Papers of the War Cabinet's Eastern Committee [‎114v] (228/544)

6
of Indian defence under the same authority as now, and receive from
the War Office his orders for the rest of the area under his command.
This had been negatived as impossible, and therefore he would
welcome the appointment of General Monro if he could be spared
from India to take charge of the non-Indian part of the theatre,
commanding either at Baghdad or possibly, as an alternative, at
Cairo. But this new Eastern Command should then be linked with
the Indian Command by a link at home. This might be done by
appointing another Deputy C.I.G.S. to work under General Wilson,
and to be responsible for communicating the orders of the War
Office to the new Eastern Commander-in-Chief, and to be in such
relation with the India Office The department of the British Government to which the Government of India reported between 1858 and 1947. The successor to the Court of Directors. also as to enable him to be the channel
of communication to the Government ,of India on Army matters.
Thus although the new Commander-in-Chief would not be in India,
the resulting duality could be remedied in England. If the new
Commander-in-( hief, however, were General Monro, he had only to
repeat the difficulty he had already mentioned to the Committee,
which seemed to make it absolutely essential that the active command
in the field should be given in each area to some subordinate agent
acting under General Monro’s general control, and he would add one
other point. General Monro was filling the most difficult position
with conspicuous success, and under him the Indian army was
recovering from the depression and lack of self-confidence which
followed the Mesopotamian Commission’s report. He had, moreover, T ^
reorganised the army and organised the North-West frontier Region of British India bordering Afghanistan. of
India on a new basis, and it would be a grave step to remove him
from India just when the menace on the 1^orth-West frontier might , ,
be drawing nearer.
General Wilson said he wished again to say that he could not
agree that matters were in such a bad way as some members of the
Committee seemed to think, nor did he regard big changes and new
inflated Staffs as at all necessary. General Marshall had all the
troops that he needed, and even more than he really required. His
difficulty was that of transport, and no amount of changes in personnel
or administration could create more Ford cars.
Mr. Balfour agreed with General Smuts that Marshall had
not got the right perspective. General Marshall’s services in
this war had been almost entirely rendered in Mesopotamia, and he
evidently found it difficult to turn his eyes away from his old, and
immediate, front. What we were asking him to do was to look upon
Mesopotamia as a side-show and the Caspian as being more important,
but the impression which Marshall’s telegrams gave was that his
gaze was still riveted upon Mesopotamia and that he was unable to
look beyond. As regards the necessity for a change of personnel,
Mr. Balfour was in agreement with General Smuts. As regards i $
unity of command, he thought Mr. Montagu was right in saying that
this did not exist at present. He did not, however, go so far as
Mr. Montagu in wishing to include India in this command. He
regarded the threat to our Indian frontier as remote, and he hoped * *
and believed that it would remain so, at any rate during the present
war. For the moment, therefore, the Indian frontier was not
included in the Middle-Eastern theatre, much extended as that
theatre had been. He could not feel that General Marshall fully
grasped the magnitude of the problem we had to solve. No body or
individual responsible, as was their Committee, for big operations of
war, had, he thought, ever been kept so much in ignorance of our
resources and of the state of affairs.
General Wilson said that he would like to refer to Lord Robert
Cecil’s letter to Mr. Balfour. He would ask the Committee who it
was that Persia was under ? Ihe position was that we were at peace
with the Persian Government and yet we were fighting in North-
West Persia, and this greatly increased our difficulties.
Ihe Chairman said that he did not entirely accept the account
of the situation, complex as it is, that was given in Lord Robert’s