The Americans at D-Day by John C. McManus

Author:John C. McManus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER TEN

THE AIR COVER

Allied airmen had spent more than two years making Overlord possible. While the ground troops trained, the aviators fought. Ever so steadily, they pummeled the Luftwaffe into submission. The veritable destruction of the once formidable enemy air force served as a kind of gateway back to the continent. To the airmen, Overlord represented a new and welcome phase in the war, one in which the Germans were on the defensive, one that foresaw the end of the war, one that meant that the airmen could now look forward to the day when the Europe below them was no longer an unfriendly maw of perilous, enemy-controlled territory that promised only captivity to the downed airman.

The bomber crewmen and fighter pilots of the U.S. Army Air Force in England were tingling with pre-invasion anticipation and excitement. They had felt this way for weeks, ever since they began carrying out the transportation plan, an offensive whose obvious purpose was to prepare the way for invasion. It is fair to say that the aviators had worked themselves to a fever pitch; they were keenly waiting for the special day.

In the declining hours of June 5, teletype machines clacked at American bomber and fighter bases in England. The awkward machines—so reminiscent of the stock market tickers of an earlier era—spit out the fragmentary orders that eventually set the Air Force into motion. Tonight, at Grafton Underwood (American crewmen liked to call it Grafton Undermud for obvious reasons), Colonel Dale Smith of the 384th Bomb Group sat in his tiny office in the group’s operations shack. He heard the teletype machine chattering in the main room outside his office. A few seconds after the teletype went silent, Smith’s operations officer, Major Tom Beckett, stepped into the little office and solemnly handed him a piece of paper. Beckett rarely, if ever, gave the colonel copies of the fragmentary order (“frag order”). Usually, Beckett orally conveyed the orders while they waited for the formal, more complete field orders that followed. Not this time, though, and that could only mean one thing. Colonel Smith felt a nervous surge of anticipation. “My hand trembled a little as I held the yellow paper. I had a good idea what it contained: the long anticipated invasion.” The 384th was ordered to bomb enemy positions near Caen in the morning. “I told Tom to call a meeting immediately of all senior staff officers, squadron commanders, and Company commanders, and to have them assemble at the Senior Officers’ Quarters. We had a lot to do.”1

At nearly the same time at Ashford, home of the 406th Fighter Group, Captain William Dunn, the ace and Eagle Squadron veteran, was awakened by the sound of hundreds of aircraft engines. He lay in his cot and listened for a moment. What was this all about? he wondered. He decided to go to the operations shack to find out. When he arrived, the invasion frag order was just coming over the teletype. “What’s going on, guys?” Dunn asked.

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