When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. General Ismay accompanied Churchill on his trips to France early in the war, and later accompanied Churchill on summit meetings with other Allied leaders. And he was “instrumental”, writes John Kiszely, a forty-year veteran of the British Army and a visiting professor at King’s College and visiting research fellow at Oxford, in his magnificent new biography of Ismay, “in designing and managing the ‘handling machine’ that converted the Prime Minister’s decisions into action”.
Long before World War II, Hastings Ismay was, Kiszely writes, a “child of the Raj”, meaning that his “roots were in India and in the British governance of it”. His mother was born in India, so were his grandparents on his mother’s side.
He grew up in a family most of whose members were closely involved in [the British Raj’s] management and dedicated to its purpose. All six of his maternal aunts and uncles had grown up in India … The family was steeped in the self-perceived institutional ethos and values of the Indian Civil Service.
Duty, honor, loyalty, and a belief in the civilizing obligation of the British Empire were among those values. The members of the Indian Civil Service, Kiszely writes, never saw themselves as oppressors or exploiters of their colonial subjects—though many of their subjects begged to differ.
In 1900, Ismay was shipped-off to a boarding school in England (Charterhouse School in Surrey), then trained at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, which Churchill had also attended. After Sandhurst, he was sent to India to serve in the Gloucestershire Regiment, north of Delhi in the Punjab. Later, he joined the 21st Cavalry which was based on the North-West Frontier near the Kyber Pass and the Afghan border. It was there that his fellow officers gave him a nickname that stuck: “Pug”. He saw combat in the 1908 Mohmand Expedition, a six-week campaign against raiding parties of the Mohmand tribe that terrorized border villages. And, Kiszely notes, Ismay began to read voraciously—Gibbon, Kipling, and Churchill’s River War. From 1914 to 1920, while many of his fellow officers and friends were fighting in Europe, Ismay served in a Camel Corps that chased and fought against the “Mad Mullah” (Muhammad Abdullah Hassan) and his jihadist followers in British Somaliland. In five years and four separate campaigns, British forces, including elements of the Royal Air Force, defeated the jihadists, but the Mad Mullah escaped capture, later dying of influenza.
After holidaying in England and marrying Kathleen “Darry” Clegg, Ismay returned to India. Soon he was sent to Simla, the Himalayan headquarters of the Indian Army. Ismay’s star was rising. He was soon back in London, appointed as assistant secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). This committee, Kiszely notes, was where military policy and strategy were formulated and developed. Here, Ismay rubbed shoulders with service chiefs, government ministers, generals, admirals, and other military and civilian experts. It was when Ismay worked on that committee that he first met Churchill, who was then serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Here, Ismay also got a taste of the inter-service rivalries that plagued the British defense establishment.
His next assignment was as head of Military Intelligence at the War Office. He was now a colonel. He reported to General John Dill, who greatly valued Ismay’s work and who would cross paths with Ismay again during the Second World War. In 1936, as war clouds gathered over Europe, Ismay returned to the CID, where he discovered that Churchill was mostly right about British defense deficiencies. In 1938, with war on the horizon, Major General Ismay was named head of the CID, where he worked to establish a much-needed ministry of supply. When war broke out, he became the military’s Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet.
Kiszely shows that during the next five years, Ismay was indispensable to Churchill, especially as a go-between with the British Chiefs of Staff and later when America joined the war, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Churchill constantly fought with the British chiefs, and the British chiefs constantly fought with their American counterparts. Ismay was quite often the calm voice of reason that helped to hold the alliance together. He established good relations with US Generals Marshall and Eisenhower. Ismay often worked 18-hour days filled with what Kiszely describes as “unremitting hard slogging and pressure”. Churchill later wrote that Ismay and he “became hand in glove and much more.”
After the war, an exhausted Ismay was called back to India to help General Mountbatten implement the end of British rule there and the partition of the country between India and Pakistan. Ismay met often with Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah in futile efforts to conclude a peaceful partition. He found this work to be even more exhausting than World War II, as civil strife led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in clashes between Hindus and Muslims. When he returned to England, he helped Churchill with the writing of his World War II memoirs. And when Churchill once again became Prime Minister in the early 1950s, he tapped Ismay to be Secretary General of NATO, a position he held for five years. He later became a member of the House of Lords.
Ismay was a pallbearer at Churchill’s funeral in January 1965. Ismay died in December of that year. Kiszely credits Ismay’s achievements to his “sense of duty and service, honour, loyalty and patriotism”, which he traces to his upbringing in India. Kiszely shows that this “child of the Raj” helped Winston Churchill save Western civilization.