The Supreme Commander by Ambrose Stephen E

Author:Ambrose, Stephen E. [Ambrose, Stephen E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307946638
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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