When Gort went to command the
British Expeditionary Force (BEF), he wanted to take Adam as his
chief of staff. Hore-Belisha refused the request on the grounds of maintaining continuity. However, in October 1939 Adam was appointed commander of
III Corps, , General
Sir Alan Brooke (left), during a visit to
Northern Command with Adam (right), conferring around a
6-inch coastal defence gun, 6 August 1940. Following his return from France on 31 May 1940, Adam was appointed
General Officer Commanding-in-Chief
Northern Command, responsible for the defence of the coastline from
The Wash to the Scottish border. It was during his year with Northern Command that he concluded that the army needed both more effective selection procedures and to ensure that soldiers understood the cause for which they were fighting. On 1 June 1941 he was appointed
Adjutant-General, the second military member of the
Army Council and a key role with responsibility for all personnel, administration and organisational matters. The role was of particular importance during the war years because of the need for the army to adapt its practices to meet the needs of a conscript army led by non-career officers. In peacetime, each infantry regiment conducted its own recruit training. As a result, in 1941 there were fifty-eight infantry and four machine gun training centres. In July 1941, Adam consolidated them, reducing their number to just fourteen and one. This saved 14,000 men. Adam then went further. Since battle casualties need to be replaced either by cross-posting or new recruits from training centres, he proposed creating a Corps of Infantry. Others ranks could then be routinely cross-posted; no transfer to another regiment would be required. The proposal met with alarm among traditionalists at the War Office, who blocked it. However, Adam managed to then push through another reform creating the
General Service Corps (GSC) in January 1942. All recruits—some 710,000 between July 1942 and May 1945— were initially posted to the GSC for the period of their basic training, after which they were sent to a training centre for specialised training, which took from sixteen weeks for the infantry up to thirty weeks for signallers. Transfers of men from one corps to another were still needed, especially in late 1944 when thousands of men were transferred from anti-aircraft units to the infantry. , commanding the
161st Brigade within whose area they were. The new system gave the Army more time to assess the capabilities of recruits and how to best employ them. In 1940, the government had hastily mobilised 120 infantry battalions. By the middle of 1941, half of these had been disbanded, and their manpower transferred to other arms. In November 1941, recruiting of skilled men was halted pending investigation of 9,800 allegations of misuse of skilled personnel. Of these, 1,300 were found to be justified. Adam noted in July 1941 that the Army was "wasting its manpower in this war as badly as it did in the last." He set up a Directorate for the Selection of Personnel that drew up aptitude tests to establish recruits' psychological stability, combatant temperament, technical aptitudes and leadership potential.
IQ tests were rejected as being for children. Standardised tests were developed to classify men into six grades, and nine trade groupings, which were then allocated to each arm. Under the new system the failure rate for tradesmen dropped from 16.7 to 6.7 per cent, and for drivers from 16 to 20 per cent to 3 per cent. When applied to women, the failure rate for radio operators plunged from 64 per cent to just 3 per cent. Under Adam's guidance, this led to tackling the British Army's other major personnel problem, officer selection. As in the Great War, the classes that had traditionally provided leadership in society could not furnish the numbers of leaders that the Army needed. Those with a university education who had completed
Officers' Training Corps (OTC) training were immediately commissioned. Those that had attended a
public school were sent to an Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) for a three-month course before being commissioned. While there were those who felt that one's parents' ability to pay for an education did not necessarily imply the possession of leadership qualities, it was considered that public school boys were imbued with good character, self-restraint, perseverance, and courage, and that participation in team sports promoted physical fitness and quick decision making—all characteristics that the Army considered desirable in its officers. This still did not provide enough officers. Commanders were ordered to furnish quotas of potential officers from their other ranks for OCTUs, but not all nominated, or could nominate, good candidates, and there was a general feeling that men with only elementary schooling, regional accents or even mildly left-wing views had no chance of nomination. Failure rates at the OCTUs were high, averaging around 30 per cent of the candidates on each course. Adam did not accept the traditional view that there was an "officer-producing class", but believed that men and women of innate ability could be found in all parts of the community. Both these innovations met resistance, most of which was overcome. He instituted a new system of OCTU nomination that was no longer based on a simple interview by commanding officers, but carried out through a
War Office Selection Board ("Wozbee") whose members, advised by psychiatrists and psychologists, oversaw various tests, especially those aimed at showing a man's leadership potential. Psychiatrists were in short supply, and there were doubts about the value of predictive psychiatry. Wozbees were established at home starting in March 1942, and overseas by the middle of 1943. Men were sent to a country house in groups of 30 to 40, and divided to groups of about eight. They then undertook a series of tests. Adam particularly liked the one where a leaderless group was asked to bridge a stream using material lying about, which included three planks, all too short, and some rope. "The test showed", he noted, "not only who were the leaders, but also those who fitted into a team." By the end of the war, 21 per cent of the British Army's officers had elementary school education, compared with 34 per cent who had attended public schools. Adam went even further in his search for officer candidates. In one experiment, he divided a unit into four groups—officers, junior NCOs, senior NCOs and polled an entire unit, asking all ranks to nominate potential officers. Those nominated by three out of four groups were then sent to the Wozbee. Of the 114 nominated, 56 per cent passed, which was not significantly higher than the usual 54 per cent, but 7 per cent of the unit was nominated instead of the usual 0.1 per cent, producing far more officers. Adam then wanted to expand the trial, but for his critics, it was clear evidence that he had finally crossed the line from
socialism to full-blown
Bolshevism. The Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces, Lieutenant General Sir
Bernard Paget wrote to the
Secretary of State for War, Sir
James Grigg, warning him that Adam was "a serious menace to both morale and discipline." When the matter was placed before the Army Council, Brooke and Grigg, who normally protected Adam, failed to support it, and the trial did not proceed. The British Army remained short of officers. In order to supplement the British Army with junior officers, Adam helped devise the
CANLOAN program in 1944; which saw 673 Canadian officers serve in British units. Just before
D-Day, some 200 Canadian officers were seconded to the British
21st Army Group in Europe, and 168 Australian officers to the
Fourteenth Army in Burma. The effectiveness of the Wozbees is hard to gauge. When commanding officers in the Mediterranean and the 21st Army Group were surveyed in 1943 and 1944, they considered that there was little difference between the products of the Wozbees and those nominated by earlier means, suggesting that their training was more important.
George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the
Harry Flashman series of novels opined that "the general view throughout the Army was that they weren't fit to select bus conductors, let alone officers." (ABCA) course at the
American University in Beirut, for officers stationed in the Middle East. A medical officer is shown giving a lecture on plans for a post-war health service. The ABCA, which provided the opportunity for debate on current social and political affairs, was often accused of having a left-wing bias as it concentrated on progressive ideas for peace-time reconstruction. No one was specifically responsible for morale in the Army as a whole until 1941, when it was given to Adam. He championed the
Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), which produced fortnightly pamphlets on current developments to provide officers with material for compulsory discussion groups with their men. He and other senior officers recognised that the call of "King and Country", which had been so powerful in 1914, was not enough for a more sceptical generation; a citizen army had to be encouraged into battle, not just ordered. However, the "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die" attitude was still widespread almost a century after the
Battle of Balaclava, and the leftward swing in British public opinion during the war years that resulted in a landslide for the
Labour Party in the
1945 general election was blamed by some Conservatives on the ABCA, a charge Adam considered absurd. The ABCA discussion groups substituted the "habit of rational argument for the anarchy of the barrack-room argument", he told the British Institute of Adult Education in 1945. On an inspection tour of the
Middle East Command in November 1943, Adam, by pure chance, encountered men who had been condemned to death and penal servitude for their part in the
Salerno mutiny. He immediately suspended their sentences. In a letter to General
Sir Bernard Montgomery, who had not been consulted about the sentences, Adam wrote that this was "one of the worst things we have ever done." Some of the men subsequently deserted, and therefore had their sentences re-imposed. Adam appointed a psychiatrist to examine their mental state. He wanted them released, but this did not occur before the end of the war. Adam blamed the mutiny on maladministration in General
Sir Harold Alexander's
15th Army Group; Montgomery was more specific, putting the blame on Lieutenant General
Sir Charles Miller, Alexander's Chief Administrative Officer. As the end of the war approached, thoughts turned to demobilisation. Adam asked for the records of the demobilisation after the Great War, and found that they had been destroyed. Information was gathered from newspapers,
Hansard, journal articles, and a chapter in
Winston Churchill's
The World Crisis. He instituted a demobilisation system based on the "first in, first out" principle, in which the only criteria were age and length of service, and resisted attempts to repeat the practice in 1918–19 of giving priority to the needs of the economy. Employers had preferred men with recent experience to those who had been away for years, which had led to mutinies by long-serving men. Adam remembered that many men had been hurt that in the demobilisation process they had left the Army without a word of thanks for years of service. He instituted a procedure whereby an officer personally thanked each man and said "goodbye." Adam was seen by Churchill, amongst others, as being too radical, and Adam aroused the suspicions of more conservative generals like Paget. Churchill even attempted to have him posted in early 1944 as
Governor of Gibraltar but Brooke, who had been appointed CIGS at the end of 1941, and who saw him as progressive, ensured Adam continued to hold the post of Adjutant-General so long as Brooke remained CIGS, which he did until the end of the war. Adam was promoted to general on 12 April 1942. His influence on the conduct of the war was not only through his long tenure as Adjutant-General but also because he was one of Brooke's only two confidants, and the two of them lunched together regularly when both were in London. Adam was appointed a
Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the
1941 Birthday Honours, and a
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the
1946 New Year Honours. He was also made a Commander of the United States
Legion of Merit on 14 November 1947. He was
colonel commandant of the
Royal Army Dental Corps from 1945 to 1951, of the Royal Artillery from 1940 to 1950, and of the Army Educational Corps from 1940 to 1950. He was succeeded by General Sir
Richard O'Connor, who hated the job, and resigned in August 1947. Few of Adam's reforms survived. The Wozbees remained, but psychologists were removed from them. Infantry training reverted to the regiments, but post-war cuts in the size of the British Army reduced the number of infantry regiments though amalgamation and disbandment from 64 in 1945 to 16 in 2012, achieving much the same result. The ABCA was abolished in 1945. ==Later life==