'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything'

Country houses great and small were indispensable to D-Day preparations, with electricity and sanitation, well-stocked wine cellars, countesses to run the canteens and antique furniture to feed the stoves

- Allan Mallinson

A S day broke on June 5, 1944, Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander for Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied Europe, was driving to Southwick House near Portsmouth from what he called his ‘sharpener camp’ the other side of the park—the tents and caravans from which he would command in Normandy. The landings should have begun that morning, but he’d postponed them because of foul weather. The evening before, his chief meteorologist, Group Capt James Stagg, had fore- cast a change and ‘Ike’ said he would take the final decision at his morning meeting. Yet now, with lashing rain and ‘a wind of almost hurricane proportions shaking and shuddering’, he wondered why he was bothering.

There was a fire burn- ing in the grate, coffee on a sideboard and his subordinate commanders gathered ready: Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, Gen Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Then, as Ramsay put it afterwards, ‘the prophets came in smiling’: Stagg said that the predicted high pressure was holding and even building. Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their opinion. All said ‘go’. He paced up and down for what seemed an age, drawing heavily on his cigarette: ‘OK, I don’t like it, but we’ll go on June 6.’