The interwar period between the First and Second World Wars can serve as a point of comparison for the US Army’s current modernization campaign, known as the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). The technical and tactical innovations by the German Army, and lack thereof by the French and British, during those interwar years are often used as a warning as to the dangers of peacetime complacency. However, a less appreciated story is that of how the British Army, with the assistance of the American Lend-Lease Program, converted from a territorial defense and constabulary force into a technologically and tactically superior beast within two years of their 1940 defeat in France. In Brothers in Arms, author James Holland tells the story of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry’s transformation from a horse mounted cavalry regiment in Palestine in 1939 to a highly competent Sherman tank mounted cavalry regiment in North Africa by 1942. The Sherwood Rangers not only spearheaded the British Normandy landing at Gold Beach on 6 June 1944, but were also the first British troops into Germany, and ended the Second World War with the most battle honors of any regiment in British history.
Holland is an English historian, prolific author, broadcaster, and podcaster (We Have Ways of Making You Talk). Brothers in Arms is one of Holland’s more than twenty Second World War non-fiction books and is a follow up to his broader Normandy campaign work, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Battle of France (Bantam, 2018). Admittedly inspired by Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers (Simon & Schuster, 1992), Holland follows one British mechanized cavalry regiment from their preparations in southern England, through the D-Day landings, the liberation of France, the ill-fated Operation Market Garden, and ultimately the defeat of the Third Reich. Holland’s work serves as a testament to the potential transformation that can be achieved with the right amount of leadership, training, and technological innovation.
One of Holland’s key insights is that there is no substitute for combined arms maneuver. The Allied way of war was “steel not flesh.” The use of overwhelming and accurate artillery fire (to include naval gunfire), air superiority, armor, engineers, and infantry, allowed the Allies to continuously attack and defeat the Germans with a less than three to one manpower advantage. While the Allied casualty rate was high, the aforementioned materiel and tactical advantages kept the relative combat power ratios favorable to the Allied side. As today’s Army embarks on the ATI, we must remember that technology can enable and enhance combined arms maneuver, but technology cannot replace combined arms maneuver.
A key aspect of the Allies’ superior way of war was the armor-infantry team. Although the Sherwood Rangers were a pure tank regiment, they quickly became adept at working with not only British but also American infantry. Across Normandy, the Netherlands, and Germany, the Sherwood Ranger tanks provided fire fight ending direct fire lethality to the infantry, while the infantry protected the tanks from the dreaded German Panzerfaust equipped infantry in complex and restrictive terrain. The close cooperation of armor and infantry remains an essential part of modern combat. Any changes to the armor-infantry team through ATI will still require close collaboration between these two arms.
The success of the Sherwood Rangers, and the Allies in general, relied heavily on air superiority. Since the North African campaign, the Allies benefited from the situational awareness, protection, and firepower provided by the near constant presence of friendly aircraft overhead and the lack thereof by German aircraft. The only real obstacle to Allied air support was the poor European weather, which deteriorated the further east that the Sherwood Rangers fought and the later that operations occurred in the calendar year. The Second World War and beyond given of air superiority is no longer assumed in modern combat. The integrated air defense systems (IADS) of our enemies and the relatively recent dominance of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) on the Ukrainian battlefields have forced modern day militaries to rethink all aspects of ground combat. Today’s maneuver forces must not only use technologies, tactics, techniques and procedures to protect themselves from enemy UAS, but they must also find new ways to integrate UAS to enable combined arms maneuver.
In summary, James Holland’s Brothers in Arms is a worthy addition to the history of armored warfare. The Sherwood Rangers’ story of transformation from a constabulary force to a technically and tactically adept armored regiment also serves as a point of comparison for the US Army’s ongoing transformation initiative. Ultimately, it reminds us that there is no substitute for tactically sound combined arms maneuver.