Air Power at the Battlefront

Allied Close Air Support in Europe 1943-45

Dr Ian Gooderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780714642116
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136305955
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Ian Gooderson presents a study of close air support in World War II, with the analysis focusing on the use of tactical air power by British and American forces during the campaigns in Italy and northwestern Europe between 1943 and 1945.

1
Operational Research

Operational Research is a scientific approach to the problems of determining the likely effects of weapons and tactics and of deciding between varying courses of action. The OR material consulted for this study was compiled by Operational Research Sections serving with British Army and RAF formations in the field, and in order to fully appreciate their work it will be useful to outline briefly their nature, organisation and method. The emphasis has been placed upon No.2 ORS of 21st Army Group and the ORS of RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force in North-West Europe for, as we shall see, these two units were responsible for some of the most important work on air support.

The value of OR had been shown by studies conducted by the Admiralty and Air Department during the First World War, but its potential was more fully realised during the early years of the Second by the extensive work conducted within the RAF to develop Radio Direction Finding (radar) and a fighter interception system for Fighter Command.¹ The need to analyse the effectiveness of the air defence system also led to the beginnings of OR in the Army, and in September 1940 Professor Blackett, Scientific Advisor to the Army's Anti-Aircraft Command, formed a small group of civilian scientists to study the performance of the anti-aircraft defences and to address particularly the problems associated with radar gun-laying.²

While the RAF adopted a positive attitude to the utility of OR, with ORS attached to all the operational RAF Commands, the future of Army OR remained for a while questionable after Blackett's departure in March 1941 to RAF Coastal Command. However, after the appointment of a Scientific Advisor to the Army Council in May 1941, this post being taken by the distinguished physicist Sir Charles Darwin, the situation was resolved and by August 1941 an enlarged Army Operational Research Group (AORG) had been created under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Basil Schonland, the South African physicist. The AORG was intended to serve both the Ministry of Supply and the War Office, the former with regard to research in the UK, and the latter for research overseas. ³

On 26 November 1942 the decision was taken to establish ORS for overseas theatres and an establishment for a pool of 36 officers, on the basis of six for each of an estimated six theatres of war, was planned. It is interesting that there was considerable War Office concern at this stage about whether as many as 36 suitably qualified officers could be found, whereas by 1945 a total of no less than 120 officers had served with Army ORS.⁴

The first ORS sent overseas was posted to the Middle East in the summer of 1942 and attached to General Headquarters in Cairo. It encountered the problem that all subsequent ORS had to contend with — the reluctance of operational commands to allow civilian scientists, even in uniform, to conduct work in the battle zone. When it was suggested that the section investigate the effectiveness of anti-tank guns, the response from Eighth Army was that this would necessitate study in the battle area, and that no officer from General Headquarters, with the exception of the Commander-in-Chief, could visit the battle area. ⁵

Nevertheless, ORS continued to be prepared for service overseas and on 24 May 1943 No.1 ORS was established and mobilised the following month, eventually to serve in Italy, On 14 August 1943 No.2 ORS was formed, for eventual service with 21st Army Group in North-West Europe. These ORS attached to armies in the field were intended to provide scientific assistance to the Commander in four respects:

1. Advice and assistance in the solving of technical problems arising during operations and advice as to the best use of available equipment.
2. Analysis of the performance of weapons and equipment in battle.
3. Assistance with, and analysis of, trials of British and captured enemy weapons and equipment.
4. Assistance with any problems which might arise requiring a scientific approach to their solution.

The composition of ORS varied according to theatre, but there were important features common to all. One was that the ORS was to be located near to Army headquarters so that it could receive orders directly and that its role might become familiar to the headquarters staff. Each ORS was led by a scientist, normally a Deputy Director of Scientific Research, who was accorded the rank of Colonel in order to have the necessary military status to tender advice to the headquarters staff. An ORS usually contained at least one competent statistician and, when manpower permitted, a number of NCOs (Sergeants) for the task of data collection together with an adequate clerical staff. A basic, far from lavish, scale of transport was also allocated to enable the ORS to operate as a self-contained unit.⁶

While the Army was organising its OR sections for service overseas, so too was the RAF. The ORS attached to RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force in North-West Europe originated in a decision taken in 1942 to create an ORS for Army Co-operation Command, at that time the only RAF formation responsible for practising the weapons and methods of close air support with the Army in the UK. The ORS consisted of two scientific officers and six junior scientific officers, all of whom had been recruited from ORS Fighter Command, with Mr. Graham, another physicist, appointed as officer-in-charge. Close contact with the AORG, particularly with regard to air support problems, was maintained from the outset.⁷ In June 1943, Army Co-operation Command was redesignated the Tactical Air Force (TAF), and by the end of the year ORS TAF, as the ORS had become known, was absorbed by the new ORS Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) created in December under the direction of Mr. Larnder of ORS Fighter Command who was appointed Scientific Adviser (Operational Research) or SA(OR).

The ORS AEAF was a self-contained branch of the Air Staff at Headquarters AEAF and had two main functions:

1. Advise the Air Commander-in-Chief on scientific matters affecting operations,
2. Carry out investigations and analyses for the various Headquarters branches.⁸

Anxious to maintain the identity of an ORS TAF which would be concerned with problems affecting air-to-ground operations, Larnder formed a section which, after the Tactical Air Force had been redesignated the 2nd Tactical Air Force at the end of 1943, became known as ORS 2nd TAF. This was composed of the original ORS TAF members and remained under the control of Graham. Two members of this unit were attached to each of the composite groups within 2nd TAF, while Graham with one assistant was occupied mostly at 2nd TAF's main Headquarters. Scientists attached to ORS AEAF were granted honorary commissions, Larnder being accorded the rank of Group Captain and Graham, commanding ORS 2nd TAF, that of Wing Commander. When serving overseas the ORS personnel wore RAF uniform.⁹

While both the British Army and the RAF had ORS ready to accompany their forces during the liberation of North-West Europe, it would actually be the former's No.2 ORS that carried out the most extensive work on air support. This came about as the result of accident rather than design, and to understand why it is useful to have an idea of how No.2 ORS worked. There are two important factors to consider. First, the size of the Section throughout the campaign was always a factor limiting the amount of work that could be done. Before D-Day it consisted of five officers, three drivers, a clerk, one jeep and two 15 cwt. trucks. When an increase was made, this only amounted to three more officers, an extra jeep, a staff car, and a few more Other Ranks. Second, the work was not carried out by the Section systematically, since it had no clear brief as to what aspects of warfare to investigate. As we shall see, No.2 ORS exercised remarkable initiative regarding the selection of problems to be investigated.

The Section did not go to Normandy as a unit but in instalments. One member, Lieutenant-Colonel Johnson, went to France on D-Day as Radar Adviser to the Anti-Aircraft Brigade, spending the following three weeks evaluating its equipment. Next to reach Normandy was Major Fairlie of the Royal Canadian Artillery who was attached to the Special Observer Party (SOP), a group formed shortly before the landings to study the effects of different forms of attack on the German coastal defences. The SOP spent two weeks working among the beach defences, and one early result of this work was that:

Whatever induced the Germans to give in, it was not physical destruction of their fortifications, for of this there was little or none, despite the huge naval and air bombardments.¹⁰

This indicated that the decisive factor had been the 'morale effect' of bombardment. This was a term used rather loosely in contemporary OR to refer to the prevention of troops under air or artillery bombardment from manning their weapons, and from moving and functioning effectively not only during the bombardment but for varying periods of time afterwards. It was a phenomenon never properly defined, not fully understood, and impossible to quantify. The SOP made no attempt to evaluate it, being concerned only with the physical effects of bombardment, and No.2 ORS did not address the problem until August 1944. The historian of the Section observed:

To assess the morale effect of a bombardment was...to attempt an utterly new analysis; though there were many who had suggested doing it, there was no one who had ever tried.¹¹

No.2 ORS took shape in Normandy towards the end of June when the advance party of two officers (Majors Swann and Sargeaunt), a truck, a jeep, and two drivers landed. This was a week later than intended due to an inauspicious start — the Landing Craft transporting them to France had become separated from its convoy, wandered far off course, and was only saved from entering the Atlantic by observing the course of a German V.1 flying bomb passing overhead. After landing eventually in the American sector, the Section moved to Cruelly, the location of British Second Army Headquarters.

It soon became apparent, however, that the staff of Second Army had little idea of how to employ the ORS, and on its own initiative the Section began to visit the battlefront to assess where it might most usefully contribute. By August the Section had completed surveys into mortar location and the nature of tank casualties, both of which proved valuable in developing appropriate tactics and organisation, in addition to initiating work on such diverse problems as the reliability of the infantry's PIAT (Projector Infantry Anti Tank) anti-tank weapon, which was often fired at German tanks but rarely hit them, and that of the Normandy dust which was rapidly wearing out fighter aircraft engines at the RAF's forward airstrips. The somewhat haphazard nature of OR at this stage is shown by the Section initiating work on these problems without any directives from higher authority, and by the fact that shortly after they had done so the dust problem was taken over, appropriately, by the RAF, and that of the PIAT by the Army's Weapons Technical Staff.¹²

In the meantime, the Section had embarked, equally by chance, upon its extensive work on close air support — initially concentrating on the attacks by heavy bombers. On 7 July 1944, for Operation CHARNWOOD, RAF Bomber Command attacked the northern outskirts of Caen, and nothing shows the spirit of OR and the initiative exercised by the Section better than their own decision to investigate this operation:

it occurred to us to wonder what this immense effort had...achieved. Conflicting stories abounded, and neither the RAF nor the Army seemed to have any clear idea. Without any directive from above and, with the object more than anything else of satisfying our own curiosity, we set to work to find out what had really happened.¹³

Three members of the Section spent several days amid the ruins of Caen, interviewing troops who had taken part and civilians. Their Report (No.5) was forwarded to 21st Army Group Headquarters, but the OR team were far from proud of it and only too aware of its limitations. In their view it was merely a study of the physical effects of the bombing, no attempt having been made to study morale effects or conduct prisoner-of-war interrogation or to assess the effect of the bombing on the progress of the British troops, while its conclusions were too indefinite and negative.¹⁴

Nevertheless, the report was received with interest at 21st Army Group, and particularly by Brigadier Schonland, by then its Scientific Adviser. Some two weeks later, at the start of Operation GOODWOOD, Schonland sent an urgent telegram to No.2 ORS asking them to report on that and all subsequent heavy bombing operations. Report No.6, on GOODWOOD, was equally unsatisfactory in the opinion of the Section. They felt that they had started on the work too late and that the battle had been too large for their small team to cover adequately, while many of the bombed areas remained in German hands.¹⁵

In the analyses conducted after GOODWOOD, the ORS tried to ensure that work started in good time, that Operation Orders were examined, and that the course of the battle was closely monitored. It was this work on heavy bombing that set the pattern for most of the Section's subsequent work in the campaign:

our work developed into the search for means to reconstruct and analyse particular battles. Once the missing elements of the battle had been supplied, suggestions for improvement followed; once, for instance, the real value of a particular air attack had been determined, it was not difficult to say whether another type of attack would have been better.¹⁶

Between 30 July and 20 August 1944 No.2 ORS c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables and Diagrams
• Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1 Operational Research
• 2 Flawed Instruments: The Allied Air Support Systems, 1943-45
• 3 The Fighter-Bomber Weapon, 1943-45
• 4 The Flying Spearhead: Close Support for Allied Mobile and Airborne Operations
• 5 Allied Fighter-Bombers versus German Armoured Forces: Myths and Realities
• 6 Heavy and Medium Bombers in the Close Support Role
• 7 Fighter-Bombers and Artillery: A Comparison of Effectiveness
• 8 The Cost Effectiveness of Close Air Support: A Comparison with Armed Reconnaissance
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Note on Source Material
• Bibliography
• Index