General Slim instead of Monty

For all that this is so, what Leese did was apply the full Monty in every situation without change and without any real differentiation of one system from another. The result was again like Montgomery's hammering at Rommel's defensive line in the east after El Alamein: protracted slugfests that did nothing to shorten the war and were supremely ammunition-intensive.

But that's still the point. Leese may have immitated Monty but it was still just an immitation. You yourself said in a different that "Leese was a wooden Monty knockoff who lacked Montgomery's abilities to at least perceive that some of the time the whole recreating WWI battles thing needed to be changed and to make the use of firepower effective." Monty pretty much wrote the rules for the British Combined Arms doctrine but he allowed flexibility within it, Leese followed it to the letter, rigidly.
 
But that's still the point. Leese may have immitated Monty but it was still just an immitation. You yourself said in a different that "Leese was a wooden Monty knockoff who lacked Montgomery's abilities to at least perceive that some of the time the whole recreating WWI battles thing needed to be changed and to make the use of firepower effective." Monty pretty much wrote the rules for the British Combined Arms doctrine but he allowed flexibility within it, Leese followed it to the letter, rigidly.

And that is the essential difference, yes. I'm trying to make the point that Montgomery the man made the difference and that his methods used badly worked badly.

While that might annoy an accountant, I doubt it would concern in the slightest anyone serving in Monty's army :p

See below.

But isn't that the prefered American way of war? Expend materiel not men? I would rather commanders that wasted ammunition rather than those that wasted soldiers.

More like the Allied way of war. All the Allies, Soviets included, came to prefer a steel rain at the last phase of WWII. The democracies wouldn't pay for raising the men to spend, the Soviets killed too many of their own men to spend them.
 
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