Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (19 page)

IN MARCH 1943
, while Eisenhower was reorganizing his forces in the wake of the humiliating American defeat at Kasserine Pass, a relatively
obscure British major general named Frederick Morgan learned that he had been selected to coordinate “plans for cross-Channel operations this year and next year.” No one—Morgan included—was quite sure how seriously to take the assignment. After all, one of the elements of British strategy was a massive disinformation campaign, subsequently code-named Fortitude, a vast conspiracy involving bogus radio transmissions, nonexistent units, and even double agents, that was designed to keep the Germans confused and off balance. And, as his new orders made clear, one of Morgan’s responsibilities was to conduct “an elaborate camouflage and deception scheme” to tie down German forces along the Channel coast. On the other hand, his orders also specified two other objectives: “a return to the Continent in the event of German disintegration” and the development of plans for “a full scale assault against the Continent in 1944 as early as possible.” Of course, having three assignments somewhat muddied the waters and led Morgan to wonder what had priority: the misdirection campaign, the possible but entirely contingent emergency operation, or planning for an actual full-scale assault. Whatever the intentions of those who had written his orders, Morgan had no option but to take all three charges seriously.
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The eldest son of a middle-class businessman in Kent, Morgan had not attended Sandhurst—the Royal Military Academy, designed to turn “gentlemen cadets” into line officers, and the school where Churchill had won his commission as a young subaltern. Instead, Morgan had matriculated at Woolrich, the military school for artillery and engineering officers. Rather than focus on leadership and tactics, his curriculum had centered on trigonometry and engineering. His background and scientific training set him apart from the scions of the aristocracy who dominated the higher ranks of the British Army, and in class-conscious Britain, that mattered. At least he looked the part. Forty-nine years old in 1943, Morgan might have been conjured by central casting in Hollywood to play the role of a British officer. He was slim and pale with sandy hair—light brown with hints of red—a fine straight nose, a brush mustache just beginning to gray, and, like Eisenhower, was seldom to be seen without a cigarette held between the first two fingers of his left hand. He approached
problems with seriousness of purpose, an organized mind, a professional commitment, and a wry sense of humor.
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With Eisenhower in Africa, Morgan took over the available space in Norfolk House and began to assemble a staff. The group had to have a name—an identity—and it was Morgan who came up with COSSAC, an acronym for “Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander,” though no one knew yet who that commander would be. Not only was it logical, but it served a secondary purpose of contributing to the disinformation campaign, since many individuals outside Norfolk House assumed that the unit must have something to do with the Russians, who, after all, were the ones who had Cossacks.

Morgan and his nascent COSSAC team took up their multiple and even contradictory assignments in April and May. As part of the disinformation campaign, they sought to encourage the German assumption that the Allies might assault either Norway or the Pas de Calais in France that summer. For Norway, they invented a new and entirely fictional force—the British Fourth Army—which was supposedly headquartered at Edinburgh, and they coordinated the release of hundreds of coded radio signals that implied both its existence and its purpose. It was subtly done and may have helped convince Hitler to keep a substantial force in Norway to defend it from this phantom army. For France, the COSSAC team managed a program of “controlled leakage” to convince the Germans that yet another fictional army—the British Sixth Army—was encamped around Luton, north of London, and preparing to attack Calais. It was only partially successful. To be sure, the disinformation campaign kept the Germans guessing, but in December 1943, Vice Admiral Friedrich Rieve of the Kriegsmarine speculated in his official war diary that “the Seine River estuary as well as the Cotentin Peninsula” constituted the most likely target for Allied “amphibious assaults on the greatest scale.”
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In addition to these impostures, COSSAC also developed a plan to move quickly onto the continent in case of a German collapse. Though such a thing seemed remote in the spring of 1943, Britons remembered how swiftly the Germans had fallen apart in 1918, and Churchill in particular never quite abandoned the notion that another such collapse might
occur at any moment. If it did, and if the western Allies were unready to reenter the Continent, Stalin’s armies might march through Berlin and all the way to the Channel—a prospect nearly as appalling as leaving Hitler in charge. So Morgan’s team assembled a plan for a kind of updated Sledgehammer that they dubbed Roundhammer—a conflation of Roundup and Sledgehammer.
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It was the third assignment—the creation and development of a plan for a full-scale invasion of continental Europe in the spring of 1944—that dominated the COSSAC agenda. It is unclear how seriously Churchill intended this charge to be. Neither he nor the Combined Chiefs gave Morgan any specific guidance; Morgan did not even have access to Eisenhower’s 1942 plan for Roundup. For all practical purposes, he had to start from scratch with no preconditions or limitations. Professional that he was, he simply got on with it.

He began by identifying an appropriate landing beach for the assault and then calculating the number of divisions needed to secure it. For this he needed detailed maps, and the CCS had not supplied him with these, either. Morgan had to send his aide to scrounge around the London bookshops for Michelin travel maps. These were then cut up and taped together onto the wall at Norfolk House. The resulting montage, Morgan later claimed, triggered an epiphany. By spreading out the coastal maps from Spain to Holland, he saw that instead of being an island on the periphery of Europe, England was really at the enter of a giant arc of possible targets. Nevertheless, after much study, Morgan and his team narrowed their focus to two sites on the French north coast: the Pas de Calais, where the English Channel narrowed to only nineteen miles, and the coast of Normandy east of the Cotentin peninsula, an area known as Calvados and famous for its potent apple brandy.
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The advantage of the Pas de Calais was that the beachhead could be covered by land-based air from Allied bases in East Anglia, and the short distance between Dover and Calais meant a quick turnaround for scarce Allied landing craft. The downside was that these very factors made it the obvious target, and because of that, the Pas de Calais was the most heavily defended stretch of coastline in German-occupied France. As for Normandy, it had
good beaches and nearby ports, but it was farther away, which meant that Allied planes would have a shorter time over the beaches and landing craft would have a longer turnaround, effectively doubling the number of vessels needed. Then, too, the terrain behind the beaches at Normandy was carved up by hedgerows in a landscape that was known locally as the
bocage
country. That would make a breakout from the landing beaches more difficult.

To choose between these alternatives, Morgan assigned teams of officers to make the best possible case for each site. They engaged in a kind of parliamentary debate as each team argued its case and defended it against verbal challenges. It was a useful way to bring out the strengths and weaknesses of each site, though it also bred a spirit of competition between the study groups as their passionate arguments transformed them into genuine advocates rather than merely briefers. In the end, Morgan concluded that despite the obvious geographical advantages of the Pas de Calais, Normandy offered the best chance to spring a surprise.
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The second issue Morgan had to deal with was how many Allied divisions would be needed. The coast of Normandy could accommodate only so many men at a time, and that necessarily limited the initial landing to only a few divisions. The more important question for the planners was the total number of divisions needed to complete the conquest of occupied France and drive on to Berlin. Back during the Arcadia conference, Churchill had suggested that such a campaign would require forty divisions (twenty British and twenty American); the Eisenhower-Marshall Roundup plan had called for forty-eight divisions (eighteen British and thirty American). In his plan, Morgan envisioned no fewer than one hundred divisions (fifteen British and eighty-five American). Assuming a division strength of fifteen thousand men, Morgan’s plan called for the deployment of one and a half million men. It was stunningly ambitious. In the entire war from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, the United States managed to create a total of only eighty-nine Army divisions, and Morgan’s preliminary plan called for the deployment of eighty-five of them in a single operation. The monumental scale of his plan contributed to the
perception by some, both inside and outside Norfolk House, that Morgan and his team were not serious.
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Indeed, that perception—that Morgan and his COSSAC team were part of the disinformation campaign rather than a legitimate planning group—contributed to Morgan’s most intractable problem, which was that many in the British military bureaucracy did not take him or his command seriously. By now detailed planning was well under way for Husky, the invasion of Sicily, which was set for July. After that, who knew: maybe Sardinia, Greece, Italy, even the Dodecanese Islands had been mentioned. By contrast, Morgan’s project seemed both distant and uncertain, another time-consuming exercise, perhaps even (as Morgan himself often assumed) a hoax. Such doubts bred what Morgan later called a “corrosive and potentially explosive” mood at Norfolk House. Despite that, there was no alternative except to work as hard as they could whatever the final result of their labors.
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EISENHOWER
’
S LONG-DELAYED VICTORY
in Tunisia prompted yet another round of high-level talks about what to do after the presumed success of Husky. In mid-May, Churchill and the British chiefs of staff flew again to Washington for another conference, this one code-named Trident. It was Churchill who led off and by asking the key question: “
TORCH
was over,
HUSKY
was near, what should come next?” Of course Churchill never asked a question unless he already had the answer ready, and he quickly supplied it: “To get Italy out of the war by whatever means might be best.”
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At every top-level conference so far, the British had come better prepared than the Americans, arriving with both elaborate arguments and detailed plans already in hand, and inevitably those plans had become the
basis for ensuing discussion. This time, however, the Americans were ready for them. For one thing, Marshall had managed to secure an agreement from Roosevelt that their principal objective during Trident would be “to pin down the British to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe at the earliest practicable date.” In addition, Wedemeyer, still smarting from his defeat at Casablanca, had prepared a set of detailed plans of his own. And finally, the relationship between the western Allies had undergone a subtle but significant sea change in the four months since Casablanca. During the Arcadia conference in January 1942, and even during the Casablanca meeting a year later, Britain had significantly more men under arms and engaged with the enemy than the United States, despite a population less than one-third that of its bigger and richer ally. When Commonwealth units were included, the United States was very much the junior partner in terms of active combat troops. Not until the middle of 1944 did the number of U.S. soldiers in uniform begin to rival that of its British ally. Nevertheless, by May 1943, the balance was beginning to shift, and American productivity—always the Allies’ trump card—was surging dramatically. In his opening remarks at Trident, Roosevelt made a point of noting that the industrial output of the United States surpassed that of Germany and Japan combined. He hardly needed to add that many of the products of that industrial cornucopia were being sent to England under Lend-Lease.
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Churchill knew he would need all of his eloquence to convince the Americans to continue the peripheral strategy he preferred. He opened by noting how much things had changed in a year. The last time he had been hosted in the White House, news had arrived of the fall of Tobruk; now all of Africa was in Allied hands. Sicily would fall soon, and the next step, clearly, was the invasion of Italy to take her out of the war altogether. If Churchill expected that Roosevelt would applaud such a goal, he was surely disappointed when the American president disputed Churchill’s assertion that the fall of Italy would provide succor to the Russians. Indeed, Roosevelt suggested that an Allied occupation of Italy might have the opposite effect, releasing German troops from the Italian boot for service on the Eastern Front. Moreover, the president revealed an agenda of his own. “
ROUNDUP
and
SLEDGEHAMMER
have been talked about for two years,” he
said, “but as yet none of these operations had been accepted as a concrete plan to be carried out at a certain time.” While he conceded that there was “no possibility” of a cross-Channel operation that year, he declared that such an operation “should be decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.” In a direct challenge to Churchill’s strategic vision, Roosevelt asserted that “the most effective way of forcing Germany to fight was by carrying out a cross-Channel operation.”
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