer, partly because cantonment life lacked excitement and partly because he suffered the first occurrence of a medical condition which was to be a continuing problem, gallstones. By 1922 he was seriously ill and was invalided home, where the initial prognosis for his career in the Army was poor. However, he made a good recovery and was able to rejoin his battalion, which was by then in Ireland, in the closing year of ‘the Troubles’. It was whilst he was there that he first became aware of Brevet Major Bernard Montgomery, Brigade Major of 17 (Cork) Brigade, although the two men did not meet. This situation was remedied shortly afterwards, when Freddie was posted to the regimental depot at York, where his job was to train NCOs. As Monty wrote many years later:
In 1922 I was appointed GSO2 to the 49th (West Yorkshire) Division of the Territorial Army, i.e. senior G.S. officer since in those days a T.A. Division was not allowed a GSO1. The Div. H.Q. was at York, and, being a bachelor, I lived in the depot of the West Yorkshires in Fulford Barracks. Freddie was a 2nd Lieutenant on the Depot strength, and was O i/c the Training Cadre. I quickly spotted him as a very intelligent young officer, and made use of him and his Cadre to help me with the T.A Division by giving demonstrations of platoon tactics.
His life in those days revolved around wine, women, and gambling – in all of which he excelled! I reckon he was about 22; I was a Captain (Bt. Major) and about 35. We became great friends. We played a lot of golf together, and bridge most evenings in the Mess.
When I saw his potentialities, I urged him to work for the staff college – or rather to begin a serious study of his profession, and to read widely, because he was too young then to take the exam.1
Monty and Freddie both moved on in 1925, Monty to command a battalion of his own regiment, Freddie to return to his battalion, albeit only for a short time. In early 1926 he volunteered to join the King’s African Rifles on secondment. Such an opportunity, popularly known as ‘bushwhacking’, was attractive to officers with little hope of fast promotion in the inter-war years and expectations of a relatively unexciting life in one of the two battalions of their regiment, in the UK receiving and training recruits or overseas in some dreary posting in India or the Middle East. Service in one of the colonial regiments such as the KAR offered more responsibility and much more excitement as well as being better paid.
To Freddie the life was highly congenial and it left him with a lasting love of Africa. He began his tour as Adjutant of the 1st Battalion of the KAR in Nyasaland, becoming a temporary Captain in 1929, with substantive promotion the following year. The regimental life was itself more energetic than he had been accustomed to, with marches and exercises taking place around the country; but more attractive still were the significant opportunities for big game shooting and fishing, both of which he took to with enthusiasm. When his Commanding Officer moved on to become Officer Commanding Troops, Nyasaland, Freddie accompanied him as his Staff Officer.
His tour ended in 1931 and he returned to the home battalion of the West Yorkshires. Depressed, like many of his seniority, at the prospect of regimental soldiering in England, he was persuaded to stay on only by a transfer in the following year to the overseas battalion, which was then in Egypt. Once again he became the Adjutant, and this time his CO was Harold Franklyn, a highly competent officer who subsequently had an outstanding career and under whom Freddie enjoyed serving.2 One of Franklyn’s fellow COs in the Canal Brigade was Monty, commanding the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and he and Freddie renewed their friendship. On a brigade exercise Monty was appointed to its temporary command and selected Freddie as his Brigade Major. In Monty’s words, ‘We completely defeated the enemy in the desert in the Mena House area!’3
Two years later, both men found themselves in Quetta, Freddie still the Adjutant of his battalion, Monty now the Chief Instructor at the Staff College. Freddie had qualified for the Staff College course by passing the exam, but had failed to secure the necessary nomination and, in terms of his age, had left it rather late to do so. Monty took it on himself to badger the CGS India to nominate him, which duly happened. In reply to Freddie’s letter of thanks, Monty wrote:
I am not used to backing the wrong horse when it comes to asking favours of people in high places; it would only result in one’s own undoing! You ought to do well at Camberley. I know many of the instructors there, some of them quite well … I will write & commend you to them in due course.4
Freddie duly returned to England to take the two-year course at Camberley, which passed uneventfully. A further spell in his regiment, latterly as a company commander, was followed by a posting as Brigade Major of the Small Arms School at Netheravon, during which he managed to visit both its French and its German equivalent. He found the French school deeply depressing and the German school most impressive.
In June 1939 Freddie was selected to be Military Assistant to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha. The role was a demanding one. Although the Secretary of State had, like all his colleagues, a number of Civil Service aides, including a Principal Private Secretary, he also needed someone with a good knowledge of the Army to give him an informed view on military matters, to assist with his speeches in the House of Commons and elsewhere, to accompany him on his many visits to units, formations and military establishments and, above all, to act as a personal confidant.
Hore-Belisha was an unusual character as a government minister, on the one hand exceptionally clever, on the other flamboyant in his personal life, and he was far from popular with his Cabinet colleagues. He was, moreover, a reformer, which often made him equally unpopular with the senior officers of the Army, especially when he brought forward their retirement ages, sweeping out much of the dead wood. Freddie did not care much for him at first, but grew to hold him in both high regard and affection. This was his first experience of the corridors of power at the War Office, where he had never served before and where he was able to use his considerable charm to deflect some of the barbs aimed at his master. This was particularly important as Hore-Belisha and Lord Gort, the CIGS, were not on speaking terms; and once Hore-Belisha had engineered Gort into command of the BEF on the outbreak of war, he was to experience similar difficulties initially with his successor, General Sir Edmund Ironside. That these were overcome was due in some measure to Freddie’s diplomacy, but the knives were out for Hore-Belisha in both the Army and the Government, and in January 1940 he was forced to resign.
Freddie immediately asked to be transferred back to his regiment, only to be appointed as an instructor at the newly established Staff College at Haifa. The Commandant when he arrived was Sandy Galloway, but he was succeeded shortly afterwards by Chink Dorman-Smith, whom Freddie had known as an instructor at Camberley whilst he himself had been a student there. Freddie was in due course appointed Chief Instructor, in which post he made a considerable impression on the students and the other members of the Directing Staff, who included Charles Richardson and Gerry Duke, another Royal Engineer who would serve under Freddie later in the war. Duke was later to recall that he and a small party from the college were on a weekend expedition to Damascus when the news arrived that Paris had fallen to the Germans. The gloom that this inspired was quickly dispelled by Freddie’s wit and humour.
Freddie had actually predicted the fall of France some time beforehand in one of the weekly talks he gave to the students on the overall military situation. Dorman-Smith was so incensed by what he saw as defeatism that he ordered him off the platform, but Freddie, with his assessment of the relative military capability of the French and Germans still relatively fresh in his mind from his pre-war visits to their military schools, refused to budge until he was placed under arrest. Dorman-Smith relented, but he did change the weekly speaker!
With Dorman-Smith frequently absent in order to involve himself as much as possible with the more interesting action taking place in Cairo or, better still, on the battlefield, Freddie found himself jointly running the college in tandem with John Tiarks, the Deputy Commandant. He was briefly diverted to set up a School of Combined Operations, with himself as the proposed commandant, only to be ordered in December 1940 to take up an appointment as GSO1 at GHQ Middle East as part of the Joint Planning Staff. He was also to act concurrently as the secretary to the C-in-Cs’ Committee, on which sat Wavell for the Army, Sir Andrew Cunningham for the Royal Navy and Sir Arthur Longmore for the RAF, thus establishing vital contacts with the other two services at the most senior level. By this time Operation COMPASS was well into its stride and would soon result in the expulsion of the Italians from Cyrenaica.
The Joint Planners were convinced that a swift advance to Tripoli would be possible, but instead they were diverted to planning the intervention in Greece. They were overruled in their objections to the latter operation by purely political considerations, and Freddie accompanied Wavell, Sir John Dill, the CIGS, and Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, to Athens for conferences with the King and General Papagos, the Greek C-in-C. Whilst in the country he was sent off to reconnoitre the much vaunted Aliakmon Line, the main defensive position in the north, of which he thought little, experiencing an earthquake and being arrested as a spy during the journey. Freddie’s confidence in the venture remained low and, contrary to the orders of and initially unknown to Wavell and his CGS, Arthur Smith, he and his team prepared a plan for evacuation of W Force if things transpired as they feared. Although Wavell and Smith subsequently gave their approval to the evacuation plan, it was on the explicit instruction that no one outside GHQ should know of it. When it became necessary to implement it, all the components were in place and many more Allied soldiers were saved than would otherwise have been the case.
Freddie’s first experience of the battlefield came when he accompanied Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, then Longmore’s deputy but soon to become his successor, to Tobruk in April 1941 as the Germans began to invest the town. There he found chaos and confusion, but also a cheerful John Harding, confident in the ability of the Australians and British to hold on. Back in Cairo the planners were kept hard at work on Crete, Iraq and Syria, one disaster and two modest but important successes. These were followed by Operations BREVITY and BATTLEAXE. Freddie thought that the latter in particular had no chance of success. ‘The aim’, he wrote later, ‘was a laudable one, but the tools with which to carry it out were terribly weak.’5
Auchinleck’s arrival led to a further bout of planning for the new Eighth Army. The first proposal was to hold the enemy on the frontier close to the sea, whilst sending the main force across the desert in a huge hook to take Benghazi. This foundered on the lack of knowledge of the ‘going’, as surface conditions in the desert were called. Whilst the Long Range Desert Group had done excellent work on surveying parts of the route, there was insufficient information to give any confidence of its viability and the plan was shelved for what became Operation CRUSADER. Freddie himself was diverted into a study of the defence of Iraq, Syria and Persia against a possible German thrust through the Caucasus, flying to Teheran to meet Great Britain’s new Russian Allies, whom he found exceptionally uncooperative.
In late February 1942 Freddie was suddenly and unexpectedly summoned by Auchinleck to be told that he was being appointed Director of Military Intelligence, Middle East. In his own words, ‘This was a shattering thing for a lieutenant-colonel with no previous Intelligence experience to be told. When I recovered my breath I replied: “But I have never done anything of that sort before, sir.” “Excellent,” said the Auk, “that’s just why I’ve chosen you, you’ll do all right. I want you to take over at once. Good night.’”6
This development arose as the result of the sudden departure of Freddie’s predecessor, John Shearer. Rommel’s counter-attack so quickly after his setback in CRUSADER came as a considerable shock in both Cairo and London, and Shearer was blamed for an over-optimistic assessment of Axis capabilities. This had been queried at the time in London, and Brooke wrote to Auchinleck suggesting that he might be replaced. Auchinleck was nothing if not loyal to his staff, but the lack of confidence in Shearer at the War Office and the fact that he had also made enemies in the Middle East compelled him to act. The C-in-C consulted Dorman-Smith, who strongly recommended Freddie for Shearer’s job.
Freddie’s first task was to rebuild confidence in GHQ’s Intelligence branch, primarily at Eighth Army. This he was able to do largely through his own sharp intellect, his congenial personality and his willingness to go up to the front as often as required. That he knew little about intelligence work proved to be of no consequence, as Auchinleck had foretold; indeed, bringing a fresh mind to the subject was just what was needed. As luck would have it, he found some excellent subordinates in place. Two of them, Major Joe Ewart and Captain Edgar Williams, were university dons who proved to have outstanding brains which attuned very easily to intelligence work. Ewart, who had served as an officer in the Royal Scots in France, was also a fluent German speaker. He was to stay on at GHQ Middle East, but to develop close links with Eighth Army before being recruited by Freddie for the campaign in North-West Europe, at the very end of which he found himself at the centre of momentous events.
Williams was to become one of Freddie’s closest confidants, part of his inner circle for the rest of the war. Known to all as ‘Bill’, he was still only 29 years old when Freddie became DMI. He had read Modern History at Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree and subsequently became a research fellow. Unlike many at the university, he was strongly opposed to appeasement, joining the Supplementary Reserve as an officer in the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, which in due course became the armoured car regiment of 2 Armoured Division. It was his armoured car, in the van of the newly arrived division, which was the first to detect the presence of Germans in the desert in March 1941. During the various confused encounters that ensued Williams found that his already weak eyesight was adversely affected by the strong sun and he was posted back to GHQ. There both he and Ewart became privy to one of the great secrets of the war, ULTRA, which was already providing excellent intelligence, although its interpretation was not always straightforward, as Shearer had found to his cost.
The immediate focus of the I Staff at GHQ was on Rommel’s intentions at Gazala, and a list was prepared of the signs which would indicate his intention to attack. In addition to ULTRA, Freddie made considerable use of the Long Range Desert Group, which provided some direct confirmation of intelligence from other sources. To one idea of Dorman-Smith’s, the setting-up of a small body of officers to act as the enemy, he was instinctively opposed, as it would be outside his control and potentially offer conflicting advice to the C-in-C. By playing for time, claiming difficulties with selecting the right officers and identifying other practical problems, he managed to have the idea dropped.
As May 1942 passed by, the indicators of an attack by Rommel were crossed off Freddie’s list one by one and, when it came, it was as no surprise to the Intelligence Staff. The next few weeks were highly confused until Eighth Army made its stand on the Alamein Line. In early July, Freddie was asked by Auchinleck to spend ten days at his HQ, which gave him a very good idea of the unsatisfactory state of affairs there. Back in Cairo, he carried on strengthening contacts which would serve him well in the future, notably with Cunningham, Tedder and Richard Casey, Churchill’s representative as Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, to whom Freddie took a liking.
Back at Eighth Army HQ Auchinleck had by now come to the conclusion that Whiteley would have to be replaced and, with the concurrence of Dorman-Smith, who was not interested in the job in spite of having effectively carried it out for weeks, selected Freddie to relieve him. Freddie was concerned that, lacking any experience in the field, he would be unsuitable for the role, and consulted the Deputy Military Secretary, Angus Collier, who agreed to fly up to see Auchinleck about it. On the following day, 27 July, a sharp telegram arrived ordering Freddie to report for duty. Tedder lent him an aircraft and he was at Army Advanced HQ within hours.
Whiteley was helpfulness itself and stayed on for three days to give Freddie the benefit of his advice, before leaving for the UK and a senior position for the rest of the war on the staff of General Eisenhower. Dorman-Smith continued to be an annoyance, producing numerous ideas for evaluation, most of which Freddie thought were a waste of time which prevented him from carrying out his proper duties. In due course he persuaded Auchinleck that the duplication of roles was no longer necessary and, with Dorman-Smith himself welcoming a return to GHQ as the Auk’s DCGS, the authority of the BGS was fully restored. Freddie could now concentrate fully on the General Staff team, his immediate subordinates being Belchem, Mainwaring, Richardson and the GSO1 (Intelligence), Lieutenant Colonel L. M. ‘Spud’ Murphy, an Indian Army officer. To assist Murphy as one of his GSO2s, Freddie brought in Bill Williams from GHQ.
At the same time Freddie began to build close relationships with his opposite number on the ‘Q’ side, Brian Robertson, and with Robertson’s newly arrived AQMG, Miles Graham. Graham had served in the 2nd Life Guards in the Great War, acting for a time as the regiment’s adjutant, but left in 1919 for a highly successful career in industry, whilst remaining on the Reserve of Officers. In 1939 he rejoined the regiment as a captain, the same rank that he had held twenty years earlier. The Life Guards were merged with the Royal Horse Guards as the Household Cavalry Regiment for the duration of the war, and it was as the Adjutant of the composite regiment, still equipped with horses as a component of 1 Cavalry Division, that Graham arrived in the Middle East. The skills which he had developed in industry were to lead him into Q work and he was in due course to form a pairing with Freddie which was to become the lynch-pin of success of the HQs of both Eighth Army and 21st Army Group.
Auchinleck continued to combine the roles of C-in-C and Army Commander, but it was evident to him and to others that this was an inherently unsatisfactory situation. Freddie, when consulted by the Auk on possible successors, recommended two, Monty and Bill Slim, the latter having impressed him greatly as an instructor at Camberley. Foremost amongst the others considering the problem were the Prime Minister and the CIGS, Alan Brooke, and the latter decided that he would have to visit Cairo in person. Churchill, his confidence in Auchinleck seriously eroded by the C-in-C’s poor choices as Eighth Army Commander and more recently by the events of the last two months, felt equally strongly that the question of command in the Middle East required his presence on the spot. As a meeting with Stalin was also high on his agenda, he decided to kill two birds with one stone and stop off in Egypt en route to Moscow. Churchill and Brooke travelled separately to Cairo, but arrived within an hour of each other on 3 August.
The next day was taken up with discussions between Churchill, Brooke and Auchinleck. Wavell, summoned from India, Cunningham, Tedder and Casey joined in, together with Field Marshal Smuts, an old friend of the Prime Minister and, in spite of his age, a man with an acute brain. Various permutations of command were considered, one of which had Monty in command of Eighth Army, with Auchinleck remaining as C-in-C. Brooke was championing Monty but, as he was to write later, ‘I felt some very serious doubts as to whether an Auk-Monty combination would work. I felt that the Auk would interfere too much with Monty, would ride him on a very tight rein, and would consequently be liable to put him out of his stride.’7 He was apparently not fully aware of the antipathy which Monty had shown towards Auchinleck in 1940, but he still judged the characters of the two men correctly.
Brooke and Churchill visited Eighth Army on 5 August and took soundings from the various formation commanders. The following day became what the CIGS described as one of the most difficult of his life, with Churchill now insisting on the removal of Auchinleck. Brooke himself was offered the position of C-in-C, which he declined as he felt that his current role, arduous and exasperating as it often was, would render the best service to Great Britain; in retrospect, he was absolutely correct. The Prime Minister then insisted on breaking up Middle East Command by detaching Iraq and Persia under Auchinleck, whilst General Sir Harold Alexander would be summoned to take over the reduced Middle East Command. On the previous day Churchill had been most favourably impressed by Gott, who was still in command of XIII Corps, and now insisted that he should move to command Eighth Army. In spite of having been told by Gott that he was tired and had run out of ideas, Brooke could find no arguments to oppose his appointment.
On the next day, Gott boarded a slow-moving Bristol Bombay transport aircraft at Burg el Arab for Cairo and a few days rest before assuming command of Eighth Army. The route was well behind the lines and considered so safe that no escort was ever provided. As bad luck would have it, the aircraft was pounced on by two German fighters and shot down. One pilot died in the attack, but the other managed to make a crash landing. Soon afterwards the plane caught fire and most of the passengers, including Gott, were killed.
As soon as the news broke in Cairo a signal was sent to Monty, ordering him to Egypt immediately to assume command of Eighth Army.