World Battlefronts: MEN AT WAR: A Soldier’s Death

When Winston Churchill uttered his defiant “We shall fight on the beaches . . . in the fields and in the streets,” he knew the man to back his words with armed men. It was eagle-faced, gentle-eyed General Sir John Greer Dill, recalled from France, who had become Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

Ulsterman Dill, a man (said other British officers) who was always “buttoned up,” refitted Britain’s tattered Army, carried on with silent, machinelike precision as C.I.G.S. Then when he reached-retirement age (60), he applied his rule to himself, and accepted a less important duty in India.

But Soldier Dill, now armed with a Field Marshal’s baton, was destined never to reach India. A topflight job developed for which he was Churchill’s inevitable choice—head of the British Joint Staff Mission to Washington, set up immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Among the Allies’ top planning soldiers John Dill found friends—General Marshall, “Hap” Arnold, the Navy’s “Ernie” King—and bound them close to him by his easy wit, his Jim Farley-like ability to remember first names and nicknames, his all-round proficiency as a soldier and a staff officer.

Field Marshal Dill was a fast worker, but he knew no hours. To force him to rest, George Marshall took him to his home in Virginia for weekends, sometimes took him canoeing on the Potomac. When the second Quebec Conference was called, General Dill’s physician forbade him to go. He went anyhow.

The man whom many Britons call “our best general since Marlborough” died (of anemia) last week in the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Hospital. Promptly Franklin Roosevelt awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal. John Dill’s body was borne across the Potomac to Arlington Cemetery, to lie among the U.S.’s military great.