15

Big Week, Berlin and Nuremberg

‘Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.’

H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (1907)

We have seen how the 17 January 1944 announcement of Tedder as deputy to Eisenhower concerned the Germans. When he arrived in England, it was after thirty-eight months of Middle East and Mediterranean service, broken only by two very brief visits to London. For eighteen of those months he had worked closely with Eisenhower and, with varying degrees of mateyness, Montgomery. His time abroad had taught him how much Britain relied on partner nations to wage her war: the support of all the empire forces on land, sea and in the air was vital, but so, too, was a growing list of other coalition colleagues, headed by the United States, but also including France and Poland.¹

Tedder realised this to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries, and certainly more than anyone who had spent their war in the British Isles. When it came to the Allied command chain, this experience of ‘sand in his shoes’ gave him little in common with his fellow RAF airmen Harris and Leigh-Mallory, or Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz. On the other hand, Tedder’s knowledge of the Mediterranean brought him fellow feeling with Admiral Ramsay, US airmen like Doolittle and Brereton, and American generals like Bradley, Patton and Bedell Smith. Tedder also appreciated – unlike Montgomery – that the United States had become the senior partner in the wartime alliance and its representatives needed to be respected as such. This was why he functioned so well as Eisenhower’s deputy, and managed to bring consensus to many a confrontation between his Anglo-American colleagues.

Part of the 1943 Pointblank directive had always included an intense, all-out phase of operations against the Luftwaffe, Operation Argument. The idea was to exhaust the German Air Force by launching near-continuous day and night missions against aircraft factories, whilst trying to destroy as many Luftwaffe fighters as possible in aerial combat. Its implementation was much delayed by the diversion of resources to the Mediterranean theatre and poor flying conditions: Spaatz and Doolittle were briefed by the British Meteorological Office at Dunstable that for 240 days of a typical English year, weather fronts originating in the Atlantic and moving from west to east across the British Isles produced lousy flying weather of rain and fog, and that ‘a forecast for more than a day or two ahead in this country can be nothing more than speculation’.² Consequently, even when weather stations in the USA and ships taking readings in the Atlantic suggested a spell of cold and clear weather for the end of February 1944, the decision to launch Argument was in doubt until the last minute.

As late as the morning of Sunday, 19 February 1944 there were cloud bases of up to 5,000 feet over East Anglia, preventing the assembly of the great bomber formations needed to pound Germany – aircraft frequently collided in such ‘clag’ as they circled to gain height and join formations, while the cold also induced icing, which affected the fighter escorts as well as the bombers. However, these delays cumulatively worked in the USAAF’s favour as the number of American aircraft had dramatically increased from twenty-two heavy bomb groups (each of forty aircraft) and twelve fighter groups in November 1943 to double that by the time Argument – known to aircrew as ‘Big Week’ – was launched.³ Later on 19 February, Spaatz instructed Doolittle to ‘Let ‘em go’ and the unprecedented aerial assault was under way.

RAF Bomber Command opened the assault during the night of 19–20 February with a costly raid on Leipzig; on the following day the Eighth Air Force put up over one thousand B-17s and B-24s, escorted by their entire fighter force, to which the RAF added sixteen squadrons of Mustangs and Spitfires. They attacked twelve aircraft factories, the RAF following with a night raid on Stuttgart. Thereafter the Eighth launched more daytime attacks on aero plants on the twenty-first. On the third day, 22 February, weather hindered some of the Eighth’s effort, but bombers from the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy joined in the assault. The story was the same on the twenty-third, but on the twenty-fourth, nearly one thousand bombers took to the skies to raid Schweinfurt, with RAF Bomber Command attacking the same target that night. Another thousand bombers from the Eighth and Fifteenth attacked more aircraft production and assembly centres on the twenty-fifth, after which poor weather brought Big Week to a close.

The commander of all US Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold, was an airman who had been taught to fly by the Wright Brothers in 1911; he was nicknamed ‘Hap’ because of his sunny countenance. Like Carl Spaatz, he had a grandparent who still spoke German, and assessed that Big Week was ‘a battle as decisive as Gettysburg. Those five days changed the history of the air war.’⁴ Five huge daytime raids over the course of the week cost the Eighth, Ninth and Fifteenth Air Forces 226 bombers and twenty-eight fighters, about six per cent of those committed. This was far less than the prevailing rate amongst Harris’s night-time bombing force, while 355 Luftwaffe aircraft were brought down – ten per cent of those sent into battle. More significantly, this cost the Luftwaffe the irreplaceable loss of 150 pilots – though there were wild Allied claims made at the time of far higher figures.

While US bomber casualties were kept tolerably low, their escorts caused most of the German fighter casualties, and it was realised the Luftwaffe could be tempted into the skies and overwhelmed, using the B-17s and B-24s – plodding on to German cities and factories – as live bait. Big Week cost the Germans an estimated 750 fighters in lost production, but forced the Reich to disperse its manufacturing industry: twenty-seven major plants were immediately broken up and reconstituted in 729 smaller centres, camouflaged in tunnels, disused mines and natural caves. It was a policy the British had implemented as far back as 1940. Although output rose – the true figures are difficult to ascertain as German bureaucrats were inclined to inflate their own figures to impress the Nazi Party machinery – quality declined as the size of their unskilled, enslaved workforce rose.

The activities of the Reich’s slave labourers came to light when the B-17 of navigator Lieutenant Elmer Bendiner was hit by flak over Kassel. Flying out of RAF Kimbolton with the 527th Squadron of the 379th Bombardment Group, Bendiner recorded how his aircraft, named the Tondelayo, was repeatedly hit in her wing tanks. The crew were amazed that none of the rounds had ignited the gasoline. All of the eleven warheads later retrieved appeared to be inert. Sent for defusing, Bendiner noted, ‘when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were clean as a whistle and just as harmless [but] one contained a carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech. Translated, the note read: This is all we can do for you now.’⁵

On 22 February, during Big Week, American air power in Europe was reorganised on an impressive scale. The Fifteenth (based in Italy) and Eighth Air Forces, both operating heavy bombers, were placed under a single headquarters, the United States Strategic Air Forces (USSTAF), under Spaatz. This enabled the coordination of simultaneous attacks by both air forces, and for the Eighth’s bombers to range further, flying on to the Fifteenth’s bases in Italy rather than having to return to East Anglia, and vice versa. At the same time, Major General Jimmy Doolittle relinquished command of his Fifteenth Air Force in the Mediterranean and took over the Eighth from Ira C. Eaker. The uncompromising Eaker was reassigned as commander in chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF), the post previously held by Tedder. Doolittle was best known for leading the first raid against Tokyo in April 1942, flying sixteen B-25s off a carrier to reach the Japanese capital. For this he had won a Medal of Honor and was one of the few American names with which the British public were familiar when he arrived on 6 January 1944 to take up his new appointment.

While Eisenhower may have brought from the Mediterranean to the Eighth Air Force the affable Doolittle, Leigh-Mallory’s appointment – the choice was British-made – was often disruptive. His post was not infrequently rendered superfluous, by Tedder intervening to fulfil the role that L-M had been appointed to undertake. While Tedder’s collaborative character helped turn the wheels of Allied cooperation, the air component commander’s prickly nature definitely hindered the progress of the AEAF. However, there was one important contribution to success that did emerge from his office, which was the adoption of the Transportation Plan.

Leigh-Mallory, Tedder and Dr Solly Zuckerman, L-M’s scientific advisor, were convinced of the necessity to implement an interdiction campaign using the available tactical and strategic air power, along the lines of Strangle in Italy. An AEAF Bombing Committee study had shown that two-thirds of French and Belgian rail capacity was being used for military traffic and observed that its disruption – effectively creating a ‘railway desert’ within 150 miles of Caen – would be the most efficient way of slowing German reactions to the invasion.

Its findings suggested that marshalling yards could be destroyed by employing four 500-pound bombs per acre; with sixty railway yards occupying an average of five hundred acres each, the Bombing Committee recommended dropping 45,000 tons of bombs.⁶ Zuckerman and Tedder concurred with the wider idea of systematically attacking not just the railway system, but roads, bridges, rivers and canals, having witnessed the MAAF’s recent aerial campaign in Italy. Railways and waterways were the arteries of the German military system and played to the Reich’s strengths. The German war economy was dominated by one word: ‘benzin’. Having no oil-based economic resources of their own, Germany relied on what she possessed in abundance – coal, wood and iron – which resulted in an unrivalled railway network, none of which required benzin to function.

With the addition of all the foreign railway networks absorbed during occupation, Deutsches Reichsbahn, the German state railway, could call on around fifty thousand locomotives and three million pieces of rolling stock to shunt its war materiel and troops around Europe. The Germans understood trains in a way no other European nation could. They even had rail-borne mobile teams that could repair bomb damage to lines and infrastructure within hours, being fully equipped with personnel, lifting gear and replacement items. Therefore, Leigh-Mallory, Zuckerman and Tedder argued, it was vital this network be not merely raided, but overwhelmed to the point of obliteration.

They faced violent dissention from Harris and Spaatz, who remained opposed to any diversion of their bombing force away from the strategic Pointblank campaign, centred on the destruction of the wider German war economy and generally undermining morale through hitting cities. Frederick Morgan, the former chief of COSSAC, then with SHAEF, referred to the ‘problem of persuading the Bomber Barons to play with us in spite of the overriding demands of their private war over the Reich, at this time getting into its thunderous stride’.⁷ Spaatz was extremely antipathetic to any calls on his strategic bombing forces – back on 20 November 1943 he had claimed to Roosevelt’s advisor Harry Hopkins that he could end the war against Germany with three months of clear flying weather, without the need for any land campaign at all.⁸

As late as April 1944, according to conference minutes, Spaatz had exclaimed in a mixture of metaphors:

the Allied air forces might be batting their heads against a stone wall in the Overlord operation. If the purpose of Overlord is to seize and hold advanced air bases, this purpose is no longer necessary since the strategic air forces can already reach all vital targets in Germany with fighter cover. It is of paramount importance the combined bomber offensive continue without interruption and the proposed diversion of the Eighth Air Force to support Overlord is highly dangerous. Much more effective would be the combined operation on strategic missions under one command of the Eighth, Ninth and Fifteenth air forces. If this were done, the highly dangerous Overlord operation could be eliminated.⁹

Harris agreed with Spaatz, additionally objecting that the degree of precision required to hit railway facilities without killing French civilians would be beyond his force. Behind Spaatz’s bullish attitude – shared by Arnold and Eaker but not Doolittle, who was more subtle – was the institutional mentality that the United States Army Air Force was ‘young, aggressive and conscious of its growing power, and guided by the sense of a special mission to perform. It sought for itself both as free a hand as possible to execute the air war in accordance with its own ideas, and the maximum credit for its performance.’¹⁰

Spaatz also sowed the seeds of discontent by submitting absurdly high estimates of French civilian deaths were the Transportation Plan to be implemented: these ranged from 40,000 to 100,000 killed, plus more injured. This set Churchill against the plan, though Tedder – by now its champion – refused to back down, and had to endure the odium of the Prime Minister, as on 3 May, when the latter challenged, ‘You will smear the good name of the Royal Air Force across the world.’¹¹ During February and March, Spaatz repeated his misgivings to Eisenhower, bypassing Leigh-Mallory and Tedder, in an attempt to stymie the Transportation Plan, writing that the use of a strategic force against tactical targets would be ‘a misdirection of effort’. He may also have harboured a private belief that the invasion would fail. Harris likewise felt that the Transportation Plan would ‘divert Bomber Command from its true function’.¹² On 25 March the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, summoned all concerned to thrash out their differences in the presence of Eisenhower, where Leigh-Mallory and his staff presented the benefits of the Transportation Plan.

Spaatz and his team suggested a radically different target set for attacks by the strategic air forces, and a deviation from Pointblank:

Our plan is to attack the German petroleum industry, along with the aircraft industry as a secondary objective. We would be hitting at a weak link in the enemy war economy. We are quite certain that such attacks would produce constant air battles, resulting in the progressive destruction of enemy front-line fighters and force him to retain his remaining fighters for the defence of his industry. The shortage of fuel that would result from successful attacks would, we estimate, be felt on the battlefield, and so reduce his mobility, and his chances of staging a counter attack against our bridgehead.¹³

All of which contained an inescapable logic, but Spaatz eventually had to concede that the benefits of his ‘oil plan’ were longer term, whereas Eisenhower needed immediate results that would stymie his opponents before and during the invasion, less than three months distant.

Spaatz, meanwhile, defiantly ordered his men to continue their strategic assault against Germany, and on 6 March the Eighth reached a milestone with its first daylight raid on Berlin, escorted by 730 fighters. The propaganda rewards alone were considered worth the investment, although eleven fighters and sixty-one of the 748 bombers despatched failed to return, with the loss of 427 aircrew killed, wounded and missing. A quarter of the casualties came from the 100th Bomb Group, who had already acquired the moniker of the ‘Bloody Hundredth’. Lieutenant Vern L. Moncur of the 359th ‘Hell’s Angels’ Squadron with the 303rd Bomb Group flew the mission out of RAF Molesworth, Cambridgeshire. He remembered:

our fighter support was splendid, and even though the Krauts kept ripping through other wings, our combat wing was rather lucky in not getting too many direct fighter attacks that seriously threatened us. Over the target it looked like the Fourth of July – flak bursting in red flashes and billowing out black smoke all around us. It seemed almost thick enough to drop your wheels and taxi around on it. The Krauts were practically able to name the engine they were shooting at.¹⁴

Of the return to England, Moncur witnessed

a few passes made at our group, but the P-51 fighter escorts very quickly took care of those Me-109s. Our fighter escort was really swell on this mission. We put up twenty-seven ships, and every one of them went across the target, and every one of them came back. Our ship, the Thunderbird, received the heaviest damage of any of the planes in our squadron. I had a close call. A piece of flak came through the cockpit and cut the left sleeve of my leather flying jacket, but didn’t touch me.¹⁵

Luftwaffe pilots claimed 108 bombers and twenty fighters, with Nazi media suggesting 140 B-24s and B-17s brought down, more than double the true total.

Lieutenant Bud Fortier, with the 354th Fighter Squadron, flying P-47s out of RAF Steeple Morden, Hertfordshire, was one of the many protecting the hundred-mile-long bomber train that day. He surprised a Messerschmitt attacking a crippled B-17:

The 109 was just a few feet above the ground, and I wasn’t much higher, so as I tried to get it in my gunsight, I had to be careful not to fly into the ground. I closed to within about three hundred yards, firing whenever I could get him in my gunsight for more than a split second. I saw hits on the wings and tail section, but every time those eight 0.50s fired, the recoil slowed my P-47 down by twenty to forty miles per hour, allowing the 109 to stay ahead of me. By this time he had led us on a long, merry chase over towns, farms and airfields.

Moments later, Fortier’s quarry crash-landed in a field, bringing him his first ‘kill’ since arriving in England the previous July.¹⁶ Three other raids of similar magnitude followed in quick succession, on 8, 9 and 22 March, aimed at industrial plants in the suburbs, and proved the USAAF could range over Germany at will. In the longer term, these raids caused the Luftwaffe to pull back more fighters from France to defend the Reich’s airspace, meaning there would be fewer to oppose Overlord.

The Luftwaffe’s ability to combat operations in all theatres demonstrably declined as hoped for after Big Week. From a peak strength directed against Russia of sixty-seven per cent of Luftwaffe aircraft on 22 June 1941, the numbers had fallen to fifty per cent by 10 December 1942 and forty per cent by 10 February 1944 – most of the remainder were not over France or the Mediterranean, but defending Germany. Altogether, Berlin would be bombed 363 times by Allied aircraft; one of the millions on the receiving end was seventeen-year-old Gerda Drews, working in a sewing factory making uniforms for the Luftwaffe. ‘When the first night raids took place on Berlin, my mother said, “We must keep our faith in Herr Hitler. He will protect us!” My father, who was a First World War veteran and had refused to join the Nazi Party, never said a word.’

Drews remembered the 6 March daylight raid, when Vern Moncur and the 303rd Bomb Group were overhead. ‘When the alarm sounded we ran to shelter in the Humboldthain bunker, with swarms of others from all directions.’¹⁷ This was the biggest shelter in Berlin, seven storeys tall, with room for thousands of people. ‘There were anti-aircraft guns on the roof and when they fired the whole building shook – very nerve-wracking. Because I was working, I obtained a ticket that allowed me to sleep there every night, starting from March 1944 until the end of the war.’

Drews recalled, ‘I had to be inside by 10 p.m., and home for breakfast at 6 a.m., to show my parents that I was fine. One day there was a daylight raid and we ran to the bunker; when we returned our factory was a pile of rubble. After that, we only thought one day ahead.’¹⁸ Also under the bombs was Ursula von Kardorff, a liberal-minded journalist with the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung; her family moved among Berlin’s middle-class intelligentsia and her father had had to resign from the Academy of Art for his refusal to support anti-Semitism. Yet she was moved to note in early 1944: ‘A mine fell on our house during the last raid, and now nothing is left of it. This disaster, which hits Nazis and anti-Nazis alike, is welding the people together. After every raid special rations are issued – cigarettes, coffee, meat. If the British think that they are going to undermine our morale, they are barking up the wrong tree.’¹⁹

The spirit of resistance was echoed by another German writer, Christabel Bielenberg. Born in London and the well-connected niece of two peers, Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe, she had married a handsome young Berlin lawyer in 1934, exchanging her British passport for a German one. She was deeply involved with the Stauffenberg Plot; although the bombs raining down were delivered by her fellow countrymen, Bielenberg wrote, ‘I learned when I was in Berlin that those wanton, quite impersonal killings, that barrage from the air which mutilated, suffocated, burned and destroyed, did not so much breed fear and a desire to bow before the storm, but rather a certain fatalistic cussedness, a dogged determination to survive and, if possible, help others to survive, whatever their politics, whatever their creed.’²⁰

Although Harris had witnessed at first hand the fortitude of Londoners in the Blitz, both he and Spaatz seemed unaware that they were actually increasing the resolve of the Third Reich, not diminishing it. Harris’s Bomber Command had been plugging away at Berlin for months: for example, the war diary of the Lancaster-equipped 100 Squadron, flying out of RAF Waltham, noted six major night-time raids against the German capital in January 1944 alone.²¹ Yet these attacks were accomplishing a military objective by imposing an attritional battle on the German Air Force they knew it could not win. US losses during the 6 March raid over Berlin stood at less than ten per cent of the force committed, but Spaatz’s bombers claimed ninety-seven kills and the escorts eighty-one, a total of 178. Though actual German losses (caused mostly by the escorts) amounted to sixty-six, this was still twenty per cent of Luftwaffe aircraft deployed, a crippling loss rate the Third Reich could not sustain – and from Eisenhower’s point of view, these were sixty-six aircraft that would not intervene with their aircrew against Overlord.

Overall, Pointblank triggered a crisis in the Luftwaffe: in the west, its fighter force lost 1,052 aircraft in the last quarter of 1943, 2,180 in the first quarter of 1944 and 3,057 in the second quarter, the majority inflicted by USAAF escorts (though bomber crews and flak played their part also). This was more in nine months than had been lost during two years on the Eastern Front. The drain of skilled Luftwaffe flyers was, in more ways, even worse, with 264 day-fighter aircrew lost in January, 366 in February, 322 in March, 395 in April and 462 trained airmen lost in May. These statistics, plus the effects of Spaatz’s oil plan, which had begun to eat into the Luftwaffe’s stocks of fuel, effectively neutered the Luftwaffe’s ability to intervene when Overlord began.²²

Harris’s Bomber Command, too, kept plugging away at its targets by night. He wanted to strike at one last major target before Pointblank formally ended on 1 April. Perhaps in competition with the Eighth’s mission to Berlin, he sent 795 bombers to attack the cradle of Nazism, Nuremberg, during the night of 30–31 March. The raid, flying for eight hours deep into Germany, proved catastrophic. ‘They started to go down just after we crossed the coast, and after that it never seemed to stop; I weaved all over the shop like a madman, trying to make it as hard for the buggers as I could,’ recalled Australian pilot Squadron Leader Arthur Doubleday of 61 Squadron, flying out of RAF Coningsby.²³ Flight Sergeant Bob Gill, a ‘tail-end Charlie’ rear gunner from 35 Squadron from RAF Graveley, Huntingdon, described the burning wreckage of nine aircraft shot down on their bombing runs as ‘funeral pyres stretching sixty miles into the distance’.²⁴

Flight Lieutenant Neville Sparks of 83 Squadron from RAF Wyton, Cambridgeshire, recollected, ‘Contrary to the forecasts, there was no layer cloud in which they could hide from German fighters. They were clearly visible, glinting in the moon light.’²⁵ These three crewmen flew on Lancasters, of which sixty-four failed to return that night. In all, sixty RAF bombers were downed on the way out, another thirty-five on the return leg, while fourteen more would crash on British soil, and many others having to be scrapped on return. Bomber Command lost 545 aircrew that night – more than had perished in the Battle of Britain, and a rate Harris could ill afford. The damage done to the Germans, including the destruction of ten night fighters, was minimal.²⁶ These casualties came on top of seventy-eight RAF bombers lost over Leipzig on 19–20 February, the opening night of Big Week, and another seventy-two which failed to return from a raid on Berlin on 24–25 March. Together, such losses forced a temporary suspension of Harris’s night bombing offensive.

At SHAEF, the depressing results of Operation Grayling – the Nuremberg raid – only served to underline the need to shift the bomber fleets towards more positive support for Overlord. After the 25 March Portal conference, Eisenhower found himself having to adjudicate between the two rival schemes: bombing German oil refineries or blowing the French and Belgian railroad system to pieces. As it had become apparent that the French civilian casualty estimates presented by Spaatz and company were likely to be incorrect, and in some cases were found to be deliberately exaggerated, Eisenhower backed Portal, Tedder and Leigh-Mallory and formally opted for the Transportation Plan. He was also prompted to do so by the results of several trial raids. On 6–7 March the French railway centre at Trappes, in the western suburbs of Paris, was hit by 261 Halifaxes, led by six Mosquito pathfinders, where 1,258 tons of bombs yielded instant and conclusive results – it was out of action for a month with no loss to the RAF. Strikes against the railway hubs of Le Mans soon followed, then Aulnoye, Amiens, Laon and Courtrai (Kortrijk).

The Transportation Plan was implemented with Harris’s support – it being seen as a way of showcasing Bomber Command’s expertise. Spaatz was never truly won over, and acquiesced only grudgingly. Thereafter seventy-nine transportation targets were attacked before D-Day. In 21,949 sorties, RAF and USAAF strategic bombers released 66,517 tons of bombs, all finely nuanced so that operations against Calais, rather than Normandy, seemed to be its intent.²⁷ Of these missions, RAF Bomber Command flew 13,349 sorties against rail targets in and beyond France, dropping 52,347 tons of bombs with a low casualty rate of 2.6 per cent during April–July 1944; the equivalent loss rate against Nuremberg had been twelve per cent.²⁸

The aerial preparation for Overlord was vital to its success. Despite much hostility from the ‘bomber barons’, the Transportation Plan gradually saw Normandy isolated from the rest of France, with the destruction of roads, railways and bridges. Saint-Sever-Calvados is about twenty miles south of Saint-Lô, but such attacks had to be cleverly nuanced so that Calais, rather than further west, seemed the object of the Allies’ attention. (US Army Signal Corps)

Harris would later write, graciously, in his memoirs:

Bomber Command’s attacks in the three months before D-Day were so effective, and the new means and tactics of precision bombing were so rapidly mastered (I myself did not anticipate that we should be able to bomb the French railways with anything like the precision that was achieved) that the invasion proved an infinitely easier task than had been expected. Not even the most hopeful of the Allied leaders had thought the casualties would be so light or the setbacks so few.²⁹

Even Harris had been shocked by his losses over Nuremberg and he may have privately welcomed the opportunity to switch targets.

For his crews, the switch meant fewer hours in the air, much lighter casualties, and more of a sense of direct military contribution to the war effort – attacking towns and cities was never an easy ‘sell’ to bomber crews, many of whom had been brought up in such environs themselves. Wireless operator Bertie ‘Butch’ Lewis of 102 Squadron, flying out of RAF Pocklington, recalled the good fortune that his Halifax was grounded during ‘the terrible night Bomber Command lost almost a hundred aircraft against Nuremberg. It seemed impossible to carry on with night bombing of Germany. Good luck cropped up, however – preparing for the second front. French railway marshalling yards were to be reduced to impotence. There were very few enemy fighters that could be spared, so our losses over France were greatly reduced, to about two per cent. Bomber Command was saved from a massacre.’³⁰

There was a flaw with the Transportation Plan, however. Successfully hindering the arrival of German reinforcements by destroying the French road and rail networks would equally put the brakes on a rapid Allied breakout. Therefore, a staggering 1,548,000 man-days were allocated for French road, railroad and bridge reconstruction. Illustrative of the forethought and thoroughness that defined COSSAC and SHAEF preparations, besides locomotives, rolling stock, rail lines and sleepers, 11,700 tons of construction plant – everything from graders, tipper trucks and cranes, to rock-crushing equipment to operate quarries and make roadstone – 15,800 tons of asphalt and 112,000 tons of bridging (including 975 standard and heavy Bailey bridging sets and 365 standard and heavy pontoon Bailey sets) were included in the Neptune shipping plans, in phased arrivals.

Thus the amount of damage inflicted on French infrastructure from the air had to be finely balanced against the time it would take to repair everything in time to still be of military value to the Allies. Likewise, in letting loose the heavy bomber forces to destroy everything of value to the Germans in fifteen major French ports, a similar number of man-days had to be set aside towards the reconstruction of those same installations once their occupiers had been subdued.

In the three months preceding D-Day, two-thirds of sorties mounted by Harris and Spaatz were still against the Third Reich’s aero industrial complexes and German cities, but the remaining third was, as directed, against transportation targets, mostly railways. This was further refined in May when restrictions on bombing rail marshalling yards in cities were lifted, as were caveats on attacking moving trains – which hitherto had been considered to be carrying some civilian traffic. Meanwhile, a raid on 24 April by fighter-bombers of 438 (Canadian) Squadron had demonstrated that individual bridges could be successfully struck, in this case by Typhoons carrying two 1,000-pound bombs – which in itself was an illustration of how far aircraft design had progressed since 1939, when a typical RAF bomber carried a maximum load of four thousand pounds.³¹ Thereafter, ‘bridge-busting’ strikes were ordered against many crossings with spectacular results: all thirty-six significant bridges over the Seine between Paris and Rouen had been destroyed by 6 June.

However, even when the Transportation Plan was under way and delivering results, Churchill perversely tried to get Roosevelt to cancel it. He first cabled the President on 14 April claiming the results ‘failed to justify the massacre of French civilians. I beg you to put pressure on LeMay [Colonel Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the US 3rd Air Division of heavy bombers], Eaker and Spaatz about this.’ Met with stony silence, he repeated his entreaties on 29 April, then on 7 May, disregarding the advice of Eisenhower and Tedder. The President refused to overrule the Allied policy, responding after over a week’s deliberation with a cold, fifteen-word missive to his opposite number on the fifteenth: ‘Whatever is necessary for the safety of our boys is at the discretion of Ike.’³²

This was probably not a last-ditch attempt to put the brakes on Overlord – Churchill’s hardening-to-Overlord comment was made on 15 May – but Brooke’s diaries make frequent mention of his prime minister looking and sounding very frail at this time. ‘The [War] Cabinet finished with another long discussion on the bombing strategy of attack on French railways and killing of Frenchmen. More waffling about vacillating politicians unable to accept the consequences of war,’ he noted on 2 May. The following day it was the same: ‘at 2230 hours another meeting with PM on bombing French railways which lasted until 0115 hours!! Winston gradually coming round to the policy.’³³

The cause may have been the final battle for Monte Cassino, which was being fought in Italy at this time. Its name may have resonated for the damage done to the historic abbey and town in the strategic bombing raids of 15 February and 15 March. However, we can now say that fewer than six thousand French civilians perished as a result of the Transportation Plan, which ensured the success of the invasion in a way no other single initiative could.

After the war, an Allied staff study dated 11 May 1945 summarised the value of the plan: ‘The measure of the success of these attacks on the enemy lines of communication in delaying the movement of troops into the battle area exceeded the highest hopes of the Allies. It had been estimated that in spite of air attack, the enemy forces on D+7 would have increased from nine to twenty-four divisions, and by D+17 would total thirty-one divisions. Actually the strength on D+7 was only fifteen divisions, and by D+17 only eighteen divisions,’ read the report. It continued,

Moreover, some enemy formations suffered heavily en route. Long detours were forced on troops who had to move by truck, horse-drawn vehicles, bicycles and even on foot from the Paris area. Heavy equipment, especially tanks, entered the battle with greatly reduced efficiency – and the fighting value of troops, who walked a hundred miles from Paris under constant air attack, must also be considered in assessing the results of the air attacks on communication.³⁴

Nevertheless, Free French Spitfire pilot Pierre Clostermann with 602 Squadron later reflected on the stress of escorting B-17s to bomb his native land. He found himself over Rouen watching a raid which left ‘the rail yards undamaged, but hundreds of wrecked houses were blazing right up to the foot of the cathedral. Its graceful spire, through some divine providence, appeared intact. How many of my fellow Frenchmen – all civilians – had died or would die for nothing, before our eyes? A murderous rage exploded inside me. I started yelling over the radio, so everyone could hear: “You American sons of bitches! You immoral bastards, you’ve got no feelings at all.”’³⁵

The whole Transportation Plan debate, bringing together many headstrong characters, brought to the surface one of Eisenhower’s other concerns, that the strategic air forces were responsible to the Combined Chiefs and not to SHAEF. With Pointblank completed, and after much kicking and screaming (as we have seen), they were brought under his formal command from 1 April. On the seventeenth of the month, the Supreme Commander issued a directive to Spaatz and Harris which concluded, ‘The particular mission of the Strategical air forces prior to the “Overlord” assault is: (a) to deplete the German air force and particularly the German fighter forces and to destroy and disorganise the facilities supporting them; (b) to destroy and disrupt the enemy’s rail communications, particularly those affecting the enemy’s movement towards the “Overlord” lodgement area.’³⁶ Like the January 1943 directive, it was a compromise, in that it allowed Spaatz to keep plugging away at oil refineries, ball bearing plants and other targets deep in Germany on the grounds that they were supporting the German fighter forces, but left both bomber barons in no doubt that they were now subordinate to Eisenhower.

The Transportation Plan also acknowledged the growing capabilities of the Allied air forces to pinpoint and attack quite small targets, such as bridges and moving trains. The requirement to destroy the German transport infrastructure had to be balanced against the Allies’ need to use it in the future. The Plan would cost nearly six thousand French lives, but not nearly as many as Churchill feared. (US Army Signal Corps)

In addition to the transport targets, factories and Luftwaffe airfields, SHAEF also directed the 2nd TAF and the Ninth to concentrate on V-weapon sites (known as ‘Noball’ or ‘Crossbow’ targets). These had earlier been targeted by the strategic forces, but in May the tactical air forces intensified this campaign, and before D-Day some 103 out of 140 launch sites had been destroyed. Although the subsequent campaign by V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets would prove to be imprecise and of limited military value, there was pre-invasion anxiety that they would be used against waiting troops, concentrated in their ports of embarkation, or against the Overlord lodgement areas, possibly conveying poison gas. All military logic pointed to this application, which could potentially defeat the invasion, and their use as an area weapon against London seemed a waste of a valuable asset.³⁷

German airfields, too, came within the cross hairs of the tactical air forces before D-Day. They were divided into those 150 miles from the beaches, and others beyond. These had to be cleverly nuanced so as not to indicate Normandy as the future invasion area. By 5 June, forty Luftwaffe fighter and fifty-nine bomber airfields had received ninety-one major attacks which delivered seven thousand tons of high explosives: runways were cratered, hangars and maintenance and repair facilities were shattered, the aim being to keep the Luftwaffe away from the arrival of the Overlord forces. Coastal gun emplacements clearly needed to be struck, but this was done in a ratio of two in the Pas-de-Calais and Dieppe areas for each one in Normandy; by 5 June, sixteen thousand tons of bombs have been released over twenty-one batteries threatening the Neptune area alone. At the same time, the German Signals Intelligence Centre in France and forty-two major radar and communications sites between Ostend and the Channel Islands were hit in a campaign to blind the defenders of Fortress Europe. Some of these controlled night fighters, others coastal defence batteries; all tended to be heavily defended and needed to be eliminated.³⁸

Group Captain Desmond Scott, leading No. 123 Wing of rocket-firing Typhoons, recalled, ‘getting at them was like fighting your way into a hornet’s nest. Most were near the coast and all held a commanding view; no matter from which direction you approached you could never surprise them, and the amount of light flak surrounding them was a true indication of their value.’³⁹ Some were blinded electronically by the jamming of No. 100 Group of RAF Bomber Command, formed in November 1943 – who had an equal ability to ‘manufacture’ air fleets and naval flotillas where none existed, through the use of aluminium strips called ‘window’ scattered in the clouds, which dazzled and distracted operators. Likewise, the Atlantic sea lanes – vital for the sustainment of Overlord – were cleansed of submarines by Liberators, Catalinas, Beaufighters and Mosquitos of RAF Coastal Command, by then well experienced in their maritime protection role after winning the Battle of the Atlantic. In northern waters, the 1944 monthly losses of U-boats to aircraft and surface vessels speak for themselves: fourteen in January; fifteen in February; seventeen in March; sixteen in April; and fifteen in May, totalling seventy-seven – in the same period, twenty-five Allied vessels of small tonnage and ten warships were sunk.⁴⁰

All the while, RAF and USAAF Mustangs, Spitfires, Mosquitos and F-5 Lightnings (a twin-engined P-38 fighter with nose cameras replacing machine guns) were daily conducting photo reconnaissance (PR) sorties, with the eight British and four American PR squadrons at the AEAF’s disposal. Other ‘Special Duties’ squadrons dropped supplies to the French and Belgian underground. Four thousand containers of weapons, explosives and other supplies were released between January and April – but six thousand in May. Staff Sergeant Wilbur R. Richardson, a B-17 ball turret gunner with the USAAF 331st Squadron, with the 94th Bomb Group flying out of RAF Rougham, Suffolk, recalled that ‘Invasion fever was rife. In May all us aircrew were ordered to carry their .45s at all times, while ground crews were issued carbines in case German paratroops dropped on the airfield to disrupt our invasion plans.’⁴¹

Lieutenant Bud Fortier of the USAAF 354th Fighter Squadron remembered a comment made by a fellow P-51 pilot at the beginning of June: ‘That whole French coastline is one huge gun emplacement. The Germans know the invasion’s coming. They just don’t know when or where.’ Neither did he, then – but within hours he observed ‘all afternoon and into the night ground crews were busily painting large black and white stripes around the fuselage and wings of the fighters. It didn’t take the rumour mill long to put all the pieces together, but the biggest piece came when the bars at the officers’ and NCO club were closed at 1900 hours. Pilots were advised to go to bed and get some sleep.’⁴²

B-17 navigator Lieutenant Franklin L. Betz flew thirty-five missions with the 524th Squadron of the 379th Bomb Group out of RAF Kimbolton, but most remembered ‘to be awakened at about 0400 hours for a mission was pretty much routine, but to be hauled out of the sack at 0130 hours was something unusual. We waited sleepily on benches, smoking to wake up. “Tenshun!” someone bawled up front in the briefing room when the CO strode in. “At ease,” Colonel Preston said. “This is it, men – this is D-Day!” Cheers and whoops shattered the quiet of a moment before.’⁴³

Bud Fortier recalled being woken: ‘Briefing at midnight’:

The briefing room door was locked, and the large reading room next to it was jammed with pilots. High-spirited chatter filled the room. As the pilots filed in, they were greeted by “This is it!” Major Rosenblatt arrived and called the roll – a most unusual procedure that somehow injected a note of gravity into the proceedings. Then the briefing room door was unlocked and the pilots swarmed in laughing and jostling each other, exclaiming about the display on the large mission map.

It showed more than the usual information. Bold black and red arrows pointed to the landing areas. At nine minutes after midnight, we were called to attention as Colonel Cummings strode to the stage. ‘The general told me this afternoon that the biggest show in history has started – the invasion of France. We’re going to do our part, and we’re going to do it well!’ After the weather and intelligence briefings, Cummings came back onstage. On the way out this morning you’ll see the largest fleet in history in the channel. If you have to bail out over that fleet, try to land on a ship that’s headed back to England.⁴⁴