The role of rail in the days after D-Day

American sappers from the 333rd Engineer Special Service Regiment remove the swing bridge sabotaged by the Germans in Cherbourg.

Christian Wolmar discovers how the railways helped the allies to victory 80 years ago and remain vital in today's war in Ukraine.

When I started researching the Liberation Line: the last untold story of the Normandy landings, the story of how the rebuilding of the railways after D-Day was a key factor in the ultimate victory in the Second World War, I thought I was researching a piece of history.

I was wrong. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that the use of railways in warfare remains as important today as it was 80 years ago.

That was unexpected. As was the extent to which this simple truth has been forgotten.

The subtitle of my book - the last untold story of the Normandy landings - was suggested to me by the author of the foreword, General Mungo Melvin CB OBE, the historian of the Corps of Royal Engineers.

He recognised both the importance of the story and the fact it has not been told before, telling me: “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.”

That remains true today.

Therefore, this story needs to be told.

But oddly, it has not just been forgotten, but rather simply written out of history.

Robert Fox, the veteran defence correspondent of the Evening Standard, put it aptly: “One of the great epics of the war in Northern Europe from 1944-45, the story of the Liberation Line, has been hidden in plain sight.”

Even a cursory look at the achievements of the railway and the men who rebuilt and operated it during the last year of the Second World War should have alerted the many historians who have covered it to a significant aspect of the story.

Indeed, more than significant - vital and essential.

Just take one statistic.

Cherbourg, the port on the northern tip of the Cotentin peninsula, was the main transition point between sea and land for the first six months after the invasion.

And it remained vital even when Antwerp, then Europe’s biggest port, was finally opened up in November.

After D-Day, 2.5 million tons of equipment were carried through the French port, and all but one million tons of that carried forward by rail.

That represented dozens of trains per day - every day.

Indeed, the capacity of the port was greatly expanded so that 20,000 tons per day, nearly ten times the pre-war level, could be handled.

Other numbers are equally impressive.

Over the course of the invasion, more than 2,000 locomotives and 20,000 freight wagons were carried over the Channel to be used on the railways of northwestern Europe.

And around 50,000 men were tasked with rebuilding the railways - a considerable proportion of the two million troops who eventually crossed the Channel to fight the Germans.

But where are the accounts of what these men did?

Where are their stories told?

Why is there no campaign medal for them?

I came across their story by accident. A photograph in my book Engines of War, published a decade ago, showed landing craft directly connecting with the railways on the beaches of Normandy.

My agent was intrigued by this picture, and it was only in researching this latest book that I learned of the importance of this process.

Apparently, Hitler was bemused by the fact that supplies were being brought over much more quickly than expected - and that was largely due to this new method.

Then, by chance, my name was mentioned in an article published in an obscure American railfan magazine, titled ‘The trains that fuelled the Normandy breakout’.

It was the story of how General Patton, soon after the creation of the Third Army in August 1944, had stopped all engineering activity to concentrate on rebuilding a windy little rail line through the forests of southern Normandy.

It was rebuilt to provide 30 trains of fuel to enable the troops to proceed towards Paris, 150 miles east of Le Mans, where the supplies were needed.

No fewer than 10,000 men worked to rebuild that 135-mile line in just three days, to meet Patton’s deadline.

And astonishingly, despite extensive damage which included wrecked yards and downed bridges, the trains got through.

That story is at the heart of the book.

But in many ways, it is illustrative of the wider narrative of rapidly reinstated bridges, often worked on by men under fire, and of rickety railways being used to transport huge amounts of freight.

The main thrust throughout is the people - the men completely forgotten in other accounts of the war.

Many were probably railwaymen in civilian life, drafted in to carry out the vital work of rebuilding the railways having had very little military training.

Most carried guns - and some were called upon to use them. But in essence they were railwaymen.

There was no shortage of danger.

The book relates episodes of when railwaymen sleeping in parked rail coaches were attacked by strafing planes, of rail reconnaissance teams stumbling into enemy territory and having to flee, and even of a ‘well-stacked, elegant’ woman spy who tried to inveigle information of what the local freight trains were carrying.

There was also a major accident, resulting in 89 deaths, that was hushed up for security reasons, as well as several near misses where brave men pulled burning wagons away from ammunition trains, and even of organised theft from the trains.

It was the combination of the two stories, the photograph, and the 30 trains to Le Mans that stimulated me to produce a lengthy synopsis for the book, which was accepted by publishers in both the UK and the US.

But I had no idea of the extent and importance of the story until I started researching it and stumbled across a website in the US on military railway history (militaryrailwayservice.com), run by a woman called Nancy Cunningham who had spent years collecting accounts of what these railwaymen (including her father) had done in the war.

She became my researcher. And for the next year we communicated virtually every day, as she scanned thousands of pages of documents which gave first-hand accounts of these stories.

Certainly, the people who planned Overlord, the operation to invade and take over Normandy, were well aware of the importance of the railways.

They ensured that huge amounts of railway supplies were taken over very early in the process.

In fact, just four days after D-Day, two British officers of the 181 Railway Operating Company landed at the Arromanches beach.

Two days later, they were followed by an advance party of 60 men.

So important was their task of rebuilding the railways around the beach heads that these men had been split into three groups travelling on different ships, to ensure that sufficient numbers to start work arrived as quickly as possible.

The groups had been split up in such a way that each had all the requisite skills required to rebuild a railway line.

And they set about immediately to rebuild a line that ran along the coast linking two small towns - Courseulles and Luc-sur-Mer.

To provide the traction, two small diesel locomotives were shipped overnight on June 11.

They were the first locomotives to cross the Channel after D-Day, and they were fortunate to arrive because the ship carrying them was attacked by a German craft.

After they arrived, the diesels had to be hauled onto the local line by a tank transporter because the system of direct delivery onto the beaches had not yet been developed.

But remarkably, on June 14, just eight days after D-Day, the first train - one of the diesels hauling a couple of wagons - ran along a section of the line which had been checked for booby traps and mines.

By July 4, this became a regular freight service - the first trains to run on what would become the largest military railway network in the world, operating over some 9,000 miles in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

The Americans, who worked separately on lines further west along the Cotentin peninsula, started a much longer service a week later, running for both passengers and freight between Cherbourg and Carentan.

To operate it, they commandeered a series of luxury wagons they had discovered in a yard near Cherbourg, and which still boasted advertisements in German for the delights of the Côte d’Azur.

Try to imagine, for a moment, what these early train journeys were like.

The heavily loaded trains that Patton had ordered to operate through the sparsely populated area of southern Normandy had to make their way through unknown territory.

The men who drove them (mostly Americans) were experienced railwaymen. But they had no experience of the particular types of locomotive that they were being asked to operate, nor of the tracks on which they were proceeding. “Drive down those tracks, and when you reach a town called Le Mans, stop,” they were told.

There was no signalling. No lineside communications.

Orders were transmitted by jeeps running on busy roads at risk of being intercepted by German stragglers.

Yet Patton’s 30 trains got through.

And soon, not only did he reach Paris, but he swept through the rest of France.

Having outrun his supply line, which was entirely dependent on railways that had not yet been rebuilt, his advance stalled and only restarted once the railways were able to supply his army.

Just before Christmas 1944, the Germans counter-attacked with the Ardennes Campaign. Again, the railways played a vital part in stopping the advance, being used to move men and supplies around the front to stymie the Germans’ move.

And then, of course, came the triumphant progress into Germany, across the Rhine over which three railway bridges were built, and VE Day on May 8 1945.

Ever since starting work on this book, I have wondered why this astonishing story, involving two very widely written-about subjects (war and railways), has been so totally ignored.

At various times, I had doubts about whether the railways really were that important, whether their role could have been carried out by the alternatives of truck and air.

But as I read more and more of the (mostly American) analyses of the role of logistics in the war, I became convinced that this had been one of the great missing stories of the conflict.

Moreover, now that this story has been uncovered, there will be further coverage and, hopefully, research.

I’ve always thought that the lack of coverage was down to the fact that railways were perceived as a 19th century invention, hardly relevant to the 20th century wars.

They had, I thought, just been overshadowed by the more exciting events on the front line.

But Paul Woodadge, who runs the WW2TV channel which has featured the book, has an ingenious (and I reckon rather compelling) explanation for the fact that these events have received so little attention: “They were too successful. With most wartime stories, there are spectacular failures, leading to death and destruction, but the task of rebuilding the railways was carried out so efficiently and successfully.

"The railways were then simply taken for granted, as no one thought about just how difficult they were to run.”

That is quite convincing.

It is a great British trait to spend far longer examining our failures than our successes.

That is, perhaps, a backhanded compliment for the railways.

They did, indeed, do much to help win the war.

As for the Americans, their logistics coverage of the war has, inevitably, concentrated on road vehicles because of the US obsession with automobiles.

The Red Ball Express, a stop-gap operation while the railways towards Paris were being rebuilt, has received far more coverage than the role of the railways. It was even the subject of a feature film in 1952 featuring a very young Sidney Poitier, despite the fact that the scheme could not be sustained because it required so many resources - notably 50,000 trucks and twice as many drivers.

The mistake, though, would be to allow this lapse in memory to continue.

The war in Ukraine has revived interest in the railways as an important element of military forces.

The Russians have made heavy use of the railways to bring equipment westwards, and notably their efforts to take Kyiv with massive forces from the north in the early days of the conflict were stymied because the Ukrainians blew up the bridges behind their lines, which led to the attack being halted and then abandoned.

For their part, the Ukrainians have become remarkably adept at repairing lines attacked by the Russians, and the country’s railway system is seen as an important and symbolic part of their national identity.

More recently, the Russians have been building a 125-mile new (and repaired) line to the north of the Crimean Peninsula, in order to avoid having to rely on the Kerch bridge, which is vulnerable to attack.

And as mentioned recently (RAIL 1007), NATO is actually concerned that there is insufficient rail capacity to bring military equipment eastwards quickly enough to repel a potential invasion.

That’s why the story of the men who worked on the Liberation Line is important. Supply lines and logistics are all too often subsumed in military discussions by the ‘bang bang’ stuff, which is more exciting but often irrelevant.

This story of the intrepid railwaymen who rebuilt and operated thousands of lines of railway in difficult circumstances should be a wake-up call to today’s military authorities. This is not history - it is a contemporary story.

The Liberation Line, the Last Untold Story of the Normandy Landings, has just been published by Atlantic books and is available in all good bookshops and online. 

The full version of this article with more pictures from his book appears in issue 1010 (May 29 - June 11 2024). Subscribe to read Wolmar's regular column and to never miss an issue.