first was Barker’s introduction to Morgan of the offices and work of Sir Samuel Findlater Stewart, chair of the Home Defence Executive, located in the attic of Norfolk House and hitherto unknown to COSSAC.47 Born in Largs, Scotland, he had joined the India Office in 1903 and spent the majority of his career there. He had been the permanent undersecretary of state for India from 1930 to 1940. In 1939 he was transferred on a temporary basis to become the director general for the Ministry of Information and in 1940 left the India Office to be the chair of the Home Defence Executive. It was in this capacity that he “became involved in the work of Britain’s intelligence agencies. In 1941, he was invited to join the Twenty (or XX) Committee, supervising British wartime deception policy.”48
Stewart also chaired a committee under the COS, called the BOLERO Combined Committee, on which served representatives of ETOUSA, including Barker; Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces; Minister of War Transport; Minister of Home Security; and Combined Operations, among others. Subcommittees had representation from the Ministry of Production, Ministry of Supply, the Railway Executive Committee, the War Office Director of Movements, and other agencies.49
Stewart had an unrivaled understanding of how Whitehall worked and was “apparently intimately acquainted with every individual in British Government employ and, with the aid of an absurdly small staff, able to adjust any matter needing coordination of any kind, however vast and complicated.”50 Sir Findlater provided immeasurable support to OVERLORD throughout 1943 and 1944, notably by chairing an ad hoc committee on the security arrangements for the invasion.51
For the actual invasion, under Stewart’s direction, a secure area was created around the coast from Hull in the east to Penzance, plus the areas of Milford Haven in Wales and Portishead in the Severn estuary, near Bristol, as well as the estuaries of the Forth, Tay, and Clyde Rivers. This resulted in some 600,000 people being prevented from visiting the coast each month. In some places, this ban was kept in effect through August 1944.52
In July of 1944 Stewart became responsible for deception operations against the Germans relating to the threat of the V-1, creating the impression that the bombs were overshooting their targets. He also chaired a committee that attempted to resolve disputes between the Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive. In 1945 he was asked to examine and make recommendations regarding the postwar assignments and structure of the Security Service.53
Another lesson was that the value of the British Double-Cross System of agents run by the Twenty Committee was underscored. In particular, agent Tricycle was able to send a great deal of information about troop movements and other details gleaned from his notional network of agents in Britain during the STARKY period, elevating his status with his German handlers and relieving them of some anxiety about his qualities as an agent. Agent Garbo was also incredibly busy, sending reports from his fictitious agents and burnishing his reputation with German intelligence. Other Double-Cross agents were put into play as well, all helping build up the picture that London Controlling Station wanted Berlin to see. The creation of two fictitious armies in Britain for Double-Cross agents to discover and report on as part of the operation also paid dividends in 1944 as part of the FORTITUDE deception campaign, which was largely dependent on controlled agents’ reports.
An additional benefit to the Twenty Committee was the realization that extensive use of double agents for deception required a procedure that would ensure there was a standard method of handling the traffic that was produced. Each “story” that was created was broken down into a set of “serials.” Each “serial” then had an alternate story for the Germans along with a date on which it was to be provided to the enemy along with the real and notional evidence that would support the story. The evidence would then be “assigned” to the notional subagents that the Double-Cross agent was running, depending on their profile and location. This was used with particular success in the handling of agent Garbo.54
Morgan had specifically identified the attainment of air supremacy as a prerequisite for the invasion. STARKY showed that feints and demonstrations in the Channel were not going to lure German day fighters into battle, and the British stopped trying. As a consequence, in COSSAC’s outline plan, emphasis was placed on the Combined Bomber Offensive’s potential to engage and destroy German fighters in large numbers. The task fell largely to the Eighth Air Force, whose daylight raids certainly attracted fighters. It also became necessary to solve the problem of long-range fighter escort for the bombers (which came from British-suggested modifications to the P-51 Mustang and adding increasingly larger drop tanks to Allied fighters). By the spring of 1944 the Allies controlled the skies over northwest Europe.
COSSAC also learned a valuable lesson in press relations. They had failed to properly inform reporters, and, consequently, a range of stories about the operation were written. Morgan noted after the fact that “we had to content ourselves with a very lame communique to the effect that an enjoyable time had been had by all and many useful lessons had been learnt.”55 COSSAC and later SHAEF learned how to organize positive relations with the press, get their story out, and gain the trust of the reporters.
The second part of this press relations lesson was that whenever cover stories were put out in London or Washington, a sensitive awareness of the emotions, morale, and planned actions of the various resistance groups in occupied countries had to be maintained. Later, when COSSAC was able to communicate to the partisan groups, it was made clear to them that accurate information would only come from one source, and it wouldn’t be the daily newspapers.
The most important lesson from STARKY was the realization that the Allies needed to reconsider how best to deceive the Germans about Allied intentions and what channels of communication to manipulate. Bevan, Morgan, and the planners realized that they had to find a solution to the problem of “how do we work out a deception plan using the idea of a cross-Channel assault on one part of the French coast when our actual plan is—a cross-Channel assault against another part of the French coast?” They abandoned the concept of raids and demonstrations designed to distract and confuse the defenders in favor of the expanded use of the Double-Cross network of double agents to exaggerate the size of the assault, positioning forces so as to appear to threaten as many targets as possible, using visual misdirection (as opposed to camouflage), phantom formations and other measures, such as dummy radio traffic, designed to “induce the enemy to make faulty strategic dispositions in relation to operations by the United Nations against Germany.”56 Their deception planning also included a timing component, trying to create an environment where the Germans would be caught off guard by the assault.
As we’ll see in chapter 11, COSSAC continued to work on the invasion’s deception plan, particularly from the period of September 1943 onward. That plan ultimately became the famously titled BODYGUARD (which included FORTITUDE North and FORTITUDE South), approved on 23 January 1944. Unlike STARKY, BODYGUARD was, in the words of British historian Sir Michael Howard, “perhaps the most complex and successful deception operation in the entire history of war.”57
— 5 —
THE INDIAN ARMY AND CHASING PANCHO VILLA
The oldest of nine children, Frederick Morgan didn’t come from a family with a military background. There were none of the evocative scenes of the ancestral country estate filled with generations of military glory as portrayed in films like the Korda brothers’ 1939 version of The Four Feathers. Morgan’s father came from a succession of timber merchants—importers of soft woods from Russia and North America. As a result of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the business disappeared—leaving his father to “the management of the dwindling family estate … [which] in turn also became a casualty of the First World War. Whereafter the family migrated to Chichester.”1 Consequently, Morgan, who relied on his military pay to live, was keenly aware of the ebb and flow of his finances.
He
