Normandy '44

by James Holland

  However, while there now seemed to be a way forward for the strategic air forces, strong concerns remained, because although sound reasons could be found for using heavies against marshalling yards, their proximity to city centres meant that civilians – including French citizens whom the Allies were planning to liberate – would inevitably be killed and wounded in the process. Bombing had become considerably more accurate in recent months, but it was still not precise enough to avoid collateral damage. Bombing Frenchmen did not sit easily with a number of Allied war leaders, especially not Churchill and his Cabinet, who took a very grave view of the plan. ‘Considering that they are all our friends,’ the prime minister wrote to Eisenhower on 3 April, ‘this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces.’3

  After discussions with Tedder, Eisenhower replied two days later, pointing out that one of the prime factors in the decision to launch the invasion was the use of overwhelming air power. ‘I and my military advisors have become convinced that the bombing of these centers will increase our chances for success in the critical battle,’ he wrote, adding that he believed estimates of civilian casualties, some as high as 160,000, had been massively exaggerated.4 ‘The French people are now slaves,’ he told Churchill. ‘Only a successful OVERLORD can free them. No one has a greater stake in the success of that operation than have the French.’ Everything would be done to avoid loss of life, but he felt very strongly that it would be ‘sheer folly’ to overlook any operation that would dramatically improve the chances of the invasion’s success. And at the beginning of April 1944, despite the huge materiel superiority of the Allies, the cross-Channel invasion, all the way from southern England to Normandy, still looked an immensely difficult and fraught operation. For Eisenhower, the most senior military officer for the entire operation, OVERLORD was in no regard a foregone conclusion. It is hard to imagine the oppressive burden of responsibility resting on his shoulders.

  On 19 April, Eisenhower gave Spaatz direct authority to bomb oil targets, while bombers from the Eighth and Bomber Command struck at marshalling yards and even bridges over the Seine and Meuse rivers. At the same time, bombers and fighters from the tactical air forces continued to destroy further bridges, railway lines and any sign of enemy movement all across France and the Low Countries. Any targets in this large swathe of western Europe were potentially useful to OVERLORD, while at the same time helping to keep the enemy guessing where the invasion would actually come.

  Eisenhower had also agreed on 19 April to give greater priority to targeting V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket sites. These were so-called Vergeltungswaffen – ‘vengeance’ weapons – that had been developed by Nazi scientists. The Allies had been aware of them for some time and had targeted Peenemünde, the testing site on the Baltic coast, for precisely that reason. Since the previous May they had also been monitoring the launch sites being built in northern France for both V-1 bombs and V-2 rockets. Operation CROSSBOW had begun that November specifically to target these sites, which appeared to be being built with the aim of directly attacking Britain. That was potentially bad enough, but the concern, of course, was that once the invasion began they would be turned towards Normandy too. The British had been sufficiently worried about the devastation they might cause to ask Eisenhower to give their destruction priority over all other air attacks apart from those urgent requirements for OVERLORD. This he had now agreed to do.

  Meanwhile, Bomber Command were also doing a very good job of disproving Harris’s earlier concerns about a lack of accuracy. On the night of 19/20 May, for example, Bomber Command simultaneously hit the railway yards at Boulogne, Orléans, Amiens, Tours and Le Mans with considerable success. Orly, Reims, Liège and Brussels were all plastered by the Eighth on the 20th. On the 21st, the first day of CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO, the Eighth claimed ninety-one locomotives destroyed. Le Mans and Orléans were hit again by Bomber Command on 22/23 May. The Eighth struck at bridges along the Seine and enemy airfields in France on 25 May. Aachen was hit heavily by Bomber Command on 27/28 May, its marshalling yards severely damaged and all traffic through this major thoroughfare halted. So it had gone on, night after night, day after day.

  For the Luftwaffe, these were dark days indeed. Once the spearhead of the dazzling Blitzkrieg victories, it had become a depository for huge numbers of increasingly under-par fighter aircraft for which there was no longer enough fuel nor sufficiently trained pilots. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was still commander-in-chief, but his star had long been on the wane and his influence over Hitler had plummeted. He had always been a far better businessman and Machiavellian politician than air commander in any case; like Hitler, he chopped and changed his plans and tactics continually.

  For the most part, the Luftwaffe was run by Göring’s number two, Feldmarschall Erhard Milch, and the Luftwaffe General Staff, although day-to-day operations were left in the hands of a number of much younger and highly capable commanders desperately trying to salvage some kind of order from the mounting mayhem and increasingly impossible demands from Hitler. At a meeting about supply and procurement on 21 April, General der Flieger Adolf Galland, still only thirty-two and a highly decorated fighter ace in his own right, warned that the Allies had already gained not only superiority but almost supremacy. ‘The ratio in which we fight today is about one to seven.5 The standard of the Americans is extraordinarily high,’ he reported. ‘During each enemy raid we lose about fifty fighters. Things have gone so far that the danger of a collapse of our arm exists.’ Something had to be done, and he urged Milch and the procurement teams to hurry up and bring the exciting Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter into service at the earliest available opportunity. Only this miracle weapon, he suggested, could turn the tide in the air war.

  Galland’s fighter pilots were simply being swamped by the growing number of American day-fighters: Thunderbolts with drop tanks flying over north-west Europe and Mustangs penetrating deep into the Reich. One of those battling against the massed formations of the enemy was 22-year-old Leutnant Wolfgang Fischer, a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter pilot of 3./Jagdgeschwader 2 (JG2). From the tiny town of Waldthurn in the ancient Upper Palatinate Forest in Bavaria, he had joined the Luftwaffe in late 1939 although he had not initially been chosen for flying training, instead becoming an ‘airmen/general duties’, which to Fischer had meant the lowest of the low. In fact, he had worked in the Wetterzentrale – the meteorological office – deciphering Allied weather reports, but continued to try to get posted for pilot training, a dream that had finally come true in February 1942. It was not until more than two years later, however, that he had at last been posted to a front-line fighter squadron, having first retrained as a night-fighter and then been assigned as a temporary instructor. ‘It had been a long and at times incomprehensible road,’ he wrote.6 ‘But now that road was finally behind me.’ No matter how frustrating it had been, however, such a long apprenticeship would certainly give him a much greater chance than the vast majority of fighter pilots being newly sent to the front. Very few now had a blind-flying certificate or anything like the number of hours in their logbooks that Fischer had.

  Initially, he had joined 4./JG2 in Italy, where the last few Luftwaffe units were still based. Flying a Messerschmitt 109G-6, he and his fellows had almost immediately been told to fly to southern France, but en route they had run into some American P-39 Aircobras and Fischer had been shot down. Bailing out safely, he had then been forced to complete the journey to Aix-en-Provence by train. There he had been reassigned to 3./JG2, which flew Focke-Wulfs rather than 109s, and on 1 May the I. Gruppe had been posted up to Cormeilles, north-west of Paris. With this as their new base, they would operate daily from forward airfields further to the west, usually flying two or three sorties each a day, mostly against marauding fighter-bombers, or ‘Jabos’ as the Germans called them, from Jagdbomber.

  After a week, 2. and 3. Staffeln had been moved again, this time to Boissy-le-Bois, near Beauvais to the north-west
of Paris, and were quartered in a luxurious small chateau. Fischer might have enjoyed it had it not been for the permanent air of tension and fear. Every morning on the bus taking them to the airfield, he could not help wondering who might still be there the following day. The only time the dead weight of apprehension left him was the moment the airfield loudspeakers ordered them to scramble. Then the ground crew would hurriedly pull back the camouflage netting, push them clear of the trees, and Fischer would clamber up and into the cockpit and get moving. Only then, focusing solely on flying, did his mind start to clear.

  Thursday, 25 May, was typical of the daily missions he and his comrades were now flying. Scrambled to intercept a formation of enemy bombers approaching, they climbed until ahead of them they spotted some 120 B-24 Liberators, flying in four distinct boxes and surrounded by at least fifty P-38 Lightnings. There were just five in Fischer’s Staffel. They pressed on and, still in formation, made a headlong pass over the outer box of B-24s, claiming a Herausschuss in the process – a bomber that was damaged and so began falling out of formation. The German fighter pilots flew on, however, before turning to attack some P-38s that seemed not to have noticed them. Leutnant Walterscheid, the Staffelkapitän, shot down two and Fischer hit a third. ‘Its pilot,’ noted Fischer, ‘immediately bailed out and tumbled past beneath my wings like a badly wrapped parcel.’7

  One of Fischer’s colleagues was in trouble, however. ‘Start travelling!’8 Fischer yelled at him over the radio. ‘Start travelling!’ But it made no difference. By now, more P-38s were swarming around them and, with tracers hurtling past his cockpit, he pushed the stick forward and dived, almost vertically. To his great relief, none of the American pilots followed. Heading for home, he safely touched back down, but was joined by only two others; two more dead pilots were found in the burning wreckage of their Focke-Wulfs a couple of hours later.

  Recognizing that operating in such small formations could achieve very little, General Galland and Generalmajor ‘Beppo’ Schmid, commander of I. Jagddivision, had begun, by the second half of May, sending up massed formations of 50–150 of their fighters to intercept the bombers. It meant they could attack only one formation at a time, but it was the only way to confront the hordes of American fighters; VIII Fighter Command was now regularly sending out as many as 600 fighters with every bomber raid.

  On Sunday, 28 May, a little over a week before D-Day, more than 850 of Eighth Air Force’s bombers were sent out on two separate raids against mainly oil targets, principally around Magdeburg and Leuna in eastern Germany. Among the 697 fighter aircraft dispatched to escort them were fifty-six P-51 Mustangs of the 354th Fighter Group. The 354th, although flying with the Eighth, were actually only on loan from the Ninth Air Force and were due to rejoin IX Fighter Command once the invasion got under way. For the past few months, however, they had been racking up scores against the Luftwaffe and making aces out of an increasing number of their pilots.

  Among them was 24-year-old Dick Turner, commander of the 356th Fighter Squadron, newly promoted to major and now leading the entire group. Adopting a similar approach to Colonel Zemke, Turner split his three squadrons as they escorted the 3rd Bomb Division’s Flying Fortresses on their mission to bomb the Brabag synthetic-fuel complex at Magdeburg-Rothensee, so that two were covering the north of the bomber formation while his squadron was to the south. It was now around 2 p.m., and Turner took his own Red Section up to 30,000 feet flying top cover, while the other three sections remained lower down at about 22,000 feet. Glancing out, Turner could see the bomber formation glinting in the afternoon sun below, stretching across the sky, their contrails following.

  Of the enemy there was no sign, but then suddenly he heard excited chatter over his radio as a large number of German fighters attacked from the north directly into the other two squadrons of the 354th. Knowing he and his own squadron could not abandon their southern sector, on they flew, listening as one after another of their colleagues excitedly made their claims over the airwaves. ‘There is no torture,’ he noted later, ‘comparable to that suffered by a fighter pilot forced to listen to a nearby aerial action which he cannot join.’9

  Eventually the battle died away and the bombers hit their target, but then, just as Turner was about to turn for home, his wingman spotted a ‘bogie’ – an enemy aircraft heading towards them. Turner now ordered his squadron to try to intercept. As they got closer, he wondered at its odd shape – it was certainly unlike any fighter plane he had seen before. It was probably one of the Luftwaffe’s new jet or rocket planes, and possibly the Me262 jet, which was entering service that April. At any rate, his four different flights were converging on this peculiar aircraft when it suddenly dived at incredible speed, then pulled away, disappearing before they had a chance to pursue and despite the Mustangs flying at a true airspeed of over 400 m.p.h. themselves.

  Back safely on the ground in England, and still wondering what he had seen up there in the skies over Magdeburg, Turner discovered that not only the 354th but the Eighth as a whole had had a very successful day. For the loss of just nine aircraft, the Americans had shot down and heavily damaged seventy-eight enemy planes, with eighteen German pilots killed or missing. What’s more, the last week of flying had shown that every aircraft shot up on the ground had been at least 500 miles from the Normandy beaches. This meant the majority of the Luftwaffe’s fighter force had been successfully pushed back into the Reich – from where they could not interfere with the D-Day landings. The battle in the air was very much a part of the wider battle that was about to begin on the beaches and in the hedgerows of Normandy. A vital stepping stone to Allied victory had already been achieved.

  For the Luftwaffe, 28 May had been a dark day. Those losses were devastating. Then came even more shattering news. Fighter leaders like Galland and Schmid knew they were losing, and understood they were reaching a stage where losses in pilots could no longer be made up. Their one hope lay in the development of dazzling new aircraft, and especially the Me262 jet. Even this, it seemed, was now being taken away from them. At a meeting on 23 May at the Berghof, the Führer had discovered that Milch had been developing the Me262 as a jet fighter. Hitler had earlier demanded it be a bomber. When he learned he had been duped, he was apoplectic. So too was Milch, but he wasn’t the Führer. The news reached Galland and Schmid that evening of Sunday, 28 May: the Me262, on which so much of their future hopes had been resting, was being taken away from their jurisdiction. ‘The fighter arm and the defence of the Reich, which had seen in the jet fighter the saviour from an untenable situation,’ noted Galland, ‘now had to bury all hopes.’10

  CHAPTER 3

  Understanding Montgomery and the Master Plan

  Arriving at Broomfield House, General Montgomery’s new 21st Army Group Headquarters near Portsmouth on the south coast of England, on Saturday, 20 May was Captain Carol Mather. Mather was twenty-five years old and originally from Manchester, where his father was the head of a successful engineering company. Mather Senior was also an avid adventurer and naturalist, a member of the Royal Geographical Society and had known the explorer Ernest Shackleton well. This spirit of inquisitiveness and adventure had rubbed off on his son, who during the ‘long vac’ from Cambridge University in the summer of 1939 had headed off on his own to explore the Yukon and Alaska. He had been on his way back when war was declared.

  There had been no question of returning to Cambridge; instead he had headed to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, trained as an officer and joined the Welsh Guards. Unsurprisingly for such an adventurous spirit, he had been swiftly seduced by the Commandos and, having been posted to the Middle East, then joined the fledgling SAS. Mather had been part of the core team during the summer of 1942 when its founder David Stirling’s men had wreaked havoc behind Rommel’s lines in North Africa, but had briefly joined Montgomery’s staff, which included his older brother, for the Battle of Alamein; Monty was an old family friend. Returning to the SAS, Mather had been captured by the Italia
ns and spent the next nine months in a POW camp in Italy before escaping and walking 600 miles south through the mountains. After arriving home in December 1943, he had rejoined the Welsh Guards, now in tanks and training in Yorkshire for the invasion. Out of the blue that spring, Mather was summoned to London to dine with Monty at Claridge’s hotel near Grosvenor Square. The general wanted him to join his Tactical Headquarters as a liaison officer.

  ‘This is going to be quite a party!’ Montgomery told him across their dining table, then added ruefully, ‘If you come with me, your chances of survival are not very good.’1 Mather was loath to leave his fellows in the regiment, but knew it was an invitation he could not turn down. So it was that on that Saturday, 20 May, he arrived at Monty’s encampment at Broomfield House.

  As always, Montgomery had established himself in a series of caravans, tents and Nissen huts in the grounds rather than using the house itself; that would have been too reminiscent of First World War generals. Monty preferred a military aesthetic where minds could be concentrated on the job in hand. Conditions were comfortable but in no way luxurious. No one was to become soft. None the less, he had taken over the study in the main house as his temporary office and it was here that Mather presented himself.