Page 124 - They Also Served

before arriving in the Middle East soon after the outbreak of war. Here, he planned Operation Compass, using lightning armoured strikes, of the sort he had advocated for years, to push the Italians out of the Western Desert. With the operation a stunning success, Dorman-Smith’s reputation as an innovative thinker rose and, as an acting major-general, eventually became Auchinleck’s key planner at Eight Army headquarters. However, when Churchill, tired of what he saw as inactivity in the desert, sacked ‘The Auk’, Dorman-Smith was removed, too. Brooke later wrote: ‘Dorman-Smith had a most fertile brain, continually producing new ideas, some of which (not many) were good and the others useless.’ One junior staff officer put it more bluntly: ‘He really was as near to a lunatic as you can get’.
In April 1944, Dorman-Smith, in what Brooke referred to as his ‘sink or swim’ moment, was given command of the 3rd Infantry Brigade on the Italian front. His reputation preceded him, and his divisional commander, William Penney, with whom he had clashed as a student at Staff College, greeted him with, ‘I didn’t want you before, and I don’t want you now’. Only a few weeks later, Dorman-Smith’s career came to an end after two of his three battalion commanders complained to Penney about his leadership. Dorman-Smith was removed as ‘unfit for brigade command’. Conveniently, no records were kept of the procedure. Retiring as an honorary brigadier, he returned to Ireland and changed his name to Dorman O’Gowan, becoming a father for the first time in his 50s. With a festering grudge against Britain, he became close to the IRA, even acting as an advisor during their terrorist campaign in the 1950s. He also allowed his Bellamont Forest estate to be used by the IRA as a training ground, but this seems to have been dismissed by the authorities as the actions of a harmless crank.
Dorman-Smith remained loyal to his old commander, with a threat of legal action forcing Churchill to tone down criticism of ‘The Auk’ in his book The Hinge of Fate, and also Montgomery, when he published his memoirs. ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith died in 1969. The author’s son and Dorman-Smith’s, born 50 years apart, read war studies on the same course at university. Christopher remembered being sent to bed when, ‘rough-looking men arrived at the house to inform his father that they were “at work” in the grounds’.
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