Now the dynamite had exploded. The two 75mm cannon were destroyed, the 88 damaged, the two 50mm antitank guns gone, as were the flamethrowers. Jahnke’s radio and telephone communications with the rear were kaput. His men had survived, huddled in their bunkers; when they emerged they were horrified. The mess corporal’s assistant, an old man, came running up to Jahnke.

“Everything is wrecked, Herr Leutnant! The stores are on fire. Everything’s wrecked!”

Shaking his head, he added, “We’ve got to surrender, Herr Leutnant.”

“Have you gone out of your mind, man?” the twenty-three-year-old Jahnke replied. “If we had always surrendered in Russia in this kind of situation the Russians would have been here long ago.”

He called out a command, “All troops fall in for entrenching!” Just as they were getting into the work, here came another wave of Marauders. The men huddled in the sand. Jahnke sent a man on a bicycle to report to battalion HQ, but he was killed by a bomb.

As the bombardment ended and the sky brightened, Jahnke could see the naval armada slowly emerging out of the dark and headed straight toward La Madeleine. The sight shattered any morale the Germans had left. Jahnke’s men had believed that La Madeleine, with its mighty cannon, was impregnable; now the fortress was destroyed and they were brought face-to-face with the reality of the naval forces rising up out of the sea. And all Jahnke had to oppose the invaders were two machine guns and two grenade launchers.²⁶ The American Marauders had done an outstanding job of destroying Rommel’s fixed fortifications at Utah before the Germans had an opportunity to fire even one shot.

Another twin-engine bomber, the A-20 Havoc, was also effective in low-level missions, led by the 410th Bomb Group (known, at least to themselves, as “The World’s Best Bomb Group,” and awarded a Presidential Unit Citation). The 410th blasted Carentan, making it all but impossible for Colonel Heydte to move vehicles out of the city into the battle.

AFTER MAKING THE bomb run, the bombers continued across the Cotentin Peninsula, then turned right, flew around the tip of the peninsula and then north to home base in England. That gave them another never-to-be-forgotten sight. As Lieutenant Delong described it, “Out over the French countryside, scattered everywhere, were parachutes, and pieces of crashed gliders. I don’t believe I saw an undamaged one. I had this sick feeling that things were not going well.”²⁷

Lt. Charles Middleton saw parachutes “everywhere, and parts of gliders scattered all over. You could see where they had gone through the hedgerows, leaving wings behind, some burnt and some still intact although not many.” Then he saw the most improbable sight: “Not far from the battle zone a farmer was plowing his field. He had a white horse and was seemingly unconcerned about all that was happening around him.”²⁸

By 0800, many crews were back at base, having a second breakfast. In an hour or two, they were in the air again, bombing St.-Lô and other inland targets. The RAF returned to Caen, trying to concentrate on the railroad station. The Germans in Caen, in retaliation, took eighty French Resistance prisoners out of their cells and shot them in cold blood.

IN CONTRAST TO the near-total success of the B-26s at Utah, the great bombing raids by B-17s and B-24s of June 6 against Omaha and the British beaches turned out to be a bust. The Allies managed to drop more bombs on Normandy in two hours than they had on Hamburg, the most heavily bombed city of 1943, but because of the weather and the airmen not wanting to hit their own troops most of the blockbusters came down in Norman meadows (or were carried back to England), not on the Atlantic Wall. Yet the B-17 pilots and crews did their best and in some cases made important contributions, certainly far more than the Luftwaffe bomber force.²⁹

AT THE TOP of the elite world of the Allied air forces stood the fighter pilots. Young, cocky, skilled, veteran warriors—in a mass war fought by millions, the fighter pilots were the only glamorous individuals left. Up there all alone in a one-on-one with a Luftwaffe fighter, one man’s skill and training and machine against another’s, they were the knights in shining armor of World War II.

They lived on the edge, completely in the present, but young though they were, they were intelligent enough to realize that what they were experiencing—wartime London, the Blitz, the risks—was unique and historic. It would demean them to call them star athletes, because they were much more than that, but they had some of the traits of the athlete. The most important was the lust to compete. They wanted to fly on D-Day, to engage in dogfights, to help make history.

The P-47 pilots were especially eager. In 1943 they had been on escort duty for strategic bombing raids, which gave them plenty of opportunity to get into dogfights. By the spring of 1944, however, the P-47 had given up that role to the longer-ranged P-51 (the weapon that won the war, many experts say; the P-51 made possible the deep penetrations of the B-17s and thus drove the Luftwaffe out of France).

The P-47 Thunderbolt was a single-engine fighter with classic lines. It was a joy to fly and a gem in combat. But for the past weeks, the P-47s had been limited to strafing runs inside France. The pilots were getting bored.

Lt. Jack Barensfeld flew a P-47. At 1830 June 5, he and every other fighter pilot in the base got a general briefing. First came an announcement that this was “The Big One.” That brought cheers and “electric excitement I’ll never forget,” Lt. James Taylor said. “We went absolutely crazy. All the emotions that had been pent-up for so long, we really let it all hang out. We knew we were good pilots, we were really ready for it.”³⁰

The pilots, talking and laughing, filed out to go to their squadron areas, where they would learn their specific missions.

Barensfeld had a three-quarter-mile walk. He turned to Lt. Bobby Berggren and said, “Well, Bob, this is what we’ve been waiting for—we haven’t seen any enemy aircraft for two weeks and we are going out tomorrow to be on the front row and really get a chance to make a name for ourselves.”

Berggren bet him $50 that they would not see any enemy aircraft.³¹

Lieutenant Taylor learned that his squadron would be on patrol duty, 120 miles south of the invasion site, spotting for submarines and the Luftwaffe. They would fly back and forth on a grid pattern.

“We were really devastated,” Taylor remembered. “I looked at Smitty and Auyer and they were both looking at the ground, all of us felt nothing but despair. It was a horrible feeling, and lots of the fellows were groaning and moaning and whatnot.” Taylor was so downcast he could not eat breakfast. Instead of a knight in shining armor, he was going to be a scout.³²

The first P-47s began taking off at about 0430. They had not previously taken off at night, but it went well. Once aloft, they became part of the air armada heading for France. Above them were B-17s. Below them were Marauders and Dakotas. The Dakotas were tugging gliders. Around them were other fighters.

Lt. (later Maj. Gen.) Edward Giller was leader for a flight of three P-47s. “I remember a rather harrowing experience in the climb out because of some low clouds. There was a group of B-26s flying through the clouds as we climbed through, and each formation passed through the other one. That produced one minute of sheer stark terror.”

It was bittersweet for the P-47 pilots to pass over the Channel. Lt. Charles Mohrle recalled: “Ships and boats of every nature and size churned the rough Channel surface, seemingly in a mass so solid one could have walked from shore to shore. I specifically remember thinking that Hitler must have been mad to think that Germany could defeat a nation capable of filling the sea and sky with so much ordnance.”³³

Lt. Giller’s assignment was to patrol over the beaches, to make certain no German aircraft tried to strafe the landing craft. “We were so high,” he remembered, “that we were disconnected, essentially, from the activity on the ground. You could see ships smoking, you could see activities, but of a dim, remote nature, and no sense of personal involvement.” Radar operators in England radioed a report of German fighters; Giller and every other fighter pilot in the area rushed to the sector, only to discover it was a false alarm.³⁴

Lt. Mohrle also flew a P-47 on patrol that day. “Flying back and forth over the same stretch of water for four hours, watching for an enemy that never appeared, was tedious and boring.”