Hayek's Heroes.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.
• Position: Review

The greatest idea of the 20th century paid off on its biggest day.

To close out this century, I decided to read a book about what was arguably its most important day: June 6, 1944. Hey, call me a party animal. But you, too, might want to welcome the millennium by checking out 1994's D-Day: The Climactic Battle of World War II, by historian Stephen Ambrose.

Even today we think of the Wehrmacht as a mighty force. Certainly, its well-trained, well-armed, battle-tested soldiers struck a fearsome pose at Normandy, the most heavily fortified coastline in history. The Allies viewed the Germans as an unforgiving piece of iron.

So doubts ran high as 175,000 Allied troops - Yanks, Brits, Canadians, and Aussies - traversed the English Channel. Could the children of democracy prove themselves warriors? Would they freeze in mortal combat? Adolf Hitler, who slept until noon on D-Day, believed the disciplined defenders of Third Reich would crush the soft soldiers of the liberal West.

Yet Ambrose shows that it was the rigid Nazi war command that fell apart on D-Day. The Allied soldier kept his head while all about him were (all too often) losing theirs. Such resilience proved necessary. The best-laid plans of the Supreme Allied Command were almost immediately rendered moot; the massive landing amounted to a chaotic dumping of troops into a very hostile environment. Allied forces landed out of position, units were a shambles, and radio communications were knocked out.

But Ambrose identifies a crucial difference between the German and Allied fighting men. The Germans were hamstrung by sweeping orders issued from far away. In contrast, the Allies relied on mid-level and junior-grade officers issuing impromptu commands based on facts gleaned firsthand.

There is no more dramatic example of F.A. Hayek's seminal discovery: the importance of dispersed information - "knowledge of time and place." Hayek, who was to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1974, published his memorable essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," in the American Economic Review just the year after D-Day. It explained the motive force driving Adam Smith's "invisible hand" by noting that great efficiencies resulted when millions of dispersed individuals, motivated by market incentives, utilized the information uniquely available to them to make decisions. It's why a decentralized competitive system beats a top-down bureaucracy, even when the planners are "experts."

The bloody...