ISBN 0-7146-5037-4
227 pages

Series Editor's Preface; Acknowledgments; List of Abbreviations; TOE diagrams; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   Timothy Harrison Place's book at first glance seems not to be the most electrifying work to appear on the scene in recent years, but it turns out to be a most worthwhile examination of a topic often overlooked. The author begins by reviewing the perspectives of various historians who have analyzed the fighting in Normandy—including Carlo D'Este, Max Hastings, and Williamson Murray—and the issues raised by Harrison Place foreshadow the engaging nature of his book.

   Using a variety of sources, both D'Este and Hastings highlight the poor standard of co-operation between tanks and infantry among British troops and the reluctance of the infantry to fight without high volumes of fire-power in support or to continue the struggle when their officers became casualties. D'Este argues that the lacklustre performance of the British Army in Normandy was partly the product of the cautious strategy of attrition by which Montgomery directed the operations of the British and Canadian troops in the eastern sector of the lodgement area. Hastings' interpretation, contrarily, holds that Montgomery's generalship was constrained by the mediocre tactical qualities of his troops. That the general standard of British troops in the Second World War was mediocre is confirmed by Professor Sir Michael Howard, a veteran of the Italian campaign as well as a distinguished military historian.
   Numerous reasons have been advanced for the British Army's mediocrity. The parochialism engendered by the regimental system has been cited as a bar to effective co-operation between tanks and infantry. British weapons and equipment were frequently inferior to those available to the Germans: not only were German tanks better armoured and better armed than their British counterparts, but German infantry weapons, especially anti-tank weapons, were superior. In Normandy the bocage terrain supposedly favored the defence. This factor had not been foreseen in training and the three veteran British divisions in Normandy, which had won their spurs in the desert, found the adjustment particularly hard.
   In his wide-ranging treatment of the British Army's tactical effectiveness during the Second World War, Murray cites the revelations in Hastings' work and numerous other sources of circumstantial evidence relating to other theatres in which the British Army was engaged pointing to a similar malady, before offering the following diagnosis: 'The real cause of such a state of affairs lay in the failure of the army leadership to enunciate a clearly thought-out doctrine and to institute a thorough training program to insure its acceptance throughout the army.'
   The assurance of that sentence belies what is quite properly a rather tentative discussion of the subject, for the evidence that Murray adduces in its support is thin to say the least. None the less, although it offers no hint of the full complexity in which tactical doctrine and training became entangled, Murray's diagnosis is meaningful enough to serve as the text for this study.

   From this, Harrison Place explains the intent of his book:

   It simply will not do to put down the lacklustre tactical performance of the British Army in North-West Europe to a lack of opportunity for training. There was no such lack. Murray's hypothesis—for that is all it is—that it was unsuitable doctrine and training that hampered the tactical performance of British arms clearly stands the test of logical reasoning. This book investigates whether it can be sustained by the evidence of what the British Army at home actually did during the four years between Dunkirk and D-Day. That is why the campaign in North-West Europe provides only the backdrop to this study. Its main focus is the hitherto neglected subject of those four tedious years of home service.

   In his second chapter, Harrison Place discusses how doctrine was disseminated in the British Army. In addition to the formal training manuals, a series of periodicals—Military Training Pamphlets, Army Training Memoranda, Army Training Instructions, Notes from Theatres of War, and Current Reports from Overseas—published by various headquarters during the war attempted to ensure that knowledge, doctrine, and training kept pace with evolving conditions on the battlefield.
   These periodicals typically contained useful, unvarnished information gained in the hard school of combat. Harrison Place shows that the volume of written material, however, far exceeded the time (and inclination) available for most officers to read and digest it. And in some cases certain unpalatable facts were suppressed. For example, Montgomery censored a passage, written in June 1944 by officers attached to his HQ to produce after-action reports, about "...the undoubted superiority of the German Tiger and Panther over our Cromwell and Sherman...."
   Harrison Place lays out the mechanism of training exercises and dwells on the role of umpires, and how even the best planned exercises could fail to produce satisfactory results due to umpiring problems.

   Cheating by troops in defiance of the umpires was one way in which an exercise could be perverted. Cheating by troops with the connivance and even active assistance of the umpires was another. During exercise EAGLE, an intercorps scheme held in February 1944 under the auspices of Northern Command, 11th Armoured Division recorded two such occurrences. On the night of 17-18 February an attack by 1st Hertfordshire Regiment on an enemy strongpoint failed 'due to the fact that a formidable wire obstacle (type umpire) had been put up during the day, the chief peculiarity of which was its invisibility to a patrol which had kept the position in full view all day from a haystack only 50 yds away.' Four days later, the division found that enemy tanks withdrawing after a (presumably unsuccessful) counterattack were able to retire 'through gaps in their own minefields, which were filled with a remarkable rapidity, in view of the fact that no one approached them after the enemy had passed through.' It is noteworthy that owing to an acute shortage no umpires were provided for the enemy side in exercise EAGLE. Instead, all officers of the enemy side were empowered to act as umpires where necessary.

   Harrison Place goes on to describe how lessons learned in Tunisia led the British to implement tactical exercises in England to deal with German reverse slope defenses. These were not especially popular, or apparently very widespread, and the author points out how "...6th Royal Scots Fusiliers could have used better training on this matter before operation EPSOM [in Normandy], in which they suffered from a reverse slope defence, something they had apparently never expected."
   A number of training exercises are reviewed and Harrison Place concludes that too many ended up being imbued with "bogus verisimilitude" due to a whole range of limitations, many of which—such as inability to simulate serious hand-to-hand combat—could never be resolved. Such exercises, then, failed to prepare officers and men for the rigors and reality of combat.
   Chapter Four moves on to the TOEs of British rifle sections and platoons and discusses their fundamental doctrine of fire and movement and how they were equipped and trained to perform their roles. Infantry training, Harrison Place writes, was in a "rotten state in the first two years of the war," partly due to lack of equipment, anti-invasion duties, and demands of non-military tasks such as dispatching troops to help with harvests.
   Most training manuals published for "minor tactics" were quickly outdated by changes in TOEs, and Harrison Place follows the evolving doctrine.

   The new organisation, which gave each section a Bren gun, did not alter the principal of fire and movement but made its application possible within the section. Whereas before a section could execute fire or movement (but not both simultaneously), with an organic LMG it had the fire-power to cover the movement of its riflemen.... This small change in organisation thus had the highly significant effect of turning the corporal in charge of a section from a mere subordinate leader into a commander, with two tactical components to co-ordinate.

   In 1942 the British infantry were recovering from uncertain doctrine, poor training, and low morale mostly through the advent of "battle schools" for intensive work in fieldcraft, observation, and practical exercises in battle drills. One of the keys to the success of this training was the use of live fire.
   Overall, though, the efficacy of the battle drill taught in these schools was subject of considerable debate, and some considered such training to be too regimented and mindless, leading to inflexible troops and field officers lacking initiative. Indeed, Harrison Place calls his fifth chapter "The Failure of Infantry" and points out that many serious deficiencies remained in the state of training of British infantry units. He goes on to describe various tactics, such as the "lane" and "pepperpot" methods of attack, and how these drills—which some of the infantry had been practicing for years in England—actually functioned under German fire in Normandy. Despite the official doctrine and training in approved tactics, it appears that much of what transpired on the battlefield was devised on the spot. Harrison Place discusses the improvised doctrine of the 6th Royal West Kents and the 5th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry as examples of successful tactics which veered from the teachings of the battle schools. Even so, many battalions, companies, and platoons relied on exactly what they had been taught in England.

   Brigadier James Hargest, a New Zealander who observed the fighting in Normandy until 10 July 1944, bemoaned the frequent reluctance of British infantry to rely on their own weapons. Too often they called for artillery support when held up in circumstances where they might well have made progress without it. It is surely no coincidence that the ethos of exercise umpiring...militated against the generation of the unexpected, and that where some setback was allowed to rear in an exercise its purpose was usually to test the forward infantry in obtaining on-call artillery support.

   Where else did the British infantry go wrong? Harrison Place especially identifies lack of rehearsal of section, platoon, and company commanders in situations where they would be forced to take initiative in unexpected circumstances.

   The second half of the book moves from infantry to armor. One of the fundamental differences in training the two arms had to do with technical requirements and specialization.

   The [tank] training regiments were organised in specialist wings for (1) driving and maintenance, (2) gunnery and (3) wireless, with a further wing for (4) crew training and troop tactics.

   And Harrison Place points out inescapable problems with tank training exercises.

   In an infantry attack, whether or not the attacking troops got to close quarters with the objective depended largely upon the quality of the covering fire-plan decided well beforehand in comparative leisure and easily umpired. In an armoured attack, 'split-second manouevre and gunnery' could make all the difference between failure a thousand yards short of the objective or sweeping success. The impossibility of umpiring those factors rendered all exercises inherently unrealistic.

   Furthermore, there was a considerable divergence in armored training based on tank type.

   The differences in armour thickness, weight and top speed that resulted from the infantry tank/cruiser tank distinction are shown in Table 1. But it was not only the tanks in the two types of armoured formation that were different: the tactics were too. Their training followed quite different lines. A unit that formed part of an armoured brigade was unlikely to be able to meet the demands of infantry support duties without retraining. A unit in a tank brigade was equally unlikely to be able to step readily into the role of an armoured unit.

   Many other technical, organizational, doctrinal, and practical issues—some inescapable, some self-imposed—complicated the training of British tank crews and leaders, and Harrison Place enumerates these problems along with some of the suggestions for improvements from commanders like Montgomery as well as the failure of some of these suggestions.

   Montgomery's disagreements with the War Office over the infantry tank/cruiser tank question was highly regrettable. The rights and wrongs of the dispute are not the point. What matters is that armoured divisions in particular trained according to the War Office conception of their role but ultimately had to function in battle according to Montgomery's different policy.

   Harrison Place follows the Guards Armored Division and 11th Armored Division through years of inconsistent training in England. In part because it took so long for lessons learned in Africa to be transmitted up the chain of command and then to be transformed into doctrine and training programs in the UK, partly because of the evolving abilities of the tanks with which the units were equipped, and partly because there was no unified enforcement of War Office doctrine, it seems that each division mostly worked out its own armored doctrine.
   According to Harrison Place, it was the good luck of 11th Armored to have as its commander in the months before D-Day Pip Roberts, a veteran of North Africa, who managed to impart to his formations solid, viable tactical solutions to the situations they were likely to encounter in France. Even at that, conditions in Normandy severely strained the unit's tactical doctrine, and Roberts was soon forced to reorganize his division (from an armored brigade and lorried infantry brigade to a pair of mixed armor and infantry brigade groups). The Guards Armored Division was less fortunate, and the 11th went on to be considered the finest British armored division in 21st Army Group.
   The next chapter offers a look into tank cooperation with infantry and the complicated manner in which doctrine and equipment evolved in tandem, with no shortage of opinions among senior officers about the best techniques for tactical employment of tanks. Montgomery comes in for a bit of criticism in that regard. The bottom line? "Britain's armored divisions were neither trained nor organised for the kinds of battles they would have to fight in Normandy."
   Harrison Place discusses in considerable detail the practical consequences of that failure in Normandy of tank-infantry doctrine and training. In addition, he demonstrates how the advent of the German Panzerfaust—a weapon about which the British were barely aware, and for which there was no training in Montgomery's forces prior to the invasion—further upset British armored tactics.
   Sometimes British tank-infantry cooperation doctrine worked. Often it did not. Sometimes it was applied correctly and failed. Sometimes it was mis-applied and succeeded. Sometimes hastily improvised expedients saved the day. On the whole, however, British armor in Normandy was mostly ill-prepared and not extremely successful. "It would be unfair to blame Montgomery entirely for the tactical errors into which tank-infantry co-operation fell. While Montgomery's intervention made the situation worse, it was already bad.... The problem facing 21 Army Group was not merely a matter of bad doctrine; it was also a matter of doctrinal indiscipline. Regardless of what Whitehall said, units and formations pleased themselves when it came to tank-infantry co-operation tactics."
   Summing up armor in Normandy, Harrison Place has this to say:

   In view of the tactical pluralism tolerated in tank-infantry cooperation before Montgomery took over 21 Army Group, the flaws in the doctrine he imposed when he assumed command and the negligible attention to the subject within the armoured divisions, such evidence of interarm misunderstanding is no surprise. The varying approaches to the problem attempted within the 27th Armoured Brigade in Normandy reflect the failure to achieve a well-founded consensus on the matter before D-Day. Criticism of poor tank-infantry co-operation within armoured divisions, while not invalid, is unfair. The Normandy battles were not what the British armoured divisions had trained for because such battles were not the task assigned to them in doctrine. It was all very well for Montgomery to reject that doctrine, but the consequence was that the armoured divisions were set to do work for which they were neither trained nor organised. Whether one blames the War Office for the inflexibility inherent in doctrine, or Montgomery for failing to grasp the limitations the training and organisation of his armoured divisions placed upon the tasks they could reasonably be expected to accomplish, is a matter of personal taste. The armoured divisions themselves were not to blame.

   In his Conclusion, Harrison Place offers a synopsis of his chapters and a number of telling remarks about what the British were trying to do with training, how they were trying to do it, where they went wrong, and where they succeeded. It's definitely worth reading.
   Indeed, the bland title of the book, the rather dreary perception of the subject matter, and even the uninspired dust jacket belie the importance of this work. Harrison Place has done a splendid job of investigating his topic, and he provides readers with valuable insights and engrossing lessons in British military training and its implications. In fact, much of what he describes here should be of interest to anyone involved in the field of education and training today, be it in the armed forces or in a business environment.
   Recommended.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Frank Cass.
   Thanks to Frank Cass for providing this review copy.