Men of Air by Kevin Wilson

Author:Kevin Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

10

Escape Lines in the Railway Desert

The Transportation Plan, which would be judged to be one of Bomber Command’s greatest achievements, had no greater critic than the very head of the force itself. In the run-up to D-Day Harris had fought bitterly to retain authority over his squadrons and continue his assault on Germany’s material base. Any cessation would give the Germans time to make good what damage Bomber Command had already inflicted, he argued. The head of the US Eighth Air Force, Carl Spaatz, felt the same, that the war could be won by bombing alone and he was best able to decide where the bombing should take place.

Harris was also unsure that his airmen could strike small targets such as marshalling yards successfully. In January he had written to Portal among others accepting that ‘Overlord must now presumably be regarded as an inescapable commitment’, but stressing that his bombers were not suitable for cutting railway communications at key points.1 In his immediate post-war book, Bomber Offensive, he wrote: ‘All previous experience had gone to show that the RAF’s heavy bombers, with their futile .303 defensive armament, could not operate by day in face of serious opposition, and could not hit small targets by night except when the opposition was negligible and the weather and light exceptionally good.’2

Three months before D-Day Harris was also claiming that bombing railway targets would cost thousands of French lives at a time when French goodwill was so needed, a point that also worried Harris’s boss Portal, Churchill and even Eisenhower. There was some justification for concern. It was greatly satisfying in early March to hear from the French Resistance that the 263 aircraft of Bomber Command, which on the 6th had dropped 1,258 tons of bombs on the railway centre of Trappes, south-west of Paris, had put it out of action for days, but later intelligence revealed that sixty Frenchmen had been killed3 and another such raid on marshalling yards at Lille a little over a month later caused 456 civilian deaths.

In France itself several bishops expressed fears of bombing as D-Day inevitably approached, appealing to the higher clergy of the British Empire and the United States to intervene to ‘ensure the greatest possible diminution in the horrors of aerial bombardment’. Air Marshal Vallin, commander of French air forces in Britain, replied in a radio broadcast to France in mid-May that he regretted the appeal had not ‘been made earlier and addressed to others. It was in 1940 that the first French cathedrals were destroyed by fire and materials manufactured beyond the Rhine.’4

The worries of Frenchmen apart it was clear to the military in Britain there was a need to switch the might of Bomber Command to sealing off Normandy both before and after the invasion. The Transportation Plan was designed to create what was later described at Bomber Command headquarters as a railway desert.5 Its prime mover was a zoology professor, Solly Zuckerman, Tedder’s former scientific adviser in Italy, where the problems of invasion had already been tested.

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