Rommel intended to lobby hard to have this carving up of the panzer divisions overturned, but the following day, 9 May, as he and Ruge set off for another two-day inspection tour of Normandy, he was still grumbling to his companion. He had two armies under his command, the Fifteenth and the Seventh, but they both contained badly equipped and mostly low-grade infantry divisions, although there were some Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger – paratrooper – units as well, who generally were cut from a better cloth. The 15. Armee had nineteen divisions, covering the coastal regions of northern France and the Low Countries, and had a very competent and experienced commander in Generaloberst Hans von Salmuth. He did, however, have blood on his hands, like so many Eastern Front commanders, having assisted the Einsatzgruppen – the Action Groups – to round up and execute Soviet Jews. He had later broken his 2. Armee out of Stalingrad against Hitler’s wishes, for which he was sacked and demoted, but was soon after promoted again and given 15. Armee. He now loathed Hitler and the OKW, and was clearly disillusioned. Rommel thought he had become a little lazy.
The 7. Armee covered Normandy and Brittany, and now had fourteen divisions. It was commanded by Generaloberst Friedrich Dollmann, a man who exemplified the wildly varying skills and experience levels of both commanders and units under Rommel’s charge. Although a career soldier and artilleryman, Dollmann had been an early enthusiast for both Hitler and the Nazis, had correctly read which way the wind was blowing and, by actively promoting National Socialism within the army, had been quickly promoted. Given command of 7. Armee in 1940, he had remained in post ever since, mostly sitting on his backside and gaining an ever-widening girth as he enjoyed the full delights of the countryside in which he was based. Fat and indolent, he made absolutely no effort to learn about or understand modern warfare. Consequently, he was hopelessly out of touch and a woefully ineffective army commander.
On the other hand, the commander of LXXXIV. Korps in Normandy, General Erich Marcks, thin-faced and bespectacled, was every bit as cultured and intellectual as he looked and brought with him considerable experience of high-level staff work and combat command. He had even lost a leg during Operation BARBAROSSA, but had overcome his disability with a determination and courage that had earned him great respect. Rommel had wanted him as 7. Armee commander, but Hitler insisted on keeping Dollmann in post. It paid to be a good Nazi.
It was to see Marcks that Rommel and Ruge were now heading, as he was far more able to give an accurate and intelligent report than Dollmann; in effect, Rommel was simply cutting his army commander out of the loop. En route they stopped to inspect coastal defences south of the Seine. With Meise’s help, Rommel had supplemented concrete with vast numbers of offshore obstacles that ran the depth of the beach at low tide. There were steel tetrahedrons, as well as logs covered with mines, and poles that could jag on to any vessel – some of them tipped with further mines. Each beach was due to have four belts of obstacles, each at a different depth of the beach. Rommel assumed the Allies would land close to full tide in order to let troops get off the beach quickly, but the third and fourth belts were to provide lines of obstacles at low tide too.
While they were looking at this array of obstacles the tide began to rise swiftly. ‘On this beach,’ noted Ruge, ‘it rises three metres in an hour, so we had to leave the beach in a hurry.’10 Off the beach, thick belts of wire and more minefields covered the coastline, while yet more mines continued to be laid inland – these, Rommel knew from his experiences in North Africa, could be very effective in slowing and breaking up attacks, especially by armour, and giving his poorly equipped infantry more time to fight back. The previous October, some 2 million mines had been laid in Normandy. Now that figure had risen to 6.5 million. Rommel understood such weapons were effective force multipliers, but he and Meise had reckoned 20 million were needed to protect the coast to the level he intended – and they were still a long way from achieving that.
After pausing for an air raid to pass over, they drove on through Caen. Large areas of land around the River Dives to the east and the various river valleys that ran from the River Douve estuary at Carentan had all been flooded on Rommel’s orders by shutting a number of sluice gates so that the water built up behind them. This was designed both to hinder any planned Allied airborne drop and to channel any attempted advance inland towards roads that were now mined and blocked. Over larger areas, there were signs that further anti-invasion work was going on – in bigger fields, posts had been driven into the ground and strung together with wire to prevent gliders from landing.
They met Marcks in fields near Caen. The sun was shining as the one-legged corps commander made his report. There had been plenty of enemy aerial reconnaissance, he told Rommel, over both the Cotentin Peninsula and either side of the River Orne. Air attacks had been targeting coastal artillery positions as well as crossroads and main thoroughfares. Reinforcements had arrived into the Cotentin – the 91. Luftlande-Division – Air Landing Division – who were now digging across its 20-mile width and making the most of the dense hedgerows to hide themselves from prying enemy eyes in the air. He was confident they could respond to any attack on either the east or west coast of the peninsula. Marcks also reported that 50 miles of offshore obstacles had now been completed, as well as 170,000 stakes against airborne landings.
After briefings from the commander of the Cherbourg fortress and Generalmajor Edgar Feuchtinger of the 21. Panzer-Division, they drove on, pausing by the four 150mm coastal guns at Longues-sur-Mer, and then on along the coast to the tiny ports of Grandcamp and Isigny, before finishing for the day at General Marcks’s headquarters at the Château de la Meauffe near Saint-Lô.
More inspections followed the next day, while at La Roche-Guyon a message from OKW arrived warning of an invasion around 18 May. ‘Irrefutable documentary proof is, of course, not available,’ ran the signal.11 ‘Point of concentration first and foremost: Normandy; secondly: Brittany.’ But really, it was still anyone’s guess.
CHAPTER 2
Command of the Skies
Monday, 22 May 1944. Sixteen P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes of the 61st Fighter Squadron were speeding towards the northern German city of Bremen led by the imperturbable Lieutenant-Colonel Francis ‘Gabby’ Gabreski. Shortly before, the 61st, part of Colonel ‘Hub’ Zemke’s 56th Fighter Group, had helped escort almost 300 B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers on an attack on the Baltic port of Kiel, but, their escort duty over, their role now was to maraud the skies of northern Germany shooting down any enemy planes they might see and, especially, destroying locomotives on the ground. The intensive train-smashing operation, begun the previous day, had been given the code name CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO, after the famous song. A jaunty and jolly jingle it may have been, but the business of shooting up railway engines was a deadly serious one. The German rail network, the Reichsbahn, really was the glue that kept the German war effort together. Almost everything travelled the shrinking Reich by rail: raw materials, weapons, labour, troops, food, Jews being sent to death camps. The more marshalling yards that were smashed, the more locomotives shot up, the more railway bridges destroyed and lines cut, the harder it would be for the Germans to move. The Allies’ greatest fear before the invasion was a concentrated counter-attack by the mass of ten panzer divisions known to be in the West. The aim of the ‘Transportation Plan’, as it was called, was to make it as difficult as possible for the Germans to move those all-important troops, as well as other reinforcements, to Normandy.
Hub Zemke had introduced a new tactic that day, which the men quickly named the ‘Zemke Fan’. There were three squadrons in the group, each flying sixteen planes in flights of four, and to make maximum use of them on the return leg he ordered them to maraud over three distinct areas rather than all flying together back to base. So, the 62nd FS had been sent to hunt over the Paderborn area, the 63rd FS to Hanover, while Gabreski’s bunch had sped south-west towards Bremen.
They were around 20 miles east of the city when a couple o
f locomotives were spotted. With their clouds of white steam, they were easy enough to spy on such a lovely clear day, so Gabreski ordered Evan McMinn’s Yellow Flight down to shoot them up, while the remaining twelve Thunderbolts circled as cover at around 15,000 feet. They had barely begun circling, however, when Gabreski spotted a not very well camouflaged air base below. Moments later, McMinn’s voice crackled over the radio saying he could see some Focke-Wulf 190 fighters taking off.
Gabreski felt the now familiar surge of excitement as he led the squadron down in a dive. The Thunderbolt was a big fighter and unrivalled in a dive. Armed with .50-calibre machine guns, it could pack a big punch, take a lot of punishment itself and was highly manoeuvrable. More to the point, American fighter pilots were in a different league to those in the Luftwaffe in terms of flying skill. Most new pilots joined their squadrons with more than three times the flying hours of their German opposite numbers, and because of the plentiful quantities of fuel and the large pilot overlap in each squadron – usually over fifty to keep sixteen planes flying per mission – there was a lot of time to practise further and hone skills alongside those who had more experience. Because of the chronic shortages of fuel, new Luftwaffe fighter pilots tended to fly on missions only. Most were promptly shot down.
That was about to be the fate of a number of FW190s now. As Gabreski and his men hurtled towards them, he saw around sixteen of them spread out in line abreast. The enemy fighters were now at a height where they could have turned and fought, but they seemed oblivious to what was happening and instead flew on in steady formation, presenting themselves as juicy targets for the P-47s. Picking out one, Gabreski opened fire and saw his bullets flash all over the German’s fuselage and wing. It turned and fell away, then burst into flames. Now Gabreski got behind a second and, closing in, opened fire a second time. This time the canopy flew off and, moments later, the pilot bailed out. Looking over his shoulder, he saw two 190s homing in on him. He managed to climb, turn and shake them off, but then saw one of his men going down in flames and another trailing smoke, which was a big blow. Climbing back up to 12,000 feet, Gabreski ordered his men to regroup on him over the enemy airfield. Soon he had six Thunderbolts together and they spotted some twenty Focke-Wulfs down below. Suddenly, though, the German fighter’s own anti-aircraft gunners opened up on them. Someone fired a green recognition flare, but the enemy formation had scattered.
Without hesitating further, Gabreski led his men back down, speeding in behind a formation of six German fighters. Moments later, he had shot down his third of the day, but then caught sight of a further Focke-Wulf sneaking up on him on his left. Yanking back the control column into his stomach and cutting the throttle, his Thunderbolt climbed and slowed to a near stall so that his pursuer had no choice but to hop over him. Suddenly, Gabreski was behind him, but with his ammunition low and five more Messerschmitt 109s behind, he reckoned it was time to cut and run. He ordered his men home and they sped west, only to run into a lone Focke-Wulf flitting in and out of cloud. Speeding in behind and using the last of his ammunition, Gabreski shot him out of the sky too, giving him three confirmed kills and one probable for the day.
In all, Gabreski and his men shot down thirteen confirmed, one probable and two damaged that day for the loss of two of their own. A further pilot, Joel Popplewell, managed to get his Thunderbolt back home to England despite counting over a hundred bullet holes on his ship. Gabreski, now one of the leading aces in the US Eighth Air Force, reckoned it had been one of the toughest missions he had ever been on, but it demonstrated the absolute dominance the American day-fighters now had over the Luftwaffe in the West. A little over two weeks before the invasion, that was good news. Just as good was the hunting that day by Zemke’s fighter group: six locomotives destroyed, seven damaged, as well as eighteen river barges shot up. CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO was going well.
And there was further cause for cheer just under a week later, on Sunday 28 May, a day that saw the culmination of what had been in effect a five-month battle in the skies for air superiority over north-west Europe. This was a non-negotiable precondition for the invasion that had been uppermost in the Allied war leaders’ minds since the previous summer.
All through the summer and autumn of 1943, the US Eighth Air Force, along with the RAF’s home commands, had struggled to make much headway, despite their growing numbers, experience and improving navigational aids. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the C-in-C of RAF Bomber Command, had stubbornly insisted that night bombing of German cities by growing numbers of heavy bombers would be enough to bring not only the Luftwaffe but all of Nazi Germany to its knees. As the months passed, that claim had become an increasingly misguided one for a number of reasons. First, the Luftwaffe had finally put together an increasingly efficient and coordinated air defence system. Second, they had brought much of the Luftwaffe home to defend the Reich, while at the same time dramatically increasing aircraft production. There had been many more night-fighters in the skies to meet Harris’s bomber streams than ever before and, what’s more, they were now being expertly directed towards the British bombers by a combination of well-organized intelligence, ground control and radar. Bomber Command was still causing lots of damage, but not enough to hustle Germany into surrendering, and bomber crews were being slaughtered in the process.
The Americans had begun bombing Germany by day in the belief that this would enable them to bomb targets with greater precision and therefore more efficiently and effectively. To do this, they had developed very heavily armed four-engine bombers flying in tight defensive formations, but soon learned the hard way that bombers flying alone could not protect themselves effectively. Like Bomber Command, they were getting hammered.
Over the crisis months of the second half of 1943, the Americans, especially, had recognized they needed to rethink how to achieve air superiority, which was their priority for strategic bombing. This had been agreed as early as January 1943 and more formally in early June that year in a directive called POINTBLANK. The reason for prioritizing the Luftwaffe as a target was twofold: strategic bombing would be considerably more effective if there were no longer any enemy fighters intercepting them along the way; and gaining air superiority over not just the invasion beaches but the skies of all of western Europe was an unequivocally agreed prerequisite before the Allies launched a cross-Channel invasion. Air power was both absolutely vital to the planning of OVERLORD and rightly seen as key to victory on the ground.
In fact, even Hitler had understood the importance of air superiority over the invasion front; it was why his Luftwaffe had been trying to destroy the RAF before he even considered launching troops across the Channel back in 1940. For OVERLORD, however, air superiority was essential over the invasion front so that troops could land without interference from the air, but was also needed much further inland as well. This was because it was recognized that, for all the millions of men and gargantuan amounts of weaponry and supplies being built up in Britain, shipping and port restrictions limited the number of men and amount of materiel that could be landed in Normandy on D-Day, as the day of the invasion was known, and the days immediately after. If the Germans were to have any chance of throwing them back into the sea, they would need to launch a coordinated counter-attack with all their mobile forces as quickly as they possibly could. Intelligence had shown there were ten German panzer and mobile divisions in the West, so it was critical for the Allies that these units should be slowed, delayed and obstructed as much as possible in their efforts to reach Normandy. In this, the French Résistance had a crucial role, but the hard yards were to be performed by the air forces, who would strike bridges, locomotives, railways and any vehicle that moved during the nine weeks leading up to D-Day and in the days – and weeks – that followed. For the most part, these operations would be carried out by the tactical air forces – that is, those created specially to support ground operations. The bombers were faster, smaller, two-engined varieties that operated at lower levels with
the support of fighters and ground-attack aircraft. To fly effectively at lower altitudes, however, it was essential that the skies were largely clear of enemy aircraft. This was why winning air superiority was so important to the Allies. Without it, OVERLORD was a non-starter.
Until very recently, however, it had seemed like a very distant goal. The dilemma back in the autumn of 1943 had been just how to destroy the Luftwaffe, because bombing alone was clearly not cutting the mustard, not least because most of the enemy factories were deep in the Reich where the daylight bombers and even Bomber Command at night could not effectively reach. What was needed, urgently and in large numbers, was a long-range fighter. Only in the nick of time, however, did they realize the solution was, in fact, right under their very noses.
The RAF had had the opportunity to make Spitfires long range, but – largely because of Bomber Command’s continuation with night bombing, and the insouciance and lack of vision of men like Leigh-Mallory and even Sir Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff – had not thought it necessary. However, the previous year a US-built P-51 Mustang had been equipped with a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 rather than its original Allison engine, and its performance and fuel economy had improved astonishingly. Extra fuel tanks had been added and had made little difference to its speed or manoeuvrability, then so too had discardable drop tanks. Suddenly, the Allies had a fighter capable of nearly 1,500 miles and able to fly to Berlin and back with ease. That was a game-changer. Unfortunately, however, the American air chiefs had only woken up to the potential of the P-51 in the summer of 1943.
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