As soon as it was decided that the 1st Division was to provide the landing party, conferences took place between Admiral Bacon and General Sir Henry Rawlinson (now Lord Rawlinson), and I took the opportunity of a visit paid by Sir H.Rawlinson to London to confer with him myself.

Subsequently a conference took place at the War Office at which Sir Douglas Haig was present.
There was entire unanimity between the Navy and Army over the proposed operation, and we greatly admired the manner in which the Sister Service took up the work of preparing for the landing.

Secrecy was absolutely vital to success, as the whole scheme was dependent on the operation being a surprise, more particularly in the selection of the landing place.

Admiral Bacon describes in his book the methods by which secrecy was preserved.

As time passed, and the atrocious weather in Flanders during the summer of 1917 prevented the advance of our Army, it became more and more difficult to preserve secrecy; but although the fact that some operation of the kind was in preparation gradually became known to an increasing number of people, it is safe to say that the enemy never realized until long after the operation had been abandoned its real nature or the locality selected for it.
Some officers with experience of the difficulties encountered during the landings at Gallipoli expressed doubts of the practicability of the operation in the face of the heavy fire from large guns and from machine guns which might be expected, but the circumstances were so different from those at Gallipoli that neither Sir Reginald Bacon nor I shared these doubts.