The Liberation Line – Christian Wolmar
On 7th November 2024 the Milton Keynes Branch welcomed Christian Wolmar back to give his talk “The Liberation Line, the last untold story of the Normandy Landings” based on his book of the same name. Christian explained how railways were vital for the Allies to make the breakout from the Normandy beaches. He set the scene by explaining that a combination of Allied bombing and French Resistance sabotage in the run up to D Day had left much of the local railway infrastructure unusable which, ironically, the Allies now had to restore in double quick time if they were to make progress. Vital junctions at Caen and the dock railways in Cherbourg were especially badly hit.
Christian showed rare images of the temporary rail offloading linkspan on the D Day beaches moving wagons off of specially modified landing craft, within hours of the beaches being secured. General Patten required fuel for his armoured divisions and rail was the only way of moving the volumes required from the PLUTO (Pipeline Under The Ocean) bridgehead to the troops as they moved forward.
To do this a small army of railway Sappers was required and 35,000 US and 10,000 British railway specialist troops (most with civilian railway operating and engineering backgrounds) were at work within days of the D Day landings. The speed of their work seems barely credible today – by 11th July 1944 the first train between Cherbourg and Carenton (50km) had been run. To aid the breakout from Normandy a local branch line of 137 km was rebuilt in 3 days!! As a result, 2.5 m tonnes were moved through Cherbourg docks and forwarded by rail using 20,000 wagons brought over and 1,200 bailey bridges to get lines functioning again.
At one point the Americans tried to use road transport to cover a gap in the rail network, the so called “Red Ball Express” but they soon found that road transport just couldn’t deliver the quantities of “material” required.
The rail relaying and operating effort soon got the Allies to Paris by late July and on into Eastern France but were eventually held up on the Belgium/German border as they ran out of resources and supplies. By that stage the main problem they faced was German sabotage of the rail infrastructure as they retreated.
The railways operated by the Allies not only moved supplies to the front line but also moved 200,000 injured troops in 50 ambulance trains, including mobile surgery units, back to French ports and England.
All in all, a fascinating glimpse at a piece of wartime history that has received little, if any, coverage by historians or railway chroniclers.