a bit of cloak-and-dagger work, the group traveling to England were given civilian passports and wore civilian clothes on the trip, as they went by Pan American Clipper from New York to Bermuda, to the Azores, and then to Lisbon. From Lisbon they went to Shannon Airport in Ireland on a British Overseas Airways aircraft, then flew to Poole (near Bournemouth on the Channel coast) and went by train into central London.
The London they encountered had adapted to war. In a series of “Letters from London” for the New Yorker magazine, journalist Mollie Panter-Downes sketched out what life in the British capital was like during the Blitz.
Life in a bombed city means adapting oneself in all kinds of ways all the time. Londoners are now learning the lessons, long ago familiar to those living on the much-visited southeast coast, of getting to bed early and shifting their sleeping quarters down to the ground floor.12
… For Londoners, there are no longer such things as good nights; there are only bad nights, worse nights and better nights. Hardly anyone has slept at all in the past week. The sirens go off at approximately the same time every evening, and in the poorer districts, queues of people carrying blankets, thermos flasks, and babies begin to form quite early outside the air-raid-shelters.13
… Things are settling down into a recognizable routine. Daylight sirens are disregarded by everyone, unless they are accompanied by gunfire or bomb explosions that sound uncomfortably near. A lady who arrived at one of the railway stations during a warning was asked politely by the porter who carried her bag, “Air-raid shelter or taxi, Madam?”14
In London Barker joined what was then a group of about ten officers. While initially tasked with planning the deployment and training of artillery units expected to be arriving as part of BOLERO, he was quickly named head of the war plans section. While that may not have seemed an obvious assignment for a field artillery officer, he explained that he was picked “because I happened to be standing there and no one else [was] available.”15 From then on, he was involved in what he called the “planning racket.”
Initially there were only a couple of U.S. Army officers involved in planning relating to the eventual reentry into the Continent. While he requested and got additional support, he felt that the first thing he needed to do was “to find out what the British were doing in this field.”16 This is when Barker discovered the Combined Commanders and their planners. While building his own staff, Barker worked in close daily cooperation with the British planners. Asked if he had been assigned to work with the British, Barker replied, “No one actually told me that I should associate myself or collaborate with these people; it was just the obvious thing to do.”17
Barker and his group got to work on preparations for BOLERO as well as plans for SLEDGEHAMMER and ROUNDUP. In July, there was what his then boss, Dwight Eisenhower, described in his diary as a day that might become “the blackest day in history.”18 SLEDGEHAMMER was cancelled. But not entirely. The COS decided at its meeting of 22 August 1942 that “for purposes of deception and to be ready for any emergency or a favourable opportunity, all preparations for ‘SLEDGEHAMMER’ continue to be pressed … and [recommended] that a Task Force Commander be appointed with authority to organize the force, direct the training and maintain a contingent plan for execution.”19 Both Paget and Mountbatten were at the meeting, as was Pug Ismay.
At the same meeting, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, acting as chair in the absence of General Brooke, quoted from a Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) memorandum written the prior month, saying in effect that as a result of TORCH going forward, “we have accepted a defensive encircling line of action for the continental European theatre … but that the organization, planning and training for eventual entry in the Continent should continue [in case there was] a marked deterioration in German strength … and that the resources of the United Nations available after meeting other commitments, so permit.”20
General Paget noted that the planning for ROUNDUP would be based on working out the minimum requirements for forcing an entry into the Continent against weakening opposition. He also felt that, at this time, there was “no need for the Supreme Commander-in-Chief or his Deputy to be nominated.” Mountbatten added that TORCH would employ every available landing craft and trained crew, and no operation of any scale could be mounted from the UK before March or April of 1943.21
The vision in August 1942 was to prepare contingency plans for an operation that could not occur before the spring of 1943, using the minimum force available after all other commitments were met, assuming that German resistance had weakened, and without identifying a commander or his deputy or identifying units that would be involved.
After the Dieppe Raid, planning continued. In late September 1942 a deception exercise, Operation CAVENDISH, was postponed for a second time and the Commander-in-Chief, South Eastern Command, Lt. Gen. J. G. Swayne, wrote to Paget arguing that the operation should be cancelled. Originally planned for October 1942 and now proposed for early November, the operation was an attempt to convince the enemy “that an invasion was being staged, though this deception was always difficult on account of the small number of modern landing craft available.” General Swayne pointed out the obvious fact that the “enemy must know that the possibility of sufficiently long periods of suitable weather being obtainable in November are extremely remote…. I am informed by A.O.C. 11 Fighter Group that from the air point of view November would be very unsuitable for this enterprise.”22 We can infer that the operation was another attempt to lure the German air force into battle while a sea-based feint approached the Pas-de-Calais. As the general noted, weather over the Channel in November is rarely favorable for such operations; indeed, it was a basic principle (at least for experts like Hughes-Hallett) that the Channel’s “invasion season” ended in September. The operation was cancelled.
Another operation, titled OVERTHROW, was to be a major cross-Channel effort and required coordination with Bomber Command to ensure that pre-invasion targets like gun emplacements and all forms of transport were attacked, which meant that Bomber Command would have to stop bombing cities and start bombing tactical targets. In part, this was to test if bombers could hit targets like gun emplacements and to find out what the level of damage might be. That operation also didn’t get past the planning stage.
By now the long-considered operation to capture the Cherbourg Peninsula had a code name as well, and by September 1942 outline plans for a similar operation focused on Brittany were being considered.
By the end of September 1942 the Combined Commanders and their planners were considering the sixth draft of a memorandum to the COS, “Future Planning for Operation ROUNDUP” and the third draft of a similar memo, “Offensive Combined Operations in North-West Europe in 1943–1944.” The memo for ROUNDUP outlined what the planners believed a theoretical phase 2 would look like—assuming the Allies had successfully reestablished themselves on the Continent. They identified three main goals: the capture of Paris; the capture or peaceful occupation of the Atlantic ports of Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, and Nantes, in part for a secure rear area to build up forces and in part because they expected the French would have to be fed with food shipped into the country; and a drive to capture Antwerp.
The commanders and planners requested that the COS grant them the authority to “frame an outline plan … basing it on the assumption that the full number of divisions included in the [previously] approved outline plan for Phase I will be available; and to prepare this outline plan in cooperation with the staff of the Commanding General ETOUSA, on the distinct understanding that the completed plan is subject to his approval and may therefore require revision.”23 That is, they asked for permission to plan given a certain set of assumptions, knowing that the American commander might modify or reject their plan after the work was completed.
The second memo recommended that “raids, whether designed primarily to provoke
