War Madness
For some reason Twitter is circulating something allegedly said by the Hon. Tobias Ellwood MP, now Chair of Parliament’s Defence Committee:
‘Britain must go to war with Russia directly, we are at war in Europe, we must introduce martial law.’
He said it five months ago on Sky and did NOT call for martial law, something that has never happened in this country.
But he did say the first two things, and that is sufficiently mad. In that interview he was calling attention to Britain’s diminished land forces, in which case openly declaring war on Russia would risk our destruction. Remember Stalingrad: if Russia senses defeat, her people might well decide that if there is no room for Russia in the world, there may as well be no world.
War is far too important to be left to the military, brave as Mr Smallwood is, with his record of Army service, which continued after his time in the field: five years ago he announced his promotion to Lieutenant Colonel as a reservist in 77th Brigade, the unit specialising in information and presumably disinformation.
The Brigade’s name and emblem are references to Orde Wingate’s unconventional force in wartime Burma, the Chindits. That’s interesting, since if you read John Masters’s autobiography ‘The Road Past Mandalay’ you’ll see that Wingate was crazy.
Masters led a brigade dropped behind Japanese lines to act as a diversion, very successfully though at a heavy cost; heartened by this venture, Wingate proposed a repetition on a massive scale and fortunately this scheme was not taken up, for as Masters observes, the Japanese would then have moved forward, captured the air bases and left our forces cut off without hope of support.
Courage and dash are not enough.