Closing the Ring (10 page)

I left London for the Clyde, where the
Queen Mary
awaited us, on the night of August 4, in a train which carried the very heavy staffs which we needed. We were, I suppose, over two hundred, besides about fifty Royal Marine orderlies. The scope of the Conference comprised not only the Mediterranean campaign, now at its first climax, but even more the preparations for the cross-Channel design of 1944, the whole conduct of the war in the Indian theatre, and our share in the struggle against Japan. For the Channel crossing we took with us three officers sent by Lieutenant-General F. E. Morgan, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, yet to be finally chosen, who with his combined Anglo-American staff had been working for nearly five months upon our joint plan. As the whole of our affairs in the Indian and Far Eastern theatres were under examination, I brought with me General Wavell’s Director of Military Operations, who had flown specially from India.

I took also with me a young Brigadier named Wingate, who had already made his mark as a leader of irregulars in Abyssinia, and had greatly distinguished himself in the jungle fighting in Burma. These new brilliant exploits won him in some circles of the Army in which he served the title of “the Clive of Burma.” I had heard much of all this, and knew also how the Zionists had sought him as a future Commander-in-Chief of any Israelite army that might be formed. I had him summoned home in order that I might have a look at him before I left for Quebec. I was about to dine alone on the night of August 4 at Downing Street when the news that he had arrived by air and was actually in the house was brought me. I immediately asked him to join me at dinner. We had not talked for half an hour before I felt myself in the presence of a man of the highest quality. He plunged at once into his theme of how the Japanese could be mastered in jungle warfare by long-range penetration groups landed by air behind the enemy lines.
This interested me greatly. I wished to hear much more about it, and also to let him tell his tale to the Chiefs of Staff.

I decided at once to take him with me on the voyage. I told him our train would leave at ten. It was then nearly nine. Wingate had arrived just as he was after three days’ flight from the actual front, and with no clothes but what he stood up in. He was of course quite ready to go, but expressed regret that he would not be able to see his wife, who was in Scotland and had not even heard of his arrival. However, the resources of my Private Office were equal to the occasion. Mrs. Wingate was aroused at her home by the police and taken to Edinburgh in order to join our train on its way through and to go with us to Quebec. She had no idea of what it was all about until, in the early hours of the morning, she actually met her husband on a platform at Waverley Station. They had a very happy voyage together.

As I knew how much President Roosevelt liked meeting young, heroic figures, I had also invited Wing-Commander Guy Gibson, fresh from leading the attack which had destroyed the Mohne and Eder Dams. These supplied the industries of the Ruhr, and fed a wide area of fields, rivers, and canals. A special type of mine had been invented for their destruction, but it had to be dropped at night from a height of no more than sixty feet. After months of continuous and concentrated practice, sixteen Lancasters of the 617th Squadron of the Royal Air Force attacked on the night of May 16. Half were lost, but Gibson had stayed to the end, circling under fierce fire over the target to direct his squadron. He now wore a remarkable set of decorations—the Victoria Cross, a Distinguished Service Order and bar, and a Distinguished Flying Cross and bar—but no other ribbons. This was unique.

My wife came with me, and my daughter Mary, now a subaltern in an anti-aircraft battery, was my aide-de-camp. We sailed on August 5, this time for Halifax, in Nova Scotia, instead of New York.

*  *  * *  *

The
Queen Mary
drove on through the waves, and we lived in the utmost comfort on board her, with a diet of pre-war times. As usual on these voyages, we worked all day long. Our large cipher staff, with attendant cruisers to dispatch outgoing messages, kept us in touch with events from hour to hour. Each day I studied with the Chiefs of Staff the various aspects of the problems we were to discuss with our American friends. The most important of these was of course “Overlord.”

I had reserved the interlude which a five days’ voyage presented for the consideration of our long-wrought plans for this supreme operation of crossing the Channel. Study on an ever-expanding scale had gone forward since the struggles on the coasts of Norway and France in 1940, and we had learned much about amphibious war. The Combined Operations Organisation which I had then set up under my friend Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes had played an all-important part and created a new technique. Small-scale raids by the Commandos paved the way for greater things, and not only gave us confidence and experience, but showed the world that although beset on all sides we were not content with passive defence. The Americans, still neutral, had observed this new trend, and later developed it in their own way on a vast scale.

In October 1941, Admiral Keyes was succeeded by Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten. We were still hard-pressed, and our only ally, Russia, seemed near to defeat. Nevertheless, I had resolved to prepare for an invasion of the Continent when the tide should turn. First, we had to increase the intensity and scope of our raids, and then translate all this experience into something much more massive. To mount a successful invasion from the United Kingdom, new engines of war must be contrived and developed, the three fighting services must be trained to plan and fight as one team, supported by the industry of the nation, and the whole island converted into an armed camp for launching the greatest seaborne assault of all time.

When Mountbatten visited me at Chequers before taking up his new duties, I told him, according to his account, “You
are to plan for the offensive. In your Headquarters you will never think defensively.” This governed his actions. To provide him with the necessary authority for his task, he had been made a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, with the acting rank of Vice-Admiral and equivalent honorary rank in the other Services. As Minister of Defence I retained personal responsibility for his Headquarters, and thus he reported direct to me whenever necessary. At Vaagso in Norway, at Bruneval, at St. Nazaire and elsewhere, the Commandos played a steadily increasing part in our affairs. Our raids culminated in the costly attack on Dieppe in August 1942. When thereafter we passed to major Anglo-American offensives, we applied our lessons to the North African landings and to our amphibious descents in the Mediterranean. In all these Mountbatten’s organisation played a prominent and indispensable part.

In May 1942 a body known as “the Combined Commanders” had been appointed to grip the problem. It included the Commanders-in-Chief at home, Mountbatten, and later General Eisenhower, commanding the United States forces in Britain. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, it was decided to set up an Allied Inter-Service Staff under a British officer to prepare a definite plan for “Overlord.” This group began its task in London, under Lieutenant-General F. E. Morgan, with the short title of “Cossac.”
¹

The first question was where a landing in force could best be made. There were several options: the Dutch or Belgian coast; the Pas de Calais; between the mouths of the Somme and the Seine; Normandy; Brittany. Each of these had its own advantages and disadvantages, which had to be weighed up under a whole set of different headings and varying, sometimes uncertain, factors. Of these the principal were beaches; weather and tides; sites for constructing airfields; length of voyage; near-by ports that could be captured; the nature of the hinterland for subsequent operations; provision of cover by home-based aircraft; enemy dispositions, their minefields and defences.

The choice easily narrowed to the Pas de Calais or Normandy. The former gave us the shorter sea passage and the best air cover, but here the defences were the most formidable. General Morgan and his advisers recommended the Normandy coast, which from the first had been advocated by Mountbatten. There can be no doubt now that this decision was sound. Normandy gave us the greatest hope. The defences were not so strong as in the Pas de Calais. The seas and the beaches were on the whole suitable, and were to some extent sheltered from the westerly gales by the Cotentin peninsula. The hinterland favoured the rapid deployment of large forces, and was sufficiently remote from the main strength of the enemy. The port of Cherbourg could be isolated and captured early in the operation. Brest could be outflanked and taken later.

All the coast between Havre and Cherbourg was of course defended with concrete forts and pill-boxes, but, as there was no harbour capable of sustaining a large army in this fifty-mile half-moon of sandy beaches, it was thought that the Germans would not assemble large forces in immediate support of the sea-front. Their High Command had no doubt said to themselves, “This is a good sector for raids up to ten or twenty thousand men, but unless Cherbourg is taken in working order no army in any way equal to the task of an invasion can be landed or nourished. It is a coast for a raid, but not for wider operations.” If only there were harbours which could nourish great armies, here was the front on which to strike.

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Of course, as the reader will have seen, I was well abreast of all the thought about landing-craft and tank landing-craft. I had also long been a partisan of piers with their heads floating out in the sea. Much work had since been done on them following a minute which in the course of our discussions I had issued as long ago as May 30, 1942.
²

Prime Minister to Chief of Combined Operations

They must float up and down with the tide. The anchor problem
must be mastered. The ships must have a side-flap in them, and a drawbridge long enough to overreach the moorings of the piers. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.

  Thought moved to the creation of a large area of sheltered water protected by a breakwater based on blockships brought to the scene by their own power and then sunk in a prearranged position. Mountbatten’s reports in 1942 concentrated upon this idea, suggested directly by an officer on his staff, Captain J. Hughes-Hallett. Imagination, contrivance, and experiment had been ceaseless, and now in August 1943 there was a complete design for making two full-scale temporary harbours which could be towed over and brought into action within a few days of the original landing. These synthetic harbours were called “Mulberries,” a code-name which certainly did not reveal their character or purpose.

*  *  * *  *

  One morning on our voyage, at my request, Brigadier K. G. McLean, with two other officers from General Morgan’s Staff, came to me as I lay in my bed in the spacious cabin, and, after they had set up a large-scale map, explained in a tense and cogent tale the plan which had been prepared for the cross-Channel descent upon France. The reader is perhaps familiar with all the arguments of 1941 and 1942 upon this burning question in all its variants, but this was the first time that I had heard the whole coherent plan presented in precise detail, both of numbers and tonnage, as the result of prolonged study by the officers of both nations.

Further discussions on succeeding days led into more technical detail. The Channel tides have a play of more than twenty feet, with corresponding scours along the beaches. The weather is always uncertain, and winds and gales may whip up in a few hours irresistible forces against frail human structures. The fools or knaves who had chalked “Second Front Now” on our walls for the past two years had not had their minds burdened by such problems. I had long pondered upon them.

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It must be remembered that in the “Mulberry” harbours we had a multiple problem to face. The whole project involved the construction in Britain of great masses of special equipment, amounting in the aggregate to over a million tons of steel and concrete. This work, undertaken with the highest priority, would impinge heavily on our already hard-pressed engineering and ship-repairing industries. All this equipment would have to be transported by sea to the scene of action, and there erected with the utmost expedition in the face of enemy attack and the vagaries of the weather.

The whole project was majestic. On the beaches themselves would be the great piers, with their seaward ends afloat and sheltered. At these piers coasters and landing-craft would be able to discharge at all states of the tide. To protect them against the wanton winds and waves breakwaters would be spread in a great arc to seaward, enclosing a large area of sheltered water. Thus sheltered, deep-draught ships could lie at anchor and discharge, and all types of landing-craft could ply freely to and from the beaches. These breakwaters would be composed of sunken concrete structures known as “Phoenix” and blockships known as “Gooseberries.” In my second volume I have described the similar structures which I thought might in the First World War have been used to create artificial harbours in the Heligoland Bight.
³
Now they were to form a principal part of the great plan.

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This was the scheme of the “Mulberry” harbour, but even so it was not enough. There would not be room for all the ships we needed. Many would have to discharge outside. To shield these and the very numerous naval vessels engaged, an additional scheme of
floating
breakwaters was proposed. For this purpose several devices were being considered, among them one to create a barrier to wave action by means of a continuous screen of air bubbles discharged from pipes laid on the sea-bed. It was hoped this screen would break up and
absorb the rhythm of the waves. Another device known as a “Lilo” consisted of partially inflated air bags carrying submerged curtains of concrete. These would be moored in line to seaward of the “Phoenix” and enclose a considerable additional area of water. Neither of these ideas reached fruition, but eventually a device called the “Bombardon” was adopted, embodying some of the features of the “Lilo.” It was a cruciform steel structure about two hundred feet long and twenty-five feet high, with all but the top arm of the cross submerged. In the event this device was of doubtful value, as we shall see in due course.