Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (21 page)

It was Mountbatten who stepped in to apply the balm. In June, he invited the entire COSSAC team to his summer home, Largs, on the west coast of Scotland. When Morgan and the other officers arrived there on June 28, their general mood was somber, even defeatist. Morgan feared that some members of his team had decided the mission was hopeless. The retreat to the Scottish highlands, however, proved a tonic. Morgan himself felt the change that first evening when he walked the grounds of the estate with the tall, handsome, and buoyantly confident Mountbatten. The new mood was aided by a felicitous coincidence later that night when the conferees watched from Mountbatten’s rooftop as a convoy of ships departed the Firth of Clyde carrying soldiers to the invasion of Sicily, now twelve days away. On the spur of the moment, a small signal lamp was set up on the roof and a message of “Godspeed” blinked out to the embarked soldiers. Whether it was the change in venue, Mountbatten’s irresistible confidence, the fine June weather, or the vision of soldiers off to do their duty, a new sense of optimism infused the COSSAC planners. Within days, deadlocks were overcome and a plan finalized for a May landing on the Normandy beaches.
³⁴

Morgan’s orders required him to provide a detailed operational plan to the CCS by the first of August. Two weeks before that deadline, he presented a preliminary report to the British chiefs of staff. In it, Morgan asserted, first, that he believed the operation was feasible. To be sure, shipping would be a difficulty, and the number of landing craft would have to be increased dramatically, but these difficulties were surmountable. Second, he announced COSSAC’s conclusion that the landings should take place on a three-division front on the Normandy beaches near Bayeux. A larger initial landing force would be desirable, but the limited number of landing craft was the controlling factor. In an effort to extend the optimism of the Largs
retreat to the chiefs of staff, Morgan reminded them that it was essential for the government to embrace the plan fully, and to take “all possible steps” to support it. That meant that “action must start now and every possible effort made by all means in our power … to speed up our own preparations.” There was, he told them, “not one moment to spare.”
³⁵

According to Morgan, the reaction of the British chiefs of staff was “not demonstrably enthusiastic.” Even allowing for traditional British reserve, their response was disappointing, and some members of the COSSAC team were angered that their hard work was so casually received. When Morgan asked if he could forward the plan to the American chiefs of staff, permission was denied. The British were about to leave for another conference in Quebec (code name Quadrant) and they wanted to keep the cards in their hands. This created a serious professional dilemma for Morgan. He was a British officer, but COSSAC was an Allied organ, set up to be “neither British nor American, but equally answerable to both … governments.” He knew the Combined Chiefs would have to approve the plan before anything could be done, yet he was denied permission to share the plan with the Americans.
³⁶

Morgan resolved his dilemma by ensuring that an advance team of COSSAC members, some of them Americans and all of them familiar with the plan, sailed for the United States a few days ahead of the British delegation. Once there, they briefed not only their American counterparts but Roosevelt himself, both in Washington and again at Hyde Park. By then Churchill was also en route, this time on the
Queen Mary
. Lounging in his bunk with cigar in hand, he listened impassively as staff officers read aloud the details of the COSSAC plan to invade the beaches of Normandy eight months hence.
³⁷

At the Quebec conference, the British did not attempt to overturn the decision that had been made at Trident; instead they emphasized the importance of keeping the Germans distracted by conducting a vigorous and aggressive campaign in Italy. The Americans remained deeply suspicious that this was simply another manifestation of British obstructionism. That suspicion fed Marshall’s opposition, which in turn provoked Brooke’s impatience. “It is quite impossible to argue with him [Marshall],” Brooke wrote in
his diary, “as he does not begin to understand a strategic problem.” The undercurrent of inter-Allied hostility was best personified by the American chief of naval operations, Ernest King, who announced challengingly that he would not authorize “a single additional warship” to another Mediterranean adventure, and (according to the official minutes) employed some “very undiplomatic language” in the process. After so many contentious months, the British and Americans simply did not fully trust each other.
³⁸

A decisive element in resolving the dispute was the fact that the United States was by now clearly emerging as the senior partner. It was the United States that was producing the ships, the planes, the tanks, and, soon enough, the manpower that would be used in the proposed operation, and this gave the Americans incalculable leverage. It was also the key factor in deciding who would become Supreme Allied Commander. Ever since Eisenhower had been named to command Torch back in 1942, some Britons, Brooke included, had expected that a British officer would command the eventual cross-Channel operation. According to Brooke, Churchill had promised him the command at least three times. Such an appointment had seemed logical in 1942, perhaps even in early 1943, but by the late summer of that year, the growing preponderance of American strength undermined such an expectation. At Quebec, Churchill himself suggested to Roosevelt that an American should be named to command the cross-Channel invasion. Roosevelt was gratified, perhaps even relieved.

Churchill then broke the news to Brooke. Churchill wrote later that Brooke “bore the great disappointment with soldierly dignity,” but in fact it was a terrible blow. Years later, Brooke wrote that as he listened to Churchill deliver the news, he felt “swamped by a dark cloud of despair.” Almost as bad was the casual, matter-of-fact way Churchill did it. “Not for one moment did he realize what this meant to me,” Brooke wrote. “He offered no sympathy, no regret.”
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Other issues got a hearing at Quebec as well. The CCS discussed the Burma campaign, the role of China in the Pacific War, even Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Indeed, Churchill adopted Sumatra as his new hobbyhorse, arguing that the Allies should seize airfields there in order to bomb Singapore. Even Brooke recognized this as another peripheral diversion
and sought to rein him in, with little success. Still nursing resentment of his cavalier treatment, Brooke recorded in his diary that Churchill “behaved like a spoilt child that wants a toy in a shop.”
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There was an odd moment on August 19 when Mountbatten insisted on demonstrating the practicality of his somewhat bizarre idea to use giant, specially constituted slabs of ice as mobile aircraft platforms in the North Atlantic. He arranged to have two blocks of ice brought in to the dining room of the Château Frontenac, which was being used as a conference room. One of them was ordinary frozen water; the other was composed of 5 percent wood pulp, which yielded a frozen substance that Mountbatten called “Pycrete.” To demonstrate its resilience, he challenged the members of the CCS to try to break it. Hap Arnold gave it a try, spitting on his hands and swinging a heavy meat cleaver, though with no visible effect. Then, drawing his pistol, Mountbatten announced that he would fire a bullet into each frozen block to show how different they were. That announcement led to a sudden scraping of chairs as admirals and generals scrambled to get out of the way. Mountbatten fired a bullet into the first block of ice, which shattered spectacularly. Then he took aim at the block of Pycrete. The bullet bounced off the hardened ice and ricocheted about the room, causing three- and four-star admirals and generals to dive for the floor. Brooke and General Sir Leslie Hollis actually collided, skull to skull, under the table. Outside the room, junior staffers wondered if the Americans and British had finally started shooting at each other.
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Compared to that, the final agreement was anticlimactic. Churchill and Roosevelt formally approved “the outline plan of General Morgan,” and the CCS endowed it with a name: Operation Overlord. The naval aspect of the plan, including the sealift to England and the cross-Channel movement itself, was Operation Neptune. Like many others, Morgan was struck by the historical weight of the moment. As he put it later, “This campaign would absorb the bulk of the resources of United States and the British Empire. If they did not suffice, the future hardly bore thinking about.”
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A
T CASABLANCA, BROOKE HAD SUGGESTED
that even during an active campaign in the Mediterranean, the United States could still maintain a buildup of troops in England at the rate of twelve thousand men per month. At that rate, he noted, there would be some 135,000 American soldiers—about nine divisions—in England by August 1943, in position for a swift cross-Channel assault in case of a German collapse. Of course, Germany did not collapse that summer, nor did the Americans manage to ship twelve thousand GIs a month to England. Instead, the number averaged only a fraction of Brooke’s proposed goal—in March, for example, only twelve
hundred
GIs arrived. As a result, by mid-May, when the Trident conferees agreed to invade France a year hence, while there were more than a hundred thousand U.S. support personnel on or near the airfields in East Anglia, there were fewer than twenty thousand American combat troops in England—barely one division. Clearly, if the Allies were serious about a cross-Channel invasion in less than twelve months, the movement of American troops to England would have to increase dramatically.

And it did. Once Neptune-Overlord was approved at Trident and ratified at Quebec, the transatlantic trickle of American soldiers turned into a flood. In June, nearly fifty thousand GIs arrived at British ports, all but overwhelming the ability of the British to accommodate them. Another fifty thousand arrived in July, and nearly that many in August. Eighty thousand arrived in September. In October, the numbers topped a hundred thousand, and for each of the next seven months, an average of nearly 150,000 Americans arrived in Britain. (See
Table 1
,
page 124
.)

For nearly four hundred years, the movement of humanity between Europe and America had been overwhelmingly westward as immigrants took passage for the New World. Now that tide was reversed, and in particularly dramatic fashion, for the American “invasion” of Britain took place not over centuries or even decades but in a single calendar year. Not only did this phenomenon test the sealift capability of the Allies, but it greatly affected the soldiers themselves, most of whom had never been outside their home states, much less out of the country, and of course it dramatically affected the citizens of the United Kingdom who became their hosts. As one Briton recalled, “The American invasion rated second only to the bombs as the outstanding feature of wartime life.”
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Most of those who took part in this mass migration were young men in their late teens and early twenties. They had volunteered, or been conscripted, and sent to training camps where, in a dizzying sequence, they were barbered, inoculated, and issued uniforms. They learned how to salute (and whom to salute), how to march, and how to shoot. Then, after a brief leave home, some, though not all, received more instruction at an advanced training center. Before a year had passed, they hoisted their olive-drab duffel bags, stenciled with their names and units, and boarded trains and buses that took them to one or another port of embarkation, New York being by far the largest. There they were mustered on a pier and marched up a gangplank onto a ship. Only a few had ever been on a ship before—or even seen one. They did not know where they were bound, and made guesses about their destination based on the type of clothing they had been issued. Though they were filled with the confidence (and the arrogance) of youth, few had ever fired a shot in anger, and for the most part they were utterly ignorant of what lay ahead.

Table 1 U.S. Troop Strength in Britain, June 1942–May 1944