During October 1943, Churchill expressed his fears to the British chiefs of staff that a landing in north-west Europe might give Hitler ‘the opportunity to concentrate, by reason of his excellent roads and rail communications, an overwhelming force against us and to inflict on us a military disaster greater than that of Dunkirk’. The chiefs agreed that as an alternative to Operation Overlord Britain should strengthen her forces in Italy, capture islands in the Aegean and advance into the Balkans. But in November, when the ‘Big Three’ (Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill), met in Teheran, Stalin insisted that Overlord begin in May and Churchill was obliged to agree.
However, in January 1944 Churchill persuaded the Americans to join British forces in Operation Shingle, under the command of an unusually-incompetent American general, John Lucas. Shingle was an amphibious landing at Anzio, on the Italian west coast, about thirty-five miles south of Rome, intended to get behind the formidable German ‘Gustav Line’. It was the last Anglo-American operation Churchill inspired and a costly failure. Shingle, wrote the British official historian, ‘was given an extraordinary degree of importance. It was fathered by wishful strategical thinking and was not made the subject of a searching tactical analysis.’
Slessor offered no criticism of Churchill’s part in the ‘unsound conception’, although the great man himself admitted that ‘Anzio was my worst moment of the war. I had most to do with it. I didn’t want two Suvla Bays in one lifetime.’ That is exactly what he got. ‘Churchill’s vision of a cheap, quick victory at Anzio was wishful thinking and counter to everything he had been told regarding the practicality of a linkup between the Shingle force and the 5th Army.’ But the entire Allied high command – Eisenhower, Brooke, and Alexander in particular – shares in the blame for allowing a loquacious politician to impose his mistaken notions.
The Germans were defending the town of Cassino and Monastery Hill overlooking it as a vital part of their Gustav Line, barring Clark’s army from advancing on Rome and also preventing relief of the Allied forces at Anzio. Attempts to break through in January and February failed and the ground force commanders, Freyberg in particular, demanded the destruction of a famous Benedictine abbey on top of the hill, believing that the Germans were using it as an observation point. They weren’t, until Allied bombers wrecked it on 15 February and the ruins offered them excellent defensive positions.
Slessor was delighted at the time, but later claimed that he had opposed ‘a shocking miscalculation’ and the historian Carlo D’Este found that most of the bombs had missed the abbey and it was largely destroyed by artillery fire. The destruction ‘was the crowning example of the failure of Allied strategy in Italy in 1944’. It brought no military advantage and the only people killed were Italians. The lesson, not followed three months later in Normandy, ‘was that heavies were not suitable for close support of ground action’: they were far too inaccurate, and the bombing was not immediately followed up by ground forces.
Slessor and Lauris Norstad (MAAF’s Director of Operations) gave attention to systematic attacks on communications, especially bridges, using Martin Marauder B-26 medium bombers and fighter-bombers in Operation Strangle. Between 15 March and 11 May (when Operation Diadem, the ground attack on Rome began), MAAF was constantly on the attack. Casualties on both sides were heavy. Clark was set on reaching Rome and allowed strong German forces to retreat in good order and fight on for another ten months.
Although the Allies were not driven away from Anzio, they suffered heavy casualties: 40,000 dead, wounded or captured, and perhaps as many again sick or deserted out of a force of 110,000. Carlo D’Este described it as ‘one of the bloodiest campaigns of World War II’, and one man who fought there prayed: ‘God help us. You come yourself. Don’t send Jesus, this is no place for children.’
Anzio, in fact, leaves as big a blot as Gallipoli and the Dodecanese campaign on Churchill’s reputation. He fulfilled ‘a lifelong fantasy’, thought D’Este, by playing the part of a commanding general. It never occurred to him that he lacked the skills needed for such a part.
‘The planning was a masterpiece of incompetence’, wrote Shelford Bidwell, made worse by its commanders: Mark Clark, ‘avid for glory as the liberator of Rome’, and Harold Alexander, a Churchill favourite who was, wrote Michael Howard, ‘charming, personally courageous, but ineffectual; like Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli, a gallant gentleman, far out of his depth’.
Years later, Slessor told Auchinleck: ‘I became convinced, as a result of serving alongside [Alexander] for a year in Italy, that he is quite the stupidest man who has ever commanded anything more than a division... he owes his position entirely to Churchill’s occasional gross misjudgement of men.’
The hope was that victory over strong German forces in Italy would permit an advance through Austria into Germany as an alternative to landings in Normandy. By March, however, it was clear that Rome and all of Italy north of the capital would remain in German hands for months to come. Operation Strangle, in April 1944, revealed again to Slessor (and other bomber enthusiasts) that German soldiers remained effective despite Allied air superiority: bad weather, inaccurate target-finding and reluctance among some Allied soldiers to engage closely helped them.
Both Slessor and American bomber enthusiasts found it difficult to understand that ground forces could fight effectively even when the Allies controlled the air. Slessor consoled himself, in writing to Portal, with the opinion that ‘the Hun is undoubtedly the world’s finest ground soldier’. Men who fought against either Japanese or Soviet soldiers, including historians who (unlike Slessor) have studied their efforts may not agree.
The Anzio disaster weakened further the confidence of Churchill and Brooke in the proposed Normandy landings, but mercifully the commanders responsible proved to be far more competent than Alexander, Clark, Freyberg or Lucas in Italy.
In October 1943 Eisenhower expected George Marshall to be appointed Supreme Allied Commander for Overlord. He told his chief of staff (Walter Bedell Smith) who was about to visit Washington to discuss air matters with Marshall that he would need an airman with a good understanding of both strategic bombing and the problems of supporting ground forces. Marshall should therefore insist on Tedder for this appointment. It will be a ‘bitter blow for me to lose him’, Eisenhower continued, but Tedder was an expert who also had the full confidence of Portal and would therefore be able to use, ‘during critical junctions of the land campaign, every last airplane in England’.
By the end of 1943, Tedder’s support for American views on Italy as a strategic bomber base and his resistance to the Aegean adventure had drawn him away from Portal and towards all his American colleagues, not only Eisenhower. His opinion of Spaatz was improving and he welcomed the part he played in creating the 15th Air Force, which attacked German targets from its Italian bases. However, Tedder believed that Spaatz – just like Harris – exaggerated the bomber’s capacity for destruction. Spaatz never wavered from his belief that bombers alone could win the war and there was no need to land men on the shores of occupied Europe.
This opinion was seconded by Harris in even more extravagant language: ‘To divert Bomber Command from its true function,’ he declared, ‘would lead directly to disaster.’ In order to win a measure of co-operation from such narrowly-focused men, Tedder would need all those qualities that Zuckerman saw in him of ‘patience, tact, cunning and political sense’, together with Eisenhower’s backing, who trusted him.
Eisenhower learned on 6 December 1943 that he, not Marshall, would command Overlord. Tedder was to be ‘my chief airman’ with Coningham co-ordinating the tactical air forces and Spaatz commanding the bombers. Tedder wrote to his daughter on the 15th, telling her that he had seen a lot of Smuts at recent meetings. ‘One feels he is in a different class from Winston, Roosevelt, Uncle Joe [Stalin] etc., he’s a bigger man all round; just as good and astute a politician, just as good a leader of men, a better judge of strategy, and a more far-seeing statesman.’
A comparison between Churchill and Smuts was very much in Tedder’s mind at that time. Churchill had asked him to place fifteen fighter squadrons at Turkish disposal between mid-February and the end of March 1944. Tedder reminded him, not for the first time, that his resources did not allow such a dispersion, least of all for no good military reason. He sent this signal with a fervent prayer – answered, for once – that Churchill might never again try to involve him with Turkey.
Churchill had arrived in Tunis on 11 December and remained there, suffering from pneumonia and a heart attack until the 27th. Tedder and his second wife Marie (usually known as ‘Toppy’) dined with him on the 14th and Toppy told her mother that ‘a lot of the fire had gone out of his eyes, this I suppose due to dope... He does look ill, as if the engine is running down’. She wrote again on the 18th to say that Clementine Churchill had arrived: ‘which made all the difference to the old devil! We are lunching there today. I have been keeping him supplied with invalid food – which he adores – and dug up a supply of thirty-five-year-old brandy!’
On that day Churchill formally proposed Tedder to Roosevelt as deputy Supreme Allied Commander, ‘on account of the great part the air will play in this operation [Overlord], and this is most agreeable to Eisenhower’. Montgomery was proposed as ground commander, despite Eisenhower’s preference for Alexander, because, said Churchill, ‘Montgomery is a public hero and will give confidence among our people, not unshared by yours’. This may have been true for British ground forces, but would become very much less so for American ground forces during the rest of the European war. Spaatz also returned to England, taking with him James H. Doolittle as head of American bombers in place of Ira Eaker, who went – most unwillingly – to Italy as Tedder’s successor. Harris would remain in command of British bombers. Slessor became Eaker’s deputy, Sholto Douglas returned to England as head of Coastal Command and was succeeded in Cairo by Keith Park.
Eisenhower repeated his preference for Tedder and Spaatz as his principal airmen for the proposed liberation of occupied Europe in a letter to Marshall written on Christmas Day, 1943.
‘I am anxious to have there a few senior individuals who are experienced in the air support of ground troops. The technique is one that is not (repeat not) widely understood and it takes men of some vision and broad understanding to do the job right. Otherwise, a commander is forever fighting with those air officers who, regardless of the ground situation, want to send big bombers on missions that have nothing to do with the critical effort.’
Tedder played a significant supporting role to Eisenhower by insisting on stressing intelligence for all decisions of the Supreme Command. Like Eisenhower, recalled Kenneth Strong, ‘he invariably turned to his intelligence advisers for facts about the enemy’.
‘Mary’ Coningham, appointed to command a tactical air force in the Overlord operation, wrote to Tedder on 30 December. He and Alexander had flown that morning to Montgomery’s headquarters at Vasto on the Adriatic coast, some fifteen miles south of the Gustav Line to bid him farewell. ‘I mentioned your appointment, but he brushed it aside and said that you were merely the air adviser to the Supreme Commander. The cheek of the blighter! He then told me that he considered that my proposed appointment to tactical was wrong.’
By Montgomery's standards these insults were mild, bearing in mind his genius for causing lasting offence and Coningham reminded Tedder – who needed no reminding – that Montgomery believed himself invincible and would attempt to command all American as well as British armies.
Walter Bedell Smith wrote to Eisenhower from London on 30 December. ‘We all believe that Tedder should be the real air commander and your adviser in air matters’, but an officer by the name of ‘Mallory’ was claiming that position. ‘Mallory’ was Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. By December 1943 he had spent six years in Fighter Command, five as a group commander and one as its head. His professional judgement during those years has often been criticised by combat pilots, other commanders and historians. Nevertheless, backed by Portal and therefore by Sinclair, he had been confirmed in November by the combined chiefs of staff as head of the proposed Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) to support Overlord; promotion to air chief marshal followed in January 1944.
To paraphrase what his brother George (who had not added ‘Leigh’ to his name) said about Mount Everest, Leigh-Mallory was appointed because he was there. The head of Fighter Command could hardly be overlooked for a senior place in a massive combined services operation launched from southern England, but months of ill-will and confusion would have been avoided if Portal had made it clear to Leigh-Mallory, as he should have done, that he was subordinate to Tedder and Coningham. When British and American air commanders assembled in London during January, they were unwilling to accept Leigh-Mallory into their close-knit team even before they discovered that he was unimpressive: personally and professionally.
In January 1944 there was a strong belief in Whitehall and among many Britons, thanks to fervently patriotic reporting by the BBC and in their newspapers, that Eisenhower was merely a figurehead for an operation to be conducted by Montgomery, a British hero since the battle of El Alamein. As Eisenhower confided to his diary on 7 February, he was tired of being regarded as a friendly front for British generals who made all the important decisions. ‘The truth,’ he wrote, ‘is that the bold British commanders in the Mediterranean were Sir Andrew Cunningham and Tedder’, not Montgomery and still less Alexander, much as Eisenhower admired the latter. Backed by Marshall and Roosevelt, Eisenhower had made all the critical decisions in 1943 and would do so, even more confidently, in 1944 and 1945. In air matters, they would be the ones Tedder wanted.
After Germany’s defeat, Spaatz was asked by an American historian about the air organisation. He replied that he had wanted the same organisation as had worked so well, after trial and error, in the Mediterranean. Eisenhower, Tedder and Spaatz himself ‘kept in such close touch’ from 1944 onwards that the system was made to work well enough, but he hated to think what would have happened if any one of the three had been struck down.
Portal ought to have remembered what Anglo-American tactical air forces had achieved in the Mediterranean under commanders well versed both in co-operation with each other and with ground forces, operating a wide variety of aircraft: fighters, fighter-bombers and transports. Leigh-Mallory was experienced only in handling British fighter operations across the Channel, revealing no particular merit in selecting targets or disrupting German control of France and Belgium.
Harris and Spaatz (aided by Doolittle) commanded British night and American day bombers and were to continue with Operation Pointblank, the Anglo-American air offensive against German targets. Coningham and Brereton were the obvious choices for command of tactical air forces and there was simply no place for Leigh-Mallory at the top level, except in the minds of Portal and Sinclair. ‘In other words,’ said Spaatz, ‘it was a lousy organisation.’
Churchill raised with Sinclair and the three British chiefs of staff, on 6 January, the ‘anxiety’ expressed to him by Eisenhower and Bedell Smith about the air organisation for Overlord. ‘They disliked the powers granted to Leigh-Mallory, who has, apparently, let it be known that he intends to be a real C-in-C in the air’, but Tedder, thought Churchill, ‘with his unique experience and close relation as deputy to the Supreme Commander, ought to be, in fact, and form the complete master of all the air operations’.
However, Sinclair – ever ready to meddle on behalf of his favourites – wanted a more prominent role for Leigh-Mallory. He suggested to Churchill on 7 January that Coningham and Brereton be placed under his ‘active command’; so too should all airborne forces, a photo-reconnaissance wing and, not least, all heavy bombers assigned by the combined chiefs to Overlord. Tedder, in Sinclair’s opinion and that of the British chiefs, should be politely kicked upstairs to make room for Leigh-Mallory.
‘There is a fundamental difference,’ the chiefs pontificated on 8 January, ‘between command arrangements in the Mediterranean and those in the United Kingdom.’ In the Mediterranean, Tedder controlled all air forces, but in Britain that position was held by Portal with Harris and Leigh-Mallory under him. Tedder was asked for by the Americans ‘not as a substitute for Leigh-Mallory but as a deputy to Eisenhower’, the mouth through which the Supreme Commander speaks, the ear through which he listens and no longer a mere airman. As for Eisenhower, he was ‘in effect, a task force commander with certain forces allotted to him for re-entry onto the Continent and the subsequent invasion of Germany’.
These foolish words emanated from Brooke, head of the British Army. Known (behind his back) as ‘Colonel Shrapnel’, he had found that blunt opinions, rudely expressed, but based on professional knowledge of the army far beyond that of most officers, won arguments.
Montgomery was another totally committed army man, even curter. Both believed that British soldiers would lead the way to victory over German soldiers and that the other services, British or American, especially in the air, were no more than useful allies. The unwavering confidence of Brooke and Montgomery in their own opinions and their belief in the superiority of British to American soldiers lie at the heart of all the problems faced by Eisenhower, Tedder and their colleagues during the rest of the European war. Canadians were also undervalued.
Brooke and Montgomery did their best to ignore the fact that American forces far outnumbered those of Britain the longer the war lasted, and that the Americans had more and better weapons, medical facilities and ‘comfort zones’ behind the fighting lines. Nor did they willingly accept the fact that the Soviet Union was largely responsible for the defeat of Germany.
Eisenhower decided to form his headquarters as far as possible from the differing distractions of Whitehall and the West End. Leigh-Mallory expected him to move to his own headquarters at Bentley Priory in north-west London, where communications were excellent. But Bedell Smith was aware that the Mediterranean team – all of whom had sand in their boots – would be swamped there by British officers who had none. He therefore set up shop for Eisenhower some fifteen miles south of Bentley Priory, at ‘Widewing’ in Bushy Park, near Kingston-on-Thames. Leigh-Mallory was furious, but helplessly so, as he would so often be during the coming months.
Tedder and Spaatz had lunch together on 22 January and agreed that a set-up similar to that in the Mediterranean should be created, ‘presided over by Tedder’, and include representatives from both strategic and tactical air forces. They confirmed their agreement on the 24th: ‘operations must be conducted the same as in the Mediterranean area, no matter what type of organisation was directed by topside.’ So much for the British chiefs of staff and Sinclair.
Tedder told Portal on 22 February that the air organisation was still shaky. ‘Spaatz has made it abundantly clear that he will not accept orders, or even co-ordination, from Leigh-Mallory’, and Harris’s representatives were concerned only to adjust their bombing statistics to demonstrate that ‘they are quite unequipped and untrained to do anything except mass fire-raising on very large targets’. Both could be brought to heel, but it had to be both.
One of the main lessons of the Mediterranean campaign, Tedder reminded Portal, was the need for unified control of air forces. If Churchill and the British chiefs concocted a formula to exempt Harris from Eisenhower’s control, ‘very serious issues will arise’. Eisenhower had a long talk with Churchill late on 28 February and summarised their conclusions for Tedder next morning. Eisenhower was determined to have the final say, through Tedder, about all air operations during Overlord. He therefore warned Churchill that unless he got full co-operation from the British, he would ‘simply have to go home’. Churchill had no answer to such blunt words.
Despite his postwar protestations, Churchill always had doubts about Overlord. He never got over his ‘enthusiasm for dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, sallies more appropriate – as officers who worked with him often remarked – to a Victorian cavalry subaltern than to the direction of a vast industrial war effort’, wrote Max Hastings. War, like life, was for Churchill, exhilarating, even fun. During the early months of 1944, he still wanted to keep Italy, the Greek islands, the Balkans and Turkey in the forefront of Anglo-American ambitions. As alternatives, he hankered for an assault on Norway or Bordeaux, even Sumatra (a rare expression of interest in the war against Japan): anything, in other words, appealed more strongly than a direct engagement across the Channel.
As Liddell Hart wrote in 1960, Churchill and Brooke were ‘half-hearted about Britain’s promised commitment to the invasion of Normandy’; they were only whole-hearted about campaigns in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, where they could evade those German armies not already engaging the forces of the Soviet Union.
The Americans, however, like the Russians, had had more than enough of what Hastings described as Churchill’s ‘butterfly strategy-making’, ardently seconded by Brooke, who had ‘a sublime, and exaggerated, conceit about his own strategic wisdom’. Faced with the inevitable however, Churchill rightly recognised that he must back Eisenhower and his chosen deputy. Tedder was ‘the aviation lobe’ of Eisenhower’s brain, Churchill told the British chiefs on 29 February, and must be allowed ‘to use all air forces permanently or temporarily assigned to Overlord’ as he thinks best.
Bomber Command could not be entirely handed over to Eisenhower – because of the demands of Pointblank – but Overlord, said Churchill, ‘must be the chief issue of all concerned and great risks must be run in every other sphere and theatre in order that nothing should be withheld which could contribute to its success’. Portal accepted, on 2 March, that Tedder was to be regarded as an operational commander as well as Eisenhower’s deputy. After a long meeting of the chiefs next day, Brooke noted that Tedder ‘is now to assume more direct command’, which could only be done ‘by chucking out Leigh-Mallory’, who should never have been chucked in.
Tedder thought Leigh-Mallory could be found a vacancy in the Far East, but this suggestion – which would have spared him and many others much anguish – was not followed through. The strategic air forces were to be placed at Eisenhower’s disposal when he asked for them. They would remain under the command of Harris and Spaatz, but receive their ‘general directives’ from Tedder. This ‘passage of responsibility’ was to come on 14 April. According to the British historians of the strategic offensive, this was ‘an historic event by which a Supreme Air Command was at last created’, even if only for a time.
By the end of 1942, Coastal Command had devised ‘strike wings’ to destroy or at least disrupt shipping to and from German ports and, above all, to win control of the Channel. These wings became a necessary part of Overlord’s success, as Christina Goulter wrote. The excellent twin-engined Bristol Beaufighter used its powerful cannon and rocket armament against German shipping and ports; Beaufighters also attacked U-boats with torpedoes. These operations, from 1943 until the end of the war, were greatly assisted by reliable intelligence information.
The strike wings are of ‘historical importance’, recorded Stephen Roskill, because they represented, from April 1943, a joint enterprise by Bomber, Fighter and Coastal Commands. How many of the disasters during more than three years of war could have been avoided, he wrote, if inter-service co-operation had been a priority for the RAF and Royal Navy in 1939? More than 500 vessels were sunk or damaged, Germany’s steel production fell by ten per cent in the last year of the war and substantial resources – including 150,000 men – were tied up in resisting strike wing attacks. Were they in blunt terms ‘cost effective?’
Between April 1940 and May 1945, mines dropped by Bomber and Coastal Command during nearly 20,000 sorties, at a cost of 450 aircraft, sank more than 630 vessels in the Channel and the North Sea; direct attacks during nearly 38,000 sorties, at a cost of more than 850 aircraft, sank 366 vessels. These are appallingly heavy casualties on both sides: an average of twenty-two aircraft and seventeen ships down in every month for five years.
This aspect of the war at sea was no mere sideshow in comparison with the well-known campaign against the U-boat, but it was scarcely mentioned by Churchill in his memoirs. For all that he proclaimed a ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, long after it was actually in full swing, he remained far more concerned to increase the strength of Bomber Command and regarded Coastal Command as merely a defensive necessity. Yet when the war was won, Bomber Command was lightly passed over in those memoirs.
There were bitter disputes over how best to use Allied air superiority in 1944 and 1945. Advised by Zuckerman, Tedder proposed what became known as the ‘transportation plan’: a systematic attack on the numerous marshalling yards and railways serving the invasion area. It should go on for as long as possible, to exhaust repair squads and force them to use up essential materials. The Germans must not be allowed to move reinforcements of heavy weapons (tanks, artillery) or ammunition, fuel, food and water quickly and easily to the landing areas. The plan was so arranged that Calais, rather than Normandy, seemed to be its focus.
Apart from destruction, Tedder hoped to canalise surviving traffic and therefore make it more vulnerable to subsequent attack. Later studies of attacks in Sicily and Italy showed that bridges were not as difficult to hit, if low-flying medium bombers were used, as Tedder and Zuckerman thought. Although the plan was sensible, it was hotly opposed by alleged experts, British and American: many of them academics, over-stimulated by their first brush with the real world, especially in wartime. Although ignorant of the actual workings of transport systems (to say nothing of military operations), they persuaded themselves that the railway system in Western Europe had large reserves of spare capacity and what really mattered was destruction of oil sources.
Spaatz was foremost in advocating an ‘oil plan’, overlooking the difficulty lightly-loaded day bombers, operating far from their bases in England or Italy, would face in destroying widely dispersed, well-defended oil targets. For no good reason – as ample aerial photographs revealed only too clearly – he believed that American bombers hit targets with ‘precision’ and had advised Arnold on 10 January to speak in press handouts of ‘overcast bombing technique’ or ‘bombing with navigational devices over cloud’; at all costs he was to avoid the term ‘blind bombing’ which was in fact what day bombers usually did. Ramsay Potts, an American bomber pilot who ended the European war as Director of Bombing Operations, admitted that the Allies did ‘area bombing of precision targets’.
As Sebastian Cox wrote, the Americans described all their attacks as ‘precision’ attacks, when in fact they were nothing of the sort: ‘more than seventy per cent of the bomb tonnage dropped by the 8th Air Force between September 1944 and April 1945 was dropped non-visually, i.e. blind-bombing.’ Max Lambert commented that ‘the Americans dropped their bombs when the formation leader did, rather than individually. It follows that if the formation covered ten acres, you would get a ten-acre bomb plot, so the idea of each bomb going “into the pickle barrel” is plainly nonsense.’
They faced long journeys out and home, dependent on imperfect navigation in weather that was often bad and always unreliable whatever forecasters had predicted. These handicaps remained, even when at heavy cost the enemy day-fighter force had been gravely weakened late in February during what Americans called ‘Big Week’: a hard-earned triumph that cost 2,600 aircrew killed, wounded or captured. But experienced German flak gunners remained a threat until the last days of the war.
Harris’s opposition to Tedder’s plan had been partly based on his belief – again for no good reason – that his crews were unable, even in 1944, to find and hit any target smaller than a city centre. But he always obeyed specific orders and respected Tedder. British night bombers were far more destructive than American day bombers (because they carried heavier loads) and were becoming, as aerial photographs revealed, more accurate as well. The transportation plan could not have succeeded without the co-operation of Harris, who privately realised that the breathing space thereby given to German targets was also a rest for Bomber Command, which had taken a terrible hammering during the winter of 1943-1944.
The transportation plan, as Spaatz admitted to Arnold on 14 June, ‘opened the door for the invasion’. The Germans were unable to move reinforcements towards Normandy quickly enough or on a sufficiently large scale to prevent the Allies from securing a bridgehead. Since Eisenhower the soldier had learned his wartime trade in North Africa, he knew what he owed to airmen. His son John, a lieutenant in the US Army, said to him on 24 June: ‘You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy.’ Eisenhower replied: ‘If I didn’t have air supremacy, I wouldn’t be here.’
As well as communications, attacks on electric power plants – where they could be located – were obviously profitable. After 1945, several writers in Britain and the United States argued that a more sustained effort should have been made to identify and target these plants.
Portal summoned everyone who mattered to a meeting on 25 March, where Spaatz admitted that his oil plan could have no immediate effect on helping soldiers to get established in Normandy. That was the decisive point, as Eisenhower ruled. When Portal asked him if the plan would not handicap Allied movement after the bridgehead was secure, he got a dusty answer: that was not a matter of immediate concern and in any case the Germans could be expected to smash everything in reach as they retreated. Spaatz was satisfied because British night bombers would be doing most of the work while his bombers continued to aim at oil targets in daylight.
After the meeting on 25 March, Portal informed Churchill that ‘very heavy’ civilian casualties would be ‘unavoidable’. Churchill was rarely at his best by 1944 and refused to recognise the obvious consequences of any plan to liberate occupied Europe. Members of his War Cabinet, who knew little about military realities, expressed alarm and asked for the matter to be reconsidered. Cherwell was invited to do this and in his usual easy way asserted that as many as 40,000 civilians might be killed, a further 120,000 would be seriously injured and the plan would fail anyway. Churchill, accustomed to accepting Cherwell’s pronouncements on practical matters as gospel, worked himself into a frenzy. On several occasions in April – while raids were actually being carried out – he had the arguments endlessly rehearsed at his ‘midnight follies’, as Zuckerman described them.
Although it quickly became clear that Cherwell had been mistaken and that French and Belgian civilians recognised that their communication networks (road and canal, as well as railways) were essential targets and had been warned to avoid them, Churchill blathered on endlessly. ‘There is no better plan’, Tedder assured him. ‘I’ll show you a better plan’, came the confident reply. Zuckerman saw Tedder’s knuckles whiten as he gripped the edge of the table, but he refused to quarrel. ‘You are piling up an awful lot of hatred’, Churchill snapped at him on 3 May. ‘You will smear the good name of the Royal Air Force across the world.’
He claimed not to understand, let alone accept, arguments in favour of the plan. Fuel and arms dumps and troop barracks, were better targets he said, ignoring the fact that such targets were usually found in or near towns, put civilians at greater risk (because specific warnings could not be given) and were of marginal value. He was well aware by 1944 that the Germans did not spare civilians anywhere in occupied Europe who showed even signs of resistance.
How tired he looked, recalled Tedder: ‘the rush of events since 1940 had undermined even his strength’, he had been very ill as recently as December 1943 and every senior commander who had to deal with him from then until the end of the war was familiar with his tedious, endless, alcohol-fuelled ramblings, usually far into the night.
Whatever his merits as a national symbol, Churchill never showed any understanding of the skills and sheer hard labour needed to get large formations – on land, at sea or in the air – into effective combat with powerful opponents. Inspiring words, individual courage and ignorance of battlefield realities were never enough. Tedder knew that he had Eisenhower’s support, backed by Marshall and Roosevelt: men with whom Churchill could not argue and win. Portal backed the plan and so too, for what it mattered, did Sinclair. Harris did his best to wriggle out of any contribution to the transportation plan, but was obliged to do so. To his surprise (which reveals how little he knew about the capabilities of his force), bombers caused significant damage to communications in France and the Low Countries.
Tedder visited his hero Smuts at his London hotel on 2 May, who supported him fully. Sadly, Churchill did not consult Smuts before writing to Roosevelt on the 7th to invite him to order Eisenhower to cancel the plan. Churchill’s letter used the word ‘slaughter’ (of French civilians) four times and quoted casualty estimates that he then knew to be false. Roosevelt, neither impressed nor deceived, replied coldly on the 11th and Churchill grudgingly accepted defeat on 16 May.
Eisenhower sent Bedell Smith to tell General Marie-Pierre Koenig (head of Free French forces in Britain) about the plan on that day. ‘We would take twice the anticipated loss,’ Koenig assured Bedell Smith, ‘to be rid of the Germans.’ Civilian casualties in France and Belgium before and after D-Day were indeed horrendous, so too was the destruction of livestock, homes, public buildings, pasture and woodland. Antony Beevor, writing in 2009 and making use of French sources, estimated that over 34,000 civilians were killed during the Normandy campaign by Allied and German forces.
Tedder had lunch in London on 6 May with Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Director-General of the Political Warfare Executive. Lockhart thought Tedder ‘the most naturally and mentally best-equipped commander I have ever met’. And he had met many, during a long career spent among powerful people. They discussed Cherwell, whom Tedder described as ‘a bad man, a really bad man. Yet the PM listens to him.’ As for Churchill himself, his ‘brilliance was still visible’, even to Tedder’s unenchanted eyes, ‘but now his peaks were fewer and shorter, and his slumps deeper and longer’. Yet Tedder feared his collapse, because the Cabinet comprised men whose abilities did not include a firm grasp of military matters.
On 25 May, Freeman (now chief executive of the Ministry of Aircraft Production) wrote to Portal about the choice of a new Air Member for Personnel (AMP). He proposed that Tedder be appointed and advised Portal to summon Slessor from Italy to take over as Eisenhower’s deputy: this on the very eve of D-Day. Portal wisely ignored this grotesquely mistimed proposal. The old friendship between Freeman and Tedder had been withering since 1943 and was now dead. Tedder had grown with the ever-increasing demands of total war, understanding that Britain was a vital, but junior, member of a coalition in which he had a key command role.
Starting on 1 June, the commanders met daily to consider weather reports, but only Eisenhower could give the order to launch Overlord. They met in Admiral Ramsay’s headquarters at Southwick House, north of Portsmouth. Early on the 4th, Montgomery asserted his willingness to launch what Terry Copp has rightly emphasised was an Anglo-Canadian army next day even if bad weather prevented the air forces from giving their support.
Mercifully, wiser heads agreed that air superiority was essential, together with a naval bombardment aimed at beach defences. Next day, 6 June, taking advantage of a brief break in the weather, Eisenhower made his heroic decision to begin what he called ‘this great and noble undertaking’. Years later, when Tedder was writing his own account of Eisenhower’s decision, he recalled these words spoken by Marshal Joffre in 1914: ‘I see they are trying to decide which of my generals won the battle of the Marne. If it had gone the other way, I know who would have lost it.’