A couple of months after D-Day, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. Birds were once again singing in Paris, the Germans were routed/running away rapidly, a light breeze was blowing over our left shoulder. We would be in Berlin by Christmas.
“By September 1944 the Allies were in a state of euphoria. The speed of the allied advance since the Normandy landings, alongside news of Stauffenberg’s failed plot to kill Hitler, convinced British and US Intelligence that the Wehrmacht had reached a state of war weariness and would soon disintegrate.”
Time to put the hammer down?
“Montgomery and other Allied officers considered the Wermacht to be a defeated force, on the ropes and ripe for the picking.”
There were obstacles on the horizon. Straight west were the Alps. As the crows flies was the Siegfried line. To the north east, a flood plan, the way the Germans came in four years before.
Montgomery – short, British, funny moustache, master strategist – convinced Eisenhower of the latter approach, arguing that, with a lightning strike, we could sweep in, take the bridges crucial for success on a low land playing field and win the war before forty four came to an end.
They called it “Market Garden”.
It was a complete disaster.
Some say Montgomery was just a little full of himself.
“Nowadays, the image of Montgomery has been adjusted considerably downwards, but in early September 1944, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was at the height of his fame.
Montgomery was the hero of El Alamein. He was the British commander who had driven the Germans out of Africa, and after D-Day he was the one to defeat the toughest German resistance in Normandy. In August 1944, Montgomery had chased the Germans back to the Dutch border.”
Others suggest it was confirmation bias, that he was incapable of seeing/hearing the opposing view.
“In reality, the German Army still had a lot of motivated soldiers and more equipment than realized. Additionally, the Germans had done the obvious and planned the defense of the river and canal crossings coveted by the Allies. Worst of all, a couple of German divisions were located at or near Arnhem to rest and reequip in what the Germans thought was a “safe” area.”
And not just the leader of the operation.
“Nevertheless, the planners continued to claim that the German soldiers to be dealt with consisted of ‘children and old men’.”
The year before, in the hinterland just east of Ukraine, Hitler was swinging his dick.
In a small town/village on the edge of the steppes, Kursk, he had an opportunity to deliver holy revenge for Stalingrad and show the world that resistance was futile.
A salient had formed by the Russian advance. An ugly/smelly/subhuman force, the Russians were looking to encircle the retreating Germans. The plan was to attack from the north and south, a classic pincer operation, cutting off the smelly ones from support and destroy them at leisure.
It failed miserably.
It certainly didn’t fail due to the smelly ones.
“Such a conquest would, Hitler believed, be easy because the Slavs who lived in the region were sub-humans, dull-witted and without fighting spirit.”
Or the power of their weaponry.
“The Germans might have lost the element of surprise but had used the three-month quiet period to build up their own forces, including the deployment of two new tanks – the Panther and the Ferdinand tank destroyer. Although both were untested in the field of conflict, Hitler had high hopes for his new weapons, which he believed would negate the loss of surprise.”
It failed because the Germans overestimated their ability and underestimated the Russians.
“However, the new weapons and extra manpower caused the German High Command to engage in over-optimistic planning. Their new weaponry assumed that they could inflict a serious defeat on Stalin and led them to underestimate their enemy.”
A jarring commonality between the two tales.
War has a sadistic way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Intelligence and agility, leadership and creativity are skills of value in the heat of battle.
War also has a nasty way of creating job openings. Lots of them. Rapidly. In the examples above, the leaders were products of informed promotion, the military using a filter based on the skills of value to bring the best of the best to the forefront.
They still fucked up.
Many will tell you it’s unconscious bias. And they have a point.
The aforementioned bias is ubiquitous.
“A confirmation bias is cognitive bias that favors information that confirms your previously existing beliefs or biases.”
There are others.
“The self-serving bias refers to the tendency to attribute internal, personal factors to positive outcomes but external, situational factors to negative outcomes.”
Our mind plays a lot of games with us.
“Psychologist Leon Festinger first described the theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957. According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance occurs when people’s thoughts and feelings are inconsistent with their behavior, which results in an uncomfortable, disharmonious feeling.”
Lest you get all comfortable knowing your biases:
“The bias blind spot is a cognitive bias that causes people to be less aware of their own biases than of those of others, and to assume that they’re less susceptible to biases than others.”
We all know who came up with the brilliant idea of supporting thousands of paratroopers via a single lane highway, or abandoning the awesome/successful tactical manoeuvre of blitzkrieg for a full frontal assault, running their troops into the teeth of dug in Russian defences, Charge of the Light Brigade substituting tanks for horses.
Their bias might explain why they would double down on a bad idea, but it doesn’t tell us the mental aberration that caused them to come up with these obviously flawed plans in the first place.
Bias describes the reaction to stimulus - often the initial response to the implementation of a plan - not the impetus.
Perhaps it was:
“Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown.”
Fuck if I know and I’m beginning to suspect that the ones who do know number in the zeros.