Coalition war has created friction among friends, whether at Normandy or today in Afghanistan

In war-by-coalition, allies can be ‘first enemy’

WASHINGTON — The battlefields of Normandy, launch point for the Allies’ D-Day push to liberate France and crush Nazi Germany, lie far from the front lines of Afghanistan, focal point of today’s war-by-coalition.

Yet 65 years after the June 6, 1944, landings on the northern coast of France, it is clear that one of the hardest challenges then — keeping peace among the Allies themselves — remains one of the biggest problems in coalition warfare today.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander for Europe, put it this way in a letter to an Army colleague in 1943, “One of the constant sources of danger in this war is the temptation to regard as our first enemy the partner that must work with us in defeating the real enemy.”

When President Barack Obama visits Normandy on Saturday to commemorate the best-known — but not only — Allied invasion of German-occupied France, he’s unlikely to make mention of the disagreements and rivalries between wartime leaders and commanders that marred planning for a separate and less-known offensive — the August 1944 landings led by U.S. and French forces on the French Riviera. Those troops eventually pushed north and east to the Rhine River, liberating the Alsace region.

In World War II, as now, the hazards of coalition warfare were no secret, yet still hard to manage.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposed making the southern landing, codenamed Operation Dragoon. But he was urged by Gen. Alan Brooke, chief of his Imperial General Staff, to relent. Tell the Americans, Brooke advised, “All right, if you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we shall be damned fools with you,” according to the book “First to the Rhine.”

In Afghanistan, the problem appears to be less one of personality clashes than a fundamental divide in how the Americans in particular and the Europeans in general view the role of military force there. Neither side favors a military-centric solution, but the Europeans have tended to put more emphasis on the role of economic development and other nonmilitary approaches to stabilizing the country.

With lives and reputations at stake, tensions between allies often are kept under wraps. But in the European theater of World War II, just as in the battle against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, there was no hiding divergent national interests and priorities — or the personalities of commanders.

“Great commanders will always have great egos,” says Andrew Morris, an historian at U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany. While self-confidence is a necessary ingredient for battlefield success, “the problem with great egos is that they can also get in the way, especially in a coalition where they bump up against other equally great egos,” Morris said in an e-mail exchange.

In Morris’ view, it was fortunate that Eisenhower insisted on making himself the supreme commander for the invasion of Europe, ahead of the top British general on the scene, Bernard L. Montgomery.

“If he allowed Monty to act as senior commander for the invading armies, Monty’s enormous ego and essential misunderstanding of the dynamics of coalition warfare could have fractured the effort,” Morris said.

After the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachhead in late July 1944, with German forces in retreat, the Allies advanced across northern France to a point at which Montgomery believed they should mass their forces for a single, narrow thrust into Germany.

Montgomery pushed repeatedly for this approach, but Eisenhower — supported by Bradley — refused. As the top overall commander, Eisenhower prevailed with his preference for the Allies to press east to the German frontier across a broad front, although the main emphasis was be in the north along the British axis of advance.

Montgomery and Eisenhower were frequently at odds.

In a Dec. 31, 1944 letter to Montgomery, Eisenhower responded to his demand that U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, be placed under Montgomery’s command.

“In your latest letter you disturb me by predictions of ‘failure’ unless your exact opinions in the matter of giving you command over Bradley are met in detail,” Eisenhower wrote. He said he hoped to forestall “an unbridgeable gulf of convictions between us” that would “damage the good will and devotion to a common cause that have made this Allied Force unique in history.”

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler recognized the Allies’ problem. He is reported to have said, upon ordering the counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, “Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies. … Even now these states are at loggerheads, and if we can deliver a few more heavy blows, then at any moment this artificial front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder.”

Squabbles among the Allies complicated but did not derail the final drive to victory in Europe.

In Afghanistan today it remains to be determined whether the coalition — with more participating countries but far fewer combat troops than in World War II — will prevail in a very different kind of war.

U.S. Army Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the soon-to-retire top NATO commander, put his finger on a problem that the World War II Allies didn’t have to worry about: demands by individual allies that they be allowed to withhold their troops from some kinds of combat or to otherwise limit how their troops are used.

It’s a problem, Craddock said last month, that puts the entire NATO effort in Afghanistan in doubt. He said the individual restrictions, known in NATO parlance as “caveats,” seem reasonable at first.

“Then, over time, those start to build on top of each other … and pretty soon what we’ve done is we’ve built a situation where the limitations and constraints start to sink the ship,” he said.