Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff unwillingly came to a final compromise agreement on January 19, 1943. They would invade Sicily (Operation HUSKY), but also continue building manpower in England for a thrust across the English Channel if “the German strength in France decreases.” Brooke finally acknowledged at Casablanca that “we could definitely count on re-entering the continent in 1944 on a large scale.” However, he did not say whether this meant Italy or France! The Americans were now adamant about no further delays in invading northwestern Europe.28

  At the Trident conference in Washington, DC (May 12–27, 1943), British opposition to a cross-channel invasion appeared to soften. A provisional date of May 1, 1944, was set for the cross-channel invasion ROUNDUP, now renamed OVERLORD. This was later confirmed at the Quebec Quadrant Conference (August 17–24, 1943). Much to the British dismay the Americans also added Operation ANVIL. This was a simultaneous landing in southern France to coincide with OVERLORD.29

  Meanwhile Allied battlefield successes were mounting. On May 12, 1943, all Axis forces surrendered in North Africa.30 Sicily was then invaded by the Allies on July 10. By August 17 the last German soldier was banished from the island. These positive Allied developments also precipitated an anti-war coup d'état in Italy that overthrew Benito Mussolini on July 25. The Italians then asked for an armistice.31

  This string of successes and the relentless Allied bombing of factories and rail yards around Paris raised hopes in France that the Allies would soon launch a cross-channel invasion from England. When would the Allies attack? In the fall of 1943, an ironic joke circulated widely across France: “Stalin's army crosses Germany, then France, until it reaches the English Channel. Taking up a loudspeaker, the leader of the USSR bellows across the Channel to the British and Americans: ‘You can come over now!’”32

  The Axis collapse was so rapid that it gave the Allies many military opportunities. For once they jointly agreed on an immediate plan for an assault on mainland Italy. On September 3, the Allies crossed the narrow Straits of Messina (Operation BAYTOWN). US general Mark Clark's Fifth Army then launched an amphibious invasion at Salerno on September 9 (Operation AVALANCHE). Simultaneously, British general Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army landed at Toronto (Operation SLAP STICK) in the Puglia region.

  The Germans rapid response to these assaults moved additional armored and infantry divisions into Italy. They strongly contested the Allied Salerno landing before successfully withdrawing to the heavily fortified Gustav defensive line. This stretched across the mountainous width of the Italian peninsula. Here the Germans would halt the Allied armies until May 1944.33

  During the autumn and winter of 1943, preparation for OVERLORD advanced. Yet behind the unified Allied front, the British grew increasingly apprehensive. In a cable to Marshall, Churchill stated, “We are carrying out our contract, but I pray God it does not cost us dear.”34

  On November 11, a British Chiefs of Staff memo recorded, “We must not regard Overlord on a fixed date as the pivot of our whole strategy…. The German strength in France next Spring may…be something that makes Overlord impossible [or] Rankin not only practicable but essential.”35

  The Americans reacted angrily to the British advocacy of RANKIN at this advanced date. A US chiefs of staff memorandum that autumn expressed their deep dismay:

  It is apparent…that the British…now feel Overlord is no longer necessary…continued Mediterranean operations coupled with POINT BLANK [major aerial bombing of German strategic war infrastructure]…will be sufficient to…[assure] her military defeat without undergoing what they consider an almost certain “bloodbath.”36

  Brooke finally had driven the Americans to their breaking point. Marshall was determined to force the British into a final non-revocable commitment to Overlord.

  This opportunity presented itself at the Tehran Conference in Iran (November 28–December 1, 1943). This was the first joint meeting of the “Big Three”—Joseph Stalin, Winston S. Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Stalin was impatient for major military relief through the long-promised Anglo-American second front in France. Without actually knowing about RANKIN, he began to suspect that a plot existed to weaken Russia's armies by making them face the brunt of the German military machine. Churchill still supported the idea of gradually wearing down the Germans and avoiding potentially high British casualties from such an invasion. Roosevelt backed US military policy that was still committed to a major invasion as soon as possible.

  The Tehran Conference gave Stalin's generals a chance to pin the British down on their OVERLORD commitment. With Americans present, Russian marshal K. E. Voroshilov, a member of the State Defense Committee, pressed Brooke by asking him if the American stance on OVERLORD's importance coincided with British thinking. Brooke equivocated repeating the old arguments about the need to drain off German divisions in France through ancillary military operations.37

  The Russians pressed on the Normandy operation remorselessly. During another session at which Roosevelt was present, Stalin looked at Churchill across the table and asked, “Do the Prime Minister and the British Staff really believe in Overlord, or are they only saying so to reassure the Soviet Union?” Churchill hedged saying that under agreed conditions they would attack the Germans with “every sinew of our strength.”38 Stalin continued to press harder, demanding an exact invasion date, and the naming of the OVERLORD supreme commander.

  At Tehran the Allies finally agreed to an OVERLORD launch date sometime in May 1944, and a supporting operation in the south of France. The naming of the supreme commander was promised in the near future.39

  Churchill and Brooke had been backed into a corner by the Russians and Americans and finally ran out of maneuvering room. Major General John Kennedy, a British planner, later conceded, “Had we had our way, I think there can be little doubt that the invasion of France would not have been done in 1944.”40

  Even after the Tehran Conference, Churchill tried to get OVERLORD postponed for some more assaults “around the ring.” In April 1944, he told an American general that if he were planning OVERLORD, it would not be executed until the Allies had retaken Norway, invaded the Aegean islands, and secured Turkey's support.41

  After interminable delays all the Allies had finally accepted the OVERLORD concept. The die was cast! It had been a hard, bruising process.

  Now began an even harder phase. Appointing OVERLORD's leadership and successfully planning the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted in the history of warfare.

  “We had worked like beavers for months.”

  —General Frederick Morgan, author of the original invasion plan1

  THE COSSACS ARE COMING!

  Though the Allies had agreed to an invasion in northwest Europe, this was only the beginning of their prolonged struggle to determine where and when to launch D-Day. At Casablanca the British were successful in securing the postponement of a cross-channel attack and substituting an agreement to mount Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. To appease the Americans, Winston Churchill suggested appointing a commander for the invasion of northwestern Europe. He proposed that a member of the British Chiefs of Staff be named as a temporary deputy commander.

  Marshall liked the idea. While Churchill thought this was a harmless consolation prize, Marshall perceived that appointing a deputy commander or a chief of staff gave the invasion planning a new lease on life. On January 22, 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered such an appointment and an independent US-British staff to plan the future amphibious assault.

  In March a relatively unknown lieutenant general, Frederick Morgan, was appointed chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander designate (i.e., not yet appointed). As commander of the British I Corps, Morgan had gained significant experience in operational planning. Brigadier General Ray Barker was made his American deputy. Their staff was built from people who already had been planning the buildup of Allied soldiers in England for the cross-channel invasion.2

  Fig.
2.1. Lieutenant General Sir Frederick E. Morgan. (© Imperial War Museums [EA 33078])

  Morgan was given the bulky files already developed by the British since 1942 containing plans for cross-channel operations. He was ordered to plan what came next for 1943 and 1944 and develop an outline for the British Chiefs of Staff.

  Morgan found little enthusiasm from the British military establishment. They didn't take his organization seriously. This operation was assigned space in Norfolk House on St. James Square in London. Morgan was very aware that the building was considered a jinx because of its prior history. It was thought to be a symbol of lost causes. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had beheaded several members of the Norfolk family, its original owners, for high treason because of their refusal to renounce Catholicism.

  Initially it was unclear to Morgan how much of his assignment was just a smoke screen for hiding British intransigence. The first part of his orders was to conduct an elaborate disinformation campaign to confuse the Germans on the Allied invasion intentions (Operation COCKADE). This subsequently became Operation FORTITUDE.

  Morgan was also charged to prepare for two other contingencies: (1) “a return to the Continent in the event of German disintegration” (Operation RANKIN), and (2) “a full scale assault against the Continent in 1944 as early as possible.”3 No one had told Morgan what had priority, so he began the implementation of all three assignments.

  Morgan began calling himself COSSAC, taken from the first letters of his new title. This was meant as a joke. However the name stuck.4

  The third assignment became the central focus of COSSAC. The most immediate issue was to select a suitable landing area for the cross-channel invasion. The Combined Operations Command (COC) headed by Lord Louis Mountbatten had experience with this problem, as it had been charged with launching multiple raids along the coastlines of Nazi-occupied Europe. The COC conducted missions of various sizes mainly designed to sabotage key enemy assets.

  In 1942 a more ambitious operation was planned to determine whether it was possible to quickly capture a major port with its facilities largely remaining undamaged. The port of Dieppe in France was selected as the site for an exploratory foray that was supposed to be executed in less than one day.

  On August 13, 1942, over six thousand troops, mostly Canadian forces but also Royal Marine Commandos and a small contingent of US rangers, stormed ashore at Dieppe in a dawn raid. By early morning half were dead, wounded, or captured. The rest withdrew after this humiliating defeat. Only about 2,500 returned to England.5 It was an appalling slaughter.

  Dieppe weighed heavily in the future calculations of both the German and Allied military planners. It convinced many of the German generals that the future invasion could be defeated at the water's edge. They also came to believe that the Allies’ target of choice would be the capture of a major seaport in order to keep the invasion properly supplied. In their subsequent building of Festung Europa's (Fortress Europe) fortifications, the Germans tended to concentrate these defenses in regions around major channel seaports: Calais, Antwerp, Dunkirk, Le Havre, Boulogne, and others.

  However, the Germans drew the wrong conclusions from Dieppe. This was only partially later rectified by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's energetic defensive efforts that we will examine in a later chapter.

  Morgan's COSSAC planners also learned important lessons from the Dieppe debacle and other amphibious operations in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. First, they could not expect to capture a major port intact in an early assault. From Dieppe came the idea of constructing a portable harbor. Second, a massive air and naval bombardment was mandatory to soften up the German defenses. Third, a specially trained and equipped marine assault force was required to get and stay ashore. New tactics and techniques were proven under fire, and a new generation of landing craft and equipment for such operations was developed.6

  INVASION SITE DECISION

  In the end the COSSAC planners winnowed the choice of an invasion site to two areas: the Pas-de-Calais and the coast of Normandy west of the Seine estuary. Pas-de-Calais was nearer to Berlin, but Normandy offered better anchorages. Both offered good inland-access roads and shorelines interspersed with wide, sandy beaches framed by a mixture of cliff and shingle.

  But there was no clear-cut choice. Morgan feared that the inefficiency of the British planning machinery, interservice rivalry, and the dead hand of British bureaucracy would impose a crippling delay in reaching a decision.7 As previously mentioned, Lord Mountbatten was head of the Combined Operations Command (COC) that had conducted British raids along the coasts of Nazi-occupied Europe. He was related to the royal family and was a close personal friend of Churchill. It was the prime minister's idea to establish the COC, and Churchill helped to ensure Mountbatten's appointment as its commander. Due to his political and social connections at the highest level, Mountbatten was able to assemble a formidable group of military commanders to attend a brainstorming program at his COC training headquarters at Largs in Scotland. What became known as the Rattle Conference (June 28–July 2, 1943) was intended as a COC training course for senior officers. Instead its seminar sessions mapped out the potential invasion points. It was chaired by Mountbatten with buoyant confidence and enthusiasm, and consensus was hammered out on the place and methods for the landing on the continent.

  Rattle became known as the “Field of the Cloth of Gold Conference” because Mountbatten attracted so many high-ranking officers. There were twenty generals, eight admirals, eleven air marshals and air commodores, plus numerous brigadiers. Of those attending, five were Canadian and fifteen were American.8

  Mountbatten interspersed these planning sessions with rousing pipe-band performances and champagne suppers. But Rattle got the job done.

  The senior Anglo-American officers chose Normandy. This site offered the potential capture of two major ports—Cherbourg and Le Havre. It also included the possibility of capturing the ports along the coast of Brittany, just to the west of Normandy. Pas-de-Calais, though closer to the German border, offered none of these vital logistical plums in support of a long-term campaign to defeat Germany.9

  Morgan's orders were to complete the monumental task of turning the voluminous plans and related memorandums into a detailed operational plan for the invasion by August 1, 1943. Before that deadline, Morgan was to present a preliminary report to the British Chiefs of Staff. But Churchill insisted on seeing the plan before anyone else!10

  The old American code name ROUNDUP had been discarded. Morgan sent one of his senior deputies, Major Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, to the Inter Services Security Board (ISSB) to assign a new code name. These code names were carefully collated to avoid duplication and compiled so no similar-sounding code names would be assigned to future operations. All this effort was to avoid confusion over the Allies’ secret operations.

  When Hesketh returned he reported to Morgan that the one code word then available was “Mothball.” At that time the Allies had numerous European and Pacific military operations taking all the other potential names and only Mothball was left!11

  On hearing this, Morgan knew Churchill would rebel. He would never willingly swallow an “Operation Mothball.”

  When Morgan presented his plan and code word—Mothball—to the prime minister, Churchill went right through the roof. “Do you mean to tell me that those bloody fools want our grandchildren 50 years from now to be calling the operation that liberated Europe Operation Mothball? If they can't come up with a better code name for our landing than that, I damn will pick the code name myself.”12

  Morgan said that Churchill “glowered for a moment” and then shouted, “Overlord. We shall call it Overlord.” That is how the greatest D-Day of them all came to be known to posterity as Operation OVERLORD.13 It was Churchill's most important personal contribution to the invasion plan.

  NEVER PREVIOUSLY ATTEMPTED IN HISTORY

  In his newly titled initial report of July 15, 1943, Morgan wrote, “An operation of the magnitude of Opera
tion Overlord has never previously been attempted in history. It is fraught with hazards, both in nature and magnitude, which do not obtain in any other theatre of the present world war.”14

  The COSSAC plan's mission was based on the directive from the Combined Chiefs of Staff: “You will enter the Continent of Europe and, in conjunction with other Allied Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and destruction of her Armed Forces.”15

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1943, a team of about forty British and American officers with the rank of colonel and above conducted a detailed analysis of every aspect of OVERLORD. Those continuous meetings were held at Norfolk House, the COSSAC headquarters.

  The growing mutual trust among the members of the Anglo-American planning staff was apparent during a transatlantic telephone conference call from London with US military staff in Washington, DC. A small group participated at each site. At its conclusion a senior US Army general warned, “For Christ's sake, don't tell the British,” regarding the information they had shared. Loud laughter broke out at the other end of the line. The general asked what was so funny. He learned that London group included two British generals and an admiral.16

  After Morgan and his COSSAC staff finished the OVERLORD plan, they celebrated with a high-spirited party held on the top floor of the Norfolk House. To accommodate both British and American tastes, it featured an American swing band and a British dance orchestra. Morgan recalled, “All entered wholeheartedly into the occasion.”17

  Although Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery and his staff later belittled the initial COSSAC plan, its research memoranda provides solid evidence of the broad range of challenges they screened and debated, and for which they actually conducted feasibility tests. For example, they sent Royal Navy canoeists close inshore by submarine and landed them to take surface samples of the proposed landing beaches. This was to determine whether the terrain could withstand the weight of landing craft, tanks, jeeps, and other vehicles to preclude them ending up bogged down in a mire as what happened at Dieppe.18