“We’ll bomb oil production facilities, chemical plants, ball bearings plants inside Germany. “They said, let us devise our own plan,” Citino explains. “The real question was who could win the war more quickly.” The strategic bombing brass insisted that Germany already was on its last legs, and that they could win the war in six months on their own. While Churchill’s concerns about collateral damage were genuine, “to be honest, the humanitarian debate was very much second line,” Citino says. Eisenhower wanted to drop bombs on France, an Allied country that the British and Americans were supposed to be liberating, and in addition to destroying the railroads, the raids ran the risk of inflicting casualties among the French civilian population.

To make matters even worse for Eisenhower, the Transportation Plan had another, even more powerful opponent-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who already was feeling uneasy about the invasion, since the depleted British army-'they were running on fumes,” D’Este explains-couldn’t afford another punishing setback. READ MORE: What Hitler Got Wrong About D-Day “That was probably Eisenhower’s biggest frustration-his lack of control over the air forces, and their unwillingness to listen to him and desire to go their own way,” D’Este says. You want to bomb Berlin, and instead you’re being told to bomb some podunk French village because it’s got a railway crossing.” The air forces wanted to prove that they could win the war on their own. That might seem like the height of naivete today, but people believed it at the time. “They thought that was the quickest way to end the war. “They wanted to keep bombing German cities,” Citino says. To them, it seemed like a waste of resources, a diversion from their real mission. They weren’t under Eisenhower’s command, and their crews were accustomed to attacking massive industrial plants and German cities, not railroad switches and stations scattered across the countryside.

Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, didn’t see it that way. Montgomery, watch tank maneuvers on Februin preparation for the D-Day landings.īut Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of the Royal Air Force’s strategic bomber command, and his American counterpart, Gen. He probably thought, we’ve got to have every advantage we can get, to avoid a disaster.”Īllied Chiefs Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Dwight D Eisenhower, and Field Marshall Bernard L. “The Transportation plan played into that. “He thought he had to do everything possible to make sure Rommel couldn’t kick them off the beaches,” explains military historian Carlo D’Este, author of biographies of both Eisenhower and Churchill. He knew that landing a massive invasion force and overcoming the elaborate layers of defenses that the Germans had built along the coast would be an incredibly difficult task, and the consequences of a failure would be catastrophic. “Eisenhower wanted to use our heavy strategic bombers, the big four-engine planes that were built to destroy German cities and the economy, and send them to wreck the French roads and railway system,” explains Robert Citino, executive director of the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy and senior historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.įor Eisenhower, the switch in bombing seemed like a no-brainer. Instead, Eisenhower wanted them to temporarily shift to a new mission-crippling the transportation infrastructure that the Germans might use to move troops and equipment to the coastal region, thus hindering them from rushing to counter the Allied invasion force. The so-called Transportation Plan, largely devised by British zoologist-turned-military strategist named Solly Zuckerman with the help of British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, called for diverting Allied strategic bombers that had been hammering German industrial plants. READ MORE: D-Day: Facts on the Epic 1944 Invasion That Changed the Course of WWII

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