Introduction

In September 1944, a major argument broke out between the Allied commanders during the Normandy Campaign. This argument was about the future strategic direction of the campaign given the shortage of the logistics, arising from the failure to capture the Brittany ports on schedule.1 This followed on from earlier clashes in June-July around the speed at which the campaign was developing, and the failure in August to destroy the German Army on the Seine river. The main focus of the majority of academic accounts has attributed these disagreements to a clash of personalities between Field Marshal Montgomery and Lieutenant General Eisenhower and other US commanders. Yet other factors have not received as much attention, because they were an inherent part of the structure of Allied command and hence less amenable to change. Moreover these structural factors would have remained influential, even if Montgomery had been replaced by Field Marshal Harold Alexander, and would have continued to generate inter-Allied conflict.

This essay will seek to examine the most influential of these 'structural' factors, firstly the unresolved conceptual issue of how to fight large wars, left over from failure of the Clausewitz paradigm at the start of the First World War. Secondly the role of the differing British and American strategies and thirdly the command structure’s influence as it evolved during the Normandy Campaign. As with all multi-factorial scenarios, the challenge is to weigh each factor in relation to the others and with the whole. In this case, the influence of each factor will be measured against three key decision points of the campaign. Firstly, following the breakout by Operation Cobra, the decision to capture the Brittany ports by only one corps rather than one army.2 Secondly the struggle in early August to close the Falaise Gap3 and finally the failure in late August to destroy the German armies on the Seine River.4 Had Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) succeeded at any one of these decisions points, the campaign would have fulfilled the Overlord Plan of destroying the German army in front of the Seine. Failure in all three left the German army battered but intact, and the Allies without a sufficiently strong logistical base to pursue them across France to the Rhine.

The historiography of this period has been ably set out both by John Buckley in his book 'Monty's Men' and by David French in 'Raising Churchill's Army', so only a brief overview is required here.5 The immediate post-war period through the 1960s was largely filled by the publication of the personal memoirs of the main protagonists, which led to a bitter 'battle of the memoirs'.6 The debate was essentially around the quality of Allied generalship and the fighting abilities of their troop. The period 1950 to 1969 saw the publication of both the British Official Histories and the US Army 'Green Books' both of which sought to establish the basic events from existing documentation.7 Further authors, such as d’Este, Lamb, van Creveld and Hastings in the 1970s and 1980s criticized both Allied command and soldiers, especially the British and Montgomery.8 Since then, a revisionist turn has largely restored the reputation of Allied soldiers, particularly British and Canadian ones, and revealed the constraints under which they fought.9

The deterioration in senior Allied command relationships

In 1899 Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, attended the Hague Peace Conference to distribute copies of his book ‘Is War Now Impossible? Being an Abridgment of ‘The War of the Future...’’.10 A Polish banker, his study of war had concluded that modern weaponry had advanced to the point that the defence had a considerable advantage over any offensive, that armies had now grown so large as to be impossible to defeat in a single battle, and that consequently a long war would wreak havoc on nation's economies through the disruption of their interconnected trade and commerce. Generally, Bloch is regarded as having been broadly correct in his assessment and given this, the main question facing generals was how to make war decisive by breaking through deeply echeloned, fixed defences. The complexity of this breakthrough battle led to a concentration on this subject to the detriment of the following exploitation and on wider strategy. So when the Germans achieved a breakthrough in March 1918, the following exploitation was sluggish and only covered 70 km to Amiens. Similarly the great Allied advance in 1918 barely covered 100 km and left the German line largely intact.11 Post war theorists such as Basil Liddell Hart and J.F.C Fuller presented ideas centred around the new technologies of the tank, chemical weapons and aircraft as being the solution to these problems. For instance Fullers 'Plan 1919' envisaged a massed tank attack:

The objective of the attack was to penetrate the enemy's zone of defence and to strike directly at the German organisational and communications infrastructure. With the collapse of the opposition's command-control hierarchy its combat forces would become impotent from isolation, lack of supply and the severe loss of morale that would affect these cut-off units.12

Yet US doctrine writers at Fort Leavenworth and British ones at Camberley concentrated on producing tactical doctrines focussed on frontal assaults and destroying the enemy in place or breaking through his line.13 What this meant for Eisenhower and Montgomery, was that they did not have a working conceptual framework for fighting wars with mass armies, and that the concept for exploitation following a breakthrough remained unclear. Lacking a common operational level doctrine made it harder to coordinate the Allied armies and in prioritising objectives. Even talented commanders such as Patton suffered from this lack of direction, as he was heavily criticised for bypassing too many enemy positions in the speed of his advance, failing to destroy the enemy by the end of the operation, simply occupying territory.14 However a surprising group of thinkers had managed to successfully produce such a conceptual framework.15

The Soviet school of military thinkers cannot be regarded as a uniform body of officers, since some were ex-Tsarist staff officers, 'military specialists' in Bolshevik jargon, while others were young Bolshevik officers fully steeped in the 'dialectical materialism' of Marxist-Leninism. Nonetheless by 1936 they had produced three key concepts which were expressed in the Provisional Field Regulations 1936 (Vremennyi Polevoy Ustav 1936).16 The first of these was written by A. A. Svechin, in Strategy (1927), who coined the phrase "operational art", and conceived the idea of wars being won by a continuous stream of linked operations, although he saw these more in terms of attritional warfare.17 The creator of the 'deep battle' concept and a major contributor to the 'deep operations' concept was V. K. Triandafillov with his work, The Character of Operations of the Contemporary Army (1929) and he was joined by G. S. Isserson with his seminal, The Evolution of Operational Art (1932).18 So at a time when the poorest country in Europe had only 90 working tanks, its military thinkers had conceived a series of concepts that could win large scale wars and leverage its military power by the use of 'shock' of an enemy. The purges and retrenchment of the late 1930s almost threw this advantage away, yet Isserson had trained so many wartime senior officers such as Malinovskii, Bagramian, Zakharov, Konev, Vatutin, Voronov, Vasilevskii and Antonov who commanded at army, front and STAVKA levels, that they were able to modify the theories into real life operational practice.19

The view that this operational art conferred a significant advantage to Soviet forces and its absence, a disadvantage to the Western Allies is supported by a considerable body of evidence starting with the seminal article by Luttwak who stated ‘Nor did the radically different character of the World War II suffice to establish the operational level in the conduct, planning, and analysis of Anglo-Saxon warfare.’20 Nonetheless at the strategic level the Allies were clear as to their overall objectives, the defeat of Germany and Japan, even if they disagreed about the route to achieve these.

By June 1944, the United States had the dominant voice in the alliance, as it would be providing two out of every three men and the bulk of the materiel. This made President Roosevelt and his Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy, the principal determiners of the overall strategic direction.21 Under the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), determined the detailed strategy, and worked alongside other agencies in determining economic priorities and allocations.22 The dominant figure in this arrangement was Admiral Leahy in his role both, as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief (i.e. Roosevelt,) and Chairman of the JCS. Phillips O'Brien has argued that Leahy's position was far more influential even than Marshalls' and the other Joint Chiefs of staff and notes that Leahy got his way on every major decision over Marshall, including the size of the army, while Roosevelt was alive.23 Then the JCS issued broad directives to the theatre commanders, such as Eisenhower, who determined the method to meet these objectives and had considerable freedom of command. However the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) was such a key one, that it attracted a considerable level of scrutiny and interference in lower level decisions.24

While by 1944 the Americans were the main driving force in the strategic direction, nonetheless they had to take into account the view and wishes of their principal ally, the British Empire, as well as the other United Nations. Later Churchill would described the relative position of the USA as a "big, strong and dominating partner". The British Empire’s system of strategic direction reflected the Prime Ministers role as being responsible to Parliament and head of the Dominions and colonies. While Churchill was Prime Minister, he increased his level of involvement in decision making, by creating the post of Minster for Defence, with both positions held by Churchill simultaneously.25 This allowed him a much greater say in day to day operations than under the American model and this suited Churchill very well, if not the military hierarchy.26 Strategic direction was performed by the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COS) which comprised the head of each service, with Major-General Ismay as secretary and Chief Staff Officer to the Minister of Defence. As heads of their service, and in particular the First Sea Lord who held both an administrative and operational position, the COS took a more direct role controlling theatre level commanders and issuing orders about specific circumstances.

However this changed over the course of the war, as the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCOS), made up of both the British and American Chiefs of Staff, took over this role, representing the joint views of both allies to their political leaders. Since the CCOS met in the Public Health Building in Washington DC, the British COS was represented by the Joint Staff Mission under Field Marshal Sir John Dill, and it was largely due to Dill’s diplomatic skills that the system ran as well as it did.27 Also key to the running of this system were the regular conferences held between the Western Allies and later the USSR, to thrash out issues of strategy.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Churchill pressed his Mediterranean strategy, of an Allied push from the head of the Adriatic Sea into the Balkans, whose aim was to establish an Allied presence in the area before the Soviets arrived.28 This viewpoint is supported by Churchill's discussion with Stalin at the fourth Moscow Conference, agreeing 'percentages' of influence across Eastern Europe. Both he and Sir Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) continued to press this strategy at the Tehran Conference and even delayed Roosevelt's return to the USA with the Cairo II conference in order to press it further.29 This campaign continued both before and after Overlord was launched, as Brooke tried to get a cancellation of the invasion of southern France, Operation Anvil, in order to keep the resources for the Italian Campaign.30 At the heart of this issue was the early American decision to fight a "quick and decisive war" in order to reduce costs and to keep US public opinion on board. There was little taste for a post-war European settlement along the lines of President Wilson's 14 points plan of 1919.

In reality both CCOS and SHAEF were the only levels of command representing joint Allied decisions, with national structures above them and national armies below them. So the CCOS was unable to surmount these strategic disagreements, as the American JCS found that the British COS continued in their old ways and even though the Tehran conference fixed the date of Operation Overlord, the British soon reversed their decision and proposed a wait and see policy which the Americans resisted.31 This divergent view was known to all the main Allied senior commanders. Seen from this perspective, Montgomery's championing of the 'Single Thrust' concept fitted in with British strategic aims to exclude the Soviets from as much of Europe as possible, by getting to Berlin first. In daily communications with Brooke, Montgomery could promote his idea with the broad support of the COS.

In many ways, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force lay outside the national command structures of both Allies, and its officers reflected SHAEF's own strategic and theatre level views, rather than the narrower ones of national commanders.32 By virtue of the composition of its forces it had more in common with American practice, as Eisenhower issued directives rather than orders and left army group commanders to make their own decisions. Also SHAEF encompassed a wide range of responsibilities including reporting to national administrations, civil administration of liberated territories and propaganda. This led to SHAEF being rather large, with 4,914 personnel in July 1944 (3,476 American and 1,438 British,) rising to 16,312 personnel by February 1945 with the increase in occupation duties.33

Yet it did not control everything, as 12 and 6 Army Group were American forces which came with their own supply system provided by COMZ under General Lee (whose headquarters contained an astonishing 29,000 personnel,) and the British/Canadian 21 Army Group whose supply system was provided by the Royal Army Service Corps.34 Initially this did not present a problem since both organisations operated over the beaches, however once ports were captured, this effectively meant that the 21 Army Group was independent since it controlled the Channel ports, supply routes and distribution to British/Canadian troops. COMZ operated from Cherbourg and later the Brittany ports further to the west. One of the reasons that the port of Antwerp later became such an issue, was simply because 21 Army Group could supply itself relatively easily from the Channel ports, while 12 and 6 Army Groups were less favourably placed. SHAEF did have a Deputy Chief of Staff (Administration) in Lieutenant General Sir Humfrey Gale, however he did not command either supply service, acting simply as coordinator and as chairman of high level supply committees. The one thing that he could direct was the flow of materiel into the ports and he could obtain some leverage this way. This was in direct contrast to his time in the Mediterranean at Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) under Eisenhower where he was directly responsible for supply and administration.35

Another example of how SHAEF was weakened by inter-allied and inter-service squabbling, is the case of Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who was appointed to command all the Allied air forces, both strategic bomber commands, both tactical air forces and the Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB). However neither strategic bomber commander would serve under a tactical commander and Tedder did not support Leigh-Mallory in his command of the tactical air forces, preferring to command them directly himself.36 In reality once Operation Overlord was completed there was less need for coordination between the strategic, tactical air forces and ADGB, so Leigh-Mallory was side-lined and then sent to Burma. Nonetheless, Tedder had important duties as Deputy Supreme Commander, being sent on a mission to Moscow and the command could have worked with the right officer in post as it had in the Mediterranean. A similar issue beset the operation of an overall 'land forces commander'.

For Operation Overlord, Montgomery served as both as 'land forces commander' and 21 Army Group commander for the landings and breakout battle. However he failed to co-ordinate both 21 and 12 Army Groups in their attempt to encircle the German forces in August. Eisenhower took over the role in September, to set operational level objectives, and to coordinate three army group commanders in successfully meeting those objectives, such as the capture of Antwerp. Yet neither SHAEF's size nor scope of responsibilities would aid Eisenhower in the fulfilment of these tasks which met with resistance from both 21 and 12 Army Group commanders. One can speculate how a Deputy Supreme Commander SHAEF appointed as 'land forces commander' might have fared in providing continuity of command and in following the theatre level plan, as had been successfully done by the Mediterranean command structure.

When the Allies landed at Normandy, their basic plan drawn up by COSSAC and later by SHAEF, was to engage the Germany OB West between the beaches and the Seine river and destroy it in this geographical area. This plan was conditioned by two fixed factors, firstly the speed at which the Allies could build up their forces and secondly the ability of the Allies to supply themselves over the open beaches. The Allies had 37 divisions in UK and another 40 divisions in US, around two million men and a vast amount of equipment and supplies to bring into Europe. Their capacity to do this would be seriously limited until D+23 of the plan, when Cherbourg was operational and D+53 of the plan when Brest became operational. It was planned to be on the Seine river by D+90 (5 September,) at which there would be a 30-day pause to build up a logistical base before a rapid advance to the Rhine to gain a crossing.

Yet everything did not go according to plan with an advance by stages. Instead the Germans hung on close to the beaches until July when Operation Cobra broke out of the bridgehead. This sudden German collapse presented Eisenhower with both an opportunity and a dilemma, as according to the plan US Third Army should sweep into Brittany to capture Brest and the Brittany ports. However there was now an opportunity that a rapid Allied advance might allow an encirclement of the defending 7.Armee in front of the Seine river, yet if this did not succeed, the Allies would be left without the logistical means to continue the campaign and would have to halt on the Seine. Eisenhower took the decision on 7 August (D+61) to send only US VIII Corps was sent westwards 300 km to capture Brest instead of Third Army.37 The result was that Brest did not fall until D+110 (25 September or 53 days behind schedule,) and this led to the Allies poor logistical situation later in the campaign.

Looking at this decision from the point of view of ‘operational art’, this was undoubtedly the correct one and also, it met the Allied strategic criteria of defeating the German army close to the beaches. Yet what failed at this point was the command structure. Montgomery was both Land Commander and 21 Army Group Commander, with Bradley as 12 Army Group Commander, and Eisenhower had not yet taken up his operational command. In an agreement between them, they hatched this major change of plan, yet supervision of Major General Middleton was lax until 5 September when it came under US 9 Army.38 Nor was any senior commander overseeing this plan, Montgomery was fully occupied with Operation Totalize and Bradley was maintaining minimum communication with him as his senior officer.39

The failure to capture Brest on schedule, would not have mattered if the other two aspects of the plan had materialised. However the plan to encircle and destroy a large part of the German OB West in the Falaise Pocket in August also failed. Bradley sent only his weakest XV Corps to Argentan to close the gap, sending the other two onto the Seine and then stopped both the corps commander, Major General Haslip and his superior at Third Army, General Patton from advancing beyond the town. Lieutenant General Simmond’s II Canadian Corps had been bogged down in heavy fighting for three days and so was unable to close the gap from the north.40 This was a colossal failure of operational art, two Corps attempting to surround a German army of more than 100,000 men was bound to fail. Yet Leavenworth provided no doctrinal guidance on encirclements, with no understanding of the operational level41 and the directives from Eisenhower and Montgomery, together with the army group boundaries issues, clouding the situation still further. This was a failure of the Allied strategy as well, with the German army escaping destruction. Nor was the command structure working as intended, with Bradley failing to keep Montgomery informed, Montgomery focussed on Operations Totalize and Bluecoat, not on the operational level and Eisenhower not yet in command. Yet this operation was Bradley’s proposal!42

The tragedy was that the same mistakes were repeated with even less excuse, in a second attempt to destroy OB West on the 26 August along the Seine river. The causes were the same; lack of operational understanding, a failure to integrate Allied strategy into the plan and a command structure unable to deliver a concrete plan above the level of an army group. Moreover the situation was made worse, by Eisenhower’s decision of 19 August to abandon the logistical pause on the Seine river and to continue the pursuit towards the Rhine, knowing he lacked the resources to reach it.43

Conclusion

Coalition warfare has always presented a unique set of challenges, and none more so that during the Second World War, nonetheless the Western Allies created one of the most integrated alliances in history especially when measured against Foch’s position as Supreme Commander in the First World War.44

Despite this, senior commanders of the Allied forces in Normandy had a serious disagreement over strategy (Eisenhower’s Broad Front versus Montgomery’s Single Thrust concept,45) and over command structure (Montgomery’s proposal for a land forces commander46) in September 1944. The genesis of this argument lay in the failures in August to either destroy the German army at Falaise, or on the Seine or to prepare for a long pursuit to the river Rhine by capturing a sufficient number of ports in Brittany and Normandy.

Historians have focussed on the colourful personalities involved as being the main reason behind these major disagreements, however more modern research has shown that the structural factors of a lack of operational art, divergent Allied strategies and problems in the structure of the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, SHAEF and at Army Group level were as important, if not more so. While balancing the importance of one factor against another is problematic, nonetheless it is clear that the lack of an operational level concept and the associated problems of command structure played at least, if not more an important role in the deterioration in senior Allied command relationships.

Bibliography

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1 John Buckley, Montys Men - the British Army and the Liberation of Europe. (London: Yale University Press, 2014), p.203.

2 Joachim Ludewig and David T Zabecki, Ruckzüg: The German Retreat from France, 1944 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p.98.

3 John A Adams, The Battle for Western Europe, 1944: An Operational Assessment (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp.6.

4 Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-45 (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.246.

5Buckley, Montys Men - the British Army and the Liberation of Europe., pp.7; David French, Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945. (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), pp.2.

6 Bernard Law Montgomery Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field-Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. (London: Collins, 1958); Dwight D Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe. (New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948).

7 ‘U.S. Army in World War II Series - U.S. Army Center of Military History’, accessed 8 December 2020, https://history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/usaww2.html; ‘United Kingdom Official Histories’, HyperWar: a hypertext history of the Second World War, accessed 2 March 2021, https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/UK/.

8 Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy (New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 1983); Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (London: Michael Joseph, 1984); Martin Van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Richard Lamb, Montgomery in Europe 1943-1945: Success or Failure? (London: Buchan & Enright, 1983).

9 S. Hart, Montgomery and ‘Colossal Cracks’ the 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45, Praeger Series in War Studies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); John Alan English, The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991); John Buckley, British Armour in the Normandy Campaign, 1944 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004); Jeremy A Crang, The British Army and the People’s War, 1939-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Robert C Engen, Canadians under Fire: Infantry Effectiveness in the Second World War (Montréal, Québec: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2009).

10 Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, Is War Now Impossible? Being an Abridgment of ‘The War of the Future ...’, trans. W. T. Stead (London: Richards, 1899), https://archive.org/stream/iswarnowimpossib00bloc#page/n3/mode/2up.

11 Richard W. Harrison, Architect of Soviet Victory in World War II: The Life and Theories of G.S. Isserson (Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2010), p.107.

12 Albert Palazzo, ‘Plan1919—The Other One’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 77, no. 309 (1999): p.41.

13 Charles J. Dick, From Victory to Stalemate: The Western Front, Summer 1944 Decisive and Indecisive Military Operations, Volume 1 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016), p.306; Adams, The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944, p.287 for General Denvers role.

14 Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, p.244-5.

15 James J Schneider, The Structure of Strategic Revolution.: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State. (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1994), pp.163.

16 ‘Provisional Field Regulations for the Red Army - VPU 1936’ (Defense Technical Information Center, 12 June 1986), JPRS, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a361873.pdf.

17 David R Stone, ‘Misreading Svechin: Attrition, Annihilation, and Historicism’, The Journal of Military History 76 (July 2012): p.676.

18 Harrison, Architect of Soviet Victory in World War II, p.91 & 96.

19 Harrison, pp.300.

20 Edward N. Luttwak, ‘The Operational Level of War’, International Security 5, no. 3 (1980): p.62, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538420; Shimon Naveh, In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (London,: Frank Cass Publishers, 1997), p.179.

21 David Rigby, Allied Master Strategists: The Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), p.159.

22 Rigby, p.47.

23 Phillips Payson O’Brien, The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff. (New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 2020), p.203.

24 Rigby, Allied Master Strategists, p.122.

25 Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command, United States Army in World War II European Theater of Operations, CMH Publication 7-1 (Washington DC: Office of the Chief of Military History Department of the Army, 1957), p.36, http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Supreme/.

26 Rigby, Allied Master Strategists, p.145.

27 Rigby, p.64.

28 O’Brien, Second Most Powerful Man, p.217; Rigby, Allied Master Strategists, p.123.

29 O’Brien, Second Most Powerful Man, p.263.

30 D. K. R. Crosswell, Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith, Illustrated edition (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), pp.583.

31 Rigby, Allied Master Strategists, p.139.

32 Crosswell, Beetle, p.553 for the example of the British General Morgan ‘(Morgan)has hurt himself with Brooke by his square dealing with our people’.

33 Pogue, The Supreme Command, pp.533 Table 4 & 5; Crosswell, Beetle, p.568 For differences between Morgan’s and Bedell-Smith’s concepts.

34 Great Britain, War Office, and D. W Boileau, Supplies and Transport, vol. II, Red Books Official Histories (Great Britain: War Office, 1954), p.420; Roland G Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies Volume I: May 1941--September 1944, United States Army in World War II (Washington DC: Office of the Chief of Military History Department of the Army, 1953), p.201.

35 Crosswell, Beetle, pp.429.

36 Vincent Orange, Tedder: Quietly in Command (London: Routledge, 2004), p.271, Google-Books-ID: gWXPH8oy050C.

37 Ludewig and Zabecki, Ruckzüg, p.98.

38 Ludewig and Zabecki, p.352 n.30.

39 Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, p.216.

40 Adams, The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944, p.7; John Buckley, The Normandy Campaign 1944 Sixty Years On, Military History and Policy Series 24 (London: Routledge, 2006), p.110.

41 Buckley, The Normandy Campaign 1944 Sixty Years On, p.30.

42 Dick, From Victory to Stalemate, p.165.

43 Adams, The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944, p.87.

44 Rigby, Allied Master Strategists, p.50; Crosswell, Beetle, p.568.

45 Dick, From Victory to Stalemate, p.223.

46 Dick, pp.201.