ABSTRACT
The ability of the British army to generate and sustain fighting power during the Normandy campaign has attracted a good deal of criticism. The morale of British troops committed to the campaign has been reckoned to be fragile; some of their equipment was inferior to that of the Wehrmacht; they had not been prepared to fight in the kind of terrain they encountered in the Normandy bocage; and several of their senior officers were found wanting.1 However, generals in their memoirs, and historians in their post-war studies have devoted little attention to the preparations that the army undertook to prepare itself for the campaign before the landing. Montgomery wrote a mere two pages on it.2 His chief of staff, Freddie de Guingand, and his operations officer, David Belchem, did not mention it at all in their own accounts of the campaign.3 Historians of the divisions that spent four long years in Britain between Dunkirk and D-Day usually wrote only a few token pages on pre-invasion training before passing on to examine the more exciting doings of their division in north-west Europe.4 The official British historian of the campaign merely wrote of ‘months of individual and combined training’.5
