Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2024 i Flight Journal

EIGHTY YEARS AGO on June 6, 1944, D-Day Operation Overlord, history’s largest amphibious invasion, commenced and began the liberation of continental Europe. Despite the massive Allied buildup and numerical superiority, the planners knew it would be a perilous venture as the German Wermacht had over a year to prepare and amass thousands of troops, gun emplacements, and defenses to greet the invaders on the French Channel Coast. Allied airmen enabled D-Day’s success by breaking the Luftwaffe, crippling enemy transportation, gathering intelligence, dropping paratroopers, and directly supporting ground troops. The scale of the operation literally redefined the military phrase “D-Day,” which was used to denote the beginning of a military operation. The aerial initiative alone that day is still astonishing and included 11,590 aircraft flying over 15,000 sorties. It must have…

THEY MUST HAVE BEEN A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES to the soldiers on the beach as wave after wave of fighters, bombers, and paratrooper-stuffed transports, some towing gliders, passed overhead, all of them adorned with black and white painted stripes. The invasion was on, and many of the fighter pilots expecting a Luftwaffe slugfest were disappointed by the dismal numbers that showed up. But there were still plenty of targets both on the ground and in the air for those lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. Follow along with these “little friends” about the historic day known as D-Day: the 6th of June, 1944. BIG STUD Lt. Col. F. C. Gray 78th Fighter Group, 8th Air Force Encounter Report—June 6, 1944, Plan “Stud” 1540…

THE BACKBONE OF THE INITIAL ALLIED ASSAULT against Erwin Rommel’s Atlantic Wall was the unsung heroes of the AAF’s Troop Carrier Command. Evolving from the pre-war Air Service & Ferrying Command, a specific need for the Army’s expanding parachute units led to the division of the now AAF’s transport units into the more commonly recognized Air Transport Command and new Troop Carrier Groups (TCGs). Dedicated to the mission of delivering airborne combat troops, gliders, and equipment directly to the battlefield, the first Troop Carrier Command was established in June 1942. The first two operational units were reorganized from existing Southwest Pacific transport units while training began in the States for what would eventually add another 26 groups to all theaters of war. The subject of this Kodachrome spread, “Mary Co-ED…

MISSION ELMIRA Normandy D-Day Flight Officer George L. Williams flew seven glider missions during World War II. Fresh out of high school when he enlisted, he was excited to be a part of the war. He had the opportunity to fly both the large British Airspeed Horsa glider and the relatively smaller American Waco CG-4A Hadrian glider. The wooden Horsa’s fuselage was 67 feet long, its wingspan was 88 feet, and it had a loaded weight up to 15,500 pounds. The American Waco’s tube-and-fabric fuselage measured 48 feet, 8 inches long, its wingspan was 83 feet, 8 inches, and it had a loaded takeoff weight of 7,500 pounds (or up to 9,000 pounds at emergency load weight). Horsa vs. CG-4A When asked to compare the two gliders he flew, Williams…

THERE’S A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF ELITISM attached to what we do here at Flight Journal: all of our focus is on aircraft and their pilots. In fact, as you worked your way through the preceding articles to this final page, you probably couldn’t help but glory in the deeds accomplished by those winged warriors during the D-Day experience. This even includes the ugly ducklings, like the gliders. Our focus is on everything that’s airborne, so, without meaning to, we give the impression that World War II was won by the aerial heroes we venerate in these pages. In so doing, we sometimes overlook what, in the final analysis, actually wins wars: a dogface with a rifle. Foot soldiers are the point of the lance, and everything else exists to make…

In June 1944, the European War had dramatically reversed from four years previously. When Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht conquered Western Europe in 10 weeks, Nazi Germany seemed unstoppable. But since the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the growing Allied bomber offensive, with German defeats in the Mediterranean and Russia, the grand alliance stood poised to pounce from Britain, across the English Channel, and liberate Occupied Europe. That spring, the American public avidly followed the European Theater “ace race” as Thunderbolt and Mustang pilots vied for the highest score. The 4th Fighter Group competed with the 56th to produce the top gun, and by June 5, the highest scores were Capt. Robert S. Johnson, rotated Stateside with 27, Maj. Francis S. Gabreski with 22, and Capt. Don Gentile, also rotated, with…

Since the 25th of May, the group had been informed that it was on a six-hour alert status, and it had been assigned two officers from General Patton’s Third Army to stay with us and set up liaison procedures. Our flying hadn’t changed much except that more dive-bombing, fighter sweeps, and strafing missions were being thrown in with our normal escort duties. “It didn’t take much brain power to know that the invasion of the Continent was imminent. The clincher came when we discovered a small detail of cameramen among us who had been assigned to cover our first-day activities on D-Day. “On the 3rd and 4th of June, a couple of short missions were run over France. Rumor and speculation ran high on the 5th and 6th as we…

D-Day Spitfires On D-Day, June 6, 1944, a total of 57 Royal Air Force Spitfire squadrons were available to No 2 Tactical Air Force (2 TAF) and Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB)—the new and temporary title allocated to RAF Fighter Command—for offensive operations in support of the D-Day landings. Most of these squadrons were equipped with Mk IX Spitfires, but 11 squadrons under the command of ADGB were still operating the older Mk Vb Spitfires. One of these was Spitfire Mk Vb BL415 AZ-B of 234 Squadron, which flew on two beachhead cover patrols on D-Day, one of those in the hands of Flight Lieutenant Walter “Johnny” Johnston. Later in the day on D-Day it was used to escort 37 C-47 Dakotas towing Horsa gliders to the Caen area.…

THE GROUND CREW CHIEF, his mechanics and armorers are true unsung heroes of the aerial D-Day invasion. The complexity of their job—and the battle environment in which they had to perform to keep the aircraft airborne—were immensely challenging. Keeping any multi-cylinder radial engine like a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 or Merlin V-12 combat-ready was a feat in itself, not to mention all the other key aircraft systems. Dealing with battle damage created yet another set of problems. In addition, there was a good chance that a year or two prior, the crew in this photo were just kids on a farm or sitting at the local soda fountain in some small American town. Most had never been out of the country and never worked on anything more complex than a…

ON THE AIRFIELD at Barkston-Heath (USAAF Station AAF-483) near the city of Grantham in Lincolnshire, 72 Douglas C-47 Skytrain transports from the 61st Troop Carrier Group sat waiting. Soon they would carry 1,230 paratroopers from the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment to Normandy as a part of Mission Boston, the code name of the operation to move the 82nd Airborne Division to France on D-Day. Just seven miles away on the airfield at Fulbeck (USAAF Station AAF-488), 45 C-47s of the 442nd Troop Carrier Group were preparing to load the regimental headquarters and the 1st Battalion, 507th—an additional 770 paratroopers. By mid-1944, the flight crews of those two troop carrier groups had gone through just as much intense training as the paratroopers they would carry…

AS THE LONG-LIVED THUNDERBOLT group in the ETO, the 56th FG certainly sported some of the most varied camouflage plus squadron and individual markings in England. Upon arrival at Kings Cliffe in January 1943, its first combat-ready P-47C models bore a factory-standard olive drab over neutral gray livery. As the Thunderbolt was the first and only radial-engined U.S. fighter in the ETO at the time, its similarity to an Fw 190 quickly forced visual augmentation with 24-inch white nose cowl bands and later matching bands on the horizontal and vertical tails. A further enhancement was a second star cockade added to the left side underwing and a short-lived red surround to the fuselage star. RAF-style group/squadron three-letter codes were soon added as new U.S. units arrived in theater. Markings remained…

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