In âThe Second World War,â (on pages 415-417) John Keegan writes:
On 12 January 1944 Air Marshal Arthur Harris, chief of RAF Bomber Command,
wrote:
It is clear that the best and indeed the only efficient support which Bomber
Command can give to [Operation] Overlord is the intensification of attacks on
suitable industrial targets in Germany as and when the opportunity offers. If we
attempt to substitute for this process attacks on gun emplacements, beach defences,
communications or [ammunition] dumps in occupied territory, we shall commit the
irremediable error of diverting our best weapons from the military function, for
which it has been equipped and trained, to tasks which it cannot effectively carry out.
Though this might give a spurious appearance of âsupportingâ the Army, in reality it
would be the greatest disservice we could do them.
âBomberâ Harrisâs prognosis of the effect of diverting his strategic bombers from the âareaâ bombing of Germany to âprecisionâ bombing on France was to be proved dramatically in-correct. In the first place, his crews demonstrated that they had now acquired the skill to hit small targets with great accuracy and to sustain this âprecisionâ campaign even in the teeth of fierce German resistance. In March the objections of Harris and General Carl Spaatz, commanding the Eighth Air Force, Bomber Commandâs American equivalent, were overruled and both air forces were placed under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhowerâs deputy. From then onwards strategic air forces embarked on a campaign against the French railway system which was to cost them 2000 aircraft and 12,000 aircrew in a little over two months. In April and May Bomber Command, which had dropped 70 per cent of its bombs on Germany in March, reversed its proportional effort: in April it dropped 14,000 tons on Germany but 20,000 on France; in May it launched three-quarters of its sorties against France. During June the weight of attack on France increase when 52,000 tons were dropped in the invasion area and on the military infrastructure surrounding it.
Moreover, in flat contradiction of Harrisâs forecast, RAF bombers carried out missions with an effectiveness which not only âsupportedâ the army very effectively indeed but went far towards determining the Germansâ defeat in Normandy. By comparison the British and American armies, the German army belonged to a previous generatic military development. Its Panzer and motorised divisions apart, it moved over short distances on foot by road and over long distances by rail; while all its supplies and heavy equipment, even for formations which possessed their own motor transport, moved elusively by rail. The interruption of the French railway system and the destruction bridges therefore severely restricted its ability not only to manoeuvre but even to fight at all; from April to June, and thereafter during the course of the Normandy battle French railway working was brought almost to a standstill and most bridges over the major northern French rivers were broken or at least damaged too severely to be quickly repaired.
Much of the devastation was achieved by the medium-range and fighter bombers the British Second Tactical and the recently formed American Ninth Air Forces; American Thunderbolt and British Typhoon ground-attack fighters flying vast daylight âsweepsâ over northern France destroyed 500 locomotives between 20 and 28 May alone. However. - far more serious structural devastation - to bridges, rail yards and locomotive repair shops - was the work of the strategic bombers. By late May, French railway traffic had declined 55 per cent of the January figure; by 6 June the destruction of the Seine bridges had duped it to 30 per cent, and thereafter it declined to 10 per cent. As early as 3 June a despairing officer of Rundstedtâs staff sent a report (decrypted by Ultra) that the railway authorities âare seriously considering whether it is not useless to attempt further repair workâ, so relentless was the pressure the Allied forces were sustaining on the network.
The rail capacity that Germanyâs OB West succeeded in maintaining in June and July 1944 just sufficed to provide the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies with the irreducible minimum of food, fuel and ammunition (though not enough to revictual Paris, which way in serious danger of starvation just before its liberation). However, such supplies could be guaranteed to the fighting troops only as long as they did not attempt to manoeuvre; so fragile and so inflexible was the network of communication improvised between the Reich and Germany that the troops at the battlefront could depend upon it only if they remained fixed to its terminals. Once they moved, they risked starvation of essentials - hence their inability to âmake a fighting withdrawal in Franceâ. When their fortified perimeter of the bridgehead was destroyed by Pattonâs Blitzkrieg, they could only retreat at the fastest possible speed to the next fortified position with which a communication system connected: and that was the West Wall on the Franco-German border.
The Normandy campaign, in both its preliminaries and its central events, therefore proved Harris wrong. Airpower used in the direct support of armies had worked with stunning success at the immediate and at the strategic level. None the less it was inevitable and also understandable that Harris should have resisted pressure from above to direct his bomber force from the attack on German cities. After all, Bomber Command justifiably prided itself on having for three years been the only instrument of force the Western powers had brought directly to bear against the territory of the Reich (the US Eighth Air Force had more recently come to the struggle). Moreover, Harris was the spokesman of a service whose singular and unique raison dâetre was to bomb the enemyâs homeland.
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Penguin: ISBN- 0-14-303573-8
