The Allied Expeditionary Air Force

On 15 November 1943 the Allied Expeditionary Air Force (AEAF) was formally established in Britain – a joint Anglo-American command that was to prepare and lead the air side of the invasion of occupied France. At its head stood the commander of Britain’s fighter forces, Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who had been designated for the post as early as August 1943; on taking up his new appointment he was promoted to Air Chief Marshal.

War chronologies record under this date that “the Allied Expeditionary Force for the invasion of Europe is officially formed”. This is a simplification that needs correcting. What was created on 15 November was only the air component of the future invasion machine. There was as yet no supreme commander of the whole operation, and his headquarters – Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) – was set up only in February 1944, when Dwight Eisenhower took charge.

From COSSAC to an air command for the invasion

Since the spring of 1943 a small Anglo-American staff under General Frederick Morgan had been planning the cross-Channel invasion in London; it was known by the abbreviation of his title, COSSAC (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander – that is, chief of staff to the future supreme commander). His plan, named Overlord, was approved in August by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Quebec Conference. From the outset it assumed that the landing could succeed only if the Allies won command of the air over Normandy and air power cut the battlefield off from German reserves.

Experience in North Africa and Sicily had shown that ground forces needed tactical air power – fighters, fighter-bombers and medium bombers – operating under a single command and in close cooperation with the army. In Britain such forces were only just taking shape. On 1 June 1943 the British Second Tactical Air Force was formed out of the former Army Co-operation Command, made up of squadrons handed over by Fighter Command and Bomber Command. On 16 October 1943 the Americans re-established in England their Ninth Air Force, which had previously fought in the Middle East and Africa. Its commander was General Lewis Brereton, and its core consisted of B-26 Marauder medium bombers taken over from the Eighth Air Force, together with new fighter squadrons and transport squadrons for the airborne troops.

Leigh-Mallory was a natural candidate for the role, though not the only one. Since November 1942 he had commanded RAF Fighter Command, and in August 1942 he had directed the air cover for the Dieppe Raid – the largest air battle over France since 1940. At the beginning of 1943, after a visit to the headquarters in Africa, he had himself pressed for the creation of a unified command of all the Allied air forces earmarked for the invasion.

The new structure of 15 November

On the same day that the AEAF came into being, the old name of Fighter Command disappeared. The fighter command that under Hugh Dowding had won the Battle of Britain in 1940 was divided: some squadrons went to the tactical forces, while the remainder, responsible for the defence of the British Isles themselves, was given the historic title of Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB). Its commander was Air Marshal Roderic Hill. The name Fighter Command was restored in the autumn of 1944.

Leigh-Mallory thus had three main components under his orders: the British Second Tactical Air Force (commanded until January 1944 by Air Marshal John d’Albiac, then by Arthur Coningham, the creator of the tactics of air support for ground troops in the desert), Brereton’s American Ninth Air Force and – in operational matters – the ADGB. In addition there were the transport units intended for dropping paratroops and towing gliders. The Americans agreed to place their tactical air forces under him only operationally; administration, supply and appointments they kept in their own hands.

Without the heavy bombers

What mattered most, however, was what the AEAF did not get. Both of the great strategic air forces remained outside its authority: the British RAF Bomber Command under Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris and the American Eighth Air Force. Since June 1943 – under a directive stemming from the decisions of the Casablanca Conference – they had been conducting a combined bomber offensive against Germany, codenamed Pointblank. Their commanders believed that strategic bombing alone could break the Reich, and that diverting heavy bombers to tactical targets in France would weaken this offensive. The Americans were paying a very high price for it at the time: on “Black Thursday” over Schweinfurt, 14 October 1943, they lost 60 bombers, which showed that without long-range escort fighters daylight raids deep into Germany were too costly.

To the dispute over authority were added personal issues. Leigh-Mallory was not popular with many airmen – British ones (his part in the removal of Dowding and Keith Park in 1940 was remembered) as well as American ones, who considered him rigid and ignorant of strategic bombing. Neither Harris nor General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe from 1 January 1944, had any intention of taking orders from him.

Its place in the war

The creation of the AEAF was the first step towards building the invasion command, but the dispute that had surfaced as early as November 1943 was settled only in the spring of the following year. In December 1943 Roosevelt gave command of Operation Overlord to Eisenhower, whose deputy was an airman, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder. In mid-February 1944 SHAEF was established, absorbing the COSSAC staff. At that time a bitter debate was raging over targets for the bombers. Leigh-Mallory and Tedder, drawing on the analyses of the scientist Solly Zuckerman, backed the so-called Transportation Plan – the systematic destruction of railway junctions and workshops in France and Belgium so as to paralyse the movement of German reinforcements to Normandy. Harris argued that his bombers could not hit such small targets, while Spaatz wanted to strike at the German oil industry. There were also fears of casualties among French civilians. In the end, under pressure from Eisenhower, from mid-April 1944 both strategic air forces were placed under his direction for the duration of the invasion – but through Tedder, not through the AEAF.

On the day of the landing, 6 June 1944, Leigh-Mallory commanded the tactical forces that gave the Allies almost complete air superiority over the beaches of Normandy. His contribution was appreciated by General Bernard Montgomery, who in the summer of 1944 wrote to the British War Office that Leigh-Mallory was the only airman truly determined to win the land battle. The AEAF was disbanded in October 1944, and Leigh-Mallory, appointed air commander of South East Asia Command, was killed on 14 November 1944 in an air crash in the French Alps on his way to his new post.

Although the AEAF itself never became what it was meant to be – a single command of all the Allied air forces in the West – its creation on 15 November 1943 showed that preparations for opening the second front in France, which Joseph Stalin had long been demanding, had entered the organisational phase. Thousands of aircraft, airfields and men began to be concentrated in the British Isles, which six months later were to cover the largest amphibious operation in history.