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ordering him to move his headquarters
immediately to Poix-de-Picardie, closer to the
anticipated invasion site on the Pas de Calais.
The dawn skies were 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 southwest 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 west.
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 in history. 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.
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’s
Mustangs strafing enemy positions and shot
down four P-51Bs in the first pass for no losses.
For most of the next eight weeks, I. Gruppe and
III./JG 54 operated from Cormeilles and Boissy le
Bois, while II. Gruppe was based at Guyancourt
outside Paris, and III. Gruppe from Villacoublay
Nord and Sud, also in the Paris region.
By 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 only 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. Over the course of the
next two months, what was left of the flower
of the Jagdwaffe would die in the Norman 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.”
The day’s action saw Priller score his 97th and
98th victories, a P-47 and P-51 respectively. The
hard-pressed pilots of I and II Gruppen scored
eight for two losses. The next day, Priller led
11 Fw 190s of I Gruppe on a strafing mission
against the invasion beaches, their “score” was
the “destruction” of 15 crashed gliders.
Operation Pointblank had succeeded. The
Allied air forces now had air superiority over
western Europe. The five month campaign had
cost the Eighth Air Force 2,600 bombers and 980
fighters lost, with 18,400 casualties including
10,000 dead.
The weather cleared on June 10, a day that saw
the Blue Nosers’ 328th squadron, led by Captain
“Ferocious Frankie,” a well-known P-51D-5 of the 361st Fighter Group. (USAF Official)
Ralph Hofer was one of the real “characters” of the Fourth Fighter Group. On June 10, 1944, he became the first
Allied fighter pilot to make an emergency landing on an Advanced Landing Ground in Normandy after suffering
damage to his oil cooler in a dogfight. (USAF Official)
“Too little, too late”
HISTORY
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