What American Generals Quietly Admitted About British Soldiers After The War

[00:00:00]In April 1943, American troops fought their first significant engagement against German armor in Tunisia. The battle of Elgatar was a creditable performance. Patton's second core held its ground against a German counterattack and inflicted meaningful casualties. It was the moment the US army proved it could stand against the vermarked in the field. What Patton wrote in his diary that evening was not about Elgatar. It was about the British.

[00:00:26]He had spent the preceding weeks watching the eighth army operate alongside his [music] own forces. He had watched their artillery. He had watched how their infantry handled defensive positions. He had watched the coordination [music] between their forward observation officers and their gun lines. And he had written in the private shortorthhand of a man who did not hand out compliments carelessly that the British artillery system was [music] the best he had encountered and that the American army had nothing comparable.

[00:00:54]Patton did not say this publicly. He did not say it in any official communication. He said it in his diary, which was not intended for publication during his lifetime. The distinction matters because it separates what American generals said about the British for diplomatic consumption from what they said when they believed nobody was listening. The two accounts are different in specific and revealing ways. This video is about the second account, the private one. what American commanders actually thought about British soldiers admitted in diaries, in private letters, in post-war memoirs, and in the specific institutional changes they made to their own army based on what they had observed the British doing. If the honest private assessments that allies make of each other, not the public version, but the one that survives in personal papers is why you're here, the like button and subscribe genuinely help this channel reach the right audience. Right, let's start with what the Americans found in Tunisia. The US Army's arrival in North Africa via Operation Torch in November 1942 brought American forces into direct contact with the British 8th Army for the first time. The two armies would spend the next 2 and 1/2 years fighting alongside each other, competing with each other, and forming assessments of each other that shaped both institutions for decades. The American army that arrived in Tunisia was green. This is not a criticism. It is a statement of fact that American commanders acknowledged freely at the time. The troops had not been in sustained combat against the Vermachar. Their equipment was adequate, [music] but their doctrine was untested against an opponent as capable as the German army. When the first armored division was badly mauled at Casarine Pass in February 1943, the defeat produced a specific and documented shock that ran through the American command.

[00:02:47]What happened after Casarine is instructive. Eisenhower sent observers to the British Eighth Army, which had been fighting RML for 18 months to study how the British handled the specific tactical problems that had produced the American defeat. The observers came back with detailed reports. Several of the reports focused on the same subject, artillery. The British artillery system in North Africa had by early 1943 reached a level of coordination that the American forces could not match. The FO system, forward observation officers, embedded [music] at infantry level, calling and adjusting fire in real time had been refined through 2 years of combat into [music] something that American artillery officers found genuinely impressive. the speed at [music] which British guns responded to infantry requests, the precision of the adjustments, the ability to concentrate multiple batteries on a single target within minutes. None of this had equivalence in the American system as it existed in early 1943. The American Army adopted elements of the British artillery coordination method, not publicly credited, not formally attributed. But the changes that appeared in American artillery procedures between [music] Casarine and the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 reflect specific lessons drawn [music] from British practice. And the officers who implemented them acknowledged the source in their private correspondence.

[00:04:14]On June 6th, 1944, British and Canadian forces landed [music] on three beaches at Normandy. American forces landed on two. The casualty rates on these beaches were dramatically different, [music] and the specific reason is one of the most consequential decisions of the entire campaign. Major General Percy Hobart's 79th Armored Division had developed a range of specialized armored vehicles for the assault. DD tanks that could swim ashore, crab flail tanks for clearing minefields, AVRE engineer tanks for demolishing obstacles, crocodile flamethrowers for reducing bunkers.

[00:04:48]Hobart offered these vehicles to the Americans.

[00:04:52]General Omar Bradley declined most of them. The Americans accepted the DD swimming tanks and lost most of them in the heavy seas off Omaha Beach where the conditions were worse than the design tolerances allowed. They declined the crabs, the Avaris, and the crocodiles.

[00:05:08]Bradley's reasoning, as recorded in post-war accounts, was that American forces preferred to develop their own solutions and that the British equipment was unfamiliar to American crews on the British [music] and Canadian beaches.

[00:05:22]Gold, Juno, and Sword. Hobart's funnies went in with the first wave. Crabs cleared lanes through the minefields.

[00:05:29]Avres demolished [music] concrete obstacles. Crocodiles suppressed defensive positions. The specialized armor did exactly what it had been designed to do, and the casualty rates on the [music] British beaches reflected it. On Omaha Beach, where no specialized armor was available, American infantry assaulted [music] fortified positions without mine clearance, without obstacle demolition, without the specific engineering support that Hobart's vehicles provided on the other three beaches. The result was approximately 2,000 American casualties on Omaha, the bloodiest of the [music] five beaches by a significant margin. Bradley addressed this decision in his postwar memoir, A Soldier's Story. He did not describe the refusal of British equipment as a mistake in explicit [music] terms, but the specific care with which he discussed the Omaha casualties and the specific absence of any defense of the decision to decline the funnies is read carefully as close to an admission as a man of his temperament and position was likely to make. Eisenhower in his own postwar assessment was more direct. He described Hobart's specialized armor as having made a significant contribution to the success of the British and Canadian landings and noted its absence on the American beaches without further elaboration. The absence of further elaboration was itself eloquent.

[00:06:49]Eisenhower's relationship with the British military was the defining professional challenge of his wartime career. And his private papers reveal a man whose assessment was considerably more nuanced than either the official warmth of Allied communicates or the American narrative of British obstruction would suggest. Eisenhower's frustrations with Montgomery are well doumented and genuine. Montgomery's insistence on cautious setpiece operations drove Eisenhower to periodic fury. The broad front versus narrow front argument consumed enormous amounts of command energy and produced ill feeling that lasted decades. None of this is disputed. What is less often noted is what Eisenhower said about British forces as [music] distinct from British command. His private papers and his postwar memoir Crusade in Europe contains specific observations about the quality of British soldiers that are consistently respectful. He described British infantry and defense as among the most tenacious he had encountered. A specific professional assessment from a man who had commanded forces across two continents. He noted the quality of British artillery coordination repeatedly in terms that acknowledge it as superior to the American equivalent in several specific respects. He described the British logistics system in northwest Europe as effective and noted that British supply discipline, the institutional procedures for managing material flow was more rigorous than the American system. The specific Eisenhower assessment that is most revealing because it addresses the underlying quality of the British soldier rather than any particular institutional [music] strength appears in his private correspondence. He described British troops as fighting with a specific determination that reflected something deeper than training. A quality he attributed to the regimental system and to the specific social cohesion it produced at the small unit level. This was not the public Eisenhower managing [music] an alliance.

[00:08:43]This was a professional soldier writing privately about what he had [music] observed. George Patton's private diary is one of the most unfiltered documents to emerge from any senior commander of the war and his entries about the British are a study in contradiction that tells you more about Patton than about the British. Patton's public persona regarding the British was contemptuous. He competed with Montgomery openly and personally.

[00:09:07][music] He regarded the British command structure as cautious to the point of timidity. He believed and said repeatedly in settings that range from inappropriate to [music] catastrophic that American forces were superior in every respect and that the British were an obstacle to be managed rather than an ally to be coordinated with. His diary tells a different story, not a contradictory one. Patton genuinely believed most of what he said publicly about British command. But the diary contains entries that the public would never have acknowledged. notes about the quality of individual British units he had observed observations about the effectiveness of British defensive operations that he would not have conceded in any conference. A specific entry from Sicily in which he noted with evident professional surprise that a British unit had held a position under conditions that his own assessment suggested should have produced a withdrawal. The specific quality of Patton's private assessment is the distinction it draws between British soldiers and British [music] generals.

[00:10:09]Patton's contempt was directed overwhelmingly upward at Montgomery, at the British command culture, at what he perceived as institutional caution masquerading as strategic wisdom. His assessment of the soldiers themselves, the men doing the fighting at section and platoon and company level, was markedly more respectful than his public posture suggested. He had been a soldier long enough to recognize competence at the sharp end, regardless of the flag it flew under. We're at the halfway mark of this investigation. If your family served alongside American forces at any point during the war, I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments. The experience of Allied cooperation from the inside is some of the most valuable testimony this channel can help preserve. Back to the story. The Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 produced the most politically sensitive admission any American general made about British forces during the entire war. On December 20th, as the German offensive split the American front, Eisenhower gave Montgomery temporary command of all Allied forces north of the breakthrough, including the US first and 9th armies.

[00:11:18]The decision was militarily logical.

[00:11:21]Montgomery was geographically positioned to coordinate the northern response, and the communications between Bradley's headquarters and his northern forces had been disrupted by the German advance.

[00:11:31]The decision was politically explosive.

[00:11:33][music] American generals were placed under British command during an American crisis. Montgomery's handling of the situation, competent militarily, catastrophic diplomatically, produced a rupture in Anglo-American relations at command level that nearly ended the alliance's operational coherence.

[00:11:52]What is less discussed is what specific American commanders said privately about the British contribution to stabilizing the northern shoulder of the Bulge. The 29th Armored Brigade, the Sixth Airborne Division, and other British units that were committed to the Northern Flank performed in the assessment of American Divisional Commanders who fought alongside them with a steadiness [music] that contributed materially to holding the line. These assessments appear in unit histories and in private correspondence. They do not appear in the American public narrative of the Bulge, which understandably, given the scale of American sacrifice, centers on American units and American endurance. H Montgomery's press conference on January 7th, 1945, in which he described the bulge in terms that appeared to credit British intervention for saving the American situation nearly destroyed the [music] alliance. Bradley threatened to resign. Patton was incandescent. The damage was real. But the military reality that Montgomery described with such disastrous self- congratulation that British forces had been committed to an American crisis and had performed effectively was not disputed in private by the American commanders who had been present. Of all the specific areas in which American commanders privately acknowledged British superiority, strategic and tactical deception is perhaps the most clear-cut. The American intelligence and deception apparatus at the start of the war was by comparison with the British system rudimentary. The United States had no equivalent of the London controlling section. It had no systematic program of double [music] agents. It had no institutional experience with the kind of largecale coordinated deception operations that the British had been developing [music] since 1940. What the Americans found when they began working alongside British deception planners, first in North Africa, then in the Mediterranean, then in the planning for overlord was a system of sophistication and institutional depth that they had not anticipated. Operation Fortitude, [music] the deception plan that held German reserves at Paala for 7 weeks after D-Day was designed primarily by British intelligence officers. The double agent system that fed the deception [music] was managed by MI5's 20 committee. The ultra feedback loop that allowed the deception to monitor its own effectiveness was a British capability. American participation in Fortitude was real and significant.

[00:14:16]Fusag, the fake army group, was nominally American, and Patton's assignment as its commander was an American contribution to the credibility of the deception. But the system itself was British. and American intelligence officers who worked within it acknowledged this in post-war accounts with a directness that is notable precisely because it was unusual. The joint security control, the American deception planning body was modeled [music] explicitly on the London controlling section. It was established after American planners had observed the British system in operation and concluded that they needed something equivalent. The institutional learning flowed in one direction from Britain to America. The Americans who oversaw this transfer described the British deception apparatus in their official post-war assessments as the most effective intelligence operation of the war.

[00:15:07]British expertise in night operations was one of the specific capabilities that American commanders acknowledged privately as superior to their own and the acknowledgement was accompanied by specific institutional [music] changes in American practice. The British Army had developed systematic night fighting capability across the desert campaign and into Italy. The 51st Highland Division, the 50th North Umbrean Division, and other formations that had fought at Lalamagne brought to the European theater a specific and rehearsed competence in coordinated night movement that the American army did not [music] possess at comparable scale.

[00:15:43]American infantry divisions in Normandy and Northwest [music] Europe conducted night operations. They were not, by the assessment of their own afteraction reports, as consistently effective at them as the British formations operating alongside them. The specific difficulty maintaining unit cohesion, navigating without visual references, coordinating multiple units in darkness required a level of training and NCO competence that the British regimenal system had been producing for decades and that the American training pipeline, which was faster and larger but less specialized, did not consistently replicate.

[00:16:20]American liaison [music] officers attached to British formations during night operations wrote specific reports on what they observed and these reports informed changes in American night fighting training from late 1944 onwards. The changes were not credited publicly to British influence. They were implemented as improvements to American doctrine. But the timing and the specific nature of the changes, improved compass navigation training, enhanced NCO authority during nights movements, revised procedures for maintaining unit integrity in darkness, reflect what American observers had seen the British doing [music] and concluded their own forces needed to learn.

[00:17:00]Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story, published in 1951, is the most carefully constructed of the major American command memoirs, and its treatment [music] of the British is revealing precisely because of what it includes alongside what it emits. Bradley's public position on Montgomery was critical. He believed Montgomery was too cautious, too self-promoting, and too willing to use his relationship with Eisenhower to secure resources at American expense. These criticisms were genuine, widely shared among American commanders and documented extensively.

[00:17:35]What Bradley's memoir also contains, scattered among the criticisms of Montgomery and the celebrations of American achievement, are specific professional acknowledgements that tell a different story. He describes the British artillery system in Normandy as efficient, which in the vocabulary of a man who did not use adjectives carelessly [music] represented a specific professional assessment. He noted that British mine clearing techniques developed in North Africa were superior to American methods at the time of the invasion. He described the performance of specific British divisions in terms that acknowledged their competence without dwelling on it. Bradley's second memoir, A General's Life, published postuously in 1983 and co-written with Clay Blair, was considerably more candid. The additional 20 years of distance and the fact that most of [music] the principles were dead permitted a frankness that the 1951 memoir had not allowed. In the later book, Bradley's assessment of British forces was [music] more explicitly respectful, and his criticism of Montgomery was balanced by a clearer acknowledgement that Montgomery's methods, while frustrating to his allies, produced results with acceptable casualties in an army that could not replace losses [music] at American rates. That last observation that Montgomery's caution was partly a response to the specific demographic constraint [music] that Britain's smaller population imposed was an insight that few American commanders articulated publicly during the war, but that several acknowledged privately afterward. Britain could not afford to fight the way America fought. Its methods reflected its means. The methods that American commanders criticized as timid were viewed through the lens of manpower economics rational. The most telling measure of what American generals thought about British methods is not what they said, it is what they adopted. Beyond the artillery procedures, the deception system, and the night fighting techniques already discussed, the American military borrowed specific institutional innovations from the British that reflected genuine professional respect for the source. The concept of the forward air controller, the officer embedded with ground forces who directed close air support was developed by the RAF and adopted by the USAAF for the Normandy campaign. The cab rank system, [music] in which fighter bombers orbited above the battlefield and were directed onto targets by ground controllers, was a British innovation from the desert campaign that the Americans employed extensively from 1944 onwards. The Pluto undersea fuel pipeline across the channel was British designed. The Malbury artificial harbors were British designed. The amphibious assault doctrine that underpinned D-Day drew extensively on British experience at DEP. A disaster that the British paid for and the Americans learned from. The specific pattern of institutional borrowing ran consistently from British innovation to American adoption throughout the war. The Americans did not always acknowledge the source. They did not need to. The adoption itself was the acknowledgement.

[00:20:37][clears throat] The private assessments that American generals made of British soldiers differ from the public narrative in a specific and consistent direction. They are more respectful.

[00:20:49]This does not mean American generals secretly admired everything about the British. They didn't. The frustration with Montgomery's command style was [music] genuine and it was shared across the American command. the competition for resources, for credit, for the central role in the final offensive. All of this was real, personal, and sometimes bitter. What the private record shows is that beneath the competition, beneath the national rivalry, beneath the public posturing that wartime alliance requires, American professionals recognized specific British capabilities that their own forces did not possess. They recognized them because they were professionals and professionals can see quality even in a competitor. They recognized British artillery as the best in any theater.

[00:21:34]They recognized British deception as the most sophisticated intelligence operation of the war. They recognized British infantry and defense as tenacious beyond what their own training system reliably produced. They recognized British specialized armor as a capability they should have accepted and didn't at a cost measured in lives on Omaha Beach. They said these things in diaries, in private letters, in postwar memoirs where the passage of time had made honesty less costly. They did not for the most part say them during the war because the war required each army to believe it was the best and an American general who publicly praised British methods would have undermined the confidence his own men needed. The borrowing [music] tells the real story.

[00:22:20]You don't adopt another army's methods unless you believe those methods are better than your own. The American army borrowed from the British throughout the war. artillery procedures, [music] deception techniques, night fighting doctrine, close air support methods, specialized armor concepts. Each adoption was a private admission that the source had something worth [music] taking. The admissions were never spoken publicly. They were enacted in changed procedures and [music] adopted techniques across 5 years of fighting alongside an ally they competed with and in their private moments respected.

[00:22:55]The code word is funnies. Leave it in the comments if you made it to the end.

[00:22:59]It tells me who watches all the way through, and it matters for this channel more than you might think. If the honest, private record [music] of how allies actually assess each other, not the diplomatic version, but the one that survives in diaries and in institutional changes, is [music] what brings you here. Subscribe. Thank you for watching.