The St Paul's School briefing

On Monday 15 May 1944, at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, west London, almost all the people on whom the fate of the invasion of France depended gathered together. On the wooden benches of the school’s lecture theatre sat King George VI, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the British Chiefs of Staff, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, and the commanders of the armies, corps, fleets and air forces who in three weeks’ time were to lead the troops onto the beaches of Normandy. The host was General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of 21st Army Group and of all the ground forces in the first phase of the invasion, who had set up his headquarters in the building of his old school.

It was the last great gathering before D-Day at which the plan for Operation Overlord was presented in its entirety – from the seaborne and airborne landings, through the support of the fleet and the bombers, to supply and further operations on land. In a single room the commanders heard what their neighbours would do, and Britain’s political leaders could ask questions for the last time before the invasion machine was set in motion. No new decisions were taken there; the date of the landing had already been fixed and the orders issued. The briefing was meant to show that all the parts of the plan fitted together – and to give confidence to the men who were to carry it out.

Headquarters in an old school

St Paul’s School, one of the oldest schools in London, founded in 1509 beside St Paul’s Cathedral, had occupied an imposing red-brick building on Hammersmith Road since the nineteenth century. After the outbreak of war the pupils were evacuated to the country, to Easthampstead Park in Berkshire, and the empty buildings were taken over by the army. At the turn of 1943 and 1944 they became the headquarters of 21st Army Group – the British and Canadian formation that was to land in Normandy alongside the Americans.

For Montgomery the place had a personal significance. He had been a pupil there in the early years of the twentieth century, before going on to the military college at Sandhurst, and had not been a particularly distinguished scholar. Now he occupied the office of the headmaster (the High Master) – by his own account, a room he had never entered as a boy. From that office, from January 1944, he directed the preparations for the land part of the invasion.

Montgomery had taken command of 21st Army Group at the beginning of 1944, on his return from Italy. The first thing he did was to challenge the outline drawn up earlier by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan’s COSSAC staff for a landing by three divisions on a narrow stretch of coast. Together with Eisenhower, who arrived in London in mid-January, he pushed through a landing by five divisions from the sea and three from the air on a broad front, from the base of the Cotentin peninsula to the mouth of the River Orne. The bigger plan required more landing craft, and that in turn forced the date to be put back from May to the beginning of June. The command structure, in which Montgomery commanded all the ground forces in the first phase and Eisenhower stood at the head of the whole, took shape during the winter, with the setting-up of SHAEF headquarters and the Overlord plan.

In the months that followed, Montgomery’s staff officers worked in the classrooms of St Paul’s under General Francis de Guingand. Here the tasks of the armies and corps were worked out, here conferences with the navy and the air force were held, and here the orders were drafted that by May were reaching the divisions.

A dress rehearsal on Good Friday

The briefing of 15 May had a forerunner. On 7 April 1944, Good Friday, Montgomery gathered the army, corps and division commanders and their staffs at St Paul’s for a staff exercise code-named Thunderclap. There he presented his plan for the Battle of Normandy in full for the first time, and his subordinate generals discussed the tasks of their formations in turn. Montgomery spoke, among other things, of how after the landing the British and Canadians on the left wing were to draw the German armoured reserves onto themselves around Caen, while the Americans on the right wing were to take the Cotentin with the port of Cherbourg, then break out into Brittany and wheel towards the Seine. On the wall hung a map with the expected front lines for the days ahead, up to the ninetieth day after the landing.

The April exercise was intended for those who would carry out the plan. The May briefing was of a different character: the commanders of all three services were to present the finished plan to Britain’s highest political and military authorities and to one another. Between the two meetings the plan had taken its final shape, the troops had held major landing exercises – including Exercise Tiger at Slapton Sands, which ended in tragedy – and the bombers had begun in earnest the raids preparing the invasion against French and Belgian railway junctions.

The hall, the map and the guests

The briefing was held in the school’s lecture theatre, where tiers of benches rose above the floor like an amphitheatre. On the floor lay a huge relief map of the Normandy coast with the lines of advance, the flight paths of the aircraft and the routes of the convoys marked on it. The speakers could walk across it and point to the places under discussion, while the audience in the upper rows looked down on it as on a staff table. The King, the Prime Minister and Eisenhower sat in the front row.

Accounts differ on the number present. Modern war chronologies speak of more than 130 politicians and officers, other works of roughly 145–150 people. All agree on the importance of the gathering. The American official historian Forrest Pogue called it one of the great military conferences of the war and listed those present: the King, the Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts – Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa and Churchill’s friend and adviser – the British Chiefs of Staff, members of the War Cabinet and the principal Allied commanders. The Chiefs of Staff at the time were Field Marshal Alan Brooke, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal and Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham.

Almost all the commanders who were to lead the invasion came to the hall too. Among them were the commander of the naval part of the operation, Admiral Bertram Ramsay; the commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory; the commander of the American First Army, General Omar Bradley; and the commander of the British Second Army, General Miles Dempsey. The bombers were represented by the commander of RAF Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, and the commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, General Carl Spaatz. General George Patton was present too; his Third Army was to go into action only after the bridgehead had been won, and barely three weeks earlier his careless words at Knutsford had nearly cost him his command. Also there was General John C. H. Lee, head of the American supply services in the European theatre, responsible for ensuring that a river of ammunition, fuel and food would flow after the troops.

The plan in several voices

The briefing was run by SHAEF, Eisenhower’s headquarters. The Supreme Commander opened it with a short address: he reminded those present that the plan was a joint effort and urged them to raise any doubts, since now was the last moment to clear them up. According to Pogue, he was followed in turn by Montgomery, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory and Bradley, who presented the revised outlines of the plan and the support on which the individual commanders could count. According to other accounts, the bomber commanders also spoke.

Montgomery spoke at the greatest length and with the most colour. In the notes for his address, which he later published in his memoirs, he began with the enemy. He reminded his audience that the defence of the coast was commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who since the winter had been strengthening the Atlantic Wall. Rommel, Montgomery wrote, was an energetic and determined commander, at his best in disruptive attacks; he would not want to fight a great tank battle inland, but would do everything to give the Allies a “Dunkirk” – to smash them on the beaches before they could land their tanks, by throwing his own armoured divisions in as close to the shore as possible. That was why, he said, on the first day the Allies had to drive inland quickly and gain space before the Germans could concentrate their reserves.

Montgomery also set out the division of tasks. On the right wing Bradley’s American First Army was to land on two sectors code-named Utah and Omaha, supported by two American airborne divisions – the 82nd and the 101st – dropped at the base of the Cotentin. On the left wing Dempsey’s British Second Army, with British and Canadian divisions, was to attack on the Gold, Juno and Sword sectors, and the British 6th Airborne Division was to cover the eastern flank on the Orne. The ambitious objective for the first day was the capture of Caen. Montgomery announced that the British and Canadians would take the main weight of the German counter-attacks, while the Americans in the meantime took Cherbourg and the ports of Brittany.

He devoted most attention, however, to the men. In his notes he wrote that the soldiers had to be sent into this fight “seeing red”, fully convinced of the plan, confident and filled with an infectious optimism. In the weeks that followed he himself toured the units, addressed the troops from the bonnet of a car and told them again and again that the plan was a good one. The self-assurance he radiated at St Paul’s impressed his listeners – although it irritated some of the Americans.

Admiral Ramsay discussed Operation Neptune, the naval part of the invasion: the crossing of several thousand warships, merchant ships and landing craft – nearly seven thousand vessels according to later tallies – the sweeping of channels through the minefields, the bombardment of the coast by battleships, cruisers and destroyers, and the supply of the bridgehead over the beaches and through the artificial harbours being built in England. Leigh-Mallory presented the tasks of the air forces: winning command of the air over the landing area, flying in three airborne divisions on the night before the landing, covering the convoys and the beaches, and isolating the battlefield by destroying bridges and railway lines. Bradley discussed the tasks of the American corps on the two beaches. The bombing of communications centres was spoken of as something already under way: since the spring the British and American heavy bombers had been subordinate to Eisenhower for this purpose.

The King and the Prime Minister

Towards the end of the meeting the two most important guests spoke. George VI, known for his difficulty with public speaking and usually very reserved, rose and gave a short, unscheduled speech in which he wished the commanders success. This surprised even his private secretary, and Montgomery noted in his diary that the speech had been absolutely first-class, quite short and exactly right.

Churchill spoke too. His attitude to a landing across the English Channel had for years been a matter of dispute with the Americans: the Prime Minister remembered the slaughter on the Western Front in the previous war and the defeat at Gallipoli, and in 1942 and 1943 he had preferred to strike in the Mediterranean. Eisenhower remembered his words from those weeks: “Gentlemen, I am hardening toward this enterprise.” He read them as proof that the Prime Minister had long doubted the invasion would succeed and only now backed it fully. Churchill himself, in his memoirs, presented himself as a supporter of the landing who had merely wanted it to be well prepared, and historians interpret the remark in different ways. What is certain is that on 15 May the Prime Minister no longer questioned the plan itself.

Eisenhower later summed up that the meeting not only marked the practical completion of all the preliminary planning and preparation but also seemed to instil confidence, because each of the dozens of commanders and staff officers present learned in detail what support he would receive in his part of the undertaking. That is how Pogue quotes his words.

After the briefing

The St Paul’s briefing closed the planning stage. Eisenhower had already fixed the date of the landing at a conference on 8 May – it was 5 June, with the possibility of postponement to 6 or 7 June – and on 17 May he formally notified the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Over the following days the orders filtered further down, to regiments and battalions. At the end of May the troops were shut into marshalling camps in southern England, cut off from the world, and only there did their officers acquaint them with the details of their tasks, still without the names of the real places. Montgomery moved his command post to the vicinity of Portsmouth, closer to the embarkation ports and to Eisenhower’s headquarters.

Place in the war

The briefing of 15 May 1944 changed neither the plan nor the date of the invasion, but it was the last occasion on which the whole concept of the operation was presented in one place to all those who were to carry it out and to the men who bore political responsibility for it. For the British government, and especially for Churchill, it was an opportunity to satisfy themselves that the planning was complete and that the commanders believed in success. For the commanders themselves it was a chance to see how their tasks dovetailed with those of their neighbours at sea, in the air and on land.

Three weeks later the plan was put to the test. The weather forced Eisenhower to postpone the landing by a day, and on 6 June 1944 the Allies landed in Normandy. Much of what had been presented at St Paul’s proved right: surprise was achieved, the bridgeheads were won, and the Germans failed to throw the Allies back into the sea. But not everything went as forecast. On Omaha the Americans suffered heavy losses, and Caen, which was to have fallen on the first day, was taken only after several weeks of bloody fighting, in July. The breakout came at the end of July in the American sector, in August the Germans were defeated at Falaise, and the Allies reached the Seine at roughly the time forecast for the ninetieth day.

After the war Montgomery maintained that the Battle of Normandy had gone essentially as he had planned it at St Paul’s – with the British tying down the German armoured divisions around Caen and the Americans breaking through on the western wing. Many historians, and some of his superiors at the time, considered this an interpretation fitted to the results rather than a faithful account of the original intention. That dispute continues to this day. The briefing itself, held in Montgomery’s old school, has gone down in history as the symbol of the moment when the preparations for the largest amphibious operation in history were completed, and all that remained was to wait for the weather.