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Did Eisenhower Threaten Resignation over Bombing Policy?
- By MAX E. HERTWIG
- | December 11, 2023
- Category: Churchill in WWII Q & A
Q: Did Eisenhower threaten to quit?
This question involves the weeks before Operation Overlord, the invasion of France in 1944. The producer of a forthcoming documentary asks if General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, threatened to resign over bombing policy. The specific question: “Was Churchill so fixated on bombing German cities that he resisted diverting bombers for D-Day?”
A: Neither truth nor heresy
The answer is twofold. Yes, Eisenhower threatened to resign over bombing policy. No, it was not because Churchill wanted to keep bombing German cities. (Indeed, Churchill was the only Allied leader ever to question that bombing. (See Richard Langworth, “The Myth of Dresden and Revenge Firebombing.”)
Eisenhower’s threat to resign was not made to Churchill, but to his colleagues, General Carl Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. An adjunct to the subject is Churchill’s persistent concern for French civilian casualties—another expression of his sense of morality versus the exigencies of total war.
The vital role of air power
Dwight Eisenhower quickly appreciated the importance of air superiority. The February 1943 first encounter of U.S. and Axis forces in Africa was at the Kasserine Pass. Axis commander Irwin Rommel inflicted a disastrous defeat, thanks in part to U.S. air power being assigned to local commanders. In his book Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower explained that the invasion of Europe could not happen…
…until we had established ourselves so firmly that danger of defeat was eliminated—all air forces in Britain, excepting only the Coastal Command, should come under my control…. [T]hese great bomber units, with their ability to strike at any point in western Europe, should never be confined, even temporarily, to a role wherein their principal task would be to assist in a single ground operation…. [Overlord] could not be classed as an ordinary tactical movement in which consequences would be no greater than those ordinarily experienced through success or failure in a battle. The two countries were definitely placing all their hopes, expectations, and assets in one great effort to establish a theatre of operations in western Europe. Failure would carry with it consequences that would be almost fatal.1
Defeat at Normandy, Eisenhower continued, would mean redeploying all U.S. forces accumulated in Britain. “The setback to Allied morale and determination would be so profound that it was beyond calculation….” Russia might consider her Allies “completely futile and helpless,” even make a separate peace with Hitler. “[W]hen a battle needs the last ounce of available force, the commander must not be in the position of depending upon request and negotiation to get it.”2
Eisenhower’s ultimatum
The crunch came on Saturday, 25 March 1944. The historian Rebecca Grant reports:
Eisenhower convened a meeting to settle the issues. On the Wednesday prior, he grimly thought through the idea that if he did not get the decision he wanted, “I am going to take drastic action and inform the combined chiefs of staff that unless the matter is settled at once I will request relief from this command.” Many issues plagued Eisenhower that spring, but this was the only one that made him consider calling it quits. It was an indication of the importance that he attached to the full use of air power.3
The chief objections were not Churchill’s. Lieutenant-General Carl Spaatz, commanding U.S. Strategic Air Forces, believed that air superiority would best be achieved by “sustained strategic bombing of synthetic fuel plants and aircraft factories.” Royal Air Force Marshal Arthur Harris also dissented. He opposed diverting his nighttime bombing of German cities.4
Churchill had first supported Spaatz and Harris, but in Washington, Generals George Marshall and “Hap” Arnold backed Eisenhower. Churchill referred to Roosevelt, who would not countermand his supreme commander.5 By early April, Churchill and Harris had come around, and Eisenhower had overruled Spaatz.6
Bombing France
An adjunct to this question is a controversy often laid at Churchill’s feet: civilian bombing deaths. Pre-Normandy bombing targeted German railroad marshalling yards and airfields in France. The object was to prevent the movement of troops, planes and Panzer units toward the invasion beaches. Estimates were circulating of French civilian casualties as high as 80,000. Here Churchill weighed his high sense of morality and concern for his French allies against his public duty. On 3 May 1944, he importuned the War Cabinet:
The Prime Minister said that with the exception of railway centres, the targets were of a purely military nature, and no one could reasonably object to their being attacked [but what] he feared was propaganda to the effect that while the Russian and German armies advanced bravely despite the lack of air superiority, the British and Americans relied on the ruthless employment of air power regardless of the cost in civilian casualties. It might also be said that the British were the greatest offenders in that they scattered their bombs over wide areas by night.7
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said French reaction to these necessary bombings had been good, but Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced alarm. The “political disadvantages of the plan,” Attlee said, “outweighed its military advantages.” Churchill asked Air Marshal Tedder whether he could accept a limit of 10,000 French civilian deaths up to D-Day. Tedder said only 3000-4000 had been killed to date. “He was hopeful that the full plan could be implemented without exceeding the limit…”8
“Piling up an awful load of hatred”
The “Transportation Plan,” as it was known, went ahead in the weeks preceding D-Day. Churchill followed it with mounting concern. “Terrible things are being done,” he wrote Eden. “The thing is getting much worse.” To Tedder he wrote they should have attacked the German armies, which “involve no French casualties. You are piling up an awful load of hatred. I do not agree that the best targets were chosen. Have you exceeded the 10,000 limit?”9
June 6th came and the troops swarmed ashore at Normandy. Churchill’s alarm proved unfounded. French civilian losses in pre-D-Day bombings remained under the limit he had set. The historian R.W. Thompson wrote:
The arguments, heart searchings, accompanied by constant changes of targets, and the inclusion of roads and bridges, continued almost up to the eve of D-Day, as also did the derogatory and derisory intelligence estimates of the effects on traffic, and of the “load of hatred being generated in the hearts of the French people.” They were hopelessly wrong on both counts. The civilian casualties were less than 10% of the worst fears, and were suffered without rancour.10
Addendum: Rommel’s intuition
We were also asked: Didn’t the bombing of Normandy approaches and arteries alert the Germans to the closely guarded secret of the landing site? Evidently Eisenhower thought it worth the risk, but Rommel, wrote Rebecca Grant, suspected:
Rommel nearly figured out what Eisenhower was trying to do. The “Desert Fox” noticed that “Allied airplanes were bombing all the bridges into Normandy, as if they were trying to isolate it.” He began to suspect that Normandy would be the landing site…. To compensate, he moved troops closer to the coast and put them to work building more obstacles on the beaches.
It was too late. By the end of April, the Germans had to move 18,000 workers out of Normandy, where they were building defenses, and set them to work repairing railways…. The air attacks slowed down coal shipments to the plants that were churning out concrete to build defensive positions in Normandy. The plant that was Rommel’s main source closed down.
When the Allied invasion came, Rommel’s real dilemma would be how to move infantry to the landing zone to hold the line [while] he was forming up the key Panzer divisions being held in reserve. The infantry traveled by rail, but the Panzers moved with their own tanks and trucks. Speed was vital. “If we cannot get at the enemy immediately after he lands, we will never be able to make another move, because of his vastly superior air forces,” Rommel told his boss that spring. “If we are not able to repulse the enemy at sea or throw him off the mainland in the first 48 hours, then the invasion will have succeeded, and the war will be lost.”11
Endnotes
1 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 243-44.
2 Ibid., 244. Eisenhower did not mention his threat to resign in his book.
3 Rebecca Grant, “Eisenhower, Master of Air Power,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, 1 January 2000, accessed 25 September 2023.
4 Silvano Wueschner, “The ‘Transportation Plan’: Preparing for the Normandy Invasion,” Maxwell Air Force Base, 25 March 2019.
5 Herman S. Wolk, “Ike and the Air Force,” Air and Space Forces Magazine, 1 April 2006.
6 Grant, “Master of Air Power.” Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 245.
7 War Cabinet: minutes. 3 May 1944 (Cabinet papers, 69/6), in Martin Gilbert and Larry P. Arnn, eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20 Normandy and Beyond, May-December 1944 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2018), 50-51.
8 Ibid., 51, 53.
9 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory 1941-1945 (Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 765. Arnn and Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, 318.
10 R.W. Thompson, The Price of Victory (London: Constable, 1960), 134.
11 Grant, “Master of Air Power.”