Asylum Annals
COMBINED Operations HQ was a military laboratory, an inter-service training establish- ment and, in the words of Earl Mountbatten, `the only lunatic asylum in the world run by its in- mates.' It defined the kind of war we had to fight after 1940, learned valuable lessons in raids about how to fight it and devised the tools with which to fight it. All its accumulated experience and skill, together with its inventions (landing craft, odd kinds of tank and the Mulberry har- bour), poured into the cross-Channel invasion (if 1944. But, as Brigadier Fergusson's vigorous account makes clear, the men in COHQ had many anxious hours before they came to their finest one. Only four years before, their em- bryonic HQ had been regarded by the orthoddx as a maddening and suspicious knot in established chains of command. That dynamic old sea-dog Sir Roger Keyes had taken over a Directorate that was under the Admiralty's wing and built it up into what he often seemed to regard as a war- winning alternative to, rather than an obedient servant of, the Chiefs of Staff organisation. He treated the heads of the three Services, writes Brigadier Fergusson, `as a trio of comparatively junior officers.'
Under Mountbatten, the aggressive spirit of Keyes was augmented by a proper attention to planning. The `lunatics' (scientists like Bernal and Zuckerman, amateurs of genius like Pyke) moved in. Each limited operation (such as the ill-fated Dieppe raid) taught lessons for the next. Each service acquired battle experience from units engaged in such operations. The history of combined operations is difficult to disentangle from the history of the war. Brigadier Fergus- son, however, keeps the main strand of his story clear of tempting digressions, describing raids and battles in terms of what they taught. COHQ emerges from the story as an organisation is characteristically British as it was militarily in- valuable. Neither allies nor enemies could ever understand how the `asylum' worked at all.
RAYMOND FLErcHFR
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