Operation Overlord and Its Planning

As a starting point it must be remembered that the military planners tasked with planning Operation Overlord were not blessed with foresight and did not know whether they were under or over estimating the level of the German Air threat to the successful implementation of Operation Overlord.

It could be argued that Allied over – estimations of the Air threat posed by the Luftwaffe did have a serious effect on the Operation Overlord planning. The Allies believed that the Luftwaffe remained a formidable opponent and therefore a serious and potent Air threat to the successful execution of the plans for Operation Overlord. The Luftwaffe in numerical terms still had thousands of operational aircraft, even if before Operation Overlord was launched, the majority of those aircraft were used upon the Eastern Front and in defending the Third Reich from the Allied strategic bombing campaign.

For the Allied military planners tasked with making Operation Overlord a successful reality it was worth ensuring that the Allied Air Forces had enough operational aircraft available to establish air superiority over the projected landing areas to avoid a disastrous repulsion of Operation Overlord. Although the warships that were tasked with protecting the troop ships would carry a large complement of anti-aircraft guns they would have found it very difficult to overcome German air strikes against the invasion fleet without their own aircraft providing cover. Besides the landing craft that were needed to ferry the Allied troops to the beaches were the parts of the invasion fleet that would have been particularly vulnerable to any German Air threat. Allied military planners were grudgingly respectful of the Luftwaffe’s fighting prowess, after all German air power had been a major contributory factor in the success of the blitzkrieg campaigns between 1939 and 1942.

An over- estimation of the German Air threat by the Allied planners of Operation Overlord had the effect of delaying the invasion of France, yet the delays were arguably more serious for the Soviet Union than for the actual completion of the Operation Overlord plans. For the Soviet Union it was an imperative for the Western Allies to open a second front to force the Germans to transfer forces away from the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union had been forced to do the bulk of the fighting against the Germans on its own territory and suffering horrendous fatalities and destruction. Stalin not unsurprisingly kept requesting Churchill and Roosevelt open the second front at the first practical opportunity. For the military planners responsible for drawing up Operation Overlord to over estimate the German Air threat gave their government feasible excuses for delaying the second front.