3rd April, 2024 in Military

The attack on Épinal

By Ghee Bowman

And so, in the early morning of 11 May, 973 heavy bombers took off in fine weather from airfields across East Anglia. Their mission was Operation 350: to fly 500 miles across France to attack railway marshalling yards in Mulhouse, Épinal, Belfort and Chaumont, and an airfield at Orléans.¹

The official file states that the target at Épinal was ‘bounded on all sides by a heavily built-up area, residential on the W, and industrial on the N and E’.² The B-24 Liberators that attacked Épinal knew there was housing near the target; they were prepared for ‘collateral damage’. It is not clear, however, whether they knew there was a large POW camp nearby. The target file doesn’t mention it, but Military Intelligence was almost certainly aware of its existence. By July that year, a document listing POW camps and circulated to RAF stations included the following entry for Épinal: ‘Fort Military Building on summit of hill, NW of town in fairly large area. Surrounded by walls. Large 3 storey building.’³

Whether that information was available in May, and whether it was shared with the American cousins, remains unclear. In fact, neither the British nor the US government seemed very concerned about the safety of their prisoners when it came to military choices. During the period from November 1943 to the end of the war, thirty camps in Germany and occupied France were bombed or machine gunned by the Allied air forces, leading to the deaths of around 1,000 POWs.⁴ This was despite the Red Cross’s request at the start of the war that belligerents tell each other the locations of POW camps to avoid precisely this occurrence. For ‘reasons of security’, this never happened.⁵

At 15.41 on a sunny afternoon, the sixty-eight Liberator planes of the 96th Wing reached Épinal, each carrying five 1,000lb bombs, flying in from the west, escorted by Thunderbolt, Lightning and Mustang fighter planes. Their operation report states that ‘opposition was slight’:

68 B-24s dropped 336 x 1000 GP – 168 tons – between 1541 and 1542 hours from 16,000 to 19,000 feet. At least four groups of bursts fell in the target area and hits were seen on the Goods Depot, the Passenger Station, a long warehouse type building just south of the Goods Depot and wagons in the Station sidings. The storage sidings were also hit. Many buildings in the residential section on the east and west sides were hit by at least seven groups of bombs causing many fires.⁶

Fig. 10 – from the French authorities – shows the distribution of bombs that fell on Épinal. This map and the Allies’ narrative report reveal that aerial bombardment in 1944 was not a precise science, and a so-called ‘precision raid’ like this could end up – to those on the ground – feeling like an area attack. The bombers flew over the barracks at Chantraine before they reached the railway and several planes dropped their bombs too early, in what one authority called ‘bad approaches’ and against the aim of a ‘concentrated bombing pattern’.⁷ The French map, which names roads and buildings, shows that thirty bombs fell on or just outside the barracks housing 3,000 Indian prisoners and their guards. On the other missions that day, the bombing results were assessed to be ‘fair to good’ at Mulhouse, ‘fair’ at Belfort and ‘good’ at Épinal.⁸ Of the three, Épinal was therefore deemed to be the most successful.

Extracted from The Great Épinal Escape by Ghee Bowman

[1] Freeman, The Mighty Eighth, p. 141; ‘Report on Operation 350: Mulhouse, Epinal, Belfort and Chaumont Marshalling Yards and Orleans/Bricy Airfield, 11 May (Am)’, The National Archives, Kew, England, AIR 40/625.

[2] ‘Target File for Epinal’, 1944, The National Archives, Kew, England, AIR 51/217/943.

[3] Monthly Statement of Camp Locations (by Areas) of Imperial Prisoners of War, July 1944, forwarded by Sebastian Cox, ‘Email from Air Historical Branch’, 14 October 2016.

[4] Report of the ICRC, p. 316.

[5] Report of the ICRC, p. 306.

[6] Baldoli and Knapp, Forgotten Blitzes, p. 34.

[7] Freeman, The Mighty Eighth, pp. 140–41.

[8] ‘Report on Operation 350’, the National Archives, Kew, England, AIR 40/625.