Frederick E. Morgan

It is one thing to manoeuvre freely when secure in the knowledge that the man behind the gun is doing his best to miss us, but it is quite another thing when that same man is doing his utmost to liquidate you.

Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Edgeworth Morgan KCB (5 February 1894 – 19 March 1967) was a British Army officer in the Second World War, famous as the original planner of Operation Overlord.

Quotes

Sound opinion is not the exclusive prerogative of those who are paid to give it.

• As those of us know who have taken part in battle, it is one thing to manoeuvre freely when secure in the knowledge that the man behind the gun is doing his best to miss us, but it is quite another thing when that same man is doing his utmost to liquidate you.
  • Comment to his staff officers, on the crucial distinction between intensive battle training and actual battle (19 May 1943), quoted in History of COSSAC (May 1944) by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

• Sound opinion is not the exclusive prerogative of those who are paid to give it.
  • Overture to Overlord (1950), p. 51

• I had won notable victories on paper and the map with the aid of greaseproof pencils and a typewriter. In the course of this very campaign, if one may dignify the disaster thus, I had seen French generals create imaginary "masses of manoeuvre" with strokes of the crayon and dispose of hostile concentrations, that unahappily were on the ground as well as on the map, with sweeps of the eraser. Who was I to criticise them, hero as I was of a hundred "Chinagraph wars" of make-believe?
  • Peace and War: A Soldier's Life (1961), p. 138