SHAEF and the Overlord plan

In mid-February 1944 preparations for the invasion of France were given a formal framework. On 12 February the Combined Chiefs of Staff – the joint military leadership of Britain and the United States – issued General Dwight Eisenhower with a directive defining his title, his task and his place in the Allied chain of command. The next day, 13 February, Eisenhower formally assumed supreme command by General Order No. 1, and on 14 February, by General Order No. 2, he announced the names of the principal officers of his headquarters – Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). This date is often given as the day SHAEF was established in Britain.

It was largely a formal act. Eisenhower, named Supreme Commander for the invasion in December 1943, had been working in London since mid-January and was in fact directing the preparations, and the American official history notes that when the directive was issued he had been acting as Supreme Commander “for nearly a month”. February, however, brought what he had lacked until then: a written mandate from both governments, and a staff that was turning from a team of planners into a wartime command.

What happened on 8 February

Popular chronologies also state under 8 February that “the plan for the invasion of France, Operation Overlord, is approved”. There is no evidence of a single act of approval on that day. The American official history (Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command) shows rather a sequence of decisions spread over several weeks. On 21 January, at the first commanders’ conference in London, an enlarged landing plan was adopted – five divisions in the first wave instead of three – and on 23 January Eisenhower presented it to the chiefs of staff. At the end of January it was agreed to postpone the invasion from May to early June, to gain an extra month’s production of landing craft. On 1 February the three service commanders – Admiral Bertram Ramsay, General Bernard Law Montgomery and Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory – issued the Neptune Initial Joint Plan, covering the landings themselves and the battle for the beachhead; from then on the plans of the armies, navies and air forces were based on it. According to Pogue, the five-division assault had been “accepted in early February”.

On 8 February the invasion did indeed come up at a meeting of the British War Cabinet, but the discussion concerned one segment of the plan. Winston Churchill pressed there for an increase in the number of transport aircraft, so that the two airborne divisions Eisenhower had asked for could be dropped in the first assault. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, warned that rushed training would lower the quality of the crews, and Leigh-Mallory maintained that not a single additional pilot could be added to the first lift. The reference to the plan being “approved” on 8 February is therefore best understood as shorthand for the whole process of January and February rather than as the date of a specific decision.

The directive: “the heart of Germany”

The dispute over the wording of the directive had been running since January. The British draft instructed Eisenhower to enter the Continent and secure lodgements from which further offensive operations could be directed against the heart of Germany. The American chiefs of staff considered this too cautious: they feared that the British wanted to limit the invasion to holding a lodgement and to conduct the main operations elsewhere, for example in the Mediterranean. They demanded wording stating that the Supreme Commander was to strike at the heart of Germany and destroy her forces. To the British this seemed divorced from reality, given that some forty divisions were being assembled in the British Isles – too few to defeat the entire German army. The compromise kept the American objective but tied it to the operations of the other Allies. The Combined Chiefs of Staff adopted this text on 11 February and issued it the following day.

The key point of the directive read: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.” Eisenhower was given the title of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, and was to liberate Europe from the Germans. The directive still gave the date for entering the Continent as May 1944, although in practice preparations were already being made for June. After capturing the Channel ports he was to secure an area that would facilitate further ground and air operations, and, regardless of the target date, to be ready to return to the Continent at short notice should the Germans begin to withdraw from his front.

The directive also set out the lines of authority. Eisenhower was answerable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, but could communicate directly with the American and British staffs. Supplying the troops in the British Isles was the responsibility of the British ministries and the American War and Navy Departments, while he coordinated logistics on the Continent. The document assumed that at about the same time as Overlord the Red Army would launch an offensive that would prevent the Germans from transferring divisions from east to west – as had been agreed at the Tehran Conference. The Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson, was to support the invasion with a landing in southern France. One important question remained open: what proportion of the heavy bombers would come under Eisenhower’s command. Questions of civil government in the liberated territories were left to separate instructions.

Pogue judged the directive favourable to Eisenhower: framed in very general terms, it left him wide latitude in command and planning. Earlier British proposals to set out the powers of the service commanders in detail in annexes had been struck out.

An integrated staff

SHAEF was not built from scratch. Its nucleus was the COSSAC staff (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander), which the British General Frederick Morgan had run since the spring of 1943 at Norfolk House in London and which had drawn up the original Overlord plan approved at the Quebec Conference. The second source was Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ), from which Eisenhower had commanded in North Africa and Italy. It was there that the principle carried over to London had been worked out: an “integrated” staff, in which a British or American officer in a given division could take decisions affecting the troops of both nations, and the head of a section of one nationality was usually supported by a deputy of the other. Eisenhower announced that he had no intention of sweeping out Morgan’s people, but would fit into the existing structures.

The order of 14 February arranged this structure into a hierarchy. The Deputy Supreme Commander was the British Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, whose chief task was to coordinate air operations. The Chief of Staff was General Walter Bedell Smith, and his three deputies were all British: Morgan; General Humfrey Gale, brought over from AFHQ at Eisenhower’s express wish as chief administrative officer; and Air Vice-Marshal James Robb, deputy for air. The operations division (G-3), the “nerve centre” of SHAEF, was headed from 14 February by the American General Harold R. Bull, who replaced the Briton Charles West in the post. The personnel division (G-1) was taken over by the American General Ray Barker, until then Morgan’s deputy, and supply (G-4) by General Robert W. Crawford, who in February swapped places with the British head of that division in COSSAC. Intelligence (G-2) was headed temporarily by the British General John Whiteley, because the War Office was unwilling to give Eisenhower his African intelligence chief, General Kenneth Strong; Strong arrived only in May. The civil affairs division (G-5) was placed under a single head on 15 February, and on 14 February a publicity and psychological warfare division was set up.

The service commanders for the assault phase were British: Ramsay at sea, Montgomery as commander of 21st Army Group on land, and Leigh-Mallory at the head of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force. Together with an American Supreme Commander and a British deputy, this made up a carefully balanced arrangement designed to prevent national quarrels. SHAEF formally began work in COSSAC’s former premises at Norfolk House; in March it moved to huts in Bushy Park on the outskirts of London, under the codename Widewing.

Landing craft, bombers and Anvil

The formal establishment of the command did not settle the disputes hanging over the plan. The most important concerned Operation Anvil, the landing in southern France. Five divisions in Normandy required additional ships and landing craft, and the only source of them at short notice was the Mediterranean. Meanwhile the forces there had become bogged down: instead of opening the road to Rome, the landing at Anzio had itself come under pressure, and the landing craft needed to supply it could not leave. On 4 February Churchill launched a sharp attack on Anvil, arguing that it was not “strategically interwoven” with Overlord, and the British chiefs of staff proposed cancelling it and moving its equipment to England. Eisenhower, who wanted to save Anvil, himself began to doubt whether both landings could be carried out at the same time.

In Washington this was received with suspicion: General George Marshall saw the British proposals as yet another attempt to expand Mediterranean operations at the expense of the invasion, and asked Eisenhower whether pressure from those around him had not warped his judgement. The American chiefs of staff did not come to London, but made Eisenhower their representative in the talks with the British. Throughout February calculations were made of how many men and vehicles the landing craft could carry in combat conditions, and on 22 February General Wilson recommended cancelling Anvil because the German counter-attacks at Anzio were exhausting his troops. On 26 February a compromise was reached: the Italian campaign was given priority, and the fate of Anvil was to be decided after a review of the situation on 20 March.

The second open question was the heavy bombers. The directive of 12 February placed under Eisenhower neither Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris’s RAF Bomber Command nor General Carl Spaatz’s US Strategic Air Forces. Both men believed that the war would be won by bombing German industry, and were reluctant to switch their forces to destroying the railways in France and Belgium, as the invasion planners wanted. The third bottleneck was transport aircraft: the discussion of 8 February showed that instead of two airborne divisions in the first lift, one division and part of a second was the most that could be counted on.

Place in the war

February 1944 closed the period in which the invasion was above all a planners’ project and opened the period of preparation under a unified command. On the other side of the Channel, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had been strengthening the Atlantic Wall since December, and the Germans did not know where or when the blow would fall.

The most important disputes were settled in the months that followed. In March the plan to destroy French and Belgian railway junctions was adopted, and from April the heavy bombers operated according to Eisenhower’s directions, which he exercised through Tedder. Anvil was postponed to free landing craft for Normandy; the landing in Provence took place only on 15 August 1944, under the name Dragoon. On 6 June 1944, after a one-day postponement because of the weather, five divisions – with a further three airborne divisions – landed in Normandy. SHAEF commanded the Allied armies in the West until Germany’s surrender in May 1945; it was dissolved on 14 July 1945. The principle of the integrated staff, tested in Africa and brought to full development in London, became the model for later Allied commands, including NATO’s command in Europe, whose first head in 1951 was once again Eisenhower.