Operation Armature

Has anybody heard of this operation and know what it was/was planned to be (in very broad terms)?

WO 169-24877 mentions it twice but provides no details except an envisaged date (21 March 1941) and that it was to involve the Glen ships (Glengyle, Glenroy, Glenearn).

It seems to have been envisaged as a prelude to Operation Cordite, the proposed landing on Rhodes, which was going to happen in mid-April 1941.

The Glen ships would've been in the Great Bitter Lake area having arrived with Layforce Commandos.

My assumption is that Armature was/would have been a landing on a Dodecanese island.

I know there was an Operation Blunt landing envisaged. That was going to be at least a landing on Kasos, to land guns to protect landings on the nearby island Scarpanto/Karpathos.

I had imagined that the Scarpanto/Karpathos landings would also fall within the scope of Operation Blunt too, but maybe it was these landings that were Operation Armature, with only the Kasos ones part of Blunt.

The alphabetical nature of A-Armature and B-Blunt also tempts me to think these were related, too, although that may have been just in terms of planning rather than geographical proximity (hence C-Codite).

Discovery doesn't throw up any hits in the National Archives.

Anyone heard anything about Armature?

 

(Is it "bad form" to answer your own question?)

Dipped into PREM 3/124/2 today during a visit to the National Archives and it looks like I wasn't alone in being unsure; Winston Churchill had to ask for clarification, too:

The significance of "Mandible" he already knows. The next named word (beginning with "B") [Operation Blunt] is Caso [Kasos]. The second word (beginning with "A") [Operation Abstention] is Casteloritzo [Kastellorizo]. The third (also beginning with "A") [I now even more strongly suspect Operation Armature] is Scarpanto [Karpathos] and the fourth (beginning with "C") [Operation Cordite] is Rhodes.​

 

I was going to suggest one of the operations along the Red Sea coast into Eritrea or alternatively British Somaliland as one of those was Operation ABAFT, I think. More rowing boat than Glen ship though!

Regards

Tom

 

Armature isn't mentioned in Clarkes 'Cordite Cover Plan' although an invasion of Scarpanto is as part of the deception for Cordite itself.
There were a lot of deception plans in operation or proposed in early 1941.
Appearance was to use the fictitious SAS Brigade to help regain British Somaliland.
Cascade was the creation of the above Brigade.
Byng Boys and Dolphin were for observation of Dodecanese.
Workshop was cancelled with Cordite taking its place.
Abstention and Pitch (I) went ahead.
Blunt went ahead.
There was the Spring Offensive Plan which was an advance by land by the Australians supported by a sea landing at I think Benghazi, tanks were also involved, Rommel scuppered that.
Influx and Whipcord were due to follow Crusader.
Acrobat, Gymnast and Super Gymnast all basically the same operation was for North Africa.
What then of Armature? It seems like Anti-Rommel it was 'here's an idea' a bit like Roman Holiday that never got any further than that. What Armatures idea was I don't know apart from it does stem from Mandibles.

Anti-Rommel

 

I forgot to come back and post the page that I ended up writing: I've taken a slight punt that Armature was the original planned landing on Scarpanto - it does seem to "fit" from the sources I've seen:

Kasos and Scarpanto

Also a bit about how Clarke adopted "landings on Scarpanto" as his later Cordite/Rhodes cover plan - in the meantime the plan for Rhodes had "flipped" from landings in the south to landings in the north, so Clarke was concerned with drawing Italian forces to the south:

Clarke and Rhodes