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DOI: 10.1177/1742715014526479
2014 10: 240 originally published online 6 March 2014 Leadership
Keith Grint
The Hedgehog and the Fox: Leadership lessons from D-Day
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Article
The Hedgehog and the Fox:
Leadership lessons from
D-Day
Keith Grint
Warwick Business School, Warwick University, UK
Abstract
On 6 June 2014, it will be 70 years since D-Day. This article, drawn from my book on the topic
(Grint, 2008), reconfigures the operation as a contest between two different approaches to war
that embody different assumptions about the importance of leadership, management and com-
mand. Taking Archilocus phrase The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big
thing I suggest that the success of the Allies was dependent upon their greater attention to all
three decision modes and their related problems than their German foes, whose penchant for the
Cult of Combat led them to be more effective in battle but less effective in the pursuit of war. I
relate this to the difference between Tame, Wicked and Critical problems and comment on the
difference between Deficit and Asset models of organizations.
Keywords
Leadership, management, command, tame, wicked, critical, D-Day
Introduction
The book that this article is drawn from Leadership, Management and Command:
Rethinking D-Day had a long gestation: it began life as the nal chapter of my Arts of
Leadership I wanted something to draw that book together by looking at the most complex
single organizational event I could think of, and that was D-Day. I was brought up in an
army family, and worked for Craneld University inside the Defence Academy at one point,
so I have some familiarity with the military but I never had the slightest intention of joining
up I think Im allergic to saluting! However, the topic of D-Day gripped my interest, and
when the rst draft of the 10,000 word chapter ended up at 38,000 words, I decided to turn it
into a book. It took about two years to complete the research and write up the descriptive
Corresponding author:
Keith Grint, Warwick Business School, Warwick University, CV47AL, UK.
Email: Keith.Grint@wbs.ac.uk
Leadership
2014, Vol. 10(2) 240260
! The Author(s) 2014
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draft but there were, and still are, a lot of good descriptions of D-Day and I wanted to write
something dierent, so it stayed on my oor for another couple of years while I thought
about how to analyse the data. In the mean time, I had begun to write about Wicked
Problems and it seemed obvious at the time that this might be a way of reinterpreting
what happened. And that, dear reader, is the story of the book. When I was asked by
Dennis Tourish to write an article that captured some of the main issues of the book to
coincide with the 70th anniversary, I initially tried to write something that was a very
condensed version starting from the beginning, but it did not do what I was hoping for so
I scrapped the rst draft and started again; this time from the back of the book where I
alluded to the allegory of the Hedgehog and the Fox and this became the framing piece for
the article.
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing, or so Archilochus
suggests in his poem. Isaiah Berlin, in his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, suggests that
this probably implies that the hedgehogs single defensive ability to curl up into a spiny ball
is sucient to defeat all the wily skills of the fox. In intellectual terms, Berlin suggests that
this mirrors the dierence between centrifugal and centripetal approaches to life: some
people the centrifugalist hedgehogs relate everything to a single central principle or
cause; others the centripetalist foxes have a diversity of interests and causes that under-
mine any attempt to generate a single or simple form. While Dante, Plato, Ibsen, Hegel,
Goethe, Nietzsche and Proust are Hedgehogs, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Herodotus, Balzac
and Joyce are Foxes (Berlin, 1992: 34). Berlin contends that Tolstoy the subject of his
essay wanted to be a Hedgehog with a grand centralizing explanation for the world but
could not contain his various energies and ended up as a Fox.
Zaleznik (2008) takes the framework for the title of his book about dierent individual
leaders including Eisenhower, the Allied Commander but there is little application of
the idea. In this article, I want to take this division between a single all-encompassing
centralizing model of a hedgehog and one that embodies the multiple diversities of a fox as
two metaphors for explaining why D-Day culminated in an Allied victory and a German
defeat. In general, I want to suggest that adapting Rittel and Webbers Tame and Wicked
problems model enables us to congure approaches to problems and decision making that
shines a dierent, and contrasting, light on the German and Allied approaches to leader-
ship, management and command. In particular, I want to suggest that the German obses-
sion with the Critical Problem of combat, the unifying role of Nazi ideology and its
association with Command as a decision style a single philosophy associated with the
hedgehog undermined their attempt to deal with the Allied fox, whose comparative
weaknesses in combat, ideological cohesion and command were compensated for by
their understanding of, and expertise in, the relatively Tame Problem of logistics and
materiel, and the relatively Wicked Problem of Strategy. In eect, I will argue that the
romanticization of combat on the part of the German military made it the most eective
organization for a battle event and simultaneously the least eective for war. The
Western Allies operated from the opposite approach: relatively weak in combat and
battle command but much more resilient and robust in terms of conguring war as a
holistic process where management and leadership were as important as command. In
what follows, I rst lay out the background to the operation, briey run through the
problems typology and the associations with decit models and then compare the
German hedgehog to the Allied fox. I conclude with some thoughts about the implications
of the approach.
Grint 241
The background to D-Day
D-Day (Operation Overlord) was the largest-ever amphibious operation. It involved 175,000
allied troops and 50,000 vehicles, all of which were landed either by air, using 11,000 planes,
or by sea, using 6833 ships, and all within 24 hours (Doughty, 1994: 79). The battle for
Normandy, which D-Day initiated, lasted until the end of August 1944 and was the largest
single battle ever undertaken by the Western Allies against Germany. The Allied forces
involved 40 divisions: 23 American in Bradleys 25th US Army Group and 17 in
Montgomerys 21st Army Group (13 British, 3 Canadian and 1 Polish). Three months
after D-Day, on 15 September 1944, the Allied armies were joined from the south of
France by Denvers US 6th Army Group of 25 divisions (12 French and 13 American).
At their height, the American Army Groups totalled 72 Divisions while the Anglo-
Canadians, plus the Poles, totalled 21 Divisions (Fraser, 1999: 201). By comparison, the
battles in the North African desert between Montgomerys Eighth Army and Rommels
Afrika Korps seldom involved more than eleven divisions.
D-Day was also the most complex military operation ever undertaken but it was not the
largest. The battles along the Eastern front involved more soldiers (Operation Barbarossa, the
German invasion of the Soviet Union, involved 140 divisions (3 million troops), 7100 artillery
pieces and 3300 tanks on the German side alone (Williamson, 1999: 52), but fewer planes and
no ships. When the Soviet Army launched its summer oensive in 1944 to coincide with
Overlord, it had amassed 2.5 million soldiers, 5200 tanks and 5300 aircraft, though of course
not all of themwere deployed in the rst 24 hours (Macksey, 1996: 201). However, the military
signicance of the German losses in Normandy was greater than those at the battle of
Stalingrad. In all, only 30,000 German troops and 120 tanks escaped across the river Seine
fromthe encircling Alliedforces at the endof the battle for Normandy (Badsey, 1994: 255277).
Overall, in the spring of 1944, the German Army in all theatres of war had 314
divisions, including 47 armoured divisions. Additionally, it had 66 divisions from its Axis
allies. Over half of the total (215 divisions 57%) was stationed on the Eastern front, with a
further 36 divisions in the Balkans, 27 in Scandinavia, 25 in Italy and 8 travelling between
fronts. There were only 61 divisions (16%) available to defend France, including 10
armoured, and six Schutzstael (SS), divisions. That distribution is also represented in
casualties inicted on the German military: Allied casualties on D-Day were about 8500
that was less than the average daily loss for the Soviet Union for everyday of the war. The
Soviets also inicted 3 of the 4 million casualties that the Germans suered (the Soviets
suered about 12.5 million). In the next section, I outline the typology of problems that will
act as the analytic frame.
Tame, Wicked and Critical Problems
Rittel and Webbers (1973) paper on Tame and Wicked Problems proved to be seminal,
despite, or perhaps because of, the paucity of academic references to support their claims.
Indeed, the novelty of the assumption that some problems may be beyond solving was
particularly arresting in the context of a traditional American can-do culture. Without
wising to spend too much time on a well-trodden path, suce it to say that Management
and Leadership, as two forms of authority rooted in the distinction between certainty and
uncertainty, can be related to their typology. Tame Problems are complicated but resolvable
through unilinear acts and are likely to have occurred before. In other words, there is only a
242 Leadership 10(2)
limited degree of uncertainty and thus it is associated with Management. Tame Problems are
akin to puzzles for which there is always an answer: a Rubiks cube is a Tame Problem
there is a solution to it: a standard operating procedure. The (scientic) managers role,
therefore, is to provide the appropriate process to solve the problem. Examples would
include timetabling examinations, building a school, training the army or planning the logis-
tics to support an invasion.
Wicked Problems are complex, rather than just complicated that is, they cannot be
removed from their environment, solved and returned without aecting the environment.
Moreover, there is no clear relationship between cause and eect. Such problems are often
intractable for instance, trying to x the British National Health Service (NHS) on the
basis of a scientic approach (assuming it was a Tame Problem) would suggest providing
everyone with all the services and medicines they required based only on their medical needs
and existing medical expertise. However, with an ageing population, a change in life styles
that are manifest in issues like obesity, an increasing ability to intervene and maintain life
and a decreasing nancial resource to fund it, we have a potentially innite increase in
demand but a nite level of economic resource, so there cannot be a scientic or medical
or Tame solution to the problem of the NHS. In sum, we cannot provide everything for
everybody; at some point, we need to make a political decision about who gets what and
based on what criteria. This inherently contested arena is typical of a Wicked Problem. If we
think about the NHS as the NIS the National Illness Service then we have a dierent
understanding of the problem because it appears to be a series of Tame Problems: xing a
broken leg is the equivalent of a Tame Problem there is a scientic solution, medical
professionals in hospitals know how to x them and they are achievable within limited
budgets. Thus, the category of problems is subjective not objective what kind of a problem
you have depends on where you are and what you already know. Moreover, many of the
problems that health services deal with obesity, drug abuse and violence are not simply
problems of health, they are often deeply complex social problems that sit across and
between dierent government departments and institutions so attempts to treat them
through a single institutional framework are almost bound to fail. Indeed, because there
are often no stopping points with Wicked Problems that is the point at which the problem
is solved (e.g., there will be no more crime because we have solved it) we often end up
having to admit that we cannot solve Wicked Problems.
Conventionally, we associate leadership with the ability to solve problems, act decisively
and to know what to do. But we cannot know how to solve Wicked Problems, and therefore,
we need to be very wary of acting decisively precisely because we cannot know what to do. If
we knew what to do it would be a Tame Problem not a Wicked Problem. Yet, the pressure to
act decisively often leads us to try to solve the problem as if it was a Tame Problem. When
Climate Change rst emerged as a problem some of the responses concentrated on solving
the problem through science (a Tame response), manifest in the development of biofuels; but
we now know that the rst generation of biofuels appear to have denuded the world of
signicant food resources without arresting climate change so that what looked like a solu-
tion actually became another problem. Again, this is typical of what happens when we try to
solve Wicked Problems other problems emerge to compound the original problem. So we
can make things better or worse we can drive our cars slower and less or faster and more
but we may not be able to solve Climate Change, we may just have to learn to live with a
dierent world and make the best of it we can. In other words, we cannot start again and
design a perfect future though many political and religious extremists might want us to.
Grint 243
The we in this is important because it signies the importance of the collective in
addressing Wicked Problems. Tame problems might have individual solutions in the sense
that an individual is likely to know how to deal with it. But since Wicked Problems are partly
dened by the absence of an answer on the part of the leader, then it behoves the individual
leader to ask the right kind of questions to engage the collective in an attempt to come to
terms with the problem. In other words, Wicked Problems require the transfer of authority
from individual to collective because only collective engagement can hope to address the
problem. The uncertainty involved in Wicked Problems imply that leadership, as dened
here, is not a science but an art the art of engaging a community to face up to complex
collective problems.
Where the individual decision maker is much more evident is in a Critical Problem, e.g. a
crisis, which is presented as self-evident in nature, as encapsulating very little time for
decision making and action. This kind of problem is often associated with authoritarianism:
here there is virtually no uncertainty about what needs to be done at least in the behaviour
of the Commander, whose role is to take the required decisive action that is to provide the
answer to the problem, not to engage Standard Operating Procedures (management) if these
delay the decision or ask questions and seek collaborative assistance (leadership). Critical
Problems need decision makers who are god-like in their decisiveness and their ability to
provide the answer to the crisis. And since we reward people who are good in crises and
ignore people who are such good managers that there are very few crises Commanders
soon learn to seek out (or reframe situations as) crises. Of course, it may be that the
Commander remains privately uncertain about whether the action is appropriate or the
presentation of the situation as a crisis is persuasive, but that uncertainty will probably
not be apparent to the followers of the Commander. Examples would include the immediate
response to a major train crash, a leak of radioactivity from a nuclear plant, a military
attack, a heart attack, an industrial strike or a failure to secure a lodgement on Omaha
Beach in the early hours of 6 June 1944.
These three forms of authority Command, Management and Leadership are, in turn,
another way of suggesting that the role of those responsible for decision making is to nd the
appropriate Answer, Process and Question to address the problem, respectively. This is not
meant as a discrete typology but an heuristic device to enable us to understand why those
charged with decision making sometimes appear to act in ways that others nd incompre-
hensible. This is not to suggest that the correct decision-making process lies in the correct
analysis of the situation that would be to generate a deterministic approach but that
decision makers tend to legitimize their actions on the basis of a persuasive account of the
situation. In short, the social construction of the problem legitimizes the deployment of a
particular form of authority (Grint, 2005).
The notion of power suggests that we need to consider how dierent approaches to, and
forms of, power t with this typology of authority, and amongst the most useful for our
purposes is Etzionis (1964) typology of compliance which distinguished between Coercive,
Calculative and Normative Compliance. Coercive or physical power was related to total
institutions, such as prisons or armies, close to what Nye (2004) calls Hard Power;
Calculative Compliance was related to rational institutions, such as companies; and
Normative Compliance, close to what Nye (2004) calls Soft Power, was related to institu-
tions or organizations based on shared values, such as clubs and professional societies. This
compliance typology ts well with the typology of problems: Critical Problems are often
associated with Coercive Compliance; Tame Problems are associated with Calculative
Compliance, and Wicked Problems are associated with Normative Compliance you cannot
force people to follow you in addressing a Wicked Problem because the nature of the prob-
lem demands that followers have to want to help.
This typology can be plotted along the relationship between two axes as shown in
Figure 1 with the vertical axis representing increasing uncertainty about the solution to
the problem in the behaviour of those in authority and the horizontal axis representing
the increasing need for collaboration in resolving the problem.
Typologies such as this are often deemed to be Decit models (Wynne, 1991; Ziman,
1991). That is, they focus on the organizational problem or what the weak point is perceived
to be, not what the strength of an organization is perceived to be. Decit models tend to
generate Organizational (as opposed to individual) Foxes: they are often engaged in con-
trolling several simultaneous problems as they struggle to keep aoat. Concentrating on
what the organization is good at a quintessential Organizational Hedgehog would be
considered an Asset model: it bypasses the negativity of weaknesses and seeks to enhance
the positive aspects of strengths (Morgan et al., 2010). In school, one might consider
remedial education as a decit model it is essentially concerned with addressing the
missing or weak aspects of a childs development so as to bring them back up to the
norm. A schooling system rooted in enhancing what the child is already good at would
imply that a remedial approach, by denition, tends to undermine self-condence, turn
pupils into fatalists and starts by assuming the problem lays in the individual not the
system. Beatings will continue until morale improves would be an extreme version of a
decit model.
One of the earliest Asset Models was Peters and Watermans In Search of Excellence
(1982) that advocated sticking to the knitting that is, what the organization was good at,
and while many people are, ironically, still in search of excellence, the positive approach
gained most credence in the guise of the Positive Psychology approach most associated with
Increasing
uncertainty about
the solution to
problem
TAME
WICKED
CRITICAL
CACULATIVE
RATIONAL
NORMATIVE
EMOTIONAL
COERCION
PHYSICAL
COMMAND
Provide
Answers
MANAGEMENT
Organize
Processes
LEADERSHIP
Ask
Questions
Increasing
requirement
for
collaborative
compliance
Figure 1. Typology of problems, power and authority.
Grint 245
the work of Seligman (2011). This is not the place to engage in a long debate about the
relative merits of both negative and positive approaches, but I want to make two points that
relate to the Problems/Decit versus the Strengths/Asset approach. First, if we always
stuck to what we were good at the British would still be making steam engines at best or
building Stone Henges at worst, so the binary essence of this division does not seem that
helpful in explaining change. Second, although there is a long history of positive thinking
and a can-do philosophy in US culture (much of it related to the rise of American Christian
theologies that stressed the role of positive attitudes (Ehrenreich, 2009; see also Burkeman,
2012 and Collinson, 2012)), there do seem to be many occasions when not making people
face up to bad news is signicantly more dangerous than cosseting them by just focussing on
the good. For example, it seems to dicult to comprehend how we are ever to control the
epidemics in obesity and liver disease unless we can get individuals to change their life styles
and become responsible for addressing the issue: that is, to focus on the problems that lead
them to eat and drink too much. Without suggesting that either problem can simply be
reduced to will power or any other Daily Mail solution, it seems to be self-evident that the
suerers of these medical conditions must become part of the solution and that focussing
upon their strengths is missing the point. In eect, and in terms of learning how to deal with
organizational dilemmas, bad in stronger than good (Baumeister et al., 2001).
What I now want to do is to use the Problems typology to think about the success of the
Allies and the failure of the Germans on D-Day. I want to consider whether mapping the
typology onto the contrasting military cultures of the protagonists can help us explain why
the German military failed to defeat the Allies when, on a comparison of resources available
on the day, the Allies should have been swept back into the sea. And I want to do this by
considering whether the Decit model undertaken by the Allies was part of the reason that
they were successful. Let us start by analysing the most ecient military machine of most of
the 19th and 20th centuries: the German Army.
The German Army: a changing Asset Model rooted in an unchanging
Hedgehog
The original German, or rather Prussian, army of Frederick the Great (17401786) (Hitlers
hero) had been rooted in a social system not unlike the British: amateur aristocratic ocer
corps, coupled to a primarily mercenary force of soldiers kept in line by brutal discipline.
Indeed, the brutality of the Prussian disciplinary system facilitated the mechanical skill and
speed of movement with which it regularly crushed its opponents. Thus, it was rooted in a
culture of Befehlstaktik (an uncompromising order): a well-oiled battle-hardened hedgehog.
In eect, the Prussian army was rooted in a combination of Management and Command;
planning and coercion. But at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, the Prussian army
was defeated by Napoleons Levee en Masse: an army of ill-disciplined citizens; indeed, their
lack of discipline enabled the exibility of a swarm that simply unhinged the mechanical
inexibility of the Prussians.
The Prussian Army was subsequently reconstructed under the guidance of Scharnhorst
(17551813) and von Gneisenau (Chief of Sta of the Prussian Army 18131815). Eight
hundred ocers were dismissed, conscription as a duty to the state was invoked, and a
General Sta was introduced to concentrate, among other things, on strategy and tactics
(Macksey, 1996: 3233). Perhaps, the most important development, at the behest of Von
Gneisenau, was to use the word intention to displace the term direct order, thereby
institutionalizing the freedom of movement and decision making that ran counter to the old
Prussian Army. In short, it shifted its philosophical approach from one of linearity to non-
linearity. From the former, where both proportionality (the systems output was propor-
tionate to the system input) and the additive nature of combat (the whole is the sum of the
parts) explained success and failure, to the latter where non-proportionality and synergy
prevailed: from the traditional Befehlstaktik (an uncompromising order) to the new
Auftragstaktik (mission command). Or, to put it another way: the role of decision making
shifted from Management and Command to Leadership: from the planner with a big stick to
the facilitator. Of course, simply shifting from centralized control to decentralized initiative
did not necessarily signal a move from Command to Leadership for it could also imply a
shift from autocracy to anarchy. To prevent anarchy from breaking out the local decision
makers needed to know what the central decision makers were trying to achieve. The former
needed knowledge of their commanders intent but not detailed orders that would con-
strain their freedom of initiative. They needed the training and resources to act according to
the unfolding situation and they needed to operate on the Jesuit basis of forgiveness not
permission which required support from above for decisions taken honestly that did not
accomplish the intent. All of this required signicant levels of trust between the superordin-
ate and the subordinate; or, using the analogy of a knife: between the sharp end on the
battleeld and the blunt end in the cha teau.
But simply changing the words in the rulebook was not enough the action of subor-
dinates had to be facilitated and supported from above, and that became the task of von
Moltke (the elder), chief of the Prussian and the German general Sta (18581888). Aware
of the utility of the railways to move troops six times faster than they could march, von
Moltke quickly recognized the implications of this for a more mobile and faster form of
warfare. That, in turn, had implications for battleeld planning and control for, following
Clausewitz, No plan of operations can look with any certainty beyond the rst meeting with
the major forces of the enemy . . . . All consecutive acts of war, are, therefore, not executions
of a premeditated plan, but spontaneous actions, directed by military tact (quoted in
Holborn, 1986: 289). Or, in his rather pithier phrase: in the case of tactical victory, strategy
submits (quoted in Holborn, 1986: 289).
Thus, by 1939 what subsequently became the German army had long practised what the
Allied armies generally found inconceivable, indeed, directly contrary to military common
sense: individual initiative rather than deference to formal command. In 1887, the German
eld regulations were explicitly supportive of this policy: This regulation intentionally leaves
freedom of action in the eld, which will develop initiative in ocers of all ranks. This
initiative is absolutely necessary, and must not, under any circumstances, be limited by
more precise orders (quoted in Kier, 1997: 153).
Towards the end of the First World War, the Germans had evolved an organizational
technique that embodied this philosophy of Mission Command, rooted as it was in the
knowledge that no battle plan lasted beyond the opening shots, into a culture of combat.
Initiative was therefore encouraged, military education and learning was promoted at all
levels all in strong contrast to the philosophy and practice of Allied armies. Thus, in 1918,
the Germans developed an assault strategy based on Mission Command: small groups of
eight Stosstruppen (Shock/Storm troops) led by non-commissioned ocers and junior o-
cers whose mission was to advance as quickly through enemy lines without waiting for
orders from above and ignoring them if they felt they contradicted the mission to advance.
This tactic, deployed in the German Spring Oensive on 1918, led to the greatest advances of
Grint 247
any army since 1914. Within two weeks, the Germans had advanced 40 miles and taken
75,000 British prisoners but, and this is the point: their romantic attachment to combat
above everything else (their Hedgehog strategy) led to the collapse of the supply lines, the
termination of the oensive and ultimately set in motion the precursor for Allied victory in
November that year.
This nicely captures a further contrast between the Management and/or Command
approach of the Allies and (until Hitlers intervention) the Leadership approach of the
Germans. The German approach to battle also undermined their ability to ght prolonged
wars or support strategic assaults that did not achieve rapid results. In other words, where
the Allied armies resembled rhinos slow to start, lots of armour, inexible, and dicult to
stop once they got going the German armies were closer to large cats very rapid, exible
and ferocious in attack but with a tendency to run of steam.
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had limited the Germans to an army of just 100,000, with
no more than 4000 ocers. But this assumed that, like the British and American armies, a
high ratio of ocers to soldiers was necessary for discipline: about 1:13 and 1:17, respect-
ively. But the German army historically operated with a very low ratio of ocers to soldiers
about 1:32 precisely because Mission Command lodged initiative lower down the hier-
archy. Thus, the interwar German Army involved almost half of the entire number as a non-
commissioned ocer. This was the Fuhrerheer an army of leaders not followers, and was
embodied in the training manuals of the time: as soon as the enemy weakens, the junior
leaders without waiting for orders and without regard to the fatigue of the troops, must
carry on the pursuit of the defeated enemy. They must act with daring and independence
(Shamir, 2011: 50).
In contrast, the 1924 British Cavalry Training Manual comprised only three topics: 212
pages (56%) on equitation, 96 pages (25%) on parade drill and ceremonial and just 36 pages
(9%) on weapons and eld operations; at least it touched on combat in contrast the 1926
British Infantry Manual had only two topics: 153 pages (70%) on parade drill and 64 pages
(30%) on ceremonial. Contrasting the experiences of junior ocers in the British Army with
those of the German Army in 19171918 also captures the British emphasis on discipline and
control, compared to the German emphasis on initiative. In 1916, after the Battle of the
Somme that saw 57,000 British casualties on the rst day, the British adopted a French word
degommed for all the eld ocers removed for questioning Haigs battle plans.
Ironically, as we shall see later, it was the liberal democracies Fox that accumulated the
necessary resources for winning the war, rather than the battle, but they also relied on
Befehlstaktik not Auftragstaktik in combat. As Lucas (1998: 25) suggests, the
Befehlstaktik principle was clearly present when the US forces landed at Anzio in
February 1944, under orders to land and prepare for defence. They did precisely as ordered,
even though the German defenders were caught unawares, leaving an opportunity for the
exploitation of a local contingency that most German commanders would have found
impossible to resist had they been the invading force. As Churchill concluded, the allies
had intended to throw a wildcat into the belly of the enemy but instead they had discharged
a beached whale (Murray, 1995: 323). Such defensively minded inactivity was not a con-
sequence of anything other than a culturally conditioned response to what appeared nor-
mality. With disarming candour John Hogan, from the US Armys 9th Amphibian Force,
captured this perfectly: If you havent got stripes, you arent doing anything . . . Every day I
see the problem mounting and more and more maladjustment building up (quoted in
Linderman, 1997: 53).
Hargest, an acute analyst of the Allied armies, was also clear about the dierence between
the German and the Allied armies. It was certainly not lack of courage that distinguished
them because the casualty rate of those that led the Allied troops their eld ocers was
alarmingly high. But that was the point; if the Allied ocers did not lead from the front and
expose themselves to enemy re, little could be achieved. On the German side, on the other
hand, since they were ghting in somewhat dierent circumstances to ourselves and . . . . had
more reason to ght desperately, they were capable of carrying out their tasks without the
continued presence of immediate leadership (quoted in DEste, 1983: 281).
Moreover, the training system adopted by the German army in sharp contrast to that of
the British and American armies required junior ocer cadets to train as private sol-
diers rst, then they were taught platoon, company and battalion tactics so that all young
ocers could take over senior positions in the eld as and when they occurred (French, 2000:
5859).
On the eve of the Second World War, and after Hitler the arch authoritarian whose
Fuhrerprinzip embodied the Befehlstaktik principle had already spent three years in con-
trol, the ocial army manual repeated the approach that von Moltke had enunciated many
years before: A favourable situation will never be exploited if commanders wait for orders.
The highest commander and the youngest soldier must always be conscious of the fact that
omission and inactivity are worse than resorting to the wrong expedient (quoted in Kier,
1997: 150). The inability of the British to understand the value of this is summed up by a
remark made by Sir John Dill in 1935 (and Chief of Sta in 1940) on visiting the battleeld
of Tannenburg; How, he asked his host, had the Germans achieved such success despite
the notorious disobedience of the junior oces? (quoted in French, 2000: 45).
Subordinate initiative became apparent at many dierent levels in the German army:
subordinate ocers replaced their dead or injured superordinates as quickly as they were
themselves replaced by their own Non-commissioned ocers (NCOs), who, in turn, were
often substituted for by privates. And it also enabled local commanders to organized battle
groups (Kampfgruppen) to respond to local emergencies as indeed occurred behind Omaha
beach on D-Day. But the opposite tradition that the German military theorists had spent so
long to overcome overt and total control from the top was reintroduced by Hitler after
1941 and was critical to the undoing of German defences. As Geyr von Schweppenburg
(1999: 411) admitted after the war:
By 1944 Hitler had seriously undermined both the spirit and the principles of the German
command system. In the old army, teaching on the subject of command depended upon a
cold and sober assessment of every situation, and relied upon the competence of every subor-
dinate to carry out his task in whatever manner seemed best to him. This was replaced by
intuition from Berchtesgarden, and by a strict control of every smallest detail from the top.
Contrary opinions were not entertained.
Paradoxically, then, while the German ideology in its Nazi guise rendered the world beyond
ethnic Germans, the external focus, as one full of subordinate races and sub-human species
in a vertical hierarchy, the inward focus rendered all Germans as virtually equal. But the
ocial Anglo-American ideologies of liberal democratic capitalism that outwardly espoused
tolerance, legal and political equality, human rights and individual freedom, simultaneously
generated an inward military focus that polarized the world between the ocers and the rest,
a polarization at its worst that counter-posed the privileged gentlemen to the coarse cannon-
fodder. The general result of this was the fostering of a quite dierent relationship between
Grint 249
ocers, NCOs and troops. Whilst the complaints by the Allied troops about their ocers
(other than those directly in the front line) are commonplace, Reynolds (1997: 34) suggests
that it is noteworthy that when talking to German veterans, one rarely encounters the
constant criticisms of ocers one hears from Allied soldiers. This should not be that
surprising, after all, one of the primary reasons for the strict discipline so pervasive amongst
armies is to coerce unwilling or disinterested individuals into risking their lives. For the SS
units, the problem of motivation scarcely seems to have existed; they were, after all, person-
ally devoted to Hitler and often capable of acts of extreme violence, as Meyer suggested
about 12th SS division:
There was no dominant superior relationship, recognizing only orders and unconditional obedi-
ence. The relationship between ocers, NCOs and other ranks was that between older experi-
enced and younger comrades . . . . The boys were educated to a sense of responsibility, a sense of
community, a willingness to make sacrices, decisiveness, self-control, [and]
camaraderie . . . . During their training, square bashing was frowned upon . . . . Everything
focused on training for battle and this took place under the most realistic conditions possible.
Such a culture also implied that risk taking was encouraged, rather than frowned on, and
inevitably subordinates made mistakes. Indeed, this is often the dening point of success in
Mission Command how superordinates respond to subordinate mistakes. As Dupuy (1977:
17) (an American colonel) suggests, Generally, the German high commanders rarely or
never reproached their subordinates unless they made a terrible blunder . . . . This went
down to the individual soldier, who was praised for developing initiative. And the result
of this cult of combat, continues Dupuy, was that,
On a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inicted casualties at about a
50 per cent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops
UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. This was true when they were attacking and when they
were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case,
they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority, and when they did not, when they won
and when they lost. (Dupuy, 1977: 95)
Max Hastings (1993: 370), concurs, calling the German army:
the nest ghting army of the war, one of the greatest the world has ever seen. This is a simple
truth that some soldiers and writers have been reluctant to acknowledge, partly for reasons of
national pride, partly because it is a painful concession when the Wehrmacht and SS were
ghting for one of the most obnoxious regimes of all times . . . . Their junior leadership was
much superior to that of the Americans, perhaps also to that of the British.
The German Army, then, cultivated a cult of combat rooted in Mission Command and an
Asset model they focused on what they were good at and this hedgehog strategy was self-
evidently eective on the battleeld, but it lacked the multiple skills and resources familiar to
the Allied fox and was itself undermined by Hitler after 1941. Indeed, the irony is that while
the Germany army was much better equipped to replace dead and injured leaders in the eld,
their lines of authority at senior level were so deeply bureaucratic that the Wehrmachts top
hierarchy remained implacably inexible. To immobilize the American, and especially the
British, armies one only needed to kill or injure the junior ocers, but to immobilize the
German army one only needed to keep the senior leaders alive. This was not only with regard
to the chaos at the planning and production centres of the Reich induced by the Nazi
system but also in specic military decisions made by Hitler. Four of these were critical.
First, his ill-dened war objectives in the Soviet Union that ensured that none was
achieved. Second, his order to Paulus at Stalingrad not to surrender that doomed the
250,000 Germans who died plus 84,000 of the 90,000 who surrendered. Third, the
Mortain counter-attack in early August 1944 that played straight into the Allies hands
and led directly to the slaughter at Falaise. And nally, the Ardennes oensive in
December 1944 that squandered whatever reserves the Wehrmacht had left. In each case,
Hitlers subordinate Generals either failed to voice their concerns or allowed Hitler to bully
them into submission with catastrophic results for the Germans.
Nor was it always the case that refusal to accept Hitlers demands led to death or even
dismissal: Kesselring frequently refused to accede to Hitlers whim but remained in com-
mand, at least until injured in an air attack on October 1944 in Italy. He had recovered
suciently to resume control in February and then replaced the once again dismissed Von
Rundstedt after the bridge at Remagen fell into American hands. Guderian, also frequently
rejected Hitlers demands and was dismissed in 1941 for organizing a retreat, then reinstated
in 1943, only to be ordered to take six weeks leave on 28 March 1945. Had he taken it and
returned he would have been back just in time to celebrate VE Day. Lastly, Manstein did
what Paulus should have done: he refused to obey Hitlers order not to withdraw when he
led the escape from the Cherkassy salient and saved 20,000 troops in the process, though he
was subsequently dismissed (Macksey, 1996: 192).
The result of this polarity in the German command system was that German troops in the
eld almost always proved more than a match for most of the Allied units facing them.
As one SS ocer recalled:
I felt when we were in the eld that in a fair ght with all things equal we would always win, not
because of superior bravery but through better methods which I assure you were always
ALWAYS designed to preserve lives, or at least to win a battle with fewer casualties.
(Quoted in Blandford, 1999: 130)
And, since SS casualties as a proportion of SS troops (25%, 253,000 of 1 million) were
remarkably similar to those suered by regular Wehrmacht units (24%, 2.9 million killed
from 12 million called up), we can assume that the stories of SS suicide actions were little
dierent from any other Wehrmacht unit overall (Williamson, 1999: 45). But that deep
strength in the eld was fatally undone by the catastrophic weaknesses at the top; but
what about the Allied fox?
The long tail of the Allied fox
If the German culture of combat had generated a military machine that was ruthlessly
eective on the battleeld, it became quickly apparent that the allies could not match
the German hedgehog in a head to head ght. The experience of both the British
Expeditionary Force in 1940 and the American forces in North Africa in 1943 was
that an inexperienced and inadequately led and prepared force was no match for the
Germans. And, if the typical German soldier was ideologically committed to combat,
the British and American soldiers, in sharp contrast, seemed to have regarded the war
not as an ideological crusade for freedom or democracy but as an unpleasant job that
needed doing so that the status quo ante could return. A British Army Report on
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Morale suggested: The majority of [British] soldiers . . . . were not interested in a New
Britain, nor the stirring speeches that political leaders made but were simply concerned
that they should return to a decent house and secure employment in the post-war
world. The Americans seemed little dierent, as one soldier from the US 29th
Division in Normandy explained:
Ask any dogface [American soldier] on the line. Youre ghting for your own skin on the line.
When I enlisted I was patriotic as hell. Theres no patriots on the line. A boy up there sixty days
in the line is in danger every minute. He aint ghting for patriotism. (Quoted in Balkoski, 1999:
218219)
Indeed, Frank Capras propaganda lms Why we Fight, which tried to induce the
American forces to consider the importance of ghting not just against the Nazi tyranny
but for liberty, equality and security, were singularly ineective: most of the conscripted
troops only fought for two reasons: to get the war over and go home, and for their buddies
on the line with them.
In early 1942, the US forces began compulsory lectures twice a week for 13 weeks to
explain why the US was at war, what the enemy was like and what was expected of the
troops (Reveille, 16 March 1942). But they had only marginal impact and we can be more
certain that the average US soldier was probably not driven by ideological commitment than
that the German soldier probably was. If anything, the US went out of its way to avoid
generating an anti-fascist ideology because it so clearly contradicted the cultural mores of the
typical soldier; for these people, the heroic US cinema icons of the day were not John Wayne
(too many children to be conscripted) or Frank Sinatra (perforated eardrum). The best
example was Humphrey Bogart, whose sardonic, disinterested and even cynical machismo
embodied none of the emotion or attitudes thought necessary to construct a passionately
anti-Nazi ideology but would nevertheless provide the necessary eort to do what had to
be done.
The Government Issue (GIs) may, of course, have been driven by hatred of what the
German Wehrmacht was doing to their buddies (and there is little evidence that such GIs in
Europe distinguished much between the Nazis and the Germans; even if the US Government
tried to maintain a distinction), but few seemed to adopt this attitude: less than 10%
admitted that they would really like to kill a German (the numbers rose to 50% when
the Japanese replace the Germans in the question). However, almost 90% thought that
killing Germans was a necessary but unpleasant task and 65% thought that after the war
only the leaders should be punished (though 25% thought that the whole German nation
should be wiped out (McManus, 1998: 183). This was particularly the case with troops
who had been involved in liberating the death camps. Donald Lembeke was one such soldier
deeply aected by his experiences:
Shooting is too good for them. They should be starved, beaten and then shot the same way as
they had been treating these other people. Maybe I shouldnt have written this but the people
over there (in the U.S.) know so little about what goes on over here. They still think the Germans
are civilized. They arent even human. (Quoted in McManus, 1998: 189)
But by the time these camps were liberated, the war was almost over. Most American
soldiers thought that most German soldiers were professional, well trained, well armed,
and well led. Indeed, the US army magazine Army Talks suggested that Fritz Muller, the
German equivalent of GI Joe, was not a goose-stepping mechanical automaton . . . . He has
been in the army longer than you; he is by nature an eager beaver and extremely anxious to
be a good soldier; his ocers have carefully instilled in him a spirit of independent action
(quoted in Bolkoski, 1999: 650).
But if the ideological cohesion of the Allied fox was less gelatinous than that of the
German hedgehog, the overall strategy of the Allied fox was much more coherent and
cohesive, and once the Americans entered the war, it became clear that the conict was
going to be between the Science of Total War on the Allied side and the Culture of Combat
on the German side. Shamir (2011: 61) captures the dierent approaches well for where
American military
graduates focused on the science of management rather than the art of war. . . the managerial
focus allowed the Americans to excel at such aspects of war as large scale mobilization, logistics
and deployment; it was less helpful in the realm of combat command.
Perhaps, nothing represents the US approach to war better than the deployment of its
population: of 132 million American citizens, the US military only drew 16.3 million into
service and of these probably no more than 800,000 (5% of those were in the combat arms
and this comprised just 0.6% of the total population (Eiler, 1997: 423; Linderman, 1997: 1)).
Here, surely, was a manifestation of how the US had managed to tame the problem: 99.4%
of the US population involved in the greatest war it had ever fought (beyond the American
Civil War) were never engaged in combat. Here too we can see the reason why the man-
agement of the war was as, if not more, important than the leadership or command of the
war almost no one needed to be commanded to engage the enemy.
In terms of general resources, the Allied fox had an inordinately long tail compared to the
German hedgehog: it had three times the population, twice the coal reserves, oil reserves,
aluminium and iron ore, three times the crude steel, and at least twice the manufacturing
capacity. The dierences in capacity can best be seen by comparing Allied and German tank
production. The US produced 88,000 tanks in the war, the British produced 30,000 and the
Soviet Union churned out 105,000. In sum, the allies built about 223,000 tanks while the
Germans manufactured a mere 62,000. In eect, the Allies churned out almost four times as
many tanks and at a faster rate than the Germans. Or, as Lawrence Butler recalled, reecting
on the American Arsenal of Democracy, We won the war by losing more tanks and
cluttering up the battleeld (quoted in McManus, 1998: 36).
But building more tanks was, in itself, insucient: you also needed enough fuel to run
them and enough mechanics to keep them running. By 1945, the Germans had eectively run
out of fuel: little tank training occurred in Normandy because there was never enough fuel,
and ghter aircraft were regularly towed onto the runways by cows to save fuel. In contrast,
the allies never ran out of fuel despite being on the wrong side of the channel for supplies
because they solved the problem with underwater armoured pipelines between the Isle of
Wight and Cherbourg and between Dungeness and Calais. They needed to: in July 1944, the
Allied Expeditionary Air Force was using a million gallons of fuel a day.
In terms of the maintenance of tanks, 10,000 (just under 60%) of the 17,000 troops in a
US mechanized division were directly (as mechanics) or indirectly (as tank crew responsible
for tank maintenance) engaged in keeping the division moving. Cooper (1998: 166) calculates
that such a division would normally have 1200 vehicles, half of which would be tanks or
combat vehicles of some kind, and for every 60 miles travelled the division could expect to
suer about 200 mechanical breakdowns. Behind the division itself worked an even longer
tail (appropriately for a fox) of personnel whose job was just to service the combat units. In
Grint 253
the Pacic, this ratio reached 18:1 for the Americans; a British infantry unit worked on half
this with 9 service personnel for every 1 combat soldier; in contrast, the German army
worked on the basis of just 2:1. At this juncture, it becomes clear that the German cult of
combat threw huge numbers into battle but left precious few to service the war; the Allies
preference for scientic management generated the opposite extreme.
By comparing the experiences of the enemy air forces in the 1944, we can see precisely
where the dierent approaches to war led the two sides. Given the importance of air super-
iority, it was self-evident that domination of the skies over Normandy was going to be a
critical factor in the success or failure of D-Day. The German cult of combat threw young
and inexperienced pilots into the air in 1944 to rebu the Allied bombing of Germany and
France but bravery in the cockpit was not an eective strategy against an Allied air force
willing and able to match German bravery but outclass their capacity to replace the casual-
ties. Between January and May 1944, the Luftwae lost on average about 2000 pilots a
months that was twice their rate of replacements and resulted in a 99% loss by D-Day.
In contrast, the Allies lost about 1000 pilots a month and that was half the replacement rate.
On D-Day itself, the Luftwae had only 319 operational aircraft left in Normandy to repulse
the 11,000 aircraft of the Allies. By the end of the war, the Germans had not run out of
aircraft; they ran out of fuel and pilots. Indeed, some of the German defenders on the
beaches in Normandy stopped ghting not because they believed the cause hopeless but
because they ran out of ammunition.
German strategic failures versus Allied tactical successes
But having a surplus of ammunition and fuel and a long tail of personnel to service the
combat troops was not, in and of itself, sucient to breach the Atlantic Wall in Normandy.
After all, the defenders had sucient armoured reserves, troops and ammunition to defeat
the invaders, irrespective of where they landed, so what was the nal piece in the jigsaw?
Ironically it was the inversion of the combat cultures: had the Germans maintained their
philosophy of Mission Command, they would have moved the armoured reserves up to the
coast before the Allies had established a foothold, because despite the colossal imbalance in
air support, the weather on the morning of 6 June was so poor that few Allied combat
aircraft were ying, so the tanks would have been undeterred by air attack. But, the German
penchant for decentralized decision making was undermined by Hitlers interference.
After the debacle in the Soviet Union in 19411942 itself a reection of Hitlers confused
strategic goals (was the intent of Barbarossa to defeat the Soviet Union or just take territory
for German expansion?) Hitler began to intervene more and more in military strategy. His
strategy in the West was to build the Atlantic Wall 3500 miles of fortied coastline from
Norway to Spain so that the Germans would be impregnable to every enemy. This
became clear in the Fuhrer Directive No. 51: No [enemy] foothold on the coast will be
permitted. Rommel, in charge of the Normandy region, referred to this hard shell
approach (developing a defence like an exoskeleton) as Cloud Cuckoo land, but he recog-
nized the importance of holding the coast line long enough to get the strategic armoured
reserves in position and, given that the invasion could be anywhere on this coast, that meant
distributing the reserves thinly. Von Rundstedt, Rommels superior, was adamant that it was
not possible to prevent a landing and hence a signicant armoured reserve needed to be
available within easy reach of the coast line, a soft shell or endogenous skeleton approach
that was more concerned with repairing damage than trying to prevent it. Hitler agreed with
Von Rundstedt but placed the reserves under Von Geyr and then retained all decision
making, so the end result was neither hard shell nor soft shell but a fatal compromise of
both: a broken shell.
We can see this most eectively by looking on the ground itself. As the rst paratroopers
landed shortly after midnight, the local German commanders were as embodied in the
principles of Mission Command ready to take action against them and move units towards
the coast line to repel the Allies, but most did not. Two examples will suce to illustrate the
point.
Colonel Hans Von Luck, Commanding Ocer of the 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment
(part of General Feuchtingers 21st Panzer Division) was aware of invasion by 01.00 and
noted I gave orders without hesitation, all units are to be put on alert immediately and the
division informed. No. II battalion is to go into action wherever necessary. But he waited
for permission to move from Feuchtinger who was absent; when Feuchtinger returned,
Von Luck still had to wait because Feuchtinger waited for Rommels clearance, who was
in Paris.
General Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr division (the best supplied unit in the
West) was at Le Mans, 130 miles from the coast, and was informed of the invasion at 02.00.
He was ready to move against the invaders by 05.00 and the low cloud that existed on the
morning of D-Day would have eectively rendered the movement invisible. However,
Panzer Lehr was part of the strategic reserve and unable to move until personally released
by Hitler. He was asleep until 10.30 and nobody dared to wake him. At 15.40, Hitler at last
gave orders to move, but the light was good by then and Panzer Lehr would be vulnerable to
aircraft attack, so Bayerlein requested a delay until dark. Hitler denied this, and so the
division moved towards the coast and was attacked 10 separate times from the air. By the
end of the day, Panzer Lehr had still not reached its destination but had lost 40 fuel trucks,
50 other trucks, 5 tanks and 84 half-tracks and self-propelled guns.
What we see here is an inversion of the traditional German combat philosophy of Mission
Command decentralized decision making in the knowledge of superordinate intent and
support towards a model much closer to the Allied philosophy hierarchical control. So
the only really eective advantage that the Germans had over the Allies their combat
philosophy that should have been sucient to repel the invasion, was itself undermined by
Hitler and the weakness of his senior military commanders.
If the Germans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, the Allies stole victory from the
jaws of defeat. On the British beaches the infantry, heavily supported by all kinds of
Funnies ingenious armoured vehicles managed to prize the coastline from the relatively
thin German defenders. On Utah beach, the Americans faced very limited defences and
breached them easily. But Omaha beach was the most heavily defended and the American
invaders had few of the specialized armoured vehicles that had facilitated the British. In itself
this is an interesting reection on the American assumption that the minutely planned and
scientically managed shock and awe of the pre-invasion air and navy bombardment would
undermine the need for armoured support in the rst phase of the invasion; it did not
because the light was so poor most of the munitions dropped several miles inland to
avoid hitting the American infantry as they approached the beaches.
So precarious was the American position on Omaha that at 09.15 Bradley, The US
Commander, sent a message to London asking permission to cease the landings at
Omaha and divert the troops to an alternative beach, but the message was lost in the barrage
of delayed communications and never reached London until the afternoon, by which time it
Grint 255
was too late and progress had been made. In fact, Franz Gockel, a German defender at
Omaha, recalled that at that time it did look like the Americans were withdrawing (quoted in
Ambrose, 1995: 380).
Here indeed was a crisis in search of a decisive commander; in this case, the metaphorical
cavalry arrived, not on waves of horses but the backs of the waves. The destroyers, standing
o shore, had been ordered to cease ring directly on Omaha Beach as soon as the rst
waves landed at 0630 until ship to shore communications was established. But this never
happened; for example, 75% of the 116th Regimental Combat Teams radios were lost in the
water. Traditionally allied commanders would have waited for orders, but by 0810 it was
clear to some destroyer captains that the situation on the beaches was intolerable. The
destroyers began shelling identiable targets and were then ordered by Captain Sanders,
commander of the destroyer group on the USS Frankford, to move closer still. His order was
reinforced by a message from Admiral Bryant on the USS Texas: Get on them men, get on
them. We must knock out those guns. They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and
we cant have anymore of that. We must stop it (quoted in Kilvert-Jones, 1999: 127).
So close were they that the USS Shubrick even red four of its ve-inch shells at a lone
German ocer believed to be spotting for his own artillery in the area. Charles Murphy was
just one of hundreds pinned down by re from a pillbox when a destroyer moved in: He
couldnt have been 200 yards o the beach. He pumped four rounds right into that brazier
(of the pillbox). Boy that was the end. Then things started moving fast. I loved the Navy
from then on (quoted in Mcmanus, 1998: 118).
Opposite Dog Green sector, where the 29th Division were landing, the USS Carmick
spotted Sherman tanks pinned down by a gun built into the cli. The tanks red at the
cli but their shells could not penetrate the emplacement. However, the destroyers much
larger guns could, and, taking their lead from the tank, the destroyer quickly silenced the
German position and then tracked the tank shells marking out the next target (Kilvert-Jones,
1999: 127).
The casemated 88 mm gun on the eastern side of Exit 1 on Easy Red was another des-
troyer target. It had been pounding the landing craft and troops all morning and eventually
an army-navy beach team landed with radio contact to the ships. Don Whitehead takes up
the story:
We saw the destroyer come racing towards the beach and swing broadside, exposing itself to the
re of the batteries on the blu. One shell from the destroyer tore a chunk of concrete from the
side of the blockhouse. Another nicked the top. A third ripped o a corner. And then the fourth
shell smashed into the gun-port to silence the weapon. Always, in my mind, the knocking out of
this gun was a major turning point in the battle in our sector . . . . As I saw it, that was when the
battle of the beach was won seven hours after the rst wave hit the beach. (Quoted in Ramsey,
1995: 351)
By the end of the day, each of the 11 destroyers o Omaha beach had red between 400
and 1200 ve-inch shells at the beach targets. Lieutenant Joe Smith, a Navy beach-
master was not alone in his conclusion: There is no question in my mind that the few
Navy destroyers that we had there saved the mission (quoted in Ambrose, 1995: 389).
His opinion is supported by Colonel S.B. Mason, who inspected the German defences at
Omaha after the invasion and suggested that they were impregnable to conventional army
artillery and that only the Navys pounding had loosened them enough to enable the troops
to break through.
On the beaches, the story was very similar: the decisions taken by junior ocers and non-
commissioned ocers were what saved the day for the Americans; waiting for orders from
above would not have worked because the communication system had broken down. In
short, the Americans adopted Mission Command on the day, just as the Germans aban-
doned it; the American troops on Omaha Beach and the US naval destroyer captains
standing just o the beach rescued the mission just as surely as the German senior com-
manders threw their mission away. Or, to put it another way: the poor bloody infantry (and
sailors) of the Allies rescued their senior commanders while the poor bloody infantry of the
Germans were able but unwilling to do the same for their senior commanders.
Conclusion
I have tried in this article to integrate two distinctive frames for understanding D-Day: the
problems typology and its relationship to decit models of organization and the links
between this and the German hedgehog or cult of combat rooted in the Leadership phil-
osophy of Mission Command versus the Allied long tailed fox of Management, Command
and Leadership. The Allies could never hope to match the military eciency of the Germans:
the latter were ideologically committed and ruthlessly eective at addressing the Wicked
Problem of chaos on the battleeld. But what had secured victory across generations its
cult of combat was only ever the strategy of a hedgehog: it, to mix metaphors, was a one
trick pony, and the weakness of focusing just on decentralized leadership in the eld of battle
at the cost of subordinating the management of war and the central command of strategy left
them bereft of a coherent strategy in Normandy and without the resources to maintain
sustained defence in depth.
In contrast, the Allies were experts in the Tame Problem of War administration in ways
far beyond the abilities of the chaotic Nazi administration. For the Allies, D-Day
involved getting a city the size of Birmingham in the UK across the channel and all the
way to Berlin whilst under re; this was a Tame Problem but one of extraordinary compli-
cation. And if the Command skills of eld ocers were seldom on a par with their German
counterparts, the Allies did at least have the advantages of a coherent strategy ably led in
collaborative fashion by Eisenhower; something the Germans could never manage in the
presence of Hitler. Finally, the last piece in the Allied fox that ensured the destruction of the
German hedgehog was its exibility: the troops on the ground and the captains at sea could
take initiative when necessary and if the Allied air forces did not play a signicant role on the
morning of D-Day because of the bad weather, when that cleared in the afternoon the
Luftwae never appeared in numbers because it had already been destroyed in the previous
six months in a battle of attrition that the Germans could not win. Hedgehogs look cute, but
they dont eat foxes.
So what might we glean from this for leadership lessons beyond D-Day? Perhaps, one
could start by thinking about the teaching of leadership. Three lessons seem to me instruct-
ive: rst, the past is never settled but always in dispute; it is as essentially contested as the
present. So part of the learning is about recognizing how leadership is reinterpreted in
dierent times and to suit dierent interests. Second, that the romance of leadership, the
fascination with individuals, is unable to explain much of what happens in life; this does not
mean individuals are irrelevant but that we need to situate their actions in a particular
historical context if we are to make sense of their decisions and actions. Third, the moral
disquiet of many scholars at the analysis of war and violence simply leaves the eld open to
Grint 257
those who are enamoured of such an arena; but if we cannot understand war and violence,
we cannot hope to limit its signicance.
And what about lessons that ow from the hedgehog and the fox analogy? Well again, I
just want to highlight three, and to begin with my own profession: academia. The perverse
audit culture and its associated cult of the 4* article, as Craig et al. (2014) and Tourish
(2011) have identied, is a good example of an academic hedgehog: whether the research is
read or relevant, whether the academic can teach or whether there is a social purpose beyond
the accumulation of such articles is clearly irrelevant when only one thing really counts. An
academic fox might be expected to undertake research, teach and do some administration
but they seem to be a dying breed and the implications for the quality of teaching and the
purpose of universities are dire. Second, for professionals such as the police, the re and
rescue service, the military, or even the health service, the issue might be to consider whether
success as a Commander in critical situations is a suciently broad skill base to lead an
organization where the Leadership of Wicked Problems and the Management of Tame
problems seem just as important in the Age of Austerity. Third, for business more generally,
one might ponder the seductive dangers of focusing on what youre good at a typical
hedgehog strategy when that drove the nancial sector to the brink of collapse and
when a more balanced strategy that covered the viability of the system as a whole and
questioned the value of genuecting before the god of mammon might not, on reection,
have been the wisest thing to do. Hedgehogs are usually fatter than foxes but they dont
last as long.
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Grint 259
Author biography
Keith Grint is Professor of Public Leadership at Warwick University. He is a founding co-
editor of Leadership and founding co-organizer of the International Conference in
Researching Leadership. His books include The Sociology of Work 3rd edition (2005);
Management: A Sociological Introduction (1995); Leadership (ed.) (1997); Fuzzy
Management (1997); The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Society (with Steve
Woolgar) (1997); The Arts of Leadership (2000); Organizational Leadership (with John
Bratton and Debra Nelson); Leadership: Limits and Possibilities (2005); Leadership,
Management & Command: Rethinking D-Day (2008); Sage Handbook of Leadership (edited
with Alan Bryman, David Collinson, Brad Jackson and Mary Uhl-Bien) (2010); The Public
Leadership Challenge (edited with Stephen Brookes) (2010); and Leadership: A Very Short
Introduction (2010). Sage Major Works of Leadership (four volumes) (ed. with David
Collinson & Brad Jackson) (2011).

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