Much time was devoted to inculcating battle drills in the
expectation that they would speed the tempo of operations. A week before
Montgomery arrived in the desert, Auchinleck’s newly appointed BGS, Brigadier
de Guingand, asked Corps commanders to develop a battle drill for breaking
through deep enemy positions protected by minefields. ‘In the German Army this
type of operation is carried out stage by stage in accordance with a standard
procedure which may be modified for particular conditions. This has proved
successful in recent operations.’ Montgomery had already enthusiastically
embraced battle drills in Britain and lost no time in insisting that all arms
develop them. They ‘will enable deployment to be speeded-up’ as well as
ensuring the proper co-ordination between all arms. He appeared to have
succeeded. At Alamein the Germans captured British orders that seemed to them
to be clearer and briefer than anything they had seen before. Almost
simultaneously the General Staff formerly endorsed the practice in an ATM.
Montgomery did not remain isolated from his generals. On the
contrary he went out of his way to train them. ‘I do concentrate’, he wrote in,
September 1943, ‘on teaching my Generals, and I am certain one has got to do
so.’ He spread his ideas through a series of short booklets distilling his
experiences as a field commander and by organizing lectures and study periods
at which he presided. Before D-Day, he continued the process. On 13 January
1944, for example, he spoke to all Army, Corps, and Divisional commanders in
21st Army Group, explaining to them how he intended to stage-manage his battles
and issued each of them with another pamphlet, Notes on High Command in War.
Like Haig, Montgomery preferred to be surrounded by his own
men, but the criteria he employed in selecting them was professional
competence, not whether he found them personally congenial. He was ruthless in
placing men who he had trained in his methods and who had demonstrated their
ability as commanders in the field in command of units and formations under his
command. Before Alamein, for example, he obtained not only two new Corps
Commanders, Leese and Horrocks, but also a new CRA, Sidney Kirkman. On
returning from Italy to take command of 21st Army Group, he quickly installed a
number of senior staff officers who had worked closely with him in 8th Army in
key staff posts and throughout his tenure in command kept close control over
appointments. These measures went a long way to ensure that formations that had
fought in the Mediterranean and formations that had been training in Britain
since 1940 practised a common operational doctrine by 1944.
However, Montgomery did not always get his own way over
appointments. He did not think that Crerar was fit to command an army in
action, only two of his original corps commanders in Normandy, Guy Simmonds and
Gerald Bucknell, were his protégés and his attempt to dismiss the commander of
the Guards Armoured division, Alan Adair, was blocked. Officers excluded from
his favoured circle were resentful, but he was hardly unique amongst Second
World War generals in placing men he knew and trusted in key positions under
him. General Sir Richard McCreery, for example, began the war as a
Lieutenant-Colonel and GSOI to Alexander, then commander of 1st division. When
Alexander became C-in-C Middle East in 1942, McCreery became his CGS and ended
the war, still under Alexander, as GOC 8th Army.
The extent to which other senior commanders followed
Montgomery’s example and reduced the latitude of their subordinates to
interpret orders varied. Neither Alexander, when he commanded Army Groups in
Tunisia and Italy, or Leese, when he commanded 8th Army in Italy, tried to do
so to the same extent as Montgomery. The fact that their forces contained large
allied contingents made it politically necessary for them to adopt a more
relaxed policy towards those of their subordinates who were also allied or
Dominion commanders responsible to their own governments.
The reaction of subordinates confronted by this new regime varied.
Some positively welcomed it. ‘Pip’ Roberts, who commanded an armoured brigade
in the desert in 1942, contrasted Montgomery’s precise orders before Alam Halfa
favourably with Ritchie’s indecisiveness before Gazala. ‘There was one firm
plan’, he later wrote, ‘and one position to occupy and we all felt better.’
When he commanded VIII Corps in Normandy, O’Connor found that ‘what Montgomery
gave to his commanders was a sense of assurance. A sense of confirmation having
examined the plan.’ Others did not like his methods but they seldom lasted
long. Montgomery did share another attribute with Haig, namely his willingness
to dismiss senior officers who he believed had failed in action through showing
insufficient determination and drive to carry out his orders. Since Ritchie’s
appointment to command 8th Army, senior officers had grown increasingly prone
to question his orders. But Montgomery would not tolerate this habit he called
‘bellyaching’. He dismissed Herbert Lumsden from command of X Corps and Alec Gatehouse
from command of 10th Armoured division after Alamein because he had no time for
officers he believed had shown signs of ‘“wilting under the strain”’. Shortly
after arriving in London, Lumsden was reputed to have entered his London club
wearing a bowler hat and his uniform and said, ‘I’ve just been sacked because
there isn’t enough room in the desert for two cads like Montgomery and me.’
Others whose careers suffered because they were insufficiently ruthless in
driving their troops forward included D. C. Bullen-Smith (dismissed from
command of 51st Highland division in July 1944), Bucknell, and ‘Bobby’ Erskine
(dismissed from command of XXX Corps and 7th Armoured division in August 1944).
Again in contrast to Haig, Montgomery developed human and
technological systems to monitor the work of his subordinate commanders. As an
Army Group commander he could keep in close personal contact with his army and
corps commanders. But he could not hope personally to visit each of his
divisional commanders regularly, and so he employed a team of specially trained
liaison officers to monitor their work. They visited divisional HQs in the
afternoon when the commander was making his plans for the next day. They
interviewed him, and he briefed them about his intentions. When Montgomery
debriefed them in the evening, the liaison officers could tell him about not
only each divisional commander’s plans, but also his state of mind. If
Montgomery was disturbed by anything they told him, he quickly contacted the
relevant army or corps commander. On top of this Montgomery also eavesdropped
on his own subordinates. During CRUSADER some British commanders began
unofficially to copy the Germans, and to monitor the operational traffic on
their own units’ wireless nets. By this method messages picked up from forward
nets could be in the hands of Army HQ within ten to fifteen minutes, whereas
normal ‘sitreps’ took up to twelve hours to filter through. At Alam Halfa this
process was systematized in the shape of the ‘J’ service, which was developed
largely by the GSO1 (Operations) at 8th Army’s HQ, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh
Mainwaring. It brought to light a worrying series of lapses in the command and
control system. After Alamein the J system was established on a permanent
basis. Parallel developments took place in Britain. The result was that in
North West Europe a ‘Phantom’ patrol was attached to each divisional HQ to
intercept traffic on the divisional and brigade nets and pass it back
immediately to army HQ.
Montgomery and his colleagues were only able to command from
near the forward edge of the battlefield because by late 1942 the army finally
had the communications system that it required. They could now rely on
receiving a steady flow of up-to-date information about their own and the enemy’s
troops, and they could issue realistic orders in time for their subordinates to
act upon them. The army’s mature system of C31 rested upon a greatly expanded
signal establishment, and the manufacture of more and better equipment. In the
course of the war the establishment of an infantry division’s signals regiment
increased from 491 to 743 all-ranks, and an armoured division’s regiment from
629 to 753. The army was also issued with more radios. Between 1939 and 1945,
the Ministry of Supply produced over 550,000 wireless sets for the army. It
might have been better equipped sooner but for the fact that it received a
lower priority than did the other two services for radio equipment. The quality
of radio equipment also improved, so that by 1943 armoured units, for example,
had sets that enabled commanders to control their whole regiment on a single
frequency. However, the system did not depend solely on more and better radios.
Cable retained its technical advantages over wireless in that it could carry a
larger volume of traffic more securely. At Alamein, in Tunisia, and for much of
the fighting in Sicily, Italy, and North West Europe, the distances and speed
with which operations were conducted diminished compared to the war in the
desert, and mountains degraded the performance of radios. It therefore became
possible and necessary for signallers to create elaborate systems of line
communication. This trend was most discernible in infantry formations, but it
also occurred, although to a lesser extent, in armoured divisions. It was one
reason why the British Army could employ large artillery concentrations in the
second half of the war. The outcome of these developments was a more flexible
communications system, with inbuilt redundancies that both reduced the
likelihood of communications collapsing and facilitated the rapid transmission
of information and orders. From 1942 onwards, commanders were far less likely
to lose battles because their communications failed.
The purpose of the ‘master plan’ was to produce the maximum
concentration of force at the decisive point and time. One of the first things
that Montgomery did when he arrived in the desert in August 1942 was to end
Auchinleck’s experiments with new forms of organization. Henceforth
Divisions must fight as divisions and under their own
commanders, with clear-cut tasks and definite objectives; only in this way will
full value be got from the great fighting power of a Division, and only in this
way will concentration of effort and co-operation of all arms be really
effective.
This greatly assisted team-building, for it meant that
divisions were more likely to reap the full benefits of their training. Raymond
Briggs believed that one reason why his own 1st Armoured division performed
more effectively than the other two armoured divisions in X Corps at Alamein
was that, unlike them, all of its component units had been able to spend a
month training together before the battle.
The most obvious expression of Montgomery’s pursuit of the
principle of concentration, and the one which gave his battles the same outward
appearance as those of the First World War, was the army’s employment of
concentrated artillery. But appearances were deceptive. It was only in Normandy
that Montgomery was able to employ the same high concentrations of artillery
that Haig had employed on the Western Front. On the opening day of the Somme,
the latter had massed 92 guns per kilometre of front; at Vimy Ridge he had 161
guns per kilometre; at Pilckem Ridge 172 guns per kilometre, and at the
Ghelveult Plateau 324 guns per kilometre. The latter represented the heaviest
concentration of artillery employed by the BEF throughout the First World War.
Comparable figures for Alam Halfa were 9 guns per kilometre, for Alamein 31 per
kilometre, and for Cassino 127 per kilometre. Haig’s concentrations dropped in
the final year of the war. He employed only 125 guns per kilometre at the
opening of Cambrai, 110 at Amiens, and 160 on the opening day of the assault on
the Hindenburg Line. The only one of Montgomery’s offensives in Normandy that
exceeded these figures was GOODWOOD, when he employed 259 guns per kilometre.
However, other offensives had the support of thinner concentrations of
artillery. The opening day of EPSOM was supported by only 64 guns per
kilometre, the Canadian attack towards Falaise on 8 August 1944 (TOTALIZE) by
98 guns per kilometre, and the opening of the Anglo-Canadian offensive in the
Reichswald on 8 February 1945 (VERITABLE) by 105 guns per kilometre. To some
extent Montgomery used air power to compensate for his relative paucity of
artillery, but he could not always do so. GOODWOOD, TOTALIZE and VERITABLE were
supported by large numbers of bombers, but bad weather ruled out the heavy air
support planned for EPSOM.
Furthermore, although some of the techniques that Montgomery
and his colleagues employed were the same as those used by Haig between
1916–18, others were not. Montgomery was not the first Second World War field
commander to recognize that massed artillery was a battle-winning factor of
major importance. Auchinleck had employed it in July 1942 to inflict a series
of hammer blows against the advancing Axis forces on the Alamein line. He was
able to do so not only because the comparatively short line his troops held
made the physical concentration of his guns possible, but also because
sufficient 6-pdr. anti-tank guns had now been issued to relieve his field
artillery of their anti-tank role. It was this artillery, plus Rommel’s own
logistical problems, that were decisive in stemming the final German advance.
After being bombarded for seven hours, a German infantryman lamented that the
barrage was ‘such as I have never before experienced. Tommy has brought our
attack to a standstill.’
Montgomery discovered how to use massed artillery
successfully on the offensive. By late 1942, confronted by deep German
defensive positions, the British had learnt that no attack could succeed
without overwhelming fire-support provided by artillery and air support. ‘Fire
dominated the battlefield. Fire is the chief antagonist of mobility’, and
Montgomery did re-employ some of the same techniques that Haig’s army had
perfected twenty years before. The artillery battle, for example, began with a
counter-battery programme to destroy, or at least neutralize, the enemy’s guns.
In Normandy each hostile battery that was located was deluged with an average
of 20 tons of shells. In principle, after 1942 covering fire for infantry and
tanks could be called down by a FOO at the request of the unit his guns were
supporting. In practice, the army usually employed techniques first devised in
1916. Because the precise position of enemy defences was rarely known with
sufficient accuracy, concentrations on known targets were employed less
frequently than timed creeping barrages.
However, to dismiss the way in which the British employed
their artillery as an outstanding example of the use of ‘brute force’ is to
overlook the myriad ways in which forces in the field introduced innovations to
enhance their combat effectiveness between 1942 and 1945. Some were relatively
minor, like the use of 17-pdr. anti-tank guns to destroy concrete pillboxes
that had proved resistant to field gun shells.106 Far more important were the
drills that the gunners devised to augment the speed and effectiveness of their
fire. Standard concentrations (‘stonks’) were first employed by 8th Army at
Alamein in October 1942 and later used by 1st Army in early 1943. By the eve of
the Normandy landing they had been perfected. They were standard drills in
which the fire of individual batteries and regiments were superimposed upon a
single map reference and then moved about as necessary. They could be employed
both to support attacks or to lay down defensive fire to break up enemy
counter-attacks. Air Observation Posts made their mark in the mountains of
Tunisia, the first campaign when the army had a reasonable supply of medium and
heavy guns. Flown by Royal Artillery officers, not RAF pilots, AOP pilots were
soon entrusted with firing regimental and even divisional concentrations. In
1942 a new type of formation entered the army’s order of battle, Army Groups
Royal Artillery (AGRA). Normally allocated on a basis of one per corps, AGRAs
usually consisted of a mixture of field, medium, and heavy regiments. They
provided a new element of flexibility in the provision of fire-support by
enabling army commanders to mass their guns against a particular part of the
enemy’s defences.
Developments such as these, when coupled with improved
communications, produced an extremely flexible system of fire-support.
Commanders could centralize control of their artillery at divisional, corps, or
even army level, or decentralize it down to individual units. Hundreds of guns
could be brought down quickly on a single target for a set-piece attack. At
Alamein, 1st Armoured division’s gunners could produce a divisional
concentration in five to ten minutes. By July 1943 gunners in Sicily had cut
the time to only two minutes, and, even in the more difficult terrain of Italy,
company commanders could summon a divisional concentration and expect to
receive it in ten minutes. Moreover, in more mobile operations, by mid-1943
improved command and communications systems made it possible (although each
battalion could have its own affiliated battery and each brigade its own
affiliated field regiment) for the divisional CRA to exercise almost
instantaneous control over all the guns in his division when necessary. This
produced a real camaraderie between the infantry and their supporting gunners.
The Russian army also employed massed artillery in support of its ground
operations. But by 1944–5, in the opinion of at least one senior German gunner,
the British artillery outshone it both in tactical flexibility and the speed
with which it could lay down effective fire. Rommel himself was impressed, not
just by the weight of fire that British gunners could deliver but by their
‘great mobility and tremendous speed of reaction to the needs of the assault
troops’.
Montgomery’s interpretation of the principle of
concentration also meant attacking on much narrower fronts than the BEF had
employed in the First World War. Rawlinson’s 4th Army attacked on a front of
15,000 yards at Amiens on 8 August 1918; a month later it broke the Hindenburg
Line on a front of 11,000 yards. By contrast Operation LIGHTFOOT, the opening
stage of the Alamein offensive, was mounted on a front of about 7,000 yards. On
26 March 1943, the 8th Armoured Brigade led the assault on the Tebaga Gap to
outflank the Mareth Line on a front of less than 1,000 yards. On 6 May 1943,
Anderson mounted his final thrust in Tunisia on a front of only 3,000 yards.
The opening phase of Operation GOODWOOD was mounted on a front of only 2,000
yards. From 1942 onwards, the British also mounted their offensives in
considerable depth in order to sustain the momentum of the advance. Anderson
employed two armoured divisions to exploit the gap he expected his infantry to
make. For GOODWOOD, Dempsey’s spearhead, 11th Armoured division, was followed
by no less than two other armoured divisions.
Air superiority was an essential pre-requisite because
attacks on the narrow fronts that Montgomery favoured required a very high
density of troops to space. They were only possible from late 1942 onwards
because allied air superiority denied the Germans the possibility of disrupting
British forces before they attacked. Montgomery recognized that it could only
be secured if ground and air force commanders worked in the closest
co-operation. He strove to secure that by preparing his plans from the outset
in co-operation with his air commander. Air superiority prevented the Luftwaffe
from interfering with his own operations. It supplied reconnaissance reports,
and, either in the form of tactical air support or, less frequently, support
provided by medium and heavy bombers, it supplemented the fire-power of his
artillery. The latter could produce fire-support in all weathers and at any
time of the day or night. But its range and the destructive power of its
projectiles were limited. Air power could not operate at night or in bad
weather. But when it was available, it enabled Montgomery to fight the kind of
‘deep battle’ that had been denied to Haig. It could hit the enemy far behind
his front line, isolating the battlefield by destroying the enemy’s supply
lines, and delaying the arrival of his reserves. It also played a major role in
reducing the tempo of German operations relative to that of the British by
disrupting German communications. Closer to the front line, when appropriate
command and control techniques were in place, air power could deliver a
demoralizing weight of high explosive onto enemy front line troops. In
Normandy, the 2nd Tactical Air Force, sometimes assisted by the heavy bombers
of Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force, inflicted heavy losses on the
Germans and denied them a large measure of tactical and operational mobility by
forcing them to abandon movement in daylight. But air attacks not only
inflicted heavy material losses on the Germans. By investing their ground
forces with a sense of their own inability to hit back, their morale was also
undermined. By Normandy, adding direct air support to the land operations,
making a single integrated plan, had become a fundamental part of 21st Army
Group’s operational technique. Captured German officers frequently remarked
that ‘our overwhelming air superiority was one of the most, if not the most,
important factor of our success’.
Haig has been much criticized for the ways in which he
employed intelligence material. With the exception of a handful of occasions,
such as the opening of his offensives at Cambrai and Amiens, surprise and
deception had rarely formed a central plank of his operations. In the second
half of the Second World War, accurate intelligence, and the willingness to act
upon it, and the use of security and surprise as a force-multiplier were vital
components of British operational doctrine. On 29 October 1942, for example,
Montgomery decided to shift the thrust line of Operation SUPERCHARGE further
south when his intelligence discovered that Rommel had brought up the 90th
Light Division to hold the line where he had originally intended to attack. In
February 1944, ‘sigint’ gave allied commanders in the Anzio beachhead ample
warning of the timing and direction of a major German counter-offensive
intended to drive them back into the sea and enabled them to mass sufficient
forces to repulse it. In Normandy the combination of signals intelligence and
aerial reconnaissance enabled the British successfully to practise C31 warfare.
They killed or captured some twenty German army, corps, or divisional
commanders. At the divisional level, the British improvised an intelligence
organization to locate the numerous German mortars that caused them such heavy
casualties. At the unit level, they patrolled energetically to ascertain the
position of the enemy’s defences. General von Obstfelder, GOC of LXXXVI Corps,
warned his troops in July 1944 that the enemy employed ‘tricks and is very
cunning. During his attack he stages feints to provoke our anti-tank guns to
open fire. If an anti-tank position is discovered it is as good as lost before
it has a chance to fire.’
Montgomery believed that surprise was second only to high
morale as a factor making for success. In January 1944 he told his senior
officers that achieving surprise was an essential element in the stage
management of battle. The British multiplied the effectiveness of their own
forces by combining surprise, achieved by security, and active deception. By 1943–4
the British had effectively blinded most German intelligence sources. Allied
air superiority meant that the Luftwaffe was able to provide few reconnaissance
reports. Although the Germans continued to capture POWs, most knew little about
anything other than their own sub-unit’s activities. The result was that the
British could practice a successful deception policy and were repeatedly able
to achieve tactical, operational, and sometimes even strategic surprise. The
deception techniques that 8th Army successfully employed before Alamein to hide
the direction, weight, and timing of the initial assault were not in themselves
new. What was new was the thoroughness with which camouflage schemes were
co-ordinated by the General Staff and incorporated into the main plan for the
battle from the very beginning. Before D-Day, not only had the allies persuaded
the Germans that they had far more divisions in Britain than was actually the
case, but they had also convinced them that the main allied landing would take
place in the Pas de Calais. The result was that prisoners captured from 716th
Infantry Division on D-Day complained bitterly that they had been utterly
surprised by the allied landing.
The British army that landed in Normandy in 1944 was not the
sole creation of Montgomery. It was an amalgamation of formations that had
fought under his command in the Mediterranean and the formations that had
trained in Britain since Dunkirk. However, just as it would be wrong to
attribute the causes of its successes and failures to one man, it would be
equally wrong to ignore the fact that Montgomery made a major contribution to
enhancing its combat effectiveness. He did not create the army’s operational
doctrine, but he did insist that formations under his command practised a
common interpretation of it. The outcome was that by the second half of the
war, the British possessed what was in some respects a military machine capable
of considerable flexibility on the battlefield. Auchinleck had employed a
series of thrusts along alternative axes to destabilize Rommel’s army during
the first battle of Alamein. But he had failed to break through in July partly
because he lacked sufficient reserves and partly because, although he had
concentrated his artillery, he continued to employ his infantry in brigade
groups rather than divisions. Montgomery also attacked along a series of
different thrust lines, but, unlike Auchinleck, took care to ensure that he had
the reserves necessary to exploit success. The first thrust compelled the enemy
to begin to commit his reserves, the second, coming from an unexpected
direction, left him unbalanced, and the third was a decisive break-through
operation on yet another part of the line. Montgomery employed this technique
at Alamein in October-November 1942, at Mareth in March 1943, and again around
Caen during his attempts to encircle the town between June and August 1944. His
obsession with remaining ‘balanced’ throughout his operations was a product of
his need constantly to create new reserves so that he had troops on hand to
mount the next thrust. The essence of Montgomery’s generalship was to defeat
his enemy by unbalancing him. This was an appropriate operational technique,
because the combination of deception and security that the British practised
plus allied air superiority meant that Montgomery could switch his main thrust
lines far more speedily than could the Germans. Supplied with a sufficiency of
equipment and an insufficiency of men, Montgomery’s operational techniques were
chosen to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of the army he commanded.
The ability of the British army to overcome the Germans in
the second half of the war continued to depend, as it had done before Alamein,
on its ability to mount successful combined arms operations. ‘It cannot be
emphasised too strongly’, Montgomery insisted in August 1942, ‘that successful
battle operations depend on the intimate co-operation of all arms, whether in
armoured or unarmoured formations. Tanks alone are never the answer; no one
arm, alone and unaided can do any good in battle.’ Montgomery and his acolytes
continued to reiterate this until the end of the war. The level of operational
and tactical co-operation of British formations was undoubtedly better after
1942 than it had been earlier in the war. However, there is ample evidence that
also points to continued serious shortcomings.
