<em>The Liberation Line</em>
Christian Wolmar
Atlantic Books, £25, 384 pages
In <em>The Liberation Line</em> transport journalist and historian Christian Wolmar tracks the Allied invasion of Europe in the summer of 1944. It examines the American, British and French personnel involved: first in neutering the German-controlled railway network in occupied France, and secondly the reconstruction of this infrastructure following D-Day.
Wolmar writes with journalistic flare, and is able to make relevant a number of often arcane details. The railways were the key in providing a steady and consistent supply chain to support the Allied advance, offering an economy of scale which the roads could not match. Yet he argues that it was not the railways but a fleet of some 6,000 trucks, zooming to and from the front lines, which captured the public imagination, being the subject of the 1952 film Red Ball Express, directed by Budd Boetticher.
A particularly arresting chapter of the book concerns the efforts of the French resistance to derail the German war effort. This section is filled with plots to blow up track, sabotage the locomotives and act as innocently incompetent as possible, in an effort to delay any Wehrmacht counter-offensive to the Allied landings. Although Wolmar does not acknowledge this, a flavour of these acts and the inevitable, gritty reprisals were captured magnificently in the 1964 John Frankenheimer film, The Train, which follows the French resistance (led by Burt Lancaster) in their efforts to stop a German colonel (Paul Scofield) from removing the collection of the <em>Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume</em> from Paris to Germany in August 1944.
Much of Wolmar’s research has been built around the archive of Nancy Cunningham, whom he chanced upon when beginning to research the book. This online resource “Military Railway”, which Nancy curates is a treasure trove of additional information; Wolmar encourages his readers to investigate it. Many of the black-and-white photographs included in the book come directly from Cunningham’s archive.
One photograph which Wolmar includes shows the inside of a railway chapel, a converted freight wagon acting as a mobile tin tabernacle, in which two dozen service men are crammed, sat two abreast in tightly arranged pews. They face a simple table altar, adorned with mess-tin sacred vessels and wooden cross, beside which a padre offers absolution. An additional soldier hangs from the roof with a camera flash to illuminate the shot. Sadly, Wolmar does not explore this to any great extent: yet the railway chaplaincy provided spiritual comfort to the troops of the Catholic, Anglican and Jewish faiths. An article in the Transportation Journal from June 1945 shows that the army padres operated across vast territory, often holding services in the open air and improvising truck bonnets, oil drums and packing cases to be used as field altars.
The phenomenon of the railway chapel is not confined to the allied armies of World War Two. In Zimbabwe, the Bulawayo Railway Museum preserves a carriage which was used to provide a space for Christian worship in the remote communities of colonial Rhodesia, while in the Orthodox world it is not uncommon on a Sunday to find the Eucharist being celebrated at a chapel often built into a larger railway station, as at Thessaloniki in the north of Greece.
Documenting “Steam’s Indian Summer” in the 1990s, Mark Tully paused to reflect upon the railway-side shrines of those of non-Christian faiths. Wolmar restricts his comments to documenting that a chapel was included in a static, 50-carriage train acting as the headquarters of the 735th Railway Operating Battalion of the US Transport Corps, alongside a dentist, medical laboratory and post office. Still the message is a crucial one: God may be found wherever there are people to seek him.
There are times where the narrative lags slightly, for example where yet another bridge over the Rhône is rebuilt. The repetition of the narrative plot points most likely reflects in turn the repetitive task of reconstructing and running this complicated rail network.
Yet Wolmar shows that the military pioneers of the rail network often faced intrepid advance, unsure when they set off whether the railway line they were driving down was entirely in Allied hands.
Overall, Wolmar’s book is an important work, which places the supply chain at the centre of the story of D-Day. At a time when Europe is again at war, Wolmar sees his prose as a warning to prepare our railways once more.
<em>A group of people cluster around a train derailment near Lyons. Sabotage by the French resistance was the order of the day. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
