Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (50 page)

Yet in Normandy, the greatest concentration of air power ever assembled in support of ground operations also revealed its limitations. It was unable to inflict sufficient damage upon German defensive positions to offer the Allied armies anywhere an easy passage, despite Sir Arthur Harris’s characteristically extravagant assertion in 1945 that the air forces had given the armies in north-west Europe ‘a walkover’. The poor flying weather – which averaged one day in three through the summer – and the hours of darkness provided the Germans with sufficient respite from air attack to move their forces more or less where they wished, and to continue bringing forward a bare minimum of ammunition and supplies. Every captured German officer in 1944–45 complained bitterly about the difficulties caused to his unit by Allied aircraft and this, together with the exaggerated claims of the airmen, caused Allied intelligence to be too uncritical in its assessments of the material damage inflicted upon enemy formations in transit. Almost all were indeed seriously delayed by the wrecked river bridges and railways and the harassment upon the roads. But careful study of German records shows that only in a very few cases was the combat power of a unit seriously diminished by air attack on the journey to Normandy. Even allowing for the early morning cloud, it is remarkable that 21st Panzer’s armoured regiments were able to reach the battlefield on D-Day from their harbours around Falaise with only minimal losses from air attack. Panzer Lehr’s journey was fraught with frustration and harassment, but its order of battle was diminished by less than 10 per cent. Most Germans interviewed for this narrative recall the
smashed railway junctions and bridges they passed on their way to the front, but very few remember their units suffering the actual loss of more than a few trucks. The allegedly appalling journey of the 2nd SS Panzer Division from Toulouse to Normandy has passed into the legend of the Second World War, and its arrival was certainly much delayed by encounters with the Resistance and Allied air forces. But its material losses of tanks and armoured vehicles were negligible.
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The truth is that tactical air power began to inflict crippling damage upon enemy transport only in the later stages of the battle for Normandy, when difficulties on the ground compelled the Germans to move in daylight, and when techniques of forward air control, which should have been available from 6 June, were at last put into practice.

The fundamental difficulty overhanging all Allied air support of operations in Normandy was that, with two very honourable exceptions of whom more will be said below, senior Allied airmen remained obsessed with their conviction that it was not the major function of the air forces to serve as flying artillery for the army. This, of course, was precisely the role in which the Luftwaffe had achieved such remarkable results for the Wehrmacht in the first half of the war. In 1944 and in their own writings after the war, Allied airmen wrote with astonishing condescension about the diversion of their forces to support ground operations.
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Vandenburg records a conversation with a colleague on 15 June about the army’s demand for a massed bomber attack, ‘to blast the English army from in front of Caen . . . We both agreed that the use contemplated was not proper . . .’
²
Whatever Montgomery’s shortcomings in other directions, he could never be accused of failing to understand the vital importance of air support. He harangued his officers again and again about the need to live and work in the closest proximity to the airmen. It was the airmen themselves, and
Air-Marshal Coningham in particular, who resolutely refused to accept a close relationship with the soldiers. Coningham had been nettled by Montgomery’s supposed failure to grant sufficient credit to the air forces under his command in the desert, and he never forgave him. He saw as little of the C-in-C of 21st Army Group as he could, and physically distanced himself from the ground headquarters. It is remarkable that Coningham’s attitude and behaviour was not rewarded with dismissal. But Tedder shared many of Coningham’s views, and above all sympathized with his distaste for Montgomery.

Tedder’s high intelligence has often been praised by his colleagues, yet his arrogant self-assurance matched that of Montgomery. He shared the views of the ‘bomber barons’ that air support by heavy aircraft for ground operations was a diversion from their war-winning role in attacking German industry: ‘I told Leigh-Mallory that he was in danger of leading the Army up the garden path with his sweeping assurances of help . . . I felt that the limitations of air support on the battlefield were not sufficiently understood; neither was the full scope of the role of air power outside the battle area sufficiently appreciated by the Army, or by Leigh-Mallory.’
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Studying Tedder’s writings, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that he suffered the same grievous handicap as most airmen of his generation – the inability to perceive that the war could only be won by the defeat of the German army upon the battlefield, an enormously difficult task to which all other operations by sea and air must be subordinated. There were grounds for much disappointment and sympathy over the failures of ground operations in Normandy in June and July. It has been suggested above that few of these were the fault of Montgomery’s generalship. Yet Tedder’s remorseless hostility to the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group, his sniping and carping from SHAEF about the shortcomings of the soldiers, lessen his stature as a commander; although, of course, the anomaly of his position was that he could speak his mind in the highest places about any
aspect of the campaign that he chose, but bore direct responsibility for none of it. Early in July, he was agreeing with Coningham ‘that the Army did not seem prepared to fight its own battles’.
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He persuaded Eisenhower to amend a draft letter to Montgomery promising that all the resources of the air would be available to support him: ‘I insisted that the Air could not, and must not, be turned on thus glibly and vaguely in support of the Army, which would never move unless prepared to fight its way with its own weapons.’
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He made common cause with two senior British officers at SHAEF known for their enmity to Montgomery – Morgan and Humphrey Gale – in discussing the possibility of removing the British general. On 20 July after GOODWOOD, ‘I spoke to Portal about the Army’s failure. We were agreed in regarding Montgomery as the cause. We also talked about the control of the Strategic Air Forces. Portal felt that the time was drawing near when their control could revert to the Combined Chiefs of Staff exercised through himself.’
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Yet it was Portal who, during the autumn and winter, would prove wholly incapable of controlling the British strategic bomber force, to the extent that he was obliged to confess his own inability to induce Sir Arthur Harris to conform to Air Staff policy.

The airmen considered that they were on most solid ground in their complaints against the army about heavy bomber operations. The soldiers repeatedly demanded and received the support of the ‘heavies’ in a role for which the airmen insisted they were unsuitable. The soldiers were then surprised when the bombers failed to achieve the expected results, whether against coastal positions on D-Day or tank concentrations on the Bourguébus Ridge. The bombing of Caen had accomplished nothing but the levelling of a great Norman city. The bombing before GOODWOOD had been provided, the airmen claimed, only because the army insisted that it would pave the way for a major breakthrough. This it did not. On 21 July, somewhat obscurely, Tedder ‘saw the Supreme Commander at once and told him that Montgomery’s failure to take action earlier had lost us the opportunity offered by the attempt
on Hitler’s life.’
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This comment appears to reflect the airman’s wholly mistaken assumption that the German army was on the brink of internal collapse.

A SHAEF Operational Research report upon the benefits of heavy bombing in support of ground operations declared that ‘it is the provisional opinion of the investigators that the moral effects of the bombing upon the enemy and upon Allied troops far outweigh the very considerable material effects.’
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Quesada of IXth Air Force declared that he doubted whether the American bombing before the attack on Cherbourg had killed more than 10 Germans: ‘Of course, our army loved to see it before they went in. But it made me more sceptical about whether we should be using the air force as a USO show. I believed in attacking specific, identifiable targets that could be destroyed by aircraft.’
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The airmen considered that the proven inability of heavy bombers to do crippling material damage to enemy ground forces was sufficient reason to confine them to assaults upon Germany’s cities and industrial plants. Yet if massed bomber attacks provided moral benefits in the greatest campaign of the western war – which all concerned on both sides agreed that they did – it seemed reasonable to suggest that the armies were entitled to them. It was also forgotten, amidst the recriminations about ‘short bombing’ and ground-force failures, that the use of the ‘heavies’ had in fact inflicted immense damage upon the German defences before both COBRA and GOODWOOD, even if this was not conclusive. What was gravely needed, and never achieved as a result of the lack of sympathy between the personalities concerned, was improvement in the technique of co-ordinating heavy bomber operations with ground offensives. Vandenburg recorded sourly in his diary for 27 July: ‘Leaving for lunch with the C-in-C and Bedell Smith, I heard Beadle tell Jimmy [Doolittle] to the effect that what was needed to correct deficiencies in strategic bombers operating with ground forces was to get a commander who could view that support sympathetically.’
¹⁰
As late as November 1944, a 21st Army Group report on air support lamented that ‘we have lacked and still do
lack high-powered air staff officers at the Army Group HQ to be in on the initial stages of planning just as the gunners and sappers are.’
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This was surely a damning reflection on the gulf between the two services even in the last months of the war. All that summer of 1944, the feuds within the air forces, which had so disfigured the Allied high command in the spring, continued unabated. Vandenburg’s diary for 23 June reports: ‘Lunched with General Spaatz at which time he cautioned me to be very careful not to create an incident which, in his opinion, was desired by the RAF to start the disintegration of this can of worms by “the Tedder, Coningham, Harris clique”.’
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Brereton, commanding IXth Air Force, held a press conference following the COBRA short bombing tragedy, at which he blamed COBRA’s slow start upon the sluggishness of the ground troops.

Yet the sluggishness with which ground–air co-operation techniques developed in Normandy must be attributed principally to the attitudes of the airmen. Air-Marshal ‘Mary’ Coningham, commanding the British 2nd Tactical Air Force, was a bitter enemy of Montgomery and of Leigh-Mallory. Brigadier Charles Richardson, Montgomery’s very able BGS Plans, worked closely with the airmen on ground support plans, and found Coningham to be ‘a prima donna. He seemed to have a glorified concept of his own position, and to be too remote from the battle.’
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For many weeks, Coningham continued to direct air support from Stanmore, outside London, on the grounds that communications in France were too poor for him to command his squadrons from a headquarters with the armies. While the wide-ranging fighter-bomber sweeps carried out every day over France by Allied aircraft created great difficulties for the Germans, it was Typhoons and Thunderbolts operating in close support of the ground troops and directed by a Forward Air Controller (FAC), which could play the critical role. Requests for air support channelled through a rear staff and then passed forward with merely a map reference to the squadrons did not produce rapid or precise results. There was no lack of communications technology for Forward Air Control. Yet above all in the
early stages of the battle, there were nothing like enough FACs with the front-line troops. The destruction of a single RAF vehicle in the first hours of GOODWOOD wiped out Forward Air Control for the central axis of the offensive. ‘As a result of our inability to get together with the air in England,’ wrote Bradley, ‘we went into France almost totally untrained in air–ground co-operation.’
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Brigadier Richardson said: ‘In North Africa we seemed to have got the air business right, yet we had lost some of it in Normandy.’
¹⁵

Only two senior air force officers distinguished themselves by an absolute commitment to assisting the armies, undiminished by personal hostilities or jealousies. The first was British, Air Vice-Marshal Harry Broadhurst, working alongside Dempsey’s Second Army as the RAF’s AOC 83 Group. Broadhurst, a fighter pilot of great experience and a veteran of the desert, earned the affection and respect of all the soldiers with whom he worked. The second was the American General Elwood R. ‘Pete’ Quesada, a pioneering airman of Spanish extraction, quick intelligence and easy charm who commanded IXth Tactical Air Command, responsible to Bradley for close air support of the American armies.

Quesada may claim to have done more than any other airman in the Allied ranks to originate and refine techniques of ground–air co-operation, and to put them into practice. ‘Unlike most airmen who viewed ground support as a bothersome diversion to war in the sky,’ wrote Bradley, ‘Quesada approached it as a vast new frontier waiting to be explored.’
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The American airman had served in North Africa, where he found that the prevailing USAAF attitude ‘was that air forces should take care of themselves, with little consideration to the needs of the armies.’ Indeed, in 1943, it was Coningham – such a thorn in Montgomery’s side in Europe in 1944 – to whom Quesada paid generous tribute, ‘for forcing the USAAF to participate in the ground battle’. It was in North Africa that Quesada’s undogmatic willingness to adjust command arrangements to the needs of the battle first caught the attention of Eisenhower. The airman handed over operational control of a B-24 anti-submarine wing to the navy rather than seeking to
direct it himself through Casablanca, on the simple grounds that this scheme was likely to be more effective. Undramatic enough, perhaps, but his gesture should be seen in the context of a war in which most airmen fought tooth and nail to retain control of their squadrons rather than surrender direction to either of the other two services. Only 38 years old, unmarried, with a quaint enthusiasm for cabinet-making in his off-duty hours, Quesada was the embodiment of the American ‘can do’ spirit which so attracted all those Europeans of his generation who were not intractably prejudiced.