Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC)

Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC). National D-Day Memorial. January 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill accompanied by their senior military-poltical advisors, gathered at Casablanca, Morocco, to settle on a strategy for the defeat of Germany. Despite profound American misgivings, Roosevelt and Churchill did agree that major Allied ground operations in 1943 would be confined to the Mediterranean. That understanding, however, rose above the bedrock premise that the Allies must prepare for a cross-Channel invasion in 1944, toward which end they would commit overwhelming resources. The Casablanca Conference concluded with agreement that “a British chief of staff, along with an independent U.S.-British staff, should be appointed it once for the control, planning, and training of cross-Channel operations.” , , That decision reaffirmed an implicit understanding Roosevelt and Churchill had come to at the Atlantic Conference (9-10 August 1941). In March 1943, General Sir Alan Brooke, Chier of the Imperial General Staff, selected Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan to become "Chief of Staff to the supreme Allied Commander" (COSSAC) and issued him orders to prepare for the invasion of northwest Europe, At London, during his first staff meeting on 17 April, Gen. Morgan declared: "I want to make clear that, although the primary object of COSSAC is to make plans, I am certain that it is wrong to refer to it in any way as a planning staff. This implies the production of nothing but paper. What we must contrive to do somehow is to produce not only paper but action! I am to plan nothing less than the reconquest of Europe." , , In three months, COSSAC finalized his plan for the cross-Channel invasion of Normandy. Rather than opting for an assault across the Channel's narrowest point on the Pas de Calais, a landing site Gen. Morgan deemed unsatisfactory due to its unsheltered beaches, paucity of major regional ports, and strong enemy defenses, he selected as the invasion's focal point three Norman beaches on the Calvados coast between the Orne and Vire Rivers. In a 15 July letter to the British War Cabinet, Morgan wrote, “I have come to (the) conclusion that we may be assured of a reasonable chance of success on May 1, 1944, only if we concentrate our efforts on an assault across the Norman beaches about Bayeux.” , , Although issues related to the timing of Overlord and commitment of Allied resources to it remained unresolved for many months, Roosevelt and Churchill accepted the plan in principle at the Quebec Conference, August 1943. Three months later at the Tehran Conference, a meeting hosted by Joseph Stalin, the Big Three concurred that Overlord would be the principal Anglo-American military operation of 1944. It was also the one they expected to bring the war in Europe to a successful conclusion by the end of that year. One element of the Overlord plan , the identification of a supreme commander , remained unresolved until 6 December 1943, when President Roosevelt named Gen. Eisenhower. If the President gave the Supreme Commander his job, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall gave him an emphatic brief. "Consider only Overlord and your own heavy burden of responsibility for its success. Everything else is of minor importance." In March 1944, Gen. Eisenhower tapped Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith to become chief of staff, and Gen. Morgan remained at SHAEF as one of the new chief’s three deputies. For his vital contribution to the planning of and preparation for D-Day, Gen. Morgan was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath later that year. , In loving memory of Cecil Paul Allen. Given by Mary Lou Allen and Paula Allen Cohen. .