Appendix B: Structure of the British Army’s Home Forces, 1940–44
Appendix C: Outline OVERLORD Plan, Cover Letter, and Digest
Appendix D: Organizational Charts of COSSAC, Initial Formation and as of January 1944
Appendix E: Organizational Chart of Western Allies Command Structure
Glossary of Selected Code Names and Abbreviations
PREFACE
For the English, D-Day might well have stood for Dunkirk Day. The tremendous news that British soldiers were back on French soil seemed suddenly to reveal exactly how much it had rankled when they were beaten off it four years ago. As the great fleets of planes roared toward the coast all day long, the people glancing up at them said, “Now they’ll know how our boys felt on the beaches of Dunkirk.”
D-Day sneaked up on people so quietly that half the crowds flocking to business on Tuesday morning didn’t know it was anything but Tuesday, and then it fooled them by going right on being Tuesday. The principal impression one got on the street was that nobody was smiling…. Everybody seemed to be existing wholly in a preoccupied silence of his own…. There was no rush to put out flags, no cheers, no outward emotion…. Even the pubs didn’t draw the usual cronies….
It is in the country districts just back of the sealed south coast that one gets a real and urgent sense of what is happening only a few minutes flying time away…. Everything is different now that the second front has opened, every truck on the road, every piece of gear on the railways, every jeep and half-track that is heading toward the front has become a thing of passionate concern. The dry weather, which country folk a week ago were hoping would end, has now become a matter the other way round. Farmers who wanted gray skies for their hay’s sake now want blue ones for the sake of their sons, fighting in the skies and on earth across the Channel.1
So wrote the correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes in her “Letter from London” for the New Yorker magazine on 11 June 1944.
Since then, the OVERLORD D-Day has become the D-Day of World War II—recounted, celebrated, and analyzed in countless books, articles, and films.2 Quite understandably, most of the interest focuses on the story of the battle: Omaha Beach, Pegasus Bridge, the bocage, Sainte-Mère-Église, Falaise, Operation COBRA, and the liberation of Paris.
There is, I submit, another story of great interest: that of the process by which it became possible for the cross-Channel assault to occur—that is, a detailed examination of the arguments, decisions, and context in which they were made that led to a successful reentry into the Continent by a coalition force.
This is a story often told in passing, if at all, as if it were the preliminary to the main event. Relatively few know the story of an ad hoc Allied staff that came to be named COSSAC and of how the outline plan came to be. While changes were made before it became the NEPTUNE/OVERLORD plan of 6 June 1944, it was the plan on which all the political and strategic decisions were based. Its history is essential to a complete appreciation of OVERLORD.
As a result of a decision made by the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, forty-nine-year-old British lieutenant general Sir Frederick Morgan, a field artillery officer with twenty years of service with the Indian Army and who had led elements of the 1st Armoured Division in France in 1940, was tasked with examining and evaluating the various studies and proposals that had been written over the prior two years and turning them into something that resembled an outline for a possible assault—or series of assaults—to create a lodgment somewhere in France. The goal was to achieve some understanding of what it might take to reenter the Continent by force. “Against determined opposition” was one term used. There were many in positions of authority who were not convinced it could be accomplished at all.
This examination was necessary because, since the British had been beaten off the Continent, an amphibious assault was the only way back. And getting back was the only way to win the war, or so everyone outside of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, and perhaps the U.S. Army Air Force’s Eighth Air Force, believed.
Exactly how, exactly when, and with what this assault would take place had not yet been determined. A great debate was starting to rage: should the Allies cross the Channel as soon as forces could be gathered for the assault, or should they wait for the Germans to be worn down and weakened in secondary theaters of operation, thus making success more likely but taking more time? If it were to be an assault across the Channel, there was no agreement as to where the landing should occur. Nor was there a commander in chief, just Morgan, a temporary three-star general designated as chief of staff, who did not have command authority and was not given much guidance from the British Chiefs of Staff one way or the other.
Morgan changed the terms and scope of his assignment, envisioning a design of and approach to a staff that hadn’t been attempted before. He created the embryo of what would be the commander’s operational staff, resolved arguments, made decisions, created policies, and expanded the work of his staff into areas not previously considered by the Combined Chiefs. There was no template for his concept of a multinational staff that would plan a campaign and then become the core of the operational headquarters for a coalition army (as well as naval forces and tactical air forces) executing that key campaign. Morgan had to invent that as well. He also came up with a name for himself and his staff: COSSAC—Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander.3
Along the way he had an hour-long, one-on-one meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt, an extraordinary occurrence for a relatively junior officer of an allied nation. He spent more than a month in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of and as guest of Gen. George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff. There he was in daily contact at the Pentagon with General Marshall and in frequent contact with the other U.S. chiefs of staff as well as Secretary of War Henry Stimson and high-level officials at the State Department. Marshall also gave Morgan frequent use of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s private aircraft and its car and driver to tour bases and installations in much of the southeastern United States. Both Marshall and Stimson welcomed Morgan into their homes for private dinners. Throughout his time as COSSAC, Morgan, stationed in London, routinely met with ministers of state as well as senior military and naval officers from both the United States and Great Britain.
COSSAC, in the short nine months of its existence, created the outline plan that made it possible for the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff to have discussions at a very practical level, to understand in concrete terms what was meant by choosing either an early cross-Channel assault and drive toward the heart of Germany or using the Mediterranean as a means of exhausting the Germans, hoping that bombing German cities, combined with Russian successes, would fatally
