Operation Neptune

by Kenneth Edwards

  While Britain and her allies were still fighting desperately on the defensive, operations were put in hand, the main object of which was to save or conserve shipping. Our landings in Iceland and our occupation of the Faroes in the spring of 1940, were undertaken for the greater protection of the Atlantic trade routes. The invasion of Madagascar in May, 1942, was carried out to forestall a danger threatening the trade route to Suez via the Cape of Good Hope—the only feasible route at that time for the great convoys carrying supplies to our forces in Egypt and in the Middle East. Diplomacy and the loyalty of our oldest ally gave us bases in the Azores for the greater safety of the Atlantic convoy routes.

  As the strength of the United Nations waxed, even greater operations were undertaken with the same end in view.

  On 8 November 1942, Britain and America invaded French North and West Africa. By the early summer of 1943, the enemy had been dislodged from the whole of North Africa, and the small Italian islands in the Central Mediterranean narrows had been captured. Malta had been finally relieved. There followed the invasions of Sicily and the allied conquest of Sicily, Sardinia, and the whole of Southern Italy. All these operations had as their main objects the opening of the Mediterranean and the removal of Italy from the side of Germany—objects the achievement of which would effect a tremendous saving in shipping.

  Apart from the shipping losses incurred in fighting relief convoys through to Malta, each one of which had involved a major naval operation, the opening of the direct route to the Suez Canal would shorten the voyage from England to Suez (which had hitherto been by way of the Cape) by about 9,000 miles. If one allows ten days for the turn-round at the outward end of the voyage, a ten-knot ship could do the round trip from Liverpool to Suez and back via the Mediterranean in a little more than one-third the time that she would take if she had to go by way of the Cape. This is equivalent to saying that a given flow of deliveries in the Middle East could, with the Mediterranean open, be maintained with well under half the number of ships formerly required.

  During 1942 and 1943, too, there had been a great change in our fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic. For some months the U-boats had been driven out of the Atlantic, and even when they returned to those waters they were the hunted rather than the hunters, able to inflict loss or damage upon our shipping only at infrequent intervals. Our vigilance could in no sense be relaxed, nor could our counter-measures be weakened in a struggle demanding the best that the application of science and experience by determined men could achieve. It was only because these was no relaxation on our part that the advantage gained over the U-boats in the early summer of 1942 was so successfully maintained after they returned to the attack in the autumn of that year.

  The importance of the ascendancy of our escorts and patrols over the U-boats in the Atlantic was two-fold. Firstly, there was a great diminution in the loss of experienced seamen, engineers and firemen—those officers and men who had for so long faced unflinchingly the hazards of the Battle of the Atlantic in all weathers. Out of this there grew inevitably an increase in the faith of these men in the ability of their comrades of the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to deal effectively with the enemy whenever and wherever he might be met. This was a psychological factor which had never faltered, but it could not be too strong, particularly with the demands of a great invasion in view. Secondly, the defeat of the U-boat meant that the shipbuilding yards on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean ceased to be largely concerned with repairs and the replacement of losses. Nearly every ship launched from May, 1942, onwards was a definite addition to the shipping resources of the United Nations. In time the danger mark was passed and there began the building up of a shipping “pool” in reserve. The importance of this would be difficult to exaggerate; the demands on shipping were enormous and were to be increased almost beyond measure.

  In addition to the normal requirements, hundreds of ships were needed for the swing to the offensive in the Pacific; the movements of armies and their equipment and supplies in all the operations on both sides of the Italian peninsula, and in the unhappy operations in the Aegean. There was also need to build up a reserve of shipping for the great invasion of North-west Europe. The normal shipbuilding requirements had, of course, to be served, but the changed strategic situation was such that it enabled men and material to be diverted to many specialised tasks in connection with the invasion. Thus there was superimposed upon the normal shipbuilding industry on both sides of the Atlantic a great weight of specialised construction and alteration which the existing shipyards were able to handle only because of the reduction in the normal demands upon them..

  Invasion is not merely a matter of putting troops ashore on hostile beaches and supporting them within the range of naval gunfire. It involves the continuous and rapid reinforcement of the forces landed, in men, equipment and stores until such time as the invading troops can inflict decisive defeat upon the enemy and so impose a cessation of hostilities. The shipping requirements for invasion go far beyond what may be called the “assault period.” They are, in fact, greater during the “build up-period” than during the “assault period,” particularly in circumstances in which a great proportion of the “build up” has to travel the long distance across the Atlantic.

  From the very moment that our leaders began to think in terms of the invasion of Europe from Britain they were aware that the limiting factor in any project of this sort would be the availability of shipping. There were so many other calls upon our shipping, some of which might be modified in time, but the majority of which were likely to persist and even to increase. In the whole vast scheme of invasion, with all its thousands of different requirements, none would be so urgent or so indispensable as the contribution of the Merchant Navy. Many ships of the Royal Navy could be kept waiting in readiness for such an operation, particularly in view of the decrease in our naval commitments following the surrender of Italy; but to keep merchant ships lying idle in readiness for invasion duties would be to starve the industry, if not the people, of this country. The merchant ships, although earmarked for special duties in connection with the invasion, had to continue with their normal functions until the last possible moment—and to continue with these functions meant to continue to take risks.

  There is ample evidence that the German High Command was fully aware that availability of shipping was the limiting factor in any invasion attempt that we might contemplate. From that it was but a step to realisation by the Germans that the most effective defence against invasion would not be on the beaches or among the coastal defences, but in the open ocean over a long period before any invasion could possibly be mounted. It was for this reason that the U-boats were sent back to the Atlantic, re-armed with powerful anti-aircraft guns with which to deal with the ever-increasing number of their adversaries in the air, and with a special “acoustic torpedo” designed to adjust its course by the sound of the engines of the target ship and thus eliminate the errors caused during the attack by imperfectly trained officers, forced to make “snap attacks” between the ever-thickening screen of our escort vessels. Nor did Germany ignore the use of her mines or her E-boats.

  German propaganda, as usual, far outstripped reality during this period. There were frequent references to the obvious inability of the United Nations to strike directly at Germany or German-occupied Europe by invasion on account of the steady drain in the vital shipping resources, and these statements were usually used to fill in the gaps between heavy, but carefully undated, claims of successes against our shipping, chiefly by U-boats. One is tempted, on examining this facet of German propaganda, to conclude that Dr Goebbels deserved ill of his country by lulling its people, and probably also a proportion of the Wehrmacht, into a false sense of their security within the “Unassailable European Fortress.”

  Since the possession of sufficient shipping was the most vital requirement of invasion, all who strove to make shipping available fought and worked directly or indirectly for the success of the invasion. T
he great numbers of shipyard workers on both sides of the Atlantic played a noble part, as did all the workers in the factories of the engineers and sub-contractors associated with the production of vessels or equipment. This was recognised by the First Lord of the Admiralty when he issued a post-D-day message to workers, in which he said: “Four long years of endeavour and hardship came yesterday to this eagerly-awaited climax. Yesterday was for all of you in the shipyards and allied industry throughout the country a day of reward.”

  The workers in industry had certainly done nobly, but every man who had contributed in any way to the reduction in our commitments in shipping, shipbuilding, and ship repairing, also had a stake in the triumph of successful invasion. That applied to every officer and man of the Merchant Navy who had contributed to the safe voyage of a ship through the dangers of the enemy and the hazards of the elements. It applied to every officer and man of whatever service who had taken part in the operations which had effected so great a reduction in the demands upon our shipping—the invasion and battles of North Africa, of Sicily and Southern Italy—which had opened the direct Mediterranean route to the East. It applied to the officers and men who had year after year met the full impact of the enemy’s main sea offensive on the great Atlantic trade routes, and who had by sheer tireless determination worn the German U-boat warfare down to comparative impotence.

  There can be no denying that the successful prosecution of the Battle of the Atlantic was an indispensable prelude to invasion. In the Battle of the Atlantic, too, those who never went to sea played an important part—the workers in the shipyards, the scientists who devised new weapons and new methods, and the staffs who controlled the movements of the great convoys and who put the hunters on to the trail of the U-boat packs. The crews of the escort vessels spent long periods at sea in small vessels devoid of all comfort, in ships battened down for days on end with mess decks continually a-swill with water in which was washed hither and thither all the ghastly débris of a ship’s motion in which nothing can be made to stay in its appointed place. In winter their clothes were never dry, and their blankets had frequently to be wrung out before use. They had to live as best they could, often on scrappy, sodden meals from a galley which had been “drowned” by the sea, and they had to be perpetually on the alert and ready for any emergency. There were commanding officers of these little ships who did not leave their tiny spray-swept bridges day or night for ten days or a fortnight, who slept—when they could—standing and wedged into a corner of the bridge; yet they had to triumph continually over weariness so that all their faculties should be instantaneously at the very peak of efficiency if there came a hint of the presence of the enemy.

  It is not to be wondered at that the U-boats failed to triumph over such men; yet they alone did not defeat the U-boats. They were the backbone of the anti-U-boat forces, but they were given great help by the very long-range aircraft of the Royal Air Force, operating right out into the Central Atlantic from their bases in Northern Ireland, Iceland, Newfoundland and the Azores, and later by naval aircraft operating from escort aircraft carriers.

  It was the combination of the escort vessels, the very long-range aircraft, and the short-range aircraft operating from small escort carriers, which led to the discomfiture of the U-boats. While the escort carriers were being designed and prepared, however, there was a stop-gap measure which called for a very high order of courage from a few fighter pilots. These were so-called CAM ships—Catapult-Armed-Merchant-ships. These ships had an aircraft catapult mounted on the forecastle, and on it an old “expendable” Hurricane fighter to deal with the German Focke Wulff aircraft which used to report the convoys to the U-boat packs. There was no means of recovering the Hurricane so, except in the comparatively few cases when combat took place within Hurricane flying distance of a shore airfield, the pilot had to bale out as near as possible to the convoy and hope that he would be seen and picked up.

  In due course the escort aircraft carriers arrived, to give short-range air cover to the convoys. At the time of the sinking of the great German battleship Bismarck Admiral Sir James Somerville paid high tribute to the Fleet Air Arm pilots who operated from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal when the after end of her flight deck was rising and falling as much as 56 feet. The ends of the flight decks of these small escort carriers probably never rose or fell as much as that, but their flight decks were far smaller and they took on more difficult and alarming angles in heavy weather.

  It is improbable that any of the men engaged in this seemingly interminable Battle of the Atlantic—that battle which began with the declaration of war and ended only with Germany’s surrender—thought as they endured hardships and danger that they were making active contribution to the successful invasion of Hitler’s Europe. Yet they were.

  . . . . .

  Of all the essential pre-requisites for the invasion of Europe there were few more important than production of specialised craft, training of personnel, and experience. Of these three, experience must be accounted the most important, because both training and production might have progressed upon suicidally wrong lines had they not been guided by experience.

  In a very small degree there had been some attempt at experience and training in combined operations even before the war. In those far-off days there had been set up a committee of three officers, one from each Service, to study the problems of combined operations. Everything about that committee was shrouded in the deepest secrecy, and its purpose was cloaked under the title of “Inter-Services Technical Advisory Committee.” Its terms of reference were strictly limited, but it did succeed in making some preliminary survey of the problems and difficulties of combined operations. Moreover, it produced a design of landing craft—the first modern conception of such a vessel. With a very few of these craft certain experiments were carried out, so that a few officers and men derived some experience in the handling of such craft and in landing from them.

  As a beginning, it was ludicrously small—and yet it was a beginning—so that entirely new ground did not have to be broken when the expulsion of the Allied forces from the European continent made it obvious to the few with faith and vision that combined operations on the largest scale would have to be undertaken if victory was to be won. It is true that during the early months of the war the question of combined operations had been mooted, but only from the point of view that it might be feasible and desirable to stage a landing somewhere in order to create a diversion. The conception of a combined operation with an objective of any magnitude was yet to come.

  In the autumn of 1940, a Combined Operations Command was set up under the leadership of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes. It had the active-encouragement of the Prime Minister and might be said to have been Mr Winston Churchill’s “special baby.” It was at this stage that there came into being the Commandos, or Special Service Troops—picked men of excellent physique who were specially trained to carry out the assault in an amphibious operation. The formation and training of these Commandos went steadily ahead, as did the evolution of equipment and of landing craft.

  A year later Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed Commodore of Combined Operations. Very soon afterwards two events showed the growing importance with which this branch of warfare was being viewed in high places. One was the rapid growth of the Combined Operations staff at Lord Louis Mountbatten’s headquarters in Richmond Terrace—opposite to the War Cabinet Offices. This staff was a training, development and planning staff composed of officers of all three Services. The other event was the public announcement that Lord Louis Mountbatten had been given the acting ranks of Vice-Admiral in the Navy, Honorary Lieutenant-General in the Army, and Honorary Air Marshal in the Royal Air Force. These were simultaneous appointments without precedent, and had been occasioned by the decision that the Chief of Combined Operations should be a member of the Chief of Staff’s Committee, the Committee which—under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister—was responsible for the higher direction of t
he war.

  Under this impetus, the training of personnel and the development of equipment by the Combined Operations Command was greatly accelerated. These, and the planning of a number of raiding operations, were the chief functions of this command.

  During the time that Lord Louis Mountbatten was Chief of Combined Operations a number of assaults were carried out against the enemy. These ranged, geographically, from the Lofoten Islands to the Channel Islands, and in size and importance from the Vaagso and Lofoten raids to small forays involving only a few men, the details of many of which were never published, since it was considered unlikely that the enemy was aware of what had taken place. These raids had a two-fold importance. They added to the enemy’s unease all along the 2,000-Mile coastline which they had to defend and increased the burdens of the German General Staff and its already overworked communications. They also provided us with much valuable information of the extent and organisation of the enemy’s defences, while giving us the opportunity to do him much damage.

  On 19 August 1942, there took place the great raid on Dieppe. This was more than a raid, and was officially described as a “reconnaissance in force.” That is precisely what it was. From the naval point of view it was highly successful. A great concourse of shipping lay close off a hostile shore for the greater part of a brilliantly clear day with the loss of only one destroyer (HMS Berkeley) and that was sunk by bombs jettisoned by a hotly pursued German aircraft. The Royal Air Force imposed a very high loss upon the enemy at little cost to our own aircraft and air personnel.

  The Dieppe raid was, however, very expensive in casualties to the ground troops, and particularly to the Canadian troops taking part. This gave rise to certain doubts in the public mind as to the value of the Dieppe raid, and the authorities could at that time only answer these doubts in the most general terms by issuing statements to the effect that “valuable lessons had been learnt.”