Today marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most pivotal points in modern history — the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France — known as “D-Day.”
Some might say that the fate of the entire world hung in the balance on June 6, 1944, as the largest air, land and sea force ever assembled in history made its way across the English Channel, headed toward Normandy.
Dr. Brett Shufelt, a World War II historian and professor at Copiah-Lincoln Community College, said the D-Day invasion, Operation Overlord, was a battle of “the highest stakes.”
“The big thing about D-Day is they had to make victory certain,” he said. “If it was a catastrophe or a reversal, or if the Allies didn’t make the landing, it would have killed the enthusiasm for the war.”
Had the outcome been different, Shufelt said, one likely scenario would have been a stalemate and a subsequent truce, allowing Hitler to maintain control of western Europe.
On that single day, Allied casualties, dead and wounded, numbered around 12,000. German casualties numbered around 1,000.
“It was a numbers game that day,” he said. “The only battle you can compare it to is the Battle of Marathon, the Persian invasion of Greece, in 490 B.C.”
Several key factors caused infantry units to sustain heavy casualties during the initial beach landings.
One of these was the weather.
“The weather was critical to the effort,” Shufelt said. “Because of the tide situation, the rough seas and the heavy cloud cover, many of the armored vehicles sunk and not many airplanes were able to get up.”
McComb resident Bill Stroble served as a B-24 pilot in the 392nd Bomb Group and has first-hand knowledge of what the weather was like on D-Day.
Stroble said there was a dense overcast up to 22,000 feet in altitude.
“I was flying instruments,” he said referring to the aviation practice of using gauges instead of what the pilot can see in order to operate a plane. “There (were) five or six hundred planes in a formation — none of them able to see each other.”
The No. 3 engine on Stroble’s B-24 lost oil pressure and shut down, requiring him to turn back without dropping any bombs.
“On something like that, you can fly it on three engines, but you can’t fly it on two,” he said. “It was very disappointing, but you got nine crew members up there you got to think about, and you got to think about the airplane.”
Stroble’s experience was not uncommon on June 6. In fact, most of the bombers that did get to drop their payloads hit absolutely nothing.
Unable to see through the clouds and concerned about hitting friendly troops, the lead bombers relied on radar bombsights and cushioned their drops away from friendly positions, causing an estimated 5,000 tons of high explosives to fall harmlessly behind the German beach fortifications, Shufelt said.
Despite flying 32 successful combat missions in 1944, Stroble discounts his contribution to the D-Day invasion.
According to Shufelt and many other scholars, however, the high-altitude bombers laid the foundation for Overlord’s success in the five months before June 6.
Shufelt said the Allied air forces won the battle for air supremacy between January and June of 1944.
“It’s not just about that day for that pilot or that air crew member,” he said. “Their job started way before that. The B-24s and the 8th Air Force’s effort to control that airspace was everything.”
Stroble’s mission on April 8, as he recorded in his diary, demonstrates that effort:
“What a day — always will remember. Wake us at 03:30, briefed to an airfield and factory out of Brunswick (Germany).” ... “Little flak after Dutch coast. Hit by fighters just before target. Saw four 24s go down and couple enemy fighters plus a couple P-51s.
“... Fighters buzzing all around, bombers going out, smoking engines, tracer bullets and what-have-you. Flak over Brunswick and Hanover was damn bad and really accurate, could have walked on it easy. ... Andy, Jake and Leland went down. Hate it.”
Such battles paved the way for ground and naval forces on D-Day.
The Allied bombing missions in the first half of 1944 suppressed the enemy to the point where the Luftwaffe — Germany’s air force — was pulled back to defend German airspace, Shufelt said.
He said that in the five-month battle leading up to June 6, the American air forces suffered around 18,000 casualties, including 10,000 deaths.
While the beach invasion of Normandy stands out as the embodiment of D-Day, the deaths suffered by the air forces leading up to the invasion are equally significant.
“You had to control the air space for your ground forces. When you start talking about high-altitude bombing, really, the risks outweigh the benefits,” Shufelt said.
