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“NO SUBSTANTIAL LANDING IN FRANCE UNLESS WE ARE GOING TO STAY”

Shortly after taking command of 1st Corps in May 1942, Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan found that it was becoming difficult “to work up much enthusiasm in the preparations to meet so unlikely an event as a German seaborn invasion.”¹ To rekindle interest and enthusiasm in the professional lives of his troops and subordinate commanders, who “had had their fill of manning coast defenses,” he proposed that 1st Corps consider taking the offensive. What better offensive action to take than to plan a crossing of the Rhine and invading Germany?

As he wrote the outline for this map study / command exercise, he found himself “confronted with the problem of how to get 1st British Corps from Yorkshire to Hamburg and points east.”

Appalled by the immense difficulties of such an operation that the briefest consideration made only too obvious, this being an affair of the imagination only, we decided to solve the problem by means of a simple assumption. Starting with the heartening passage, “The British Army having successfully invaded Germany from the Northwest … ” our prospectus went on to describe a situation of reasonable orthodoxy. But it was a refreshing change to be toying with German place names rather than those of our own home towns.²

Morgan was right to be appalled. There wasn’t much history of large-scale amphibious assaults or of combined operations in the British terminology of the time (attempted landings from the sea against prepared enemy defenses) in the two hundred years or so before World War II. The one most people could remember, the Gallipoli campaign, didn’t inspire confidence in the concept. Nor had attempts in Norway or Dakar in the current war done much to rebalance the record.

It’s true that there were landings from the sea throughout history. The British had a particular fondness for “descents” or raids, but those were, in the main, unopposed landings, seeking to “hit ’em where they ain’t” followed by either a brief action and return to the sea or by a set battle, as in the case of Quebec during the Seven Years’ War, or at New York in the American War of Independence.³ How to “kick the door in,” fight one’s way ashore, and stay with a modern army was a different matter. What could be said was that amphibious operations on a larger scale than ever seen or imagined were the only way for the Allies to take the fight to both the Germans and the Japanese. While there was some study of the subject before World War II, how to do it was largely worked out during the war as operations were conducted—and there was no one agreed-on way of doing it.

In 1938 the British created a modest establishment, the Inter-Service Training and Development Centre, staffed by four officers: a Royal Navy captain, a British Army major, a Royal Air Force wing commander, and a captain of the Royal Marines. Their task, as then captain L. E. H. Maund, the “chairman” of the center, put it, was to show that an assault from the sea “was practical, to indicate how the assault should go and to design and build the equipment that would make it practical.”⁴

By the time war broke out they had managed to design and have built a small number of landing craft of various types, primarily for the raids they envisioned would occur. They had given consideration to what kind of beach organization there should be to handle troops and supplies that had landed, experimented with raids launched from submarines, examined what types of vessels could be converted into transports or assault ships, and put forth some general theories of operation, mainly regarding small “hit-and-run” operations with an emphasis on gaining tactical surprise, landing at night, and, consequently, the minimal use of naval gunfire support.

In 1940 and again in 1941 they placed what were at the time large orders with Andrew Higgins of New Orleans, whose boats were also being ordered by the U.S. Marines. Higgins, the inheritor of a great deal of money as well as a timber business, was a trained naval architect and had a great deal of experience building fast, light, wooden boats that were at home in the bayous and that had been highly desired by rumrunners and bootleggers during Prohibition.⁵ The British preferred Higgins’ thirty-six-foot version while the Marines opted for the thirty-two-foot size, the British and Higgins believing that the larger boat was a better sea boat and had the advantage of carrying a few more men.

For U.S. armed forces, the Marines had spent the most time thinking about amphibious warfare, beginning with America’s pivot toward Asia that started in the 1920s. As with most projects in the interwar years, training and exercises were modest, as were the budgets, and much of what was considered was essentially theoretical. The Marines published the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations in 1934, which was adopted by the Navy in 1937; with modifications, it remained “the book” during World War II. The Marines rejected the idea of night landings and surprise, believing that the difficulties outweighed the advantages. Instead, they opted for the employment of naval gunfire support, close air support, and ultimately days or weeks of preparatory bombardment. “There was no ambiguity in the doctrine. Surprise was not significant. Battles were, ideally, to be won with the deliberate, methodical, sustained use of overwhelming firepower, followed up by a direct, mass infantry assault.”⁶ This was to be World War II in the central Pacific.

The U.S. Army was late in considering amphibious war. Notwithstanding the fact that projection of American power was going to require shipping to move forces to operational theaters, the Army was initially focused on hemispheric defense. As with so much else, Dunkirk and the fall of France changed the basic assumptions. While there had been limited exercises with the Navy in the 1930s, efforts became serious starting in 1941. In 1942 Army units that were to be part of TORCH conducted amphibious training in the Caribbean and on the Atlantic coast with the 1st Marine Division and with the Navy’s Amphibious Corps. “The Army’s experience in working with the Navy and Marine Corps did not persuade it that the Marine Corps doctrine was the best solution to amphibious warfare.”⁷ Indeed, Gen. George Patton reported after the TORCH landings, “Daylight landings are too costly and will be successful only against weak or no opposition.”⁸

Obviously, there are differences between isolating and then capturing an island and invading somewhere on a continental shoreline. Still, there are viable options from which to choose and questions to answer—daylight or night, how long a preparatory bombardment, how to employ tactical and strategic aircraft, can isolation of the invasion area be achieved and how, use of airborne troops, speed of buildup, and so on. The amphibious assaults conducted in the Mediterranean and at Normandy were both joint and combined—more than one military service was involved from more than one country. Each one became a bespoke, one-off operation with the British approach dominating the planning. OVERLORD was, to a degree, the exception. In developing the outline plan for the cross-Channel attack, the COSSAC planners would be working with a narrow knowledge base.

Combined Operations

As the last British troops were being evacuated from France in June 1940, Churchill was hectoring the Chiefs of Staff (COS) to find some way to take offensive action. “The passive resistance war, in which we have acquitted ourselves so well must come to an end. I look to the [British] joint Chiefs of Staff to propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline.”⁹

While more ambitious in concept than practical in execution, this exhortation led to the adjutant-general (the commandant) of the Royal Marines, Lt. Gen. Alan Bourne, being appointed by the COS as the first “Commander of Raiding Operations on coasts in enemy occupation and Advisor to the Chiefs of Staff on Combined Operations.”¹⁰ In addition to planning and conducting raids across the Channel, he was tasked with providing advice on the organization for conducting amphibious assaults, supervising all training relating to combined operations (including training the crews who would operate the special purpose craft that were to be built), and developing and issuing contracts for the production of those craft. As one might anticipate, the work of the Inter-Service Training and Development Centre became part of the Combined Operations domain. While all three services were involved, Bourne and his staff were headquartered in the Admiralty.

General Bourne was in the job for about a month, during which time there were some small raids that achieved little. In July Churchill’s thoughts returned to the idea of large raids and imaginative enterprises. Having never approved Bourne’s appointment, he now desired to see someone more senior and more unorthodox in the position.

Sixty-eight-year-old Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes certainly fit that description. Early in his career, Keyes, as commanding officer of a destroyer in support of the efforts to rescue the legations besieged in Peking (Beijing) during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, was eager to get into the fight. He “handed over command of his destroyer to his First Lieutenant and joined an army column [marching on the Chinese capital]…. He was the first man into the city [Beijing], climbing a 30-foot wall.”¹¹ He survived the naval battles at Gallipoli in 1916 and was best known for planning and conducting the raid on German U-boat pens in Zeebrugge harbor in 1918. He had retired in 1935 but returned to active duty in 1940. He also served as a member of Parliament from 1934 to 1943. A friend of Churchill’s, he became director of Combined Operations in July 1940.

Within a week, Churchill was asking Keyes for proposals for medium-sized raids using between five thousand and ten thousand men, to be launched in September or October at the latest. When Keyes received the memo, the strengths of the Commandos and independent companies that had been formed for raiding “were 500 and 750 respectively, and of the latter 250 were earmarked to go to Gibraltar.”¹²

Keyes’ fifteen months as director were contentious, at best. He set up Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) as an independent entity, moving out of Admiralty offices and into the newly built and as-yet unoccupied New Scotland Yard building in Richmond Terrace, near Downing Street. This was a mixed blessing. The benefits of an independent command are many, but “from the material, naval personnel and psychological aspects, separation at this particular time, when everything depended on Admiralty effort, was a misfortune and led … to a good deal more than separation. The day of private navies and armies had dawned.”¹³ Not just the famous Commandos, which were the COHQ’s operational units, but eventually groups such as the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Service, the Long Range Desert Group, and even Gen. Orde Wingate’s Chindits in Burma were all part of a range of special operators that siphoned off some of the best small-unit leaders to what were arguably peripheral operations. Whatever their value may have been, they certainly appealed to Churchill’s late-Victorian sense of combat—just the thing for a former subaltern of cavalry who fought at Omdurman in Sudan in 1898 and who, as a war correspondent, was captured and then escaped from a Boer prisoner of war camp in 1899 and then wrote about the adventure for the newspapers.

While Keyes was in charge, there were advancements in the thinking about special ships and craft, particularly the LST (landing ship, tank), and the establishment of operational training centers. There were, however, few raids. “Plans were discussed, but the answer was always the same: you cannot assault an enemy coast without the proper number of special craft and until the crews have been trained.”¹⁴

Keyes went to Churchill and proposed that Commandos take the small island of Pantelleria, just south of Sicily, in order to improve the sea transport situation in the central Mediterranean. Both the COS and the commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, doubted that the island could be held.

Churchill gave Keyes permission to conduct the operation with two thousand commandos under his direct command. At the last minute, in December 1940, the operation was cancelled. Keyes was furious and blamed everyone from the COS on down, venting his anger in a string of memoranda to Churchill.¹⁵

There was also a fundamental organizational disagreement that could not be resolved. Keyes believed that as “director” of Combined Operations, he should have control over the planning and preparations for any amphibious operation and should be responsible for the training of all the naval personnel involved. This meant that on occasion, the idea and the planning for a raid originated in Combined Operations, as was the case for Pantelleria, and then it had to be “sold” to the appropriate commander in chief for execution. Consequently, coordination with the joint planners and any connection with strategic goals was not always achieved. Additionally, Keyes’ opinion of the COS bordered on contempt (in the midst of one meeting, he accused them of being “yellow”¹⁶), and he was inclined to give his opinions freely and directly to the prime minister, among others.

The COS took the view that only they were to give advice to the prime minister or the War Cabinet regarding strategy, that commanders of various operations or organizations were responsible to them not to COHQ, and, as for the reentry into the Continent, that “the planning and training for this must be the job of the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, with his appropriate naval and air opposite numbers” (soon to be called the Combined Commanders).¹⁷ Consequently, the COS believed that the exact role of the head of Combined Operations needed to be redefined. Keyes was notified by Churchill that his title was now advisor of Combined Operations, not director. Keyes would not accept what he saw as a demotion and resigned.

On 27 October 1941 Lord Louis Mountbatten, captain in the Royal Navy, cousin to King George, and longtime friend of the Duke of Windsor, took over as advisor of Combined Operations. Selected by Churchill without consulting the COS, he was “many ranks and 27 years junior to Keyes, but all this was reckoned an asset.”¹⁸ Mountbatten brought great energy and enthusiasm to the project and set about building up his staff and strengthening his hand, ensuring that the COS and everyone else knew that he had the full support of the prime minister. While no expert in combined operations, he was a fast learner, able to effectively represent the amphibious warfare views at major interallied conferences, had great charm, was liked by the Americans, and had what in different circumstances could be described as a knack for effective presentation.

The exchanges between the COS, Keyes, Mountbatten, and Churchill had the seeds of future difficulties embedded. The Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, and his naval and air equivalents were, according to the COS, responsible for the planning and training of forces related to some future, as-yet-unplanned or agreed-on reentry into the Continent. They would report directly to the British COS. When the Americans arrived, planners at ETOUSA had an informal liaison relationship with the planners of the Combined Commanders, but all plans still went through them to the British COS.

Mountbatten and COHQ felt, as had Keyes, that they existed as the depository of all knowledge and doctrine related to amphibious operations and, as the duty experts, would have to play a major role in the planning and conduct of any amphibious attack launched from Great Britain. After the entry of the United States into the war, some American officers served at COHQ, but it remained a British organization.

The Casablanca conference established a planning staff related to cross-Channel operations, initially to catalog and bring some organizational structure to whatever studies and concepts had been put forth so far. Headed by a British staff officer but without a commander, this staff, near as anyone knew, was to report to the CCS in Washington and was tasked with planning both a deception operation in the Channel and reentry into the Continent under two possible sets of circumstances. The resolution of this tangle was neither easy nor quick.

In March of 1942 Mountbatten was promoted from captain (acting commodore) to vice-admiral, with the additional ranks of lieutenant general and air-marshal. His title was changed to chief of Combined Operations and he now joined the COS as an equal member whenever either combined operations or the general conduct of the war were discussed, which is to say, for almost every meeting.

By now there were trained troops, specialized assault craft, and experience from smaller raids in the Mediterranean and Norway. From the relatively simple and straightforward creation of small landing craft that began in 1938, by 1943 there developed an entire range of specialized craft types, each designed and built to address a specific need or provide the means of moving some of the various components of an invasion force from ship to shore. There were the LCA (landing craft, assault), which were small craft for infantry initially designed for raiding; the LCC (amphibious command ship), which were control craft; the LCH, the headquarters craft; the LCI(L), landing craft infantry (large), which carried up to two hundred men and their equipment; the LCM, which were for mechanized equipment like vehicles and tanks; the LCP(L), also for personnel; the LCS (Landing Craft, Support); the LCT, which carried fifty-five men plus vehicles; and the LCVP, landing craft designed for either vehicles or personnel. There was also the LSI(L), the landing ship, infantry (large), which carried assault craft and men. And there were the LSM (landing ship, medium), a larger, oceangoing version of the LSI, and the famous LST. This was in addition to the AKA (amphibious cargo) and APA (attack transport) ships, which carried craft and men for the assault, and the MT (motor transport) ships, in which forty vehicles or mechanized transport could be loaded.¹⁹ By 6 June 1944 there were even close-support craft like the LCT-R, or landing craft tank–rocket.²⁰

In some cases, assault ships would have both men for the assault and the craft needed to land them. If so, then it was a matter of proper coordination so that the troops would be loaded into the assault craft at the proper moment, take their place in the correct assault wave, and land on the right beach. If the craft were on one ship and the troops on another, then the boats had to be loaded out in the correct sequence, be gathered in assembly areas, be directed to the right transport at the right time, pick up the troops, and then head to the right beach. In both cases, there were often subchasers, control craft, or mine sweepers helping with the navigation.²¹ It took a great deal of training before young men, most of whom had no sailing experience, were proficient in the art of laying a small craft alongside a large ship, loading troops, and delivering them on the beach, then turning around and doing it again.

Between January and June of 1942, ten raids of various sizes were conducted; the planning for some had started under Keyes. The raid on the radar station at Bruneval, France, and the raid on the dry dock and other facilities at Saint-Nazaire are among the most well known in this period.

Operation JUBILEE, the Dieppe Raid, might well have been controversial even if it hadn’t been a spectacular failure. It would seem to have violated Churchill’s requirement of “no substantial landing in France unless we are going to stay,” as well as having a long list of questionable planning and operational decisions associated with it. Whatever else can be said about the tragedy of 19 August 1942, one perceived accomplishment (which turned out to be false) was the “massive fighter battle in the skies…. Convinced that a great air victory had been won at Dieppe, and that at last a way had been found to inflict severe wastage on the Luftwaffe, the head of Fighter Command, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, wrote Mountbatten shortly afterwards urging more raids of the same kind, making only one common-sense observation … : ‘When attacking the enemy on land, one does not generally strike at his strongest point.’ ”²² That is to say, don’t attempt to seize a defended port by direct amphibious assault without substantial air and naval gunfire support, which would likely damage the facilities that one would hope to seize intact.

Mountbatten was encouraged to think of other raids or feints that would continue to bring the Luftwaffe up into battle with the Royal Air Force under favorable conditions. The fact that well-trained troops might be the bait to attract the Germans did not seem to enter into the equation, nor did the possibility of the Germans deciding to not take the bait as offered.

A Plan for What Might Be Done Next

Summer and fall of 1942 were, of course, also the time of the debates over SLEDGEHAMMER, which was put to rest before the Dieppe Raid. The North African campaign also put an end to the discussion about any major cross-Channel effort in 1943. Additionally, TORCH drew off most of the small group of experienced American planners who had been in London working on the question of reentry into the Continent and who were now assigned to Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) at Norfolk House. Soon Lieutenant General Morgan and his 1st British Corps would become part of the TORCH campaign.

Morgan enjoyed challenging his staff to consider some of the larger issues confronting them. He felt that with the Americans now in the war, some sort of offensive action—certainly not across the Channel, but somewhere—should be considered. The question to his officers’ mess was—where? In early autumn 1942 their collective answer was somewhere between Casablanca and Tunis. This was, as it turned out, a pretty good guess, but for Morgan it also marked the beginning of what became a very different assignment.

In October 1942 1st Corps was renamed 125 Force, assigned to TORCH, and was initially intended to be deployed in case the Germans drove into Spain and attempted to close the Strait of Gibraltar. Morgan’s force was to conduct an amphibious landing and occupy what was then Spanish Morocco so that the strait would remain open even if Gibraltar was captured. Morgan observed that, “on paper, in London, there seemed to be a certain rough logic in the idea but, the more deeply one went into it, the more I became impressed with the lack of our knowledge of the conduct of such affairs in general.”²³

Morgan traveled from his headquarters in Yorkshire down to London to meet General Eisenhower, arriving the same day as Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, Eisenhower’s deputy, returned from his clandestine negotiations with the French military in North Africa. While Morgan was impressed with his new commander, he encountered one significant problem almost at once. His written orders, conveyed to him by the AFHQ staff, were totally incomprehensible. While it had been “compiled according to the best War College standards … the whole document as it stood meant not a thing to any of us.”²⁴ As a result, one of his first steps was to become acquainted not only with “American English” but with that specific subset known as U.S. Army staff language. (COSSAC later took this into consideration with their communication. Memoranda, for example, would employ “combined” terminology for clarity. Thus, reference would be to “L of C/Communications Zone,” “Formations/Units,” or “Stores/Supplies.”)

Morgan set about to train his force for amphibious operations. The two divisions were stationed in the Scottish Lowlands, from where it would be relatively easy to embark from the River Clyde around Glasgow. Among the training areas used were those associated with various COHQ facilities, notably the Combined Training Center in Largs, a small summer resort town near Glasgow.

Morgan also grew to know and respect Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, who stayed in London while Eisenhower went to Gibraltar for the final planning of the North African invasion. “By the time he [Smith] in turn left for Africa we had established an understanding which stood us in good stead later on.”²⁵ By December of 1942 Morgan was obliged to travel to North Africa, as the hypothetical planning questions of October had become a more complex reality and the details of employing 125 Force could no longer be dealt with at long range. He took the injunction of Marshal Ferdinand Foch seriously: “Don’t phone, go and see.”²⁶ Interestingly, Morgan’s command was joint and combined, with “his sailor” being Commo. W. E. Parry of the Royal Navy and “his airman,” Brig. Gen. Robert Candee of the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force.²⁷

The trip to North Africa connected Morgan with many of those involved in TORCH. He demonstrated little of the standoff reserve so often attributed to British officers, on one occasion enthusiastically entering into a very American debate about the American Civil War that flared up during an evening’s festivities. Seeing that those arguing for the “South” were outnumbered, he entered the fray with such good effect that Adm. John Leslie Hall, USN, made Morgan an honorary Southern Democrat. The same Admiral Hall was to be the commander of Amphibious Force “O” at Omaha Beach, the force that put the U.S. 1st Division ashore on D-Day. More importantly, Morgan saw an allied operational headquarters that worked. He “had been able to talk with old British Army friends who formed part of Ike’s team, to catch from them the spirit of the thing … to appreciate to what an extent … integration of the two forces had already taken place.”²⁸

His flight back to the United Kingdom was not without incident. When the pilots sighted land an hour earlier than planned, Morgan was summoned to the cockpit of his loaned B-17 for a consultation. He was able to confirm that the land in sight were the Isles of Scilly and not the Brest peninsula of occupied France. Successfully landing outside London, one member of his staff “sought confirmation of our good luck by means of the slot machines in the bar, from which he quickly derived a small fortune. It was not all luck. Acquaintance with [this B-17’s crew] taught one a lot.”²⁹ (Had they missed the Isles, they might have missed landfall altogether as they were flying on a northerly heading.)

The potential threat for which 125 Force was formed never appeared, and by early 1943 Morgan was ordered to plan an invasion of Sardinia, for which his force would be reinforced by two American divisions and the Royal Marines division. As planning for that operation developed, he was then told that the next operation would now be Sicily and to start planning for that operation. “It became evident that the conquest of Sicily would be an affair far larger in scope than either of our previous projects, larger in fact than could be contemplated with the use of so small a body as a corps.”³⁰ The responsibility for planning that operation was transferred to AFHQ and to the commanders responsible for the operation. By March 1943 both his divisions had been stripped away and fed into the Mediterranean battle. His 1st Corps, now reduced to just a headquarters, was to be reformed with the assignment of training as part of the spearhead for the eventual cross-Channel attack.

Having given the matter some thought, Morgan began to press higher authorities to be more specific. Where are we to attack, when, and with what? He fully understood and advocated for troops to get used to the idea of fighting “in some country in which they would arrive after a long sea voyage and where they would find strange conditions among a population which might range anywhere from demonstratively friendly to definitely hostile.”³¹

He noted from his contact with COHQ and in planning for the various deployments of 125 Force that no two beaches are alike. Therefore, it seemed to him, that some correlation between training and operations needed to exist. As he said, “it was essential to narrow down the various possibilities with which one might be confronted on some future D-Day.”³² In a conversation with his old friend from their service together in India, Gen. Lord Hastings “Pug” Ismay, Morgan expressed his strong opinion that someone should be appointed who would do something about this lack of direction and clarity. Ismay was now deputy secretary to the War Cabinet and military advisor to Winston Churchill. He suggested that Morgan write a paper on the subject, which Morgan then did and sent off to his old friend.³³

In early March Ismay invited Morgan down to London to discuss the matter further, and, upon reporting to Ismay’s office, Morgan was handed a stack of documents that represented the work done by various people at various times related to a cross-Channel attack. Morgan was asked to review the material and to produce for presentation to the COS his concept of “a plan for what might be done next.” It was due the next day. Morgan submitted a memorandum but admitted that he didn’t think much of his first attempt “nor did the Chiefs of Staff, so I was given a second chance.”³⁴

Not yet having new divisions assigned to 1st Corps and being free from any attachment to any potential project, Morgan, on his second attempt, gave the chiefs a straightforward and honest analysis of what he thought, which was also witnessed by Ismay and Mountbatten. He then left the meeting.

Not long after, on 12 March, standing in an elevator at New Scotland Yard, while heading to a meeting at COHQ, Morgan got an indication of what was to be his fate. Just as the elevator door was starting to close, Mountbatten jumped in and offered his enthusiastic, if premature, congratulations, notwithstanding the fact that the elevator was jammed full of people of all ranks. As far as Mountbatten was concerned, Morgan, with his presentation, had apparently talked himself into a job. One problem for Morgan was that he wasn’t sure he wanted to transition from being a corps commander, albeit one without any troops at the moment, back to a senior staff officer for what sounded like a decidedly dodgy and not yet clearly defined project. “As soon as I could emerge from Combined Operations Headquarters I … made for the nearest open space, the Temple Gardens, where I walked with Bobbie [his aide] to regain composure, a process that was completed shortly afterward at the bar of the Cavalry Club.”³⁵ How he traveled from Richmond Terrace, across from Downing Street, to the Temple Gardens, just beyond King’s College London, and then back to the Cavalry Club in Mayfair is not explained. With his composure regained, at least for the moment, Morgan began to reflect on what needed to be done, if he were to be given this new assignment.