Frederick Morgan (British Army officer, born 1894)
Sir Frederick Edgworth Morgan, was a senior officer of the British Army who served in both world wars. He is best known as the chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, the original planner of Operation Overlord.
A graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Morgan was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in July 1913. During the First World War he served on the Western Front as an artillery subaltern and staff officer. Afterwards he served two long tours with the British Army in India.
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Morgan was promoted to brigadier and assumed command of the 1st Support Group, part of the 1st Armoured Division, which he led during the Battle of France. After serving as Brigadier General Staff with II Corps, he was promoted to major general in February 1941 and commanded both the Devon and Cornwall County Division and the 55th Infantry Division, before being promoted again in May 1942 to lieutenant general when he was given command of I Corps. His headquarters was then designated Force 125, and given the task of dealing with a German thrust through Spain to Gibraltar that never occurred. In March 1943 he was appointed Chief Of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, or COSSAC. As COSSAC he directed the planning for Operation Overlord. When American General Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander in early 1944, Major General Bedell Smith became chief of staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, while Morgan became deputy chief of staff.
After the war, Morgan served as Chief of Operations for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany until his position in Germany was eliminated after he had alleged that UNRRA was infiltrated by Soviet agents seeking to stir up trouble among displaced persons. In 1951, Morgan became Controller of Atomic Energy, and was present for Operation Hurricane, the first British atomic weapons tests at the Montebello Islands in 1952. His position was abolished in 1954 with the creation of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority but he remained as Controller of Nuclear Weapons until 1956.
Early life
Frederick Morgan was born in Paddock Wood, Kent, on 5 February 1894, the eldest son among nine children of Frederick Beverley Morgan, a timber importer, and his wife Clare Elizabeth. He was raised at Mascall's Manor, Paddock Wood. He commenced his education at Hurstleigh, a private school in Tunbridge Wells in 1902. At an early age it was decided that Frederick would become a British Army officer, and in 1907 he entered Clifton College, a school noted for its connections with the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. At Clifton he played rugby and cricket, and served in the School Cadet Corps, which became the Officers' Training Corps in 1908. As a cadet sergeant, he was one of many who lined the route to Buckingham Palace for the Coronation of George V of the United Kingdom in 1911. He eventually rose to the rank of second lieutenant. Morgan duly passed the entrance examination for Woolwich, which he entered in 1912.Morgan was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery on 17 July 1913, and joined the 41st Battery, 42nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery at Aldershot. He volunteered for service in India, and in January 1914 departed on the British-India Steam Navigation Company troopship Rewa, joining the 84th Battery, 11th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, which was stationed in Jabalpur.
First World War
Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Morgan's battery departed for the Western Front in October 1914 as part of the 3rd Division. Morgan suffered a near-miss from a German 5.9-inch gun which blew him into the air and buried him in a shell hole, and he was evacuated to hospital in Boulogne with shell shock. He was granted a short sick leave in England only to be present when news reached his family that his brother had been killed in action. On returning to the front, Morgan became aide-de-camp to Brigadier General Edward Spencer Hoare Nairne, the commander of the Lahore Divisional Artillery. The artillery remained on the Western Front when the bulk of the division departed for the Mesopotamian campaign. As it took longer to train artillery than infantry, the Lahore divisional artillery acted in turn as the artillery of the 2nd Canadian Division, 3rd Canadian Division, 4th Australian Division and finally the 4th Canadian Division until their own artillery was sufficiently trained to take over.Morgan became a staff captain in February 1916, and was promoted to the temporary rank of captain in May 1916. The Lahore divisional artillery was broken up in mid-1917 and Morgan, promoted to captain on 18 July 1917, was posted to the 42nd Division as a staff captain. On 15 August 1917, he married Marjorie Cecile Whaite, the daughter of Colonel Thomas du Bédat Whaite of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The couple had met on board the Rewa en route to India in 1914. Their marriage produced two daughters and a son.
During the Hundred Days Offensive which ultimately led to the armistice with Germany on 11 November 1918, he served as brigade major of the 42nd Divisional Artillery. During the war Morgan was twice mentioned in dispatches, on 15 May 1917, and again on 5 July 1919.
Of the end of the war and its aftermath Morgan later wrote:
So to England, home and a new start. No question of returning home in triumph as a conquering hero. There was nothing to show outwardly for those four years in the shadows, years of inner tension for which no relief could be found since it was impossible to describe the fullness of one's sensations to any who had not shared them. Unlike the later occasion when all men, women and even children smelt the whiff of hell, in 1919 there were few among those whose task had been to keep the home fires burning who could, even with the utmost endeavour, comprehend what had happened to those of us who came back, bent or broken, aged beyond our years.
So one had to screw the lid down on it all and strive to deaden the thought of the past by immersing oneself in present soil. This drug lay plentifully at hand, specially to the hands of those of us who must reshape the shattered army in this new world that had had more than enough of armies.
Between the wars
In 1919, Morgan volunteered for a six-year tour of India, where he would ultimately spend much time during the interwar period, and joined the 118th Field Battery, 26th Field Brigade, at Deepcut, where it was forming and training for service in the subcontinent. Later that year the brigade moved to its new station at Jhansi. After three years Morgan was posted to Attock, where he commanded the Divisional Ammunition Column. In 1924 he accepted a temporary staff posting as Deputy Assistant Adjutant-General of Major-General Herbert Uniacke's 1st Division at Murree. This was followed in 1925 by a year's secondment to the headquarters of Lieutenant-General Sir Claud Jacob's Northern Command, where Morgan helped plan and direct large-scale manoeuvres.Morgan returned to England in 1926, and assumed command of the 22nd Heavy Battery. Equipped with a mixture of 9.2 inch guns, 6 inch guns, 12 pounders and 6 pounders, it was responsible for the coastal defences of Weymouth, Dorset. Still a captain, Morgan hoped that his next career move would be to attend the Staff College, Camberley, having narrowly passed the entrance examination. Instead, he was offered a place at the Staff College, Quetta, requiring a return trip to India. Morgan's classmates at Quetta from 1927 and 1928 included William Slim, John Crocker, Kenneth Anderson, David Cowan, George Alan Vasey and Tommy Burns. After graduation, Morgan was posted to the 70th Field Battery at Lucknow, and then was artillery staff officer at headquarters Western Command, under Brigadier Henry Karslake. When Karslake became major-general, Royal Artillery, at GHQ India in 1931, he brought Morgan to Delhi to serve with him as his General Staff Officer. Morgan, after receiving no promotion in rank for almost 15 years, was finally promoted to major on 22 June 1932 and brevet lieutenant colonel on 1 January 1934.
Returning to England in 1934, Morgan assumed command of the 4th Anti-Aircraft Battery, which was deployed to Malta during the diplomatic crisis that accompanied the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. He then returned to England and served in the War Office from 1936 to 1938. Here he became increasingly disturbed at the lack of urgency that the British government displayed in the face of a war that Morgan and his fellow staff officers felt was inevitable and imminent. On 28 May 1938 he was promoted to colonel and became GSO1 of the 3rd Infantry Division, in which Brigadier Bernard Montgomery commanded the 8th Infantry Brigade.
Second World War
Battle of France and service in the UK
On 8 August 1939, just a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, Morgan was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier and assumed command of the 1st Support Group of Major-General Roger Evans's 1st Armoured Division. When the 1st Support Group was shipped to France shortly after the German invasion of France in mid-May 1940 it had already been stripped of its two field artillery regiments and two infantry battalions. As a result, Morgan's command included only a force of Royal Engineers and a Territorial Army battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, which was in the process of converting to an anti-aircraft/anti-tank regiment and armed only with anti-tank guns. His group was, therefore, in no position to fulfil its normal role supporting the division's armoured brigades and so was sent to reinforce the 51st Infantry Division south of the River Somme. During a confused retreat most of the 1st Support Group was captured along with the 51st Division at Saint-Valery-en-Caux but the remainder, including Morgan, got away and were evacuated to England.The 1st Armoured Division was subsequently reformed, and became a mobile reserve in south eastern England. It was tasked with counter-attacking an invading German army, and Morgan's 1st Support Group was given two Canadian infantry battalions for this purpose. On 4 November 1940 Morgan was appointed Brigadier General Staff at II Corps, based in Norfolk. Morgan was not there long, however, as on 28 February 1941 he was promoted to the acting rank of major-general and succeeded Major-General Charles Allfrey in command of the Devon and Cornwall County Division, a static formation created for coastal defence, lacking artillery, engineers and divisional troops. The division was serving in South West England in Devon and Cornwall under Lieutenant-General Harold Franklyn's VIII Corps. He was with the division for eight months before handing over to Major-General Godwin Michelmore on 30 October and succeeding Major-General William Morgan in command of the 55th Infantry Division, a first-line TA formation serving in Gloucestershire in Southern Command. The division, which moved to North Yorkshire under Northern Command in mid-December, was placed on the Lower Establishment the following month, losing much of its artillery, engineers and divisional troops and receiving a low priority for modern equipment. On 28 February, a year after being made an acting major-general, Morgan's rank of major-general was made temporary.
He was not to remain with the division for long, however, as on 14 May Morgan handed over command of the 55th Division to Major-General Hugh Hibbert and was promoted to the acting rank of lieutenant general and took command of I Corps District from Lieutenant-General Henry Willcox, which had responsibility for the defence of Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire. In October of that year his headquarters became a mobile formation, was redesignated I Corps and placed under his American superior, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower. On 12 November Morgan's permanent rank was advanced from colonel to major-general. Morgan's I Corps headquarters was later designated Force 125 and was given command of Walter Clutterbuck's 1st and John Hawkesworth's 4th Divisions, and the task of dealing with a German thrust through Spain to Gibraltar.
This operation proved unnecessary, and Morgan's two divisions were sent to North Africa, while he was directed to plan the invasion of Sardinia. In time this was abandoned in favour of the Allied invasion of Sicily, which took place in July 1943. I Corps headquarters remained in the United Kingdom the whole time, located at 1 Cumberland near Marble Arch, with the headquarters mess in the Lyons Marble Arch Corner House. However, it gained considerable experience in operational planning. Morgan's rank of lieutenant-general was made temporary on 14 May 1943, and he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 2 June.