American railroad workers in specially formed units labored to keep men and matériel rolling forward after D-Day.
Here s What You Need to Know: Combat engineers and railway workers recorded a monumental achievement in the summer of 1944.
Historian Christian Wolmar concludes that the two world wars could not have been fought to such devastation without military railways, in his book Engines of War. In wars, from the Crimean to the arrival of the jet engine, railways were a dominant technology. Consequently, the military that best employed its railways to transfer fresh troops and supplies to the point of greatest need usually prevailed.