Supreme Commander

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The U. S. Navy had never become actively involved in the debate. Nevertheless, Eisenhower held it chiefly responsible for all the trouble. If Admiral King had been willing to see OVERLORD for what it was, the crucial operation of the war, he could have provided the landing craft to make both a five-division OVERLORD and a simultaneous two-division ANVIL possible. A proper world-wide strategy, Eisenhower felt, dictated a slowing down of Pacific operations in order to support OVERLORD. But King was stubborn, more so even than Marshall, so ANVIL instead of the Pacific had to suffer. On April 17 Eisenhower told Butcher he “would like to fly home just to have an opportunity to put all the facts before General Marshall and the President.” What was needed “above all else,” Eisenhower said, was “for the President to order the U. S. Navy to allot enough landing craft so the Mediterranean can be kept boiling throughout the summer.” In the fall of 1942 that was the way the inside-outside debate over landing sites for TORCH had been resolved—Roosevelt had forced King to turn over the necessary ships to make three landings possible. But in the spring of 1944 King would not give in. Butcher noted that “Ike put no stock in the glib phrase used with respect to the Pacific needs, i.e., ‘To keep operations going so as not to lose the benefit of the momentum,’ ” but evidently Marshall and Roosevelt did.32

  As long as Eisenhower was assigning blame, he might have looked to his own European operations. What made a simultaneous ANVIL impossible was not so much King’s intransigence as it was the failure of the offensive in Italy. Had Rome fallen in the fall of 1943, or even in early 1944, there would never have been an ANVIL debate. Eisenhower knew, however, that he had done everything possible in Italy, and he was sure Wilson and Alexander had too. He just was not willing to give King the benefit of the same judgment in the Pacific.

  In any event by mid-April, even though the decision on the transfer of craft from the Pacific had gone against them, Eisenhower and the SHAEF planners at least knew where they stood. The margin of strength in OVERLORD was still thin, but it was better than the “skimpiest, measliest figure” it had been. It was now possible to concentrate exclusively on the great invasion.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Transportation Plan

  General Spaatz of the U. S. Strategic Air Forces and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command, like Admiral King, had a private war to fight. The airmen verbally agreed that OVERLORD was important, even crucial, but in practice they held back from a total commitment. As early as September 1943 this had been apparent to Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff, General Whiteley, who had gone to the Quebec conference as an AFHQ representative. Whiteley reported that there was much discussion in the corridors about OVERLORD. He received the impression that within the RAF and U. S. Army Air Forces (AAF) there were powerful groups “who hoped OVERLORD would meet with every success, but who were sorry that they could not give direct assistance because, of course, they were more than fully occupied on the really important war against Germany.”1

  From the first Eisenhower agreed with Whiteley’s estimate that “if OVERLORD is to be a success, we must put our entire resources into it.” The airmen, wedded to Douhet’s theories of independent bombing, believed that the farther behind the lines they operated the more good they did. Eisenhower, along with most ground soldiers, never accepted that proposition. Theory aside, Eisenhower’s experiences at Sicily and Salerno convinced him that getting ashore and staying there would be extraordinarily difficult. He wanted all the help he could get, and this very definitely included close-in attacks by the big bombers beginning well before D-Day. As had been the case in the ANVIL debate, however, the trouble was that few commanders outside SHAEF took the problem of getting ashore as seriously as he did. Eisenhower and his SHAEF associates were filled with foreboding as they thought of the things that might go wrong; those not so directly involved almost casually assumed that OVERLORD would work.

  This difference in perspective was crucial. By February-March 1944 the largest single advantage the Allies had over the Germans was command of the air. It was only a slight exaggeration to say that Spaatz’ and Harris’ bombers could fly where they wanted when they wanted, with only ground fire to worry about. The question was: how this advantage could be exploited most effectively. There was fundamental disagreement over the answer. Eisenhower and most members of SHAEF thought the bombers could best help the over-all war effort by participating directly in the OVERLORD campaign for some six weeks before D-Day. Spaatz, Harris, and most airmen argued instead for an independent strategic campaign aimed against oil targets and cities far inside Germany. In practice, disagreements were blurred because few commanders believed in simple dependence on one alternative and because doctrine was at the mercy of limited means, which meant that doctrines constantly changed in response to availability of resources. It is now therefore difficult to line up commanders on one side or the other, as there was much shifting and turning in positions taken. But if the sides were neither clear nor fixed, they were nonetheless real and significant. Their positions were crucial because a misuse of the air forces could spell disaster for the entire project.

  The first requirement was a proper organization. But everything was well muddled. In North Africa Eisenhower had commanded all the military resources of the two nations in his theater, but this was not the case in Great Britain. Although he was the American theater commander, as far as the British were concerned he was in effect a task force commander, with authority only over those British forces assigned to OVERLORD. This meant that important parts of the British ground, naval and air forces in the British Isles were independent of Eisenhower’s sphere of jurisdiction. Churchill and the BCOS could take forces away from Eisenhower and OVERLORD as they saw fit; by the same token, they could assign additional forces by a simple stroke of the pen. In only one area did this cause difficulty. Cunningham was willing to give Eisenhower everything he wanted from the Royal Navy for the invasion and Brooke had already assigned to Montgomery more army troops than there were landing craft to carry. But Bomber Command of RAF was another matter. It was independent of SHAEF and wished to remain so.

  “I anticipate,” Eisenhower told Smith on January 5, “that there will be some trouble in securing necessary approval for integration of all Air Forces that will be essential to success of OVERLORD.”2 He had in mind not only Bomber Command but also Spaatz’s Strategic Air Forces, because although in theory as ETO commander Eisenhower was in charge of Spaatz’s activities, in practice Spaatz was independent. This latter situation came about because Spaatz was operating under a directive from the CCS, prepared at Casablanca in January 1943, which gave as his mission “to secure the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system.…” All through 1943 the U. S. Strategic Air Forces, as well as Bomber Command, which worked under the same directive, concentrated on this program, code name POINTBLANK. The trouble was that POINTBLANK was not making any direct contribution to OVERLORD. But until or unless the big bombers were reassigned to SHAEF, there was nothing Eisenhower could do about it.

  When Eisenhower took over, the only air power SHAEF possessed was the British Tactical Air Force, which would work with Montgomery’s group of armies, and the American Tactical Air Force (Ninth Air Force), which was scheduled to co-operate with the American group of armies. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory would co-ordinate the whole. Leigh-Mallory’s entire experience had been with fighters, he was the senior airman at SHAEF (Tedder, although Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander, was without portfolio), and it became obvious that the CCS did not intend to give Eisenhower control of the big bombers.

  This bothered Eisenhower. While he was in Washington he discussed the situation with Marshall and indicated that he thought Harris and Spaatz should work under him for a period of several weeks before the invasion. Marshall agreed. Eisenhower also received support from an unexpected quarter. He told General Arnold that he had “strong views” on the subject, and Ar
nold said he agreed that the bombers “should be placed under your direct command for the impending operations.” The chief of staff of the AAF promised to do all he could to help accomplish the transfer.3

  Like Eisenhower, Tedder thought that the organization ought to be cleared up, and quickly. When he raised the question with Churchill, however, the Prime Minister insisted that “everything is … quite simple.” He roundly declared that Spaatz could be told by Eisenhower to obey Tedder, and “there will be no difficulty in arranging between Tedder and Harris.” He thought, in short, that Tedder would not be hampered by lacking legal authority and that he could, through persuasion, get what was needed from Spaatz and Harris. “As Tedder is only to be a sort of floating kidney,” Churchill felt, he would be able to concentrate on co-ordinating the strategic air blows against the enemy.4

  Neither Eisenhower nor Tedder shared the Prime Minister’s confidence. When Eisenhower arrived in London he had a series of conferences with Tedder, and time and again said that what worried him most was what his relations were going to be with Harris. According to Tedder, “Harris was by way of being something of a dictator who had very much the reputation of not taking kindly to directions from outside his own command.” Eisenhower, Tedder recalled, “saw rocks ahead.”5

  To avoid a breakup, Eisenhower moved cautiously. All through January and the first weeks of February he conferred with Tedder about organization and possible targets for the bombing attacks. On February 9 he told Marshall that he expected to have a complete draft of the SHAEF air program ready in a day or so, a plan that “will not only lay out exactly what we have to do, with priorities, but will also fix our recommended dates for the passage of command over Strategical Air Forces to this Headquarters.” Before he presented it to the CCS, however, he was going to have a full meeting of the senior SHAEF personnel on the program “so that thereafter it becomes ‘doctrine,’ so far as this Headquarters is concerned.”6

  On February 12 the plan was ready. It proposed a simple organization—Harris and Spaatz should come under SHAEF. This proposal was necessary in order to carry out SHAEF’s target program, but in itself it raised an even more complicated set of problems. The plan began by acknowledging those points on which everyone agreed. First and foremost, the German Air Force had to be destroyed before D-Day. Much of the POINTBLANK campaign had been directed to this end with great success, but it was a continuing effort. CROSSBOW targets, the V-weapons launching sites on the European coastline, should be hit whenever weather permitted. The Allied leaders also agreed on the proper use of air in the invasion itself. On D-Day bombers should conduct a short but heavy attack on the beach defenses just before and during the time landing craft hit the beach. Meanwhile a vast umbrella of Allied fighters would protect the LSTs and the crowded beaches from enemy air forces. After the troops were ashore, the bombers could operate against hostile communications and airfields and delay and harass land reinforcements. But the question of what to do with the Allies’ greatest asset, their Strategic Air Force, in the period before D-Day was open.

  The SHAEF proposal was to concentrate on the railway system in France in order to make it difficult for the Germans to move reinforcements to the beachhead. As the official historian of SHAEF notes, “In getting the proposal adopted, Eisenhower, Tedder, and Leigh-Mallory were vigorously opposed, on both strategic and political grounds, by most of the bomber commanders, by members of the 21 Army Group staff, and by the Prime Minister and most of the War Cabinet.”7 Eisenhower bore the chief responsibility. The fact that he held firm to his position, even to the point of threatening to resign if defeated, was perhaps his greatest single contribution to the success of OVERLORD.

  The Transportation Plan, as the railway target proposal came to be called, had its origin in the bombing of Rome’s marshaling yards in July 1943. Solly Zuckerman, a professor of anatomy, was one of those thousands of British experts who during World War II devoted himself to the war effort. Tedder had put him to work studying the effect of the bombing of Rome, and Zuckerman had reached some definite conclusions. Tedder sent the professor back to London to work with Leigh-Mallory, and Zuckerman convinced Leigh-Mallory that planned assaults on only a limited number of railway centers could virtually paralyze an entire railroad system. Further, Zuckerman insisted that the bombing had to be strategic, not tactical—that is, a program had to be worked out in advance and extended over a period of time. Strafing and bombing a couple of days before the invasion would not do the trick. According to the professor, the Strategic Air Forces could best aid OVERLORD by knocking out the railroad network in France and the Low Countries before D-Day.8

  Leigh-Mallory adopted the plan as his own. Zuckerman convinced Tedder of its validity, and he in turn convinced Eisenhower. But Harris and Spaatz protested vigorously. Harris argued that Bomber Command, built for night raids and area bombing, could not achieve the accuracy required to hit marshaling yards. Tedder even accused him of juggling figures to prove that his airplanes could not hit the proposed targets.9 Spaatz insisted that the continuing success of operations against aircraft production facilities and oil refineries would assure great support for the objectives of both OVERLORD and POINTBLANK, while to turn from these targets to railways would allow German production to return to high output. He even convinced Arnold to change his mind and support him.10 Spaatz realized, as one of his intelligence officers reminded him, that he would have to make “a quick and decisive effort … to prevent the Strategic Air Forces being engulfed in the Zuckerman program,” that he would, in fact, have to come up with an alternative use of the bombers that would make a direct contribution to OVERLORD. Spaatz’s solution was the “Oil Plan,” which gave first priority to the German oil industry, with emphasis on gasoline. This, he announced, would in the long run immobilize the Germans much more effectively than the Transportation Plan.11

  The difficulty with Spaatz’s proposal was that it would have no immediate effect. The Germans had accumulated large stocks of oil in France and scattered them so that they were comparatively safe. Only when the stocks were used up—only, that is, after D-Day—would a stoppage of oil production affect Germany’s military operations. Spaatz shrugged off this point by saying that the Transportation Plan would be only of slight help in isolating the battlefield by keeping German reinforcements out of Normandy, while the Oil Plan would be of major help later.12 This was exactly the attitude to which Eisenhower objected and the crux of the matter: Spaatz assumed that it would be easy to get ashore and stay there, while Eisenhower did not. The Supreme Commander wanted any help he could get. The Transportation Plan promised some help for OVERLORD, while the Oil Plan offered none.

  But it seemed that everyone’s first reaction to Zuckerman’s proposal was negative. Brooke doubted the effectiveness of the proposed attack. Doolittle pronounced it a waste of effort. More serious were Portal’s objections. He reminded SHAEF of a 1940 War Cabinet ruling which forbade air attacks on occupied countries if there were risk of serious damage to the population. Since it was estimated that the Transportation Plan would cause 80,000–160,000 French casualties, of which one fourth might be deaths, political approval seemed unlikely. Churchill and Eden both indicated that they could never give their blessing to such a large-scale attack against French targets.13

  While Tedder worked to convince Portal, Eisenhower concentrated on Churchill. But the Prime Minister was as much concerned with organization as with targets. He did not want to give Eisenhower command of all the RAF in Great Britain, especially Coastal Command, which was responsible for the defense of the home islands, and he was much disturbed at the thought of Leigh-Mallory commanding Harris’ bombers. Eisenhower did some “long and patient explaining” to show that he had no interest in controlling Coastal Command. At a meeting with Churchill on February 28, Eisenhower said he was prepared to issue an order stating that he would exercise supervision of all air forces through Tedder, giving Tedder authority to use already existing air force headquarters to
make his control effective. Under this system, Eisenhower emphasized, Leigh-Mallory’s “position would not be changed so far as assigned forces are concerned but those attached for definite periods of definite jobs would not come under his command.”14 In other words, Eisenhower promised that if the CCS gave him command of the Strategic Air Forces, he would see to it that Leigh-Mallory was in effect out of a position of control.

  Chruchill seemed to like the idea. Tedder, he said, could be the “Aviation lobe” of Eisenhower’s brain. Still, he ruled that “there can be no question of handing over the British Bomber, Fighter or Coastal Commands as a whole to the Supreme Commander and his Deputy.” He was willing to assign forces from those commands to Eisenhower as the need arose, but maintained that SHAEF air plans should be subject to CCS approval. Eisenhower strongly objected to submitting his plans to the CCS and “demurred at anything short of complete operational control of the whole of Bomber Command and the American Strategic Forces.” It seemed to Eisenhower that Churchill was reneging on what had been agreed upon as the supreme effort in Europe. If the British refused to make anything less than a full commitment to OVERLORD by holding back part of Bomber Command, Eisenhower told the Prime Minister, he would “simply have to go home.”

  In reporting these developments to Tedder, Eisenhower warned that Churchill was “very impatient,” and he urged Tedder to “push conferences and planning.… Otherwise the P.M. will be in this thing with both feet.”15 Churchill, alarmed at Eisenhower’s vehemence, conceded. He said he would accept whatever plan Portal and Eisenhower agreed upon.