Dan Snow's History Hit - D-Day: The Air Invasion

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

In the second episode of our D-Day series, we look to the skies. In the build-up to Operation Overlord, thousands of Allied pilots in heavy bombers and fighter planes ground down the Luftwaffe and destroyed vital infrastructure. On D-Day itself, they supported their comrades on the ground and at sea in roles ranging from reconnaissance to close air support and dropped elite airborne units behind enemy lines.To talk us through all of that aerial action, Dan is joined by James Daly, a historian, museum curator and author of 'Proposed Airborne Assaults During Operation Overlord'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It must be ten years ago now I went to the D-Day commemorations in Bayer Cemetery in Normandy, on the day itself, 6th of June. And I was lucky enough to meet all sorts of wonderful veterans who were there. It was a really huge contingent, lots of men who were at that stage in their, well they must have been in their early 90s, many who were still well enough to travel. I saw a man I'd interviewed before from Special Operations, he'd recce'd the beaches before D-Day, swimming into shore from midget submarines. I met men who'd

been up the beach with the first wave. And I met an Australian. He was a Spitfire pilot during the war. And he told me the most extraordinary story about being in the air that day. In fact, the conversation didn't start too well. I asked him how he'd got here, how he'd got to Normandy. And he said, Qantas. And I said, no, no, how did he get here in 1944? Let me be clear. So that got a bit of a chuckle from the gallery, the team that organised the live feed for the BBC. Anyway, he told me that he was a Spitfire pilot.

He took off first thing in the morning, just before dawn. And his job was an interceptor. It was a very simple job that day, and that was to keep the Luftwaffe away from the beaches. And because there were so few Luftwaffe aircraft around in the skies by that stage of the war, he had a very simple time. He didn't see a German plane all day. He flew across the channel. He saw the invasion fleet as the sun came up, the largest fleet of ships and boats ever assembled then he flew along the beaches as the troops were starting to land he watched the whole thing and then he flew back he landed he had some rest and they did the same thing at sunset two sorties in one day flying across the channel and along the beaches and back and i thought in

that one day you probably saw more of human life and history than i will see in all of my allotted time on this planet one amazing man partly inspired by that conversation today i thought it'd be nice as part of our series on d-Day to talk about the air component. Planes, aircraft, are extraordinarily flexible. And by the Second World War, they were able to do all sorts of different tasks. Some were transport aircraft, some were reconnaissance aircraft. They could go fast and carry cameras. They could take very detailed pictures on the ground, take pictures in three dimensions. Some were designed to shoot down enemy aircraft. Some were designed to drop bombs on the ground and change the course of the battle. And there were all sorts of other planes doing other some were designed to shoot down enemy aircraft some were designed to drop bombs on the ground

and change the course of the battle and there were all sorts of other planes doing other jobs as well and taught me through all of that air activity on D-Day the busiest aviation day of the war thus far and therefore in human history to that point to talk me through that is James Daly he's a historian and museum. He's got a book coming up called Proposed Airborne Assaults During Operation Overlord. That's great to have him on the podcast. Talk all about D-Day from the air. Enjoy. James, thanks for coming on the podcast, buddy. Absolutely no problem at all. Thanks for having me.

Shall we start with the strategic bombing? So there are big aircraft carrying big bomb loads, flying all over Western Europe and dropping them on stuff, breaking things like infrastructure. Is this a sort of key part of the deeper build-up to D-Day, is it? Yeah, I think arguably there's possibly a concept that the Second Front starts before 1944. If you've got 1,000 bomber raids like they had from 1942 and 1943 onwards

hitting German industry, causing the redeployment of thousands of anti-aircraft guns to the home front in Germany, that's already creating the conditions that make Overlord possible by affecting the German war industry by causing a relocation of resources so that in that respect that softening up is already happening years before D-Day and then when you get closer to June 1944 you've got the strategic bombing switches towards targets in France so the marshalling yards that kind of thing so that's important we debate a lot don't we the marshalling yards, that kind of thing.

So that's important. We debate a lot, don't we, the impact of strategic bombing. Did it affect German wartime production, that kind of stuff? One area that I've always heard it was unambiguously successful was smashing French infrastructure in the build-up to D-Day and really hampering the ability of the Germans to move quickly towards where the danger threatened. Absolutely and this is part of the Overlord plan that's put together very very almost scientifically looking at the marshalling yards and the railway network and bridges over the Seine all to make it difficult for the Germans to bring up reinforcements heading towards the west towards Normandy. one of the great things about this is that it was designed so that it wouldn't give the game away about where the landings would take place so if you look at the targets that they were hitting in france they could also have been

arguably designed to stop the germans bringing up reinforcements from the south as well so they're hitting the infrastructure and hitting the transportation network but not doing it in such a way that it gives the game away about where the landings are going to take place and also i suppose it's not just railways roads and bridges but it is destroying the ability of the Luftwaffe to take part in the coming battle for Normandy yeah and i think there's a war of attrition really in the air leading up to D-Day so on d-day for example the allies are able to deploy 11 590 aircraft which is a colossal amount of aircraft the

germans you're talking about low hundreds so it's a clear mismatch where the allies with their air superiority have been able to grind down the luftwaffe's ability to interfere and as we know air superiority is critical to launching something like the E-Day. That sort of air cover is priceless. That's just an attritional struggle, is it? Or there's, you know, we hear about big week, Operation Point Blank. Those are all designed to just have an attritional effect, really, on the Luftwaffe, with a view to landing in Europe, are they?

So obviously it's an ongoing process that's been going on throughout the war where the Allies have simply been able to outproduce Germany. So the amount of aircraft the Allies are able to put up, it means that the Luftwaffe is just generally ground down. And by the time we get into D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, the Luftwaffe is such a non-existent, such a minuscule force that it's really not able to have any sort of decisive effect compared to the allies who are able to almost operate at will in the air.

So they've ground down the Luftwaffe. They've destroyed French infrastructure. What about, as we get a little bit closer to D-Day, is that strategic bomber force able to actually help with the battle for the beaches themselves? Are they able to hit targets, you know, the famous Atlantic wall? I think that's a mixed picture. Obviously, trying to hit some of these targets is very, very precision work. So if you're talking about, say, for example, a battery near the beaches or a Wiedersstandsnester, one of the resistance posts, that's very, very hard to try and hit

with any accuracy because during the strategic bombing campaign they're doing area bombing because they realize that they can't hit anything with that sort of precision so that's a bit more patchy in the actual beach defenses so there are examples where the allies try and bomb some of these positions some of it's successful some of it's not so successful obviously there's a huge psychological impact on the germans so the german troops know that the allies have got a superiority they don't really see all that much of the luftwaffe so even though the strategic bombers might not necessarily be hitting targets in the way that the allies might like them to you're talking about a lot of tonnage of bombs coming down and that can only have a very detrimental effect on the german defenders in normandy and with a heavy bomber force were

they responsible for a lot of deception as well yeah i mean so this effort in the run-up to d-day was designed very much so that it wouldn't give the game away about where the landings would take place so if the bomber force were only hitting targets in the bay of the seine in that part of normandy it'd be pretty obvious to the germans where they were going to land so they were hitting targets in the pas de calais region as well and that's a dual purpose so some of these are important targets for the transportation plan so the railway yards that kind of thing but they also add to the deception so if the allies are hitting targets in the pas de calais that looks like the allies could be thinking about

landing around that area too so it does keep the germans guessing the bombing reaches a sort of fever pitch on the night of june 5th 6th and the morning of june 6th there is that final run just before the allies land on the beaches so what you're saying is that those were probably the least effective element of what the heavy bomber force doing in So what you're saying is that those were probably the least effective element of what the heavy bomber force were doing in the build-up to D-Day, where probably their legacy is probably better reflected in the damage they did to infrastructure and things like that? I think so. I think that's their biggest impact.

And I think that's no detriment to their work at all. I think that's because the bomber force had been built up and developed by Harris and Spatz and people like that, very much with that sort of mission in mind they hadn't been designed for air battlefield interdiction in the way that they were being used on d-day itself okay so that's the heavy bombers and actually we should remember some bombers doing things like towing gliders across uh taking part in the airborne landings as well so it seems to me that-Day, every kind of aircraft of all shapes and sizes

was going to be used. Yeah, it's a huge effort. I mean, we talked about bombers. You've got fighters, obviously. Photo reconnaissance, that's a huge part of it. And on D-Day, the Allies are even able to use air observation aircraft to spot for the battleships

that are bombarding the coastline and obviously you can only really do that if you've got air superiority so they're literally able to say to the battleships effectively left a bit right a bit down a bit you know which is obviously a great asset right yeah of course yeah spotting for battleships so i mean it's just yeah it's a dizzying array of jobs that these aircraft are doing let's talk now about the fighters we talked about the big heavy bombers what are fighters doing at d-day presumably thanks in part to the all the work the bombers done and fighters have done in suppressing the luffa the fighters didn't have the busiest day um i don't think the busiest day no but i think obviously just having them i think their mere presence is a large part of this

in terms of providing cover for what's going on so providing cover for the bombers and airborne forces are extremely vulnerable so they need fight to cover one of the less known aspects of airborne forces is that all airborne operations have that air support plan built in so you know fighter escorts to get them where they need to be yes and there were still some Luftwaffe aircraft I mean was there any much interdiction going on did any fighter planes have to shoot down many Luftwaffe aircraft over the beaches or very little it's not something that comes up in veterans accounts at all really I think there may have been a couple of incidents but it really doesn't come up all that much at all the allies have a fairly free reign where opposition comes and are these fighters therefore freed up a little bit more to try and influence the ground battle and what tools they

have to do that can they fly low can they strafe some of them are in fighter bomber roles what can they do to help the poor old infantry on the ground who are slogging their way forward so one of the things that the allies had developed very effectively in north africa onwards was this idea of tactical air support so lots of fighter aircraft in particular had been almost developed into the fighter bomber so particularly things like spitfires and the typhoon that came in they can fire rockets and cannons. And they're very effectively aimed at vehicles and troop positions and things like that in a way that the bombers can't because they're more maneuverable. And there's also a system where the Allies have actually got radio contact with these air formations that are effectively ranked up in the air above them. So if they hit opposition, they can just call in some typhoons which is a tremendous asset and there's been a lot of research that the biggest effect of

this tactical air wasn't so much the actual rocket hitting a tank for example because the chances of that succeeding were very low the biggest effect there was almost like the stukas earlier on in the war the psychological effect of an aircraft diving low and a rocket firing off there's lots of cases of german tank crews simply getting out of their tank and running away because it was so terrifying which achieves the same result as a tank being hit and even where aircraft don't have rockets presumably can use their machine guns to some effect on the ground as well yeah yeah and i think they can definitely use that. One of the things about the Battle of Normandy is that the Allies are able to operate in the air

above Normandy almost with impunity because there's so little opposition. And it means that the pilots can really focus on supporting the land battle. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best is Yet to Come. Stick with us.

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who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm just recording this podcast very close to several airstrips which have now been reclaimed by nature but RAF Limington, RAF Bewley, RAF Needsall and they were probably close to airstrips in Britain to the Normandy beaches I

mean they would have been planes taking off and landing every few seconds right and this was an extraordinary pitch of aviation activity yeah I mean if you think about those 11,000 aircraft the amount of airfields in southern England that's going to have been almost a major feat of organization to get them in the air turn them around if you think about the ground crews fueling them bombing them up again it's a major major effort of logistics in many ways that they're able to get this many aircraft into theater but also able to support them and keep them going and obviously once the allies capture enough territory in normandy they're able to set up landing strips and i think the first landing strip goes in almost a day or two after d-day because some of these aircraft are able to operate

from very rough strips very close to the the front line when did the first aircraft land in france was it on d-day i can't remember the exact day it's certainly a couple of days afterwards it's very very quick i mean there's a an landing. An advanced landing strip is put in just above Omaha Beach very soon after D-Day. And it's not long until there's a patchwork of very rough landing strips that are put in. And that's all planned for. So early on, RAF engineers are going over with bulldozers and things like that, putting these landing strips in mind. and things like that, putting these landing strips in mind. There's an extraordinary BBC report that I've listened to of German armour being attacked by American fighter bombers.

So the Germans were hoping that they'd be able to sort of hold their armour in reserve and then push them towards the areas where they were needed. But air activity just made that, well, very, very difficult to achieve, presumably. Yeah, and if you look at German accounts of D-Day in the Battle of Normandy, it almost separates the generals who'd fought the British and Americans before and those who hadn't. So those who'd been in North Africa and in Italy knew how the Allies would use

their air power, and Rommel in particular knows that you can't try and move vehicles by day without serious risk of getting shot up, whereas some of the other commanders who hadn't had that experience in the past didn't quite understand that. So that affects how the Germans plan to use their armoured reserves or didn't plan to, as the case may be. So in some respects, the Allied air power is actually causing a real schism in the german command about how to oppose the landings so we've got close air support we've got interdiction they're shooting down any Luftwaffe aircraft that are brave enough to enter

that airspace what about sort of things like reconnaissance and fire control so yeah spotting for battleships and calling in artillery strikes on positions. Is the battlespace networked like that? The bombardment plan before D-Day is a wonder of almost what we'd call now Troy Service collaboration. So the bombardment plans for each beach are put together with landing craft, with guns, battleships, with the air bombardment. It's all tied in and all sort of sewn together almost in terms of what's going to hit where and when these are beautifully put together plans down to the minute and air observation is a big part of that in being able to provide information in real time to the gunnery officers on the battleships and on the landing craft because it obviously gives a

different angle so if you're trying to spot the fall of your fire from a battleship that might be you know miles offshore having an aircraft above is obviously a very different set of information coming through well let's get on to another hugely important part of airborne activity on d-day and that is landing soldiers um troop transport i guess we could call it. Nothing like this has ever been done on this scale by the Allies, right? Absolutely not on this scale, no. I mean, this is the first sort of divisional level airborne operation, not just divisional, but when you've packed her in, the Americans are landing two divisions, the British are landing one division.

It's certainly on a different scale to anything that the Allies have attempted before. And so what does that plan involve? You're such a specialist in this, the airborne operation. It's dropping paratroopers, so men with parachutes, but also gliders full of gear and different kinds of equipment. Give me a sense of it. So there were two aspects to the airborne operations, really. Firstly, in general, to provide a firm shoulder to the landing

area so the eastern and western most flanks of the landings are obviously very vulnerable to the germans potentially counter-attacking when troops are landing and when units are still forming after they've landed they're obviously very vulnerable but landing an airborne division on the flank before the seaboard landings means that they can provide a measure of protection in a general sense also just generally creating a confusing situation for the germans to deal with because airborne landings if you're on the receiving end of them always seem very chaotic when you read german accounts and also the airborne forces are able to capture key strategic points in a very tactical way so pegasus bridge

obviously a very important bridge over the canal one the germans could have used to counter-attack and that the british needed to expand their bridgehead eventually that's captured by glider troops of the oxenbucks light infantry an almost ridiculously well-planned assault where these gliders and the troops in them are trained together for months and months and the glider pilots were able to land these gliders almost to the inch close to the bridge a tremendous feat of flying it shows what almost in a surgical way these small parties of very well-trained troops well rehearsed could capture something very very quickly that would have been very difficult in any other way and you see the same thing on the um american flank as well shortly after d-day so when richard winters and easy company capture the gun battery at san marie

de mont break or manor they're able to do things like that because they're on the spot whereas the troops coming over from land would have had to fight their way to it. So it's using that new form of warfare to really help the landings get off to a good start. And it's interesting because now we think of jumping out of planes with parachutes, it feels a little bit outdated, but the idea of landing troops with a huge amount of precision via helicopters, probably more nowadays, is very much how we think battles are fought i mean that's become a huge part of the modern battlefield it has and i think helicopters essentially are a different form of technology of delivering the same thing being able to land in a pinpoint fashion and one of the things that helicopters will bring now is being able to provide a very

tight landing with a group of helicopters together whereas once you drop a stick of paratroopers out of a dakota they could get scattered everywhere by the wind in a slightly less organized way which means that it's more difficult for them to form up once they're on the ground but on the flip side it also means that germans have a huge amount of confusion to deal with because the drops are so scattered they simply don't know what allied troops are where and what they're trying to do so it's really hard for them to work out what their objectives are which ain't the allies. So that's right so even though it was a bit tricky for the paratroopers who landed in fields and hedges and streams and perhaps

weren't sure what the rest of their unit was in fact the nature of that confusion was that it was as confusing for the germans who were trying to deal with that threat absolutely and um it's easy for us to understand now because we know what happened on d-day but if you put yourself in the shoes of a german officer or even a german soldier on d-day in normandy in the early hours and suddenly you start seeing aircraft and hearing things and you hear different reports coming in from different places that sort of atmosphere really lends itself well to sowing confusion and making it difficult for the Germans to know where to counter-attack. We should quickly nod to those aircraft as well that dropped all the fake parachutists as well what form did they take and where were they dropped yeah so those are called rupert dummies and there are very different forms of rupers the one that i think most

people are familiar with is the one in the film the longest date which is almost like a perfect dummy of a human although i've seen there are quite a lot of sandbag versions as well where the little paratroopers sewn up out of a sandbag they're dropped to the north as well in further along the coast in normandy and in various points essentially to really confuse the germans into what's happening it does take them a long time to work out where the landings are taking place and where the the focal point of the operation is and the the rupets were designed to attract attention yeah so the idea of the Rupets is they're weighted enough and they look vaguely human enough so that if in the half-light particularly,

if they're landing, particularly in large bodies of them, they can easily convince personnel on the ground that they're human paratroopers. And I guess if you're on the ground and lots of paratroopers are landing on you, you're not going to worry too much about whether they might be fake or not. They probably wouldn't enter your mind. So it just adds to this chaos. And I think there's evidence that some of them were fitted with explosives as well. Again, just to add to that chaos and that confusion factor.

And the paratroopers, I mean, they work almost better than you can imagine. The Germans initially send all their armour, all their best units, to go galloping around the countryside, away from the beaches, to go and look for these paratroopers, right? Particularly on the British flank, the first counterattack that the Germans really try and put in, the 21st Panzer Division, who are around Colne, they're at first sent to the east to attack the airborne bridgehead around pegasus bridge that sort of area because the germans initially think that that's the main focus it's only later on in

the day that they join up the dots and 21st panzer are recalled and sent back to attack in between sword and juno beach so this confusion created by the different landings and the problems that the Germans have putting together the intelligence picture makes it very difficult for the commanders to know where to focus their counterattacks. between one place and another. It only really starts to get into action very late on D-Day, by which point the Allies have got 150-odd thousand men ashore. We talked about Pegs's Bridge on the eastern flank of the D-Day landing zone. Over to the west, the Americans, it seems, I mean, they had to do some really tough fighting in some of those places whose names have now become infamous, St. Mary Glees and elsewhere.

Absolutely. I think, so one of the reasons for dropping the American Airborne troops behind Utah Beach was to aid the troops landing there, to cut the Cottontown Peninsula, which was obviously a key objective of the Allies in then capturing Cherbourg and using it as a port. So the American Airborne troops were there very much, one, to help

secure the landings on utah and provide support but also to capture key points that would then enable the advance out and cutting the base of the peninsula and that's where sam meriglies comes in it's a key road network behind utah beach if you look at a map of normandy you can see that if you hold some meriglies you control that part of the coastline. And also we see on Band of Brothers how the airborne troops are able to capture those causeways. If you visit Utah Beach, there are roads that run off from it, which are very, very exposed with rivers and flooded areas around them. So any infantry advancing up those those advancing inland would be very vulnerable because there's very little room for maneuver the american airborne troops were able to capture

those in the early hours before the germans realized what was happening so the infantry landing on utah beach had a much more um secure landing than they might have done otherwise it's obviously impossible to say but you know without allied air superiority supremacy domination d-day would have been a very very different show wouldn't it yeah i think if you take out the transportation plan if you take out air superiority in general if you take out the airborne landings it's difficult to say whether d-Day would have been possible or not, but it certainly looks very, very different in terms of how long it takes and casualties, certainly. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and filling us in on the air component of D-Day. As you say, truly a remarkable example of tri-service cooperation.

Thanks, James. Your book is called? My book is called Proposed Airborne Assaults During Operation Overlord, Cancelled Allied Plans in Normandy and Brittany. Well, thank you for coming on and talking about it. Thank you, Dan. you