AS DARKNESS CAME ON, the Allied troops ashore dug in, while the Allied air forces returned to England and the Allied armada prepared for the possibility of a Luftwaffe night attack. It came at 2300 and it typified the Luftwaffe’s total ineffectiveness.

Josh Honan remembered and described it: “Suddenly everything started banging and we all went to see what it was, and it was a German reconnaissance plane. He wasn’t all that high and he wasn’t going all that fast. And he did a complete circle over the bay and every ship had every gun going and you never saw such a wall of tracer and flak and colored lights going up in your life and the German quite calmly flew all around over the bay, made another circle, and went home.”^{1 IV}

Pvt. John Slaughter of the 116th Regiment, U.S. 29th Division, also described the scene: “After dark an enemy ME-109 fighter plane flew over the entire Allied fleet, from right to left and just above the barrage balloons. Every ship in the English Channel opened fire on that single airplane, illuminating the sky with millions of tracer bullets. The heroic Luftwaffe pilot defied all of them—not even taking evasive action. I wondered how he ever got through that curtain of fire.”²

ALL ALONG THE invasion front, men dug in. Capt. John Raaen of the 5th Ranger Battalion was outside Vierville, off Omaha Beach. “By now it was getting dark and it was necessary to organize ourselves for nighttime counterattacks and infiltration from the Germans,” he said in his oral history. “Headquarters Company was in a small farmyard, located to the south of the road. At this point I learned my next mistake—I had not brought an entrenching tool.