The Importance of John Dill

[Nytram01]

Field Marshal Sir John Dill - who never recieved a peerage - was one of the more prominant officers of the British Empire during World War Two. He served in 1939 as a Corps Commander on the Continentant before returning to the UK to become Vice-CIGS and then replaced Field Marshal William Edmund Ironsides as CIGS when Churchill became PM. He lasted as CIGS until December 1941 at which time he was removed from that post and sent to America to become theChief of the British Joint Staff Mission and then the senior representative of Britain on the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He remained in that role until he died in November of 1944.

Dill was highly regarded by the Americans he worked with and became great friends with George Marshall. When he died he was awarded the honor of being buried in the National Cemetary at Arlington. Field Marshall Alanbrooke stated that Dill was the main reason Britain managed to get the Americans to agree to any of their ideas and lamented that Dill never recieved any recognition for his work from Churchill.

So what was Dill's importance to WW2?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dill

 

[Arachnid]

He wasn't much of a commander but he was a great diplomat and a top quality military bureaucrat. Such people are vitally important for winning wars but tend to get rather less attention than their more kinetic comrades.

 

[Snake Featherston]

Dill falls into a category of forgotten officers like Brooke and Antonov and Vasilevsky whose contributions to the war were extremely essential in how the Allies won, but his role was in all the ways that had nothing to do with dramatic, flashy combat so he was pretty easy to ignore.

 

[Bernard Woolley]

As a field commander, or CIGS he was so-so and in the later failed to stand up to WSC when necessary (Churchill called him 'Dilly-Dally', probably unfairly). However as Chief of the Joint British Mission in the US he was invaluable and the Americans held him in very high regard.

I was quite surprised to see a statue to a British FM at Arlington when I visited it back in '94. That in itself is a mark of the respect the Americans affoarded him.

 

[Nytram01]

The question, in the end, is; could anyone have smoothed the formulative stages of the Anglo-American Alliance at war as well as, or better than, Dill did?