The Valour and the Horror

Feasibility Studies

The British Chiefs of Staff charged Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten and his Combined Operations Headquarters, in September 1941, with investigating the feasibility of amphibious operations in the European theatre of the war. Earlier, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes had undertaken some planning for commando raids, but Mountbatten was to do more.

"You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe," British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill told him. "You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, and the technique. The whole of the South Coast of England is a bastion of defense against the invasion of Hitler; you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack."

American planners began formal cooperation with Britain in December 1941, just after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour and the German and Italian declarations of war against the United States. In compliance with earlier, informal understandings, the two partners agreed to put defeat of Germany and its ally Italy first, if forced to wage a two-front war against both those nations and Japan.

Despite some talk of a Continental invasion as early as 1942, Allied leaders decided to schedule their assault tentatively for 1943. The United States agreed that during 1942, Allied forces should concentrate on wearing down Germany's resistance through air attacks, operations along the North African coast, and assistance to the Soviet Union. This was in accordance with British fears, since the British were going to carry the brunt of the attack until the Americans could build up their forces in Europe.

Allied leaders honed their strategy further at a series of great conferences during 1942 and 1943 at Casablanca, Quebec, Cairo, and Teheran. Examining a range of alternatives, they gradually adopted the broad outlines of the attack they would launch. As planning continued, however, it became clear that the Americans disagreed ardently with the British desire to wear down the Germans before beginning a final confrontation on the Continent. Confident in the strength of their vast resources, American planners argued that

"wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies"

and that only direct action against the main body of the German force could produce an Allied victory.

Britain's peripheral approach, they asserted, would waste valuable assets on operations that could have, at best, an indirect effect on the outcome of the war. There was also the Soviet Union to consider, which had suffered millions of casualties in its fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front, and might conceivably collapse and conclude a separate peace if Britain and the United States failed to relieve some of the pressure by attacking in the west. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was already clamouring for a second front. To the Americans, it seemed far better to seize the initiative from Germany with a bold assault than to allow the alliance's resources to dribble away in operations that would have little long-term effect on the enemy's will to resist.

The British viewed the situation in Europe with an eye closely focused on their own circumstances and experience. As conscious of their nation's lack of resources as the Americans were of the vast wealth available to the United States, they had already withstood a disaster at Dunkerque in 1940, when the Germans had driven a British army off the Continent in defeat, and at the French seacoast town of Dieppe in August 1942, when the Germans, at great cost to the Allies, had repelled a Canadian landing. Their experiences with amphibious warfare during World War I had been little better. Their forces had endured a bloodletting at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, where landings championed by Churchill had failed. They had also lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare on the stalemated Western Front in France.
Britain's leaders thus had visions of catastrophe whenever the Americans raised the issue of a cross-Channel attack. If haste prevailed over reason, Churchill warned, the beaches of France might well be

"choked with the bodies of the flower of American and British manhood."

The British finally accepted an American proposal, code-named BOLERO, to establish a million-man force in Britain, trained and equipped for the 1943 invasion and drafted their own proposal, code-named ROUNDUP, for a 1943 attack across the English Channel into France. The assault would come only after a series of major campaigns on the periphery of Europe, in Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union, where the Germans would have difficulty massing their power. Once bombing, blockade, partisan uprisings, and the fighting on those other fronts had weakened the enemy sufficiently, ROUNDUP, or something like it, would begin.
The case for chipping away at the Axis became stronger as it grew obvious that the forces couldn't be mustered in time for a 1943 attack through Normandy. Churchill cabled Roosevelt on 24 November 1942 to insist "that we do not miss 1944." His recommendation, was that 1943 be used to "drive Italy out of the war."
(Dancocks: 8)

If the British had agreed in principle at the Arcadia Conference to an early attack across the Channel, by the end of 1942 they had nevertheless succeeded in shifting many of the resources marked for BOLERO to TORCH, an Allied invasion of North Africa much more in accord with their own point of view. The American military had little choice but to go along. They not only lacked the landing craft, war-planes, and shipping necessary to carry out a cross-Channel attack, they also had to contend with their commander in chief, President Roosevelt, who had become convinced that some sort of immediate action against Germany was necessary to divert the attention of the American people from the Pacific to the Atlantic side of the war.

The vehement German response to the assault at Dieppe, resulting in the loss of nearly a thousand British and Canadian lives, the capture of more than two thousand fighting men, and the destruction of better than one hundred aircraft, weighed heavily upon American planners. If the German response at Dieppe was any indication, an invasion of the Continent would require more meticulous preparation and more strength than a 1943 attack could possibly allow. Indeed, Allied planners and logisticians would have to create, field, and supply an organisation that could meet and defeat the worst counterattack the enemy was capable of devising.

By April 1943, Morgan had established an organisation to carry out that task and had named it COSSAC after the initials in his new title. He warned his officers at that time to avoid thinking of themselves as planners, and to see themselves instead as the embryo of a future supreme headquarters. "The term planning staff has come to have a most sinister meaning," he observed. "It implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action."

During the summer of 1943, COSSAC formulated a tentative plan of attack that involved a force of between three and five divisions. The assault would be supplied from two prefabricated harbours, called MULBERRIES composed of scuttled ships just off the invasion beaches, positioned along the breakwaters . The MULBERRIES would provide a measure of flexibility, allowing the Allies to provision their forces as they moved inland, without having to first capture an established port.

As COSSAC developed that plan, the question of where to land posed problems. The site had to be within range of fighter aircraft based in Great Britain, but also on ground flat enough to construct airfields once the invading force moved off the beaches and out of the range of its initial fighter support. The landing zones, themselves, needed shelter from prevailing winds to facilitate 'round-the-clock resupply operations, and enough exits to allow the invading force to proceed inland easily. Similarly, the area behind the beaches needed an adequate road network. Since the region would ultimately serve as the base for the drive across France toward Germany, the Allies also wanted access to nearby ports, large enough to facilitate unloading massive quantities of supplies and ammunition to sustain the attack.

The most appropriate location lay directly across the English Channel from Dover in the Pas de Calais region. The area met many of the Allies' requirements, and offered a direct route into the heart of Germany. Unfortunately, the enemy had recognised this fact, and had already begun construction of heavy fortifications along the coast. COSSAC sought an alternative to the west, along the Normandy coast near Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula. Here the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre formed gateways to the ports at Brest, Nantes, L'Orient, and St. Nazaire. Allied planners believed that the Germans would sabotage Cherbourg, forcing the invaders to place heavy initial reliance on the MULBERRIES, but the damage could be repaired, and the region, itself, was less strongly defended than the Pas de Calais.

As planning continued, both Eisenhower and Montgomery recognised that the three- to five-division assault COSSAC envisioned would have to be strengthened and spread over a larger area. Looking toward the early capture of Cherbourg, and a secure flow of supplies, Montgomery argued in favour of a broad attack somewhat west of Caen. Stretching from the area below the city into the region beyond St. Martin-de-Varreville, he envisioned a front of some sixty miles. When Morgan's planners responded that a bridgehead that size would exceed all available resources, Montgomery asserted that nothing less would work, and that the Allies would have to find either the means or another commander.

The Trident (May 1943) Conference and Quebec (June 1943) Conference

Under Churchill's influence, the British supported the idea of a Balkans operation. The Americans were suspect, believing Britain was more interested in securing a postwar empire than in hasty defeat of Germany. Refusing further delays, the Americans won agreement for a May 1, 1944 attack during the May, 1943 Trident Conference in Washington. One month later, the Quadrant Conference in Quebec reaffirmed the decision.
Montgomery's insistence led to a sometimes acrimonious debate over the value of ANVIL, a plan to invade southern France that Eisenhower wanted to schedule simultaneously with OVERLORD. The invasion's planners considered the attack important, and the conferees at Teheran endorsed it, but the British, particularly Churchill, had never seen its merit. Hesitant at first to cancel the operation because it seemed a necessary diversion for the main effort in the Cotentin, Eisenhower in the end agreed to a postponement. Given the enlarged scope of OVERLORD, no other alternative seemed possible. There were too few landing craft to go around.

The Casablanca Conference and the Tehran Conference

Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin strengthened the Americans' hand during the Teheran Conference in November. He reacted furiously to news after the Casablanca Conference that there would be no second front in 1943.
At Teheran, he welcomed the new emphasis on an attack and pushed vigorously for the appointment of a supreme commander to head the operation. From then on, the Americans were able to argue that any postponement of the invasion would constitute a breach of faith with the Russians. Wrangling continued over the Italian campaign and a possible invasion of southern France, code-named ANVlL, but the flow of men and supplies to the Mediterranean theatre slowed and the final buildup for the cross-Channel attack began in earnest under the leadership of Eisenhower.
The tactical air forces for the invasion were clearly under Eisenhower, but there remained disagreement over whether he commanded the strategic air forces employed in bombing Germany.
Spaatz and Harris were disposed to cooperate with Eisenhower, but insisted on remaining independent in order to concentrate on destroying Germany's industrial base and air force. After considerable give and take, an arrangement suitable to all sides emerged. Subject to the oversight of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a joint committee composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts.
Eisenhower gained responsibility for the "direction" of strategic air forces. It was understood, however that the cross-Channel attack, code-named Operation OVERLORD, would not absorb the entire bomber effort, and that the air campaign against Germany would continue.

Valour and Horror, Second World War, Canadian history, World War II, W.W.II