Compared with the Allies’ preinvasion expectations, the summer campaign of 1944 was a great success. At his St. Paul’s School briefing in May, Montgomery had posited that their armies would be up to the Loire and Seine by early September. Instead, they were 250 to 300 km (155 to 185 miles) further, on an arc from Antwerp to Commercy on the Meuse. But compared with the perhaps overblown hopes of post-Normandy, when there was a general expectation of at least crossing the Rhine, it ended in disappointment. As shown in chapter 7, mistakes and questionable judgments contributed to this letdown, as they do in every campaign, victorious and otherwise. But with the advantage of hindsight, it is clear that systemic problems were also partly responsible. Three of the more pernicious are highlighted below.
Several intelligence failures at critical moments helped give rise to faulty decisions. Most of these failures, as well as the decisions, were largely attributable to the commanders. The massive defeat inflicted on the Germans in the Falaise encirclement and subsequent pursuit led to an epidemic of “victory disease,” characterized by operational commanders and their intelligencers egging one another on to stress encouraging signs of the enemy’s imminent collapse and to downplay or even discount disagreeably contrary signs. Groupthink left no room for dispassionate analysis. For instance: Eisenhower saw too little danger in the operational formation of his armies (including the absence of a meaningful main effort and lack of reserves), their divergent axes, and their increasingly precarious supply position; Montgomery brushed aside the significance of Ultra revelations about the Germans’ commitment to keeping the mouth of the Scheldt closed and various reports about the hardening of German defenses in southern Holland, including the presence of II SS Panzer Corps in the Arnhem area; Patton ignored his intelligence chief’s warning that the enemy could and would put up a hard fight for Lorraine. In each case, decisions, or the absence thereof, contributed to operational failure. Plainly, the production and especially the consumption of intelligence were often much more subjective in practice than is prescribed in theory.
A considerable portion of the blame for failings in generalship must be laid at the door of doctrinal inadequacies. The conceptual boundaries of most Anglo-American generals of 1944 had been established in some cases by experience in the 1914–1918 war and in most cases by their respective interwar staff colleges and by the writings and mentoring of their formative years. Moreover, the British and US armies drew different, often incompatible lessons, from their historical experiences. The resulting ideas were not all well attuned to the demands the armies faced. When it came to fighting the Germans in 1944, most generals’ thinking was firmly rooted in the experience of small wars and the linear-attritional campaigns of the First World War. The interwar armies had not fully grasped the implications of the revolution in military affairs that was taking place; they used new technologies to make incremental improvements to existing doctrine rather than experimenting with qualitatively new and different methods. They tended to regard the demands of operations at higher formation level as little more than those of tactics scaled up, rather than as qualitatively different and therefore requiring different solutions. Orders often failed to specify a main effort and never explained the operational idea behind them, the commander’s intent; rather, they usually set terrain objectives and the phases by which they would be achieved. They afforded little room for subordinates’ exercise of initiative to further the achievement of wider goals. Control was considered as important as command, and it had to be maintained even at the price of rapidity and agility in the advance. The emphasis was on seeking out and fighting battles and winning them by deploying superior firepower, rather than on using maneuver to place the enemy in an untenable position and thus make battle unnecessary. The aims of operations were generally limited. Accordingly, offensives were rarely organized in depth, with substantial forces held back from battle until they could be committed to conduct exploitation into the enemy’s operational rear with the aim of precipitating a substantial and spreading collapse of his front. When penetrations were achieved, development of the operation was often conducted with cautious deliberation rather than an overriding concern for achieving the momentum that would progressively destabilize the defense and preempt its recovery by seizing depth defensive lines before they could be defended by reserves or redeployments.
Like all generalizations, those in the preceding paragraph had exceptions. Patton stands out as a champion of maneuver and speed as keys to victory, although even he could revert to linear thinking when an operation did not develop according to plan—as happened in Lorraine when Third Army was checked on the Moselle. Other, more pedestrian commanders could rise to the occasion. Bradley’s Operation Cobra was a creative departure from standard American practice, and all the army and army group commanders adjusted well to the unfamiliar demands of pursuit when daring and speed were obviously necessary and seemed safe against an emasculated enemy. The post-Normandy pursuit was generally conducted with panache, but hardening resistance in late September resulted in reversions to conservative forms of operations, cautiously implemented; the attritional slog in the Hürtgen Forest is merely the most egregious example.
The inevitable problems inherent in prosecuting the campaign as an alliance helped ensure that the Allies’ results fell short of expectations, given the sum of their resources. There was little meeting of minds at army group level, and American and British ideas and interests increasingly diverged. There was a resultant lack of synergy in their efforts as they pursued different aims, and tasks essential to Allied success (especially the opening of Antwerp) were neglected. Mutual misunderstandings and resentments grew, fanned by nationalistic politicians and newspapers. Of course, the Supreme Commander was there to resolve disagreements and to provide clear and firm direction in line with the directives he received from the CCS. His role was to preserve Allied unity and ensure the single-minded pursuit of his aim through the implementation of his campaign plan. Whatever the theory, however, there was no consistent theatre-wide main effort in practice, as Eisenhower’s shifts and equivocations bear witness. Rather, there was a series of compromises and an increasingly uneasy pretense of unity of effort. Eisenhower did a sterling job of holding the alliance together; even his British critics gave him credit for this. But he failed in his other task. This was inevitable, as the two jobs were hardly compatible. One required a shrewd, politically sensitive, flexible statesman with an outgoing, charismatic, tolerant character. The other demanded a knowledgeable, experienced, military technician with a personality that could drive as well as coax difficult subordinates such as Bradley and, especially, Montgomery. As Brooke pointed out, such a paragon did not exist. Even if he had, it is unlikely that he could have surmounted the fact that approximately one-third of his force owed its ultimate loyalty to a government that did not always share his and his government’s views on the situation and therefore on what needed to be done. National interests—indeed, national prejudices—would always complicate alliance endeavors and result in plans that were no better than the least objectionable compromise. These plans would almost always lead to outcomes that were disappointing to one or more of the alliance members.
Volume 2 examines the parallel Soviet campaign of the summer of 1944. The Red Army had its problems, but they did not include some of those affecting the Allies. The conceptual foundations of its operations were stronger. Its prewar doctrine took more cognizance of the accelerating revolution in military affairs, at least with regard to land warfare. This did not preserve it from near-fatal disasters in 1941–1942, but it did provide a sound base for the development of a doctrine well attuned to the demands of the times and one that could be implemented by cadres toughened and educated in the hardest of all schools of battle. The Red Army reaped a fine harvest from the doctrinal fruit of 1944. In doing so, it was unconstrained by allies. American and British concerns and wishes carried little weight in Moscow, and even less as the year wore on. Indeed, the main influence of the Western powers was to act as a spur to faster and deeper Soviet thrusts westward to seize as much of Europe as possible before the German collapse. For that matter, the Soviet government, and therefore its generals, did not have to adjust plans to satisfy an electorate nor worry about the casualty bill for operations (save in the sense of the expenditure of assets such as tanks or aircraft). The absence of the systemic problems that constrained the Allies allowed the Red Army to develop more radical operational ideas and to implement them with a daring and ruthlessness that were impossible for the armies of democratic states: how they did so is described in volume 2.