Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (30 page)

N
EPTUNE
-O
VERLORD
C
OMMAND
S
TRUCTURE

ALMOST FROM THE START
, there was general agreement among the “Cs-in-C” that the plan Morgan had crafted for Overlord simply would not do. Morgan had based all his plans on an initial assault force of three reinforced divisions, not because he believed three divisions were sufficient but because the Combined Chiefs had told him there would be only enough sealift for three divisions, and Morgan had planned accordingly. Now that the invasion was more than a vague ambition, it struck almost everyone that a three-division assault force was entirely too weak. After all, the Allies had employed seven divisions for the landings on Sicily. Even before he knew he was going to be appointed to command Overlord, Eisenhower had concluded that the invasion of France “was being made on too narrow a front and with insufficient land forces.” Before he left for the United States on New Year’s Eve, he sent for Montgomery, who was preparing to fly to London, and told him to do what he could to “increase the troop lift in
OVERLORD
.”
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By the time Eisenhower arrived in London in mid-January, his trio of commanders had all agreed that the initial invasion force had to be increased from three divisions to five. Since this also necessitated adding two new landing beaches, it effectively doubled the length of the invasion front, which would now extend from the Cotentin Peninsula on the west to the Orne River on the east, a distance of nearly fifty miles. Five reinforced divisions would attack in the initial assault, with two more to follow that same afternoon. In his memoirs, Montgomery claimed credit for insisting on this increased commitment, though, in fact, the initiative had come from Eisenhower. Montgomery’s principal contribution was to encourage
an additional three-division paratroop drop—a “vertical envelopment,” in military terminology—behind the beaches, two on the Cotentin Peninsula, behind the westernmost beach, and another near Caen, at the eastern end of the Bay of the Seine. That brought the initial assault on D-Day to a total of ten Allied divisions. The problem, of course, was sealift. All of Morgan’s calculations for the naval requirements had been based on a three-division assault, and the number of landing ships, landing craft, escort vessels, and gunfire support ships detailed in the COSSAC plan were wholly inadequate for a five-division assault.

There was, however, a relatively easy solution at hand. The overall Neptune-Overlord plan confirmed at Quebec had included a diversionary Allied landing in southern France. At Tehran, this diversion received enthusiastic support from Stalin, who believed it would force the Germans to face threats from two directions at once and allow the Normandy “hammer” to slam down on the southern “anvil.” As a result, the initial diversion was expanded into a two-division assault and code-named Anvil. The Americans had proposed the diversion in the first place as a way to rein in Churchill’s ambitions for other, more tangential Mediterranean adventures, but then Stalin’s support made it an integral part of the strategic plan. The difficulty was that while Anvil confronted the Germans with a potential two-front campaign in France, it also compelled the Allies to conduct two simultaneous landings, and that meant more landing craft and more support ships, including the essential LSTs. Once the SHAEF team determined on the necessity of a five-division initial assault in Normandy, it was evident that one way to resolve the problem of insufficient landing craft for Neptune was to cancel Anvil and transfer the necessary naval assets from the Mediterranean to England. All of Eisenhower’s British service commanders, including his own chief of staff, Beetle Smith, found this a compelling, even obvious, solution.
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Eisenhower was loath to do it. In part, his opposition was a product of his own analysis. He believed that Anvil would greatly aid Overlord by forcing the Germans to disperse their military assets, and he was aware of how valuable it would be to have several seaports in southern France to funnel supplies into the country once the ground campaign took off. He was also
sensitive to the political implications. Stalin had made it clear that he considered Overlord and Anvil to be a single inseparable operation. The cancellation of either might well have negative repercussions for the alliance. In addition to that, however, Eisenhower defended Anvil because he knew that Marshall supported it, and he was reluctant to oppose his mentor. Consequently, in his first report as SHAEF to the Combined Chiefs, rather than advocate the cancellation of Anvil, Eisenhower instead queried them about getting additional sealift in order to do both operations.

Ramsay was disappointed. He viewed Eisenhower’s desire to conduct both Neptune and Anvil as an unwillingness to come to grips with reality. Though Ramsay had previously written his wife that Eisenhower was “a sensible chap,” he now confided to his diary that, “Ike is waffling and seeking to have his cake and eat it [too].” In Ramsay’s view, there was simply no alternative to canceling Anvil and moving the needed sealift vessels from the Mediterranean to England. Instead of risking both operations by dividing up the limited shipping for two assaults, it was far better to ensure success for one of them, and that one, obviously, was Neptune. To Ramsay, the solution was self-evident and unavoidable: “Anvil must be cancelled.”
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This newest Anglo-American disagreement reflected the difference between British and American views of the relationship between logistics and strategy. To the British it was simply self-evident that operational planning had to adjust to the realities of logistical limits. Their view was that if there weren’t enough ships for two landings, one landing had to go. The Americans, accustomed to greater matériel abundance, took the view that if there weren’t enough ships for two landings, the obvious solution was to get more ships.

To do exactly that, Eisenhower sent a lengthy telegram to the Combined Chiefs in Washington detailing the sealift requirements for a five-division assault on Normandy. Specifically, he wanted 271 more landing craft, including forty-seven more of the scarce LSTs. Nor was that all, for in order to escort those landing ships and landing craft safely across the Channel, and to support the landings, Ike also wanted thirty-six more destroyers, five additional cruisers, and one or two battleships. Adding up all of the naval assets needed for the expanded cross-Channel operation, the new plan
called for more than twelve hundred warships, four thousand landing craft, and fifteen hundred other vessels—nearly seven thousand vessels in all if one included the small Higgins boats and British LCAs. Eisenhower acknowledged that it might be difficult to obtain all those resources quickly, and expressed his willingness to postpone the attack for a month if necessary. “Rather … than risk failure with reduced forces on the earlier date,” he wrote, “I would accept postponement of a month if I were assured of obtaining the strength required.” Eisenhower concluded his lengthy cable by asking for “an immediate decision.”
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He didn’t get one. The arrival of his memo in Washington triggered another lengthy debate within the CCS, one that pitted not only Overlord against Anvil, but also Europe against the Pacific. That very month, U.S. naval forces seized targets in the Marshall Islands at Kwajalein, Majuro, and Eniwetok, operations that also required large numbers of landing craft. King was suspicious that the CCS were looking toward the Pacific as a kind of resource pool for Overlord, and he reminded the CCS that the original Neptune plan had called for the British to provide the naval support for the invasion of Europe. Rather than a prompt yes or no, therefore, Eisenhower received a rather curious reply that came not from the Combined Chiefs but from the American Joint Chiefs. It was neither an approval nor a rejection, but a list of questions that implied skepticism about Eisenhower’s calculations. In particular, the JCS wanted to know “the basis you used in arriving at the additional resources required.” How many landing craft did he have? What was their capacity? What was the justification for more warships? In effect, the JCS wanted Eisenhower to do the math and to show his work. The Supreme Allied Commander might have taken offense at the challenging tone of that reply—Montgomery and Ramsay certainly did. True to his character, however, Eisenhower patiently responded to all of the questions, though he reiterated that he needed an answer soon, for it was impossible to make any meaningful plans until he knew whether he was to have the needed sealift. “All plans and training considerations hang on the answer,” he wrote.
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In Eisenhower’s detailed item-by-item response, he listed the number of ships he had, along with their function and their capacity, and allowed the
numbers to speak for themselves. Taking the number of serviceable LSTs already in England (173) and adding twenty-five more per month (the production numbers given him by the JCS) would give him 248 LSTs on D-Day. Because several of them had to be used as command ships and fighter-director ships, he would be left with almost exactly the 230 that Morgan had calculated would be necessary for a three-division assault, but clearly considerably short of what was needed for a five-division assault. “We have gone into this matter carefully,” Eisenhower wrote, “and as far as we know every serviceable landing craft that is worth having is allocated to
OVERLORD
.” And it wasn’t enough.
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In receipt of Eisenhower’s detailed cable, the JCS agreed to postpone D-Day from May 1 to May 31 in order to build up Allied sealift. They also agreed to preserve the Anvil landings. To make that possible, however, Ike would have to make do with forty-eight fewer LSTs and fifty-one fewer LCI(L)s than he had requested. Some of the shortfall could be made up by adding more transports and American attack cargo ships (AKAs), but it reduced the margin of safety to near zero. Eisenhower was betting on American productivity, writing Marshall that “one extra month of landing craft production, including LSTs, should help a lot.” Ramsay thought otherwise. In his opinion, the decision to continue with Anvil was “outrageous.” Even with an extra month to build more ships, he was convinced that the necessary sealift for Neptune “cannot be obtained without some of [the] Anvil lift.”
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All of Eisenhower’s hopes for Anvil were predicated on a swift and successful conclusion to the campaign in Italy so that ships from the Mediterranean could be used for both Neptune and Anvil. But as January turned to February, the Allied forces around Anzio remained virtually imprisoned in their precarious beachhead, sustained there by the very landing ships that Eisenhower wanted and needed. On February 5 the British Chiefs of Staff insisted that the stalemate in Italy made Anvil “neither possible nor desirable,” and urged that any landing craft in the Mediterranean not needed to sustain the Anzio beachhead should be moved at once to England for Overlord. Less than a year before, the British had pushed hard for expanded Mediterranean operations and the Americans had insisted on the primacy of a cross-Channel attack. Now it was the other way around.
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Eisenhower continued to defend the Anvil operation, though privately he began to lose heart. “It looks like
ANVIL
is doomed,” he wrote in a memorandum for his diary. “I hate this.” Though it was the stalled campaign in Italy that intensified the crisis, the real culprit, in his view, was the war in the Pacific. That war was “absorbing far too much of our limited resources in landing craft,” he wrote. Despite the initial strategic decision to fight Germany first—an agreement to which all parties had subscribed—“we are fighting two wars at once—which is wrong.”
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For months, the several constituencies squabbled over the scarce landing craft, and especially the LSTs. Alan Brooke, who was in the middle of it, wrote in his diary that distributing LSTs was like “one of those awful jigsaw problems when it becomes very difficult to fit in all the right pieces.” In fact, it was more like a slide puzzle: vessels shifted from one theater to another necessarily left a vacuum somewhere else. Eisenhower proposed bringing twenty LSTs and twenty-one LCI(L)s from the Mediterranean in exchange for AKAs equipped with boat davits for amphibious operations. The JCS offered a different solution: sending twenty-six LSTs in the Mediterranean to Britain for Overlord in exchange for twenty-six new LSTs from America originally scheduled for the Pacific. Sir Henry “Jumbo” Wilson, who was the Allied commander in Italy, wondered why the new LSTs from America couldn’t go directly to Britain so he could keep the twenty-six he had. The answer was that the new LSTs wouldn’t be ready until late May or early June, which was obviously too late for Overlord. But as far as Wilson was concerned, that was too late for him, too, for it would leave him without any LSTs for nearly three months. Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff insisted that an attempt to execute Anvil would strip Wilson of his operational reserve and jeopardize the entire campaign in Italy. The Americans were not especially alarmed by such a prospect, since they were perfectly willing to close down the Italian campaign in exchange for opening a new front in southern France. But instead of seeing that as a rational choice, the British, and especially Brooke, saw it as evidence of American obtuseness. On Valentine’s Day, Eisenhower wrote to Marshall that “the LST appears to be the one great question in the landing craft problem to which no really satisfactory answer now seems apparent.”
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