[tcolvin]

Rod.


You said; "While I suspect that many would concede that CAS could have been better, it was just a component of the whole combined force."
No. It was not "just" a component. It was an "vital" part of all-arms which relied for success on integration of a) infantry b) artillery c) armour d) air and e) logistics, and a half decent performance by each one.
The British army had superb infantry, artillery and logistics in 1944/45. But armour and air were deficient, and for the same reasons. Neither would subordinate itself to the infantry/artillery, and both were wrongly equipped - with Typhoons/Spitfires/mediums, and cruiser tanks.
Refusal to cooperate was endemic.
Desmond Scott refused to cooperate with the infantry/artillery. In February 1944 he had an "introduction to the future interdependence of the tank and aircraft….. the essence of our combined operations". No mention of infantry or artillery.
Tedder said the same in 1943; "The Army having been drugged with bombs, it is going to be difficult to cure the drug addicts. The Air could not, and must not, be turned on glibly and vaguely in support of the Army, which would never move unless prepared to fight its way with its own weapons". There we have it: air was not an Army weapon in the opinion of Ike's deputy and the effective head of the RAF.
Some such as Harry Broadhurst saw how crippling was this RAF attitude, but he was overruled by Coningham and Tedder; "The way I looked at it was, the Army in this particular situation, had to occupy the ground. They had to supply us and we couldn't pretend to be the main arm of the thing. You could almost say they could go on without us. So we were definitely subordinate to the Army's planning. They had to have the major say in the whole thing. So it was no good someone like Coningham saying they had to be equally important. His job was to support the Army's plan, and influence it as much as he could to suit the air force's ability to do the best".
Irony piled upon irony. The two examples that particularly riled Coningham and Tedder were the retreat of 7 Armoured Division from Villers Bocage on June 14, and that of 11 Armoured Division from Hill 112 on June 29 - both examples of the armoured elite pursuing its own mythical mission of exploitation without cooperation with the infantry/artillery. And that was exactly the problem with 2TAF.
The conclusion has to be faced, that the British Army got to Luebeck in spite of the Air and the armoured divisions. They would have got there equally quickly without 2TAF and without the armoured divisions. They would have got there six months earlier if 2TAF and the armoured divisions had equipped themselves correctly and subordinated themselves to the Army. The way to achieve subordination was an Army Air Corps, and the conversion of all armoured divisions into tank brigades equipped with a Churchill tank immune to the 88-mm.
2. I have an article to finish, and have to get on with it. But I may in the months ahead revert to this subject by starting a thread titled "Was 2TAF a fraud?", and laying out the arguments.
Tony