Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (7 page)

This document vividly reveals, first, that two months before D-Day there were still Allied officers in high commands who were deeply sceptical about the entire operation; and, second, the messianic conviction with which the airmen opposed their own participation. It is against the background of opinions such as these that the struggles between the ground and air force commanders in the summer of 1944 must be viewed. It is a tragic reflection of the extent to which strategic bombing doctrine had distorted the
thinking of so many senior air force officers in Britain and America that, on the very eve of OVERLORD, they could not grasp that this was the decisive operation of the war in the west, to which every other ambition must be subordinate.

After intense argument between London and Washington, confused by British political reluctance to surrender the independence of Bomber Command, Eisenhower had his way: direction of all the Allied air forces was placed in his hands for as long as the Chiefs of Staff deemed necessary. After a further dispute, aggravated by Churchill’s fears about the level of French civilian casualties, the air forces embarked upon the huge programme of transport bombing of French rail junctions and river crossings which was to play such a critical role in restricting the movement of German reinforcements after D-Day. Its scale was intensified by the need to attack targets relating to the entire length of the Channel coast, lest concentration westwards reveal the focus of Allied intentions. Its success was a tribute to the qualities and training of the Allied aircrew, whatever the opinions of their commanders. The cost – 12,000 French and Belgian lives – was substantially lower than Churchill had feared.

Yet if the documents quoted above reveal good reasons for the ground force commanders’ mistrust of the airmen, it is ironic that in the spring of 1944 Spaatz achieved one of the decisive victories of the war for the Allies, and embarked upon the course that was to lead him to a second. In fulfilment of POINTBLANK, his Fortresses and Liberators had for months been attacking Germany’s aircraft factories, at a cost which compelled the Americans to accept the need for long-range fighter escorts for their daylight operations. By one of the most extraordinary paradoxes of the war, the bombing of the factories achieved only limited impact upon German aircraft production; but the coming of the marvellous Mustang P-51 long-range fighter to the skies over Germany inflicted an irreversible defeat upon the Luftwaffe, unquestionably decisive for OVERLORD. In January 1944 the Germans lost 1,311 aircraft from all causes. This figure rose to 2,121 in February and 2,115 in
March. Even more disastrous than lost fighters, the Luftwaffe’s trained pilots were being killed far more quickly than they could be replaced, with the direction of the air force in the enfeebled hands of Goering. By March the Americans were consciously attacking targets with the purpose of forcing the Germans to defend them. By June, the Germans no longer possessed sufficient pilots and aircraft to mount more than token resistance to the Allied invasion of France.

In May, Spaatz began attacking Germany’s synthetic oil plants. The results of even a limited bombing programme, revealed after the war, were awe-inspiring. Employing only 11.6 per cent of his bomber effort in June, 17 per cent in July, 16.4 per cent in August, he brought about a fall in German oil production from 927,000 tons in March to 715,000 tons in May, and 472,000 tons in June. The Luftwaffe’s aviation spirit supply fell from 180,000 tons in April to 50,000 tons in June, and 10,000 tons in August. It seems perfectly possible that had the scale of the German fuel crisis been perceived by the allied chiefs of staff and the American airmen been encouraged to pursue their oil bombing campaign with vigour through the summer of 1944, Germany could have been defeated by the end of the year.

Yet it was Spaatz’s tragedy that, by the spring of 1944, his own credibility and that of the other bomber chiefs had fallen low in the eyes of the Allied high command – hardly surprising in the light of their past broken promises and wild declarations of strategic opinion. Claims of Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed had so often proved fantastic that even other leaders of the Allied air forces found it impossible to credit the extent of the Mustang’s victory. For that matter, Spaatz himself remained apprehensive about the Luftwaffe’s capabilities. Plans were laid for huge forces of fighters to cover the invasion, in expectation of a great battle for air supremacy over the beachhead. SHAEF estimates suggested that the Germans might still be capable of putting as many as 300 fighters and 200 bombers into the air over Normandy in a single operation. Leigh-Mallory feared that the Luftwaffe might employ new pathfinder techniques to mount night operations over the British south coast ports. Only on D-Day, when a mere 319 Luftwaffe sorties were flown, was the truth suspected; in the weeks that followed, as enemy air activity over Normandy remained negligible, it was confirmed. The critical air battle had been fought and won by the Americans over Germany weeks before the first Allied soldiers waded ashore.

In the months before the invasion, however, it was the level of mutual dissent between the Allied air chiefs which drove Tedder and Eisenhower to the brink of despair. Beyond the debate about the employment of the bombers, British and American airmen united in their hostility to Leigh-Mallory, the appointed Air Commander-in-Chief for OVERLORD. The bomber commanders flatly declined to accept their orders from him and would acknowledge only the mandate of Tedder. The fighter commanders also
made clear their dislike of and lack of respect for the Commander-in-Chief. The American Brereton, an officer of limited abilities commanding IXth Air Force, and the New Zealander ‘Mary’ Coningham, commanding the British 2nd Tactical Air Force, united in their antagonism to Leigh-Mallory, while General Elwood R. ‘Pete’ Quesada, commanding the close-support squadrons under Brereton, was a bewildered spectator of the wrangles: ‘I just didn’t know people at that level behaved like that. Nobody wanted to be under Leigh-Mallory, even the British.’
⁶

The burly Leigh-Mallory had achieved his eminence, and aroused considerable personal animosity, by intriguing successfully in the wake of the Battle of Britain to supplant its victors, Air Marshals Dowding and Park. He had directed Fighter Command – later curiously rechristened Air Defence of Great Britain – ever since, and retained this post while he acted as Air Commander-in-Chief for OVERLORD. His appointment was clearly an error of judgement by Portal, Chief of Air Staff. To his peers, he seemed gloomy and hesitant. Most of the Americans admired Tedder for his cool brain, incisive wit, and ability to rise above petty issues and work without reservation for the Allied cause. ‘Trivia were obnoxious to him,’ said one. ‘Though an airman, he was also a team player. He understood that war is organized confusion.’ But they were irked by Leigh-Mallory’s pessimism and indecision. ‘He didn’t seem to know what he wanted,’ said Quesada. ‘He couldn’t get along with people. He seemed more concerned with preserving his forces than with committing them.’
⁷
Brigadier James Gavin of the US 82nd Airborne returned from his division’s drop in Sicily to work on the plan for D-Day. ‘Now, I want you chaps to tell me how you do this airborne business,’ said Leigh-Mallory indulgently. He listened to them for a time, then said flatly: ‘I don’t think anybody can do that.’ The exasperated Gavin exploded: ‘We just got through doing it in Sicily!’
⁸
At a meeting of the American airmen on 24 March, General Vandenburg asked Spaatz where his personal loyalties were to lie in his role as deputy to Leigh-Mallory. Vandenburg recorded in his diary that: ‘General Spaatz directed that the
number one priority was to be the safeguarding of the interests of the American component and suggested that I make this clear to General Eisenhower and ask for his concurrence.’
⁹

At a time, therefore, when everywhere else within the Allied forces great and honourable efforts were being made to ensure that Anglo-American unity was a reality, the senior American airmen in Britain were conspiring – in a manner no more nor less dishonourable than that of some of their RAF counterparts – to defend the sectional interests of their own service. It remains an astonishing feature of the invasion that when it was launched the Allied air chiefs were still unwilling to accept Leigh-Mallory’s orders, still disputed their proper role and employment, had still devoted only minimal thought or effort to close ground support. Forward air control techniques which had been tried and proven in the desert were not introduced in Normandy until weeks after the landings. On D-Day itself, while the Allied tactical air forces made an important contribution, they lacked forward air controllers with the leading troops ashore, who might have eased the problems of the ground battle considerably. It has become an article of faith in the history of the Normandy campaign to pay tribute to Allied air power, which indeed was critical. Yet we shall see below how many weeks elapsed before the organization – not the technology or the skill of the pilots – reached the point at which aircraft could render closely co-ordinated support to ground troops.

In the spring of 1944, the air chiefs dedicated far too much attention to disputes about their own authority and independence, and not nearly enough to considering how best they could work in harmony with the armies beneath them. The post-OVERLORD report from Montgomery’s headquarters declared: ‘The most difficult single factor during the period of planning from the military point of view, was the delay in deciding and setting up the higher headquarters organization of the Allied air force. It is obvious that this delay was entirely an air force matter, and as such in no way the business of the military planners, but the effect was strongly
felt in army planning.’
¹⁰
To the dismay and near-despair of 21st Army Group, the D-Day Air Plan was finally settled only 36 hours before the landings took place.

Invaders

By the spring of 1944, all of southern England and much of the rest of the country had become a vast military encampment. Under the trees beside the roads, protected by corrugated iron, stood dump after dump of artillery ammunition, mines, engineering stores, pierced plank and wire. The soldiers themselves were awed by the tank and vehicle parks in the fields, where Shermans and jeeps, Dodge trucks and artillery pieces stood in ranks reaching to the horizon. Above all, there were the men – 20 American divisions, 14 British, three Canadian, one French, one Polish, and hundreds of thousands of special forces, corps troops, headquarters units, lines of communication personnel. They were packed into Nissen and Quonset huts, tents and requisitioned country houses from Cornwall to Kent and far northwards up the length of the country. Some were homesick, some excited, a few eager to find any means of escape from the terrifying venture in front of them. Most were impatient to end the months or years of training and to begin this thing upon which all their thoughts had been focused for so long.

One of Montgomery’s outstanding contributions before D-Day was his careful meshing of experienced veterans from Eighth Army with the keen, green formations that had been training and languishing for so long in England. Major-General G. P. B. ‘Pip’ Roberts found his new headquarters at 11th Armoured Division still operating the routines and mess life of the peacetime British army. Roberts, an old desert hand, rapidly relieved them of such
formalities, sacking his senior staff officer – a meticulous guardsman who affected a red light over his office door to indicate that he did not wish to be disturbed.

Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs, a flamethrowing Crocodile tank unit of 79th Armoured Division, had watched the Battle of Britain from his home in Kent as a schoolboy, and eagerly hastened to Sandhurst and into the armoured corps at the first opportunity. Thereafter, he and the other young officers of his unit found themselves condemned to months of routine soldiering on the South Downs under the command of ageing senior officers who knew nothing of war, but were expert in the disciplines of mess life. When Wilson, in a flush of enthusiasm for Russian achievements of the kind that was so common at the time, christened his tank ‘Stalingrad’, he was summarily ordered to unchristen it. But at the beginning of 1944, all the senior officers were abruptly removed and replaced by others from a quite different mould, who began training and exercising the regiment to the very limits of its endurance: ‘We suddenly knew that we were going to be put through the full Monty treatment.’
¹
For hours and days at a stretch, they shivered in their tanks on the hills through endless mock attacks and deployments. They did not resent this because they felt that they were learning, at last preparing in earnest for what they had to do. The dangers of taking into battle a tank towing a thinly-armoured trailer loaded with flamethrowing fuel did not greatly trouble them: ‘Any fears were overcome by our excitement at feeling that we were an elite.’
²