The Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, Lord Gort, was widely acknowledged for his personal bravery (he was a VC holder) and fighting spirit. Contemporaries however were sceptical of his Conceptual Skill. Major General Sir Edward Spears described him as “a simple, straight-forward, but not very clever man.” General Brooke, the incisive and ruthless commander of II Corps during the campaign (later Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff), though an admirer of Gort’s inspirational fighting spirit, frequently lamented the C-in-C’s total lack of strategic ability. This frustration is mentioned several times in Alanbrooke’s war diary, well before the German offensive began.
Gort was not a lone offender in Alanbrooke’s opinion. The latter believed that most of his fellow senior officers lacked Conceptual Skill. He suggested that the lack of strategic ability amongst British senior commanders was due to the best thinkers of his generation being lost in the Great War. Alanbrooke’s theory is questionable, for the Germans also lost many talented officers in the Great War, yet between the wars, actively promoted intellectual stimulation amongst its officer corps. Amongst the leading thinkers were Heinz Guderian, often regarded as the father of Blitzkrieg, although in his own book, Panzer Leader, is the first to admit that he took British ideas and developed them into something that worked. The British, it seems, were less stimulated by their own initial thinking on modern war.
This does not imply the Germans were unequivocal masters of big thinking. Many German army commanders were as locked into traditional thinking as their Allied opposite numbers. Guderian asserts that the sole reason the BEF was allowed to escape from Dunkirk was because the German Army High Command issued repeated halt orders to Guderian’s panzer corps, allowing the British the breathing space needed to avoid total defeat.
Both sides suffered in this area [interpersonal skills], and the problems arose mainly at senior level. Despite many British commanders speaking good French, the respective commanders on each side of this coalition had radically different opinions of how operations should be conducted and coordinated. There was virtually no attempt to ensure interoperability before May 1940 and the Anglo-French coalition was, at best, a well-mannered but reluctant partnership which did not stand the test of high-tempo operations well.
The lack of trust between the Allies ultimately drove Gort to contradict direct orders and use his last reserves to shore up the BEFs northern flank, rather than fritter them away in a joint counter-attack with the French that was dead in the water before it was launched. By the 25th May, just two weeks after the opening of combat operations, the Anglo-French coalition was crumbling. Bizarrely, this decision by Gort to abandon the French actually testifies to his one great moment of Conceptual Skill. He realised he was essentially committing career suicide when he ordered his troops towards the coast, but he also had the foresight to realise that the battle for France was already lost and that his sole duty from then on was to save Britain’s army.
Andy Johnson, “Dunkirk: Leadership Lessons in a Hard School”, The Wavell Room, 2017-08-01.
July 26, 2021
QotD: British Expeditionary Force (BEF) leadership in France, 1940
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