Bomber Command delivered 46,000 of the 71,000 tons of bombs dropped on rail centers. The Eighth Air Force hit some French marshalling yards in late April; on May 1 it finally joined the railroad campaign on a full scale, dropping
13,000 tons of bombs. The heavies were assisted by dive-bombing P-47s. By D-Day, 51 of the 80 rail centers on the final target list were believed useless.
However, there were already substantial doubts that the rail center bombings were the main cause of the paralysis of the enemy’s supply system. Spaatz’s insistence that bridge busting and line cutting by smaller planes would be more effective than bombing railroad yards represented a genuine conviction, not just a way to deflect participation in the Transportation Plan, and others agreed with him. An experimental attack on several bridges by RAF Typhoon fighter-bombers on April 21 did not destroy them but left them unusable for a time; this strongly suggested that such attacks would be effective. The headquarters of Bernard Montgomery, the British general who would be commander of the ground forces on D-Day, urged trying to destroy more bridges. Leigh-Mallory was strongly opposed, but the Americans proved him wrong. On May 7 medium bombers and dive-bombing Thunderbolts successfully attacked several bridges, after which even Leigh-Mallory was convinced.
Two rings of interdiction were to be established across the rail routes into Normandy. The first would cut all bridges across the Seine and Loire, while an outer ring would be established east of Paris. To avoid tipping off the enemy to the invasion site, the Allies concentrated on the outer ring first. Most of the Seine bridges waited until the last two weeks before D-Day, while the Loire bridges would be hit only after the invasion. The destruction of the Loire bridges had an additional benefit; after the breakout from Normandy, it enabled Gen. George Patton’s Third Army to dash far to the east without much attention to its southern flank.
Experience showed that B-26 attacks from medium altitude were more effective than the fighter-bombers, although the latter proved useful in finishing off damaged bridges and blocking tunnels. The Eighth’s heavies attacked the Seine bridges on June 4, but the Ninth Air Force did most of the work. Only 4,400 tons of bombs were needed for bridge attacks, far less than against marshalling yards. Fighters of the tactical and strategic air forces helped to strangle traffic by attacking trains. These “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” missions, begun on May 21, concentrated on France and Belgium, but ranged as far as Poland. Napalm bombs were not yet available for fighter-bombers, but dropping belly tanks on stalled trains and setting them on fire helped persuade French train crews that working for the Germans was bad business as well as unpatriotic. Over 50,000 Germans and slave laborers were brought in, in an increasingly futile attempt to keep trains rolling; even so, daylight runs were sharply reduced even where the lines were not cut. By June 9 rail traffic in France had fallen to just 38 percent of the February level. Under continued pounding it fell off still more, and in the most critical areas it was even worse. German troops had to detrain far from the battle area, forcing costly and time-consuming road marches.
The evidence strongly suggests that it was the bridge-busting campaign, not the bombing of rail centers, that wrecked the Germans’ transportation efforts. Although some German officers were worried even before the interdiction strikes began, the immediate effect of the attacks on rail centers was to eliminate French civilian traffic from the railroads. Until the bridges were smashed, the German Army, at great cost, was still able to keep enough trains rolling to supply its vital needs and move troops. Bridge busting, largely carried out by medium bombers and fighter-bombers, was responsible for isolating the Normandy battlefield. The campaign against rail centers was thus a tragic mistake. It killed up to 12,000 civilians and was to hamper the Allied supply system at a later stage in the campaign. The bombs dropped on marshalling yards proved worse than useless. Much, if not all, of the 59,000 tons of bombs expended by the heavy bombers could have hit German targets, with staggering effects on the enemy.
Unfortunate though it was, however, the Transportation Plan was not an avoidable mistake. It was never likely that Eisenhower would override Tedder, Leigh'Mallory, and Brereton. He could have forgone the plan only had he been certain that interdiction would do the job, and certainty about this was impossible at the time. Since the interdiction campaign could not start until just before D-Day, while the rail center attack had to start much earlier, Eisenhower could not afford to wait to see if the cheaper interdiction program worked. Had the evidence from Sicily and Italy been rightly interpreted, things might have been different. But the very fact that until March 1944 attacks on the enemy transportation system in Italy had been directed against marshalling yards, in accordance with the Tedder-Zuckerman policy, prevented the development of corrective data.®
World History
