“The working relationships among the Allied commanders were often marred by disagreements over tactics, strategy, and national agendas exacerbated by rivalries and personality conflicts.”
By Edward E. Gordon
THE ALLIED campaign in Normandy from June to August of 1944 ranks high in the annals of military history. Even Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, German senior commander in Normandy, was impressed with the sheer scale of the undertaking.
“Technically and strategically the landing in Normandy was a brilliant achievement of the first magnitude,” he said. “The functioning of the Allied fighting machine, with all its complexity, surprised even me, and I already had a fairly high opinion of their powers.”
Many people have commented that the history of war has been written by its winners. The Normandy campaign has been largely represented as a triumphant Allied success story. Noted historian Martin Blumenson believes that the Anglo-American alliance that directed it “was probably the most successful alliance in history.”
The pursuit of a common goal — the defeat of the Axis — at times held a difficult partnership together. The “sheer depth, scale and scope of the alliance,” says historian Niall Barr, “between Britain and the United States … is hard to comprehend even now.”
The combined Allied Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that planned and executed Operation Overlord contrasted sharply with the confused German Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) or Armed Forces High Command.
“Alongside the command structure of their enemies, that of the Allied Force was a masterpiece of reason and understanding,” asserts historian Max Hastings.
Though it was victorious, the Normandy campaign was far from perfect. The working relationships among the Allied commanders were often marred by disagreements over tactics, strategy, and national agendas exacerbated by rivalries and personality conflicts.
The command decisions of the leaders of the Overlord campaign remain controversial. The initial invasion came close to failure and was followed by two months of stalemate on the ground. The final breakthrough did not produce a swift victory, but rather an 11-month-long bloody struggle to end the war in Europe.
What leadership lessons can we learn from the Overlord campaign? Allied leadership failures spawned many vexing questions that persist to the present day.
Why was Caen, the top D-Day objective, not captured on D-Day but weeks later? Who forced the Americans to fight in the bocage – the hedgerow hell What stopped General Patton from closing the Falaise Pocket and capturing 200,000 German soldiers? Why was the opening of the vital port of Antwerp delayed for nearly three months? Why did Eisenhower stop Patton’s unopposed advance into Germany through the West Wall?
For some answers, we will examine the leadership records of the two principal commanders.
Eisenhower as Arbitrator
Dwight David Eisenhower was catapulted from an obscure position in a small peacetime army to playing a major role in the gradual shaping of the victorious U.S. citizen army during the campaigns in North Africa, Sicily and Northwestern Europe. He carefully developed his command abilities of tact and diplomacy and promoted the development of allied unity. During Overlord he mastered the joint operations of land, sea and air forces on a scale greater than had ever before attempted. His integrated Allied army, although composed largely of British, Canadian and U.S. troops, also contained contingents from many overrun nations.
Eisenhower acted more as an arbitrator across the alliance rather than as a soldier. He held the Allies together through moments of great crisis by showing an amazing degree of self-effacement to at times insulting and intimidating leaders including Churchill, Roosevelt, Marshall, Brooke and de Gaulle, as well as military subordinates. He handled this unwieldy cast of ego-driven leaders using intricate compromises that ultimately led to a victorious conclusion in Europe. Ike spent countless hours responding to difficult, emotional arguments using an accommodating manner that diluted his own authority.
Eisenhower’s greatest limitation was his reluctance to exercise his prerogatives as supreme commander in battlefield decisions. Ike’s conscientious tolerance at times became a liability. When the battlefield called for a leader with an action plan, he failed to intervene time after time as commander-in-chief. He shunned giving direct orders to Montgomery, Bradley, Patton and others. Instead, he issued vague and verbose instructions that gave them great tactical leeway in picking their own objectives. This resulted in some of the greatest tactical mistakes of the Normandy campaign such as Falaise.
Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Montgomery, who was the ground commander for Overlord, resented that Eisenhower was made the supreme commander of the operation. Churchill had earlier offered Brooke this command, but as American armed forces in the European theater grew to outnumber those of the British, Churchill deferred to Roosevelt’s wish to give Eisenhower this command.
Brooke and Montgomery viewed Ike as inexperienced and lacking in strategic vision. They expended much time and effort criticizing Ike’s abilities and decisions rather than cooperating with him and conducted an underhanded campaign to force Eisenhower to relinquish his position. It was only after the Battle of the Bulge that Eisenhower finally called Montgomery’s bluff by threatening to submit the question of who should hold this command to the U.S./U.K. combined chiefs of staff.
Montgomery: The Rogue Commander
Before the beginning of the Second World War, General Bernard Law Montgomery was considered an expert planner and strategist who was acknowledged as a master of the set-piece operation. Montgomery’s first claim to fame was his victory at El Alamein. This renown largely flowed from self-contrived propaganda picked up and embellished (beret and all) by the British press. The battle of El Alamein and the creation of the Monty myth were means to boost public optimism in a war-weary Britain.
As overall ground commander for D-Day, Montgomery devised a detailed but overly ambitious operational plan for an immediate breakout through the city of Caen and the hedgerow area of Normandy into the coastal plain. When this failed on D-Day he denied that this was the intent of how own plan. It took six battles between June 6 and July 18 for Montgomery’s forces to capture Caen. American troops were then forced to fight in the bocage without the equipment and training to succeed. Montgomery’s caution and failure to pursue the enemy persisted throughout the Normandy campaign. He hesitated in taking the initiative, pressing an advantage, or finishing off an enemy with a knock-out blow.
Montgomery’s failure as a commander stemmed from extreme self-centeredness. In his interactions with other senior officers, he relentlessly asserted his own ideas and failed to consider the arguments of his military equals or superiors. This made him inflexible in battlefield situations when the action did not follow his carefully laid plans.
His monumental ego was blatantly displayed when a reporter asked him to name “the three greatest commanders in history.” Monty replied, “The other two were Alexander and Napoleon.” This was not intended as a joke.
Subsequent Leadership Failures
The closing of the Falaise Pocket was a major Allied victory, but it was also a significant failure to shorten the war. The three senior Allied field commanders, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley, share the responsibility for making a hash of things.
Personal indecision, caution and fear, lack of coordination among the army groups, and the clash of egos contributed to a far less strategic victory. Delay in closing the pocket allowed at least 200,000 German soldiers and 40 generals to escape capture. Over the next eight months, these forces enabled Germany to significantly slow the Allied march to Berlin. This missed opportunity prolonged the war into 1945. In retrospect, Eisenhower admitted that if he had ordered Patton to close the gap at Argentan it “might have won us a complete battle of annihilation.”
As Allied troop strength grew, getting supplies to them became a real nightmare. The Germans wrecked the French port facilities before surrendering them to the Allies. The port of Antwerp, the second largest in Europe, was captured largely undamaged by British forces on September 4, 1944, but the Germans quickly advanced to secure the Scheldt Estuary thereby blocking entrance to the harbour. For six weeks, Montgomery made the advance toward the Ruhr his principal objective and repeatedly ignored Eisenhower’s orders to capture the Scheldt. Allied armies were being starved of the gasoline and other supplies needed to advance to Germany.
With the launching of Operation Infatuate on October 16, Montgomery finally devoted the forces necessary to secure this territory. It, however, was not until November 28 that all the obstacles to the port were cleared, thus enabling the first Allied convoy to arrive there. Uncharacteristically, Montgomery later confessed, “I must admit a bad mistake on my part. I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp so that we could get free use of the port. I was wrong.”
Competing German Invasion Plans
Two major plans emerged for the Allied advance into Germany: Bradley-Patton’s southern thrust and Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden. Patton had launched a major drive south of the Ardennes designed to breach Germany’s Siegfried Line or Westwall, drive through the Saar industrial area, cross the Rhine, take Frankfurt and advance northeast to the Ruhr. On August 31, his spearheads were nearing the Saar and faced light German opposition. At this point, Patton plea for the gasoline needed to continue his advance fell on deaf ears because Montgomery was aggressively pushing his plan for a northern thrust.
Market Garden was a daring plan to push a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem through a massive airborne operation that would be joined by ground troops. Because Market Garden was the kind of innovative mass attack that Eisenhower was looking for, he approved it on September 10. This operation was hastily planned and was tactically impractical. As in the past, Montgomery refused to alter his plans even when intelligence from numerous sources warned of heavy German troop concentrations in key attack areas. Market Garden proved to be a total disaster in every respect. Total Allied killed wounded, and missing exceeded 7,000, that’s 5,000 thousand more than on D-Day.
Market Garden ended Montgomery’s dream of being the commander of a victorious British-led drive to Berlin and severely damaged his reputation. Eisenhower’s approval of it was a serious error in judgment. Ike’s failure to support the Bradly/Patton offensive plan gave the Germans time to reinforce the West Wall and keep the Ruhr industries operating. The extension of the war led to the abortive U.S. Hurtgen Forest offensive and gave Hitler the opportunity to launch his doomed Ardennes offensive,
The Allied leadership errors outlined here were among the factors that served to prolong the European war by nine months and produced an estimated 500,000 additional casualties. The Allied leaders could and should have done better.
Historian Edward E. Gordon along with David Ramsay is the author of Divided on D-Day: How Leadership Failures Threatened the Normandy Invasion. He has also authored or co-authored 20 books in the fields of history, business, and education. A noted speaker as well, he gives well-researched and entertaining presentations across the United States to audiences in a wide variety of venues. For more information, see https://www.historypresentations.com.
