The weight of true leadership

In thinking about the 70th anniversary of the launching of Operation Overlord, I was reminded of one particular element, which didn’t make it into most of the coverage over the past few days, but is, I think, a mark of how different things—and men—were then than they are now.

The Normandy landings had been planned with extraordinary thoroughness. I have always stood in shock and awe at the idea that men and women from several nations (not to mention many different military and government branches) put together the strategy, the intelligence, the logistics, the training, the communication plans to get more than 150,000 soldiers and all the necessary matériel from the south of England to the Normandy coast (and beyond).

And they did it without computers. Without whiteboards, if you please!

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall responsibility, of course. Not to mention the heavy burden of keeping rampaging egos like Montgomery and Patton somehow working as members of a team. These days we’d refer to it as herding cats, only those two were very big jungle cats with sharp claws and vicious teeth.

But here’s the detail I’m interested in at the moment. Despite all the meticulous planning of this particular operation, it is a primary maxim of military leadership that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. In this instance, the weather—critical to safe landing and ongoing support of several armies that were far from operational ports—was a particular crapshoot. The only guaranteed result from pulling the trigger on Overlord was that men were going to get killed. Success was just one possible outcome.

So, in addition to the official “D-Day is underway” proclamation, Eisenhower prepared an alternative announcement, the one in which he admitted that the landings had failed, he’d pulled back the troops and they would have to rethink the whole thing.

And he said, “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He wrote this out in pencil—alone, no SHAEF PR flunkies polishing it, no discussion with anyone in his chain of command—and he put it in his pocket until such time as it might be necessary to have it typed up and transmitted.

These days no one embarking on any crack-brained self-aggrandizing political or corporate or military scheme on someone else's dime even considers the remote possibility that it could go belly-up. So (and probably because of that lack of forethought) when it (perhaps predictably) does go to hell in smithereens, after much behind-the-scenes scuffling and consulting of PR departments, crisis management companies, social media mavens, lawyers and other miscellaneous spin-doctors, a statement is issued in which someone grudgingly admits that “mistakes were made”, but the makers of those alleged mistakes are never named. And they are certainly never the persons reading the statement to the news outlets, Congressional committees or Oprah.

I am not a fan of the uncritical gushing about “The Greatest Generation” that has occurred since Tom Brokaw wrote his paean. The men and women blooded by the Great Depression indeed made the enormous sacrifices they were called upon to make during the years 1939-1945. And I am deeply grateful that they did. But I don’t see how it was somehow a greater sacrifice than what was asked for in the years 1914-1918.

(And if you want to talk military service, do not even try to tell me that the men and women who went to Vietnam were somehow lesser beings than the ones who went to Iwo Jima or Anzio or the Hürtgen Forrest. They suffered from bad military and political leadership and lack of strategy, not from any moral deficit.)

However—when I compare this scratched-out pencil draft of Eisenhower’s intent to accept full responsibility for the failure of Overlord with any no-fault statements made by politicians, generals or corporate executives caught in everything from flagrante delicto to global embezzlement and multiple manslaughter, it is clear to me that something indeed changed in the intervening 70 years.

And not for the better.