My Brief Dive Into the Mystery of Operation Susan

Common sense – not to mention a government secrets act – dictated that British government officials and their staffs should not keep journals or diaries in the late 1930s and early 1940s. If, as was generally accepted, Germany launched an attack on Great Britain, those diaries could guide the invaders to the leaders most worthy of their malign attention.

Fortunately for us, the proscription against diaries was widely ignored. King George VI, General Sir Edmund Ironside, Foreign Secretaries Anthony Eden and Lord Halifax, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Winston Churchill’s doctor (Lord Moran), and his assistant private secretary John Colville recorded their contemporaneous sketches of history during those fascinating years. (Even more fortunately, Germany never launched its planned naval and ground assault on Great Britain).

Significant excerpts from the diaries of John Colville were published in 1985 in a book titled The Fringes of Power. I’ve mentioned my admiration for Colville and his diaries so often (including here, here, and here) that it is practically a regular feature in my newsletters.

Colville’s observations from his daily interactions with Churchill have helped enrich the story that I’m writing. When I made my research pilgrimage to the Churchill Archives at the University of Cambridge, it was thrilling and humbling to work with the original handwritten copy of one of Colville’s diaries. (The diaries span 10 handwritten volumes) As permitted – and even encouraged – by the Archives’ protocols, I photographed a number of pages of Colville’s original writing.

In the Preface to The Fringes of Power, Colville shares that he “… eliminated a high proportion of the trivial entries which are of no general interest.” Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that not everything in Colville’s original diaries appears in the published version. I wondered if there were any discrepancies in the time period that most interests me – June and July 1940.

I took a fresh look at both the published and hand-written versions of Colville’s entries in the days around the British attacks, and had one of those aha moments when I discovered an intriguing discrepancy,

The core of the story that I’m writing is the Royal Navy's attack on the French Fleet at Mers-El-Kebir on July 3, 1940. In The Fringes of Power, Colville’s entry for July 2, the eve of the attack, begins:

(Oran and Mers-el-Kebir are both ports on the coast of Algeria, located seven miles apart. Although the British action was focused on Mers-el-Kebir, a frustrating majority of historical sources – even official British sources - use a generic reference to Oran).

When I looked at my photograph of Colville's original hand-written entry for that day, I noticed an additional sentence that did not appear in the published version

“There is also talk of a mysterious operation called “Susan”, to take place after July 15th; but I cannot discover what it is yet.”

Of course, I now had to find out what happened to Operation Susan. I had never heard of this campaign before ... or at least it had never registered with me. As it turned out, there was not much to find. Susan was the name that was assigned to an attempt to establish a British stronghold at Casablanca early in the war. The operation was quickly abandoned on the basis that it was premature and Britain lacked the resources to carry it out at the time. Colville had every reason to consider this a trivial entry.

My short-lived Operation Susan quest was not completely in vain, however. Any day I’m reminded of another facet of Winston Churchill’s personality – and get to share a good story with others – is a good day.

It might not surprise you that Churchill – who took so much care with the English language - took time to express his thoughts on appropriate code names for British operations, particularly “Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives.”

In an August 1943 letter to General Pug Ismay, Churchill shared his thoughts on acceptable code names. Names that were “boastful,” “overconfident” or “frivolous” were to be avoided. It was essential to avoid using names that would “enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo"."

Churchill ended his letter to General Ismay, his chief military assistant: “An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself in small as in great matters.”

Thanks for reading.
Bill

PS. I’m not the person for this job, but I would think it would be a fascinating research exercise for someone to search for additional differences between the original and published versions of John Colville’s diaries. What Colville considered "trivial entries" when he published his diaries 36 years ago, might have fresh relevance today