CHAPTER 35

War on Land

The army that Churchill had under him in 1940 was superficially less familiar than the other services. That summer it was still reeling from the effects of Dunkirk as well as pre-war reforms. From 1937 temporary officers were to be recruited from men who had served for some time in the ranks. Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Secretary for War, described the new meritocratic force:

In this Army the star is within every private soldier’s reach. No one, however humble or exalted his birth, need be afraid that his military virtues will remain unrecognised. More important, no one, who wished to serve in the Army need consider his status minimised by starting on the bottom rung of the ladder.¹

But this did not take account of the existing officers mainly from upper middle and upper class backgrounds, or faults in the selection process which favoured men from these backgrounds for promotion, for the regular army was still more class-bound than almost any other part of British society. According to the leading historian of the desert war:

Although the army of a twentieth century social democracy and a first-class industrial power, it was nevertheless spiritually a peasant levy led by the gentry and aristocracy. … Few poor men of great ability chose the army as a rewarding outlet for their talents – pay for all ranks was less than an income. … Men of great ability did of course make their careers in the army, but because it was a tradition in their caste and because they enjoyed private means. Therefore in a true sense most regular officers of the British army were amateurs as well as gentlemen.²

There were just over a million and a half soldiers in the United Kingdom in July 1940, not counting women and Commonwealth troops, but they were disorganised and demoralised by their recent experiences. When General Brooke took over the Southern Command in July, he found ‘Untrained men, no arms, no transport, and no equipment. And yet there are masses of men in uniform in this country but they are mostly untrained, why I cannot think after 10 months of war.’³

The glorious red and dark-blue tunics of Churchill’s youth had been put aside in wartime to be replaced by uncompromisingly functional ‘battledress’, based on a mechanic’s overall. Buttons were hidden and needed no polishing and it was far less attractive than the ‘service dress’ of the last war. Only the colour, khaki, was familiar to Churchill as it had been adopted in India towards the end of the previous century. It was claimed that ‘Men can look smart in battle dress if it is worn correctly and the necessary trouble is taken’, but the same source had to admit that ‘a slovenly man can look like a tramp’.⁴ A character in the film The Way Ahead of 1943 claimed that it made him feel like a convict.

According to Hastings Ismay, Churchill ‘venerated tradition but hated convention’.⁵ The regimental system of the infantry and cavalry was particularly venerated (though like many British traditions it dated from only the last quarter of the nineteenth century). This was reflected in Churchill’s interest in his old regiment, the 4th Hussars. In October 1941 it had recently been evacuated from Greece after having more than 400 officers and men taken prisoner and the loss of all its tanks. As it gradually rebuilt its strength in Egypt, one officer at least was heartened by the news that Churchill had been appointed their colonel: ‘Hope, pride and self-confidence could be seen in the bearing of all ranks and was heard in their voices. The regiment was not forgotten. It would be supported and succoured by the great man to whom all the world was looking.’ He was deeply disturbed in July 1944 to find that the Oxfordshire Hussars, in which he was also a colonel, was being used for drafts for the 21st Army Group which meant ‘that it can never serve as a fighting unit, and will disappear in all but name’.⁶

The pre-war army reforms allowed only essential badges indicating rank and trade. The War Office relented in September 1940 and allowed ‘arm of service’ stripes across the upper sleeve, scarlet for infantry, yellow for the RASC and blue for the Royal Engineers.⁷ Regimental distinctions were still banned, mainly for security reasons but perhaps also because Whitehall thought a more homogeneous army would be easier to administer. With troops abroad, it would be far simpler if men could be transferred from one regiment to another to fill vacancies. Churchill accepted this reluctantly, writing in 1942: ‘Of course in the stress of world war it may be necessary to post men to units different from those which they joined or from those which represent the part of the country from which they come. This process must be kept to a minimum.’ He wanted ‘to invest all combatant units with a clear sense of individual characteristics and distinction’. Regimental badges, in the form of shoulder ‘flashes’ with the regiment’s name, were creeping back, largely paid for out of regimental funds. In 1942 the Army Council issued an order forbidding them with the conclusion: ‘This decision is final and no further applications will be submitted.’ Churchill found out about it during an inspection of the 53rd Division on 20 November 1942 and was furious about the potential ‘stripping off of the badges’. He ordered a reversal of the policy.

The War Office objected that the issue was ‘one of discipline’, that a strongly worded Army Council Instruction could not be withdrawn without loss of face. Churchill replied that ‘The War Office frequently make mistakes which entail alterations of policy.’ Furthermore it should not have been passed by the military members alone, it was ‘exactly one of those cases which affect morale and nationalist and territorial feelings, in which the parliamentary ministers should have been consulted’. He suggested that the adjutant-general, in charge of army personnel, was an artillery officer who did not understand these things. He did not mention that his chief, Sir Alan Brooke, was also an artilleryman. The matter caused Churchill to dictate several long memoranda, and write at least one letter by hand. He offered the War Minister a special meeting of the Cabinet to consider the matter, but the order was withdrawn and all ranks below full colonel were to wear regimental distinctions on their shoulders as soon as they could be produced.⁸

In view of this personal role in its early development and in the conversion of cavalry regiments, followed by the dramatic effect of German machines in the Fall of France, it is not surprising that Churchill took a personal interest in the tank. He had to admit, however, that the German success came as a surprise and wrote later: ‘Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of as mass of fast-moving armour. I knew about it, but it had not altered my inward convictions as it should have done.’⁹ This puzzled Captain Basil Liddell Hart, one of the prophets of armoured warfare, who wrote that Churchill ‘had often heard, and also read, the views of Fuller and myself about the potentialities of mechanized warfare’.¹⁰

Since nearly all of the army’s heavy equipment was left behind with the withdrawal from Dunkirk, there were only about a hundred modern tanks in Britain in June 1940. Churchill called a meeting on 11 June to consider the tank production programme: ‘those under production at the time were of a type which had proved in battle in France to be too weak to stand up to the German tank guns’. The manufacture of more tanks was a priority and he ordered 500 or 600 more in addition to current programmes. But tanks were not as urgent as aircraft. In August he told Beaverbrook: ‘If it came to a choice between hampering air production or tank production, I would sacrifice the tank.’¹¹ In October 1940 he was confident enough about the situation at home to order that ‘the armoured fighting vehicles of the 2nd Armoured Division might now be withdrawn to be prepared for operating in the Middle East’,¹² beginning a row with the Admiralty about whether the convoy carrying them should pass through the Mediterranean or go round the Cape of Good Hope, putting them out of service for weeks.

The next question was the types and quality of tanks. In July he told the Defence Committee that ‘the choice which had to be made was not between a good tank and a better one, but between a fairly good tank and no tank at all’.¹³ Light tanks were obsolete except for a type that was being developed for transport by air, for use in difficult country and on combined operations. One cruiser tank, the Covenanter, which appeared in the summer of 1940, was so unreliable that it never saw active service. The Crusader was a little better and saw action in the desert war from the middle of 1941. The Cromwell was reasonably reliable and was fast, but crews tended to prefer the American Grant and later the Sherman. The specification for a new type of infantry tank, the A22, was considered at a meeting on 20 June 1940, and a month later ‘the General Staff expressed themselves entirely in favour of the project. Work proceeded with the utmost enthusiasm.’ At a meeting in February 1941, ‘The Prime Minister said that priority in delivery to the troops, and in provision of all kinds of weapons and equipment, should be accorded to the A22, in view of its superiority over all other models.’¹⁴ But this would lead to trouble which attracted notice in the House of Commons. There were many teething troubles before the tank was fully ready.

In the spring of 1941 Churchill was concerned enough about tanks to bring together various interested parties: ‘I am particularly anxious that all officers attending the meeting should be encouraged to send in their suggestions as to the points which should be discussed, and to express their individual views with complete freedom. I contemplate in fact a “Tank Parliament”.’¹⁵ At the first meeting on 5 May he announced: ‘Reviewing the progress of events since the last war, and the experiences of the present day, when we saw large armies paralysed by comparatively small forces of armoured fighting vehicles, it was evident that our tank programme was a matter of the greatest importance.’ He wanted to develop the A22 as the standard tank for 1941, but was aware that it might be obsolete by 1943. He wanted to build up a force of 25 armoured divisions instead of the 15 already planned. Tank production had been set aside due to the need to concentrate resources on the aircraft industry, and the Secretary for War proposed that ‘a similar effort should now be directed towards the production of tanks’. There was discussion on the best form of organisation, whether in brigade groups or in larger divisions. In practice flexibility would prove the key to success, according to one officer: ‘It was not until our third battle in Normandy that we got it right, and that was an organisation of complete flexibility. At the shortest notice the organisation could be altered from an armoured brigade and an infantry brigade to two mixed brigades, each of two armoured regiments, and two infantry battalions and artillery as required.’¹⁶ General Brooke found it ‘a useful meeting, as it brought those responsible for the production of tanks in close contact with those responsible for commanding them in action’. He pressed for more attention to spare parts, but ‘Winston always disliked the idea of the provision of spares, everything in the front window’.¹⁷ The Tank Parliament held six more meetings over the next few months, considering such matters as army-air co-operation, the transport of tanks by air, the development of tank and anti-tank weapons, production schedules, and Anglo-American co-operation. The last recorded one was on 23 July when Churchill pointed out that ‘it was evident we should require even larger guns for our tanks in late 1942 and 1943. This would mean a heavier tank.’ Though the meetings allowed strong characters like Brooke and Hobart to express their views forcefully, there was little consensus and the idea seems to have been dropped.

Originally tanks were known by mark and model numbers, but as always Churchill preferred names, writing in June 1941: ‘… it would be far better to give names to the various marks of tank. These … would avoid the confusing titles by marks and numbers. … it is evident that a real need for it exists, because the [Infantry] Tank, Mark I is widely known as the Matilda, and one of the other infantry tanks is called the Valentine.’ And, as he commented coyly, ‘A 22 has an alias, I think’¹⁸ – it was already known informally as the Churchill. It was never clear whether that was a reference to the Prime Minister himself or his distinguished ancestor, but in either case Churchill took a special interest in its service; in September 1942 he asked for reports on them from the divisions to which they had been issued: ‘Do not let it be known that the report is for me, as I simply want to know how the tank is viewed by the troops.’ Comments from the 21st and 25th Tank Brigades suggested that it was ‘definitely a superior type of fighting vehicle’ to the Matilda and Valentine, on account of its better armament and armour, better obstacle performance, greater radius of action and ammunition capacity and more space for the crew.¹⁹ Though the infantry tank was not suitable for war in the desert, which was often fast-moving, Churchill ordered a few to be sent to North Africa, from where it was reported: ‘A lot of trouble has been experienced and the amount of sand thrown up which lodges in the interior of the tank is such that … this model is unlikely to be entirely successful in that part of the world.’²⁰ Eventually it proved an effective weapon in the European campaign, though by the time it landed in Normandy it was on the verge of obsolescence and many were used for support roles as ARVEs (assault vehicles Royal Engineers).²¹

One of the core problems of British tank design was the type of gun to be fitted, which was barely mentioned in the Tank Parliament. Perhaps it was because, as an Army Training Memorandum of January 1944 put it, ‘There had been … a tendency in the past to look upon the crushing power of the tank, rather than its fire power, as its chief weapon.’²² As early as January 1940 Churchill had suggested using anti-aircraft guns in the anti-tank role, as the Germans did very effectively with the 88mm, but the suggestion ‘had been considered before but rejected’.²³ The 2-pounder was the main gun available early in the war, and was ordered to be fitted to the early Churchills. The 6-pounder had been developed just before the war without the consent of the General Staff, who declared ‘there was no need for the gun’ and only accepted it in February 1941.²⁴ It was intended as the main armament for the Churchill as soon as it was available. On April 1942 the Prime Minister had to consider whether to upgrade existing 2-pounder Churchills but concluded that ‘the argument for leaving the 1185 unimproved and making the best use of them and their 2-pounder guns, and going ahead full speed on the new type, seems overwhelming’.²⁵ After the successful use of American Sherman tanks armed with 75mm guns in the Battle of Alamein, the War Office decided to adopt it as standard for future British tanks. This was questioned in the cabinet in April and May 1943 with Lindemann (by then Lord Cherwell) advocating the 95mm howitzer and the Director of Artillery a flat-trajectory weapon such as the 17-pounder of 76.2mm. Churchill decided that 30 per cent of British tanks should mount the Sherman type gun, now classified as the 77mm; 20 per cent should have the 95mm howitzer, and the remaining 50 per cent should stay with the existing 6-pounder or 57mm until some of them could be converted or replaced.²⁶ But the British did not produce a truly successful tank to match the later Panzer models and the Russian T34 until the Centurion entered service just as the war ended.

With the sidelining of J. F. C. Fuller, the leader of Brooke’s ‘extremists of the Tank Corps’ was Major-General Percy Hobart, who had approached Churchill back in 1936 and warned him ‘of the terrible neglect to make the tanks and even decide upon the models’.²⁷ He had been retired in March 1940 before Churchill became Prime Minister and served as a corporal in the Home Guard until Churchill called him to Chequers in October. To John Colville he was ‘an erratic genius’ and therefore likely to appeal to the Prime Minister.²⁸ Churchill went further when he wrote to Dill: ‘The catalogue of General Hobart’s qualities and defects … might almost exactly have been attributed to most of the great commanders in British history. … Cromwell, Wolfe, Clive, Gordon and in a different sphere Lawrence, all had very close resemblance to the characteristics assembled in para 2.’²⁹ But Hobart’s idea of an independent tank army, with himself as chief of staff on a level with Brooke, Portal and Pound, was rejected and he found a role as commander of the 79th Armoured Division developing specialist armoured vehicles to destroy fortifications and surmount obstacles in an assault. These were often based on the Churchill tank and included the Crocodile with a flame thrower, the AVRE or Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers, with a large, low velocity gun for destroying bunkers, the Bobbin for laying a track, as well as assault bridges, ‘swimming’ tanks for beach landing and beach armoured recovery vehicles. All would play a part in the Normandy invasion, some more effectively than others.

For four years between the Fall of France and the invasion of Normandy, the only place where British soldiers were in long-term contact with the enemy was in North Africa and the Mediterranean. In some ways it was an ideal war, with wide spaces for much of the region, a small population and the possibility of support by sea. There is a suspicion that in an ideal world Churchill would have liked to take command himself, and certainly he took a great interest in it, sending numerous messages which often annoyed the commanders on the spot. Ismay advised General Auchinleck after his appointment: ‘[Churchill] made a practice of bombarding commanders with telegrams on every kind of topic, many of which might seem irrelevant and superfluous. I begged Auchinleck not to allow himself to be irritated by these never-ending messages, but to remember that Churchill, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, bore the primary responsibility for ensuring that all available resources … were apportioned … in the best interests of the war effort as a whole. Was it not reasonable that he should wish to know exactly how all these resources were being used before deciding the allotment to be given to this or that theatre?’³⁰

When Italy opened the campaign by declaring war in June 1940, the commander-in-chief in the Middle East was General Archibald Wavell, another intellectual soldier. He had wide responsibilities including Sudan, Somaliland and Palestine, but the main focus was in North Africa, where troops under General Richard O’Connor had a spectacular advance into Libya, taking 125,000 Italian prisoners. It was largely political considerations which caused Churchill to order part of the Middle East army to go to the relief of Greece in 1941, which does not in itself invalidate the decision. As early as November 1940 he told the War Cabinet: ‘If Greece was overwhelmed, it would be said that in spite of our guarantee we had allowed one more small ally to be swallowed up.’³¹ Later he was swayed by a telegram from Anthony Eden in Cairo who claimed that ‘Collapse of Greece without further effort on our part to save her by intervention on land … would be the greatest calamity’ and would also lead to the loss of Yugoslavia. ‘No doubt our prestige will suffer if we are ignominiously ejected, but in any event to have fought and suffered in Greece would be less damaging than to have left Greece to her fate.’ Always mindful of American opinion, Churchill told Roosevelt: ‘we have felt it our duty to stand by the Greeks. … We are therefore sending the greater part of the Army of the Nile to Greece, and are reinforcing to the utmost possible in the air.’³² But they were indeed ‘ignominiously ejected’ from Greece and then from Crete, though that was a pyrrhic victory for the Germans. The navy’s prestige was boosted by a second Dunkirk in Crete while that of the army suffered. British forces were overstretched by land, sea and air, while German units, far more formidable than the demoralized, badly led and ill-equipped Italians, landed in North Africa. If that was not enough they were led by Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel, a military genius on the level of Churchill’s heroes Marlborough and Napoleon. A few weeks later the British lost their most effective field commander when O’Connor was captured by a German patrol.

Mostly the desert generals were able to put off Churchill’s orders for premature attack, but Wavell gave way with Operation Battleaxe, an attack on Halfaya, in June 1940. The British forces were badly organised, intelligence was weak and the newly arrived tanks had constant mechanical troubles. The Germans used their 88mm gun, conceived as an anti-aircraft weapon but now used in an anti-tank role, with devastating effect. Churchill decided to replace Wavell. Churchill had not had much regard for Claude Auchinleck after his participation in the Norway campaign, until he showed determination and skill in putting down a rebellion in Iraq while he was commander-in-chief in India. In June 1941 Churchill had him change places with Wavell, but after taking up the post in Egypt Auchinleck flatly refused to begin an early offensive. He and Churchill shared some interests. The general referred to Churchill’s ‘stored knowledge of the history of war, and of war itself’ but warned him against believing too rigidly: ‘These are no new lessons – they are as old as time itself.’ On his side Churchill drafted a plan for attack in the desert based on Napoleon’s tactics at Austerlitz, though it is not clear if he sent it.³³ Auchinleck scored an impressive victory in advancing again into Cyrenaica late in 1941, rallying the troops by flying up to the front after a near disaster. He refused to fly to London to put the case against further attack to the War Cabinet but was ordered to begin by 1 June. However Rommel began his attack before that, driving the British and Commonwealth troops back to Egypt. Auchinleck’s greatest fault was perhaps in his judgement of character, and he allowed the inexperienced General Ritchie to take command in the field. Churchill was visiting Roosevelt in June 1942: ‘When … I went into the President’s room, I was greatly shocked to be confronted with a report that Tobruk had fallen. I found the news difficult to believe, but a few minutes later my own telegram, forwarded from London, arrived.’³⁴ Auchinleck’s days were numbered. He organized a successful defence at Alam el Halfa, ‘the first Battle of Alamein’, and prevented Rommel advancing to Alexandria, but that did not exonerate him in Churchill’s eyes. None of the generals Churchill replaced was a bad commander, though perhaps lacking in the unbridled aggression that Churchill favoured.

During a visit to Cairo Churchill chose a new leader of the 8th Army, the main fighting force in the desert. Lieutenant-General William ‘Strafer’ Gott had risen from the command of a battalion at the beginning of the war to lead the 13th Corps, and all his promotions had been earned in battle. But his aircraft was shot down and he was killed on the way to Cairo, and Churchill turned to General Bernard Montgomery, a far less likeable man. ‘If he is as disagreeable to those about him he is also disagreeable to the enemy,’ he wrote to Clementine. As commander-in-chief in the Middle East, he appointed Harold Alexander. Montgomery, partly through a campaign of self-publicity, restored the morale and confidence of the 8th Army and began to receive new supplies, including American Grant and Sherman tanks, while Rommel was increasingly inhibited by lack of fuel as the Royal Navy and RAF cut his supply lines. Montgomery attacked at El Alamein on 23 October and by 4 November, after much rethinking of tactics, he had broken through. Rommel was in retreat, but there was much criticism of Montgomery’s failure to pursue. Churchill famously managed expectations, proclaiming: ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning.’ But his later assessment was more sweeping. ‘It in fact marked the turning of the “Hinge of Fate”. It may almost be said, “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”’³⁵ With the landings in French North Africa, it became an Anglo-American campaign and General Eisenhower was put in overall command to eventually drive the enemy out of North Africa.

For all his interest and experience, Churchill did not tackle the basic flaws in the British army which would hinder its performance after it returned to northern Europe in 1944. Beside the long-standing problems with class and amateurism, there was a serious lack of initiative among junior officers and NCOs, who stuck rigidly to plans and were at a loss when changes had to be made. Churchill was not unaware of this. In October 1940 there was a discussion with Dill and others about ‘the British army and its lack of good officers’ in which it was concluded: ‘The present trouble was that officers were admirably versed in weapon training but had little stimulus to use their imagination and look at military problems with a broad view.’³⁶ The army’s selection boards for finding junior officers were highly praised in the press as a step towards a more egalitarian army, but Churchill thought that ‘the commanding officer of a battalion or tank unit is the best judge, and if he is not a good judge he is scarcely fit for his position’. He distrusted psychologists, who he maintained were ‘capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may easily degenerate into charlatanry’.³⁷ Though he had commented on the treatment of American officer cadets at West Point in 1895 and criticised the training of naval cadets in 1912–14, he never visited the Officer Cadet Training Units where young men were trained, according to some accounts, to become ‘perfect private soldiers’ rather than leaders and tacticians.³⁸

There was still little true co-operation between infantry and tanks, and most problems were solved by heavy artillery. Churchill perhaps supported this practice in March 1942 when he asked: ‘Surely the way to silence machine gun posts is to bring up some guns and silence them.’³⁹ An Army Training Memorandum of June 1944 described the problem under the heading ‘Not the Universal Panacea’ and went on: ‘The use and power of massed artillery fire is now so well appreciated throughout the army that there is, perhaps, a tendency to use concentrations on all occasions, to the exclusion of accurate ranging and deliberate shoots by batteries, troops, and even single guns.’⁴⁰ Churchill paid great attention to the training of pilots and troops for amphibious warfare, but surprisingly little to the training of army units and officers. The problem went very deep; the flaw of the regimental system was that the different types of unit trained separately, and the results were often uneven. The infantry often included the men who were rejected for employment elsewhere; according to Major-General Utterson-Kelso they were ‘the legitimate dumping ground for the lowest forms of military life’.⁴¹

The tanks were still divided between the Royal Tank Regiment proper and the ex-cavalrymen, who retained their old attitudes. There were reports of ‘the Hussars charging into the Jerry tanks, sitting on top of their turrets more or less with their whips out’ looking ‘like the run-up to the first fence at a point-to-point’.⁴² Early in 1942 Auchinleck had warned Churchill in one of his regular letters: ‘closer and absolutely continuous association of the three arms … cannot be avoided, however much precedent and tradition may say against it’, though he tended to blame the tank officers for tending to ‘segregate the armoured corps from the army, and to say that the handling of armoured formations is so technical and delicate a business that the ordinary commander cannot hope to cope with it’. But, he told Churchill, ‘we were … in common with many others, led astray by the idea that the tank was omnipotent’ whereas co-operation was the key to the Germans’ success.⁴³ Some lessons were learned, but reports from the fighting in the desert and in Italy were not circulated adequately among the troops. After they resumed the land war with the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the British and Canadian forces took more than a month to capture Caen, which was one of the objectives for the first day. The conduct of British troops came in for much criticism. Leigh-Mallory, the air commander, claimed that the army’s vision was bounded ‘by the nearest hedge or stream’. One brigadier reported: ‘We were always very aware of the doctrine, “Let metal do it rather than flesh.” The morale of our troops depended on this.’ And Liddell Hart commented: ‘Time after time we were checked or even induced to withdraw by boldly handled packets of Germans of greatly inferior strength. But for our air superiority, which hampered the Germans at every turn, the results would have been much worse. Our forces seem to have had too little initiative in infiltration, and also too little determination … that was particularly marked in the armoured formations.’⁴⁴

By 1944 Churchill was becoming increasingly tired and he had less formal control over the armies in France than over a purely British army, especially since the Americans now provided three-quarters of the troops. His influence was lessened further after Eisenhower took personal command of land forces on 1 September, but Churchill continued to follow and try to influence progress for the remaining months of the European war. He and the British high command had little faith in Eisenhower’s tactical skill. Montgomery tended to favour concentration of forces in a single advance and was supported by Churchill, who also wanted to push for his old stomping ground of Antwerp, as the allies were still dependent on the Arromanches Mulberry Harbour and distant Cherbourg for their supplies. Montgomery’s next plan was a ‘daring stroke, by far the greatest operation of its kind yet attempted’, according to Churchill. The plan was to capture several crossings of the Rhine and its tributaries, but it was famously ‘a bridge too far’ and failed at Arnhem. Churchill concluded: ‘Had we been more fortunate in the weather, which turned against us at critical moments and restricted our mastery in the air, it is probable we should have succeeded.’⁴⁵ But the failure meant a longer war in which British resources would be increasingly drained. When the Germans counter-attacked though the old area of the Ardennes and put the Americans on the back foot, Churchill claimed that ‘Montgomery’s comments and predictions beforehand have in every way been borne out’.⁴⁶ When the time came to cross the Rhine, Churchill was not concerned. He remembered his reading of Hamley’s Operations of War at Sandhurst, in which Napoleon’s retreat through the Champagne district in 1814 showed that ‘a river running parallel to the line of advance is a much more dangerous feature than one which lies squarely athwart it’ – though he admitted that air superiority was also very helpful in this case.⁴⁷ As the end neared for Nazi Germany with the Soviet and western allies’ advances, he suggested that Montgomery should take Lübeck to prevent the Soviets entering Denmark.⁴⁸