France vs Germany in HOI4

[Dinglehoff]

Yes and no - hopefully the experience mechanic will make it hard for the French/UK to build German-style armoured divisions pre-Battle of France, and while the allied airforces weren't small, from memory combined they were still smaller than the Luftwaffe where it counted (I think - but am not entirely sure - that the UK had more strategic bombers, but not fighters or ground support aircraft, and the French airforce was woefully under-sized). If the German advantage in air power is partly represented in CAS doctrine being ahead of its time, which should set up in 1936 so that if the French player wants an airforce with close-air support as good as the Germans, it has to sacrifice something else.

The other problem the French player should have is that the Maginot line is already largely built and sucking up large propotions of the defence budget - make France pay for its forts on the border, and suddenly it's got a lot less capacity to turn its military around.

That said, we don't want to guarantee a historical fall of France if a human player is in place - if there are human players with France in an MP game, then house rules can cover things (although it would be good to make it as difficult as it was historically for a human player to succeed with France, entrenched old guard, divisions in the military, limited political support for the airforce and all that). The issue is making sure that the game is set up so that AI France generally falls to AI Germany, or to a human Germany played reasonably competently.

According to Foreign Affairs; France had 320000 men already under arms in 1935 and 210000 overseas. With that army already constructed it would also have to pay for those forces already existing from game start in addition to the maginot line fortifications. There would also need to be some kind of penalty or offsetting disadvantage for shipping all the overseas men to metropolitan France in preparation for the upcoming war, or disbanding a bunch of them and reconstructing completely different types of troops in the face of German rearmament.

Even with this and the wikipedia figures that France is able to put up in time for the historical war, paying for this stuff the whole time is not going to strangle France and ensure German victory.

 

[RedStinger]

According to Foreign Affairs; France had 320000 men already under arms in 1935 and 210000 overseas. With that army already constructed it would also have to pay for those forces already existing from game start in addition to the maginot line fortifications. There would also need to be some kind of penalty or offsetting disadvantage for shipping all the overseas men to metropolitan France in preparation for the upcoming war, or disbanding a bunch of them and reconstructing completely different types of troops in the face of German rearmament.

Even with this and the wikipedia figures that France is able to put up in time for the historical war, paying for this stuff the whole time is not going to strangle France and ensure German victory.

Numbers are deceptive here. Most of the overseas troops were sovereignty troops : they were good for policing, not for warfare. It was still a pool of men to be trained harder, and the problem of bringing them to metropolitan France was one of the main reason why France's fleet was still the 4th of the world at that time.

 

[Chromos]

The fact France could or could not have won the war is an eternal debate, which i think nobody will be able to solve. I'm not going to enter this debate now.
However, there is still that myth that France simply collapsed withoutout a fight , or had a very poor army at that time. Even if i'm French, there are some things we can't ignore, like the problem of Leadership or equipement, but there are things which have still to be considered in the balance :

- Germany lost more men during the invasion of Belgium and France than during the first 6 months of their invasion of the USSR.
- The first real tank battle of WWII happened during Fall Geib, and was a French Victory
- Some German Generals, among them Rommel or Von Manstein, acknoledge that some of the battles during Fall Gelb were among the hardest they had to fight, due to Belgian and French soldiers refusing to give up and inflicting some heavy casualties despite being outnoumbered and less equiped. Some German regiments lost up to 8/10th of their men!
- German tanks were not so invicible. The French tank Renault B1bis was a mammoth of 32 tons, which could penetrate any German tank and wreck havock in their lines. Some official French and German reports state that some of these takes took up to 50 tanks shots without even getting a scratch.

France had a correct army, and when you combine all allied armies at that time (France, GB, Belgium and NL), you can compete with the German army. However, they took too much time to modernize, and were still fighting with WWI weapons. Also, barely any units had any AA to defend themselves.
Some elite units in the French army had really good equipment though, but due to poor leadsership they have been scattered among the front, and not in the correct place.

Overall, i'm not going to clear out the "Fleeing french" myth now, but I would at least like that one day, people recognize the courrage of the 200 000 French men who died to protect their country in 1940, despite the cheer power of the Wermarcht.
We always say that History is written by those who win it, and sometimes i have to say this is true.

All that look some more closely at what happend back then will be able to see how brave the allied soldiers fought in the initial war in the west.
The speed of the loss was not about bravery or such. I already wrote that the "political games" some Generals played befroe and in the war where very likely the biggest impact on the fall of France.
Of course the "unwillingness of GER to repeat WW1 style warfare" and some "quick suprising victories" like in Eben Emael played another vital role.


And I like to add that GER army was also not full of modern stuff, thats also a myth of some to explain the quick victory. And overall, not all WW1 weapons were bad or not of use in WW2. In contrary to allied countries, GER had to produce much more for its rearment in a very short time('34-'39). While then spending less or euqal of its GDP for defense as some allied countries did. Numbers vary depending on wich statistics where used, but overall GER was not in a very favourable position in terms of GDP usage for war efforts up until "total war" was declared in '43 and reached ist peak in the time after.
The winning in such a quick time is tied to so many details.
Alone without the Czech tanks GER would have not been able to field that much Pz-DIV in the West and would have had a harder time to achive that victories with less amoured Divisions.
Also the allied intel knowed that GER was coming through the Ardennes to cut off allied units in the BENELUX, but Commanders refused to check that or prepare for a defense as it was thought(!) impossible. Thats a similar error as GER later did not at once fend of D-Day invasion while anticipating the real invasion elsewhere..
etc. etc..

 

[Klausewitz]

All that look some more closely at what happend back then will be able to see how brave the allied soldiers fought in the initial war in the west.
The speed of the loss was not about bravery or such.

It was.
Or if not bravery (which is so hard to grasp anyway) then a breakdown of morale and the will to fight. With and after the collapse of the Meuse front some French units, metropolitan units, simply disintegrated, in some cases without seeing the enemy.

 

[Had a dad]

Stop with the off topic now

 

[Axe99]

It was.
Or if not bravery (which is so hard to grasp anyway) then a breakdown of morale and the will to fight. With and after the collapse of the Meuse front some French units, metropolitan units, simply disintegrated, in some cases without seeing the enemy.

There were issues of bravery and defeatism, but these were at the highest levels of the French establishment, not (by and large) amongst the fighting troops. Case in point - in the North, on the 19th of May, Ironside (British Chief of the Imperial Staff) asked Gort (leading the BEF) whose command he was under. Gort replied that he was reporting to General Bilotte of the French 1st Army Group, but that he hadn't issued an order in eight days (and the conversation with Bilotte convinced Ironside that he was incapable of further appropriate action)!

Gamelin at the very top had similar lapses, while Renaud, the PM, considered the war all but lost. In many cases it wasn't that the French were poorly led, but that command and control had broken down completely and they weren't led at all.

Then there's the example of Weygand - appointed to replace Gamelin, he decided his first order of priority was to get a good nights' sleep, followed by cancelling the only decision of Gamelin's that made half-decent sense, wasting a few days fluffing around, then proposing an offensive very similar to Gamelin's, but with the German's then having had the time to reinforce the corridor. Then poor Bilotte, the only person who had been thoroughly briefed on the plans, was killed in a traffic accident on the 23rd of May, leading to three days of completely absent leadership and the French Army not having enough information to carry out the offensive effectively. Needless to say, the offensive was an uncoordinated mess and the Allied formations that fought, while fighting bravely, achieved little.

In other places, French formations were overrun while preparing for battle, or smashed by combinations of airpower and armoured formations. After the initial debacle in the North, and the evacuation of Dunkirk, the French were left with 64 French and 1 British division, facing 142 German divisions (this is from Wikipedia, I remember another source and I don't think it was this high, but in both cases, post-Dunkirk the Allied Forces on the continent were outnumbered significantly). The Germans, now with numerical superiority and even greater strength in the air than at the start, met significant resistance at the Weygand Line, where the French used far better tactics and concentrated artillery to hold the Germans up. It didn't last, as the Germans had the numbers and the Luftwaffe, but the fact remains that the French, even when the situation looked pretty grim, continued to fight and at a tactical level fight effectively.

If they hadn't been so comprehensively failed by their senior leadership (combined with communications trouble) in Fall Gelb, it's still likely the case that German airpower and combined arms tactics would have got them over the line, but it would have been far, far more costly, and there would have been a real risk of the German armoured spearhead being cut off and destroyed (in which case all bets would be off).

And any army where the higher leadership has collapsed, facing a coordinated foe, is going to be in a whole lot of trouble, regardless of how brave they were.

 

[Klausewitz]

@Axe99 et al.
I know why i did not talk about bravery.
Bravery is halfway between suicidal and stupid (did he charge the machine gun nest because he did not care or because he did realize the danger?!) half of one, 50% of the other and as cloudy a concept as you can get.
And ultimately bravery does not matter.
Sure it makes for nice medal citations and such but what is much more important and what i talked about is morale.
Morale is not charging the machine gun nest.
Morale is fighting in the first place.
And the upside down Dolchstoßlegende of 1940 does not cut it.
What the French Army had, same as in 1914, was a severe lack of leadership and consequently a severe lack of morale and fighting spirit (ask yourself: If your officer gives every indication of not believing the war is winnable or even sensible and you hear talks that your government is already discussing the terms of surrender, would you risk getting yourself shot?). From Top to bottom (and the question where the rot set in also does not help us here) the whole French Army was on morale defense from day one. France was tired of the war before it even started and such things as the Panic of Bulson were the result.

 

[Axe99]

What the French Army had, same as in 1914, was a severe lack of leadership and consequently a severe lack of morale and fighting spirit (ask yourself: If your officer gives every indication of not believing the war is winnable or even sensible and you hear talks that your government is already discussing the terms of surrender, would you risk getting yourself shot?). From Top to bottom (and the question where the rot set in also does not help us here) the whole French Army was on morale defense from day one. France was tired of the war before it even started and such things as the Panic of Bulson were the result.

Definitely agree with this (on the by, technically speaking, when Chromos said it wasn't due to a lack of bravery, you said "it was", which was what I was replying to ), although the French did keep fighting, and didn't do too bad of a job of it in a number of places once they'd fallen back to the Weygand line, but by this stage it would have taken a miracle to get them out of the trouble they were in, as the German's were in such a position of numerical superiority on the land and in the air that it was just a matter of time. At the end of the day, when the situation was far more bleak than when the Germans broke through to the channel, the French Army still had the moral to put up a spirited fight for a number of weeks, but by that stage it was hopeless.

I'm not suggesting French morale was top-notch, but it wasn't their morale that lost them the Battle of France, nor was it a lack of interest in fighting. Accordingly, balancing France in HoI4 by giving them an arbitrary morale penalty would be butchering history and, from the perspective of anyone playing France, gameplay as well.

Also, not sure if you responding to me, but I didn't ask a question about where the rot set in - it was fairly clear that senior leadership were the driving problem, particularly when the French were able to perform well (in morale terms, and accounting for lack of adequate air cover and Luftwaffe attacks) in localised actions both in Belgium, having a go at the German thrust to the Channel (De Gaulle) and in a last-ditch defence along the Weygand line.

More importantly, where the rot set in is important for modelling it in-game. If it's a failure of leadership and doctrine/army structure/undersized air force (my contention, although my argument is by no means final ), then the French leadership and doctrine/army structure/air force should be the main reasons why Germany wins in the west (and they should be modelled in-game accordingly). If, on the other hand, it's a problem of morale, and unit morale is handled in the same way as it was in HoI3, then the French either need to be artificially nerfed through something like doctrinal structures that front-load German morale at the expense of Allied morale (despite this flying in the face of actual events), or by giving the French some kind of arbitrary "you're French and Germany declared war on you within the last year, here's a 10 per cent morale penalty".

As for the Panic of Bulson, it was a second-line unit that had just been put through the largest air bombardment in history (at that time), combined with communication failures. I agree it was a failure of morale, but I'm not sure it's an appropriate case study that can be used to infer the morale situation across the rest of the French army.

Sorry if I sound blunt, trying to have a friendly discussion, just a bit tired .

 

[Opanashc]

There is a difference between bravery and recklessness. Charging the MG nest while its firing at YOU is reckless. Charging through fire going in your general direction is brave.

 

[bruebottom]

Up until the BEF departed from Dunkirk neither the British or French soldiers lacked in a willingness to fight. Mark Connelly and Walter Miller argue in their paper 'The BEF and the Issues of surrender on the Western Front in 1940' that morale and discipline remained generally high for the British soldier. It was only when they were poorly lead or when orders were not clearly defined that the British soldier failed to do his duty. Lord Gort, while withdrawing to the coast, was ordered by London to get back into the fight, but he ignored these orders and continued marching the BEF to the English Channel.

Jeffery A. Gunsburg argues in his paper 'The Battle of Gembloux, 14-15 May 1940: The “Bliztkrieg” checked' that the French soldier gave as good as the German soldier and even better. A German surgeon for the 4th Panzer Division commented about the 'marked depression' of the German troops and it was only the next day, and that is after the French withdrew from the Dyle Line, that German morale recovered. German officers recognized the 'dogged resistance of the of the French and North African infantry' at this battle. The battle was won as the French offices had planned.

The Fall of France is not the result of a lack in willingness to fight by the soldiers, or poor officers quality, or poor doctrines, or obsolete equipment issues. It was an issue of failure at the highest level. First, not having a contingency plan for a German breakthrough into Northern France, Second, for not reacting fast enough when it became obvious that the Heer was over running Northern France, and finally the failure of the BEF and French commanders to cooperate in the rapidly deteriorating situation.

 

[Klausewitz]

There is a difference between bravery and recklessness. Charging the MG nest while its firing at YOU is reckless. Charging through fire going in your general direction is brave.

Why would i charge through fire going in my general direction without reason?
Sure, the odds are longer, but in the end i can still catch a bullet and one bullet is all that is needed.
What i was getting at is that bravery is hard to distinguish from poor discipline (the proper reaction to MG fire in your general direction is to seek cover and reconoiter), a death wish, gloryseeking or a failure to account for all variables of the situation.
We could go another 19 pages and we would not get at a satisfying definition of bravery, so i leave it with this gem:
I would be willing to bet that the average Iraqi or Afghani insurgent is more brave than a coalition soldier; more death defying, less concerned about his own safety, more willing to seek a glorious death while bringing ignomious death to the enemy (i would also state that airstrikes and artillery strikes are the very anti-thesis of bravery). Still i would be willing to bet that men for men coalition soldiers are the better soldiers and as a whole they are a better fighting even though the people they are fighting are at times veterans of 20 to 30 years of continious conflict while they have less than a decade under their belt.
Ultimativly bravery is meaningless.
It makes for nice stories, but those telling the stories are in most cases not heroes (which is why they are able to tell the story) or if they are the subject of the story, will dispute that their deeds were heroic. They will argue they were necessary or consequent. Lots of heroes have no connections to their heroics or are fundamentally wary of their status.
And anyways, bravery is small unit stuff and we are talking about a strategy game.

 

[Klausewitz]

Up until the BEF departed from Dunkirk neither the British or French soldiers lacked in a willingness to fight. Mark Connelly and Walter Miller argue in their paper 'The BEF and the Issues of surrender on the Western Front in 1940' that morale and discipline remained generally high for the British soldier. It was only when they were poorly lead or when orders were not clearly defined that the British soldier failed to do his duty. Lord Gort, while withdrawing to the coast, was ordered by London to get back into the fight, but he ignored these orders and continued marching the BEF to the English Channel.

I would argue that that is precisely what makes the British Army a bad army:
If the officers is subpar or absent the whole machine grinds to a halt.
The French Army had a similar problem.
The Germans not so much.
Interesting enough the Soviets suffered less from this than the Western Allies, including the Americans.

Jeffery A. Gunsburg argues in his paper 'The Battle of Gembloux, 14-15 May 1940: The “Bliztkrieg” checked' that the French soldier gave as good as the German soldier and even better. A German surgeon for the 4th Panzer Division commented about the 'marked depression' of the German troops and it was only the next day, and that is after the French withdrew from the Dyle Line, that German morale recovered. German officers recognized the 'dogged resistance of the of the French and North African infantry' at this battle. The battle was won as the French offices had planned.

It is a poor military historian who is unable to find a losing side winning battles and winning them quite clearly.
But Gembloux is a good example for the adage that one should not fight a battle unless one gets something by fighting it one would not get otherwise.
Gembloux was a tactical victoy.
Operational it was a failure. The German bound troops that could have moved against Sedan.
Strategcially it is often cited as inconclusive because it ultimately allowed the British to get away... well, if that is a strategic victory, then congratulations.
What Gembloux shows is that the French would fight well on the defensive, if they had time to properly prepare and if things went according to plan.
They also showed that impressivly in the later stages of the Fall Rot.
That is however not what makes a good army.
Defense is easier, comes more naturally and is easier.
The failure was not just on the highest level, though that is a nice legend on par with the 'All French were in the Resistance' and i think it is equally important.
It is however not strictly true because even when on the defense and out of contact with higher command French units managed to mess up bad at times even when their tactical and operational situation was not bad (again the Panic of Bulson is a nice example).

The Fall of France is not the result of a lack in willingness to fight by the soldiers, or poor officers quality, or poor doctrines, or obsolete equipment issues. It was an issue of failure at the highest level. First, not having a contingency plan for a German breakthrough into Northern France, Second, for not reacting fast enough when it became obvious that the Heer was over running Northern France, and finally the failure of the BEF and French commanders to cooperate in the rapidly deteriorating situation.

Well, i doubt we will come to an agreement there.

 

[Chromos]

Well afaik the french soldiers were known by germans as "quite competent enemies" back from ww1.
And the unwillingness to fight could be seen after certain things happened, but at the same time you have units hold out after the offcial fighting was over.
What about the french with de Gaulle?
The officiers play allways a vital role, and if they look confuse with no idea what to do that will of course affect the morale of the fighting man.

Repeating that frenchmen did overall did not fight "brave/good" is so wrong as to do that for others like Italian and so on.
Armies had different combat effectiveness because of many reasons.

 

[Dinglehoff]

It seems like the general consensus here that the French leadership, with some exceptions, had a breakdown to indecision which caused or exacerbated the collapse.
If that is true a solution might be something like this:
I haven't played HOI 3 and likely never will, but from what I've seen there are chains of command you have to set up with named commanders to put in place over different forces. Paradox could make the player set up those chains again, or have the computer autoassign them, and give each named officer a hidden loyalty stat that influences the response of the officer to player/AI orders. Game developments can raise or lower the stat and it need not effect only France. Officers with low loyalty may fail to carry out orders "promptly" or not at all, fail to send your player orders down through the chain to subordinates, others might write their own orders in the absence of orders from HQ, or ignore orders from higher up. To keep the player from gaming around that with constant changes to leaders, there should be a political point or experience point cost(or something) to replacing these people. The developers could program the AI not to change the leaders only until specified events happen, and have a command chain pre-defined for the AI to use. Determining the factors which influence that stat and implementing that mechanic could be a bigger problem than they care to grapple with.
Total control advocates playing the game will hate that, and there could be a settings option to turn the feature off for player controlled nations.

 

[Jazumir]

Going out on a limb here, with an axiom, that cannot hold to be completely true, but that might hold a grain of truth in it: Maybe, the french army was never really expected to fight, as it was an army of intimidation. Its past, its fame and its size (+maginot) were expected to ensure nobody would try its true fighting value. Everyone who could challange it knew the horrors of modern war and that challanging the french army would come at the cost of millions dead with no gurantee of success - certainly nobody would be crazy enough to try (again). Sort of like the french thought the cold war had already started and that modern armies would be enough deterence for anyone to ever put things on the blade´s edge again (and had it not been for Hitler, this could have actually worked, mind you). What difference would it have made, if all the US-nukes in the cold war had been duds - as long as nobody pressed the red button (or found out about it otherwise)?

I wonder if Gamelin was just bluffing when he said, that he´d give a million, if only he´d be attacked, during the phony war period. Maybe he meant: ´I am totally screwed and the only hope i got, is that the germans daren´t go on the offensive. Better try to bluff my way to a compromise peace, before that happens.´ I mean, they had seen what happenend to poland, and this prompted them with two options: Reform, reform, reform, at the cost of losing the nimbus of ´we have always been prepared for this´, or just keep sitting on that nimbus (which is often directly linked to military careers - ´we have not been waiting for monsineur Huntzinger to start doing our jobs...´), do nothing, and hope the enemy buys into your pretended invulnerability. In Poker: swap 4 or no cards.

Unfortunenately the bluff worked better on the french soldiers, prompting some commanders to rest on past laurels, than it worked on the germans, who went ´all in´ anyways.

 

[RedStinger]

@Axe99 et al.
I know why i did not talk about bravery.
Bravery is halfway between suicidal and stupid (did he charge the machine gun nest because he did not care or because he did realize the danger?!) half of one, 50% of the other and as cloudy a concept as you can get.
And ultimately bravery does not matter.
Sure it makes for nice medal citations and such but what is much more important and what i talked about is morale.
Morale is not charging the machine gun nest.
Morale is fighting in the first place.
And the upside down Dolchstoßlegende of 1940 does not cut it.
What the French Army had, same as in 1914, was a severe lack of leadership and consequently a severe lack of morale and fighting spirit (ask yourself: If your officer gives every indication of not believing the war is winnable or even sensible and you hear talks that your government is already discussing the terms of surrender, would you risk getting yourself shot?). From Top to bottom (and the question where the rot set in also does not help us here) the whole French Army was on morale defense from day one. France was tired of the war before it even started and such things as the Panic of Bulson were the result.

You really seem to believe that the soldiers were not willing to fight whereas all evidences show the contrary. The armistice was decided by Petain and Weygand among a few othe key actors, but this decision was not popular AT ALL within the French Army, from the metropolitan units to the others based in North Africa for example.
Units on the Maginot Line fought until direct orders were issued to them specifically a few days later, and when they had no ammunition. Units in the Loire region resisted even after the Armistice. The army was willing to fight. Saying that France was tired of the war is also only partly true. Several political formations were for the war, and is not for financial reasons France would have mobilized in 1938 and backed the Czech.

Finally, the fact that the Free French fought on after the armistice prove that the French soldiers were willing to fight... On the other hand, if the Germans were so confident about French morale and willingness to fight, they would have rejected the armistice and conquered all of France before even bothering to negociate a peace. The German high command never thought that going up to Dakar would be easy.

 

[bruebottom]

I would argue that that is precisely what makes the British Army a bad army:
If the officers is subpar or absent the whole machine grinds to a halt.
The French Army had a similar problem.
The Germans not so much.
Interesting enough the Soviets suffered less from this than the Western Allies, including the Americans.



It is a poor military historian who is unable to find a losing side winning battles and winning them quite clearly.
But Gembloux is a good example for the adage that one should not fight a battle unless one gets something by fighting it one would not get otherwise.
Gembloux was a tactical victoy.
Operational it was a failure. The German bound troops that could have moved against Sedan.
Strategcially it is often cited as inconclusive because it ultimately allowed the British to get away... well, if that is a strategic victory, then congratulations.
What Gembloux shows is that the French would fight well on the defensive, if they had time to properly prepare and if things went according to plan.
They also showed that impressivly in the later stages of the Fall Rot.
That is however not what makes a good army.
Defense is easier, comes more naturally and is easier.
The failure was not just on the highest level, though that is a nice legend on par with the 'All French were in the Resistance' and i think it is equally important.
It is however not strictly true because even when on the defense and out of contact with higher command French units managed to mess up bad at times even when their tactical and operational situation was not bad (again the Panic of Bulson is a nice example).

Well, i doubt we will come to an agreement there.

First of all, on a previous posting you said there was a breakdown on morale and a lack of willingness to fight. This sounds like you are saying the Allied soldiers had a lack of willingness to fight. Now it sounds like you are in agreement that the Allied soldiers lacked the willingness to fight only when it was the result of leadership failure on the battle field. That is the point that both authors, who I quoted, are tying to make. Too which you referred to one of them as a poor historian.

Second, Gunsburg's point about the Battle of Gembloux was that it was a tactical victory, just as you commented, and he does says in his paper that the German did not learn from their lesson as they repeated this mistake in Russia.

Third, you say that this battle is often cited as a source 'as inconclusive', yet you do not even mention any authors who say this. You also give credit that this was a strategic victory as it gave the British time 'to get away'. I understood that the withdraw was Lord Gort's own decisions and not an order from above. He was even order to get back into the fight from the war office in London. How is this a strategic success when the person in charge is not following orders?

Fourth, you said “failure was not just on the highest level...”, but then you leave me hanging with what those other reasons are. It sounds like you are in agreement with me on the part of the highest level, but you then finish off with saying “I doubt we will come to an agreement there.” If we're not in somewhat of agreement, then what exactly do you believe caused France to fall?

 

[scroggin]

I would argue that that is precisely what makes the British Army a bad army:
If the officers is subpar or absent the whole machine grinds to a halt.

The problem in the British Army was that it was still quite class ridden this limited the pool of men that officers were selected from and meant that lots of very good potential officers weren't coming up from the ranks. The cause of this was In the selection process. You had to have come from an elite school, and the officers wages weren't enough to live on except in the indian army. This limited officers to those who had come from a background of privilege, who's parents could afford to put them through expensive schools, and those who had an alternative source of income to live on. If someone like Rommel turned up in the British Army he wouldn't have even gotten to be an officer in the first place.
One of the reasons why Cromwell's "New Model Army" had been able to thrash the royalists was because it had been run on a meritocratic basis rather than giving privilege to the upper classes. After Cromwell's passing the British Army had deteriorated to the point, where you needed to buy your commission in the Napoleonic era. Promotion was entirely based on wealth and getting a good officer was a lottery. The British Army had improved since then, but not enough. There were still far too many incompetent officers, that owed their position to a background of privilege, and good social networks.

This situation improved during WWII.
When Montgomery was in charge of the British Army after the war he Improved this situation entirely. Monty was one of the few exceptions to the background of privilege. A school teacher had paid all his tuition fees through school and he had been lucky enough to get selected for the Indian army.

 

[Opanashc]

The problem in the British Army was that it was still quite class ridden this limited the pool of men that officers were selected from and meant that lots of very good potential officers weren't coming up from the ranks.

That's why they created NCOs.

 

[keynes2.0]

NCOs, the solution to officers.