captain in the Royal Navy, cousin to King George, and longtime friend of the Duke of Windsor, took over as advisor of Combined Operations. Selected by Churchill without consulting the COS, he was “many ranks and 27 years junior to Keyes, but all this was reckoned an asset.”18 Mountbatten brought great energy and enthusiasm to the project and set about building up his staff and strengthening his hand, ensuring that the COS and everyone else knew that he had the full support of the prime minister. While no expert in combined operations, he was a fast learner, able to effectively represent the amphibious warfare views at major interallied conferences, had great charm, was liked by the Americans, and had what in different circumstances could be described as a knack for effective presentation.
The exchanges between the COS, Keyes, Mountbatten, and Churchill had the seeds of future difficulties embedded. The Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, and his naval and air equivalents were, according to the COS, responsible for the planning and training of forces related to some future, as-yet-unplanned or agreed-on reentry into the Continent. They would report directly to the British COS. When the Americans arrived, planners at ETOUSA had an informal liaison relationship with the planners of the Combined Commanders, but all plans still went through them to the British COS.
Mountbatten and COHQ felt, as had Keyes, that they existed as the depository of all knowledge and doctrine related to amphibious operations and, as the duty experts, would have to play a major role in the planning and conduct of any amphibious attack launched from Great Britain. After the entry of the United States into the war, some American officers served at COHQ, but it remained a British organization.
The Casablanca conference established a planning staff related to cross-Channel operations, initially to catalog and bring some organizational structure to whatever studies and concepts had been put forth so far. Headed by a British staff officer but without a commander, this staff, near as anyone knew, was to report to the CCS in Washington and was tasked with planning both a deception operation in the Channel and reentry into the Continent under two possible sets of circumstances. The resolution of this tangle was neither easy nor quick.
In March of 1942 Mountbatten was promoted from captain (acting commodore) to vice-admiral, with the additional ranks of lieutenant general and air-marshal. His title was changed to chief of Combined Operations and he now joined the COS as an equal member whenever either combined operations or the general conduct of the war were discussed, which is to say, for almost every meeting.
By now there were trained troops, specialized assault craft, and experience from smaller raids in the Mediterranean and Norway. From the relatively simple and straightforward creation of small landing craft that began in 1938, by 1943 there developed an entire range of specialized craft types, each designed and built to address a specific need or provide the means of moving some of the various components of an invasion force from ship to shore. There were the LCA (landing craft, assault), which were small craft for infantry initially designed for raiding; the LCC (amphibious command ship), which were control craft; the LCH, the headquarters craft; the LCI(L), landing craft infantry (large), which carried up to two hundred men and their equipment; the LCM, which were for mechanized equipment like vehicles and tanks; the LCP(L), also for personnel; the LCS (Landing Craft, Support); the LCT, which carried fifty-five men plus vehicles; and the LCVP, landing craft designed for either vehicles or personnel. There was also the LSI(L), the landing ship, infantry (large), which carried assault craft and men. And there were the LSM (landing ship, medium), a larger, oceangoing version of the LSI, and the famous LST. This was in addition to the AKA (amphibious cargo) and APA (attack transport) ships, which carried craft and men for the assault, and the MT (motor transport) ships, in which forty vehicles or mechanized transport could be loaded.19 By 6 June 1944 there were even close-support craft like the LCT-R, or landing craft tank–rocket.20
In some cases, assault ships would have both men for the assault and the craft needed to land them. If so, then it was a matter of proper coordination so that the troops would be loaded into the assault craft at the proper moment, take their place in the correct assault wave, and land on the right beach. If the craft were on one ship and the troops on another, then the boats had to be loaded out in the correct sequence, be gathered in assembly areas, be directed to the right transport at the right time, pick up the troops, and then head to the right beach. In both cases, there were often subchasers, control craft, or mine sweepers helping with the navigation.21 It took a great deal of training before young men, most of whom had no sailing experience, were proficient in the art of laying a small craft alongside a large ship, loading troops, and delivering them on the beach, then turning around and doing it again.
Between January and June of 1942, ten raids of various sizes were conducted; the planning for some had started under Keyes. The raid on the radar station at Bruneval, France, and the raid on the dry dock and other facilities at Saint-Nazaire are among the most well known in this period.
Operation JUBILEE, the Dieppe Raid, might well have been controversial even if it hadn’t been a spectacular failure. It would seem to have violated Churchill’s requirement of “no substantial landing in France unless we are going to stay,” as well as having a long list of questionable planning and operational decisions associated with it. Whatever else can be said about the tragedy of 19 August 1942, one perceived accomplishment (which turned out to be false) was the “massive fighter battle in the skies…. Convinced that a great air victory had been won at Dieppe, and that at last a way had been found to inflict severe wastage on the Luftwaffe, the head of Fighter Command, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, wrote Mountbatten shortly afterwards urging more raids of the same kind, making only one common-sense observation … : ‘When attacking the enemy on land, one does not generally strike at his strongest point.’ ”22 That is to say, don’t attempt to seize a defended port by direct amphibious assault without substantial air and naval gunfire support, which would likely damage the facilities that one would hope to seize intact.
Mountbatten was encouraged to think of other raids or feints that would continue to bring the Luftwaffe up into battle with the Royal Air Force under favorable conditions. The fact that well-trained troops might be the bait to attract the Germans did not seem to enter into the equation, nor did the possibility of the Germans deciding to not take the bait as offered.
A Plan for What Might Be Done Next
Summer and fall of 1942 were, of course, also the time of the debates over SLEDGEHAMMER, which was put to rest before the Dieppe Raid. The North African campaign also put an end to the discussion about any major cross-Channel effort in 1943. Additionally, TORCH drew off most of the small group of experienced American planners who had been in London working on the question of reentry into the Continent and who were now assigned to Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) at Norfolk House. Soon Lieutenant General Morgan and his 1st British Corps would become part of the TORCH campaign.
Morgan enjoyed challenging his staff to consider some of the larger issues confronting them. He felt that with the Americans now in the war, some sort of offensive action—certainly not across the Channel, but somewhere—should be considered. The question to his officers’ mess was—where? In early autumn 1942 their collective answer was somewhere between Casablanca and Tunis. This was, as it turned out, a pretty good guess, but for Morgan it also marked the beginning of what became a very different assignment.
In October 1942 1st Corps was renamed 125 Force, assigned to TORCH, and was initially intended to be deployed in case the Germans drove into Spain and attempted to close the Strait of Gibraltar. Morgan’s force was to conduct an amphibious landing and occupy what was then Spanish Morocco so that the strait would remain open even if Gibraltar was captured. Morgan observed that, “on paper, in London, there seemed to be a certain rough logic in the idea but, the more deeply one went into it, the more I became impressed with the lack of our knowledge of the conduct of such affairs in general.”23
Morgan traveled from his headquarters in Yorkshire down to London to meet General Eisenhower, arriving the
