CHAPTER 15

The American Contention

If the Germans, who underrated the British potential in their St Nazaire report, had been aware of Myrmidon and a host of plans for large-scale attacks already under consideration they might have revised their estimate of enemy half-measures. They would also have been wiser to take into account the meaning of full American involvement. But the Germans, in their arrogance, never came to terms with reality in 1942 and had to be taught hard lessons in battle from October onwards. While it is true that the British would have liked to step up their raiding in 1942, as shipping and weapons came slowly to hand, it is equally obvious that their effort would have been weak, and that it was the stern American intent, spurred on by the decisions at the Arcadia Conference, which raised the tempo and level of aggression to a higher pitch than would have been the case if first priority had not been accorded to defeat of Germany.

Arcadia – one wonders who allocated that singularly misleading code name to conferences which were anything but ideal or rustic – put Allied joint planning on a remarkable new footing in a way which forced a change in American practice. The creation of a Supreme Council of the military heads of the US and Britain led to the formation of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), charged with the strategic direction of the war. This was natural to the British, who already had their smoothly-working Chiefs of Staff Committee, but it was foreign to the Americans. Under the President, as C-in-C, the US Navy, which had the Marine Corps under command, and the US Army, which was rapidly losing its paramount control of the Army Air Corps, collaborated with bad grace. Faced with the need to present a unified view to the British, they were compelled to form their own Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) agency, consisting of General G. C. Marshall (Army Chief of Staff), Admiral E. J. King (Navy C-in-C and Chief of Naval Operations) and Lieutenant-General H. H. Arnold (Chief of the Army Air Corps).

Nothing like CCO or a Combined Operations organization existed in the US or looked likely to do so. Outside the JCS the army and navy tended to go their own way; the navy held firmly to the Marine Corps and its commandant, Lieutenant-General T. Holcomb. For although Holcomb sat in on the Arcadia Conference and the President, taking the Marines’ part, later asked Holcomb, ‘How would you like to be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee?’ Admiral King prevented this.

The Amphibious Force stood low in King’s order of priorities at a time when the Allied navies had lost control of the Pacific Ocean and were hard pressed to contain the U-Boats in the Atlantic. In the manner of his opposite numbers in the British Admiralty, he deprived it of adequate personnel and had no enthusiasm for an equivalent Combined Operations organization or for hit-and-run raiding. His Director of War Plans, the uncompromising Rear Admiral R. K. Turner, was more farsighted. With experience of fighting on land as a young officer, as a gunnery expert and an aviator, Turner was joint-Service minded. On his recommendation the President had adopted a Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, rather than the Super Joint General Staff put forward by Brigadier-General D. D. Eisenhower. And it was Turner who, in April 1942, recommended that ‘a joint Army, Navy and Marine Section, under a Flag Officer, be established … with specific responsibility to develop material and methods for amphibious forces’. When formed in June 1942, it had been considerably whittled down by King and Marshall, and worked at too low a level to deal with a problem of enormous dimensions. But just then it was the nearest the Americans could get to a COHQ, just as Turner, as fighting admiral, thinker and organizer, was the nearest they had to a Mountbatten.4 But Turner, unlike Mountbatten, has been overshadowed in history by such men as admirals Spruance and Halsey, and his reputation has suffered from his addiction to drink and his use of strong language, which earned him the nickname of ‘Terrible Turner’.

He was aware, through the close contacts which had developed since the ABC conferences and his meeting with Churchill during the Atlantic Conference in August 1941, of the British system. But there is nothing to indicate any desire on his part to depart from the official doctrine which laid down that in Joint Operations the navy was:

 

To seize, establish, and defend until relieved by Army forces, advanced naval bases, and to conduct such limited auxiliary land operations as are essential to the prosecution of the Naval Campaign.

 

In other words, Turner was as enmeshed as everybody else in the traditional rivalries between navy and army, a schism that produced astonishing duplications of function. For example, in December 1940 the army’s Transportation Service possessed a larger fleet of ocean-going vessels than the navy’s Amphibious Force. And, as King discovered, some senior army officers ‘regarded themselves as in the position to criticize the amphibious techniques of the far more experienced Marines’, which he likened to those who could only creep instructing those who could walk when none could run.

Collaboration between the British and Americans thus posed problems of a complex though not unfamiliar nature. Allied Joint Planning for raiding started when a solitary American officer was attached to COHQ in January 1942. But by May he had been joined by a full American staff. They were the opposite numbers of the British Combined Operations Liaison Officer (COLO), Captain J. Knox, who arrived in Washington with his staff in April. In his letters to Mountbatten, Knox gave an insight into the special difficulties underlying Joint Service work with the Americans:

 

You will already have tired of hearing about lack of co-operation between the Army and Navy, but still I think it worthwhile reporting that Admiral Turner … made the admission that the Navy Department had ordered to be built a large number of Y craft asked for by the War Department, although they (the Navy Department) considered them unsuitable for the work visualised. If this was the Army requirement it was not for the Navy to buck in on their plans. Can you beat it!

 

And of great significance on another occasion:

 

Probably Bourne has told you how the land lies here as regards the Americans setting up anything in the nature of a COHQ. Dikes has put you in the picture as to how Donovan stands. He seems to have the temperament and outlook of your predecessor [Keyes]. As an example, I believe that having been warned off the Pacific Area (by Nimitz) he is planning raids of his own in Norway.

 

Colonel W. J. (Wild Bill) Donovan had something of the outlook of Mountbatten as well; as a fighting man of renown he was eager to get on with the war. A domineering member of President Roosevelt’s ‘kitchen cabinet’, as Keyes had been of Churchill’s, he visualized intensive guerrilla attacks and was working to set up what in July would become known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which, in due course, would become the partner of SOE in Europe. Unfortunately a flurry of impracticable and bizarre projects that, as head of the Central Organization of Information (COI), he put forward to the President aroused the mistrust of the Chiefs of Staff as well as of all the other departments dealing with intelligence and diplomacy. Some put in the shade the plans of the Directorate of Combined Operations in the early days of Keyes. There was, for example, the suggestion, in December 1941, for a raid on Japan by 10 to 15,000 commandos supported by half the Pacific Fleet, when half the Pacific Fleet was already out of action and no American commandos yet existed.

It was hardly surprising that Nimitz and, later, General MacArthur, sheered off COI and OSS, the former giving as a reason his fear of a clash with the Marines. It was counter to common sense, when defeat loomed large, to abandon well-tried, if patently fallible, systems and replace them with a shadowy organization, totally unproven, run by a man who tended to undermine security through the generation of personal publicity. But there is evidence that Nimitz was not as hostile to raiding as post-war remarks of his suggest. When King, spurred on by Turner, was pressing him to take the limited offensive in May 1942, Nimitz’s initial idea was to raid the Japanese seaplane base at Tulagi with nearby former Marine Raiders (see below) to help hold open the vital route from the US to Australasia.

Another reason why King and Turner wanted to gain the initiative in the Pacific was steeped in navy/army politics. They dreaded loss of navy prestige if, as a result of the President’s and Marshall’s preoccupation with Germany, they were deprived of adequate forces in the Pacific; and with good reason. On 12 May, with the full concurrence of Marshall, the British Chiefs of Staff had issued a directive calling for operations in three categories: for comprehensive invasions to fulfil contingency plans, such as Rankin; for a presence on the Continent in the most unlikely event of a crack in German morale; or Greenback, a sacrificial landing in the gloomily expected collapse of Russian resistance. These need not be described here and, in any case, they had a similarity in form to those in the second category, that is major raids under the heading of Sesame to take the strain off Russia. Graced by the names Imperator, Ransack, Foretop, Round-Up, Sledgehammer and Jupiter, these were raids whose invasion pretensions suffered from dubious potential for ‘hit’ and a good prospect of ‘run’ in the face of an opponent whose strength remained solid. Also proposed was a succession of smaller raids at the rate of two a month, thus doubling the ante. Outside Europe there was a peripheral project, Gymnast, which will be heard of again.

It was the second category that caught the Americans’ imagination, despite their inability to put much weight behind it until the autumn at the earliest. What few troops the army had ready were sent to Northern Ireland at once, but they amounted to little more than a token force. There was irony in Marshall’s question to Mountbatten in April, ‘What can I do to help?’ Try as he would to gain acceptance for a major direct assault upon the Continent that summer, he knew that it was the British who would have to provide the lion’s share of assault units. Mountbatten’s reply also indicated why such an assault was impossible: ‘Telegraph today to double every British order for landing ships and landing craft (placed in January), and take over the new orders yourself. Design and produce 300 LCI(L), 150 for you and 150 for me.’ He sketched out the design of Landing Craft Infantry (Large) then and there on paper: ‘A craft capable of transporting 200 troops in reasonable comfort and landing them dryshod on an enemy shore.’ He ensured that 1,000 of the British-designed LST 2s would be built in US shipyards. This was the 4,000-ton ship which made all the great invasions logistically possible and which Turner called ‘a marvel’ in its ability to change draught to suit beach gradients.

The scenario of a cross-Channel invasion at that time was sketchy and centred upon a 1940 notion of Churchill’s for an irruption of ten armoured divisions working in conjunction with a swarm of guerrillas. The guerrilla swarm existed only in Churchill and Dr Dalton’s imaginations and as yet had no substance. SOE had made little headway in stirring up resistance and such guerrilla fighters as there were possessed few arms. As for armoured divisions, just five were available in Britain, and of tank landing craft only the three inadequate Maracaibos, plus a handful of LCTs whose primary task would be to ferry American equipment to England from Northern Ireland, were to hand. Moreover, study after the aborted Audacity plan discouraged a major operation in Northern France because the defences were now ‘far too strong’. Small raids, on the other hand, were deemed feasible and the capture of the Channel Islands seemed attractive – ‘a good objective’.

With this thwarting knowledge in mind, the British Chiefs of Staff, including Mountbatten, met their American counterparts in London between 8 and 14 April to hammer out a strategy for 1942 and 1943. It was indeed fortunate for the Allies that the two Army Chiefs of Staff were men of immense stature and that Mountbatten enjoyed an excellent relationship with each. Marshall had the hardest row to hoe, for although the Americans had agreed to give priority to the overthrow of Germany, it was by no means an assured policy because it did not enjoy the support of the US Navy. Grim in council loomed the strong personality of Admiral King, who for years had concentrated his attention on confronting the Japanese and now had a burning desire to wipe out the stain of Pearl Harbor. Inter-Service rivalries centred upon the differences between Marshall and King. In the Pacific the navy and the Marines would dominate, in Europe the army. Naturally Marshall strove for a leading role for the immense army he was raising in the US. So when Brooke rated Marshall’s ideas for September ‘fantastic’ and ‘the product of a limited brain’, and, with Mountbatten’s support, argued strongly against a major invasion of Europe (Round-Up) or a prolonged occupation of the Cotentin peninsula based on Cherbourg (Sledgehammer), he was threatening the Arcadian priorities which favoured his own side. Brooke’s unjust remarks about Marshall were, of course, reserved for the privacy of his personal diary, but there is very little doubt that, in these negotiations, Mountbatten often provided the diplomatic salve which kept things running smoothly.

In April and May, during separate conferences, Mountbatten supplied the basic data for the two most acceptable operations, of which Sledgehammer was first favourite. Shortage of landing craft of any type was the universal stumbling block. Sledgehammer was no simple infantry hit-and-run raid, over and done with in an hour or so; it was to be a prolonged effort employing six or more divisions supported by large tank and artillery arms and demanding considerable logistic support. Much shipping would be required, but King was quick to point out to Mountbatten, at a meeting in Washington on 4 June, that ‘the US Navy was already fully occupied with operations in the Pacific, and that it would severely tax his resources if he was to undertake the provision, training and manning of landing ships and craft required for the European theatre’. To which Marshall had indicated that, if the navy could not do it, the army would. ‘Whereupon Admiral King, rather than surrender the birthright of the Navy to the Army, decided the Navy would play its part.’

From its birth in 1940, politics were ever a part of Combined Operations. At no time was this more evident than when CCO and the Chiefs of Staff found themselves involved with the Americans. It is one of the hallmarks of inspired Anglo-American co-operation that Mountbatten was able to charm the Americans – Roosevelt and Marshall above all – for nobody was ever too sure if King was vulnerable to charm, so fierce was his partisanship. In a letter to Roosevelt, confirming the positions then being held by both sides with regard to operations in 1942/43, Mountbatten supported Marshall. He had a five-hour meeting with the President in which he was scarcely likely to have missed the opportunity to impress upon Roosevelt the skills of diplomacy in which he was steeped by heritage, let alone his outstanding understanding of strategy and military technique. Concessions he could not make, since he was not a plenipotentiary, but he did give an impression of British determination to do something dramatically worthwhile in the West in 1942, and helped reinforce and shape the President’s resolve, as the following letter shows:

 

I pointed out that you stressed the great need for American soldiers to be given [the] opportunity of fighting as soon as possible, and … the agreement … that, in the event of things going badly for the Russians this summer, a sacrifice landing would be carried out in France to assist them. I pointed out that no landing that we could carry out could draw off any troops, since there were some 25 German Divisions already in France and landing craft shortage prevented our putting ashore an adequate number. The chief German shortage lay in fighter aircraft and all our efforts were being bent towards provoking fighter battles in the West … I told the P.M. how much you had been struck in the recent telegram by his remark: ‘Do not lose sight of GYMNAST!’

 

Mountbatten’s mission paved the way for the visit Churchill and Brooke made to Washington on 17 June, at which Churchill’s dictum ‘No landing with a withdrawal envisaged’ was paramount, but at which positive progress was made. By then, in any case, the future had been clarified.

Russian survival seemed possible and the need for ‘sacrifice’ landings such as Greenback less likely. American victory at Midway presented the opportunity for the US Navy and the Marines to begin tentative offensive operations based on Australasia. British insistence on tackling Germany first, allied to rivalry with Marshall and the US Army, provoked King to risk an invasion of Guadalcanal in August (see Chapter 18). Churchill’s visit paved the way for the deferment of Round-Up and Sledgehammer and the adoption, in due course, of Gymnast under another name. The strategy of bringing the German fighter force to battle and taking the strain off Russia as much as possible led to six large-scale plans: Ransack, Imperator, Foretop, Jupiter, Gabriel and Rutter.

Although a lot of work was done on Ransack – a large-scale raid of two to three days’ duration on Pte Ste Laire in the Pas de Calais with a view to provoking an air battle on favourable terms to the RAF – it was shelved when greater preference was given at the highest level to the other three contenders. Similarly Foretop, a large-scale raid of invasion dimensions aimed at bases from which U-Boats and raiders made their forays to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, was dismissed because it would prove too costly, particularly since it was beyond the range of fighter aircraft.

Imperator was easily the most imaginative scheme ever put forward, a worthy competitor, in terms of aggression, to Dudley. For just as Dudley had aimed to raid Rome, Imperator’s objective was Paris, encompassing a deep penetration by two divisions, including fast, light armoured troops, and lasting three or four days. Various permutations were considered, such as basing the raid on Boulogne, where a bridgehead might be held indefinitely. First favourite was setting out from south of the River Somme and returning, via Rouen, to Dieppe where a small ‘escape’ bridgehead would be formed on the morning of the surviving raiders’ return. Mountbatten was extremely keen on this incredible operation, and seems to have enthused the Chiefs of Staff so much with visions of light armoured troops thrashing about, while SOE arranged an uprising by the French Resistance, that they recommended its approval to the Prime Minister, saying it should take place in the first week of August at the first opportunity after the completion of Rutter, a one-day raid on Dieppe which was scheduled for the period 21–26 June.

Winston Churchill would have none of Imperator, and for excellent reasons. In a long letter to the Chiefs on 8 June, he castigated it at every point:

 

Certainly it would not help Russia if we launched such an enterprise, no doubt with world publicity, and came out a few days later with heavy losses. We should have thrown away valuable lives and material, and made ourselves and our capacity for making war ridiculous throughout the world… The French patriots who would rise in our aid, and their families would be subjected to pitiless Hun revenge, and this would spread far and wide as a warning against similar imprudences in case of larger-scale operations.

 

The Prime Minister went on with unchallengeable military logic, citing among other problems the violent counter-reaction to be expected at once by enemy mobile troops and the insuperable logistic task. ‘We heard no more of IMPERATOR after this’, he purred. Yet he was nursing his pet extravaganza, ‘my own constructive plan’, namely Jupiter, which he submitted to the Chiefs of Staff on 1 May. A revision of an earlier scheme, Jupiter suffered from similar defects as Foretop. That is, in attempting to make a lodgement in Northern Norway in conjunction with the Russians, it lacked the essential fighter support required and, moreover, would be vulnerable to interruption by major units of the German Fleet. The Chiefs of Staff would have none of it. So that left two big one-day raids, Gabriel and Rutter, as the only major strikes likely to take place in North-West Europe in 1942, if Sledgehammer, as military logic demanded, was deferred.

Gabriel, a descent on the Cherbourg peninsula, remained at the paper stage. In its place stood Rutter, a raid by infantry and armour against the strongly held enemy port of Dieppe which was conceived at the end of March and mulled over for the next six weeks before receiving Chiefs of Staff approval. It will be described in detail in its correct chronological place, after several small raids have first been dealt with. All that needs to be mentioned at this stage is the stimulating effect the debate had on American ideas about raiding and upon the future of raiding forces in general, including those of Britain. For while the ‘Grand Design’ was being roughed out and put into order by President, Prime Minister and Chiefs of Staff, CCO was pushing ahead within the Combined Operation organization with a ceaseless process of reorganization and evolution.

Indeed, important as raiding was and anxious as the Americans were to get in on that part of the act, the building of a base for the enormous invasion to come was already beginning to assume first place. Of major importance was the need to restore the ports along the Channel to their original capacity in order to handle the vast quantities of stores and shipping needed when the day for invasion dawned. Since Dunkirk they had been run down and their labour force largely dispersed. That deterioration now had to be rectified and this Mountbatten initiated in March 1942. At the same time the expansion of COHQ went ahead fast – too fast for at least one section of the bureaucracy, the Statistical Section, which occupied accommodation in Richmond Terrace which Mountbatten urgently desired. Thwarted by civil servants, he felt compelled to write one of his irresistibly persuasive letters to Sir Edward Bridges at the Cabinet Office, asking that a section, which tarried too long, should be shifted:

 

We are working under the greatest pressure … and I don’t honestly think we can continue like this… I hate taking advantage of your kind offer [to move the Section] but war is war.

 

Move they did, as did everything else Mountbatten tackled. Like all great men, he knew when and how to exceed his authority.