Allies at War: British and US Army Command Culture in the Italian Campaign, 1943–1944

Abstract

This article compares the philosophy and practice of command in the British and US Armies during the Italian Campaign of 1943–44. It assesses pre-war influences on the command approach adopted by each army, and shows how refinements derived from wartime experience enabled British and American commanders to successfully utilise mission command principles to outfight the German Army in the latter years of World War II. This examination directly challenges the historical consensus that Allied commanders were disadvantaged by an inability to exploit the advantages of mission command, and that the German Army retained superior command practices, despite its other failings, throughout the fighting between 1939 and 1945. These conclusions hold additional relevance to modern military organisations which have emphasised mission command as the optimal solution to effective command in battle since the 1980s, but from an inaccurate understanding of German, British and American command traditions and experience that persists to this day.

Key Words:

• Mission Command
• British Army
• US Army
• German Army
• Italian Campaign

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful feedback and the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives for kind permission to reproduce quotations from their collections. All reasonable efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders of the Haydon Papers, and the author welcomes the opportunity to give appropriate acknowledgement in future work. The Arts and Humanities Research Council generously funded part of this research, and the author is grateful for support received from Drs Matthew Ford and Andrew Hargreaves, and the continued encouragement of Howard Body to view the operational level of war as an essential analytical framework for understanding World War II.

Notes

¹E. Shamir, Transforming Command: The Pursuit of Mission Command in the US, British and Israeli Armies (Stanford UP 2011), 77–8.

²Among a vast literature, this characterisation can be found in ibid; R.M. Citino, Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare (UP of Kansas 2004); J. Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (London: Andre Deutsch 1990); A. Millett, and W. Murray, Military Effectiveness, Vol.3: The Second World War (Boston: Allen and Unwin 1988); G.L. Scott, ‘British and German Operational Styles in World War Two’, Military Review 65 (October 1985), 38–41; M. van Creveld, Command in War (Harvard UP 1985); M. van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (London: Arms and Armour 1983).

³Recent examples of the former include P. Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives (London: Preface 2011); M. Melvin, Manstein: Hitler's Greatest General (London: Weidenfeld 2010) and the slightly more obscure P. Rostron, The Military Life and Times of General Sir Miles Dempsey: Monty's Army Commander (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword 2010).

⁴Two article length treatments are of note: N. de Lee, ‘“A Brigadier is Just a Co-ordinator”: British Command at Brigade Level in North-West Europe, 1944: A Case Study’, and M. Howard, ‘Leadership in the British Army in the Second World War: Some Personal Observations’, both in G.D Sheffield (ed.), Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American Military Experience Since 1861 (London: Brassey's 1997). J.R. Ferris, ‘The British Army: Signals and Security in the Desert Campaign, 1940–1942,’ in J.R. Ferris, Intelligence and Strategy: Selected Essays (London: Routledge 2005), and K. Jones, ‘A Curb on Ambition: Intelligence and the Planning of Eighth Army's Liri Valley Offensive, May 1944’, Intelligence and National Security 22/5 (Oct. 2007), 745–66, both present much interesting material on command, but are primarily concerned with operational intelligence.

⁵D. French, Raising Churchill's Army: The British Army and the War Against Germany 1919–45 (Oxford: OUP 2000), 282–3. This position is repeated in R. Callahan, Churchill and His Generals (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2007), and for an older interpretation see J. Kiszely, ‘The British Army and Approaches to Warfare Since 1945’, Journal of Strategic Studies 19/4 (Dec. 1996), 179–206.

⁶D. Delaney, Corps Commanders: Five British and Canadian Generals at War, 1939–1945 (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press 2011).

⁷H.R. Winton, Corps Commanders of the Bulge: Six American Generals and Victory in the Ardennes (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2007); D.W. Hogan, A Command Post at War: First Army Headquarters in Europe, 1943–1945 (Washington DC: US Army Center of Military History 2000). Two more recent articles also follow this trend: S.L. Ossad, ‘Major General John P. Lucas at Anzio: Prudence or Boldness’, Global War Studies 8/1 (2011), 35–56; C.R. Gabel, and M. Gabel, ‘A Matter of Age: Division Command in the US Army of World War II, Global War Studies 8/1 (2011), 57–73.

⁸M.R. Matheny, Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press 2011); P.J. Schifferle, America's School for War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education and Victory in World War II (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2010); J. Muth, Command Culture: Officer Education in the US Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901–1940, and the Consequences for World War II (Univ. of North Texas Press 2011).

⁹For the US Army see Winton, Corps Commanders, 13–15. D. French, ‘Doctrine and Organisation in the British Army, 1919–1932’, The Historical Journal 44/2 (2001), 497–515, covers the British experience.

¹⁰Winton, Corps Commanders, 24; H.R. Winton, ‘Toward an American Philosophy of Command’ Journal of Military History 64 (2000), 1040.

¹¹[Kew, United Kingdom, The National Archives], W[ar] O[ffice papers] 279/70, Staff conference at the Staff College, Jan. 1930, 52; War Department, US Army FM100-5, Tentative Field Service Regulations, Operations (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1939), 29–31.

¹²War Department, US Army FM100-5, Field Service Regulations, Operations (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office 1941), 23.

¹³J.A. English, The Canadian Army and the Normandy Campaign: A Study of Failure in High Command (Westport, CT: Praeger 1991), 89.

¹⁴War Department, US Army FM101-5, Staff Officers' Field Manual: The Staff and Combat Orders (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office Aug. 1940), 1, 7.

¹⁵C.N. Barclay, ‘Four Generations of Staff College Students, Part III: 1930’, Army Quarterly 65/1 (Oct. 1952), 50; Schifferle, America's School for War, 109–10.

¹⁶British Army General Staff, Field Service Regulations, Volume III: Operations - Higher Formations (London: HMSO 1936), 9.

¹⁷See for example French, ‘Doctrine’, 505, 513–14; French, Churchill's Army, 47.

¹⁸War Office, Military Training Pamphlet No.23 (Operations) Part I: General Principles, Fighting Troops and their Characteristics (London: Sept. 1939), 11.

¹⁹Muth, Command Culture, 173–4; Winton, ‘American Philosophy of Command’, 1058. On interwar debates about decentralisation see E.J. Catagnus, ‘Getting Rid of the Line: The Development of the US Army Infantry's Way of Battle, 1930–1945,’ unpublished research paper delivered to the Society for Military History Annual Conference, Lisle, Illinois, 2011. For an alternative reading of the role of initiative in FM100-5 see Schifferle, America's School for War, 52–4.

²⁰FM100-5 (1939), 34.

²¹Ibid., 35.

²²FM100-5 (1941), 25.

²³For an excellent modern description of mission command, see UK Ministry of Defence, Army Doctrine Publication – Operations (Shrivenham: Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre 2010), 6–11, 6–12.

²⁴Schifferle, America's School for War, 60.

²⁵War Department, US Army FM100-15, Field Service Regulations: Larger Units, Aug. 1940, 51.

²⁶Ibid., 52–65.

²⁷P.J. Rose, ‘British Army Command Culture 1939–1945: A Comparative Study of Eighth and Fourteenth Armies’ (King's College London, PhD, 2009), 200–3.

²⁸FM100-15, 3–4; British Army General Staff, Field Service Regulations, Volume III.

²⁹S. Bidwell, ‘Five Armies 1920–1970’, Army Quarterly 100/2 (July 1970), 171; B.H. Reid, Selected Papers: A Doctrinal Perspective, 1988–1998, Strategic and Combat Studies Institute Occasional Paper, No.33, May 1998, 12–13, 23, 31–4; A. Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 2000), 17; J. Gooch, ‘A Particularly Anglo-Saxon Institution: The British General Staff in the Era of Two World Wars,’ in D. French, and B.H. Reid (eds), The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation c.1890–1939 (London: Frank Cass 2002), 196–8.

³⁰R. Berlin, US Army World War II Corps Commanders: A Composite Biography (Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute 1989), 14.

³¹Schifferle, America's School for War, 68–72 details the CGSS curriculum. For the course content at the interwar British Army Staff College, see WO 32/3098, War Office, Staff College Regulations (London: HMSO 1921), 11–16.

³²Schifferle, America's School for War, 186–7. Some 33 of 34 US Army World War II combat corps commanders were CGSS graduates, 29 had also attended the Army War College: Berlin, US Army World War II Corps Commanders, 10–14. A sustained critique of CGSS education is provided in Muth, Command Culture, especially 120–37; 189–92, although the thesis presented suffers from an incorrect conflation of the human traits of creative thinking and leadership – ‘the capacity to inspire and to motivate’ – with the concrete professional requirements of command – ‘the direction, coordination and control of military forces’ to achieve a given aim (Definitions from Howard, ‘Leadership’, 117; UK Ministry of Defence, Joint Warfare Publication 0-01 – British Defence Doctrine (London: HMSO 1997), G-3, G-4).

³³Schifferle, America's School for War; Delaney, Corps Commanders, 3–5, 9.

³⁴E. Shamir, ‘The Long and Winding Road: The US Army Managerial Approach to Command and the Adoption of Mission Command’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33/5 (Oct. 2010), 645–50; B.M. Linn, ‘The American Way of War Revisited’, Journal of Military History 66 (May 2002), 524–7; C.S. Gray, ‘The American Way of War: Critique and Implications’, in A.D. McIvor (ed.), Rethinking the Principles of War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press 2005).

³⁵For a representative spread of these publications from the early desert war, see for example WO 201/2586, General Headquarters Middle East, Middle East Training Pamphlet (METP) No.10: Lessons of the Cyrenaica Campaign (Dec. 1940–Feb. 1941); WO 201/352, Operations [in] Western Desert 1940: Lessons from Colonel., G[eneral] S[taff], XIII Corps, 18 Jan. 1941; WO 201/357, Report by Commander 4th Indian Division on Operations in the Western Desert 15–18 June 1941. N. Barr, Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein (London: Pimlico 2005), remains the authoritative single account of the development of Eighth's Army's fighting effectiveness in the campaign.

³⁶British Eighth Army, Some Brief Notes for Senior Officers on the Conduct of Battle (Dec. 1942) (copy available at the Imperial War Museum, London, United Kingdom).

³⁷Ibid.

³⁸War Office, Military Training Pamphlet (MTP) No.23 (Operations) Part IX: The Infantry Division in the Attack (London: July 1941), 1; MTP No.23 Part X: The Infantry Division in the Advance (London: Sept. 1941), 4–5 (copies available at the Imperial War Museum, London, United Kingdom).

³⁹See in particular A. King, ‘Military Command in the Last Decade’, International Affairs 87/2 (2011), 377–96.

⁴⁰[London, United Kingdom], L[iddell] H[art] C[entre for] M[ilitary] A[rchives], Allfrey Papers 2/4, Lecture Notes by Lt.-Gen. C.W. Allfrey, Benevento Conference, Italy, 13 July 1944 – on role of Corps HQ. See also Eighth Army, Notes for Senior Officers, 1–3, 11–12, 23–5.

⁴¹See for example Allied Forces Headquarters, Lessons from Recent Fighting in Tunisia [compiled] 18–30 March 1943, esp. 20–1; 45; 51–3, available at [Leavenworth, United States], [US Army] C[ombined] A[rms] R[esearch] L[ibrary] Digital Library, <http://cdm16040.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/1908>; Observer's Notes: Notes on Recent Operations on the Tunisian Front, 10 March 1943, available at CARL Digital Library, <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/4>. For an overview of this subject, see M.D. Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, 1944–45 (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 1994), 10–31.

⁴²Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, quoted in Winton, Corps Commanders, 8.

⁴³Quote from Berlin, US Army World War II Corps Commanders, 2. This very tactical conceptualisation of higher command is consistent with the assessment that the US ‘way of war’ has tended over time to focus primarily on the event of ‘battle’, rather than the synchronisation of these engagements to achieve a wider (political) purpose: A.J. Echevarria, ‘Toward an American Way of War’, Strategic Studies Institute Monograph, US Army War College (March 2004).

⁴⁴Shamir, ‘Winding Road,’ 649. In the British case, it had been formally recognised in early 1941 that even junior ranking liaison officers could be used to transmit senior commanders' intent and, when necessary, speak on their behalf with subordinate formations in battle: WO 201/2588, Middle East Training Memorandum No.7: Employment of Liaison Officers, 20 Jan. 1941.

⁴⁵M. Blumenson, United States Army in World War Two: The Mediterranean Theatre of Operations – Sicily to Salerno (Washington DC: US Army 1969), 196–200; and see also Ossad, ‘Major General John P. Lucas at Anzio’, 40.

⁴⁶US Fifth Army, Fifth Army History, Part IV: Cassino and Anzio (Florence, Italy: L' Impronta Press 1944), 41–7, available at CARL Digital Library, <http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/1516>; Blumenson, United States Army in World War Two, 346.

⁴⁷Quote from Blumenson, United States Army in World War Two, 349.

⁴⁸[Washington DC, United States], [US Army] C[enter of] M[ilitary] H[istory], Diary of Major General Fred L. Walker, C[ommanding] G[eneral] 36th Infantry Division, unpublished typescript manuscript, 20 Jan. 1944.

⁴⁹FM100-15, 53; Blumenson, United States Army in World War Two, 328.

⁵⁰CMH, Walker Diary, 20 Jan. 1944.

⁵¹Ibid., 20–29 Jan. 1944.

⁵²P. Mansoor, The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Division, 1941–1945 (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2001), 118–19.

⁵³CMH, Walker Diary, 25 Jan. 1944; Blumenson, United States Army in World War Two, 346–50.

⁵⁴In addition to the analysis that follows, Delaney's assessment of I Canadian Corps operations in autumn 1944 also highlights these same factors: Delaney, Corps Commanders, 285, 301.

⁵⁵WO 204/8277, 78th Division Report: Battle of the Trigno, 23 Dec. 1943; WO 204/8164, 78th Division in the Pursuit Battle [July 1944]; WO 170/437, 6th [Armoured] Division Diary, 25 May 1944; WO 204/8046, 4th Div in the Fighting Advance [Oct. 1944].

⁵⁶For the sensitivity of British Army commanders to World War I comparisons, see G.D. Sheffield, ‘Reflections on the Experience of British Generalship,’ in P. Liddle, J. Bourne, and I. Whitehead (eds) The Great World War 1914–45, Volume 1: Lightning Strikes Twice (London: HarperCollins 2000), 448.

⁵⁷H. Kippenberger, Infantry Brigadier (Oxford: OUP 1961), 349–351. During the fighting at Anzio in this same period, the British 1st Infantry Division commander complained that his US superior, Lucas, ‘never visited the 1st Division front’: Ossad, ‘Major General John P. Lucas at Anzio’, 43–4.

⁵⁸War Office, Military Training Pamphlet No.23 (Operations) Part III: Appreciations, Orders, Intercommunication and Movements (London: Sept. 1941), 9 (copy available at the Imperial War Museum, London).

⁵⁹LHCMA, Kirkman Papers, Lieutenant-General Sidney Kirkman to Leese, 11 Aug. 1944.

⁶⁰Shamir, Transforming Command, 63.

⁶¹The following section draws on US Fifth Army, Fifth Army History, Part V: The Drive to Rome (Milan, Italy: Pizzi and Pizio 1945), 141–3, available at CARL Digital Library, <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/1529>; CMH, Walker Diary, 14 May–5 June 1944; E.F. Fisher, United States Army in World War Two: The Mediterranean Theatre of Operations – Cassino to the Alps (Washington DC: US Army 1977), 184–90.

⁶²CMH, Walker Diary, 29 May 1944.

⁶³Carlisle, PA, United States, US Army Military History Institute, Diary of Major General John P. Lucas, 13 Sept. 1943.

⁶⁴CMH, Walker Diary, 20, 24 May 1944. For the postwar legacy of the tendency towards ‘over-centralization … and supervision’ in the World War II US Army, see W.M. Donnelly, ‘Bilko's Army: A Crisis in Command’, Journal of Military History 75 (Oct. 2011), 1210.

⁶⁵CARL Digital Library, War Department, Combat Lessons No. 2, Rank and File in Combat: What they are Doing, How they Do it [Washington DC: nd but 1944], <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/3346>.

⁶⁶CARL Digital Library, 353/91, HQ II Corps, Lessons Learned, 16 June 1944, <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/3425>.

⁶⁷CARL Digital Library, Headquarters 15 Army Group, A Military Encyclopedia Based on Operations in the Italian Campaign, 1943–1945, 110–12; 158–161; 261–3, <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/2353>; CARL Digital Library, HQ 34th Infantry Division US Army, Lessons Learned in Combat, 8 Nov. 1942–1 Sept. 1944 (Italy), 62–72, <http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p4013coll8/id/3425>.

⁶⁸F. von, Senger und Etterlin, Neither Fear nor Hope: The Wartime Career of General Frido von Senger und Etterlin, Defender of Cassino (London: MacDonald 1963), 208–9.

⁶⁹For an atypically nuanced theoretical view of mission command see R. Leonhard, ‘Maneuver Warfare and the United States’, in R.D. Hooker (ed.), Maneuver Warfare: An Anthology (Novato, CA: Presidio 1993).

⁷⁰D. Stahel, Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East (Cambridge: CUP 2009), 447; and see G.L. Weinberg, ‘Some Myths of World War II’, Journal of Military History 75 (July 2011), 705.

⁷¹See for example R.M. Citino, ‘Beyond Fire and Movement: Command, Control and Information in the German Blitzkrieg’, Journal of Strategic Studies 27/2 (2004), 340; Muth, Command Culture, 203–6.

⁷²This assessment contrasts strongly with, and vigorously contends, the arguments forcefully presented throughout Muth, Command Culture; and Shamir, Transforming Command.

⁷³WO 169/18866, 17th Indian Infantry Brigade Diary, 29 May 1944.

⁷⁴See in particular [London, United Kingdom], I[mperial] W[ar] M[useum], Haydon Papers, 1st Guards Brigade Intelligence Summary No.2: Operations of 1st Guards Brigade North of R[iver] Garigliano 7–20 Feb. 1944; WO 204/8267, 167th (London) Inf[antry] B[riga]de: Lessons from the Italian Campaign, 20 May 1944.

⁷⁵WO 204/7570, 8th Indian Division Training Instruction No.7, 30 July 1944, 2.

⁷⁶War Department, Combat Lessons No.2, 20–1; 34th Infantry Division Lessons, 4–5.

⁷⁷Cf. Ellis, Brute Force, 475–7; Jones, ‘A Curb on Ambition’, 760–1.

⁷⁸R.M. Citino, Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 2007), 4–5 describes these negative aspects of the German ‘way of warfare’.

⁷⁹WO 204/12512, XIII Corps lessons Index III: Lessons from 10th Ind[ian] Div[ision] [1945]; HQ II Corps, Lessons.

⁸⁰IWM 93/28/4, Haydon Papers, Operations of 1st Guards Brigade: Cassino to Florence, May–July 1944.

⁸¹Army Doctrine Publication, Operations, 5–24.

⁸²M. Howard, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 119 (Oct. 1973), 7.

⁸³The summer advance of 1944 even saw battalions operating in what one brigadier termed ‘wide and independent roles’, within a general scheme of manoeuvre set at corps level: IWM, Haydon Papers, Cassino to Florence.

⁸⁴On this latter point see Donnelly.

⁸⁵Citino, Blitzkrieg, 32–5, 73–4; Shamir, ‘Winding Road’, 657–8. For a similar assessment with regard to World War I, see M. Samuels, Command or Control? Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888–1918 (London: Frank Cass 1995).

⁸⁶cf. especially Shamir, Transforming Command, 4.

⁸⁷Shamir, Transforming Command, 196–7 gives a concise summary; also G. Sloan, ‘Military Doctrine, Command Philosophy and the Generation of Fighting Power: Genesis and Theory’, International Affairs 88/2 (2012), 253–4. For additional detail, see J.L. Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The Development of Army Doctrine, 1973–1982 (United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, VA 1984), 58–61; Kiszely, ‘The British Army and Approaches to Warfare Since 1945’ 190–200; C.J. McInnes, ‘BAOR in the 1980s: Changes in Doctrine and Organisation’, Defense and Security Analysis 4/4 (1988), 377–94.

⁸⁸See WO 33/1297, Report of the Committee to Study the Lessons of the Great War, 13 Oct. 1932; WO 32/3116, Report of the Committee to Study the Lessons of the Great War: Appendices [1932].

⁸⁹The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not in any way reflect or imply the official policy or position of the Ministry of Defence or any other UK government department.