IT REALLY WAS THE LONGEST DAY

Mustangs of the 361st Fighter Group prepare to take of to support D-Day

At 0300 hours, June 6, 1944, dawn was already rising with Double Wartime Dalight Savings. The rumble of 48 Pratt and Whitney R-2800s reverberated across the quiet English countryside that surrounded the former RAF station of Beaulieau Roads, between Southampton and Bournemouth, which was now home to the 9th Air Force's 365th Fighter Group. On the taxiway, the big P-47s, each resplendent in the black and white identification stripes hurriedly applied with mops and brooms by the ground crews, S-turned under their heavy loads of two 500-lb bombs on the wing shackles and a 110-gallon drop tank on the centerline mount as they taxied toward the runway in the growing dawn light.

At the runway, the flagman checked each pair as they moved into position. The engines roared as the pilots advanced their throttles to takeoff power, then started their takeoff roll as they were waved off. Number Eight of the sixteen P-47s of the 388th Fighter Squadron was 2nd Lieutenant Archie Maltbie, who had arrived in the squadron three weeks earlier and for whom this was his first operational mission. Maltbie ran his hands over his wool pants to dry his sweating palms, then pulled on his flying gloves. The two airplanes ahead moved into position and took off. The ground crew signaled Maltbie and his element leader to move forward. Once on the runway, he checked the engine instruments, worked the controls quickly in a last-minute check, and pushed the throttle forward when the checkered flag came down. Halfway down the runway, the Thunderbolt's tail came up, and then he was airborne as the main gear thumped into the wells. A right turn brought the two Thunderbolts over the Isle of Wight in a matter of seconds. They joined the rest of the formation as the fighters circled until all had joined up, then the formation headed east across the English Channel toward the coast of Normandy.

Brand new P-51Ds of the 4th Fighter Group prepare for takeoff on D-Day

The Fourth Fighter Group’s Bob Wehrman remembered, “June 6, 1944, really was the longest day. None of us had slept much that night. The sky was filled for hours with the drone of aircraft. I spotted bombers heading toward invasion targets and C-47s carrying what I later learned were the British and American paratroops.”

At Duxford, 78th Fighter Group ground crewman Warren Kellerstadt recalled: “They didn’t tell us when D-Day was going to be, but the night before we could smell something in the wind. They closed up the base tight and wouldn’t let anyone on or off and right after supper on June 5, they ordered black and white stripes painted around the wings and fuselages of the planes. We armorers were kept busy all night lugging bombs from the dump out to the dispersal area to stack next to the planes. I worked til midnight, then had guard from 0200 hours. All night long the bombers went out, first the RAF, then ours. They all had their navigation lights on because there were so many of them they had to worry about collisions, and the sky looked like a Christmas tree, full of red and green lights.”

Pilots of the 78th Fighter Group receive a briefing for a strike in Normandy

The 78th cranked engines at 0320 hours for the first D-Day mission. Rain poured and visibility was so bad pilot Richard Holly remembered that when Colonel Gray’s first section took off, “He just barely cleared the end of the runway before he was out of sight.” When his flight lined up for magneto check Holly instructed the other three pilots to set their gyros on his and follow him. “It was the only instrument takeoff I made in the war and also the only one I made with water injection all the way because we were so heavy.”

Nearly every pilot who flew on D-Day remembered the biggest problem they faced was avoiding mid-air collisions with other units, there were so many Allied aircraft airborne. The 78th’s Thunderbolts found themselves flying in and out of rain showers across the Channel. As they flew through one storm, they encountered a formation of RAF Lancaster heavy bombers and barely avoided disaster. Holly remembered, “I did not see anything on the ground through the clouds, but the red glow below the clouds told us it was Omaha Beach. As it got daylight the red glow went away but we knew from the smoke and haze there was still plenty going on down there.”

A formation of Ninth Air Force B-26 Marauders were caught over Pointe du Hoc just after dawn during the initial phase of the invasion by 20 JG 2 Fw-190s as the Marauders bombed the target prior to the landing of the Army Rangers who were tasked with climbing the cliff face and spiking the guns on the cliff top. The German fighters made one pass and then turned back to their base as masses of Allied fighters appeared overhead. This was the biggest battle fought by the Luftwaffe on D-day.

In France, Oberst Josef “Pips” Priller, Kommandeur of JG 26, learned the invasion was on when he was awakened by the phone in his Lille command post. It was from 5th Jagddivision, ordering him to move his headquarters immediately to Poix, closer to the anticipated invasion site on the Pas de Calais.

Pips Priller climbs out of his Fw-190

The sky was a leaden grey at 0800 hours as Priller and his longtime wingman, Unteroffizier Heinz Wodarczyk, mounted their Fw-190A-8s and prepared to take off for a reconnaissance of the invasion beaches. With Wodarczyk sticking close, Priller headed west at an altitude of 100 meters. East of Abbeville, he looked up and saw several large formations of Spitfires flying through the broken cloud base. Near Le Havre, he climbed into the cloud bank hanging at 200 meters and turned northwest.

Moments later, the two fighters broke out of the clouds, just south the British invasion beach code-named Sword. Priller only had a moment to stare out to sea at the largest naval force ever assembled. He could see wakes of the inbound invasion barges as they approached the beaches for as far as he could see in the hazy weather.

With a shouted “Good luck!” to Wodarczyk, Priller winged over into a dive as his airspeed indicator climbed above 400 m.p.h. Dropping to an altitude of 50 feet, the two roared toward Sword Beach, where British troops dove for cover while ships offshore opened up with a barrage of anti-aircraft fire so loud those on the ground had trouble hearing Priller and Wodarczyk open fire as they flashed overhead, unscathed by the fleet’s fire.

In a moment, the only appearance by the Luftwaffe over the Normandy beaches on D-Day was over. Priller and Wodarczyk zoomed back into the cloud bank and disappeared, having just flown the best-known mission in the entire history of JG 26, due to its later inclusion in Cornelius Ryan’s book “The Longest Day” and the movie made from it.

The 78th flew three missions over the course of the day. Using both A and B groups, planes were landing and taking off at Duxford all day long. Eight-plane attacks were made on targets inland. The 83rd Squadron bombed a railroad bridge 40 miles west of Paris, while the 84th Squadron hit the Alencon marshaling yard and blew up a nearby ammunition dump. Armorer Kellerstadt remembered, “All that day they were dive bombing and strafing everything that moved. When they returned from a mission, we hopped on the planes, rearmed and bombed them, and cleaned as many of the guns as we had time for before they took off again.”

Colonel Gray was leading the 83rd Squadron on the third mission of the day. As the Thunderbolts approached the Mayenne rail marshaling yard, eight Fw-190s were spotted, flying low on the deck. Grey sent two flights after them. Peter Caulfield singled out one and got into a Lufbery with his opponent. He pulled 90-degrees deflection and fired; the Fw-190 snap-rolled, spun, pulled out, turned, hooked a wing on the ground and exploded on impact. Colonel Grey and his wingman Vincent Massa pursued two Fw-190s and caught up to them using water-injection. Gray opened fire on tail-end Charlie until its canopy came off and the engine quit. He overshot his opponent, and Massa pulled behind it to give the coup de grace.

Archie Maltbie never forgot every minute of the missions the Hell Hawks of the 365th group flew on June 6. "I'll never forget what it was like that day. There were so many airplanes in the sky that there was a serious risk of collision, and there were so many ships in the Channel it seemed that you could have walked from ship to ship from England to France." The assignment for the 365th that day was to patrol the Cotentin Peninsula, to block any Luftwaffe aircraft that attempted to attack the invading American forces at Omaha and Utah Beaches and attack any enemy ground units spotted.

P-47D Thunderbolt of the 365th Fighgter Group is preapered for a D-Day mission.

After an hour, the Thunderbolts were free of their bombs and most of their ammunition. Returning to base, the pilots told the excited ground crews what they had seen. After a quick meal, they were back in their planes for a second sweep of the beachhead. "We thought that was it for the day when we got back from the second mission, but all of a sudden there was a call that radar had picked up the Luftwaffe heading toward the beaches, and all the airplanes that had been fueled were scrambled. There were no Germans around by the time we got there." When they returned, night had fallen on England. "It really was the longest day I can ever remember."

JG 26's I and III Gruppen flew the majority of the 172 Luftwaffe sorties in the invasion sector on June 6. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the 14,000 sorties flown that day by the Allied air forces. By the end of the day, II Gruppe arrived after flying across France in time to fly a mission over Normandy in the last light of day, during which they caught the Fourth group’s Mustangs strafing enemy positions and shot down four P-51s in the first pass for no losses.

A shot-down P-47 on Sword Beach

At sunset the evening of June 7, there were only six Jagdgeschwadern left in Germany, while 17 had flown into northwestern France to oppose the invasion. Had these units been at full strength, this would have been over 1,000 fighters, a force that might have had an impact on the battle. Unfortunately, with the losses suffered over Germany in the preceding months and the disorganization of the move from Germany to France, only 289 fighters were listed as operational at sundown of the second day of the invasion.

On their arrival in France, the Jagdflieger discovered that nearly all the Luftwaffe’s airfields in France had been too badly damaged by American bombing during the previous three months to sustain operations; they would be forced to fly and fight from improvised airfields that were so far from the battlefield they would have less than 30 minutes’ combat time over Normandy. Due to the inability of 5th Jagddivision to exercise control of the newly-arrived units in the form of planning and direction of operations, most fighter missions flown during the Normandy battle were “freie jagd” uncontrolled independent fighter sweeps, an ineffective use of the limited resources.

P-47s of the 56th Fighter Group take off from Halesworth during the Battle of Normandy

Over the course of the next two months, what was left of the flower of the Jagdwaffe would die in the Normandy sky, outnumbered by odds of 100:1 and outflown by better-trained and more experienced Allied pilots. Even with the fighter force growing to 1,000 by the end of June, it was a case of “too little, too late.”

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