How important were personality, ego and personal relationships to British Air Land Integration in the Western Desert and Normandy? Air Land Integration (ALI) in World War II was forged in the Western Desert by the British Army and Royal Air Force. It was instrumental to British victory in the Western Desert and Allied success in Normandy. The three men that made it work, Tedder, Coningham and Montgomery, did so through their initially close personal relationships. However, these personal relationships started to fall apart soon after success at El-Alamein and were calamitous by the time of the Normandy invasion. This paper examines how important ego, personality and personal relationships were in making ALI so successful. It concludes that while they were key for the successful introduction of ALI in the Western Desert, they were less so in Normandy. This was because the three men had been promoted to such high rank that their dislike for each other would have far wider impact than on just ALI and that other men had taken over the day-to-day responsibility for the effective delivery of ALI and they had good personal relationships. https://www.raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/c...tegration-in-the-western-desert-and-normandy/
