11,200-ton lead softens up foe before invasion
7,500 Allied planes hammer enemy guns studding the Channel
By Walter Cronkite
London, England (UP) –
Thousands of Allied bombing planes softened up the defenses of Western Europe for the Anglo-American invasion armies last night and early today, dropping more than 11,200 tons of high explosives on the Nazi coastal fortifications in eight and a half hours of furious attack.
The roar of bursting bombs and the motors of attacking fighter planes rolled back across the narrow Straits of Dover incessantly from midnight until 8:00 a.m. (local time) as some 7,500 Allied planes hammered at the network of enemy gun emplacements studding the Channel coast.
By midmorning, the Allied air fleets had swept the skies clear of Nazi planes, and fighters were racing as far as 75 miles inland without drawing a challenge from the battered Luftwaffe.
More than 2,300 U.S. and British heavy bombers spearheaded the great sky fleet, crashing an estimated 7,000 tons or more of bombs on the enemy’s beachhead defenses. Another 4,200 tons were dropped by tactical air forces.
It was the heaviest attack ever hurled against a single objective, and all reports indicated that the mighty barrage had all but beaten the Nazi forts into submission before the ground assault began.
A sky-filling parade of British four-engined heavies, 1,300 strong, opened the mighty assault at 11:30 p.m., thundering out in continuous waves until daybreak. The black-winged raiders struck in 10 separate formations of 100 or more planes each and spewed well over 5,000 tons of high explosives across the Nazi coastal forts.
At dawn, 1,000 U.S. Flying Fortresses and Liberators took up the attack sweeping out over the heads of the thousands of Allied assault troops moving on to the French coast.
Wave upon wave of U.S. and Allied medium bombers and fighter bombers followed the heavies across bombing and machine-gunning the beachheads and communications behind the battle area.
Air opposition over the French interior was described as slight. There was no immediate announcement on Allied plane losses.
Small: Sees troops landing under shell canopy
By Collie Small
With a Marauder formation over the invasion coast, France (UP) –
No-man’s-land is 5,000 feet below.
It’s somewhere between the grey, Channel-washed beaches on which Allied troops are swarming from their landing barges and the brown fields beyond. The wink of gun flashes in the half-light of dawn in those fields came from Germans fighting the invasion.
My aerial grandstand seat is in a Marauder piloted by 1st Lt. Carl Oliver of Sacramento, California, a part of an unending stream of Allied aircraft, ranging from fighters to heavies, which is streaming across the Channel to support the infantry assault.
Five thousand feet is one of the lowest altitudes the medium bombers have ever bombed from in this theater but we chance the German flak to pinpoint our targets.
As we wheel off the targets and streak back toward the Channel, dawn streaks the eastern sky. Peering down I can see our troops scrambling ashore under a canopy of shells hurled over their heads by warships in a harbor that dents the shoreline.
In the half-light we can see the flashes from German shore batteries all along the coastline and inside the harbor.
We know that it must be a disjoined and disorganized defense, for, right in this section, American paratroops floated down earlier to soften up Germans for the great armada crossing the Channel.
By now, as we across the white-capped Channel, we have a bridge of ships from England to France. They range from mighty battlewagons down to tiny, gnat-like PT boats and include all manner of transports and landing craft.
Some of the landing craft plough through the swell leaving a thin, white wake. Others have arrived off the appointed shore and appear to be just waiting.
From the cockpit of this Marauder, no-man’s-land is an eerie strip of dimly-lit coastline and fields which show dull green and brown as the first rays of the sun slant upon them. We can see the puffs of bombs and shells falling in it as the German batteries duel with the long rifles of Allied warships offshore.