Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (51 page)

In France – ‘not until Normandy did the army air force become a real participant in the ground battle’ – Quesada flew a Lightning into the beachhead on D+1 to establish his own headquarters alongside that of Bradley, with whom he established a close personal relationship. It was Quesada who first mounted aircraft radios in American tanks at the time of COBRA – it was a measure of the earlier suspicions between the two services that the airman was astonished when Bradley agreed to give them to him. Thus equipped, Forward Air Controllers could direct strikes from the very tip of the front. While on the British front the RAF jealously kept forward air control in the hands of its own personnel, among the Americans, specially-designated army officers with every unit were able to call down their own support.

Lieutenant Philip Reisler of the US 2nd Armored Division had begun his career as a Forward Air Controller in Sicily, ‘where the bombing confusion was horrible’, equipped only with red and green signal lights, which were quite invisible to the pilots, and yellow smoke canisters to reveal the Allied line. The limitations of these were still apparent in Normandy. Too many troops well behind the front fired smoke or laid out identification panels, only to expose the men ahead of them to a hail of bombs and rockets. In July, Reisler at last received a radio for his Sherman with which he could talk direct to the pilots, and operate directly under the orders of his Combat Command’s brigadier. A glimpse of clear skies at dawn and the words, ‘it looks like we’re going to have air
today’, became one of the great morale boosters on the unit radio net. CC A headquarters would inform Reisler of fighter-bombers on the way, and at the scheduled hour he would seek contact: ‘Hello, Skudo leader’ (or Red Flag or Back Door or whatever the air group’s callsign), ‘this is Cutbreak. I am at co-ordinate 656474 south-east Vire.’ For the pilot above, conditions in the cockpit made map reading difficult, and as he reported to the soldier that he was approaching his area, Reisler would seek to call down a round or two of artillery or tank smoke to mark the target. Then he would hear the flight commander on the ground ordering his pilots in: ‘Jake, you go down first, Pete fly high cover . . .’ As they bombed or rocketed, Reisler would correct their fire around the target. Within five minutes, the mission was over and the aircraft gone.

It was not unknown for the Germans to spot the planes and fire smoke onto the American positions, once obliging a desperate Reisler to yell, ‘Pull out! Pull out!’ to a Thunderbolt pilot as he dived onto the Shermans. More often still, for reasons which the tank crews were never told, there was simply no air available to them. They had no power to command the presence of the fighter-bombers; they could only request them. When they did have support and it was obliged to turn home for lack of fuel, Reisler would sometimes get the planes to attack empty countryside simply to encourage the ground troops.
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This was a practice that infuriated the pilots, for whom every ground-attack sortie was fraught with peril. If they were hit, they enjoyed very little hope of parachuting at low level. When a shortage of Typhoon pilots developed in 2nd Tactical Air Force, the RAF asked for volunteers to transfer from Spitfires. There were none. Men had to be drafted.

Quesada and Broadhurst were frequent visitors to forward areas to discover at first hand what their squadrons were achieving. One morning the American was riding a jeep in search of his old fellow pupil at the Command and General Staff School, Maurice Rose, now leading the CC A of 2nd Armored Division. Following the directions of a succession of tankers up a surprisingly silent road,
100 yards away he glimpsed a tank he took to be the brigadier’s. He was driving towards it when a 75 mm shell from its turret slammed into the jeep, smashing the vehicle into a ruin and wounding Quesada’s driver. It was a Panther. The two men spent an uncomfortable twenty minutes crawling away under small-arms fire. Quesada was conscious that only the previous day he himself had laughed heartily as he heard a German corps commander’s aide being interrogated about the whereabouts of his general. The aide answered: ‘The last time I saw him, he was crawling up a ditch.’ Now it was the American general’s turn to crawl, and he was fortunate to escape alive. Few airmen of any nationality went to such lengths to keep in touch with the realities of the ground battle.

Conversely, Quesada worked hard to keep the ground commanders up to date with the air situation. The tiny handful of Luftwaffe aircraft that ventured over the Allied lines caused wholly disproportionate distress among the ground troops, and were sometimes used as an alibi by divisional commanders to explain difficulties and failures. One morning, Quesada was compelled to listen to complaints from Bradley that the 29th Division had been harassed by enemy air attack. The airman persuaded Bradley to ride with him to see the 29th Division’s commander, the excitable Gerhardt, ‘more like a rooster than a divisional commanding officer,’ suggested Quesada wryly. He demanded to know precisely what the army was complaining about. After much prevarication and inquiries down the chain of command, it transpired that a regimental commander was fulminating about an attack by two German aircraft on his command post, which had set a half-track on fire and wounded his cook. Bradley drove back in silence, to compose a letter to all divisional commanders suggesting that they should not expect to be immune to air attack. On another occasion when a similar protest was made, Quesada sent up reconnaissance aircraft to provide Bradley with two sets of photographs of the battlefield. One showed the area behind the German lines, with its empty roads and utter absence of visible movement. The other
showed the Allied zone, crawling with nose-to-tail armour and transport convoys, uncamouflaged dumps in the fields, shipping unloading off the beaches. Bradley took the point.

Another personal venture by Quesada was more controversial. During one of Eisenhower’s visits to France in mid-June, the airman got up from a staff meeting, declaring that he was off on a fighter sweep. In an impulsive moment, the Supreme Commander asked boyishly: ‘Can I come?’ Equally impulsive, Quesada agreed. Within the hour he took off in his Mustang with Eisenhower crammed behind his seat in place of a 70-gallon fuel tank. ‘Once we were airborne, I began to realize, first, that he didn’t fit – I told him that I would have to turn the plane over if we were hit – and then that perhaps this was wrong.’ A few miles over the lines, Quesada aborted the sweep and took the general home. This spared neither himself nor Eisenhower severe reprimands from Washington for the risk they had taken.

For aircraft, as for so much else among the Allied armies, the abundance of resources was staggering. Quesada controlled 37 squadrons of aircraft, with enough reserves to ensure that losses could be replaced immediately. He was irked to see six Lightnings on an airstrip one morning marked as unserviceable, because their canopies had been damaged by pilots forgetting to lock them down on take-off. It was the type of damage that could be repaired in hours by an air force in real need of fighters, ‘like putting an automobile on the junk pile with a flat tire’. Pilots flew three or four days a week, perhaps five missions a day that might be as brief as 20 minutes, living between sorties in much the same mud and discomfort as the ground forces. The Normandy dust contained a hard silicon-like material that played havoc with aircraft engines running up on improvised strips. Filters were hastily designed and fitted to cope with this. ‘I was never consciously short of pilots or aircraft,’ said Quesada. British fliers were acutely nervous of their eager but inexperienced American counterparts, who were prone to attack any aircraft in the sky that they could not immediately identify. RAF Typhoons found that being attacked by Mustangs or
Thunderbolts was not an occasional freak, but an alarmingly regular occurrence. So too was being fired upon by the Royal Navy over the Channel.

Despite the resentment felt towards the air forces by those Allied units which had suffered from ‘short bombing’, the pilots earned the respect of most troops who watched them in action. Well-controlled close air support became, by late summer, one of the most formidable weapons in the hands of a unit which found itself bogged down. Yet for the fliers, ground attack enjoyed none of the glamour of high-level fighter interception, and was infinitely more hazardous. Like all low-level flying, it required unrelenting concentration and precision. A New Zealand Typhoon pilot described a morning over Normandy:

Quesada believed that his British counterparts never approached tactical air support with enough imagination; for instance, they did not follow the Americans in using radar for the navigational guidance of fighter squadrons rather than merely for defensive purposes. He felt that the RAF was hampered by the incubus of its immense force of Spitfires, superb aircraft for high-level interceptor work, of which there was now almost none, but unsuited to the ground-attack task because of their small 1,000-pound payload and lack of robustness. It was essential for any close-support aircraft to be able to withstand small-arms fire. The British Typhoon carried 2,000 pounds and was a sound ground-attack aircraft, but Quesada much preferred his own Thunderbolts and Mustangs, the former also carrying 2,000 pounds.

A close personal friend of both Spaatz and General Ira Eaker, Quesada would never acknowledge any lack of enthusiasm for the support of ground forces among his USAAF colleagues. Indeed, he argued that it was precisely because of their long-term ambitions for their service that ‘Spaatz saw that it was vital that we should
do whatever we could for the land battle – it was always on his mind that after the war we must have an independent air force. We were obsessed by proving our worth.’

Nothing above diminishes the claims of the Allied air forces to have made a vital contribution to the Normandy campaign. The bombers’ execution of the Transport Plan was central to ensuring that the invasion forces won the battle of the build-up. The fighter-bombers’ low-level operations inflicted immense damage upon the German army, above all in the later stages of the campaign. The issue is simply whether, if the leading airmen of Britain and America had devoted themselves earlier and more wholeheartedly to the support of the armies, the air forces could have provided even more effective, perhaps decisive, direct support for the ground offensives. From 1940 to 1942, the humiliations of the British army were consistently attributed to the Luftwaffe’s command of the air. Yet in 1944, when the Allies possessed air forces of a strength Goering’s pilots had never dreamed of, the German army continued to mount a formidable resistance until broken in bloody ground action.

By the last days of July 1944, the German army in Normandy had been reduced to such a condition that only a few fanatics of the SS still entertained hopes of avoiding defeat, far less of achieving victory. Any faint prospect of replacing the huge casualties in the west vanished in the wake of the Russian offensive against Army Group Centre, which had destroyed 28 German divisions in five weeks, a blow as shattering to Hitler as that which was now befalling him in Normandy. The Allies’ intelligence reports of the German order of battle flattered their opponents – or perhaps themselves by detailing the divisions still before them: Panzer Lehr, 2nd SS Panzer, 12th SS Panzer and so on. In fact, these formations were shattered ruins of their old selves, sustained by a fraction of the men and a tiny fragment of the armour and gun power that they had carried into battle weeks before. Attrition, not manoeuvre, had been decisive in reducing von Kluge’s formations to a state in which they could no longer sustain the sagging line. As the tide poured over the walls of their sandcastle from Bourguébus to Rennes, they lacked both the mobility to race the Allies to the breaches and the fighting power to seal the gaps, even where they could reach these. Von Kluge reported to Hitler: