COSSAC. Stephen C. Kepher
could be loaded.19 By 6 June 1944 there were even close-support craft like the LCT-R, or landing craft tank–rocket.20
In some cases, assault ships would have both men for the assault and the craft needed to land them. If so, then it was a matter of proper coordination so that the troops would be loaded into the assault craft at the proper moment, take their place in the correct assault wave, and land on the right beach. If the craft were on one ship and the troops on another, then the boats had to be loaded out in the correct sequence, be gathered in assembly areas, be directed to the right transport at the right time, pick up the troops, and then head to the right beach. In both cases, there were often subchasers, control craft, or mine sweepers helping with the navigation.21 It took a great deal of training before young men, most of whom had no sailing experience, were proficient in the art of laying a small craft alongside a large ship, loading troops, and delivering them on the beach, then turning around and doing it again.
Between January and June of 1942, ten raids of various sizes were conducted; the planning for some had started under Keyes. The raid on the radar station at Bruneval, France, and the raid on the dry dock and other facilities at Saint-Nazaire are among the most well known in this period.
Operation JUBILEE, the Dieppe Raid, might well have been controversial even if it hadn’t been a spectacular failure. It would seem to have violated Churchill’s requirement of “no substantial landing in France unless we are going to stay,” as well as having a long list of questionable planning and operational decisions associated with it. Whatever else can be said about the tragedy of 19 August 1942, one perceived accomplishment (which turned out to be false) was the “massive fighter battle in the skies…. Convinced that a great air victory had been won at Dieppe, and that at last a way had been found to inflict severe wastage on the Luftwaffe, the head of Fighter Command, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, wrote Mountbatten shortly afterwards urging more raids of the same kind, making only one common-sense observation … : ‘When attacking the enemy on land, one does not generally strike at his strongest point.’ ”22 That is to say, don’t attempt to seize a defended port by direct amphibious assault without substantial air and naval gunfire support, which would likely damage the facilities that one would hope to seize intact.
Mountbatten was encouraged to think of other raids or feints that would continue to bring the Luftwaffe up into battle with the Royal Air Force under favorable conditions. The fact that well-trained troops might be the bait to attract the Germans did not seem to enter into the equation, nor did the possibility of the Germans deciding to not take the bait as offered.
A Plan for What Might Be Done Next
Summer and fall of 1942 were, of course, also the time of the debates over SLEDGEHAMMER, which was put to rest before the Dieppe Raid. The North African campaign also put an end to the discussion about any major cross-Channel effort in 1943. Additionally, TORCH drew off most of the small group of experienced American planners who had been in London working on the question of reentry into the Continent and who were now assigned to Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) at Norfolk House. Soon Lieutenant General Morgan and his 1st British Corps would become part of the TORCH campaign.
Morgan enjoyed challenging his staff to consider some of the larger issues confronting them. He felt that with the Americans now in the war, some sort of offensive action—certainly not across the Channel, but somewhere—should be considered. The question to his officers’ mess was—where? In early autumn 1942 their collective answer was somewhere between Casablanca and Tunis. This was, as it turned out, a pretty good guess, but for Morgan it also marked the beginning of what became a very different assignment.
In October 1942 1st Corps was renamed 125 Force, assigned to TORCH, and was initially intended to be deployed in case the Germans drove into Spain and attempted to close the Strait of Gibraltar. Morgan’s force was to conduct an amphibious landing and occupy what was then Spanish Morocco so that the strait would remain open even if Gibraltar was captured. Morgan observed that, “on paper, in London, there seemed to be a certain rough logic in the idea but, the more deeply one went into it, the more I became impressed with the lack of our knowledge of the conduct of such affairs in general.”23
Morgan traveled from his headquarters in Yorkshire down to London to meet General Eisenhower, arriving the same day as Maj. Gen. Mark Clark, Eisenhower’s deputy, returned from his clandestine negotiations with the French military in North Africa. While Morgan was impressed with his new commander, he encountered one significant problem almost at once. His written orders, conveyed to him by the AFHQ staff, were totally incomprehensible. While it had been “compiled according to the best War College standards … the whole document as it stood meant not a thing to any of us.”24 As a result, one of his first steps was to become acquainted not only with “American English” but with that specific subset known as U.S. Army staff language. (COSSAC later took this into consideration with their communication. Memoranda, for example, would employ “combined” terminology for clarity. Thus, reference would be to “L of C/Communications Zone,” “Formations/Units,” or “Stores/Supplies.”)
Morgan set about to train his force for amphibious operations. The two divisions were stationed in the Scottish Lowlands, from where it would be relatively easy to embark from the River Clyde around Glasgow. Among the training areas used were those associated with various COHQ facilities, notably the Combined Training Center in Largs, a small summer resort town near Glasgow.
Morgan also grew to know and respect Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, who stayed in London while Eisenhower went to Gibraltar for the final planning of the North African invasion. “By the time he [Smith] in turn left for Africa we had established an understanding which stood us in good stead later on.”25 By December of 1942 Morgan was obliged to travel to North Africa, as the hypothetical planning questions of October had become a more complex reality and the details of employing 125 Force could no longer be dealt with at long range. He took the injunction of Marshal Ferdinand Foch seriously: “Don’t phone, go and see.”26 Interestingly, Morgan’s command was joint and combined, with “his sailor” being Commo. W. E. Parry of the Royal Navy and “his airman,” Brig. Gen. Robert Candee of the Eighth U.S. Army Air Force.27
The trip to North Africa connected Morgan with many of those involved in TORCH. He demonstrated little of the standoff reserve so often attributed to British officers, on one occasion enthusiastically entering into a very American debate about the American Civil War that flared up during an evening’s festivities. Seeing that those arguing for the “South” were outnumbered, he entered the fray with such good effect that Adm. John Leslie Hall, USN, made Morgan an honorary Southern Democrat. The same Admiral Hall was to be the commander of Amphibious Force “O” at Omaha Beach, the force that put the U.S. 1st Division ashore on D-Day. More importantly, Morgan saw an allied operational headquarters that worked. He “had been able to talk with old British Army friends who formed part of Ike’s team, to catch from them the spirit of the thing … to appreciate to what an extent … integration of the two forces had already taken place.”28
His flight back to the United Kingdom was not without incident. When the pilots sighted land an hour earlier than planned, Morgan was summoned to the cockpit of his loaned B-17 for a consultation. He was able to confirm that the land in sight were the Isles of Scilly and not the Brest peninsula of occupied France. Successfully landing outside London, one member of his staff “sought confirmation of our good luck by means of the slot machines in the bar, from which he quickly derived a small fortune. It was not all luck. Acquaintance with [this B-17’s crew] taught one a lot.”29 (Had they missed the Isles, they might have missed landfall altogether as they were flying on a northerly heading.)
The potential threat for which 125 Force was formed never appeared, and by early 1943 Morgan was ordered to plan an invasion of Sardinia, for which his force would be reinforced by two American divisions and the Royal Marines division. As planning for that operation developed, he was then told that the next operation would now be Sicily and to start planning for that operation. “It became evident that the conquest of Sicily would be an affair far larger in scope than either of our previous projects, larger in fact than could be contemplated with the use of so small