LITMIR.BIZ

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Commanders. He next brought this up at a meeting of the COS on 28 March. Mountbatten, having a choice of sitting either with the COS or with the Commanders, sat with the Commanders and, when his turn to speak came, “roundly denounced their plan [for the Pas-de-Calais]…. In the end the Commanders left the room with orders to work on the Normandy plan.”⁷ However correct he might have been, the Commanders had no great appreciation for the assistance that Mountbatten had given them. There was, as a result, some amount of friction between the various headquarters, and both Paget at Home Forces HQ and the RAF still believed in the Pas-de-Calais.

      Early British planning for crossing the Channel was also informed by their preparations for a German invasion in 1940. Hughes-Hallett was Mountbatten’s naval advisor at Combined Operations and was as expert in the details of amphibious assault as almost anyone in Britain. He noted that the experiences of anti-invasion planning in 1940–41 brought to light “the enormous magnitude of problems to be overcome before even a minor amphibious operation could be … successfully carried out.”⁸ The tides in the Channel are difficult, particularly for small craft. Both the RAF and the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had major forces that would have to be brought to the fight. Logistical support, specialized training for the crews operating the landing craft if not the assault troops as well, and timing issues were staggeringly complex. In Hughes-Hallett’s opinion, there were few army officers who had any real understanding of the magnitude of the problem, except perhaps for those few who had been personally involved in planning amphibious attacks or training troops for them.

      The Combined Commanders had planners, of course. Brig. Colin McNabb for the army, Commo. Cyril E. Douglas-Pennant for the navy, and Air Marshal Sholto Douglas were the head planners. As General Morgan later observed, “Just as no nobleman of olden times was apparently a nobleman unless he employed his tame jester, so in 1943 no commander was alleged to be worth his place in the field unless he retained his own planner.”⁹ This was a comment on the proliferation of planners, not their quality. McNabb worked well with the Americans at ETOUSA and went on to serve as brigadier general staff for Kenneth Anderson’s First Army in Tunisia, where he was killed in combat. Douglas-Pennant commanded the naval assault forces for GOLD BEACH on 6 June, and Sholto Douglas became the commander of Coastal Command in January 1944, after serving as the senior RAF commander in the Middle East.

      A principal problem for the planners was the custom of the COS to require them to examine problems and design plans without a specific operation associated with the plan they were asked to create. Consequently, their work was subject to constant revision by higher authorities. “Each such revision was liable to call for variation or amendment of the plan put forward, in many instances necessitating cancellation or re-execution of work already put in by troops on the ground.”¹⁰ Another problem was that the fighting was going on in the Mediterranean, was likely to remain there, and, consequently, planners in London were far removed from any possibility of action.

      The “Planning Racket”

      In early 1942, with the U.S. Army’s Special Observer’s Group in London and its evolution into ETOUSA, the Americans arrived, full of enthusiasm and lacking experience.

      On 7 February 1942 Col. Ray Barker, USA, commander of the 30th Field Artillery Regiment at the newly built training facility of Camp Roberts in California, received orders to report to the New York port of embarkation. He stopped in Washington, D.C., on the way and discovered that he was to take over the artillery section of the Special Observers Group in London. This meant that his promotion to brigadier general was deferred, but he told the chief of field artillery, “Never mind about the promotion part of it, if I can just go where the war is.”¹¹ Having spent some amount of time in England in the interwar years, and being a student of British history, Barker thought that he could be effective there.

      In a bit of cloak-and-dagger work, the group traveling to England were given civilian passports and wore civilian clothes on the trip, as they went by Pan American Clipper from New York to Bermuda, to the Azores, and then to Lisbon. From Lisbon they went to Shannon Airport in Ireland on a British Overseas Airways aircraft, then flew to Poole (near Bournemouth on the Channel coast) and went by train into central London.

      The London they encountered had adapted to war. In a series of “Letters from London” for the New Yorker magazine, journalist Mollie Panter-Downes sketched out what life in the British capital was like during the Blitz.

      Life in a bombed city means adapting oneself in all kinds of ways all the time. Londoners are now learning the lessons, long ago familiar to those living on the much-visited southeast coast, of getting to bed early and shifting their sleeping quarters down to the ground floor.¹²

      … For Londoners, there are no longer such things as good nights; there are only bad nights, worse nights and better nights. Hardly anyone has slept at all in the past week. The sirens go off at approximately the same time every evening, and in the poorer districts, queues of people carrying blankets, thermos flasks, and babies begin to form quite early outside the air-raid-shelters.¹³

      … Things are settling down into a recognizable routine. Daylight sirens are disregarded by everyone, unless they are accompanied by gunfire or bomb explosions that sound uncomfortably near. A lady who arrived at one of the railway stations during a warning was asked politely by the porter who carried her bag, “Air-raid shelter or taxi, Madam?”¹⁴

      In London Barker joined what was then a group of about ten officers. While initially tasked with planning the deployment and training of artillery units expected to be arriving as part of BOLERO, he was quickly named head of the war plans section. While that may not have seemed an obvious assignment for a field artillery officer, he explained that he was picked “because I happened to be standing there and no one else [was] available.”¹⁵ From then on, he was involved in what he called the “planning racket.”

      Initially there were only a couple of U.S. Army officers involved in planning relating to the eventual reentry into the Continent. While he requested and got additional support, he felt that the first thing he needed to do was “to find out what the British were doing in this field.”¹⁶ This is when Barker discovered the Combined Commanders and their planners. While building his own staff, Barker worked in close daily cooperation with the British planners. Asked if he had been assigned to work with the British, Barker replied, “No one actually told me that I should associate myself or collaborate with these people; it was just the obvious thing to do.”¹⁷

      Barker and his group got to work on preparations for BOLERO as well as plans for SLEDGEHAMMER and ROUNDUP. In July, there was what his then boss, Dwight Eisenhower, described in his diary as a day that might become “the blackest day in history.”¹⁸ SLEDGEHAMMER was cancelled. But not entirely. The COS decided at its meeting of 22 August 1942 that “for purposes of deception and to be ready for any emergency or a favourable opportunity, all preparations for ‘SLEDGEHAMMER’ continue to be pressed … and [recommended] that a Task Force Commander be appointed with authority to organize the force, direct the training and maintain a contingent plan for execution.”¹⁹ Both Paget and Mountbatten were at the meeting, as was Pug Ismay.

      At the same meeting, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, acting as chair in the absence of General Brooke, quoted from a Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) memorandum written the prior month, saying in effect that as a result of TORCH going forward, “we have accepted a defensive encircling line of action for the continental European theatre … but that the organization, planning and training for eventual entry in the Continent should continue [in case there was] a marked deterioration in German strength … and that the resources of the United Nations available after meeting other commitments, so permit.”²⁰

      General Paget noted that the planning for ROUNDUP would be based on working out the minimum requirements for forcing an entry into the Continent against weakening opposition. He also felt that, at this time, there was “no need for the Supreme Commander-in-Chief or his Deputy to be nominated.” Mountbatten added that TORCH would employ every available landing craft and trained crew, and no operation of any scale could be mounted from the UK before March or April of 1943.²¹

      The

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