It is easy to dismiss Montgomery as a Second World War
general who applied the doctrines and methods of 1918 to win his victories.
Montgomery’s insistence that his battles be fought according to a ‘master
plan’, his employment of concentrated artillery and his insistence on not
moving until he had adequate logistical support, combined to give his battles
the outward appearance of the great offensives that Haig mounted in France
between 1916 and 1918. He won because he enjoyed superiority in material, and was
able to compel his opponents to fight a series of set-piece battles, not
dissimilar to those of 1918, which minimized the British army’s shortcomings.
Closer inspection reveals a different picture. Montgomery did enjoy a
quantitative material superiority over his enemies. But so had Cunningham and
Ritchie. Both had deployed more tanks than Rommel before CRUSADER and Gazala,
and it had availed them nothing. Furthermore the British army’s quantitative
superiority was partially offset by the qualitative superiority of so many
German weapons. Montgomery did not employ the same operational doctrine and
techniques as Haig had done in 1918. His battles were a product of the
doctrines that the army had developed between the wars, the lessons of its
defeats in 1940–2, and his own personality.
Montgomery won his victories against an enemy who, from
Alamein, through Tunisia, Italy, and Normandy, practised a highly effective
defensive doctrine. The German army’s defences increasingly relied upon deep,
fortified positions, and deep minefields. They no longer deployed their tanks
en masse but used them as mobile pill boxes. The backbone of their defences
consisted of small parties of infantry, lavishly equipped with machine-guns and
mortars and supported by one or two tanks or self-propelled guns. In Italy,
they usually built their main defensive positions along natural lines, either
rivers or mountains, or along a series of small towns commanding main roads. In
the bocage country of Normandy, visibility was so poor that they preferred to
hold as strong points road junctions and villages rather than high ground. A
thinly held outpost line, usually on a forward slope, gave them warning of an
attack. Their main defensive positions, covered by minefields, machine-guns,
and anti-tank guns sited in enfilading positions, were on the reverse slope
where they were concealed from British artillery observers. The Germans ranged
their mortars and artillery onto ground where the British were likely to form
up for an attack. They held their positions in great depth, and, when attacked,
usually mounted a swift counter-attack before the British were able to
consolidate their gains.
The Germans sometimes held their positions with properly
constituted divisions. But the British frequently marvelled at their ability
rapidly to form improvised battle groups from the remnants of formations and
thought it one of the strengths of the German army. The Germans themselves were
not so sanguine. A Corps commander who fought in Italy always preferred to fight
with properly constituted divisions, saying of ad hoc groupings that ‘In a
major battle they melted away like butter in the sun’. One reason for this was
that such ad hoc groups often lacked proper artillery support. The Germans
tried to use mortars to compensate for this weakness, and in Normandy British
medical officers estimated that they caused as many as 70 per cent of infantry
casualties. When forced to withdraw, the Germans employed small, mobile
rearguards equipped with handfuls of tanks, self-propelled guns, and anti-tank
guns, mines, booby-traps, and snipers to slow the pace of the British pursuit.
They usually remained in position just long enough to enable their own
engineers to carry out essential demolition work and began to withdraw when it
was clear that the British advance guard was about to outflank them. In the
opinion of Major-General W. E. Clutterbuck, GOC 1st Division in Tunisia, the
result for the British was that ‘the A.Tank mine and the H[eav]y A.Tank gun has
“seen off” the t[an]k to a great extent and while the tank is still most useful
to inf[antry], its real helper is becoming massed Art[iller]y’.
In finding ways of overcoming their opponents, from late
1942 onwards, British field commanders were compelled to operate within two
constraints. The first was their long-held fear that the morale of their troops
was dangerously fragile. The second was their knowledge that the army was fast
running out of men. Together they meant that they had no option but to employ
operational techniques that put a premium on minimizing casualties.
Even before the war senior commanders had harboured doubts
about the fragile morale of their troops. By mid-1942 the string of defeats
that they had suffered convinced them their worst fears were justified. In May
1942 Wavell decided that
we are nothing like as
tough as we were in the last war and that British and Australian troops will
not at present stand up to the same punishment and casualties as they did in
the last war. It is softness in education and living and bad training, and can
be overcome but it will take a big effort.
A month later, worried about the apparently poor morale of
units in 8th Army, Auchinleck asked the War Cabinet to reintroduce the death
penalty as a deterrent to stem the rising tide of deserters. Two years later,
again because of a growing incidence of desertion from front line units,
Alexander followed suit.
In all three cases there was a suspicion of commanders
seeking easy solutions to complex, systemic problems. In making these requests,
they were harking back to the same solutions that Haig and his contemporaries
had espoused. They, too, had seriously doubted the willingness of the town-bred
masses who filled the ranks of the army during the First World War to withstand
the rigours of war with their morale intact. They, too, had believed that only
an outward conformity to the tenets of military life and strict discipline
would serve to maintain the army’s cohesion. Montgomery shared his
contemporaries’ concerns about the morale of their troops, but he never asked
for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Instead, he adopted a holistic
approach to conserving morale. Firm discipline was an essential factor in
maintaining the willingness of troops to fight, but discipline alone was not
enough. Troops also needed good leadership, realistic training, physical
fitness, and professional man-management. But the single most important factor
in sustaining morale was success in battle. ‘I have no failures in my Army and
the troops know it’, he told an audience of senior officers in February 1943.
However, the need to ensure that each operation was successful itself limited
the scope of what he could ask his troops to do. ‘I limit the scope of
operations to what is possible, and I use the force necessary to ensure
success.’ This meant, for example, that at the operational level in early
October 1942 he substituted a new plan for the Alamein offensive because he
believed that his troops were insufficiently trained to carry out his original
plan. In Normandy, the early stages of the campaign convinced him that some of
the divisions he had brought back from the Mediterranean were battle-weary. For
the rest of the campaign he preferred to spearhead his operations with
formations like 15th and 43rd Infantry divisions and the 11th and Guards
Armoured divisions. Fresh from Britain, where they had been training for four
years, their morale was less fragile.
Haig had begun and ended the First World War believing that
if two sides were equally matched, the one with the stronger will to win would
be victorious. At the tactical level, Montgomery and his colleagues shunned
such simplicities. They put into practice the army’s inter-war doctrine that
battles should be fought with the maximum quantity of material and the minimum
quantity of manpower. Concerned about the morale of 6th Armoured division in
January 1943, Lieutenant-General C. W. Allfrey, GOC V Corps, insisted on the
‘maximum use of Artillery and minimum use of bodies’. At the end of 1943, the DMT
in Italy concluded that a plentiful supply of armour was essential because the
infantry now expected its support as a right. Lieutenant-General Sir Sidney
Kirkman, GOC of XIII Corps, echoed his opinion in November 1944.
We may at times be lavish with artillery expenditure, but
the British soldier has come to expect a certain measure of support and if at
this stage support appears inadequate, I consider that attacks will be launched
in so half-hearted a manner that we shall incur heavy casualties without success.
But even if they had not been concerned about morale, senior
officers would have been impelled to rely more upon material. In late 1942,
just as supplies and equipment began be delivered in quantities sufficient to
enable the army to fight battles of material, manpower began to run dry.
Recruits were so scarce by late 1942 that the army had to begin to disband
formations. In December 1942, Alexander cannibalized 8th Armoured and 44th
Infantry divisions to find drafts to maintain his remaining British formations.
In mid-1943 the equivalent of four divisions were disbanded in the UK. In the
autumn of 1943, the War Cabinet, wrongly assuming that the war in Europe would
end by the autumn of 1944, allocated the army an intake of only 150,000
recruits. The only way the War Office could find sufficient men for 21 Army
Group was by reducing the six Lower Establishment divisions in the UK to
cadres. When that did not suffice, men were transferred to the infantry from
the RAF Regiment and the Royal Artillery and, once those sources ran dry,
Montgomery had no option but to disband two complete divisions in late 1944.
The shrinking size of the army from late 1942 had political,
operational, and tactical consequences. Churchill realized that it threatened
Britain’s political influence within the Anglo-American alliance. In November
1943 he insisted that the War Office find three more divisions to commit to the
cross-Channel invasion so as to give the British parity with the Americans at
least in the opening weeks of the campaign. But the process of shrinkage was
inexorable, and by December 1944 he could only lament that ‘I greatly fear the
dwindling of the British army as a factor in France as it will affect our right
to impress our opinion upon strategic and other matters’.
At the operational and tactical levels, Montgomery
recognized, as early as December 1942, that ‘In all my operations now I have to
be very careful about losses, as there are not the officers and men in the
depots in Egypt to replace them’. Henceforth British field commanders could
afford to be prodigal with munitions and equipment, but not with men. Faced
with a possible shortage of artillery ammunition in March 1944, Alexander
insisted that ‘artillery has proved a battle winning factor in this war—and now
it appears that we must give it up and sacrifice men’s lives (which we haven’t
got) to do this job. I think it’s dreadful.’ Shortly before the Normandy
landing, the Adjutant-General told Lieutenant-General Gerald Bucknall, GOC XXX
Corps, whose troops were about to assault the beaches that the ‘manpower &
Reinforcement situ[atio]n [is] very touchy’. The shortage of replacements
severely constrained commanders’ freedom of action. It reduced their
willingness to seize fleeting opportunities, for fear that they might lead to
heavy and unsustainable losses. In March 1944, Montgomery concluded that ‘We
have got to try and do this business with the smallest possible casualties’.
Initially he pushed 2nd Army hard to take the area southeast of Caen in order to
secure the airfields that his air support required. He told his army commanders
that they must penetrate inland rapidly. ‘We must crack about and force the
battle to swing our way.’ But, by 10 July, faced by mounting casualties, he
told Dempsey that, whilst he must enlarge the bridgehead, he had to avoid
excessive losses. Second Army had plenty of tanks; what it lacked was a
sufficiency of infantry. Dempsey therefore persuaded Montgomery to allow him to
mount an all-armoured attack, Operation GOODWOOD, on 18 July. In September
1944, confronted by an equally serious shortage of drafts in Italy, Alexander
admitted that ‘Commanders are forced to act cannily with serious adverse
effects all the way down the tree’. The need to keep casualties to a minimum in
1944–5 placed a premium on careful preparations and planning and the avoidance
of all unnecessary risks. In June 1944 Leese ordered that, in a set-piece
attack, infantry brigade commanders should issue their orders forty-eight hours
before H-hour and that six hours of daylight should be left to enable platoon
commanders and tank troop commanders to make their plans. Two months later,
Dempsey believed that if a battalion were ordered to attack an organized
defensive position, it had a fifty per cent chance of success if it had two
hours to make its preparations. It had a guarantee of success if it had twice
as long. Dwindling manpower and the perceived deficiencies of the morale of
their troops meant that from late 1942 onwards the British could not afford to
operate with the same haste or develop the same disregard for casualties that
characterized both the Russian and German armies.
The doctrine that Montgomery and his acolytes practised from
Alamein onwards was not original, but neither was it the same as Haig had
practised in 1918, although there were some superficial similarities. Indeed,
recent research on the battles of 1918 has suggested that Haig in fact failed
to practise any operational doctrine, and that he failed in a real sense to
command the BEF. Haig believed that it was his task as the C-in-C of the BEF to
establish a ‘master-plan’ and then leave it to his subordinates to carry it
out. If he interfered in the actual conduct of operations beyond deploying his
own general reserve, he would paralyse their initiative. These ideas synergised
with Haig’s own personality. He was highly self-disciplined, he held himself
aloof and found it difficult to form friendships with his equals. He liked
order, disliked changing his mind or hearing his ideas opposed by subordinates.
He picked weak and acquiescent men to fill staff posts at GHQ and dismissed
officers who had crossed him. It was not surprising, therefore, that senior
officers found it difficult to raise awkward questions with him. The result was
that GHQ was isolated from the rest of the army, and from the realities of the
battlefield. In 1918 Armies, Corps, and Divisions were left largely to their
own devices to find solutions to the tactical problems that they confronted in
the period of semi-mobile warfare that followed the collapse of the German
spring offensive.
Montgomery’s operational doctrine was an amalgam of
inter-war doctrine, the lessons that the high command drew from operations in
the field and in exercises at home since 1939, and his own ruthless personality
that drove him to always seek to impose his will on those around him. The
experience of defeat in France, Greece, and North Africa taught the British to
avoid operational manoeuvres in favour of set-piece attrition battles based on
the possession of superior quantities of material. Montgomery agreed with Haig
that battles should be conducted according to a ‘master-plan’, designed by the
commander and intended to minimize the risk of confusion and error. To that end
the plan had to be simple, for complex plans were inherently more likely to
fail. He also agreed that subordinate commanders had to conduct their own part
in the battle in accordance with the plan and their commander’s wishes.
But as an army and army group commander, Montgomery did not
believe that his job stopped there. He prepared the master-plan and allocated
resources to his army and corps commanders, but he also coordinated their
movements once the battle had begun and liased closely with the RAF to ensure
proper air support for the ground forces. Coordination was facilitated by the
fact that Corps were deliberately organized flexibly so that their composition
could be changed quickly to suit any particular operation. But this high degree
of flexibility was bought at some cost. In July 1944, when 15th (Scottish)
division, was switched from VIII Corps to XXX Corps, its commander complained
that ‘their staffs are almost complete strangers to my staff and of course have
different ways of working which require a certain time before we can say that
we are in complete sympathy with them’. It was the task of corps and divisional
commanders to prepare their own plans to fight the tactical battle in
accordance with the Army commander’s plan. Senior officers exercised control
over their subordinates by setting them a well-defined centre line for their
advance and ordering them to move along it in a series of ‘bounds’.
In order to enable him to exercise command without imposing
unnecessary delays on the tempo of operations, Montgomery discarded written
operational orders in favour of verbal orders, issued either in face-to-face
meetings or, during mobile operations, using r/t. He expected his subordinates
to do likewise. The issue to subordinate commanders of marked-up maps showing
start lines and objectives usually supplemented verbal orders. ‘There is’,
according to one visitor in July 1943, ‘a strong anti-paper complex everywhere
in 8th Army HQ . . .’ Far from remaining aloof from the rest of the army,
Montgomery went out of his way to maintain contact with them. To ensure that
all ranks understood their part in the ‘master-plan’, Montgomery tried to
address all officers down to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel himself and again
expected them to do the same to their subordinates.
Nor did Montgomery employ a staff of yes-men. One of the
first innovations that he introduced when he took command of 8th Army was to
appoint Auchinleck’s BGS, Freddie de Guingand, as his Chief of Staff. The
latter’s role was not only to co-ordinate all staff functions, thus freeing the
army commander to ponder how to fight the next battle. He also had the power to
take decisions in Montgomery’s name when the C-in-C was away from his main
headquarters. This enabled Montgomery to go forward and command from near the forward
edge of the battle. Before D-Day, Montgomery urged all commanders down to Corps
level to follow his example. The Court of Enquiry that investigated the reasons
for the collapse of the Gazala line and the fall of Tobruk in June 1942
concluded unequivocally that commanders had to command from the front. By
Alamein it had finally became common practice for formation commanders in 8th
Army to exercise command in battle from a small tactical HQ. However, until
1944, 8th Army’s practice was not shared by formations training in Britain.
Their commanders, preparing for D-Day, were told that forming a tactical HQ
should be the exception, rather than the rule. On taking command of 21st Army
Group, Montgomery overturned this recommendation. He expected his subordinates
down to the level of division to follow his example and fight the battle from a
tactical HQ, and most did so. Some paid the price by becoming casualties, but
their readiness to command from the forward edge of the battle meant that Corps
Commanders like Sir Brian Horrocks, who used a tank or a light aircraft to go
forward to his division’s HQs, could, in the eyes of their subordinates,
develop ‘a marvellous facility for turning up at the right moment’. However,
merely because commanders were on the spot did not necessarily mean that they
invariably took the correct decisions. On the opening day of GOODWOOD, ‘Pip’
Roberts, then commanding 11th Armoured Division, was following closely behind
his armoured brigade commander and ordered the latter to mask rather than
capture the village of Cagny. It was only after the war that he discovered that
in doing so he enabled the Germans to reinforce their defences and block the
further advance of his division.
When he took command of 8th Army on 25 June 1942, Auchinleck
realized that it was essential that commanders ‘dispense with constant
discussion with or reference to his subordinates’ and actually command them.
Some of his senior staff officers thought that he was incapable of doing so.
Auchinleck’s critics also thought he too-readily assumed that once an order had
been given it would automatically be carried out. Montgomery did not make the
same mistakes. Unlike Haig, he believed that it was an essential task of an
army commander to monitor the execution of his orders to ensure that his
subordinates were acting at all times in accordance with his master-plan. Just
as he planned his battles two levels below himself, so he monitored the work of
commanders two levels down. It was Montgomery’s refusal to allow his senior
subordinates the latitude customary in the British army to develop their own
interpretation of orders that more than anything set him apart from his
contemporaries. Determined to impose his will on the enemy, he knew that he
first had to impose it on his own subordinates. What he called maintaining a
‘firm grip’ was ‘essential in order that the master plan will not be undermined
by the independent ideas of individual subordinate commanders at particular
moments in the battle’.
Montgomery established his ‘firm grip’ through a variety of
means. He imposed a rigorous training regime at all levels of his army, and he
insisted that units and formations devised and practised drills to ensure that
they could carry out common tasks rapidly and efficiently. Most of the
shortcomings in 8th Army’s training had already been recognized by Wavell,
Auchinleck, and their senior staff officers before Montgomery arrived. What
Montgomery did do was to insist for the first time that all commanders took the
training of their troops seriously. Only if they did so would ‘the doctrine
laid down permeate throughout the formation.’ Realism, including the lavish use
of live ammunition was essential. ‘We must’, he told a Staff College audience
in September 1942, ‘adopt common-sense safety precautions and accept the risk
of a few casualties in order to get the Army fit for battle.’ Whenever
possible, he tried to rehearse operations before mounting them. Before Second
Alamein, X Corps practised how to effect a passage through deep minefields,
putting special reference on preparing rapid artillery fire-plans to overcome
enemy anti-tank screens. Units earmarked for the landing in Sicily practised
assault landing techniques at the northern end of the Red Sea. The 7th Armoured
division spent three months in North Africa undergoing individual and unit
training and combined operations training before landing in Italy in September
1943. Training was also conducted when formations were at rest. By December
1942, 1st Armoured, 4th Indian, and 50th divisions had all been left behind by
the speed of 8th Army’s advance, but their Corps Commander, Horrocks, was busy
chivvying them to ensure that they spent time in training. ‘I am going off the
day after tomorrow’, he informed Montgomery, ‘to spend two days each with 50
and 4 Ind[ian] Divisions, just to see that the training is not all on paper . .
.’
