Read D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II Online
Authors: Stephen E. Ambrose
Tags: #Europe, #History, #General, #France, #Military History, #War, #European history, #Second World War, #Campaigns, #World history: Second World War, #History - Military, #Second World War; 1939-1945, #Normandy (France), #Normandy, #Military, #Normandy (France) - History; Military, #General & world history, #World War; 1939-1945 - Campaigns - France - Normandy, #World War II, #World War; 1939-1945, #Military - World War II, #History; Military, #History: World
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.' "
u
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 an-
other 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."