The strange case of Field Marshall Sir John Dill.

Field Marshal Sir John Dill held the most important military offices of the Second World War. In the supreme crisis of May 1940, as the evacuations from Dunkirk were about to get under way, he was made Chiefofthe Imperial General Staff(CIGS). In the critical instant ofDecember 1941, as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reverberated around the world, he was translated to the United States to become head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington and senior British member of the newly created Combined Chiefs of Staffcommittee, the executive agency ofthe Anglo-American war effort. He died in harness on 4 November 1944, universally mourned throughout official America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called him "not only . .. a great soldier and a great friend, but ... the most important figure in the remarkable accord which has been developed in the combined operations of our two countries". His monument in Arlington National Cemetery, the American Valhalla, marks his apotheosis. ' This was a peculiar triumph. Throughout 1940-41 the common belief in Downing Street and Whitehall was that the CIGS was clearly "worn out", if not certifiably ill. In the contemporary idiom, Dill was said to be "a tired man".2 This euphemism suggested not so much tiredness as complete exhaustion. The deliberate implication was that he was a spent force, constitutionally incapable ofstanding up to Winston Churchill-the need to "stand up" to the delinquent Prime Minister was another instance of accepted usage-and therefore in the final analysis derelict in his duty.3 As early as July 1940, Churchill himselfcomplained: "I do not think we are having the help from General Dill which we hoped for at the time of his appointment, and he strikes me as being very tired, disheartened, and over-impressed with the might of Germany."4 These judgements, or aspersions, recalled even earlier ones. In October 1937, Basil Liddell Hart's influential advice to the then Secretary of State for War was that, after years of outstanding promise, Dill had most definitely "gone off' as a consequence of various