“Where would you like to go? The coming invasion of Europe will give you quicker action, but the Pacific war has longer term possibilities.”
Here, certainly was a businesslike enough appraisal of the differing opportunities offered by the war scene; quite unimpassioned, too. Seeing I was being offered a choice, I hastily thought it over. I was not too certain I could last long enough to take decent advantage of the Pacific’s longer term possibilities—the quicker action in the European theater had obvious attractions in my case.
“I’ll take Europe, sir,” I answered quickly.
“Done. I’ll cable Stark I’m flying you over. You’ll get action enough with him. Good luck, Ellsberg.”
That was how I came to join the staff at 20 Grosvenor Square in London, of four-starred Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, U. S. Naval Forces in Europe.
My first war assignment from Stark was nothing to set anyone’s pulses to beating madly with excitement—it was prosaically enough nothing more nor less than reading a book.
It was a massive book I was given—one glance showed it would take quite a while to read—it was at least as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory and certainly weighed as much. But unlike the Manhattan telephone directory of which the number of copies in circulation must reach toward two million, of this book there were probably not a dozen copies in existence—it was rarer than Shakespeare’s First Folio.
The reading of that book, never taken by anyone from Stark’s Naval Headquarters, was a ritual. First, a Navy Chief Yeoman with no other apparent duties than keeper of The Book, operated the combination of the safe in which it lay. The safe was opened, The Book carefully extracted by its guardian, the safe again closed and locked. Then came a short procession, composed only of the Chief Yeoman bearing The Book and of me following, to a small room down the corridor. We both entered, to complete the ritual. The door was closed behind us. The Book was laid on the solitary table there, its number (seven, as I recall) checked carefully by its keeper, a receipt for it bearing that number placed before me. In my turn, I checked the number on The Book with that on the receipt, signed it, sat down in the single chair before the table to read. The keeper took the receipt each time, reminded me I had better lock myself in, and hurriedly departed, no doubt with a considerable weight off his mind. For some hours, till I should call him to surrender that volume and get back my receipt, that priceless Book was my responsibility, no longer his.
Each day at noon when I went out to lunch, late each afternoon, when dizzy from reading I had to quit and retire to my billet, the ritual was reversed. My receipt was returned, The Book locked again in the safe, to be guarded through the night hours by marine sentries. Never did that Book leave Stark’s offices in Grosvenor Square.
For that Top Secret Book was Stark’s copy of the Overlord Plan, most carefully guarded of all military documents. It took me over a week to read it. Long before I finished, I could see the need for the extreme security measures surrounding The Book. There, first set out in over-all terms, then in exact detail, was the strategic plan involved in the Normandy Invasion, from months before D-day till months afterward when the beaches had been left far behind and the war had become one of movement deep into France, aimed at the Rhine. There were set out the forces to be used and the parts to be played by every unit, British and American, on land, at sea, in air, in carrying through the plan. And lastly there they were—what was unique to this invasion and most secret of all—the strange devices which were to make possible the impossible—the unbelievable assortment of mechanical contrivances on a vast scale designed to overcome or to nullify each and every condition which Hitler’s General Staff knew made a successful invasion impossible.
The reading of The Book left me dazed. I was given no instructions regarding it—just to read it—all of it. My instructions would come after. So I read it all, absorbed all of it I could, from the over-all strategy on a grand scale on which the campaign in France was to be based, through the tactical stratagems intended to delude the enemy on D-day as to the exact point of attack, down finally to the futuristic devices provided to make possible the breaching of the Atlantic Wall—devices alongside which, both in conception and immensity, the gigantic Wooden Horse which crafty Ulysses devised to breach the walls of Troy was but an infant’s tiny plaything.
Daily I read till higher strategy oozed from my ears, strange engineering concepts stunned my mind, life itself became only a nightmare in which all men on land, in air, over or under the sea, seemed to be gripped in a fantastic vortex, inexorably being sucked like bits of cosmic dust into a mad whirl spiralling about a solitary dazzling sun—
D-day!
Everything in The Book, in life itself now, revolved about D-day. This was to happen so many days before D-day, that, so many days after—on D minus 30 days, for instance, this was to come to pass; that, on the other hand, not till D plus 42 days had come. Here was a new calendar to govern the lives of all about me, in which time was reckoned, not from the birth of Christ, but as being such and such a time before or after THE DAY on which the Allies set foot at dawn on the coasts of Normandy. My life now, sleeping and waking, revolved, like that of everyone else around me, about D-day.
It was, perhaps, sometime in the beginning of the week of my reading of The Book, that first I met Captain Dayton Clark. He had just come north once more to London from the Channel, to pick up immediately from someone at 20 Grosvenor Square the interesting bit of news that since his last visit there something new had been added to Stark’s naval staff—the man who had been General Eisenhower’s Principal Salvage Officer in the North African Invasion, a fairly senior captain.
In Clark’s despairing eyes, here at last was a heaven-sent opportunity—someone attached to Grosvenor Square who would understand his problem. He waylaid me in the corridor as I came out for my lunchtime break from the locking up of The Book, still in a half-daze from the reading of it.
“Captain Ellsberg?”
I had to stop, since my path was blocked. I looked up (I’m not so tall myself). Before me was a gaunt naval figure with four stripes, a deeply seamed face framing a pair of intense eyes that gripped me instantly as might have those of the Ancient Mariner, and stopped me just as effectively in my tracks—a tall, lean figure whose very leanness made him look taller perhaps than actually he was.
Already in a half -trance, I was soon completely in one before I finished listening to the tale of agony poured out by this tortured seaman who had as heavy a weight crushing his soul as Coleridge’s unfortunate after he’d shot the albatross—except that this mariner apparently had no such sin to blame for the evil future that he faced. Before me, I swiftly heard, stood Captain Dayton Clark of our Navy, eight years junior to me, assigned to command Operation Mulberry. He was facing disaster over his Phoenixs, the key to the Mulberry Operation.
That finished me off as an involuntary listener. I hadn’t got that far yet in my reading of The Book. I hadn’t the foggiest notion then of where Operation Mulberry came in, in the Overlord Plan, let alone of what a Phoenix was. What this Captain Clark was so bitterly bemoaning was wholly beyond me.
In spite of those piercing eyes, I managed to come to enough to seek escape. I must be excused from further listening. Unlike Coleridge’s unwilling listener, I could plead no wedding I must attend, but I was hungry, and I stated bluntly I had a hasty lunch to get so I might return to my sole job—the reading of The Book. Come see me in about a week, Captain—perhaps then I’ll understand what so distresses you. Until then—goodby. I brusquely broke away.
Mulling how unfortunate it was any such wrought-up character had managed somehow to wangle a command assignment in an invasion requiring of all hands the most imperturbable reaction to difficulties, I ate my lunch. Soon I was back once more at my reading, trusting never again to have the ill luck of running into that Captain Clark. A few days back on the beach, with his men, away from the tense atmosphere at London headquarters, would, I hoped, rest
ore him to a state of mind more suitable to his rank and responsibilities and keep him from bothering me further. Meanwhile, there was my reading to make me quickly forget him.
By the early part of the following week, I had read The Book through completely and had a fair over-all grasp of what the vast Overlord Plan encompassed. Now I was rereading more carefully that section which had to do with the strange mechanisms which were to make Overlord possible. Somewhere among all these mechanistic fantasies, all wound up with seaports, existent and nonexistent, I know my own assignment must come. These, not the complicated strategy set out for guidance of the army commanders, now got my absorbed interest.
Among these, Operation Mulberry swiftly became to me a most concrete reality. It came first in the structure on which victory was to rise. Operation Mulberry was literally the new-found key to success in invasion. It was to make possible what the wholly impersonal German General Staff had long since concluded was an obvious impossibility; an unpalatable conclusion that the British, after their bloody repulse on the beaches at Dieppe two years before, had wholeheartedly been forced to concur in as correct; a conclusion with which every American strategist, however skeptical, who had studied the question since 1941, was also ultimately, but most reluctantly, forced to agree.
The German General Staff, a body governed in its military thinking solely by logic, had early figured the problem out to its one logical conclusion—cold logic showed a successful invasion to be impossible. Their advice to Hitler consequently had been,
“Hold the ports and we hold everything.”
And thus ran their reasoning (which no one, whether on the German side or on ours, could refute):
A large, mechanized army, such as von Rundstedt and Rommel had, covering the Atlantic Coast from Denmark to Spain, could be defeated (if at all) only by a larger, better mechanized army—an invading army of a million men, at least, formidably equipped.
Conceded that the Allies might, with their superior sea power, somehow land somewhere on the open European coast the larger army needed, they still could not land the heavy tanks, the big guns, the mechanized equipment and continuously disembark the immense quantity of supplies required to make that army an effective fighting force, without the wharfs, the harbor cranes, and the huge protected harbors necessary in all kinds of weather to handle ashore heavy equipment and supplies in such vast quantity.
Unlike the situation in World War I, when every French port was open to supply Pershing’s army, now every harbor in continental Europe from Norway through to Spain was in German hands, defended by large German garrisons and formidable concrete-casemented heavy coastal artillery emplacements.
Against those unsinkable heavy coastal batteries, the superior Allied navies could never hope to stage, from the seas, a successful bombardment to capture any one of these harbors. The Allied naval commanders knew better than to attempt that. It was freely conceded by both sides that these harbors could be taken only by massive, long-drawn-out siege assault from the land side.
However, siege assaults on the harbors from the land side could be undertaken by invaders only after defeating Rommel’s field armies.
But without the heavy mechanized equipment and supplies which could only be landed through harbors the Allies didn’t have, Rommel’s forces could not be defeated in the field, to allow after Rommel’s defeat an assault from the shore side to take the harbors needed to land the equipment necessary to defeat Rommel—and so on, round and round, ad infinitum.
The only possible conclusion? An invasion, yes, if the Allies are so mad as to be willing to offer up a million ill-equipped men to be massacred by Field Marshal Rommel’s mechanized forces. But a successful invasion? Obviously an impossibility!
To that conclusion, the German General Staff, the British War Office, the American strategists, including Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, ultimately all subscribed without dissent. How could any one of them, bound in his thinking by the laws of reason, possibly dissent? He could not. Who can question irrefutable logic?
But the British are a most illogical and stubborn race. Had they been more logical and less stubborn, they would swiftly have surrendered to Hitler after the Fall of France, and the question later of how successfully to stage an invasion impossible of success would never have risen to plague them. But running true to British doggedness even in the face of inevitable defeat, they neither accepted defeat after Dunkirk nor the impossibility of landing once again in Europe, even after their disastrous attempt at Dieppe. Doggedly the British planners continued to butt their heads against the stone wall of that impossibility. They continued to get nothing for their efforts except more headaches.
Then with Pearl Harbor, American strategists came to London, full of enthusiasm, to take over from the stupid British, to show them how an invasion of Europe should and, before the end of 1942, would be staged successfully.
Our own strategists, with their noses up against the hard realities of the problem, got no further through that impossibility than had the British. Soon it was being agreed by our planners both in Washington and in England, that if there were to be an invasion of any nature at all in 1942, it had better take place in North Africa. There we would face no German army whatever in our landings, and there the highly essential but ill-defended French African ports would fall swiftly into our hands before the nearest Germans, whether with Rommel in distant Libya before El Alamein or with Kesselring in Italy, could do anything to interfere with us.
That face-saving solution provided an invasion in 1942 for those shrieking for some immediate Allied action to pacify Stalin and save the Russians. But it failed to help any on staging the vital European invasion. That dilemma remained—the British planners, unvexed now by the Americans, continued doggedly as before to try to solve the unsolvable. The American strategists found their hands temporarily, at least, full of new problems in North Africa, but problems somewhat more susceptible to solution of some sort—Darlan for one, Rommel and his Afrika Korps for another.
Meanwhile, the phlegmatic, the unimaginative, the even (in the minds of some American worshippers at the shrine of a Yankee monopoly on ingenuity) stupid British, finally solved the riddle.
A jest, a joke too ridiculous even to be taken seriously, was the entering wedge. The scene, the messroom in Norfolk House, headquarters of Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of the British Planning Staff. The occasion, a group of British officers of all services, mulling over after dinner in late June of 1943 for the ten-thousandth time that bête noire of the invasion—the ports in France they must have to stage one.
The wine, apparently, had loosened both British tongues and British tempers, a situation much aggravated by the quite un-British summer heat on that June day.
The army representatives had just reiterated flatly, unequivocably, and for the last time their position. Without at least one major port, say Cherbourg, in our hands and working all out to land heavy equipment in the first few days, it was silly even to discuss invasion any further.
The navy planners countered acrimoniously with the obvious retort—you bloody well know the enemy has all those ports; it’s our job to solve this problem without a port. Period.
The embattled planners, stymied, could only glare ferociously at each other across the conference table, blood-pressures rising dangerously. At this juncture, when it seemed most likely that British officers and gentlemen were about to forget that they were either, Commodore John Hughes-Hallet, senior Royal Navy planner, rose, stood a moment rolling his pencil briskly between his palms, then with mock solemnity tossed in his solution for the impasse.
“Well, gentlemen, all I can say is this—if we can’t capture a port, we must take one with us.”
All hands—soldiers, sailors, airmen alike—roared heartily at this merry conceit—fancy that, a whole seaport afloat, being towed across the Channel. A good joke, Commodore, worthy of more wine! They had it. Tensions relaxed. With everyone stil
l laughing, the meeting broke up, with any solution to the port problem no nearer than before.
But by morning, the uproarious jest of the night before had begun to haunt both the jester himself and the most important of his hearers—Lieut. General Sir Frederick Morgan, Chief of the Planning Staff. That silly idea—floating a seaport across the Channel—was the only alternative. Silly then or not, might not that sole alternative, taken seriously somehow be made a reality? Morgan and Hughes-Hallett, looking hopefully at each other next morning, agreed that possibly it might. Hughes-Hallett was assigned to develop it. And so in June of 1943 was conceived what was to become Operation Mulberry.
Considering its monstrous size (its requirements stood out above those for normal military concepts as might a dinosaur above a mouse) its period of gestation was remarkably short. With the aid of Brigadier Sir Harold Wernher, called in soon to help Hughes-Hallett in design and planning, by late July the project was ready for presentation in London and in Washington to the Allied Chiefs of Staff, British and American. Both military groups felt it worthy of further consideration. By mid-August, at the Quebec Conference it was accepted by Roosevelt for America and by Churchill for England as giving at last some kind of unsuicidal basis for proceeding with invasion. From the Quebec Conference went out finally the firm order ending the endless talk on both sides of the Atlantic about invasion. Hughes-Hallett’s idle jest—a joke no longer—was accepted as foundation for an invasion set for May 1, 1944.
And thus, in August, 1943, at Quebec, Operation Mulberry was born.
CHAPTER 4
The Far Shore Page 2