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[Even someone guilty of the butchery Bagnall was in Malaysia and Cyprus drew the line at NATO's policy of 'forward defence,' of 'preemptive' nuclear incineration. But his type has been purged in favor of 'new thinking.'] Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall Decorated for courage in Malaysia, he later fought battles over Nato's cold war policy before facing the ultimate opponent - Mrs Thatcher David Fairhall Thursday April 11, 2002 The Guardian Field Marshal Sir Nigel Bagnall, who has died aged 75, 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. Bagnall was born in 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 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 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. 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 our 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. 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. In 1988, therefore, Bagnall retired from the army (though field marshals are never supposed to retire), to spend his time studying military history, writing about it, and breeding ducks. He is survived by his wife, Anna Caroline, whom he married in 1959, and by his two daughters. · Nigel Thomas Bagnall, soldier, born February 10 1927; died April 8 2002 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/ --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
