To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE Both the Germans and the Allies prepared elaborate air plans for the coming invasion of France by the latter. Taking form in April 1944, the Allied plan had many facets, but the critical one was to blanket the beachhead area and its sea and land approaches with a quilt of fighters. The intention was to deny to the Luftwaffe this air space in its expected effort to strike at the invasion fleet and to make any landing untenable. So confident was General Eisenhower that his aerial component would quickly establish this air supremacy, this dominance beyond mere air superiority , he told invasion troops on 6 June, IlIf you see fighting aircraft over you, they will be ours."l Closely related to this intended dominance were four other elements of the Allied plan: harassment of enemy ground forces in and adjacent to the landing area; securing of the flanks of that area by airborne troops; interdiction of the general landing area; and attacks on airfields within a 130-mile zone beyond that area. The plan also called for exploitation of the air superiority so recently won over the Reich by a continuation of missions against aircraft production and Ilmass attacks against sensitive ... installations in Germany." Attrition was still the name of the game: IlAny attacks 239 240 TO COMMAND THE SKY which will inveigle the German Air Force into the air in defense will result in attrition to the enemy air force in being."2 The German plan was predicated on the rapid deployment westward to bases in France of day single-engine fighter units, the majority of which had been steadily pulled back into Germany between the fall of 1943 and May 1944. Once Allied forces were ashore, the air defense of the Reich would be left to only a relative handful of twin-engine destroyer aircraft and night single-engine fighter units. The high command believed that strategic missions against vital targets inside Germany would be suspended indefinitely or sharply curtailed when the invasion was launched. These reinforcements to France were to take over the main task of air support, fighter-bomber, and counterair operations. They would number about 600 aircraft. Air Fleet 3, within whose jurisdiction lay the most feasible cross-Channel landing sites, had only about 80 serviceable fighters among its 300-odd aircraft on the eve of the invasion. Arrayed across the Channel were some 7,000 aircraft, the Eighth Air Force alone possessing some 1,800 operational bombers and over 900 fighters.3 The German high command felt that the invasion must be hurled back in not over 10 days time or it would be counted a success. The code phrase to trigger the westward movement of the single-engine day fighters was "Threatening Danger West." Goring's order of the day for the invasion when it came was that it must be beaten back even if the Luftwaffe perished in the attempt.4 The Luftwaffe was already breathing shallowly from the effects of Big Week, Berlin, and the strategic fighter campaign. The subsequent performance of the Luftwaffe on D-day must be measured against this condition. When an opportune and required combination of conditions affecting tide, moonlight, and daylight was forecast for the night and early day of 5/6 June 1944, Eisenhower made one of history's most momentous command decisions-implement OVERLORD. Allied paratroops dropped in the moonlight, as the fleet bearing the Epilogue 241 beachhead forces came out of its harbors on the English side of the Channel. In the bare break of daylight, German defenders in pillboxes were stunned to see the great fleet looming out of the offshore mist. Combat engineers and naval specialists began to gap the beach obstacles and landing craft began to disgorge the assault troops into the surf. Up and down a 50-mile stretch of Normandy beaches and extending up one side of the Cotentin Peninsula the Allies returned to France. Naval guns pounded the pillboxes, gun positions, and troop positions while German artillery and small arms fire swept the beaches. It took prodigious effort and much heroism to scale the cliffs and begin to silence the fire from the defensive positions. Bodies littered the beach .and bobbed in the surf. Smoke was dense and the din awesome. Everywhere the issue was in doubt-especially at American OMAHA beach-except in the sky. As the drama was played out on the...