army with colonial responsibilities. Paradoxically, however, it competed with a
top-down approach to command which served all too often to stifle such
initiative and inhibited the exploitation of success. The army preached decentral-
ization but practised control. Defeat at Dunkirk was attributed to insufficiently
specific and detailed instructions. As a corps commander in the home forces in
June 1941, Montgomery told his subordinates that close-order drill was an aid to
operational discipline. 75 His subsequent success with the 8th Army in North
Africa rested on his ability to plan at the tactical level, to resurrect the principles
of infantry and artillery cooperation so painfully learnt by the British army by
1918, and to inculcate those tactical methods by thorough training. What he
could not do was to rely on mission command, a readiness to use directives, while
leaving the details of their execution to subordinates. As the army had no
doctrine, it had no general body of ideas within which subordinate commanders
could be free to exercise their own judgement, and without that its understanding
of the operational level of war also remained limited. 76 As in the First World War,
firepower became the means to open up the opportunity for manoeuvre, but in
the process the means threatened also to become the ends. The approach worked
well enough at El Alamein, and it was consolidated by the outcome, the only
independent victory won by a British army against German troops in the whole
war. Better communications, real-time intelligence, and the virtuous circle be-
tween the two, meant that the army of 1944–5 possessed the tools to practise
operational art, if not the nous. But the better they did these things, the less the
pressure to address the conceptual dimension. 77
THE BRITISH ARMY OF THE RHINEThe post-war British army was shaped in Montgomery’s image; he was, after all,
chief of the Imperial General Staff between 1946 and 1948, and a powerful self-
propagandist until his death in 1976. This meant that subordinates conformed to
the ‘master plan’, as indeed the circumstances of the Cold War obliged them to do.
If flexibility and decentralization of command found a home in the army, it was
in the practice of counter-insurgency in the withdrawal from empire; the more
independent-minded officer established his niche in special forces, in contracts
with and attachments to other armies, especially in the Middle East, but not in
the British Army of the Rhine. Moreover, this was a separation of roles which
reopened divisions between the combat arms: irregular warfare was, above all, a
job for the infantry, while heavy tanks took up permanent home in north
Germany. The mental world of the latter became that of the ‘retired officer’,
more anxious to extend his appointment and its tax-free benefits than to widen
his thinking about war; ‘the only thing joint’ about the joint headquarters of the
Rhine army and the Royal Air Force (RAF) ‘was that we were in the same place’. 78
In 1985, a lengthy and exhaustive study of British military thought since 1945
observed that studies of ‘military art’ tended to be subsumed within discussion of
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 117