Nigel Thomas Bagnall, soldier,
born 10 February 1927; died
8 April 2002
Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall began his career as an infantryman in the Malaysian jungle, spent his middle years trying to make military sense of Nato's nuclear-dominated strategy on the north German plain, and ended up a Whitehall warrior who fell foul of Margaret Thatcher. Probably for this last reason, he never made it quite to the top, retiring as head of the army, but not chief of the defence staff. If he regarded this as a failure, it was an honourable one, a tribute to intellectual honesty that matched his soldierly courage.
He was born in Bangalore, India and educated at Wellington. At the end of the second world war, aged 18, he joined his father's regiment, the Green Howards, though he then transferred temporarily to the Parachute Regiment. With the paras' 8th Battalion he saw service in Palestine at a time when Israelis, not Arabs, were seen as the "terrorists". But it was back with the Green Howards, in the subsequent Malaysian emergency, that the young red-haired officer first made his mark.
Fighting to suppress the communist insurgency of the early 1950s, Bagnall won the Military Cross in 1950 for a daring night operation to destroy a jungle camp and its occupants. In the citation he was praised, among other things, for his "ruthless energy" - a quality that also characterised his approach to the political battles which dominated his later career. Before leaving Malaysia, he received a bar to his MC in 1953 for an operation in command of a machine gun platoon.
Having been commissioned as an infantryman, Bagnall was nevertheless intensely interested in the problems of armoured warfare. After a brief spell fighting yet another band of "terrorists" - the Eoka in Cyprus - he changed direction permanently to join an armoured regiment, the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards. This meant repeated tours in Germany, where the bulk of the British Army was in any case located, interspersed with staff jobs back home. Not much action, but the right place to build a successful career, and eventually to play his part in the doctrinal battles that accompanied the cold war.
Yet it was characteristic that of all the recognition that came his way he relished most his election as an honorary fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. While a brigadier, Bagnall had earlier studied at Oxford on a year's defence fellowship, under (Sir) Michael Howard, later to become Chichele Professor of the History of War. He had been given a modest foothold in the college, and then largely ignored. A man of extreme modesty, he recognised ruefully that this was rather good for him, no one having ignored Brigadier Bagnall for quite a long time before then.
The son of a lieutenant-colonel in the Green Howards, and sent to school at Wellington College, he regretted his lack of a full university education, he always sought to broaden his mind through reading and debate. Bagnall had a keen analytical intellect, applying himself in particular to military thinking. In combination with his robust and direct character this quite soon resulted in a reputation for reacting fiercely to muddled thinking or other incompetence.
His career was nearly cut short at major-general level, for insubordination; but he was saved by General Sir Frank King, then commanding Rhine Army, who perceived his outstanding quality and his potential for the highest level of command. Bagnall held that soldiers will take tough criticism if they respect their commander and know that he is genuinely concerned for their welfare. In this quality he excelled, like Wellington, although again like the Great Duke he never appeared soft.
Few commanders can have been less stuffy when dealing with their soldiers: he had an Irish intuition for their feelings. Officers, however, could get a harder time when necessary: but if he upset anyone it was never through carelessness. As with Montgomery, whose contempt for unprofessional officers he shared, Bagnall acknowledged that the profession of arms (he had contemplated no other) demanded close study. Even the most heroic military qualities could be stultified by failure to understand and apply the lessons of history, or to master modern technicalities.
As he was promoted to a succession of increasingly important posts in Germany - divisional and corps commander, commander-in-chief of the British Army of the Rhine, eventually in command of Nato's multi-national northern Army group - Bagnall grappled with changing technology, the tactics that flowed from it, and ultimately the fundamental strategy of "forward defence". Nato's strategic thinking was paralysed at that time by the natural instinct of the Germans to defend every inch of their western territory. It fell to Bagnall eventually to persuade them of a fact their predecessors would easily have understood - that a static defensive line along the Iron Curtain was not good enough. Some ground would have to be surrendered if the shock of a massed Soviet tank assault was to be absorbed and ultimately defeated.
Nato's politicians, meanwhile, were putting their faith in the strategy of nuclear deterrence that was supposed to underpin western Europe's conventional defences, not just by means of an intercontinental stand-off, but right there on the battlefield. Here again, Bagnall - along with another field marshal, Lord Carver, whose career followed a similar path - emerged as the military realist. He had no truck with the idea that Germany's freedom could somehow be defended by incinerating its land with the thousands of so-called tactical nuclear weapons - even including nuclear howitzers - with which Nato forces were then equipped.
As a soldier, he wanted Britain to spend its limited defence budget on improving its conventional weaponry, not playing potentially suicidal games of nuclear bluff. When he returned to Whitehall as chief of the general staff in 1985, a fierce debate about what role nuclear weapons should play was still going on, in the wake of the cruise missile deployments at Greenham Common. And he also found himself in a quite different kind of battle, trying to defend the professional interests of the army amid the centralising administrative reforms instituted by Mrs Thatcher's defence secretary, Michael Heseltine.
Thus, Bagnall became the professional head of the Army in 1985. Ministry of Defence ministers were not exempt from his forthrightness. A former junior minister recently admitted that he was terrified of him at first, but later came to admire and love him. The establishment of the tri-service Higher Command and Staff Course was Bagnall's notable legacy from this culminating period of his career. It filled what he saw as a dangerous gap in the training of officers already earmarked for senior command. Its benefits are now well proven, and not only for commanders from the United Kingdom. He would undoubtedly have liked to hold the supreme post of Chief of the Defence Staff. His independence of mind, and experience of Whitehall, would have fitted him well for it, although increasing deafness would have been a handicap. Probably his intellectual honesty, and fierce resistance to overstretch and fudged economies, helped to deny this last success to him.
No one could dispute the need to dispense with outmoded single-service rivalry. But, as ever, Bagnall saw a need to temper intellectual theory with military practicalities. The fact that he had a sharp intellect of his own stood him in good stead as a Whitehall warrior. He fought his way through its corridors with the same fearless determination he had shown in the Malaysian jungle. But in a world of committees, his forthright opinions and sometimes abrasive manner could be counter-productive, or perhaps just inconvenient. Mrs Thatcher seems to have found them so.
The Army, saw in Bagnall the most distinguished leader of any service for decades, yet a touchingly unassuming man, personally far happier in corduroys than in uniform.
In 1988 therefore, Bagnall retired from the army to his home in the Chilterns Hills (though field marshals are never supposed to retire). Here he had created a fine garden out of a wilderness, with his devoted wife, Anna Caroline, whom he married in 1959, who survives him along with his two daughters.
He published a learned commentary on the Punic Wars (The Punic Wars, 1991, translated into German 1995) and was engaged on a study of the Peloponnesian Wars at the time of his death. He also fostered the Anglo-German Officers' Association, which he had helped to found. To the disappointment of his admirers he accepted no public post, but devoted himself to a supremely happy family life, and to the serious propagation of some remarkable ducks.
Neither with his family nor his ducks was there recognisable the ferocious subject of many an embellished military legend. He was content to spend his time studying military history, writing about it, and breeding ducks.
Available for
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A unique opportunity for philatelists and Bagnall fans alike!
We have managed to obtain just one unique Silver Jubilee stamp cover signed
by Sir Nigel as Major General Nigel Bagnall MC. It was produced to commemorate
the Army Review on the occasion of the Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee
on 7th Jul 1977 when he was Parade Commander.
This is a personally signed original
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