Allied Interoperability Between the Wars

by Benjamin Franklin Cooling and John A. Hixson

It appears that the Allies of World War I learned very little in the way of military cooperation during the twenty years of relative peace on the European continent. On the eve of World War II, the interoperability lessons learned in war had been "unlearned" again. Differences in language, political views, personalities, organization, equipment, doctrine and perceptions of the objective are problems in any coalition force, but the paramount problem, through the ages, has been the failure to develop cooperation and measures at the operational level during peacetime.

Both Entente and Central Powers coalitions found that wartime alliances were far different from peacetime plans and promises. Yet, when World War I ended in 1918, the victors, as well as the vanquished, remembered nothing and forgot nothing as far as lessons of interoperability were concerned.

For one thing, it was never supposed to happen again; the League of Nations would see to that. For the next twenty years, Europe rested its hopes on a comparatively tranquil international scene, war weariness, disarmament hopes and "collective security." The latter policy meant anything but allied interoperability in peacetime. Distance, language and non-supportability reduced France's Eastern alliances to surround Germany to a sham. Only in the West might it theoretically count upon partners such as Belgium and Great Britain.

Until the advent of Mussolini and Hitler in the wake of world economic depression, there literally was no need for anything beyond promises and naive expectations of continued peace. Britain's focus was imperial not continental. France based its hopes on the fact that 1914 could be repeated once again in some hour of need. Germany might enjoy a brief honeymoon with Russia in order to use the latter's Lebensraum for German rearmament, but neither Hitler nor Stalin truly trusted another dictator. Mostly, however, the citizenry from America to the Rhineland was disillusioned by arms races, the death toll from the trenches and their leaders' diplomatic machinations gone sour. National rivalries, only dimly sublimated by necessity from 1914-18, once more raised their heads in peacetime.

Mussolini's incursion into Abyssinia, as well as Hitler's bluff over the Rhineland in 1935 and 1936, led to resumption of military staff consultations between Great Britain and France. Even then, "these were rigorously confined to a low level of exchange of information by military attaches and consequently were of very little use" in British eyes.

It was all a repetition of the pre-World War I scene. Random crises generated cursory, discontinuous "staff consultations." As always, the official British government policy tried to avoid any formal Continental commitment. There was a diplomatic problem that Britain and France as signatories of the Locarno Treaty were not supposed to hold secret conversations without informing Germany and Italy. This became increasingly transparent after 1935. More importantly, Britain's military leaders shunned notions of staff talks with the French while, paradoxically, increasing their conviction that an expeditionary force should be re-created and that it would be employed on the European continent.

As Major General Sir Henry Pownall, the director of military operations, put it in April 1938 when low-level staff talks were again being arranged:

We never wanted formal Staff Conversations, but we do want an interchange of information so that we can settle the administrative problems that would occur if British troops had to be landed in France. That could easily be put in hand without any sort of pledge whatever.

Such "administrative problems" were not "easily put in hand" as Brigadier (later Major General) L. A. Hawes discovered later in 1938 when he headed a War Office action team on this problem. Hawes instituted a series of cross-channel visits, clandestine negotiations with local as well as military officials in France and even studied the plans and war diaries of the 1914-18 war in order to complete his mission. "Overt action was expressly forbidden," he recalled, and the British brigadier circumvented this traditional myopia of the home government by instituting correspondence and questionnaire liaison with the French. As before World War I, a small group of staff planners, as well as the chiefs of the services, handled the whole scheme of pre-war interoperability in the Anglo-French sphere.

It was the same for other partners such as Belgium, France, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Only the top government officials, civilian and military, plus their military staffs carried out allied liaison. Always, they were frustrated or channelized by shifting diplomatic policies and national priorities. For instance, France and England drew closer militarily at a time when Leopold, king of the Belgians, and his chief military adviser, General Robert van Overstraeten, were drawing tight the restraints of Belgian neutrality, including the breaking off of recognized military communication channels through general staffs and defense ministers.

Political Differences

Ambiguities of domestic politics in Britain, France and Belgium, the impracticability of Western support for Eastern "allies" like Poland and Czechoslovakia (as well as alliance credibility once the latter "fell" to the Germans as a result of Munich) and the pitiful state of military preparedness in all the countries combine with divergent personalities impacting on the course of events. The roles of politicians like Neville Chamberlain and his secretary of state for war, Hore-Belisha, or military chieftains such as French General Maurice Gamelin and the British Lord John Gort leap from the historical record because, in each case, they affected the direction and character of inter-allied operability. It was not until 29 March 1939—barely six months before Hitler's panzers rolled into Poland—that French and British staffs could get down to the serious business of concerted planning for defense in the West.

Even then, differences of national aim, command and control, strategy and logistics clouded the picture. The French naturally emphasized pre-eminently defense of French soil. The British took a somewhat broader view. Still, British leverage on policy and strategy was limited since the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) would only put four divisions into line in the event of war. Gort, as chief of the Imperial General Staff, was determined that there should be no repetition of the friction that characterized Anglo-French military relations in the Great War when an Allied supreme commander was not appointed until the spring of 1918. The BEF commander would be no more than an army commander under French supreme command in the next war except that he would have an escape valve through appeal to the home government.

On the other hand, British air and sea forces, its major contributions to the alliance, were to be under independent national command. Lacking, however, were sufficient French airfields to handle major fighter and bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force. The naval effort was overwhelmingly British.

The policies, resources and military forces of the Belgians (the Netherlands having been virtually written off as unsupportable) remained nebulous. The Belgians remained suspicious of subordination to the French in the event of war and, despite professed neutrality, projected at least a tepid enthusiasm for informal liaison with the British through contacts in the Belgian royal household. But the direction of prevailing political winds in Belgian foreign policy rendered it quite difficult for Anglo-French planners to congeal that aspect of alliance negotiations.

Subtly pervading the scene in all camps were memories of the direction and nature of alliance fighting in World War I. Several British generals later noted that nearly everyone at the rank of lieutenant colonel in the 1939 BEF had fought in France in the Great War. Thus, terrain, allies and cultural features were all quite familiar—the sense that "we had seen it all before."

But, of course, this was a mixed bag. They remembered both the good and the bad of their French civilian and military friends, the engendered complacency of passing the same way twice, the arrogance of playing second fiddle to any ally. Such factors blinded all partners to nationalistic differences between the poilu and the Tommy of 1914 and 1939, as well as their differing equipment, doctrine and purpose.

For example, French intelligence estimates of German intentions remained fixed upon an exact repetition of the 1914 offensive despite strong indications of other options open to the Wehrmacht. Whether or not British officers really knew or understood the nature of the French military in 1939 remains unclear. Equally unclear is the French knowledge of its ally.

One of the most perceptive students of the Anglo-French alliance in 1939-40, Brian Bond, emphasizes four points about Allied interoperability prior to the outbreak of the war. First, he says, the British government's dilatory policy on re-armament and acceptance of a Continental military commitment was bound to have serious political and military repercussions. It lessened British credibility in the eyes of French public opinion, reinforced French Army feelings of supremacy and, coupled with Belgium's ambiguity, failed to provide a counterweight to French influence.

Secondly, Anglo-French contingency planning in the summer of 1939 was badly adapted to meeting the realities of the political and strategic situation which unfolded in September. Poland received no support due to Anglo-French underestimation of the power and skill of the blitzkrieg. Lack of understanding with the Soviet Union rendered economic warfare as well as Allied policies impotent in Eastern Europe. Ironically, underestimation of the decisive possibilities of blitzkrieg combined with an overestimation of Germany's abilities and intention to launch an aerial blitzkrieg on Paris and London. Consequently, the Allies neglected their other offensive instrument of strategic bombing at the outset of the war for fear of devastating retaliation.

Thirdly, observed Bond, Belgium's neutrality caused recriminations and lack of confidence both in Britain and France. Gamelin's dilemma of how to stop a German attack well forward in Belgium in the absence of prior joint Anglo-French-Belgian planning and the knowledge that the French would be invited in only after the onset of the attack was an unresolved problem during the pre-war and subsequent "phony war" periods.

Finally, interwar differences in British and French defense and foreign policies were submerged, and no attempt was made to reach an accord. Such delicate matters were scarcely discussed during the few months of the alliance's wartime existence.

More Failures

In any event, the Western allies might have better used the last six months before the invasion of Poland to solidify their coalition. True, British division and corps commanders like Sir John Dill, Maitland Wilson and Harold Alexander visited the French capital and toured the Maginot Line in May 1939. Late that summer, Gamelin paid a return visit to the British tattoo at Aldershot.

"The greatest cordiality obtained on both sides," observed one of Alexander's biographers, "but in the event it was to be shown that cordiality alone is a poor weapon in modern total warfare." Top-level coordination obscured the true state of conditions within the various national military forces as well as the operational weaknesses between them. Still, the nine-month "phony war" or drôle de guerre in the West after September 1939 might have permitted rectification of many problems.

When war finally came in September 1939, the Western allies were able to collect Anglo-French forces in northern France while Hitler's armies subdued Poland. The subsequent winter of quiet permitted France, Britain and the Low Countries to prepare for the eventual invasion by Germany.

That their preparations proved inadequate or misdirected in May and June 1940 was due, in part, to serious chinks in the alliance. Despite Belgian neutrality, some intelligence information was shared by that country with both the French and British military commanders, and clandestine visits by key British generals to Belgium to prepare for the inevitable push forward to battle the Germans on the frontier permitted a modicum of learning about defenses, roads, lakes, forests and artillery positions. Even so, there remained much ignorance on the parts of the British and French as to Belgian operational plans, defensive obstacles and military installations.

Part of the fault lay with the Belgians and their neutrality, part with faulty intelligence work, poor liaison between British and French headquarters and excessive secrecy. Most Frenchmen at general head-quarters had no idea how the Belgian Army's fuel supply service was organized.

How far official staff conversations might have alleviated such problems must remain speculative. In fact, major imbroglios might have been prevented, particularly between the British and the Belgians over road use on the outskirts of Brussels when both armies were rushing forward to fight the Germans in May. Elsewhere, French headquarters permitted the meager BEF (sandwiched between the First and Seventh French Armies in the northeast army group) to send smaller units to get "bloodied" on outpost duty before the Maginot Line. Cooperation and coordination were obviously varied.

It was not enough that French Army commander Gamelin and his subordinates had signally failed to see the true intent of German plans despite accumulated intelligence reports. But the Allies also were handicapped from the start by "an incredibly cumbersome command and staff structure," by inadequate liaison arrangements and by poor political as well as military communication arrangements. Furthermore, senior French Generals Gamelin and Georges enjoyed strained relations, and the French premier wanted to sack the latter.

Distrust among the Dutch, Belgians, French and British due to numerous false alarms from November to April "had created a fund of ill-will and prejudice which would be speedily drawn upon when things began to go wrong." It did not help that Belgian King Leopold's warmth was offset by his army chief Overstraeten's earned reputation as "evil genius" among his peers of the Anglo-French contingent.

When the Germans did strike in May, the Allied move into Belgium took place fairly smoothly. True, the British and Belgians hassled about roads; General Alexander played a game of linguistic and diplomatic contretemps with Overstraeten in an interview with King Leopold; and division commander Bernard Montgomery showed his usual pluck when faced with a touchy situation whereby his own division and a Belgian division were both situated in the same sector and interfaced one another. Montgomery placed himself initially under the Belgian's direction, knowing full well how to get the ally out:

When the Germans came within artillery range and shelling began I had no difficulty in taking over the front from the Belgian division; it moved into reserve and then went northwards and joined up with the main body of the Belgian Army.

Still, the British maintained at least five army-level liaison teams, as well as Major General Sir Edward Spears as Prime Minister Winston Churchill's personal representative with French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud. Obviously, the French tongue was no barrier at that level, and, indeed, even division commanders like Alexander had no difficulty speaking and understanding that language—much to the consternation of "allies" like General van Overstraeten.

Seeds for Defeat

The unexpected breaching of French lines on the Meuse, complete collapse of French morale, the precipitous surrender of the Belgians and the unilateral withdrawal of the BEF from Dunkirk all led to months, even years, of squabbles and recriminations between erstwhile allies. The seeds for the defeat of Belgium, France and even all of Western Europe, but Great Britain lay in the pre-war years of neglect, political chaos and traditional nationalism.

In the end, liaison missions, a common enemy and whatever measure of Allied interoperability was effected in the chaos of a six weeks' war could not overcome Anglo-French-Belgian unpreparedness, superior German martial proficiency and the reluctance of a third Great War ally—the United States—to rejoin the effort to effect an outcome on a Continental battlefield.

Actually, there was little that America could have done at the time. Committed politically to isolationism in a presidential and congressional election year, possessing an under-strength and half-prepared Army and Pacific-oriented Navy, the United States, like Great Britain, had waited too long behind a maritime moat. Like the British, American senior service colleges had spent little time studying the practicalities of alliances, particularly the lower operational experiences of the past. The few lectures at the Army War College during the interwar period, for instance, had been delivered largely by Major General Fox Conner, and we know his attitude on allies.

Still, Conner's comments in 1939 were fairly typical of professionals around the world. Scarcely a year and a half later, across the Atlantic, other Anglo-Saxons were breathing similar sentiments. Even George VI, king of England, wrote after Dunkirk: "Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper." Ironically, within the year, Great Britain was once more back into an alliance of sorts, however informal or clandestine that was prior to December 1941. But, then, that was right and proper—after all, Americans spoke the same language and agreed that defeat of Germany and preservation of the United Kingdom was of highest priority.

The warring powers of 1941-45 learned the lessons of World War I all over again. Neither Axis allies nor the Grand Alliance of Russia, Britain and the United States experienced anything new with inter-allied operability. It was all there in the historical record. After World War II, the unsettled conditions of the Cold War negated a return to 1920s-style "normalcy."

A study of the historical tableau, then, suggests the following conclusions:

That the impact of language differences; personal, regional and national animosities; individual and national political views; personalities; organizational, equipment and doctrinal differences; and perception of objective will vary in direct proportion to the number of allies in the coalition.

That little in the way of measures to effect functional-level military cooperation was ever developed and/or adopted by any coalition prior to the commencement of hostilities.

That practical military cooperation among allied units will be effected in some manner because of basic necessity, regardless of higher level agreements.

That military cooperation in the past has occurred on the ground during the conduct of operations because the nature of these operations has generally determined their form and effectiveness.

That prior study of coalition warfare problems and a detailed knowledge of allied capabilities and limitations could have measurably reduced these problems.

That the more allied armies resemble each other in organization and equipment, the more likely they are to agree on doctrine although tactical methods will differ even when the allied forces are similar in organization, equipment and military thought.

That coalition warfare will require an increase in liaison with team personnel carefully chosen on the basis of language proficiency, tact and military knowledge of the allies. Such requirements would seem highly advisable for all echelons of any national military organization working in an allied force environment.

That commanders will not readily give up control over their logistics and signal communications has been a "lesson" of two world wars in this century, but not comprehended by peacetime allied planners.

That allied cooperation in the initial stages of a coalition effort will be characterized by confusion, misunderstanding and hard feelings. A major catastrophe befalling one of the coalition members, especially a weaker one, may have a radical political and military effect on the entire coalition.

That although a coalition may intend to conduct operations with each national force having its own separate zone of operations, the demands of prolonged combat, especially defensive combat, will cause the allied force to become progressively more integrated in its composition.

That the primary factors contributing to the effectiveness of Anglo-American cooperation at all levels in two world wars were: a common language, clearly defined goals and a traditional cultural and political heritage.

That national political and military sovereignties and policies determine and limit what actions can be taken in peacetime to effect closer military cooperation among allied forces. But the dominant factor in developing effective military cooperation—available lead time for problem solving—is only truly available in peacetime and should be exploited accordingly.

Since 1941, the U.S. military forces have performed mainly as part of an allied team. The fields of Flanders, as well as the steppes of Russia, have been strewn with the flotsam and debris of wrecked coalition armies which failed to heed in peace the wartime lessons of allied interoperability.

 

General Lord Gort VC, Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, with General Joseph Georges, Commander in Chief of the French 9th Army after receiving the Grand Croix of the Legion of Honour at Arras, France. 8 January 1940.

General Viscount Gort, Commander in Chief BEF with Air Vice Marshal C.H.B. Blount, commanding the Air Component, outside the Hotel Moderne, Arras, France. 15 October 1939.

Non-commissioned aircrew of No. 102 Squadron RAF Detachment walk from their Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Mark V at Villeneuve/Vertus France, after completing a nine-hour leaflet-dropping ("Nickelling") sortie over Prague. Circa 1939/40.

Royal Air Force pilots of No. 87 Squadron practicing a scramble to their Hawker Hurricane Mark Is at Lille-Seclin, France.

Fairey Battles of No. 88 Squadron RAF based at Mourmelon-le-Grand, fly in formation with Curtiss Hawk 75s of 1e escadrille GC 1/2 of the French Air Force.

A Morris CS9 armored car of 'C' Squadron, 12th Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales' Own) receives attention parked in a farmyard at Villiers St Simon. 29 September 1939.

The BEF arrives in France. Men of the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards marching through Cherbourg. 30 September 1939.

Lord Gort and General Gamelin at le Cauroy, 13 October 1939.

3-inch anti-aircraft guns of 2nd AA Battery, 1st AA Brigade, near BEF GHQ at Wanquetin, France. They are each mounted on a "cruciform traveling platform" which was a 4-wheeled trailer. 19 October 1939.

The 'Phoney' War: 8 inch howitzer of 1st Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery camouflaged in position near Laquielle. 20 October 1939.

A Scammell Pioneer tows an 8-inch howitzer of 1st Heavy Regiment, near Calais. 12 January 1940.

8-inch howitzer of 1st Heavy Regiment near Calais, 12 January 1940.

Close-up of the driver of a 4th Royal Tank Regiment Matilda tank, named 'Deoch.' 12 January 1940.

British 7.2-inch howitzers of 3rd Battery, 1st Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, near Orchies, France. 12 February 1940.

The barrel of a 12-inch howitzer of No. 2 Super Heavy Battery, Royal Artillery, on a railway flatcar at Dunkirk, having been transported from England on a cross-channel ferry, 20 March 1940. This provides a clear view of how the components of the howitzer were transported on separate wheeled travelling carriages.

A 6-inch howitzer being inspected by General Georges and senior officers of the French and British armies at Orchies. 23 April 1940.

An 8-inch Mk VIII howitzer during an inspection by French General Georges at Bethune, 23 April 1940.

An 18-pdr gun being inspected by General Georges and senior officers of the French and British armies at Orchies. This is a Mk II gun on Mk I* or II carriage of World War I vintage. It has the bronze reservoir fitted to the end of the recuperator (above the barrel) as part of the upgrade to hydro-pneumatic recuperator.

51st Highland Division in the Maginot Line: British soldiers pass over a drawbridge into Fort de Sainghain on the Belgian Frontier.

General Lord Gort, VC, at the Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, 1940.QF 2-pounder gun, anti-tank.

General Lord Gort, VC, at the Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, 1940.