Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (31 page)

Throughout this period, the waters were muddied further by Churchill, whose behavior was even more eccentric than usual. The prime minister had suffered a physical collapse after the Tehran conference, and he spent a full month in Marrakech gathering the strength simply to fly back to Britain. Even after his return in mid-January, his behavior was erratic. He seemed to have trouble tracking a line of argument, and he became obsessed by tangential issues such as his old notion of conducting a landing on Sumatra. Brooke was nearly apoplectic in trying to keep him focused on the issues at hand. “I just cannot get him to face the true facts!” Brooke wrote in frustration. “It is a ghastly situation.”
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Meanwhile, as February turned to March, there was still no resolution concerning Anvil. Ramsay found “the continual delay … [v]ery unsatisfactory,” and wrote in his diary, “This battle of the Chiefs of Staff is wearing everyone down.” Tempers grew short. After yet one more cable from America in which the Joint Chiefs confirmed their support for Anvil, Brooke all but threw up his hands. “Marshall is quite hopeless,” he wrote in his diary. “I have seldom seen a poorer strategist! He cannot see beyond the end of his nose.” In Brooke’s view, Ike was no better. “Eisenhower has got absolutely no strategical outlook and is really totally unfit for the post he holds,” Brooke wrote, though he had to admit, “He makes up [for it], however, by the way he works for good cooperation between allies.”
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By March, Eisenhower was wavering. Much as he wanted to support Marshall, he saw that clinging to Anvil not only was logistically dubious but was damaging the alliance. Moreover, he just could not make the numbers add up. If he counted every LST currently on hand and raised the “serviceability” ratio from 85 percent to an unrealistic 95 percent, then added all the ships currently in the construction pipeline, he would still be fifteen LSTs short on D-Day. In addition, there was the inevitable attrition consequent to all of the hazards of simply going to sea in wartime. By March, several LSTs had been sunk by the U-boats or damaged in training exercises; one of them (LST-228) broke her anchor chain in Horta, the chief port of the Azores, and crashed into the rocks. Such losses, unfortunate at any time, were especially worrisome given the circumstances. On March 20, Eisenhower gave up. He reluctantly confessed to Marshall that it was
simply not possible to conduct Neptune-Overlord without drawing upon “the landing craft hitherto hypothecated for a possible
ANVIL
.” To drive the point home in a particularly vivid way, he told Marshall that without the vessels from the Mediterranean, there would be enough sealift at Normandy for only “the first three tides.” After that, “we will have no repeat no LSTs reaching the beaches after the morning of D plus 1 until the morning of D plus 4.” Though smaller landing craft would be available, the Allied landing force would be effectively stranded on the Normandy beaches for three days without any LSTs available for either major reinforcement or, if necessary, evacuation. The addition of the twenty-six LSTs and forty LCI(L)s from the Mediterranean would give Eisenhower and Ramsay “some margin of safety as well as flexibility in the assault.”
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In the end, the solution for Anvil was the same as for Overlord: it was postponed. Overlord had already been delayed for a month in order to allow time to build more landing craft. Now Anvil was delayed until midsummer so that all or most of the Mediterranean sealift capability could be used for Overlord, then redeployed back to the Mediterranean afterward for a future Anvil. Of course that meant there would be no simultaneous double pincer, but there seemed to be no other solution.

Brooke was relieved (“At last!” he wrote in his diary), though he was hardly forgiving. He remained angry at the Americans, and particularly at Marshall, for trying to manipulate the crisis. From his point of view, the American offer of twenty-six new LSTs for the Mediterranean had been an effort “to blackmail us into agreeing with them.” After Anvil was postponed, the Americans withdrew the offer and sent the LSTs, as originally planned, to the Pacific. “History will never forgive them,” Brooke wrote, “for bargaining equipment against strategy.” Brooke’s bitterness may have been exacerbated by his continuing row with Churchill, for his assessment of Marshall was hugely unfair. Marshall’s support for Anvil had been genuine, and it was with real regret that he abandoned it, accepting at last the fact that sometimes logistics do trump strategy. Ramsay’s reaction to the news that Anvil was put off was restrained but heartfelt: “Thank Goodness.”
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The issue was settled at last, but it was now April 19, 1944, three months and two days after Eisenhower had arrived in London to assume
the responsibilities of Supreme Commander. Even with the four weeks he had gained by the postponement of the Normandy landings, D-Day was only six weeks away.

OF COURSE THE ALLIES
had not been completely idle during those three months. More than four hundred thousand additional American GIs had disembarked at English ports since January—two hundred thousand of them in April alone. More ships, too, had arrived, some of them LSTs with LCTs riding piggyback on their hulls, and all of them stuffed with supplies of every kind, from beans to bullets. With them came more than twenty-two thousand U.S. Navy officers and men, most of whom were billeted ashore, eight thousand of them at Plymouth, three thousand at Falmouth, and two thousand at Dartmouth. Training, and especially joint training, was accelerated. While Eisenhower worried over grand strategy and the viability of Anvil, his trio of commanders—Montgomery, Leigh-Mallory, and Ramsay—supervised programs designed to prepare their forces for the great invasion, though their dissimilar styles made for dramatically different approaches.

As the commander of an Army group, Montgomery supervised two armies: the American First Army under command of the homely but well-liked General Omar Bradley, and the British Second Army (which included the Canadian Third Division) under the tall and gaunt General Miles Dempsey. The various elements of their commands were spread out in more than a hundred camps all over England, and Montgomery spent most of his time traveling about the country visiting them, sometimes two or three a day. He did so using a special train (which he called the “Rapier”) on which the abstemious Montgomery allowed no drinking or smoking.
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At each stop, the local commander held a parade so that the troops could pass in review. Montgomery was convinced it was essential for him to see the troops, and even more important for them to see him. He once told
George VI that his beret alone was worth three divisions because when soldiers saw it across a battlefield, they would cry, “There’s Monty!” and become unbeatable. After almost every one of these formal parades, Montgomery made an effort to interact personally with the soldiers. Often he called for the men to “stand easy,” then wandered among them, shaking hands and making chitchat. At some of the larger events, he would signal that they should break ranks and crowd up to the reviewing stand for an informal talk. If there wasn’t a reviewing stand, he might climb on top of a jeep and wave the soldiers to gather round. His actions were based on a conviction that “stout hearts” (his words) were at least as important as technical training. Paraphrasing Napoleon, he asserted that, “It is ‘the man’ that counts, and not only the machine.” What he meant was that winning battles was due as much to individual courage as to technical or mechanical superiority, but few who heard him were left in any doubt about who “the man” was. Significantly, Montgomery spent much of February sitting for a formal oil portrait.
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After visiting virtually every Army base on the island, Montgomery began giving speeches at factories and work centers. He told his listeners that “we were all one great army,” and that “we must all rally to the task and finish off the war.” He was well received everywhere he went, which contributed to his already healthy self-regard, but it was unclear to some whether he was preparing for a military operation or running for public office. In his postwar memoirs, he noted, “The people seemed to think I had some magic prescription for victory and that I had been sent to lead them to better things.” Almost certainly he thought so, too. Both Churchill and Eisenhower worried that Montgomery was not focusing on the pressing need for realistic training, and Ramsay was particularly frustrated by his lengthy absences. “His knowledge of the technique of the operation is very small,” Ramsay wrote in his diary. He worried that rather than make command decisions himself, Montgomery left almost everything to his staff. “He does
no
work at all,” Ramsay wrote in disgust.
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For his part, Ramsay established his headquarters at Southwick House, a few miles inland from Portsmouth. A large, impressive manor house with a colonnaded front, it had been turned over to the Royal Navy as a School of
Navigation to replace the one that had been bombed out in Portsmouth, and as such, it bore the name HMS
Dryad
, though it certainly never went to sea. Once an elegant private estate, the grounds were marred now by hundreds of the ubiquitous Nissen huts. A giant map of the English Channel was installed on one wall of the main house showing all the ports in southern England where Allied troops were congregated, as well as the target beaches in Normandy. Tiny wooden ship icons could be moved about on the map to show the location, both current and intended, of Allied vessels.

One of Ramsay’s first decisions after moving into Southwick House was to request the appointment of Admiral Sir Philip Vian as his deputy commander. It was a natural selection for a number of reasons, including the fact that Ramsay and Vian were close friends. Ramsay had spent the New Year’s holiday at Vian’s house in Hampshire, where they had played golf despite the weather and spent the evenings playing card games with Vian’s children.
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In addition to their personal friendship, Vian was a natural choice because, like Montgomery, he was something of a national hero in Britain. Early in the war, he had pursued a German supply ship, the
Altmark
, into then-neutral Norwegian waters in order to rescue three hundred British merchant seamen being held on board as prisoners, an act for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Two years later in the Mediterranean, Vian won a knighthood after a series of desperate actions in defense of convoys fighting their way from Egypt to the besieged island of Malta, south of Sicily.
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Vian had also commanded what was labeled “Force V” during the Husky landings in Sicily and the Avalanche landings near Salerno, in which role he had worked closely with Ramsay. After that, Churchill decided to name him to succeed Louis Mountbatten as head of amphibious forces. When Vian reported to the Admiralty in 1943, however, he learned that Ramsay had requested him as his deputy for the cross-Channel invasion, and that
put Vian in an awkward position. To him, being second in command of Neptune was a far more desirable billet than being the administrative head of amphibious operations. He was therefore concerned when Churchill invited him to dinner, unsure of what he would say if the prime minister offered him Mountbatten’s job. As usual at Chequers, dinner was quite late, and the guests didn’t sit down to eat until nearly 11:00 p.m. The party broke up at 2:30 in the morning without any job offer being extended, and Vian thought he was off the hook. Apparently the dinner had been an audition, however, because Churchill sent for him at eight the next morning, receiving him in his bed, and made the expected offer. Vian swallowed hard and told the prime minister that he would prefer the job with Ramsay, “which was operational and a fighting one.” Churchill did not press the issue. He may have been pleased that a veteran Royal Navy officer preferred a fighting command to administration, and perhaps wished that he could have one, too.
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Vian’s responsibilities under Ramsay were redefined after the cross-Channel operation was expanded from three divisions to five, for that meant there would be five landing beaches as well, too many for a single naval task force to cover. Ramsay’s command was divided in half: a Western Task Force responsible for the two American beaches (initially code-named Oboe and Uncle), and an Eastern Task Force for the two British beaches (Sword and Gold) and the Canadian beach (Juno). In that new arrangement, it seemed only logical that Vian should assume command of the Eastern (British) Task Force, and he jumped at the opportunity. Instead of being second in command of the whole operation, he would be first in command of half of it.
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The new assignment seemed a natural for Vian, a fighting admiral with an enviable war record. Curiously, however, administering the various elements of a disparate command did not come naturally to him. Impetuous as he was in fending off Italian battleships, he seemed ill at ease administering a force that consisted of hundreds of LCMs, LCTs, LCI(L)s, and LSTs, as well as minesweepers, destroyers, and cruisers. He often referred issues that he might have handled himself up the chain to Ramsay’s office, and soon enough Ramsay’s staff began to grouse about it. After a long meeting
with Vian on March 3, Ramsay wrote in his diary that his Eastern Task Force commander “strikes me as being a little helpless.” “In fact,” he wrote, “I feel that I am organizing his part of the show as well as my own.”
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