“AS DAWN BROKE,” Captain Shettle of the 506th PIR said, “we could observe one of the most impressive sights of any wartime action. Wave after wave of medium and light bombers could be seen sweeping down the invasion beaches to drop their bombs.”1
It was the largest air armada ever gathered. It was about to enter the fray in fearsome numbers. On D-Day, the Allies flew more than 14,000 sorties to the Luftwaffe’s 250 (most of those against shipping on the fringes of the invasion).I
Many pilots and bomber crews flew three missions that day, nearly every airman flew two. Spaatz, Harris, and Leigh-Mallory put everything that could fly into the attack. They held back no reserves, a sharp reminder of how far they had come in the air war since 1939–42, when the RAF was on the defensive and could not have dreamed of the day they would be leaving Great Britain uncovered.
They had earned their victory in the air war and had paid a price for it, partly in equipment, mainly in human lives. It was the most hazardous service in the war. It was also the most glamorous.
The foot soldiers envied and resented the airmen. To their eyes, the flyboys hung around barracks doing nothing much of anything, went out at night and got the girls, and had an excess of rank.
What the foot soldiers did not see was the Army Air Force in action. From the flyboys’ point of view, they were the veterans who had been at war since 1939 (RAF) or 1942 (U.S.) while the respective armies sat around doing not much of anything.
They lived a strange existence. On bad-weather days, which were a majority, they led quiet barracks lives. On pass, they had their pick of London. On their way to action, for endless hours they were cramped, cold, tense, fearful, and bored. When they entered action they entered hell. With German flak thick enough to walk on coming up from below and German fighters coming in from behind and above, the air crews went through an hour or more of pure terror.
They were not helpless. The Allied bombers bristled with machine guns, in the nose, under the belly, on top, in the rear. Experts told them they would be better off eliminating the weight of those guns and the men who served them. (A B-17 carried thirteen .50-caliber machine guns.) With a lighter airplane, they could fly higher and faster and would be much safer. No, thanks, replied the air crews. They wanted to be able to shoot back.
They took heavy casualties. Statistically, bomber crews could not survive twenty-five missions. Catch-22 was not fiction. Sgt. Roger Lovelace of the 386th Bomb Group had been told that he could go home after twenty-five missions. Then it was thirty, then thirty-five. On D-Day he was on his sixtieth mission (and eventually did a total of seventy-six).2 In the two months preceding D-Day, the Allied air forces lost 12,000 men and over 2,000 planes.
They persevered and triumphed. If how much they accomplished in trying to knock out German war production is a subject of continuing controversy, what they had accomplished in driving the Luftwaffe out of France, forcing it back into Germany and a defensive role, is not. They had gone past air superiority to achieve air supremacy.
• •
The strategic air forces had not been built to provide tactical support for the land armies. But with the climax of the Transportation Plan coming in early June, that became their task. All involved agreed that just preceding and on D-Day every bomber in Britain would participate in pounding the Atlantic Wall. There were disagreements on how specifically to do that.
The final plan was as follows: On D-Day minus two, almost half the bombing effort would be in the Pas-de-Calais as part of the Fortitude plan. The next day, half the crews rested while the others were given so-called “milk runs.” The RAF Bomber Command would open D-Day with a midnight bombing of coastal batteries and Caen. At first light, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, 1,200 B-17s (Flying Fortresses) and B-24s (Liberators) strong, would bomb for one-half hour the beaches on the Calvados coast while B-26s (Marauders) from Ninth Air Force saturated Utah Beach. If the sky was clear, the bombing would cease five minutes before the troops went ashore; if cloudy, ten minutes.
Spaatz, Tedder, and Leigh-Mallory wanted a 1,500-yard safety zone; ground officers wanted 500 yards; they compromised on 1,000 yards.
After the heavies had returned to England from their dawn attack, they would refuel and go out again, this time to hit bridges and crossroads inland, or to hit Carentan, Caen, and other towns. Spaatz argued against this as inhumane and unlikely to have much impact, but Eisenhower supported Leigh-Mallory on this dispute and those were the orders.3
• •
By June 4, Sgt. Roger Lovelace recalled, “the electricity of tension was so thick you could hear it, smell it, feel it.” By the evening of June 5, “We felt like we were sitting on a live bomb with the fuse sizzling.
“And then it started. We heard the aircraft overhead, the Dakotas hauling the airborne. We all stood outside and looked up against the semidark sky. There were so many of them it just boggled your mind.”4
In the briefing rooms at 0200, June 6, the men buzzed with excitement. They agreed that this had to be the invasion. The briefing officers, “grinning like a skunk eating chocolate,” called them to attention, pulled back the curtain covering the map, and announced the target. As Lt. Carl Carden of the 370th Bomb Group remembered it, “Everything exploded and the cheers went up all over the room and there was a long period of joy. Now we were getting down to business and from now on the Americans were on the attack.”5
The details of the briefing kept most spirits high; the crews were told they would be flying high, that flak would be light and the Luftwaffe nonexistent. Nevertheless, what about fighter cover, someone asked. “There will be 3,500 Allied fighters over the beach this morning,” one briefer assured them.
“We were told it was our job to prepare the ground to the best of our ability to enable the infantry to get ashore, to stay ashore, and fight and win,” Lt. John Robinson of the 344th Bomb Group, Ninth Air Force said. “We also hoped that while they were about it they’d kill a whole bunch of those damned antiaircraft gunners for whom we had no love or pity.”6
But for the Marauder crews headed for the Cotentin coast, where they would be hitting artillery emplacements, the details of their mission were distinctly discouraging. They would be going in at 500 feet, if necessary.
“Did he say 500 feet?” Sergeant Lovelace asked a buddy. “That shook us some. The last time B-26s had gone down on the deck like that they had lost ten out of ten in a low-level mission in Holland.”7
The Marauder, a two-engine medium bomber built by Martin, had high tail fins, a cigar-shaped body, and short wings. The crews called the B-26 the “flying prostitute” because she had “no visible means of support.” They had an affection for the craft that was well expressed by Lieutenant Robinson: “The Marauders were, without any doubt, the best bombers in the whole wide world.”8
For Lt. J. K. Havener of the Ninth Air Force, the target was the gun position near Barfleur at St.-Martin-de-Varreville. His plane would carry twenty 250-pound general-purpose bombs. “Our mission was not to knock out the gun positions but to stun the German gunners and infantry, keeping them holed up, and to create a network of ready-made foxholes which our troops could use when they gained a foothold on what was to become known as Utah Beach.”9
The B-17s were to go in at 20,000 feet, 10,000 feet lower than normal, with bomb loads one-third heavier than usual. Targets were coastal batteries and Omaha and the British invasion beaches. Each Fortress carried sixteen 500-pound bombs.
• •
After the briefings, at airfields all over England, the crews ate breakfast, then got into trucks for a ride to the revetments, where they climbed into their bombers. They fired their engines—on the Marauders, the Pratt and Whitney 2,000-horsepower engines sputtered and coughed and belched out smoke with fire from the exhaust—and they were ready.
Lt. James Delong was the pilot of a B-26 in the 387th Bomb Group. He was part of a thirty-six-ship formation, two boxes of eighteen in flights of six. He recalled that “the taxi out was maddening. The takeoff was just as bad. One plane took off down the right side of the runway; another would open up the throttle as the first plane reached the halfway mark to gun down the left side. It was dark and rainy. A plane in front of me went up in a ball of fire. Was my load too heavy to get off?”
He made it off the runway and began to climb. All around him, bombers were climbing, throttles wide open, using landing lights to avoid collisions. There were some anyway; airmen said that night assembly created a high pucker factor on each seat.
“Even with fifty missions under my belt, my hands were wet and I felt drained of energy,” Delong admitted. His group hit a cloud bank and separated. When he emerged at 8,000 feet, the sky was clear. He could not see any of his group, so he hooked onto another group of B-26s and headed for Normandy.10 Something similar happened to hundreds of pilots.
In his B-17, Lt. John Meyer heard the copilot on the intercom complaining about the clouds: “He was saying, ‘It’s a damn German secret weapon. Hitler’s got another secret weapon.’ ”11
In his B-26, copilot Havener was going through “mental anguish, more so than on any of my previous twenty-four missions. I just couldn’t get the thought out of my mind of those poor devils in Holland on that low-level raid. Here we were about to do the same suicidal thing with hundreds of Marauders following us at spaced and regular intervals of only a few minutes.”12
Lt. A. H. Corry was a bombardier in a B-26. When his plane emerged from the clouds, it was alone. In a minute “I saw a plane pop out of the clouds down below. It was a B-26. So I took my blinker light and sent the code in his direction. He responded affirmatively with the code, then pulled up and stayed on our right wing. Momentarily, another popped up on the left wing. Then more and more until three flights of six planes each were formed and took course toward the invasion coast.”13
Capt. Charles Harris was the pilot of a B-17 in the 100th Bomb Group. He was the last to take off, at 0345. “As we were absolutely Dead End Charlie in the entire Eighth Air Force, I remember glancing back a couple of times and there was not another plane in the air behind us, but as far as we could see ahead were hundreds and hundreds of planes.”14
• •
As the low-flying Marauders approached Utah Beach, the sky brightened and the crews saw a sight unique in world history. None of them ever forgot it; all of them found it difficult to describe. Below them, hundreds of landing craft were running into shore, leaving white wakes. Behind the landing craft were the LSTs and other transports, and the destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. “As I looked down at this magnificent operation,” Lt. Allen Stephens, a copilot in a B-26 of the 397th Bomb Group said, “I had the surging feeling that I was sitting in on the greatest show ever staged.”15
Lt. William Moriarity, a B-26 pilot, said, “As we approached the coast, we could see ships shelling the beach. One destroyer, half sunk, was still firing from the floating end. The beach was a bedlam of exploding bombs and shells.”16
Lieutenant Corry remembered that “the water was just full of boats, like bunches of ants crawling around down there. I imagined all those young men huddled in the landing craft, doubtless scared to death. I could see what they were heading into and I prayed for all those brave young men. I thought, man, I’m up here looking down at this stuff and they’re out there waiting to get on that beach.”17
For the B-17 crews, flying mainly at 20,000 feet, up above the clouds, there was no such sight. They could see nothing but other B-17s. Those that could tucked in behind a pathfinder plane carrying radar. With radar, the lead bombardier would be able to mark a general target area. When the lead plane dropped its bombs, so would the ones following. That was not a textbook method of providing close-in ground support; such bombing was clearly inappropriate to its purpose. Eisenhower had said when he postponed the invasion that he was counting heavily on the air bombardment to get ashore; he added that the Allies would not have undertaken the operation without that asset.
Eventually, after the infamous short bombardment in late July, on the eve of Operation Cobra, Eisenhower learned the lesson that the B-17 was not a suitable weapon for tactical ground support. The testimony from the B-17 pilots and crews describing their experiences on D-Day suggests that the asset was wasted on D-Day, and that the proper use would have been to do what the B-17 was built to do, pound away at big targets inside Germany (oil refineries, train depots, factory complexes, airfields), and leave the beach bombardment to the Marauders and A-20s (Havocs).
But not even the commanders most dedicated to the idea that strategic airpower would win the war, the ones who had opposed the Transportation Plan so strongly, ever considered for an instant not participating in D-Day. They wanted to be there, and Eisenhower wanted them there.
• •
At 20,000 feet, with heavy clouds below and the sky just beginning to lighten, where “there” was could be a mystery. Many pilots never got themselves located. The orders were, If you can’t see the target, or get behind a radar plane, bring the bombs home. In the 466th Bomb Group, sixty-eight B-17s took off, carrying 400,000 pounds of bombs. Only thirty-two were able to drop their bombs. Those that did dropped them blind through the clouds over the British beaches.
Lieutenant Carden had a brother down below. “I did not know where he was, but I wanted to be accurate. We were a little bit late because of the weather, which affected the bombing accuracy of almost every group up there with us.”18 They delayed on the split-second timing so as to avoid hitting men coming ashore; as a consequence, all the bombs from the B-17s fell harmlessly two or even three miles inland.
“It was a day of frustration,” said Lieutenant Meyer. “We certainly didn’t do as we had planned.” The good part for the B-17s was that the flak was light and there was no Luftwaffe. “It was a milk run,” Meyer concluded.19
• •
At Utah Beach, it was no milk run for the Marauders. They went in low enough for the Germans “to throw rocks at us.” Sergeant Lovelace recalled seeing “the first wave just a couple of hundred yards offshore, zigzagging toward the beach. We were running right down the shoreline looking for a target. We were drawing a lot of fire, not the usual 88mm but smaller rapid-fire stuff. I have this frozen image of a machine gunner set up by a barn, firing at us. For a short second I could look right down the barrel of that gun. A waist gunner or a tail gunner could return fire, but up in the top turret I felt helpless. I couldn’t bring my guns below horizontal, therefore I couldn’t fire on anything.”20
Lieutenant Havener saw a plane in his box take a flak hit, do a complete snap roll, recover, and carry on. “Unbelievable!” he remarked. “Now we’re on our bomb run and another of our ships takes a direct hit, blows up, and goes down. Damn that briefer and his milk run. What’s with all this flak!”21
Sgt. Ray Sanders was in Havener’s plane. “We were accustomed to heavy flak,” he said, “but this was the most withering, heavy, and accurate we ever experienced.”22
On his bomb run, bombardier Corry was well below 1,000 feet, too low to use his bombsight. He could see men jumping out of the landing craft, guys who fell and were floating in the surf, tracers coming from the bunkers, spraying that beach. He used his manual trip switch, with his foot providing the aiming point. He made no attempt to be accurate; he figured “I was making good foxholes for some of those guys coming ashore.”23
In Havener’s B-26, Sergeant Sanders “heard our ship sound like it was being blown or ripped to bits. The sound was much louder than anything I had ever heard and seemed to come from every surface of our ship. Before the terrible noise and jolting had quit, I grabbed the intercom and yelled, ‘We’ve been hit!’ And our copilot, Lieutenant Havener, came back on the intercom and said, ‘No, we haven’t been hit. That was our bombs going off.’ We were flying that low.”24
Lt. John Robinson recalled, “The explosions really bumped my wings at that altitude. It was like driving a car down the ties of a railroad track.”25 Many others had similar experiences, a good indication of how much of the explosive power of those bombs went up in air.
• •
But by no means all of it, as Lt. Arthur Jahnke at La Madeleine could attest. As the Marauders came over, he huddled in his shelter and closed his eyes. A carpet of bombs hit the dunes. Sandsprouts geysered up in whirling pillars several meters high. One bomb landed only a few meters from Jahnke’s shelter, burying him. Wounded in the arm, he dug himself out with great difficulty and threw himself into a bomb crater. Even in Russia, he thought, I’ve never seen anything like this.
Jahnke was at the site of the present-day Utah Beach museum. He had a flashback to a ceremony held on that spot just one week earlier. General Marcks had decorated him with the Iron Cross for his bravery on the Eastern Front. There had been drinking, feasting, and choir singing, followed by a performance by a troupe of visiting actors. The opening line of the play was “How long are we going to sit on this keg of dynamite?” Jahnke’s men had broken up laughing.
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
Lieutenant 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.”
In the afternoon, Barensfeld flew support for a group of Dakotas tugging gliders to Normandy. The P-47s, flying at 250 miles per hour, had to make long lazy S-turns to keep the C-47s in visual contact; otherwise they would overrun the glider formation. “Battle formation, 2-300 yards apart, then a turn, crossover, then we’d line up again. We were so busy we had no sense of time. Of course, we were looking for enemy aircraft, there weren’t any. Mouth dry. Edge of seat. Silence. Very exciting time.”
The gliders cut loose. Barensfeld descended to below 1,000 feet to shepherd them into Normandy. But for the gliders the ground was rough and the hedgerows too close together. “It was very disconcerting to see one cut loose, make the circle and hit a hedgerow. I thought, ‘My God, this invasion is going to be a failure if they are depending on these gliders for any sort of part.’ ”35
• •
The P-38 Lightning was a twin-engine, twin-boom, single-seat fighter designed by the legendary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson of Lockheed (he later designed the U-2 spy plane). The Germans called it Gabelschwanz Teufel (Fork-tailed Devil). Because of its distinctive shape, the Lightning was given the role of close-in support. The thought was that antiaircraft crews on the Allied warships would recognize the shape even if they failed to notice the white bands painted on the wings and booms.
But although they were closer to the action, the P-38 pilots found their high expectations quickly deflating. First, there were too many ships at sea with too many overanxious gun crews who had too much ammunition—the P-38s got shot at by their own gunships, and they found no German aircraft to shoot at themselves. “We circled and weaved in the air over our ships,” Capt. Peter Moody said. “We were somewhat envious of the fighters who were allowed to break free and fly over the French coast looking for targets of opportunity. At one point I heard a British controller radio to one of his aircraft: ‘Roger, Red Rover, you’re free to romp and play.’ ”36
From the point of view of Lt. William Satterwhite, flying a P-38 over Omaha Beach, “German resistance appeared to be devastating. Landing craft were being capsized, some were exploding, and the contents, including men and equipment, were being spilled into the surf in great numbers and quantity.”37
• •
The Allies put 3,467 heavy bombers, 1,645 medium bombers, and 5,409 fighters into the air on D-Day. Not one plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe. The flak batteries managed to shoot down 113 aircraft.
Overall, except at Utah, the contributions made by the Allied air forces on D-Day could not be characterized as critical, because they had accomplished the critical mission in April and May 1944. They had isolated the battlefield from much of the French railway system, they had made it difficult to impossible for German trucks and tanks to move by day, they had driven the Luftwaffe out of the skies of France.
What they had not done was develop a workable doctrine for the use of the heavy bombers in tactical support of ground troops, nor had they developed a working method of communication between the soldiers on the ground with those eager-to-shoot P-38 pilots over their heads. Techniques were developed, later in the war, that worked; in December 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge, the air-ground coordination was outstanding, and critical to the victory. But those techniques were not there on D-Day.
But what the air forces had accomplished before D-Day more than justified their cost. How completely the Allies controlled the skies over the battlefield was illustrated dramatically by the single Luftwaffe bombing mission against the beaches. It came at dusk on D-Day. LSTs were jammed together offshore at Omaha, Higgins boats were on the coastline, with jeeps, trucks, aid stations, tanks, men, and other equipment pressed together on the beach. A lucrative, can’t-miss target.
Four twin-engined JU-88s appeared over Omaha Beach. The sky was suddenly ablaze with tracers, as every man on a machine gun or antiaircraft gun in that vast fleet opened up. “The barrage was magnificent, thunderous, and terrifying,” said Lt. Donald Porter, a fighter aircraft controller on an LCI waiting its turn to go into shore. “The low trajectory of the streams of tracers, mostly .50-caliber machine guns, had us ducking. The Germans were coming in at a very low altitude so our firing was just clearing our own ships. I was huddled on the small and crowded deck with only my helmet and two blankets for protection.”
Porter looked up and saw tracers converging just overhead. At that instant, “the JU-88 burst into flame from wingtip to wingtip. It seemed that the flaming plane would crash right on us and our guns were firing into him even as he burned.” Some 100 yards away from the LCI, the German plane slid over and “plunged into the water with a hissing sound. Our guns were still firing into him as he hit the sea about fifty yards to the starboard.”38
The staggering amount of hot metal the fleets poured into those JU-88s sent a signal: whatever happened on the ground, the skies above Normandy belonged to the RAF and the U.S. Army Air Force, while the Channel belonged to the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the Allied warships.
• •
P-47 pilots were not the only ones who felt a disappointment at not being able to participate more directly in D-Day. Ground crews all over England stayed busy, refueling planes and repairing flak damage, making a direct contribution but still feeling a bit out of it. Staff officers, in London and throughout England, from the different nationalities and services, often despised by the line officers, had done their work in advance and on D-Day could only be spectators. The amount of sheer grind that the staff officers had put in denied some of them even the role of spectator.
Harry Crosby was Group Navigation Officer for the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He records: “During the week before D-Day I worked twenty-four hours a day. I had to superintend the preparation of maps and flight plans. I had to set up the formations for over a hundred different missions and variations. I had to brief all our navigators as a group and each lead navigator as an individual.
“I was a minute part in the whole operation but I worked for seventy-five hours without even seeing my bed. I didn’t shave. My orderly brought me a change of uniforms. I don’t remember eating. I remember gallons of coffee, each cup so hot and strong it shocked me into wakefulness.”
By dusk on June 5, Crosby was a zombie. His CO told him to go to bed. Crosby protested. The CO made it an order. Crosby fell onto his bed without removing his tie or shoes. He slept for twenty-four hours. So as for D-Day, “I missed it all.”39
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Shortly after Captain Shettle of the paratroops saw the sight that so impressed him, wave after wave of Marauders coming over, he spotted a German antiaircraft battery. “I had my naval radio operator send coordinates to his ship at sea. The naval gunfire came almost immediately, and after correcting their aim, they fired a barrage which silenced the antiaircraft fire.”40
The incident illustrates the coordination and teamwork that was the hallmark of the Allied effort on June 6. A paratrooper behind enemy lines uses a naval officer who had jumped with him (probably his first jump) to contact warships at sea to silence a battery shooting at Allied aircraft. The men being protected were the men who had made it possible for the paratroopers and Navy to be there in the first place, the men of the Army Air Force.
I. John Eisenhower graduated from West Point on D-Day. A week later, 2nd Lt. Eisenhower was driving around the beachhead with his father. Lieutenant Eisenhower was astonished to see vehicles moving bumper to bumper, in complete violation of West Point textbook doctrine. “You’d never get away with this if you didn’t have air supremacy,” he remarked to his father.
The supreme commander snorted. “If I didn’t have air supremacy I wouldn’t be here.”