17 May 1941. Royal Turnbridge Wells, England.
General Bernard Montgomery, GOC of XII Corps, was reviewing with his Staff, the lessons of the first exercise that the Corps had participated in since he taken command. The work of Lieutenant-General Andrew Thorne in setting up XII Corps, and preparing for the invasion that never came, had been excellent. Thorne was now GOC Scotland, and Montgomery had a high regard for his colleague whose 48th Division had done so well at Dunkirk. What Montgomery had inherited since taking over in April was an efficient organisation. However, there was room for improvement, and if commanding V Corps had taught Montgomery anything, it was that there was always room for improvement.
The exercise on Salisbury Plain had primarily been a Divisional exercise for 6th Armoured Division’s. The 56th (London) Infantry Division had played the opposition force, with tank support from 43rd Royal Tank Regiment, part of 25th Tank Brigade. Montgomery had been watching the exercise, in which General Stopford (GOC 56th Division) had tried to use his 169th Brigade and the tanks in the way a Panzer Division would. Having studied all the German equipment captured before Dunkirk, and interviewing some of the POW officers, Stopford had been attempting to use the men, artillery, tanks and RAF support in an integrated fashion. By doing so he’d managed to split the 6th Armoured Division and then take on each Armoured Brigade piecemeal. The Valiant I Infantry Tanks weren’t as fast as the German panzers would have been, but the umpires had noted that 6th Armoured Division would have been severely depleted by the end of the exercise, and that the opposition force had been the victors of the exercise.
Montgomery, along with his superior, General Alan Brooke, had agreed that the lessons of the fighting in France and Flanders still had to be learned by the British formations. By splitting up his forces, the GOC 6th Armoured had doomed them, especially when it became clear that the Divisional artillery weren’t able to support the separated Brigades. Whereas Stopford’s force, with the Divisional Signals playing an exceptional role, had managed to keep all the elements of the force under his command, including the RAF, working together effectively, and thereby winning the day.
There was no great secret to the German successes, it wasn’t too different to what the British Army had been doing in the last 100 days of the Great War. The importance of signals, shown by the elements of the German radio network captured, had been the key to making it work. The fact that 6th Division’s transmissions in the clear had been intercepted and used against them was an important lesson that had to be communicated far and wide. Concentration of force, tanks and infantry, with sufficient artillery and air support, coupled with mobility and subordinate commanders’ initiative, seemed to be the winning formula.
What had happened at Nofilia, where General O’Connor had split his force and nearly had it destroyed, was further proof that taking on the Germans, unlike the Italians, demanded all units needed to cooperate effectively or they’d be destroyed individually. With these thoughts in mind, Montgomery staff with his staff to work out the kind of training exercises where these lessons could be practiced and practiced until they were second nature to everyone in the Corps.
As usual the lessons of the exercise had been widely distributed around the rest of the army, and Montgomery noticed that General Alan Brooke had added his own comments regarding offensive operations. Most of the army’s experience up until now, in Norway, Flanders, France and mostly recently, Greece, had been defensive in nature and often took the form of a fighting withdrawal. It was going to be essential for the army to move from training to resist an invasion, to going on the offensive. The lessons of Operation Compass against the Italians were of limited use in a European context, but nevertheless, all commanders were to begin to focus on training to attack and defeat the enemy.
