Colonel Tim Collins attacked over speech

When Colonel Tim Collins (pictured) delivered his famous battle speech on the eve of the second Gulf war, in which he evoked the spirit of Churchill and Shakespeare's Henry V, it was hailed as masterpiece of martial rhetoric. However, a new book, written by a soldier who served under him in the conflict, claims that the speech, dramatised by Kenneth Branagh in the video below, had a completely demoralising effect on the troops.

Captain Doug Beattie, 43, Collins's Regimental Sergeant Major and right-hand-man at the time, says that there was "a little too much reality" for the men and that Collins's bald assertion that some of them would die - the colonel said "there are some who are alive at this moment who will not be alive shortly" - left many young soldiers in despair and unwilling to fight.

Beattie, 43, notes in his book, called An Ordinary Soldier, that he had to reverse the damage done by the supposed moral-boosting talk. "I could see heads starting to go down, and it wasn't just a reaction to the sand swirling about in the stiff breeze."

At the end, Beattie recalls thinking: "Cheers, boss. Thanks a bloody lot... I knew I had a problem. He had left the men somewhere they shouldn't have been: thinking about home, wondering if they would ever return there again, fearful of the dangers that faced them in the hours, days and weeks ahead. They had to be snapped out of it." Beattie then gave them what he describes as a right "bollocking". He adds: "Whatever the men had been contemplating five minutes earlier, they certainly weren't now."

Needless to say, Colonel Collins, who quit the Army in frustration after the war, maintains that his hard-hitting speech had been a necessary "wake-up call" for his men because so few of them had experienced combat before. "The speech was never meant for public consumption. The very few soldiers there who had been on active service before knew exactly what I was talking about."

And he said the effect of his speech should be judged by his battalion's record in Iraq in the weeks that followed, when they captured "more territory than any other formation" but suffered no fatalities or even serious injuries, despite fierce fighting.