The Steel Wave - Jeff Shaara [60]
Tedder’s argument had prevailed, but Eisenhower was suddenly confronted with political reality. Though Tedder’s plan seemed to be of greater benefit to the Overlord operation, bombing the French rail hubs and transportation centers, including major traffic intersections, meant that Allied bombers would dump their loads on or near French towns. The certain result would be the killing of French civilians, quite possibly in enormous numbers. The cost could be catastrophic, and not just in terms of human life. The French underground had been enormously helpful in sabotaging German installations, and their assistance would continue to be a vital asset to Allied plans. By bombing targets without regard for civilian casualties, the Allies risked creating a new enemy: the French themselves. The argument raged, with Churchill and the British cabinet coming down hard against the plan. But Eisenhower received support from an unlikely source. Even Churchill was stunned to receive word from French general Pierre Joseph Koenig, Charles de Gaulle’s liaison in London. Koenig seemed to grasp what every military commander had to accept.
This is war, and it must be expected that there will be deaths. We will accept great loss to be rid of the Germans.
Within days, Tedder’s Transportation Plan went into effect and Allied bombers began their work. Because of the urgent need to maintain the integrity of Operation Fortitude, Patton’s phantom invasion, the bombers focused far more on the Calais area than they did on the transportation lines behind the Normandy beaches. Despite the diversion, Allied bomber strength had become so overwhelming that even with a fraction of the air power focused on Normandy, the devastation there was quickly apparent. Though the increased level of bombings could certainly give the Germans a major clue that an invasion was imminent, Eisenhower knew that British intelligence was continuing to do everything in its power to convince the German High Command that Calais, and not Normandy, was the target.
Throughout the spring, Allied fighter planes had accompanied the bombers, the normal procedure to protect the vulnerable bombers. As the range of the Allied fighters increased, so too did the number of opportunities to confront the Luftwaffe’s devastating screen of Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulf fighters. By filling the skies with greater numbers of planes, the Allies were hoping to confront the Luftwaffe whenever possible. Intelligence had shown that German munitions factories were already stretched thin and the pace of replacing fighters had slowed considerably. On the Allied side, the situation was exactly the opposite. Enormous numbers of new and better planes were being introduced into action every week. The mathematics was obvious to everyone. The Luftwaffe had begun to withdraw many of its squadrons closer to home, to protect crucial industrial sites within Germany itself. The result was a lack of German air power along the French coast, something Eisenhower knew he couldn’t take for granted. The benefits of air superiority had already proven itself in both North Africa and Sicily. There, the inability of the Luftwaffe to dominate the skies had done much to ensure Allied victories.
With a clear understanding of the value of their increasing air superiority, Allied commanders ordered their pilots to do whatever they could to bait more German fighters into a brawl. But the air forces’ enthusiasm for increasing the number of dogfights had resulted in one enormously difficult moral dilemma for Eisenhower,