Normandy '44
Page 13
From Washington DC, Quesada had joined the army as a private, then switched to the Air Corps, been made an officer, earned his wings, attended the Air Corps Tactical School and, by the time America entered the war, was considered among the brightest and most able of a new cadre of young and dynamic air commanders. Always known as ‘Pete’ – after one of his fellow recruits had given him the nickname – Quesada had faced a huge challenge on his arrival in England. Setting up his headquarters at RAF Middle Wallop, a former Battle of Britain fighter airfield to the north-east of Salisbury in southern England, he had begun his new job with just a dozen men. Thereafter, some 40,000 personnel a month had arrived to join the Ninth, all of whom needed to be organized, housed, equipped, trained and put into action. By the eve of D-Day, the Ninth had swollen to 35,000 airmen and 1,600 aircraft, a larger number than that of the Mighty Eighth. Directly under Quesada were no fewer than five fighter wings, nineteen fighter groups split into two different tactical air commands, the IXth and XIXth, as well as one tactical reconnaissance group, three night-fighter squadrons, one signal aviation company, four communications squadrons, five fighter control squadrons, eight airfield squadrons, two signal battalions, five detached signal companies, eleven military police companies and eighteen station complement squadrons: all this in just seven months.
As his force grew, so they had been thrown into the air battle, first supporting the strategic bombers and then carrying out the interdiction operations in the run-up to the invasion. Quesada’s role was to integrate and coordinate with his peers and superiors, bring around him a staff that was competent and far-sighted, oversee the development and evolution of tactics and, in particular, set up the communications system and network that would allow him to operate with the flexibility and speed that were necessary. He was the first to admit that the support from back home in the US was second to none. New groups were arriving with an incredible level of training and at least 350 hours in their logbooks. They were also reaching their new bases with everything already in place. ‘Everybody who was supposed to have equipment had it in their hands,’ Quesada recalled.11 ‘In a matter of a few days that was often done and within a week or ten days after arrival, we had these boys flying their airplanes over Normandy.’ When technical glitches appeared, they were ironed out. Some of his men, for example, complained of guns jamming in their P-51s after turning tightly in a dog-fight. Quesada demanded this be sorted and ended up speaking to General Hap Arnold himself about it by phone link to Washington. ‘Goddam it, Pete,’ Arnold told him, ‘we are going to get that fixed within forty-eight hours.’12 Arnold was true to his word. Specialist engineers were immediately sent over from the US and the problem was resolved on every single P-51 within a week. ‘You have to have people in your airplanes that have confidence in their leadership, that have confidence in their equipment,’ Quesada commented later.13 ‘If you don’t have those two things you have poor morale. If you have poor morale, you don’t have much to lean on.’ Few would argue with that, least of all Montgomery. This was the kind of support, however, about which most German units could only dream.
By June his IX Fighter Command was ready, with stores stacked up, pilots and ground crews primed and engineers poised to hurry across the Channel to create new airfields. The only shortcoming that seriously troubled Quesada was the lack of integrated training with troops on the ground. This, however, was a consequence of the intense air campaign that had been going on and into which his units had been thrust the moment they arrived in England. There simply hadn’t been the chance. ‘The air forces were fighting,’ commented Quesada, ‘whereas the ground forces weren’t.’14 This meant air–land integration would have to be worked out once in Normandy. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a question of priorities and the most important was to make sure the actual invasion was a success. Winning air superiority and paving the way for invasion was more important than training for something that would not happen if the former had not been assured.
Travelling around England was the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Small and wiry, balding and looking considerably older than his forty-three years, Pyle had made a name for himself before the war as a columnist for the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers. His forte had been recording everyday American life in a beautifully observed, informal and affectionate style that made him seem like a personal friend to the millions who followed his travels and musings across the States. Since the start of the war, he had continued to write about what he had seen and the ordinary folk caught up in this extraordinary conflict that he had met along the way, whether it be in London in the Blitz, or North Africa, or Sicily or southern Italy. His dispatches from the front line had won him ever greater legions of fans, so that he was now one of the most well-known names in America.
He was, however, neurotic, prone to bouts of depression and had a fractious relationship with his wife. Ernie Pyle was a troubled soul, but he was an unquestionably brilliant writer and observer of life, so it was only natural that the US army brass would want him to be one of the 28 out of 450 journalists lined up to cover the coming campaign to take part in the assault phase. While there was no way Pyle was going to refuse the opportunity, he was certainly feeling deeply apprehensive. As he travelled around southern England it had seemed as though every soldier in the land was busy waterproofing vehicles for the landings. He also noticed that much of the equipment was stacked high in wooden crates, which gave him an idea. ‘I stayed up for a couple of nights with a hammer and saw,’ he wrote, ‘preparing a large box for myself, with horseshoes tacked all over it.’15 By this time he knew the invasion was imminent; everyone did. Bouts of despair started sweeping over him and he was having bad dreams. He and the other chosen few journalists had been told they would be given twenty-four hours’ notice before departure, and then, at the very end of May, that warning had been issued and they were ordered to a specific assembly area – a ‘sausage’ – on the south coast. Pyle’s heart was heavy with dread.
On the morning of 3 June, he was woken at four along with his companions, a number of officers from US First Army Headquarters. Blearily, they loaded up their kit, which seemed woefully excessive. ‘The Germans will have to come to us,’ said one of the officers.16 ‘We can never get to them with all this load.’ From there, they were told they would be joining an LST in Falmouth. As they motored south, the English roads were cleared of normal traffic, with civil and military police at every crossing. As they drew near to Falmouth, more and more people lined the route, with children signalling the American OK symbol of a finger and thumb together in an ‘O’. Then they were on the quayside and loading on to the LST and, before Pyle knew it, ropes were being cast off and they were setting sail. ‘From a vague anticipatory dread,’ he wrote, ‘the invasion now turned into a horrible reality for me.17 In a matter of hours the holocaust of our own planning would swirl over us. No man could guarantee his own fate. It was almost too much for me. A feeling of utter depression obsessed me through the night.’
As the Sherwood Rangers left Hursley Camp, Stanley Christopherson was rather surprised to see so many people lining the streets down to the Southampton docks; each time their column paused, people plied them with tea and cakes, much to the consternation of the military police, who had been told to ensure there was no contact between civilian and soldier. The regiment eventually was boarded on Landing Craft, Tank Flotillas 15 and 43, and on 4 June they finally moved away from the quayside only to anchor out in Southampton Water. The invasion fleet certainly impressed Christopherson. ‘I tried to visualise other invasion fleets which had left England over the years,’ he noted, ‘and vaguely wondered whether the invader of bygone days had the same rats-in-the-stomach feeling which I had then and experienced before going into bat, or ride in a steeple chase.’18 Most alongside him were probably feeling a little more apprehensive than they were before a game of cricket.
The plan, as explained before they left Hursley, left him in no doubt about the scale of th
e operation. They would be landing on Gold Beach, Jig sector. They had also been issued with maps – some 17 million had been printed – as well as aerial photographs of extraordinarily sharp detail on to which had been marked every German position down to the last machine gun. Bunkers, minefields, wire – all were plotted. Each company of each battalion was told its objective, the distance the men had to go and what obstacles they could expect along the way. Above them would be continual aerial cover and support. Some 12,000 Allied aircraft were ready and waiting to fly. On Battle of Britain Day, in September 1940, the Luftwaffe’s largest raid had amounted to 300 aircraft, which at the time had seemed like a lot. By June 1944, the Allies had turned the scales of the early years of the war on their head. Germany might still have many more infantry divisions than the US and the British, but that was because they had no alternative. The Allies did have a choice about how they used their manpower and their enormous global clout, and as a result had created the most modern and technologically advanced war machine the world had ever known.
The following day, the camp emptied and they trundled towards the Southampton docks. They headed out into the Solent, but then came news of the delay, which did nothing to improve morale. By the time they finally set sail, at around 4 p.m. on Monday, 5 June, there was still a heavy swell. Christopherson and his fellow tank commanders were now given a case of maps of their invasion area. ‘I immediately set about sorting out my set of maps,’ he noted, ‘and endeavoured to identify from coded maps the various place names and objectives, a somewhat awkward undertaking on a flat-bottomed craft on a choppy sea.’19 It made him feel rather seasick.
Further west, sailing from Plymouth with Force O, was the USS Augusta, with its mighty guns ready for the naval bombardment. Aboard was not only General Omar Bradley, commander of First Army, but his aide, Captain Chet Hansen, who was conscious of being part of something so immense, but so unknowable too. ‘This was the invasion,’ he wrote in his diary.20 ‘This is what we waited for through three years of war. The ships carry a grim, throbbing atmosphere about them, but there were no demonstrations, no cheering. We are sailing off to the continent, but no one seemed unduly excited about it.’
Through the night, the largest invasion armada the world had ever witnessed ploughed on through the rising swell and into the unknown.
CHAPTER 7
Air Power
‘Constant enemy air attacks concentrated on bridges over the Seine, Oise, and to a certain extent over the Aisne,’ noted a weekly situation report by the staff at Heeresgruppe B, ‘also coastal defences in the Dunkirk–Dieppe sector and on the northern sides of the Cotentin.1 Attempts to cripple rail transport continue, with raids on marshalling yards … and on locomotives.’
Air Chief Marshal Tedder and his fellow Allied air force commanders had good reason to be pleased with the past nine weeks’ efforts. Some 197,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on French targets alone – by contrast, just 18,000 tons of bombs had been dropped by the Luftwaffe on London during the entire seven-month Blitz. For all the debates that had raged over the Transportation or Oil Plans, in fact the Allied air forces had hammered a multitude of different targets, including marshalling yards, oil plants, Luftwaffe airfields, coastal radar sites, V-1 and V-2 launch and command sites, and coastal batteries, and with a combination of heavy strategic forces, tactical medium bombers and fighter aircraft. More than 200,000 individual sorties had been flown. ‘Paris has been systematically cut off from long distance traffic,’ ran a Luftwaffe report on 3 June, ‘and the most important bridges over the Lower Seine have been destroyed one after another.’2 Only by the greatest of efforts, it continued, could purely military and essential traffic be kept moving. ‘Large-scale strategic movement of German troops by rail is practically impossible at the present time, and must remain so while attacks are maintained at the present intensity.’3 There would certainly be no let-up once the invasion began. Rather, the bombardment would intensify, especially when the Allied air forces were freed from the restrictions of keeping the invasion location secret.
It had not been without cost. Some 712 French civilians were killed in March 1944 as a consequence of Allied air attacks, 5,144 in April and 9,893 in May – not as many as some had feared, but still a terrible and tragic number. From 1 April to 5 June, the Allies had lost 12,000 aircrew dead and missing, as well as some 2,000 aircraft. Without doubt, it was the strategic air forces that had borne the brunt of the losses – 763 bombers from the Eighth Air Force and 523 from RAF Bomber Command. Among those becoming increasingly fatalistic about his chances was Lieutenant Truman ‘Smitty’ Smith, co-pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress in the 550th Bomb Squadron, part of the 385th Bomb Group based at Great Ashfield, to the east of the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds.
Smith and the rest of Lieutenant Ernest ‘Moon’ Baumann’s crew had arrived at Great Ashfield on April Fool’s Day, which they had all hoped signified nothing. The ten-man crew was, Smith reckoned, an eclectic yet homogeneous pack that he hoped would be more than the sum of its parts as they battled to stay alive over the course of their tour of duty. From Ponca City, Oklahoma, Smith had always been interested in flying and as a boy had saved up $4 for his first flying lesson. At sixteen he had even soloed, and spent the next few years hanging out at the Ponca City airfield, soaking up the atmosphere, cleaning planes and bumming rides; later, he managed to help out when the local Civil Air Patrol was formed in 1941. After graduating from high school the following year, he naturally decided it was to be the air force for him. He won a coveted place, began training and won his wings in October 1943. He had then been posted as a ‘pick-up’ co-pilot – on standby to join a crew – on B-25 medium bombers before being packed off to Tampa in Florida, where he joined Moon Baumann’s crew. From Florida they collected a brand-new Fortress and flew it across the Atlantic. Although the B-17 had seemed uncomfortably large compared to the B-25, Smith soon adjusted, not least because of Baumann’s relaxed attitude. ‘In fact,’ noted Smith, ‘the whole crew was very casual, had a great sense of humour and was the most non-military group I had encountered in service.’4
Somehow, they had survived their first ten missions, then two more to reach their thirteenth, an attack on the marshalling yards at Aachen on 20 May. Smith had been convinced it would be his last: the odds had just seemed so stacked against them. Some crews referred to the thirteenth as ‘12-B’, but that hadn’t worked for Smith. ‘There was an overpowering feeling that Mission #13 was really to be my last,’ he wrote.5 ‘It had to happen sometime. That was common knowledge. That was the business we were in. We knew that up front. That’s why nobody had “graduated” for over a month that I knew of.’ He tried to be fatalistic – at least he had been to London and had some sex – but before that mission there had been nothing to shake the conviction that he was doomed. He had even initially refused to get up that morning. ‘I’m not going,’ he told the others, before reluctantly changing his mind.6
All too often such premonitions ended up being self-fulfilling prophecies, but Smith and the rest of the crew made it back and by 2 June had completed another four missions in a row: a railway marshalling yard at Königsborn in west Germany, then the Leipzig aircraft plants on 29 May, an operation against V-1 sites – known as a ‘NO BALL’ mission – at Watten-Stracourt in France on the 30th, and then the major marshalling yards at Hamm in Germany’s Ruhr Valley on the 31st. ‘This was the fourth mission in a row,’ Smith noted, ‘and a diet that did not agree with me.’7 He had worked out he was getting $10.67 a mission, and that the USAAF were more than getting their money’s worth. Again, though, the crew made it back, which meant he had just seven missions left to complete his combat tour. Two days later they were off on Mission Number 19, targeting more marshalling yards, this time at Équihen, just south of Boulogne in northern France, one of 805 B-17s and B-24 Liberator heavy bombers hitting the Pas de Calais, including 64 NO BALL targets as well as marshalling yards. It was utterly, overwhelmingly relentless.
Among those flying with the 391st was Lieutenant Joe Boylan and his crew. Twenty-two-year-old Boylan was from the town of Waterbury, Connecticut. He had had a tough childhood: money had been tight and his mother had died of cancer when he was twelve. His father, struggling to cope, had hit the bottle. Despite this, he had wisely pushed his son to get into a good high school in New York, which allowed him to sit and pass the exams for air force pilot training, something for which young Joe had long harboured high hopes. He subsequently did well and hoped to fly multi-engine fighters like the P-38, but although he had been posted to train on multi-engines, when he was finally awarded his wings and granted a commission his orders were to report to the 573rd Bomb Squadron, part of the 391st Bomb Group, now forming at MacDill Field in Tampa, Florida, where he would be flying B-26 Marauders.
Boylan had heard bad things about the Marauder, which had the reputation of being something of a ‘widow maker’ because of the high rate of accidents on take-off or landing. By 1944, however, most of these early issues had been resolved and it had become a highly reliable, robust medium bomber, capable of nearly 300 m.p.h. and agile. Unlike the B-17, it had a tricycle undercarriage so that pilot visibility was good on the ground, and it proved very easy to fly once properly initiated. ‘Once the pilots and crew learned to fly it,’ noted Boylan, ‘it was hard to knock down.’8 Casualty rates amongst B-26 groups were so far proving incredibly low and, having reached England and heard about the losses amongst heavy bomber crews, Boylan thanked his lucky stars he was flying in the Ninth and on B-26s.