The death of John Dill

On 4 November 1944 Field Marshal Sir John Dill, for almost three years the most important British soldier in the American capital, died at the Walter Reed army hospital in Washington. He was head of the British Joint Staff Mission and Britain’s senior representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff – the body that from early 1942 directed the joint strategy of the two powers. He was 62. The cause of death was aplastic anaemia, diagnosed in the summer of 1944.

Dill’s death was a loss felt on both sides of the Atlantic, although he was judged very differently in London and in Washington. To Winston Churchill he was a Chief of Staff with whom he could not work and whom he had removed from the leadership of the army at the end of 1941. To the Americans – above all to the US Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall – he was a partner without whom it is hard to imagine the coalition working smoothly.

The road to Washington

John Greer Dill was born on 25 December 1881 in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. Orphaned early, he went through Cheltenham College and Sandhurst, joined the Leinster Regiment as a second lieutenant in 1901 and was in time to take part in the final phase of the Boer War. During the First World War he fought on the Western Front and, above all, made his career as a staff officer – he ended the war as a brigadier general on the operations staff.

Between the wars he was regarded as one of the ablest officers in the British Army. He was Commandant of the Staff College at Camberley (1931–1934), Director of Military Operations and Intelligence at the War Office (1934–1936), commander of British forces in Palestine during the Arab revolt (1936–1937), and then commander of Aldershot Command. In September 1939 he took command of I Corps of the British Expeditionary Force in France. In April 1940 he returned to London as Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and on 27 May 1940 – in the middle of the French campaign, with the evacuation from Dunkirk already under way – he replaced Edmund Ironside as Chief.

Clashes with Churchill

The year and a half during which Dill headed the army coincided with the most difficult period of the war for Britain: the threat of invasion in the summer of 1940, the fighting in North and East Africa, the expedition to Greece and the defeat on Crete. Dill was a cautious, methodical officer, loyal to his subordinates, while Churchill was an impatient prime minister who meddled in the details of operations and demanded swift offensives. A clash of temperaments was inevitable. Churchill reportedly called his Chief of Staff “Dilly-Dally” – so biographers and historians, among them Alex Danchev, relate.

The disputes concerned fundamental matters. In early 1941 Dill, together with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, conducted talks in Cairo and Athens that ended with British troops being sent to Greece – a decision taken under political pressure, although Dill himself had doubts about it; it ended with the evacuation from Greece in April. In May 1941 Dill submitted a memorandum arguing that the defence of the British Isles and Singapore should take priority over Egypt – Churchill received it with irritation. The Chief of Staff also defended the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, Archibald Wavell, whom the Prime Minister replaced with Claude Auchinleck in June.

On top of all this came exhaustion and personal tragedy: Dill’s first wife, long seriously ill after a stroke, died in December 1940. On 18 November 1941 Dill received his field marshal’s baton, but by then it was a farewell. On 25 December 1941 the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff passed to General Alan Brooke. Churchill had in mind for Dill the honourable but war-remote post of Governor of Bombay.

The man of understanding

Before that could happen, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Dill sailed with Churchill to the United States for the Arcadia Conference. There a decision was taken that transformed his career: he was to remain in Washington as the Prime Minister’s personal representative on military matters and head of the British staff mission. When the Combined Chiefs of Staff met for the first time, it was Dill who led its permanent British element – the British Chiefs of Staff, after all, were in London and came to America only for the major conferences.

The general whom Churchill had pushed aside proved irreplaceable in this role. He quickly became friends with Marshall; the two officers, equally reserved and conscientious, trusted each other enough to exchange information that did not pass through official channels, and together they smoothed over disputes before they reached the politicians. Dill explained British thinking to the Americans and American thinking to London. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have called him the “most important figure” in the accord achieved between the combined forces of the two countries.

This role was especially visible in 1943. At the Casablanca Conference Dill was one of the main intermediaries in the sharp dispute over Mediterranean strategy, which ended in a compromise on Sicily. He took part in the Trident Conference, the Quebec Conference, and the conferences in Cairo and Tehran. He also sat on the Combined Policy Committee, set up under the Quebec Agreement to coordinate work on the atomic bomb (later the Manhattan Project).

Illness, death and funeral

In the summer of 1944 Dill was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia – severe damage to the bone marrow, for which the medicine of the day had no effective treatment. The field marshal worked almost to the end; he died at Walter Reed hospital on 4 November 1944.

The funeral, held on 8 November, was of a kind unheard of for a foreigner. The memorial service took place in Washington National Cathedral, thousands of troops lined the route of the cortège, and the coffin was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. One witness recorded that he had never seen so many men so visibly moved, and that Marshall’s face was “truly stricken”. The American Chiefs of Staff wrote to their British colleagues that “probably no other individual” had contributed more to full cooperation within the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

According to the George C. Marshall Foundation, it was Marshall who secured Dill’s burial at Arlington, despite regulations that made no provision for burying soldiers of foreign armies there, and the exception was sanctioned by a joint resolution of Congress. Congress – as biographers stress – also passed an unprecedented resolution of appreciation for the British field marshal’s services, and the US Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal posthumously.

The only foreigner at Arlington?

The often repeated claim that Dill was at the time the only foreigner buried at Arlington is not accurate. As early as July 1941, on Roosevelt’s instructions, the coffin of Ignacy Jan Paderewski had been placed there – temporarily, in the crypt of the USS Maine memorial; it remained at Arlington until 1992, when it was taken to Warsaw. What made Dill’s burial exceptional was something else: he was a senior officer of a foreign army, buried in the ground of an American military cemetery with full honours, by special decision and in the presence of the entire American high command.

His monument is exceptional too. On 1 November 1950, in the presence of President Harry Truman and of Marshall – then Secretary of Defense – an equestrian statue was unveiled over Dill’s grave. It is one of only two equestrian monuments at Arlington; the other commemorates the Civil War general Philip Kearny.

Place in the war

Dill died just as the Anglo-American alliance was entering its last and politically most difficult phase. American superiority in men and materiel grew with every month, and disputes over strategy – over the direction of the advance in Western Europe, the importance of the Italian front, and the Royal Navy’s part in the war in the Pacific – were becoming sharper. Dill, who for almost three years had eased these tensions behind the scenes, had no worthy successor with similar standing among the Americans. His place in Washington was taken at the beginning of 1945 by Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, until then Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean.

Historians today judge Dill in two ways. As Chief of the Imperial General Staff he could not withstand Churchill’s pressure and failed to impose a coherent military policy on the government. As a diplomat in uniform, however, he played an exceptional role: the Combined Chiefs of Staff – the mechanism through which the two powers in practice waged a single war for several years – functioned to a large extent thanks to the trust between him and Marshall. The grave at Arlington and the equestrian statue of 1950 are the most lasting traces of that friendship and that alliance.