Wings (35 page)

For the Germans, the opposite was true. It was one of Trenchard’s maxims that ‘all land battles are confusion and muddle and the job of the air is to accentuate that confusion and
muddle in the enemy’s army to a point when it gets beyond the capacity of anyone to control’. This, as Slessor was proud to point out, was what the RAF and the USAAF achieved on the
road to Rome in those critical last days. ‘Roads were cratered and blocked by destroyed vehicles, telecommunications were cut, villages became a mass of rubble barring through movement, local
reserves could not be moved because there was no petrol available, forward troops were out of ammunition and out of touch with their controlling headquarters, nobody knew for certain where anyone
else was . . .’
⁵

The Allies were able to achieve this degree of disruption through a system of air control known as the ‘cab rank’. Fighter-bombers already airborne on missions against pre-selected
targets were told to leave twenty minutes before they
attacked to await instructions from a ground-based air controller. He would pass on by VHF radio telephone details of any
enemy targets of opportunity – convoys, concentrations of troops, etc. – which showed up fleetingly, close to the front lines, for obliteration. It was a system that would work well in
Normandy and the march to Berlin. It is still in use now by British forces fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

By the time Rome was captured the greatest military operation in history was only two days away. Air superiority had been an essential prerequisite of Operation Overlord, and D-Day had been
preceded by months of aerial operations aimed not just at gaining control of the skies, but the systematic erosion of the German’s ability to recover when the invasion began. Fighters,
fighter-bombers and heavy bombers were all employed in the assault. In June 1943 the RAF had established the Second Tactical Air Force (2 TAF), whose role was to support the army in the field when
the troops went ashore. In January it came under the command of Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Mary’ Coningham, who had turned the Desert Air Force into a model of effective co-operation with
ground forces in North Africa and Italy.

Much of this would involve using fighters and fighter-bombers in a ground attack role. Ever since the Battle of Britain the RAF had been engaged in sweeps across the Channel to maintain an
offensive against tactical targets, using Spitfires and Hawker Typhoons, which had replaced the trusty but now dangerously outmoded Hurricanes. In 1943 the trains that supplied the occupation
forces in France and
Belgium were a favourite target. One of the masters of the art of ‘train-busting’ was Roland Beamont, a brilliant aviator who had fought with
Fighter Command in the summer of 1940 and now commanded 609 Squadron, based at Manston, perched on the North Foreland in Kent. It specialized in night attacks, when most movements were made to
avoid the attentions of the daytime Spitfire sweeps. According to his official biographer, under the squadrons’ cannons and rockets ‘locomotives blew up in vivid yellow-white flashes or
died in clouds of gasping steam. Goods trains were raked from stem to stern.’ The armoured flak wagons hitched to the back of trains failed to provide much protection. In reaching its first
century of ‘busted’ trains, the squadron lost only two pilots.
⁶

The work of softening up the Germans was shared with Bomber Command. The squadrons were shifted away from the deadly drudgery of area attacks on German cities to the far more precise business of
raids on targets in the hinterland of the invasion coast. The operations began in April 1944 and the date marked a new and happier phase in the lives of the crews after the nightmare of the Battle
of Berlin and the Nuremburg Raid. They were now engaged in attacks on railway targets in France and Belgium aimed at stopping the flow of reinforcements once the battle began. There were also raids
on military camps, ammunition dumps and armaments factories in France, and (as the date for Overlord approached) against radio and radar stations and coastal artillery batteries. In the two months
before D-Day, 2 TAF and Bomber Command would carry out 71,800 sorties and
drop 195,400 tons of bombs. The USAAF was almost twice as active, but due to the smaller carrying
capacity of their bombers dropped nearly the same tonnage. They were to bear the brunt of the Allied total losses of 1,953 aircraft for the period, with the deaths of more than 12,000 aircrew.
These sacrifices had brought enormous advantages to the Allies. With the approach of D-Day, the railway network of the north of France was approaching paralysis. Those trains still running moved
very slowly, under cover of darkness, and were forced to make long detours, crippling the enemy’s freedom of movement.

This exercise demonstrated that when sent against small targets (with strict instructions to avoid casualties among the civilians they were about to liberate) Bomber Command could now achieve a
considerable degree of accuracy. The use of a Master Bomber to go in low and mark the objective became standard. One of the greatest practitioners was Leonard Cheshire, commander of 617 Squadron
– the Dambusters – and ‘very learned in the art of bombing the enemy’.
⁷

In March 1944 Cheshire and Group Captain Monty Philpott, the station commander at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire where 617 was based, had prepared a paper on how the squadron’s bombing
performance might be improved. It could already count on getting 60 per cent of the bombs it dropped within 100 yards of the target. Cheshire hoped to better that. At that stage, aircraft tasked
with dropping markers arrived at the objective at the same time as the main force, which had to hang around in the flak-filled skies while Target Indicators
(TIs) were dropped
from heights of 5,000 to 8,000 feet. The memorandum argued that the target should already be marked before the bombers arrived. Also, to ensure precision, the marking should take place at the
lowest possible level. To do so in a Lancaster was suicidal. Cheshire and Philpott proposed that smaller aircraft should be used, preferably a Mosquito, perhaps the finest of the great flock of
aeroplanes that had taken flight from the inspired drawing board of Geoffrey de Havilland. The proposal was accepted by Ralph Cochrane, the commander of 5 Group to which 617 belonged, and two
Mosquitoes were duly delivered.

The new technique was called ‘Mossie marking’ and it was pioneered in a raid on Brunswick on 22 April 1944, with good results. The first time it was used in France, however, it
resulted in a qualified disaster. The target was a panzer base near the village of Mailly in the Champagne-Ardennes region and the attack was due to go in just before midnight. The operation
required expert marking and 617 Squadron, which by now had four trained Mosquito crews, was brought in. Cheshire led the team and the marking was good, so he called the main force to tell the
bombers to begin their runs. By an appalling mischance, however, the controller’s VHF set was swamped with an American forces radio broadcast and he could not communicate the order. In the
ensuing delay, the target had to be marked again. In the meantime German fighters appeared and shot down forty-two Lancasters, more than 11 per cent of the force. The raid was nonetheless a
success. But there
were misplaced accusations that Cheshire’s perfectionism had contributed to the debacle.

Cheshire possessed an extraordinary serenity that enabled him to tarry with danger for protracted periods with apparent unconcern. He combined this quality with a charisma that touched everyone
he came into contact with. ‘He was not shy. He was not reserved,’ remembered one of his men. ‘On the other hand he was not gushing, alarmist or boastful. He had no side. He was
cool, calm, sympathetic. He was impressive. He was patient with us and he was kind . . . above all else to me, he was magnetic.’
⁸

617 Squadron would play a major part in the immediate post-operational air strikes to disrupt the German counter-attack, and on the V-weapons sites that menaced London and the South East. Their
role on D-Day itself was psychological. They were tasked with executing Operation Taxable, which was part of the great deception strategy utilized in the run-up to the invasion to convince the
Germans that the landings would be in the Pas de Calais. Research suggested that Window – the alumunium strips dropped on bombing raids to blind radar defences – could also mimic the
presence of a mass of shipping. After dusk on 5 June 1944 the squadron took off from Woodhall and headed to a point off the Sussex coast to line up with a small dummy fleet. They then began flying
back and forth towards the cliffs of Cap d’Antifer near Etretat along a fourteen-mile front, dropping Window all the while. When dawn came up at 4 a.m., their task was over. As they flew back
for the last time they could see the skies to the south,
full of aircraft and gliders heading for the Normandy beaches and below them, the real invasion fleet.

The invasion of Normandy was the greatest amphibious operation in history, a one-off event that will never conceivably be repeated, and the role played by aeroplanes was of a matching magnitude.
During the night 1,056 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitoes launched bombing raids on the coastal batteries with bombs, and when dawn came up the fighters, fighter-bombers and medium bombers of 2
TAF, and the heavies and mediums of the Eighth and Ninth US Army Air Forces joined the battle. The soldiers arrived by air as well as by sea. About 24,000 flew into action. The Americans of the
82nd and 101st Airborne divisions were carried there by fifty-six squadrons of transport aircraft. Most of the British arrived by Horsa glider, which could carry twenty-nine soldiers.

The memory of the carpet of aircraft overhead that morning, their wings decorated with thick black-and-white stripes, stayed with those who saw it for the rest of their lives. John Keegan, the
great military historian, was a small boy in the West Country when one evening ‘the sky over our house began to fill with the sound of aircraft, which swelled until it overflowed the darkness
from edge to edge. Its first tremors had taken my parents into the garden, and as the roar grew I followed and stood between them to gaze awestruck at the constellation of red, green and yellow
lights which rode across the heavens and streamed southward towards the sea. It seemed as if every aircraft in the world was in flight, as wave after wave followed without intermission, dimly
discernible as
dark corpuscles on the black plasma of the clouds, which the moon had not yet risen to illuminate. The element of noise in which they swam became solid,
blocking our ears, entering our lungs and beating the ground beneath our feet with the relentless surge of an ocean swell. Long after the last had passed from view and the thunder of their passage
had died into the silence of the night, restoring to our consciousness the familiar and timeless elements of our surroundings, elms, hedges, rooftops, clouds and stars, we remained transfixed and
wordless on the spot where we stood, gripped by a wild surmise at what the power, majesty and menace of the great migratory flight could portend.’
⁹

Among the carpet of aircraft rolling overhead were gliders, packed with troops, being towed to the landing areas. Around them buzzed a bodyguard of fighters, protection against any Luftwaffe
marauders. The pilots and aircrews included men for whom the coming liberation was the answer to their most fervent prayers. Jean Accart who had escaped from France in 1943, was flying with a
Spitfire squadron to cover the landing. ‘0.4.30 hours . . . over the Channel,’ he recorded. ‘The twelve aircraft fly in three columns in close formation so as not to lose contact
. . . against a gradually lightening sky, the fleeting shadows of the fighters become sharper as they sweep over their sector in stacked groups, crowding in between the water and the clouds. We
make out the powerful silhouettes of the Thunderbolts which pass above us, dipping a little to check our identity, and of the suspicious Lightnings, which come in and sniff at our tails. It is a
miracle that all
these squadrons can manoeuvre in so small an area without colliding.’

Turning back at the end of his patrol Accart saw ‘in the early morning mist and precisely at the appointed time and place columns of towing planes and gliders appear and move onwards in a
procession more than forty-five miles long. As far as the eye can see the lines of heavy aircraft and huge gliders fly low over the Channel, covered by swarms of fighters weaving over them like
watchful sheepdogs. The French coast appears and becomes clearer as the gliders pass over precisely on time amid the puffs of a few bursts of flak. One after the other the gliders cast off, spiral
down and land lightly on their designated field, assembling with masterly skill on a pocket handkerchief. Above them the fighters provide an impenetrable defence – and impenetrable it is for
the problem is to avoid collisions. Never before had we possessed such absolute domination of the skies.’
¹⁰

The picture painted by Accart was somewhat idealized. Many gliders were whisked off course by high winds or lost their way after jinking to avoid flak; troops were scattered far and wide and
stores lost. The weather was against them, with a thick cloak of cloud overlaying the landing zones at 2,000 feet. But despite the conditions and the huge volume of missions, losses were mercifully
low. Only 113 aircraft were shot down, most of them by flak, a rate of only 0.77 per cent.

On that vital day the Luftwaffe defenders could only muster 319 sorties. Their presence over the beach head remained sparse. It was not until D plus 2 that Roland Beamont, now
leading 150 Wing and flying the new Hawker Tempest, met the enemy. It is a measure of the state of the German air defences that it was the first time in two years of regular
cross-Channel operational flying that he had done battle with a German fighter.

They crossed the coast at Dieppe and the controller passed the welcome news that there were ‘bogeys in the vicinity of Lisieux’. A few minutes later he saw a smattering of black
specks outlined against the cloud, two miles away and 6,000 feet below. With the skies so full of Allied aircraft it was vital to make a positive identification before going in to attack and
Beamont dived down to investigate. As they grew closer to what he now saw were five fighters, weaving in line astern, he noted the thin fuselages and narrow, tapered wings. They were Messerschmitt
109s. The aeroplane’s superb basic design had, like the Spitfire, enabled it to undergo numerous mutations to keep it in service even at this late stage of the war. Beamont called on one of
his two squadrons to cover him, while he took the other in on the attack.