Leadership, Management and Command

Thus did Montgomery describe D-Day. But success in Normandy was by no means foreordained. Brooke’s war diary for 5 June 1944 reads:

I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At best it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it was safely over.²

Strategy is fundamentally the concern of the senior leadership in war-time for both political and military leaders. This was the land of those with an obsessional focus on long-distant goals, and the first strategic decision the Western Allied leaders had to make was whether to concentrate on Germany or Japan. Despite the greater fear and animosity amongst the American population for the threat from Japan, it was apparent to most — though not all — the political and military leadership that Germany posed the greater threat. Moreover, the USA was the only significant Allied power in the Pacific, especially after Britain’s ignominious expulsion from Singapore, and therefore the USA assumed that the post-war situation in the Pacific would be relatively simple to control. In effect, political leadership for all the Allies was as much concerned with the postwar settlement as it was with finding a way to win the war.

In theory Overlord could well have failed: despite the planning expertise available to the Western Allies the invasion remained untameable: it remained a Wicked Problem simply because it was not possible to predict whether the German response would be scissor, paper or stone. The Germans had more troops and armour in the area than the Allies would be able to land for several weeks. The German defences would have — and indeed had — several hours’ notification that the invasion was on its way and had known that an invasion was imminent for long enough to move submarines, E-boats and aircraft near enough to cause havoc with the armada. Even a successful initial landing could well have been repulsed within 48 hours by the movement of Panzer and infantry forces close to the beaches or within a week by the movement of German reinforcements from the 15th Army encamped around Calais. That the Allies succeeded was the result of both luck and skill on their part, particularly involving relatively junior officers and troops, and ineptitude on the part of the German High Command who were not rescued by their senior officers. This chapter considers the role that information and misinformation played in leading the defenders astray. In short, leadership was critical not just in successfully leading the Allies to and across the beaches of Normandy but also in mwieading the defenders away from those same beaches.

While the Allied strategy was built upon isolating the invasion battlefield and persuading the Germans that the real invasion would occur at the Pas de Calais, the German strategy was to hold the invasion up long enough to push the invaders back into the sea. Ironically this inverted both sides’ general approach: the prior German successes had been rooted in rapid forward movement of armoured divisions in Blitzkrieg fashion, or, alternatively, in prolonged and skilful fighting retreats on the eastern front; the Allies’ successes, such as there were any early in the war, had been by maintaining strong defensive positions. In this sense the Germans, replicating the distinction between exogenous and endogenous skeletons, switched from their traditional ‘soft shell’ approach to a ‘hard shell’ approach and the Allies did the reverse. The soft shell approach embodies flexibility at the cost of sustaining reparable damage. In effect, like animals, the surface tissue is easily damaged but repairs easily too. However the ‘hard shell’/exogenous skeleton form is much tougher to ‘crack’ in the first instance because surface damage is easily resisted. However, once the surface is shattered then the integrity of the entire body disintegrates as the shell/skeleton ruptures.

All Allied ground troops in the 21st Army Group were under Montgomery’s direct command with the American 1st Army under Bradley and the Anglo-Canadians under Lt General Dempsey’s British 2nd Army On the eastern side Crocker commanded the 1st Corps composed of the British at Sword (British 3rd Division) and the Canadian 3rd Division at Juno, while Bucknall (later to be fired by Montgomery) led the British 30th Corps on to Gold (British 50th Division). This was a 25 mile sector of relatively flat land (except between Port en Bessin and Arromanches on Gold), defended by the German 716th Infantry Division in the east and the German 352nd Infantry Division in the west.

The most puzzling thing about the British Army is how it managed to survive the Second World War at all, despite its successes in 1918. At the beginning of the Second World War it remained grossly under-funded thanks to years of government parsimony; it was not organized for continental European offensive action but for Imperial defence; it was led by an officer corps that retained its preference for the amateur gentleman over the professional; and its tactical doctrines, such as they existed, were still rooted in the disciplined hierarchy of the parade ground rather than the flexible heterarchy of a mobile battlefield. The weaknesses of the British Army did not prevail through all the units however, and the elite groups tended to organize themselves along rather more flexible lines. Moreover, over time the British government and the British Army learned quickly that you could not fight a modern war without huge financial and material resources and that equitation training had little in common with the desperate fighting in Normandy, where casualty rates often replicated the horrors of the First World War. Nevertheless, the British Army persisted in its habit of retaining the highest ratio of officers to soldiers in any major army of the time. In short, the British Army seldom trusted its own soldiers to lead themselves and that proved to be their greatest weakness: once the Germans realized the inability of most of the British soldiers to act without direction from above they could effectively immobilize any unit just by killing the officers and NCOs. Nevertheless, the process of mobilization was at least Tame: the British had been there before.

The USA became renowned during the war as the Arsenal of Democracy in the profusion of material supplies of all kinds but it began the war as the least prepared of all major combatant nations. What role did the management of Tame Problems play in reducing the US to a state of military inertia in the first instance and then turning it around to the point where it seemed that the number of troops, tanks, trucks and assorted technologies of war stationed in the south of England in early 1944 might actually sink the entire country?¹

German mobilization had started in 1935 and the system operated along strict age categories. The 100,000 members of the Mannheer’, the post-Versailles Treaty army that the Germans had managed to preserve, formed the nucleus of the army with many individuals assuming the positions of officers or NCOs in the new German army. In fact the Mannheer was restricted to 4,000 officers — but had it had 18,000 SNCOs and 30,000 JNCOs so that with 50 per cent of the soldiers recognized as having some formal leadership role it was effectively leader fill. After the invasion of France in 1940, Hitler had even managed to demobilize several categories of older troops (partly to employ them in munitions factories for the future wars) but the categories — and the criteria for avoiding military service — became progressively tightened as the war in the east foundered and the war in the west began again. Only German nationals were permitted to join the army, at least until 1942 forced a change of policy when it began recruiting non-Russians from the USSR, though the Waffen SS had recruited foreign volunteers from 1940.¹

D-Day was the largest-ever amphibious operation. It involved 175,000 Allied troops and 50,000 vehicles, all of which were landed either by air, using 11,000 planes, or by sea, using 6,833 ships, and all within 24 hours.¹ The battle for Normandy, which D-Day initiated, lasted until the end of August 1944 and was the largest single battle ever undertaken by the Western Allies against Germany. The Allied forces involved 40 divisions: 23 American in Bradley’s 25th US Army Group, and 17 in Montgomery’s 21st Army Group (13 British, 3 Canadian and 1 Polish). On 15 September the Allied armies were joined from the south of France by Denver’s US 6th Army Group of 25 divisions (12 French and 13 American). At their height, the American Army Groups totalled 72 Divisions while the Anglo-Canadians, plus Poles, totalled 21 Divisions.² By comparison, the battles in the North African desert between Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Korps seldom involved more than 11 divisions.

Getting across the beaches in Normandy took years of planning, training and production. That 24-hour period, which Rommel referred to as the ‘Longest Day’, proved for many to be their shortest day. In theory Allied material strength, especially that which derived from the Arsenal of Democracy in the USA, could more than compensate for the alleged superiority of the German soldier. And since those soldiers facing the invaders were supposedly second rate the invasion should have been relatively easy. In fact, and with the exception of Omaha, it was, for fewer Allied soldiers died on D-Day than on many of the subsequent days of fighting. But while Allied technology in the form of superior aircraft and artillery, supported by the dominance of the Allied navies, ensured significant advantages for the Allied troops, the latter’s poor landing craft, tanks and machine guns proved very problematic. In the main, as the previous chapter suggested, the disadvantages were a product of culture and politics, rather than contingency or misfortune or poorer technologies or inadequate science, because there were alternative and superior boats and tanks that could well have reduced the invaders’ casualties even more. That the invasion succeeded is a tribute to those who worked around and against such unnecessary disadvantages.

The capacity of soldiers to kill on order and to remain doing so has always proved troublesome for higher command, because an army may be ‘a dumb beast which kills when it is set down but its soldiers also feel pain’.¹ Looking back at D-Day one quote always comes to mind: ‘A rational army would run away’.² Yet, by and large, armies do not act in this way and certainly the vast majority of all troops involved on both sides carried out their duties on D-Day. Keegan³ suggests several other reasons why, in the main, most soldiers do not run away, despite the danger involved in staying put in a crisis.

This chapter focuses on the air assault. It begins with a review of the strategy and then details the actions of the three Allied elements (US 85th and 101st Divisions and the British 6th Division) and the responses of the Germans to these initial attacks. It will become clear that much of the plan went awry early on the morning of D-Day for the Allies as paratroopers and gliders landed in the wrong place and generated an array of Critical Problems for all concerned. Nevertheless the scattering of troops, while it inhibited the execution of Allied assaults on specific targets, also confused the German defenders. Most of the goals of the air assault were achieved on the day but a critical element in their achievement was the catastrophic failure of the German command system. Historically the German army had moved a long way from its authoritarian and hierarchical Prussian origins and developed a system of Auftragstaktik — mission control — that replaced Befehlstaktik — an uncompromising order. This inversion had been in response to Prussian defeats at the hands of Napoleon and the subsequent displacement of ‘direct orders’ by ‘mission goals’ had proved the basis for the success of the Blitzkriegs in Europe. However, Hitler’s increasing interventions in military decisions, especially from late 1941, undermined the value of Auftragstaktik and overlaid it with a new form of Befehlstaktik. This, as we shall see, effectively compromised the efforts of the German field commanders to respond to the first developments on D-Day and provided the Allies with enough time to establish a foothold on the French coast which proved to be the bridgehead to Berlin.

One of the essential aspects of a crisis is its unanticipated nature, and the shock to the Germans of the armada’s sudden appearance was colossal, for the sheer size and scale of the operation seemed overwhelming. ‘There were so many vessels’, recalled Sergeant Richard Heklotz of the German 110th Field Artillery, ‘so many ships, that there was nowhere on the horizon that you could look and not see some type of vessel’.¹ But as Omaha Beach was to prove, surprise and materiel were necessary but not sufficient to secure the landings; that required Command too.

If all the British military casualties of the 20th century marched past the Cenotaph in columns it would take three days and three nights. In the First World War about three quarters of a million British deaths occurred.¹ In the Second World War that number decreased to around 145,000.² Including all the casualties in all the theatres of war between 1939 and 1945, over 23,000 people died every day. Overall, almost 7 per cent of US forces did not make it through the war unscathed. Two per cent died in action, 1 per cent died from wounds or disease and 4 per cent were wounded but lived. In contrast, by July 1944 over one third of the German army had been wounded once, 11 per cent had been wounded twice and 11 per cent had been wounded three times. The casualty rate amongst German officers was even greater: on average each officer’s position was refilled nine times.³ Most of these casualties had been incurred in the east not the west, indeed, 3 million of the 4 million German casualties had been inflicted by the Soviet Union.⁴