Lord Bramall: Head of British armed forces and outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons

Bramall served in the Second World War and his writing on conflict doctrine became military gospel

Bramall advocated the ‘fifth pillar’ of defence: dynamic diplomacy with indirect military support anywhere in the world (PA)

Edwin Bramall was the last Second World War soldier to serve as Britain’s head of the armed forces and by the end of his career had become an outspoken opinion-former. Bramall, who has died aged 95, opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in 2013 devoted his last speech as a crossbencher in the House of Lords to calling for Britain’s nuclear deterrent to be abandoned.

It was almost 70 years earlier in a very different war that “Dwin” Bramall first distinguished himself. He won the Military Cross in October 1944 for a reconnaissance patrol on the Dutch-Belgian frontier in which he and his command disabled a German machine-gun position. A week later he and his platoon liberated the village of Goirle in North Brabant, Netherlands. He had been wounded twice during the Allies’ advance, being first the only survivor in Normandy in July of a direct hit on his company’s half-track HQ vehicle, with a gash in his thigh so bad that evacuation and an operation in Britain were needed; then, near the Somme, taking a bullet through the shoulder.

Bramall, whose father’s family had married into the ownership of an Egyptian cotton enterprise, was schooled at Eton. There he excelled at maths and art – having two paintings selected for the 1940 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – and captained the cricket team, before joining up and in May 1943 being commissioned into the 60th Rifles.

After victory in Europe Bramall volunteered to serve in the Asia, becoming part of the Allied occupation force in Japan after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His reservations about how nuclear weapons could ever be used again surfaced early in the army career. Posted to Egypt, he wrote a paper arguing that, should the British army’s 3rd Division (to which he was attached) be threatened with nuclear weapons while there, all movement and deployment would stop, with no advantage to either side.

By 1956 he was a major, in command of D Company of the 1st /60th , which remained in Libya during the Suez crisis. In 1958 he joined the directing staff at the army staff college in Camberley, Surrey. Discussions at the time focused on tactical nuclear weapons and how they might be used on a European battlefield.

The chiefs of defence staff (Bramall, front) at the conference table in Whitehall at the height of the Falklands conflict in 1982 (PA)

He spent two years from 1961 in Berlin as battalion second-in-command of the 2nd Green Jackets (King’s Royal Rifle Corps), then, back in London from 1963, was personal staff officer to the then chief of the defence staff, Lord Mountbatten.

He saw action again in Borneo in 1965 during the Indonesian confrontation, and wrote down his thoughts on command in a pamphlet, Leadership the Green Jacket Way. Hoping for further action, he was dismayed to be harnessed instead as an author of military doctrine for use at Camberley, but the pamphlets he wrote would remain military gospel for the next three decades.

All the time he was developing the concept with which military theoreticians would associate him, the so-called “fifth pillar” of defence, which he was later to put succinctly as “helping our friends to help themselves”: dynamic diplomacy with indirect military support anywhere in the world. This was vital, he contended, in addition to the already agreed “four pillars” – nuclear deterrent, home defence, eastern Atlantic, and Europe’s central region – of post-war military planning.

Even amid the Cold War, focused on the Atlantic and Europe, Bramall saw the Middle East as a potential danger zone, and feared that force could make things worse. The wrong sort of force, he declared, might draw terrorist groups to the scene as “bees to a honeypot”.

Bramall in November 1978, a few months before he became chief of the army general staff (Getty)

During the 1970s he held command posts in first Germany and then Hong Kong. He had doubts in April 1982 about the sending of the naval task force to expel Argentine invaders from the Falkland Islands, but had been away visiting troops when the decision was taken. He was made field marshal in 1982, and as chief of the defence staff from 1982-85 had a fraught relationship with the then-defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, who sought to reorganise Ministry of Defence management.

In retirement he became lord lieutenant of London; he reorganised the Imperial War Museum, of which he was chair; and was president of the Gurkha Brigade Association and of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). He was made a life peer in 1987.

In his last House of Lords speech, on 24 January 2013, he said he had accepted nuclear deterrent argument during the Cold War, but “in a now intensely globalised and interlocked world ... our deterrent [could] never conceivably be used … without making the situation worse.”

In March 2015 Bramall’s house was searched by police investigating allegations of a paedophile ring among high-placed politicians and leading military figures, in the inquiry Operation Midland. He was questioned in April 2015, but no charges were brought.

Lady Bramall died in July 2015 while Bramall was still under investigation. In January 2016 the Metropolitan Police announced that it had dropped investigations into Lord Bramall in connection with allegations of historical child abuse.

He is survived by two children.

Edwin Noel Westby Bramall, soldier, born 18 December 1923, died 12 November 2019