Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (29 page)

Roosevelt had still not made a decision, or at least had not yet announced one, when he left to attend yet another conference with Churchill—and, for the first time, with Stalin—at Tehran in November 1943. En route to that meeting, Roosevelt and Churchill stopped in Cairo, where they met with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. There, Roosevelt first broached with Marshall the possibility that he might not be selected to command Overlord after all. The president hated personal confrontation and therefore sent his alter ego, Harry Hopkins, to sound out the general on the question. Marshall told Hopkins that he would “wholeheartedly” accept any decision the president made. Thus assured, Roosevelt himself talked to Marshall the next day. Roosevelt wanted to know how Marshall felt about the possibility of staying on in Washington as chief of staff. Marshall again professed that he would be happy with any job the president assigned to him, and asserted that “the issue was too great for any personal feelings to be considered.” At the end of their conversation, Roosevelt signaled his likely intent by telling Marshall, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”
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At Tehran, a number of the old issues were revisited. Churchill could not help reprising some of his now-familiar, even tedious arguments about continuing Mediterranean operations at the expense of delaying Overlord by a month or two, but he elicited little support. Stalin made it clear that such an option would provide no significant relief to the embattled Red Army. Russian armies, he noted, were facing 210 German divisions on the Eastern Front, plus 50 more divisions made up of Hungarians, Finns, and Romanians, for a total of 260 enemy divisions—perhaps two million men. He hardly needed to add that this was ten times the number of Germans the western Allies faced in Italy, and fifty times the force that the Anglo-Americans planned to put ashore in Normandy, though the numbers were skewed by the fact that British and American divisions were nearly twice as large as the actual (as opposed to the theoretical) size of German divisions.
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The issue of landing craft came up as well. Marshall acknowledged that “the question of adequate landing craft,” especially “those capable of carrying 40 tanks” [
sic
], was “the chief problem” in planning the cross-Channel
attack, though he assured the Russians that “the schedule of production had been stepped up” and he was confident that Overlord could take place on time as planned.
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It was Stalin who raised the issue of who would command it. When Roosevelt told him that the decision had not yet been made, the Russian premier stated that while he did not expect to have a voice in the decision,
someone
should be named, he should be named soon, and he should have complete authority. Though he did not say so, the implication was that unless and until the Anglo-Americans named a commander, it was hard to take their promises of an imminent invasion seriously.
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That may have encouraged Roosevelt finally to get off the fence. He had hesitated until now partly because it was his administrative style to delay. In addition, however, despite a somewhat selfish desire to keep Marshall in Washington, he did not want to deprive him of his place in history. Student of history that he was, the president knew that generals who operated behind the scenes seldom won the kind of public credit that fell to successful operational commanders. He resolved his dilemma by convincing himself that this war was different, that future historians would not—could not—overlook Marshall’s manifest contributions even without an active field command. That meant that Marshall could stay in Washington, where he was essential, and still earn his place in the history books.
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Having made the decision, Roosevelt did not wait long to act on it. Returning from the Tehran Conference, the president summoned Eisenhower to meet him in Cairo prior to a quick trip to Sicily to hand out some medals. As soon as the two men settled into the back of the president’s car at the airport, Roosevelt turned to Eisenhower and said, “Well, Ike, you are going to command
OVERLORD
.”
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E
ISENHOWER LEFT NORTH AFRICA
on the last day of the year to fly back to the United States. Between quick trips to visit his son, a cadet at West Point, and his mother in Kansas, he spent a quiet few days with his wife at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, which was being used as a convalescent hospital by the Army. After that, Ike traveled to Washington to discuss his new command with Marshall. He had planned to return to Africa afterward to say goodbye to the “happy family” he had worked with for more than a year, but Marshall encouraged him to fly instead directly to England. On January 15, he flew to the Azores, and then on to Prestwick Airport, near Glasgow, where he boarded a train for London, arriving there on January 17. With that, COSSAC ceased to exist and was replaced by a new acronym: SHAEF, which stood for Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.
¹

By then, a number of the men that would make up the command team for Neptune-Overlord were already in place, and Eisenhower had promised Marshall that he would “disturb the present setup as little as possible.” There
was, however, the problem of what to do with Morgan, now a lieutenant general, who had presided over the Overlord planning for the last six months, and who knew the issues and circumstances better than anyone. Morgan had known from the start that he would eventually step aside for a more exalted boss, but he had assumed that he would remain as deputy commander, or perhaps chief of staff. Instead, Eisenhower selected a British air marshal, Sir Arthur Tedder, as his deputy commander. Eisenhower was convinced that the coordination of air and ground forces during the invasion would be critical, and he had worked closely and companionably with the handsome, pipe-smoking Tedder in the Mediterranean. Eisenhower also brought his own chief of staff from North Africa, the gruff and irreverent but highly efficient Major General Walter Bedell Smith, whom Ike (and others) called “Beetle.” Eisenhower tried to let Morgan down easy, complimenting him on “the fine work” that he and the COSSAC team had done, and assuring him that Brooke had “an important job awaiting you.” That turned out not to be the case, however, and Morgan stayed on as a deputy to Smith, helping to manage the staff work with two other three-stars: Sir Humphrey Gale and James Robb. To his credit, he bore neither Eisenhower nor Brooke any ill will and continued to labor with cheerful enthusiasm, though with tongue in cheek he told an associate that he knew the reason he had been retained on the staff: “If something goes wrong they want me right here to put the blame on.”
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The rest of the SHAEF command team remained largely intact. Because the overall commander of Neptune-Overlord was an American, the three men who would exercise direct command of the ground, air, and sea aspects of the invasion were all British. Churchill himself had picked the commander of the ground forces. Though Eisenhower would have preferred Sir Harold Alexander, the prime minister instead chose Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery to head what was labeled the 21st Army Group, made up of American, British, and Canadian forces. Fifty-six years old in 1944 (three years older than Eisenhower), Montgomery had become famous in Britain after his victory at El Alamein in 1942, which had won him a knighthood. Though his actual performance in that campaign was more competent than brilliant, his status as national hero apparently went to his head, for he
exuded an ego-driven self-confidence that many, including Tedder, found embarrassing, even offensive. George Patton (who found fault with many) thought him “a little fellow of average ability [who] thinks himself a Napoleon—he is not.” Even Eisenhower, who got along with almost everyone, found Montgomery a strain to work with and confessed to Brooke that he did not know how to handle him. In some respects, Montgomery was the Douglas MacArthur of the European war—a man with evident military talents who was victimized by his own unbridled ego, his haughty demeanor, and a tendency to preen. He was also somewhat dismissive of Americans, believing that they exhibited more boisterous enthusiasm than good sense, and he thought they had made a “dog’s breakfast” of the campaign in Italy. He was therefore glad to put Italy behind him and fly to London to prepare the decisive stroke of the war.
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Command of the air assets for Overlord went to Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, a former fighter pilot whose friends called him “L-M.” Leigh-Mallory would soon be overshadowed by Ike’s deputy, the bomber pilot Tedder, but it was just as well that SHAEF had so much Air Force brass in the high command, for almost at once squabbling erupted over how to utilize air assets during the invasion. The Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington suggested that the organization of tactical air forces for Overlord should rest in its hands. Eisenhower resisted that, arguing successfully that control of the air forces over the invasion beach must reside with the invasion commander—that is, himself. The next battle was with the champions of strategic bombing. Both British Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, known as “Bomber Harris,” and American Lieutenant General Andrew “Tooey” Spaatz, were convinced that Germany could be bombed into submission if the air attacks were relentless. They were therefore reluctant to withdraw their bombers from that mission to support the invasion. Eisenhower won that fight, too. Even then, Spaatz and others argued that the bombers should conduct an “oil strategy” by targeting wells and refineries, rather than the “transportation strategy” against railroads and bridges that Ike wanted in order to isolate the invasion beaches. And finally, there was a dispute about which air forces would support which invasion beach. Some thought that American planes should cover American beaches while
British planes covered British beaches. Eisenhower rejected that out of hand, insisting, as he had from the start, on an integrated effort. In the end, Eisenhower won all these disputes, relying heavily on Tedder and Leigh-Mallory to do so.
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Of course, at root Neptune-Overlord was an amphibious operation, and the designation of an overall naval commander was critical. The officer assigned the job of Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force, which yielded the rather cumbersome acronym ANCXF, was Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay—“Bertie” to his friends. Ramsay, who turned sixty-one on January 20, was the oldest of the SHAEF commanders and physically unprepossessing: of average stature with a plain round face and thinning, though surprisingly dark, hair. The son and brother of British Army generals, he had joined the Royal Navy in 1898 at the age of fifteen, undergoing initial training aboard HMS
Britannia
, an old three-deck ship-of-the-line, not unlike those of the Napoleonic era, that served as Britain’s Naval Academy until 1905.

Like Eisenhower, Ramsay had spent much of his career as a staff officer, working for very senior officers. He had been flag lieutenant to the commanding officers of both the Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets, and flag commander to Admiral Sir John Jellicoe during a round-the-world cruise on the battlecruiser HMS
New Zealand
. He had a strong work ethic and high personal standards that he tended to apply to others as well as to himself, writing in his diary, “My faults are that I can’t sit still and see things done in an antiquated and un-progressive way.” This “shortness of manner,” as one put it, occasionally got him into trouble. Indeed, it very nearly ended his career in the 1930s when, as a rear admiral, he resigned as chief of staff to Admiral Sir Roger Backhouse after only four months on the job because he felt that Backhouse was insisting on doing all the staff work himself. Their parting was amicable and Backhouse bore him no ill will, but his voluntary abdication of such a high-profile position cast a shadow on his career, and for the next four years he was without an assignment, a status made official in October 1938 when his name was moved to the retired list. Ramsay rather enjoyed the hiatus, marrying an heiress half his age and settling down to the comfortable life of a gentleman landowner.
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Curiously, it was Backhouse, when he became First Sea Lord, who rescued Ramsay from Coventry by appointing him flag officer in charge at Dover during the Munich crisis in the fall of 1938. Ramsay still held that position two years later when the Germans smashed through Allied defenses in the lowlands and the British Expeditionary Force retreated to the beaches near Dunkirk. As the man on the spot, it was Ramsay who choreographed the evacuation of more than 338,000 men from the Dunkirk beaches, including nearly 140,000 French, Polish, and Belgian soldiers. It was all but a miracle, and it proved the making of him. In 1942, Ramsay was promoted to full admiral and appointed Commander, Expeditionary Forces with responsibility for the “general direction of all naval forces engaged in large-scale landing operations.” In that capacity he played key roles in both the Torch and Husky operations in the Mediterranean.
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Ramsay received his appointment to command the naval forces for Neptune in October 1943, a full six weeks before Eisenhower got the job as supreme commander, and he was already ensconced at Norfolk House when Eisenhower arrived there in January 1944. He got along well with Eisenhower, whom he considered “a sensible chap,” and with his British colleagues as well. He was one of very few who could call Montgomery “Monty” and get away with it, and he thought Tedder both “intelligent and sympathetic.”
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In fact, all of the British service commanders for Neptune-Overlord got along well, making up “a most cheerful party,” in Montgomery’s words. Ramsay actually lived with Montgomery, since both men took rooms at St. Paul’s School, which had been turned over to the armed forces for the duration. That allowed them to swap ideas and build a sense of interservice teamwork. Of course Montgomery always considered himself the captain of the team. Ramsay occasionally took it upon himself to remind Monty that he was not, in fact, the boss. On January 12 when Montgomery scheduled a meeting at St. Paul’s prior to Eisenhower’s arrival, the conference room was set up with a U-shaped table and place cards put out to denote the various participants. The placards for Ramsay and Leigh-Mallory read “Naval C-in-C,” and “Air C-in-C,” while others read “U.S. Army,” “U.S. Air Force,” and so on. But the place card for Montgomery at the head of the table read simply: “C-in-C.” Arriving a bit early, Ramsay looked over these arrangements, turned to Leigh-Mallory, and remarked, “I say, L-M. What is this? There are three ruddy Cs-in-C in this set up.” Before Montgomery arrived, they rearranged the placards and the chairs so that the three of them sat side by side at the head of the table. Montgomery said nothing about it at the time, though when Ramsay confronted him about it later, he insisted that the table arrangements had not been his doing, and he apologized for any perceived slight.
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