Eighty years on, the planning of Operation Neptune remains awesome

In December last year, the last surviving D-Day veteran of my old regiment, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, died peacefully in his care home. On 6 June 1944, 20-year-old Trooper Lawrence Burn had been the gunner in a specially adapted Sherman tank which, along with others of the regiment, had driven down the ramps of their landing craft 5,000 yards off Sword Beach and swum for almost an hour through the high swell to land a few minutes ahead of the assaulting infantry in order to suppress the defenders’ fire. Years later, Burn was still in awe of the scale and execution of the Normandy landings: ‘I don’t know who planned it – a committee, I suppose,’ he told a journalist on his 90th birthday, ‘but it was wonderfully, wonderfully done.’

The man with the greatest claim to having been master planner was Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan. In March 1943 he was appointed to the post of Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), no actual Supreme Allied Commander being appointed until December – Dwight Eisenhower. Morgan, with a small Anglo-American staff, worked methodically through the problems and options, choosing Normandy rather than the Pas de Calais for the assault. Eisenhower, on taking command, accepted the general concept, but wanted to land five divisions simultaneously rather than Morgan’s three with two in reserve. Morgan agreed it was better, but he’d had to work with the numbers given him. Montgomery, whom Eisenhower accepted somewhat uncertainly as his landing force commander, agreed that five divisions were essential; and so the extra two were inserted. This at once increased the strain on the naval side of Operation Overlord (code name for the Normandy landings preparatory to subsequent operations for the liberation of Western Europe) – Operation Neptune.