James Holland: observation

Transcript context

…nd that’s the quickest way. Let’s do it that way.” So it’s a different viewpoint, but Roosevelt gets that and agrees to that. So, that’s where the whole North Africa-Mediterranean campaign comes from. And as a consequence of the huge commitment to Tunisia, three and a half thousand aircraft, huge navies, two Allied armies in North Africa. By the time Tunisia is won in mid-May 1943, they think, “Well, we’ve got all this here. We might as well really try and put the nail into the coffin of Italy’s war, get them out of the battle. Sicily is an obvious one. Let’s go in there, and then we can take a view.” But between Sicily happening and the fall of North Africa is the Trident Conference in Washington, and that is where the decisions made. The Americans go, “Okay, enough of this opportunistic stuff. Okay, we get it, we buy it, but no more faffing around. May 1944, one year, hence, we are going to cross the Atlantic.” And the British go, “Okay, fair cop. We’ll do that.” So, that is where Operation Overlord, as it becomes, gets given its code name, its operational name. That’s when the planning starts. Serious planning starts at the beginning of 1944. One of the lessons from Sicily to Normandy is that you can’t have commanders fighting one battle whilst preparing for the next one. You have to have a separate command structure. And that’s okay because, by this time, we’ve got enough people that have got experience with battlefield command that you can actually split it. There are very good reasons for going into Italy, not least getting the Foggia airfields so that you can further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany. And one of the great prerequisites for the Normandy invasion is total control of the airspace, not just over Normandy, but over a large swathe of Northwest Europe. Why is that? Because the moment you land in Normandy, the cat is out of the bag, and it’s then a race between which side can build up men and material quickest. Is it going to be the Allies, who’ve got to come from Southern England, which is a distance of a slow journey across seas, and a distance between 80 and 130 miles away, or is it going to be the Germans that are already on the continent? Well, clearly, on paper, it’s the Germans, so you have to slow up the Germans. Well, how do you do that? Well, you do that by destroying their means of getting there, so bridges. Destroy all the bridges over the Seine. Destroy all the bridges over the Loire hit the marshalling yards. The glue that keeps the German war machine together is the Reichsbahn, the German railway network. So destroy the railway as much as you possibly can and make it difficult for the Germans to reinforce the Normandy British head, as and when it comes. But the way you do that, in turn, is by very low-level precision bombing. And that has to be done by twin engine, faster, smaller bombers going in low. But the problem is you can’t go low and destroy those bridges if you’ve got Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. So you’ve got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swathe of Northwest Europe to do that. es if you’ve got Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts hovering above you. So you’ve got to destroy those, which is why you need to have air superiority over this large swathe of Northwest Europe to do that. The problem is that while the industrial heartland of Nazi Germany is in the west, is in the Ruhr area, which is very convenient for bombers coming out of Lincolnshire or East Anglia on the east flats, east side of Great Britain, the aircraft industry is much deeper into the Reich, and it is beyond the range of fighter escorts for the bombers. And the American daylight bombers who are going over are discovering that, despite being called flying fortresses, they’re not fortresses. They’re actually getting decimated. And whenever their bombers go in strength over to try and hit the aircraft industry in Germany beyond fighter range, they get decimated, first, infamously, on the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid on the 17th of August 1943, coincidentally the same day that Sicily falls to the Allies, and also coincidentally the same day that face-to-face negotiations begin with the Italians for an armistice, in Lisbon. But on that day of the 324 heavy bombers that the Americans send over to hit Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where there are a Messerschmitt plant and also a ball bearing plant, which is essential for aircraft manufacturing, they lose 60, shot down, and a further 130 odd, really, really badly damaged. And even for the vast numbers of manpower and bombers that are coming out of America, this is too much, so they can’t sustain it. So, they’ve got to find a fighter escort that’s going to be able to escort them all the way into the Reich. And the race is on because, basically, if they haven’t got one airspace by April 1944, it’s game over. You can’t do a cross-channel invasion. You have to have that control of the airspace beforehand. So the race is on. And fortunately, they come up with a solution which is the P-51 Mustang, which has originally been commissioned in May 1940 by the British, developed from sketches to reality in 117 days. It’s a work of absolute genius. But to start off, it’s harnessed with a really bad engine. The Allison engine is just not right for that aircraft. And it’s not until a Rolls-Royce Merlin, which is the same one that powers the Lancaster, the Mosquito, and the Spitfire and Hurricane, is put into the P-51 Mustang, that suddenly you’ve got your solution because that means it can now fly with extra drop tanks and fuel tanks. It’s so aerodynamic, and it’s so good, the higher it goes with this engine, the more fuel efficient it becomes. It can actually fly over 1400 miles, which gets you not just to Berlin and back, but to Warsaw and back. So, suddenly you’ve got that solution. And actually, by April 1944, they have cleared airspace. And by the end of May 1944, just on the eve of the invasion, Operation Overlord, the closest German aircraft that is seen fighting Allied aircraft is 500 miles from the beachhead. Wow.…

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