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shot down in combat over France and a further
65 destroyed on the ground. For this cost, they
claimed 526 Allied aircraft shot down including
203 P-47 fighter-bombers.
n July 1, Captain Wally Starck led 352nd group’s
328th squadron on a mission to strafe suspected
V-1 launch sites, but the squadron became
involved in a battle between the 78th group and
20 Bf 109s and Fw 190s over St. Quentin. The 78th
group's mission had been dogged by bad luck
from the beginning, when two P-47s had collided
during a mass takeoff on Duxford’s wide grass
runway and exploded. The P-47s were 12,000
feet over St. Quentin when Lieutenant James
Stallings spotted five Bf 109s diving on the
Thunderbolts, bombs tumbled from their wings
at his warning. Stallings managed to avoid the
attackers by throwing his P-47 into a violent spin,
when he recovered at 3,000 feet, he found he had
no elevator trim.
“I’d taken two twenty millimeter
cannon shells in my tail surface and was darn
lucky my controls weren’t completely gone. I had
to keep a lot of forward pressure on the stick to
fly straight and level.”
Starck led the Mustangs into the fight and
immediately became involved in a turning fight
with a pair of Bf 109s that dived for the deck
when they couldn’t turn inside him. He followed,
opening fire on the wingman at a distance of 100
yards. The fighter burst into flames and the pilot
bailed out, narrowly missing Starck’s wingman,
Lieutenant Sheldon Heyer’s P-51. Starck closed
on the leader and succeeded in damaging the
Messerschmitt before losing it in the clouds. Two
other Bf 109s were also damaged by Lieutenants
Cyrus Greer of the 487th and the 328th’s “Punchy”
Powell. This was the last fight the “Bluenosers”
would engage in, despite flying eight more
missions between July 4-12.
The Battle of Normandy was over by early
September, following the liberation of Paris on
August 25. Steve Pisanos, who had remained with
the Resistance since crashing in France back on
March 5, remembered the liberation:
“Over the
two weeks before the Germans were chased out,
my friends in the resistance had been terrified
they would put up a fight for the city and leave it
like Stalingrad. In fact, there was some attempt
by the Germans to destroy things. They set out
to rig the Seine bridges with explosives, but the
resistance went out every night and removed the
explosives. They would leave all the wires and
the boxes the explosives were in, so the Germans
wouldn’t realize what had been done. With the
city restored, Pisanos was able to turn himself
in to the American army and returned to Debden.
I got back to Debden and three days later I was on
my way back to America. I got there just in time to
be best man for Don Gentile’s wedding.”
The Luftwaffe had been reduced to impotence
during the battle for Normandy. I and II
gruppen of JG 1, and all three gruppen of JG 11,
which were dedicated anti-bomber units, had
been transferred to France, where they lost
a combined 100 pilots killed and 200 Fw 190s
destroyed in the air and on the ground over the
three months of combat. In comparison, III./JG 1,
which had been transferred to the Eastern Front
and fought there over the summer, suffered the
loss of one pilot killed.
Two P-51Bs of the 361st Fighter Group’s 376th Fighter
Squadron prepare for takeoff at Bottisham. (USAF Official)
HISTORY
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