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Coningham's Marauders and other tac tical bombers had helped by blasting Nazi airfields in France; but up to D-day the strategic forces' drumbeat of destruction all over Hitler's Europe had held the spotlight. Last week the heavies were still hammering at the inner fortress (Hanover, Madgeburg, Brunswick, Ludwigshafen, etc.) in 1,000-plus bomber raids. But, with invasion, the spotlight had shifted to the agile, swooping air forces that worked with the ground armies. The heavy bombers had softened up the Reich with body blows—now it was tactical's job to help the Allied armor and infantry deliver the knockout punch to the jaw.
A Few Chores. Before invasion, Coningham's units had some inconspicuous but important chores to do, of which one was reconnaissance. In April and May, his reconnaissance crews roamed the beaches and the Channel between Cher bourg and Le Havre, filming every land mark, prying out hidden gun positions, charting the ugly underwater obstacles which lay bare at low tide. The Nazis' radiolocation positions on the coast were ferreted out (partly, of course, through Intelligence) and smashed so thoroughly by attack bombers that the defenders were unaware of the approaching invasion fleet almost up to H-hour.
Another chore was what is called, in tactical air manuals, "isolation of the battlefield." In theory, this means cutting the enemy's communication lines around the battlefield perimeter so that he is unable to supply or reinforce his units in the combat area.
In practice, that job has never been done perfectly. The U.S. Twelfth Air Force in Italy came creditably close to perfection with the "Operation Strangle" (TIME, May 8) designed by Major General John K. ("Uncle Joe") Cannon—long since ranked by insiders as one of the world's great air tacticians. The strangle paralyzed Nazi rail transport above Rome, paved the way for breaking the Anzio and Cassino stalemates.
In France, Coningham's air forces also did a crack job of "isolation" with their bridge work on the Seine and the Loire. Among the widest and deepest in France, these two rivers are only 70 miles apart between Paris and Orléans. Diverging to the west, they form a wedge enclosing most of Normandy and all of Brittany. If General Eisenhower chose the coastal part of the wedge for his invasion—as he did—the Germans counted on some 60 rail and highway bridges across the two rivers for bringing reinforcements into the wedge from elsewhere in France.
But on D-minus-10, Allied tactical bombers (including some planes and crews borrowed from Tooey Spaatz) began a systematic working-over of the bridges, destroyed or made unserviceable about 75% of them. Though not a perfect seal-off, it made hash of Nazi plans for troop and supply movements. Making due allowance for dissension and overcaution in the Nazi command, that bridge-breaking may have been the main reason why the Germans never launched an all-out counterattack to drive the invaders into the sea.