Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (37 page)

Counterintuitively, Tedder’s point of view on the use of strategic airpower in support of Operation Overlord came not from professional airmen, but from a civilian consultant who had attached himself to Tedder’s headquarters while he was in his earlier post as the commander of the joint Mediterranean Air Command. The man came to Tedder’s staff, not from the staff of an Allied air force, or any military or economic organization whatsoever. Solomon “Solly” Zuckerman came to this post of great influence and responsibility within the RAF from the London Zoo!

Zuckerman was a South African–born zoologist who had graduated from University College Hospital Medical School in London and whose prewar career had been at the London Zoological Society. When the war
began, Zuckerman consulted for the British government on several projects and wound up in North Africa working with the RAF. Given an honorary officer’s commission, he eventually became the “scientific director” of the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU). In this role, he gradually became indispensable to Tedder.

When Tedder came to London ahead of Overlord, Zuckerman came along and was assigned as the advisor to Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Tedder’s subordinate. Leigh-Mallory commanded the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF), an amalgam of the British and American tactical air forces that would support Overlord.

It had long been understood that the Eighth Air Force would participate in the preparations for Operation Overlord. They would join the AEAF effort to attack the rail transportation network, specifically railroad marshaling yards, in order to “isolate the battlefield” across northern France. It had not originally been intended that the Eighth Air Force should be under the AEAF
command
, but Tedder now insisted that it should be. Zuckerman had convinced both Tedder and Leigh-Mallory that this was the best use of strategic bombers.

Zuckerman’s abrupt arrival on the scene, and his ideas, which were at odds with existing USSTAF doctrine, put him in direct conflict with the Eighth Air Force and the EOU.

Walt Rostow recalled many years later, that “at the intellectual level, EOU was squared off against Tedder’s one-man brain trust, Solly Zuckerman, a scholar of the sexual and social life of apes; under the curious but not untypical imperatives of war, he became an expert on the physical effects of bombing which he applied in the Mediterranean, and then he became a bombing strategist. There are Americans (and some British) who to the end of their days regarded (or will regard) the last year of the struggle in Europe as a war against Solly Zuckerman rather than Adolf Hitler.”

As Dick Hughes explains, Zuckerman “had been taken into the Royal Air Force to conduct a series of experiments on monkeys, in an endeavor to determine the effects of bomb blasts on human beings. From this, being very astute and ambitious, he had gradually worked his way up to [being] an expert on the effects of bombing of all kinds, and from thence it had
been fairly easy to insert himself into the realms of target selection and operational planning. He had assisted Air Marshal Tedder in planning the raids against the transportation systems in Italy, and had sold himself to Tedder as an individual who would be of value in planning the air operations in support of the [Operation Overlord] invasion—during which it would be of utmost importance to interrupt and delay the movement of German reinforcements towards our bridgeheads.”

Zuckerman’s reputation had preceded him. Hughes went on to say that the staff of the Eighth Air Force and the EOU had “received word by the grapevine from Italy of his failings, and were more than alarmed when Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory placed complete confidence in him and gave him a free hand to prepare the invasion plan. This led to the bitterest argument over air planning that I was ever to experience.”

Essentially, it was the Oil Plan formulated by Dick Hughes facing off against the Rail Plan of Solly Zuckerman.

The battle lines were drawn, not between the British and Americans, but between the Anglo-American command staff at SHAEF on one side and the upper levels of command at USSTAF on the other. Apparently there was also a division of opinion within RAF Bomber Command. Some within that service were displeased with being assigned to fly essentially tactical missions, but their chief, Arthur Harris, sided with Zuckerman and Tedder, referring to the EOU staff and their allies as “the Oily Boys.”

As Rostow points out, “Spaatz took the view that attacks on marshalling yards would have diffuse, generalized effects but would not interdict military supplies because the minimum essential lines could be repaired overnight and because the Germans would not engage their beleaguered fighter force to defend marshalling yards. Thus, his primary and overriding responsibility of Allied air supremacy on D-Day would be at risk.”

Regarding the specific targets picked by Zuckerman, Hughes writes that the USSTAF was “convinced, from information received from [the Fifteenth Air Force in] Italy, that a rail transportation system could be much more effectively and economically interrupted by the destruction of railroad bridges [which are difficult to repair or replace] rather than by bombing marshaling yards. The latter belief contained a bonus in that if the railway system were economically paralyzed by the destruction of
bridges, then there would be enough surplus effort remaining available to destroy the oil industry—with the long term benefit of seriously hampering the operations of the German army and air force, and of German industry, for the whole of the rest of the war.”

Zuckerman countered by insisting that aircraft could not destroy targets as precise as bridges, despite the fact that he had just come from the Mediterranean Theater, where bombers
had
successfully destroyed most of the key rail bridges in Italy. During the coming weeks preceding Overlord, both Ninth Air Force medium bombers and Eighth Air Force heavy bombers proved, and on numerous occasions, that airplanes could, in fact, accurately hit and destroy railroad bridges.

Eventually, the argument went all the way to the upper levels of command, with both Prime Minister Churchill and General Eisenhower weighing in. Ultimately, at what Rostow calls “an historic meeting” on March 25, Eisenhower “decided in favor of Tedder and marshalling yards on the grounds that the latter would provide some immediate help in the landings and their aftermath, whereas the military effects of the oil attacks might be delayed.”

However, Eisenhower did compromise to a certain degree, allowing that the Eighth Air Force would be released from the rail campaign whenever weather conditions over Germany promised good visibility for precision attacks against the petrochemical industry targets favored by the Oily Boys, in concurrence with Spaatz and Anderson.

“I am convinced,” Hughes writes, “that General Spaatz did not want to argue the point with any force. His prime concern was that in case Overlord should fail, no one should be able to point a finger at him and his air forces and blame them for not cooperating with General Eisenhower’s requests in every way.”

As has been written in numerous accounts of the weeks leading up to Operation Overlord, it was a time of serious anxiety and nail-biting. Spaatz, and indeed Eisenhower himself, knew that the success of the Normandy invasion was not a foregone conclusion and that should it fail, it would be a major catastrophe that would seriously delay the end of the war.

Nevertheless, contrary to Hughes’s interpretation that Spaatz did not want to rock the boat, Rostow writes that at one point Spaatz went so far
as to threaten to resign over the diversion of his assets to support the Rail Plan.

In any case, the Oil Plan advocates were vindicated after a large number of petrochemical facilities across central Germany were attacked in one of the “compromise” missions by a force of around eight hundred Eighth Air Force heavy bombers on May 12. Rostow told an OSS symposium half a century later that decryptions done by the codebreakers of the British “ultra” project of German messages transmitted in the wake of the May 12 missions “promptly and unambiguously provided evidence of the Germans’ panic as they elevated the defense of their oil production to top priority, even ranking above factories producing single-engined fighters. The evidence was sufficient to convince Tedder that the oil attacks should be immediately pursued.”

Rostow reports that Tedder’s actual words were “I guess we’ll have to give the customer what he wants.”

By this he meant that Eisenhower was now convinced of the value of the mission for the strategic bombers.

Even with more than half a century of 20/20 hindsight, we know Spaatz was right to acknowledge that in the two months preceding June 6, 1944, there was no more important Allied strategic goal in the European Theater than ensuring the success of Operation Overlord. All roads did, indeed and rightly so, lead to that single purpose.

With the same clarity of retrospection, especially with the knowledge of the Ultra decryptions—which were known to Hughes when he wrote his memoir but which were still secret—we understand that Hughes was also right to see the “big picture” significance of the petrochemical industry as a follow-on to the Operation Pointblank campaign against the German aircraft industry. Without oil, the war machine could not run.

It is also clear that the USSTAF had handed SHAEF the
luxury
of concentrating on the rail transportation network by virtue of what had been done to the Luftwaffe during Big Week.

Overlord’s D-Day, originally penciled into the Allied offensive calendar during May, was postponed to June 5, and finally to June 6. On that D-Day, which Cornelius Ryan famously dubbed the “Longest Day,” as 156,000 Allied troops crossed the beaches of Normandy against heavy
German ground fire, the skies above were clear of the Luftwaffe. Thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of American bomber crews during Big Week, Eisenhower was able to say to the troops, “If you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours.”

Indeed, General Werner Junck, the Luftwaffe’s fighter commander in Normandy, admitted during a postwar debriefing that he had only 160 aircraft available, and just half of these were operational. Within a short time, his complement increased to 600, but counting all the aircraft assigned to it, Leigh-Mallory’s AEAF had around 12,000 aircraft available for Overlord.

In the afternoon of the Longest Day, one of those Allied aircraft was a Flying Fortress piloted by General Fred Anderson—and crewed by five generals and two colonels. Standing at one of the waist gun positions, Richard D’Oyly Hughes stood ready to man the .50-caliber Browning if a Luftwaffe fighter should appear. As had been the case earlier that day as General Laurence Kuter made his own observation flight in this same airspace, the only aircraft Hughes saw, and he saw hundreds, were friendly.

“There was cloud [cover] over England to an altitude of some 10,000 feet, and we spiraled up through this until we finally broke into the clear to find ourselves near a group of Eighth Air Force B-17s on their way to bomb Caen [a city near the invasion beaches]. We quickly joined this formation and halfway across the English Channel the clouds dispersed and the whole invasion coast lay spread out before us…. Our bomb run to Caen was uneventful, with no antiaircraft fire and not a sign of a single German fighter plane in the sky.”

While Big Week had not crushed the Luftwaffe out of existence—that final struggle was yet to come—what Big Week
had
accomplished was tellingly demonstrated in the skies over Normandy on that Longest Day in June.

A great weight was lifted from the shoulders of those Allied leaders—from Eisenhower down through the chain of command—who had sweated through the planning process for months. Difficult battles lay ahead—indeed, it would not be until July 25 that the Allies finally broke
out
of their Normandy beachhead—but the great invasion that had been the all-consuming object of the war against Germany since the beginning, had succeeded.

With the success of the Normandy invasion and the establishment of a solid Allied beachhead in northern France, the USSTAF could once again return to the strategic mission for which it had been created. On June 8, two days after the invasion, Spaatz issued an order to Jimmy Doolittle at the Eighth Air Force and Nathan Twining at the Fifteenth to give their top priority to the “Oil Campaign” that had been drafted by Hughes, Rostow, and the Oily Boys of the EOU.

The Eighth Air Force and the RAF would focus on synthetic fuel plants in the Ruhr, as well as crude oil refineries around Hamburg, Bremen, and Hannover. Meanwhile, the Fifteenth, now based in Italy several hundred miles closer to Ploiesşti than it had been at the time of Tidal Wave a year earlier, would make itself a frequent visitor to that sprawling
complex that still accounted for a significant proportion of the Reich’s petroleum needs. This renewed campaign began with an average of around four hundred heavy bombers hitting the Romanian oil country on two consecutive days in late June.

On August 25, exactly one month after the breakout from Normandy—which had been facilitated by massive Eighth Air Force attacks on German ground forces—the Allies had liberated Paris. General George Patton’s fast moving Third Army had almost single-handedly swept the Germans from the northwest corner of France, moving faster and capturing more territory than any American army in history. By September, both Eisenhower’s and Spaatz’s headquarters had been relocated there from England.

Ironically, all of the rail bridges, marshaling yards, and infrastructure across northern France that had been destroyed a few months earlier by the Tedder-Zuckerman Rail Plan were now in Allied hands and being repaired to serve the armies of those who had destroyed them.

A month later, the Anglo-American Allies were pressing close to the borders of Germany itself. So much optimism was flowing that some overly optimistic commentators dared suggest that the war might be over by Christmas.

However, the German war machine that had seemed to crumple before Allied might in August and September was not yet through. Though the Allies would not know the full extent until after the war, the German aircraft
industry had actually resumed its expansion two months after Big Week while the USSTAF was isolating the Normandy battlefield.