The Liberation Line E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 564

Beschreibung

'A masterful account of the unsung heroes of the battle for Normandy. Without the valiant efforts of the British and American railwaymen, the liberation of France might have had a very different outcome. A gripping tale.' Giles Milton They certainly were not soldiers, yet they suddenly found themselves in uniform, in a foreign land. But, as locomotive drivers, track-workers, conductors, porters, signalmen and engine cleaners, they knew how to run trains. And their job was to bring them back to life. The Liberation Line tells the thrilling story of the British and American railway engineers who, in the months after D-Day, worked around the clock and in great danger to rebuild the ravaged railways of Europe and keep the Allied forces fuelled as they pushed on into Germany. As territory was taken, these soldier-railroaders were close behind, rebuilding the lines, putting up telegraph wires, replacing bridges and laying track, all the while dodging bullets, shells and booby traps. Tales of extraordinary feats and heroism abound, including how 10,000 men rebuilt a 135-mile-long railway in just three days; the reconstruction of the bridge over the Seine in two weeks while under bombardment; and the use of cigarette lighters as improvised signalling systems. Despite being critical to Allied victory, the role of the railwaymen has been largely forgotten or ignored. In a vivid and gripping narrative, Christian Wolmar brings to life this colourful cast of generals and engineers, without whose extraordinary bravery the liberation of France and invasion of Germany might well have foundered - and the course of history changed.

Leseprobe

By the same author

British Rail

Cathedrals of SteamRailways

A Short History of TrainsDriverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere?

Crossrail: The Whole Story

Railways & the RajAre Trams Socialist?

To the Edge of the World

The Great Railway RevolutionEngines of War

Blood, Iron & GoldFire & Steam

On the Wrong LineThe Subterranean RailwayDown the Tube

Broken Rails

Forgotten ChildrenStagecoach

The Great British Railway Disaster

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar, 2024

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-752-0

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-80546-270-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-753-7

Map artwork by Jeff Edwards

Typesetting by Carrdesignstudio.comPrinted in

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Dedicated to the thousands of unknown railwaymenwho served from both sides of the Atlantic and who deservefar greater recognition than they have ever received.

CONTENTS

Maps

Foreword by Major General (Retd) Mungo Melvin CB OBE

Introduction

1. The Biggest Task

2. Destruction

3. First Tracks

4. The Greatest Task

5. All Aboard to Paris

6. Railways Everywhere

7. Lifesavers – But Not Always

8. Waiting for Antwerp

9. Hitler’s Last Throw

10. Take Over

Epilogue: Peace… But Railways Work to the End

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

List of Illustrations

Index

Appendix: The British members of railway units killed between 6 June 1944 and 1 September 1945 in northwestern Europe

MAPS

FOREWORD

AS IT IS now eighty years since D-Day one might ask if there is anything new to be said, given the voluminous and ever-expanding literature on the subject. Yet British railway historian Christian Wolmar has unearthed the last untold story of the Battle of Normandy and the subsequent campaign in Northwest Europe of 1944–45. The Liberation Line reveals the critical role played by railways and railwaymen in propelling and sustaining the Allied war effort, and ultimately defeating Nazi Germany.

Any army that fights in intense combat against a determined and well-equipped opponent depends critically on its logistics for the transportation of essential material such as ammunition, equipment, fuel and food. In large-scale continental warfare, only the railways have the capacity to meet the huge and relentless demands of military supply over long distances and duration. Without them, the war could not have been fought, let alone won. But all this effort was as much about the men involved as it was about their machinery. In his fast-paced account, drawing on many previously unpublished sources, Christian Wolmar narrates a series of remarkable experiences of British and American railway troops in overcoming a host of challenges in rebuilding and running railways from the Normandy coast through France and the Low Countries into the heart of Germany. As he skilfully explains, whether repairing damaged bridges, signals or track, and on many occasions under enemy fire, the railwaymen performed their duties with a combination of expertise and hard grit. But they received remarkably little recognition. At the end of the conflict, most returned to their civilian rail companies in the UK and the USA, and their extraordinary work was quietly forgotten. Now, some eighty years later, we can learn for the first time of their many and varied achievements.

As an historian of the Corps of Royal Engineers, which alongside its American counterpart played an enormous part in the wartime railway effort, and one who has studied, taught and toured the campaign in Normandy for many years, I was honoured when Christian initially asked if I might contribute the foreword to this essential new work. The Liberation Line deserves a prominent place in both military and railway histories. While the book should belong in any serious reference collection, it also richly deserves to be enjoyed by a wide audience as a fascinating and absorbing read in its own right.

Major General (Retd) Mungo Melvin CB OBEHistorian of the Corps of Royal Engineers

INTRODUCTION

GEORGE PATTON WAS not a happy man. His US Third Army, newly arrived in France a few weeks after the initial D-Day landings, was in danger of becoming bogged down. Patton’s reputation had been built on his ability to move and manoeuvre quickly. Static armies, he reckoned, were useless. His Third Army had just fought its way to Le Mans, a mere 150 miles away from Paris, surprisingly fast and he was anxious to keep up the momentum. Capturing the French capital was his goal and he reckoned that with the right support, he could reach the city within a couple of weeks. The fact that his superiors in High Command were concerned he was going too fast and would overstretch his supply line did not worry him. All he needed was enough gasoline to feed his precious tanks and trucks.

Patton had just achieved the near-miraculous feat of leading his Third Army out of the Cherbourg peninsula on a narrow road under constant threat of air attack. He had been so anxious to get his troops moving that he had spent a couple of hours personally acting as a traffic policeman, directing the flow of military vehicles at a vital crossroads. Nothing was going to stop him heading towards Paris except a shortage of fuel, and that was only because the damned planners had failed to recognize how fast armies could move.

It had been precisely Patton’s military nous that had persuaded General Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces, to put the impetuous and impatient general in charge of the Third Army. Patton had become the go-to man when the military High Command wanted a rapid advance, earning that reputation in two earlier major campaigns in the war. In Tunisia in early 1943, he had taken over the leadership of a demoralized invasion force and instilled a fighting spirit by boosting morale and paying attention to detail. The result, barely a month after he took over, was the important victory in the Al-Guettar battle, the first in North Africa in which the Americans had overcome the German tanks. In Sicily, in the summer of that year, he had led another invasion force with great success, making effective use of the new amphibious trucks that were to play a vital part in Normandy. In both cases, Patton had taken over armies that consisted largely of inexperienced and untried troops and turned them into effective fighting forces through inspiring leadership and improved morale.

Patton was a formidable leader who was proud to call himself a cavalryman in an age when horses were no longer at the spearhead of any attacking army. He deliberately cultivated a flashy, distinctive image to win over the men under him. He carried an ivory-handled Smith & Wesson Magnum and on visits to the troops he invariably donned a perfectly polished helmet to go along with his riding pants and high cavalry boots. His jeep bore oversized placards displaying his rank on the front and back, as well as a klaxon horn that would loudly announce his approach from afar, notably when on visits to address his troops. His speeches, delivered without notes because of his dyslexia, were ‘simplistic, profane, [and] deeply offensive to some’,1 but proved effective at motivating the troops even if some of his officers disapproved of his use of bad language.

His enthusiasm, though, could quickly transform into intolerance. After a shameful episode in Sicily during which Patton slapped a soldier in a field hospital who, today, would be recognized as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, it took Eisenhower’s intervention to prevent his dismissal from the army – though at the cost of being sidelined for a few months.

Eisenhower’s faith in Patton never wavered. And so it was Eisenhower himself who, in January 1944, appointed Patton to lead the American Third Army. This force was not to be part of the initial Normandy invasion which began on 6 June 1944 but rather to form a heavily armoured mobile group that would take advantage of an embattled enemy and sweep through France to the German frontier and beyond. Those two previous campaigns, however, had been short, both around a month long. Retaking continental Europe was bound to require a much longer effort. Even so, Patton wanted to make sure it took as little time as possible.

He had not wasted those months of preparation in England. The long delay before his army was sent abroad gave Patton the chance to turn his troops, many of whom had only arrived in Britain a month or two before crossing the Channel, into what he called a ‘hell on wheels’ outfit, as battle-ready as possible thanks to a gruelling training programme. And he did his homework. He read Edward A. Freeman’s book, The Norman Conquest, very carefully, focusing particularly on the sections describing the routes William and his army had used almost 900 years previously through Brittany and Normandy to reach the Channel.

Patton was also playing another role during his stay in England, one that involved no work on his part but was of vital importance to the preparations for the landing. He was a decoy, set up to fool German intelligence. He was the supposed commander of a phantom army group that appeared to be building up forces around Dover in order to attack Calais and Boulogne in the Pas-de-Calais, the nearest part of France to the English coast. This was part of a gigantic deception operation for the benefit of the German High Command, persuading them that they needed to reinforce that stretch of the coastline rather than Normandy where all the Allied forces ultimately were sent. Patton, as a successful general with a proven record of success, would have been perceived by the Germans as having a key role in any invasion force, which made him the perfect choice to lead this non-existent army. The confidence trick worked, with the Germans massing forces around Calais in anticipation of an attack that never came.

Patton was a general who both loved and hated war, but, irrespective of the horrors he had seen all too often, he always wanted to be in the thick of the action, and it was with relief that, at last, he crossed over to France on 4 July. His men, who would constitute the Third Army, were beginning to arrive there, too, but would kick their heels in camps behind the lines until the new army was officially brought into being. There was a delay because of bad weather and the slower than expected progress in the face of German resistance. Consequently, the Third Army was not activated until 1 August and even then not publicly acknowledged until two weeks later in order to maintain the subterfuge that there would be an attack via Calais.

The Third Army was to be the Allies’ secret weapon, the equivalent of the Germans’ Blitzkrieg, a force that would sweep through France in the same way the Germans had four years previously. From the outset, Patton deployed his troops with characteristic alacrity after the First Army’s initial breakout of the Normandy bocage – the difficult territory of hedgerows and ditches in northern France that made it hard for tanks to move forward and consequently the Allied invasion force had been stuck for weeks. After pushing through a bottleneck at Avranches, the crucial junction at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, the Third Army split into two, advancing simultaneously southeast towards Paris and southwest towards Brittany. The latter had initially been a priority but was now seen as a secondary objective. The main thrust was to be towards Paris and his troops progressed remarkably quickly, reaching Le Mans, 110 miles by road from Avranches, on 8 August.

Early on, the transport planners had expressed their doubts about the feasibility of Patton’s endeavour, suggesting that moving so fast was impossible, but their fears had been largely ignored. Consequently, Patton now faced an obstacle which risked stopping the Third Army in its tracks: it had overrun its supply line. Patton was not a man who would allow such base considerations as a lack of transportation to stop him – the planners be damned. He needed to establish a line of communication to support his troops, notably to provide enough gasoline to enable him to keep moving towards the French capital. Patton knew there was only one way that sufficient supplies could be brought forward. Road transport was proving too slow. The key roads were in terrible condition and were heavily congested with military and civilian traffic. Moreover, there was a shortage of trucks and drivers. There was nowhere for planes to land and, in any case, they could not carry adequate quantities of fuel. Only trains could provide sufficient supplies in good time. Patton’s demand was quite specific. He needed thirty-one train loads of gasoline to be delivered to the yard at Le Mans. And quickly.

His problem was that the railways had been wrecked – by the Allies themselves. Earlier in the year, the Allies had successfully launched their so-called Transportation Plan, relentlessly bombing the French network to prevent it being used by the Germans to bring up reinforcements to repel the Allied forces arriving on the beaches. While the authors of Operation Overlord, the Normandy invasion plan, had always envisaged a key logistical role for railways, they had assumed that the scale of the damage they had wreaked on the system would mean the railways would not be usable until much later in the advance towards Germany.

That, however, had been a grave mistake. As it turned out, the railways were needed far more urgently than anticipated and therefore considerable forces would need to be allocated to repairing them.

Patton was furious that the planners had not addressed this issue. He contacted Colonel Emerson Itschner, the commander of the Corps of Engineers in northern France, about the need for a rail connection to Le Mans from Cherbourg, the port where most of the supplies were arriving. Itschner, although just forty-one years old, was the perfect man for the job, as he knew about both engineering and the need for speed. He had trained as a civil engineer and had previously worked on building roads in Alaska. As part of the war effort, he had been responsible for the construction of a series of airfields across the United States and his current role involved supporting the army by building and repairing a wide variety of civil engineering projects, including the railways. The instructions Itschner received from the Third Army headquarters near Bayeux on Saturday 12 August were unequivocal:

General Patton has broken through and is striking rapidly for Paris. He says his men can get along without food, but his tanks and trucks won’t run without gas. Therefore the railroad must be constructed to Le Mans by Tuesday midnight.2

That was just three days away.

Fortunately, the area had been well reconnoitred over the previous couple of days by an aerial photographic team led by the President’s son, Colonel Eliot Roosevelt. On the basis of these pictures, Itschner came up with a plan using minor single track lines through the forests and fields of southern Normandy; he had quickly realized that a collapsed bridge at Laval on the main line could not possibly be repaired in that time. But nor was the route chosen by Itschner, mostly a rural single track used by a few desultory local passenger services in peacetime, in a functioning condition either. As Itschner flew over it to check on the state of the line, he found that five bridges were down, three rail yards had been wrecked by bombing, several miles of track had been damaged by bombs which had left deep craters, and there were few, if any, watering and coaling facilities available on the 135-milelong railway. The task was to rebuild the line in seventy-five hours, a project that would normally take several months. It was to become what was later called ‘the most dramatic achievement of engineers in railroad reconstruction’.3 Yet, it was to be just the most remarkable of the many amazing stories of how railwaymen, a truly forgotten group of soldiers, influenced the course of the war.

This extraordinary but forgotten feat of engineering is part of a much larger lacuna in even the most impressive accounts of this decisive phase of the Second World War. There is so much more to war than the aspects which are routinely highlighted in both historic accounts and fiction such as weaponry and leadership. Most notably, the fighting men are dependent on a wide range of support functions, from mechanics to mappers, and a key, often overlooked aspect is the need for engineering which, appropriately, the French call le génie. And none had a more important task than the railroaders brought over to ensure the lines of communication remained open for the advancing troops.

Yet, in the index of Max Hastings’s brilliant reconstruction of D-Day, Overlord, there is no mention of either railways or trains. Similarly, Antony Beevor’s D-Day: The Battle for Normandy contains nothing about the role the railways played in supporting the invasion. This is not to criticize these two excellent books but merely to emphasize that conventional histories of the conflict have tended to neglect the key role played by railways, especially in the final stages of the war.

It is not difficult, however, to find compelling evidence of the importance of the railways in supporting the progress of the Allied forces as they swept – or sometimes stuttered – through France and Belgium, and indeed over the Rhine and right through Germany. In Cherbourg’s Cité de la Mer, there is a permanent exhibition on the battle for Normandy which has a panel that provides a telling fact. It reports simply that after Cherbourg was retaken by the Allies in July 1944, 2.5 million tonnes of war materiel was carried through the town, of which 1.5 million was taken onwards towards the front by rail, leaving just 1 million carried by road. There were four phases to the invasion: the landings; the breakthrough; the passage through the Siegfried Line; and the crossing of the Rhine – in each one the railways were an essential component of success.

Despite the omission of the role of the railways from so many accounts of the retaking of Europe by the Allies, it is difficult to dispute the notion that they were the key to the Allies’ ultimate victory. A quote in a US military account of the conflict sums up brilliantly the role of transportation in war: ‘Objectives were set high. In war, transportation frequently has to try to do more than it can. Otherwise it will not do enough.’4 Transport is often the last consideration in military minds but is, in effect, the first requirement. ‘Nothing happens until something moves’ is the apposite credo of the US Transportation Corps.

Moreover, even as transport logistics are considered, it is the roads and the trucks that so often get the credit, despite the fact that the railways can carry far greater loads more quickly and efficiently with far less use of manpower. This bias is well reflected in the 1952 film Red Ball Express, which celebrates the special truck route set up briefly by the US Army to support General Patton’s advance through northern France to Paris. The film highlights the role of the trucks, which was, in reality, far less significant than the tale of the rebuilding of the rail line in southern Normandy mentioned above. Maybe we should not be surprised that the film industry of the most car-dependent culture on the planet should draw the wrong conclusion in its analysis of the logistics, nor that this same industry has helped perpetuate a myth about the primacy of road transport.

There have been, though, a few lonely voices pointing out the fallacy of this road-centric view. An article in Classic Trains in 2019 expresses it best. In explaining how just four months after D-Day, 20,000 freight wagons, 37 ambulance trains and 1,300 locomotives had been transported across the Channel, the author notes that Hitler was bemused by the ability of the Allies to supply their armies: ‘Hitler had said it couldn’t be done – not inside of three years. Hitler forgot or overlooked the vital importance of railroads in war. The Allies did not.’5

Hitler, as the author points out, was obsessed with roads and built the world’s first highways – Autobahnen – paid for by the Reichsbahn (the German railway) on his orders, and he ignored the evidence from the Luftwaffe’s reconnaissance of the marshalling yards and railway sidings in southern England which revealed that they ‘were full of locomotives and freight cars which the Allies apparently intended to use to penetrate his “impenetrable” fortress’. In contrast, Hitler’s ‘own roads to victory became progressively useless as Allied planes bombed the Third Reich out of gasoline, and when he turned to his long-neglected railway system to help him out, it was unequal to the task’.6

Indeed, the importance of the railways grew as the invading troops headed towards Germany and the ports of Cherbourg and, subsequently, Antwerp became fully operational. Without the ability of the railways to transport the vast quantities of supplies needed to maintain and continue the sweep eastwards, the ultimate victory may well have been in 1946 rather than May 1945 – or perhaps never.

One constant refrain of this story is the priority given by the military commanders to reopening the lines in order to restart rail services. As the forces advanced through France, just behind the front line the railwaymen were at work, taking over the lines left by the Germans and bringing them into use as soon as possible. Yet again, this is a story that has been missed in so many accounts of the retaking of Europe by the Allies in the year after D-Day. Moreover, this process continued across the borders from France into Belgium, Holland and Germany. In all those countries, a clear priority of the High Command was reconstructing the railway lines to ensure the continued sweep of the Allied forces through Europe.

This book is about the role of railways and trains in the war after the Normandy landings, and the men who rebuilt and operated them. Inevitably, therefore, it leaves out many other aspects of the conflict. Even so, I have attempted to provide a broad picture of events in order to understand the precise role of the railways in a wider context. The advance through France and into Belgium, Holland and Germany was a convoluted affair, requiring the transport over water of an army whose size and whose demands on supplies were totally unprecedented. Moreover, that army could not remain static, and was forever on the move, taking territory with little time to consolidate its gains. The advance of the troops was not steady. For the first month, the Allies were confined to a small peninsula with Cherbourg, the principal port, at its northern tip. Although after the breakout in July, the advance was faster, and resulted in the capture of much of France, helped by the advent of another army moving northwards after its landing on the Mediterranean beaches, the sheer size of the Allied forces inevitably led to delays, most notably in the autumn of 1944 after a period of rapid advance. Then finally, after a failed counterattack by the Germans in December, the Allies were able to move into Germany, overcome the difficulties of crossing the Rhine and bring about a stunning victory.

Throughout this process, the various tasks of bringing the railway back into use had to be undertaken at great pace, from rebuilding lines, repairing tunnels, replacing bridges to laying out new signalling systems. The account in this book combines the macro with the micro, outlining the strategic issues, setting out the importance of the railways in the context of the conflict, while also relaying a few individual stories of the railwaymen who enabled it all to happen. There are numerous tales of great individual heroism and dedication as well as accounts of the sheer scale and numbers required to undertake these tasks.

There are bound to be occasional errors, for which I sincerely apologize in advance. There are often conflicting accounts of particular events and I have used the most reliable source, and at times explained that this is what I have done. But also, much of the primary material comes from army sources, and at times the requirement for optimism and positive stories has superseded the fundamentals of accuracy.

There remain many other stories to be told about the achievements of these railwaymen turned soldiers. Hopefully this will be the start of other efforts to uncover and tell the story of these forgotten brave men. As David Matthew Wilkins, the author of a treatise on the 728th Railroad Operating Battalion, puts it, ‘for all of the “Saving Private Ryans” and Stephen Ambrose books, little attention is being given to those troops who served in a support capacity during the war. Even today [2002], little scholarly attention is being focused on the Transportation Corps or the Military Railway Service’.7

I have eschewed technical terms for both military and transport matters – the former because I am not competent to explain them, and the latter because I know how alienating they are for readers. Occasionally this has meant simplifications which some more expert readers may take issue with but are a necessity to ensure this book, which I am convinced will open many people’s eyes to neglected aspects of the story of the Second World War, is read as widely as possible. Quibble over the detail, indeed. But the core thesis will, I hope, bear any in-depth scrutiny.

Some might initially consider this to be a mundane story of lines of communication and supply routes in comparison with the heroics of the men at the front line and all the exciting hardware they deployed. However, it quickly becomes evident that the opposite is true. The waging of wars has always been a matter of logistics and this is merely an example of where that played a particularly prominent and even a decisive role. This is not about the transport of goods and vehicles but, rather, the people who organized the supply, the strategies involved in enabling this huge movement of men and materiel, and the ways that these processes contributed to the war effort. It is anything but dull. There are amazing stories of the courage of these men. There are, too, tales of snipers being killed with bayonets, of attractive female spies trying to extract information from railway workers and even the occasional romance and wedding.

Ultimately, the rebuilding of that railway line in Normandy over the space of three days is a microcosm of a far bigger story involving at least 50,000 US and British troops who were involved in rebuilding, maintaining and operating railways across Europe after the Normandy landings. As such, this reframing is absolutely essential for understanding what happened in that decisive battle eighty years ago. As the author of one of the many histories of army units cited in this book puts it, ‘In comparison with the deeds of gallant air and ground force troops, and the attendant publicity given to them during the war, the role of the American Services of Supply may seem unspectacular and colorless. But those who served in forward areas realize how the combat and service forces were mixed together, often fighting side by side. There are “foot-sloggers” who served in the European Theater of Operations who will never forget the job done by the men who sustained them.’8 Their story, hidden and forgotten for too long, is worth telling.

Christian WolmarJanuary 2024

ONE

THE BIGGEST TASK

IT IS EASY to forget, with the benefit of hindsight, that the outcome of the Second World War during much of the conflict was not inevitable.

Victory for the UK and its allies was by no means assured. As Max Hastings wrote, ‘for a year following the fall of France in 1940, Britain fought on without any rational prospect of final victory’.9 Even the entry of the US into the war after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor provided no guarantee of success. Doubts remained even at the highest level. As the Normandy landings unfolded, Eisenhower famously carried a letter written on the eve of D-Day which he was to make public in the event of failure. It read: ‘Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available… If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.’ Fortunately, the letter remained in the supreme commander’s pocket.

There had, of course, been previous setbacks. While the rescue of hundreds of thousands of troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940 was seen as a heroic adventure, it masked the fact that this was a major defeat that could have had a far worse outcome if the evacuation had been delayed any longer and the 338,000 returning troops had remained stranded. At the time, Britain was standing almost alone against the Nazi threat, and in the event, the entry of the United States into the war more than a year later proved to be decisive but only after some frightening reverses and numerous hold-ups. In fact, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated the United States’ involvement had followed another decisive instance of Axis overreach – Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, described by Hastings as the ‘most demented of his [Hitler’s] strategic decisions’. After Pearl Harbor, the might of the US forces backing Britain and the other countries fighting alongside it ensured that the Allies were thereafter odds-on favourites to win the war. But as racegoers know to their cost, being favourite is no guarantee of victory. Even then, the road to the ultimate triumph was long.

On land in most of the key theatres of the war, the railways were central to the transportation system in a way which seems improbable today. In fact, the railways were at the core of the UK’s transport system. All long-distance freight transport was by rail, supported by coastal navigation for bulk products such as coal. There were no motorways and, apart from the odd bypass and short section of dual carriageway, the roads were more suitable for the horses and carts which they still carried than large lorries. Although the reliability and size of trucks had improved since the First World War, when they were little used apart from short journeys, carrying freight on roads remained a subsidiary form of transport after the Second World War broke out and was principally confined to delivery to and from railheads.

Defence planners in the 1930s had long understood that the railways would remain key to the transport of goods across the country and therefore mandated that all military depots and warehouses had to be accessible by rail. Even secret underground facilities needed to be rail connected, with tracks invariably running right into the tunnels, despite this being a telltale sign for hostile aircraft. It would, indeed, have been unthinkable to build a major storage facility without rail access.

A small but instructive example of the primacy of railway travel at the time is that when Dwight Eisenhower was appointed commander of the US forces in Europe in 1942 – later becoming Allied supreme commander – he was allocated a train for his principal travel needs. These carriages had already been used by his predecessor and had been given the rather strange name of Alive. Rail travel was deemed far safer than road transport, especially as Alive was an armoured train consisting of three coaches protected by bulletproof glass with trailer vans at each end offering further protection and which were used to carry jeeps that were deployed for short journeys from a railhead. In the five months running up to D-Day in 1944, Eisenhower’s train was heavily used, covering just under 100,000 miles as preparations intensified.

Given the railways’ importance, it was inevitable that the four main British railway companies, which provided nearly all the nation’s train services, would quickly be nationalized when war broke out, replicating a similar move at the onset of the First World War. As soon as news arrived of the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain’s rail network came under the control of a Railway Executive Committee appointed by the Ministry of Transport and remained so throughout the conflict. By taking control, the government was able to commission extra services for major operations and ensure that the movement of military supplies and personnel was prioritized over civilian trains.

Long before Operation Overlord was conceived, the railways played a major role in several aspects of the war. The railways were crucial in preparations for the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force, which crossed the Channel to France within days of the announcement of war on 3 September 1939. Less than a week later no fewer than 261 special trains carrying more than 100,000 troops ran from various parts of the country to Southampton, operating on a very busy network which, in addition to normal demand, had to cope with the evacuation from major cities of all schoolchildren aged three to thirteen and many adults deemed vulnerable. Ultimately, in the five months of the build-up of the Expeditionary Force, some 1,400 special trains carrying 420,000 men were deployed to the ports. Many travelled onwards aboard ships owned by the rail companies which, at the time, operated extensive fleets of ferries on routes to France, Ireland, and even further afield. There were further major railway operations in April 1940 to support the failed attempt by the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force to prevent Norway being taken over by the Germans and then barely a month later to transport the Dunkirk survivors of the retreating Expeditionary Force away from the Channel ports where they were landed.

This was the biggest of these operations. Codenamed Dynamo, it had to be undertaken on the hoof since the timing of arrivals and the numbers involved were uncertain. The railways amassed a stock of 2,000 carriages and 186 locomotives, tucked away in various nearby sidings and little-used tracks near the ports, in preparation to take the evacuees away from the coast. In order to keep these trains and, in particular, their steam locomotives ready for immediate use, many drivers worked twenty-four or even thirty-six hours continuously, supported by local volunteers who provided food and drink for them. The Southern Railway, one of the Big Four rail companies, bore the brunt of this traffic, a task made more difficult by the frequency of enemy attacks on lines closest to European shores. The Southern owned forty-two of the ferries which were used in the Dunkirk evacuation, five of which were sunk during the operation.

The railway authorities, therefore, were well prepared for the intensive use of the network needed for the preparation of the Normandy landings, even though Operation Overlord would be on a far bigger scale. In fact, the logistics required for the success of Operation Overlord were of a scale that had never previously been considered, let alone implemented. Operation Overlord was in essence about the logistics on both sides of the Channel, namely all the planning and preparation was focused on the movement of men and materials after the initial landings. As the head of the Army Transportation Service later summed up the vital role of transportation, ‘Throughout the late war, the plans for the launching and subsequent maintenance of every campaign were conditioned to a large extent by the capacity of the transportation facilities that existed, or could be developed. Indeed, it is inconceivable that any commander would embark on an operation without considering transportation and its influence on the military situation.’10

These episodes did much to reinforce the awareness among the American leadership that logistics were going to be a crucial factor in the ability to launch such an attack, and consequently, a new Transportation Corps, which was hived off from the Corps of Engineers, was set up in June 1942. The new Corps was explicitly responsible for managing the railways and equipment sent from the US and it became a vital part of the Overlord planning. After all, this was much more genuinely a world conflict, with battles on four continents, than the First World War had been, given that the focus there was pretty much exclusively Europe and its immediate neighbours. Robert P. Patterson, the US Under Secretary of War, described the task of the Transportation Corps as ‘entirely without precedent in the history of our country’.11 Indeed, it was without precedent in the history of the world.

Even though most accounts of the history of D-Day and its aftermath ignore or minimize the role of the railways, the military planners of Operation Overlord were certainly aware of their importance. In February 1944, four months before D-Day, Field Marshal Montgomery addressed 400 staff of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway at Euston, stressing the critical role of the railways not just in the war effort generally, but specifically in order to achieve the successful launch and execution of the second front in Northwest Europe. As Lieutenant Colonel Clem Maginniss later reflected, ‘Sixty years on, with our reliance on the motor vehicle, it is almost impossible to appreciate that in 1944, the railways were fundamental to the existence of the United Kingdom and that without them, D-Day would never have been mounted.’12

Overlord required a series of massive but discrete transport tasks. First, the team needed to prepare the shipment of vast amounts of materiel from the US to the UK, where they would sit idle for many months or years, followed by transporting them to their bases, which presented another logistical headache. Over a million men had to be brought to the UK and taken onwards to their camps to await deployment across the Channel. Then, there was the assembly of all these supplies at nine huge marshalling yards, together with ensuring that hundreds of thousands of men were battle-ready in the days before the launch of the assault. This was followed by the actual crossing of the Channel, not just on D-Day but in the following weeks and months as well. Finally, there was the most complex movement – the heavily resisted sweep through Europe, which had to be backed up by lines of communication largely dependent on the railways.

During the months following Dunkirk, there was little thought of invading the Continent itself. On the contrary, Britain was on the defensive and the idea of retaking Europe from the Germans seemed inconceivable. Indeed, the main concern at the time was shoring up the British rail network and preparing it for destruction in the event of an invasion. Explosive devices were pre-emptively fitted to all major bridges, including the famous Forth Bridge north of Edinburgh, and anti-tank ditches, some up to 20 miles long, were dug alongside main lines which were also protected by miles of concrete blocks to help resist an invading force.

A rudimentary and half-hearted plan for an attack on Germanoccupied Europe was drawn up by British Joint Planners, under the aegis of the Ministry of Defence, towards the end of 1941 but its very name, Roundup, was a bit of a giveaway for its limited scope, implying that it would be some kind of mopping-up operation of a demoralized force. Nevertheless, even though Roundup was not taken seriously, some of the ideas it set out eventually formed part of the Overlord strategy.

Pearl Harbor ultimately proved to be Britain’s salvation. The attack on the Hawaiian port by Japanese aircraft on 7 December 1941, followed by Hitler’s declaration of war on the US four days later, changed the entire course of the conflict. Now, the US could reveal itself unequivocally as Britain’s ally rather than merely surreptitiously offering support behind the scenes. Within a couple of weeks, a joint strategic meeting, codenamed Arcadia, was held in Washington, during which the first ideas for an invasion force were set out.

In fact, the cooperation between the two nations, which shared a common language but differed greatly in history and culture, had been going on for some time. As the US official report into the landings revealed, ‘In the late spring of 1941, a few American officers in civilian clothes slipped into London and established a small headquarters in a building near the American embassy on Grosvenor Square. They might have been attachés of the embassy, as far as the general public could tell. Their name, Special Observer Group (SPOBS), like their attire, concealed rather than expressed their functions, for they had much more urgent business than to act as neutral observers of the military effort of a friendly nation at war.’13 Indeed, their role was rather greater than their numbers – initially just eighteen officers and eleven enlisted men – might have suggested: they created the nucleus of a military organization encompassing all aspects ranging from intelligence gathering to logistics and supply. At first, this simply involved identifying possible sites for future US bases and camps, mostly in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Pearl Harbor, however, had ensured this little task force now had a key role in the strategy for winning the entire war.

At this point, the US was officially in the war and determined to win. Crucially, despite the fact that the US had been attacked from the east by Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided right from the start that the first strategic goal of the war would be to overcome Germany, leaving the resolution of the Pacific theatre to be decided at a future date. In effect, this guaranteed that there would be the need for landings on the Continent; consequently, within a few weeks, plans were already being drawn up for a cross-Channel attack.

The initial plan, codenamed Bolero, was presented to the British government in April 1942 by General George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff, and Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s personal representative. The idea was to ‘prepare plans and make administrative preparations for the reception, accommodation and maintenance of United States forces in the United Kingdom and for the development of the United Kingdom in accordance with the requirements of the Roundup plan’.14 The three-phase plan under Bolero was conceived on a totally different scale from Roundup. It envisaged a massive build-up of American forces and supplies in the UK, which would then be followed by the seizure of beachheads, and conclude with an advance into German-occupied Europe, which was to be carried out within the following year.

However, in reality, an invasion in 1942 was impossible. Marshall’s plan would have relied on considerable amounts of British shipping being used to carry American men and supplies across the Atlantic, which was never feasible. Nor was Marshall’s suggestion that in order to support Russia, the British – alone – should launch an invasion of Northwest Europe as a sacrifice to attract German resources away from the Eastern Front. Not surprisingly, this idea did not go down well with the British command. In order not to create a rift between the Allies, the British paid lip service to the possibility of an invasion in 1943. However, in July 1942, the decision to confront the Germans in North Africa instead meant that preparations for a cross-Channel invasion were effectively put on hold.

If there were any lingering doubts about the difficulties of launching an invasion against such a well-entrenched enemy, an ill-fated attack on the French port of Dieppe on 19 August 1942 confirmed them, and demonstrated the foolhardiness of undertaking such an operation without massive resources. The plan had initially been to capture the port, albeit briefly, before then testing the German defences and destroying key structures. The idea itself was conceived by Lord Mountbatten, whose military performance had already been found wanting when he was commander of a fleet of ships that included Javelin, a destroyer that was torpedoed off the coast of Cornwall as a result of a mistaken manoeuvre. An initial attempt to attack the port in early July had to be abandoned when the flotilla was spotted by German aircraft; nevertheless, Mountbatten persuaded Winston Churchill, who was a personal friend, that the raid should go ahead, despite two previous test runs in Bridport having proved unsuccessful.

Unfortunately, when the raid, which was supposed to take place only during the fifteen hours of daylight, was eventually launched, the enemy was well prepared, probably as a result of information from French double agents. Though the Allies managed to land on four beaches, very little territory was gained while heavy losses were incurred. Within ten hours, the force of 5,000 Canadian and 1,000 British commandos had been routed, with the loss of 3,600 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. In contrast, German casualties amounted to just under 600, half of whom were killed. The RAF, too, lost 106 aircraft, more than twice the German total. In an analysis of the raid years after the fact, Joshua Schick, a curator at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, concluded: ‘The raid was not intended as a practice run for the landings in Normandy, nor did it provide any new techniques or problems to overcome that guaranteed the success of Overlord.’15

Despite the obvious failure of the Dieppe raid, the initial part of the plan for an invasion – the large-scale transfer of American men and supplies to the United Kingdom – was still implemented, and Bolero, consequently, went through numerous iterations. By the time the third version was produced at the end of 1942, any hope of launching an attack in 1943 had been extinguished given the sheer scale envisaged: 1.1 million US servicemen were to be accompanied across the Atlantic by almost unfathomable quantities of supplies, which included no fewer than 1,000 locomotives.

And the plans kept growing. After it was recognized that the invasion would have to be delayed until 1944, the fourth iteration published in the summer of 1943 required a further escalation in the number of men: upwards of 1.5 million soldiers. An assessment of the supplies required to maintain such a force suggested the need for 150 cargo vessels per month to cross the Atlantic in addition to the troop ships, most of which were themselves hastily converted cargo boats. This involved an almost exponential rise in the capability of the US merchant fleet, which had been severely restricted by attacks in the Atlantic from German U-boats. In June 1942, Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, commanding the Army Services of Supply, had warned, ‘The losses by submarine sinkings threaten failure of our war effort.’ A few months later, he reported, ‘Our plans to carry out a determined and effective offensive during 1943 and to strike further decisive blows in 1944 are measured almost entirely by the shipping which can be made available for military operations.’16

Indeed, the early stages of Bolero were severely disrupted by these attacks from German U-boats. Of seventy-four vessels earmarked by the British authorities for shipping material from the US for Bolero in the early summer of 1942, seventeen were sunk before even reaching the US. This rate of monthly losses could not continue, as it surpassed the number of vessels that could be built by the combined shipyards of the UK and US. Fortunately, things started turning around at the beginning of 1943 thanks to improved strategies against the German submarines. New types of depth charges proved effective and radar detection of submarines increased the effectiveness of air attacks. Moreover, ships were now mostly sailing within convoys with navy protection, which made the submarines more vulnerable.

By early 1943, new shipping was finally exceeding losses. The ability of the American shipyards to churn out ships was remarkable and largely thanks to a fortuitous change in legislation governing the shipbuilding industry that had been introduced just before the war, mandating that new merchant ships would be capable of military use and enabling shipbuilders to increase their output.

At last, American industry was harnessed for the war effort and shipbuilding was at the heart of it. In May 1942, President Roosevelt, who personally backed this endeavour, wrote about his intentions to increase shipbuilding production: ‘I cannot over-emphasize the necessity that this objective be met, as the success of our war effort must rest on our ability to provide the shipping required for the transportation of our troops and their supplies, and to continue the flow of essential military equipment to our associates in the United Nations.’17

Consequently, the American shipbuilders’ output more than doubled in 1943 to 20 million tons. This increase provided the capacity to move the troops and materiel across the Atlantic, especially as the threat from the submarine fleet receded. More than half of the tonnage completed during the war was of a basic freighter design known as the Liberty ship, which was relatively small at under 11,000 tons deadweight. The Liberty was an adaptation of a British coal-burning ship fitted with oil-fired engines which were being manufactured in unprecedented amounts. The ship was not universally welcomed as it was slow and had structural weaknesses, but the simplicity of its design and industrial production methods enabled 2,710 to be built during the war. By 1943, the shipbuilders also successfully reduced the completion time required for such a vessel from a pre-war total of 244 days to an average of just 42 days.

Though several other standard types were produced over the course of the conflict, their numbers were dwarfed by the huge quantity of Liberty ships. A measure of the scale of this operation, which ultimately underpinned the US effort in Operation Overlord and the subsequent sweep through Western Europe, was the more than tenfold increase in shipyard workers employed on the Commission programme, which reached a peak of nearly 600,000 in July 1943. Many of the troops were carried in markedly more pleasant accommodation than the cramped Liberty ships. The two liners, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth (named after the wives of George V and George VI respectively, and not the Elizabeth who reigned for seventy years until 2022), were capable of shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic at speeds of up to 30 knots, enabling them to outpace German submarines and therefore obviating the need for escorts. As such, both could make three round trips per month carrying 15,000 troops on every journey, and ultimately, these two ships alone brought over 425,000 American troops to the United Kingdom, accounting for a quarter of the entire build-up.

The accumulation of supplies in response to the demands of Operation Overlord was similarly unprecedented, as around 60 per cent came across the Atlantic to supplement locally sourced materiel. This influx of American supplies was very heavily dependent on the ability of the British to transport them around the country efficiently and rapidly, placing a huge burden on the wartime transport system. All the men and materiel arriving from the US had to be accommodated in the UK, using existing facilities as much as possible in order to limit the need for new construction. As the build-up stretched over two years, many of the men had to remain in the UK for a long period awaiting deployment. In order to build the necessary barracks and warehouses needed for these men and supplies, by the end of 1943, 57,000 UK citizens were employed on United States construction projects for warehouses and barracks.

While the US and the UK were longstanding allies, this did not mean that relationships were always cordial. At first, the strongly unionized British dockers (longshoremen, as they are known in the US) refused to allow American personnel to handle these goods, which at the time were mostly carried physically off the ships, but as the volume became insurmountable, they relented and allowed the military stevedores to help discharge the supplies. Much of the materiel arriving in the UK was not properly marked and vast ‘sorting’ sheds were created at the ports where it was examined, identified and despatched to the appropriate location. Though improvements in identifying cargos were mandated, these problems, with materiel sometimes taking 90 or even 120 days to reach its destination, persisted right up to D-Day.

When in 1943 the focus of the European war shifted towards the Mediterranean and North Africa, Britain for a time became a staging post for US troops and supplies on their way to those active theatres. A staggering 750,000 US and British troops were taken from the UK to North Africa between October and April 1943 to fight in the desert, along with a huge quantity of supplies, with the result that the build-up for Bolero was all but halted.

It was not only North Africa that diverted men and supplies from Bolero. The Allies had agreed on a plan to attack Italy with initial landings at Sicily. As a major amphibious operation, requiring simultaneous landings on several beaches, it was in some ways a dress rehearsal – on a smaller scale – for Overlord. Even so, the build-up was more complicated since the operation had to be planned from North Africa and Malta, much further away from the eventual landing sites than the short cross-Channel journey between England and France. Supplies not available locally had to come from the United States, a process that could take three months. Inevitably, as the date of the landing in Italy – which had long been scheduled for mid-July 1943 – approached, and detailed logistical plans were being drawn up, any focus on Bolero was lost.

In January 1943, Overlord had been given a provisional green light at the crucial Allies strategic conference held in Casablanca. However, despite this commitment, there was still disagreement about both the timing and nature of the assault. The Americans were increasingly impatient, wanting to see the rapid end of the conflict, while the British prevaricated. Indeed, behind the scenes, the Americans became increasingly concerned that the British, fearing a high level of casualties and aware of the logistical constraints after four years of war, were trying to delay any invasion beyond even 1944.

These challenges did little to improve relations between the two powers. As Max Hastings wrote in his account of the landings, ‘Throughout the autumn and winter of 1943, even as planning and preparation for Overlord gathered momentum, the British irked and angered the Americans by displaying their misgivings and fears as if Overlord were still a subject of debate, and might be postponed.’18 These doubts stretched right to the top. While Churchill was committed to the plan, he was fearful of both the outcome and the Allies’ ability to sustain the attack, writing to Roosevelt, ‘I am however deeply concerned with the situation that may arise between the thirtieth and sixtieth days’.19

However, positive news from Italy bolstered British resolve. After a hard-fought campaign, the Allied forces overtook Sicily, and as they began working their way – with great difficulty – up the mainland of Italy, attention could be focused once again on Bolero. At long last, after a series of conferences in late 1943, a firm decision was finalized for a landing on the French coast with a provisional date of 1 May 1944. Subsequently, Bolero became the Allies’ top priority and everything was done to ensure that sufficient men and supplies were available in the UK.

Though it was widely acknowledged that US and UK resources should be pooled in readiness for the invasion, this plan was fraught with difficulties because of contrasting expectations from soldiers on either side of the Atlantic. Most notably, the US servicemen baulked at eating British food, finding the bread tasteless even though (nutritionally) the rations were of equal value. While this may seem petty and trivial, in fact there was great concern among the army commanders that such disparity in rations would undermine morale. Therefore, separate bakeries and kitchens were required for each camp. According to a US Army report on the logistical build-up, the Americans had to be careful about revealing their rather generous soap and candy (sweet) rations. There was also considerable confusion about the differences in language, which was particularly noticeable on the railways (where British sleepers, points and brake vans were, in America, called ties, switches and cabooses).

The weight of imports grew steadily throughout 1943 before increasing rapidly in 1944. While army equipment and ammunition made up much of these consignments, the demands of American troops were far greater than those of their UK equivalents. Given the shortage of just about everything in Britain, an island overly dependent on imports even in peacetime, equipment sent over from the US ranged from lumber and prefabricated sections for the construction of huts in barracks, to millions of K rations, the staple for troops in the field, and supplies for up-to-date medical care, including complete field hospitals. The ratio of supplies to each soldier had also increased almost exponentially since the First World War, both in terms of the amount of ammunition and, in particular, the provision of mechanized equipment (such as armoured vehicles, motorcycles and tanks). Importantly, the Second World War was the first conflict in which the US Army was largely motorized. While in the First World War there were thirty-seven troops for every vehicle, in this conflict – barely a quarter of a century later – the ratio was fewer than five men for every motorized piece of equipment. All this equipment required transport and, on many occasions, rail was the only option.

The American troops had additional and quite specific demands rooted in the need to keep up their spirits. As the author of the report on the performance of the Transportation Corps noted, ‘the American youth is accustomed to a full quota of recreation, and supplies for that purpose were provided at all Army stations – athletic goods, motion picture equipment, theatrical properties, books, magazines, soft drinks, ice cream, etc. The best builder of soldier morale – mail from home – was encouraged, with only moderate restrictions on the size of packages.’20