Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot

by Wolfgang Fischer

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NORMANDY INVASION

  By the end of May 1944 talk was turning more and more to the subject of the coming invasion. We all knew that an allied landing somewhere along the Channel coast of France was imminent. That had been made perfectly clear to us a few days earlier when Major Hohagen had assembled the pilots of all four Staffeln together at Cormeilles to read out an ‘Order of the Day’ from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The C-in-C informed us that the invasion was expected to take place some time in the next three weeks, and that the entire Luftwaffe stood poised and ready to oppose the landings in a battle that would, he said, decide the fate of Germany.

  I also seem to recall his warning us that none of us could count on coming out of this battle alive. This didn’t impress us all that much, as the odds we were already facing on a day-to-day basis made our prospects of survival in the longer term slightly less than rosy. But we derived some hope and comfort from the fact that the full Luftwaffe complement–or at least a substantial part of it–would be sent in to support us.

  We knew from personal experience that the Luftwaffe’s ground organization across the whole of northern France had been built up to accommodate the sudden influx of several thousand aircraft. There were ample stocks of fuel, ammunition, spare parts and ration stores on every airfield and forward landing ground. We ourselves were certainly suffering no shortage of aviation fuel. We reckoned that this would give us, if not actual superiority, then at least parity with the enemy in the air for a good three or four days. During this crucial period we hoped to be able to ensure freedom of movement for our troops on the ground by protecting them against low-level attack from allied fighters and fighter-bombers. With its mobility thus guaranteed, the army would then be in a position to prepare and launch a massive counter-attack that would throw the invaders back into the sea. This was the plan. How different everything turned out to be in reality.

  Over the weekend of 3 and 4 June the whole Geschwader was suddenly pulled out of northern France, the area it had been defending so vigorously for four long years. This move seemed completely unfathomable to us at the time. With hind-sight I can only assume that our intelligence services had some-how got wind of the location, if not the exact date, of the coming landings, and that we had been withdrawn out of harm’s way of the softening-up bombing strikes that could be expected to precede the invasion itself. Whatever the true reason, the redeployment saw Hauptmann Herbert Huppertz’s III. Gruppe depart for the French Atlantic coast, while II. Gruppe, commanded now by my erstwhile Staffelkapitän, Hauptmann Georg Schröder, retired to Germany by road and rail to collect a fresh batch of Me 109Gs.

  In the meantime, we of I./JG 2 had been ordered to Nancy in eastern France. I was no stranger to this part of the world, of course, having spent many happy months there while serving with JG 107. But we were not to occupy the main Nancy-Essay airfield. We were directed instead to makeshift landing strips outside the town; 1. and 3. Staffeln being assigned a large meadow up on the nearby plateau. (JG 107, incidentally, had vacated Nancy-Essay less than a month earlier. After a heavy bombing raid on the field by Flying Fortresses late in April caused widespread damage, Old Frau Meyer had led his chicks back to Markersdorf in eastern Germany.) Upon our arrival at Nancy we found that rooms had been reserved for us in a number of hotels and guesthouses in the town, where we whiled away the remainder of the weekend and the Monday in complete inactivity.

  Our peace was rudely shattered around 5am on the morning of Tuesday, 6 June, by the sounds of cars and motorcycles racing through the streets of Nancy rounding up the Gruppe’s pilots from their individual billets. A motorcyclist screeched to a halt in front of my hotel, yelled my name and the single word, “Invasion!” I was out on the street in no time flat and he quickly drove me up to the plateau. By 6am we were taking off through the knee-high grass and heading back in the direction of Paris, our exact destination being the airfield at Creil, some forty-five kilometres NNE of the city.

  Here we were informed that our Focke-Wulfs were to be fitted with rockets. While the armourers began the two-hour job of attaching the launch tubes beneath the wings of our fighters, we set about learning how to fire our lethal new toys. The 21-cm rocket-powered mortar had originally been developed for use by the ground forces. The army tried to disguise its true function by christening it the ‘Nebelwerfer,’ or ‘smoke discharger’. But the allied troops who found themselves on the receiving end of a salvo of these banshee-wailing missiles soon found other names for them; ‘Moaning Minnies’ and ‘Screaming Meemies’ being among the more repeatable.

  The Nebelwerfer was then modified as an air-to-air weapon for the Luftwaffe under the designation 21-cm BR (for Bordrakete, or airborne rocket), although it was commonly referred to simply as the ‘Dödel’, a generic name–something along the lines of a ‘thingummy’–that we applied to all kinds of items, including the Knight’s Cross. It had first been used against the Americans’ heavy bombers in the summer of 1943. With a maximum range of at least 2,000 metres, it could be launched from well outside the effective range of the bombers’ defensive fire and the first Luftwaffe Gruppen to employ it operationally were said to have achieved considerable success. But it was one thing simply to lob a rocket into the middle of a big box of tightly packed bombers. We were told that we were going to have to use it against the allies’ invasion shipping. And hitting an individual target–however large it might be–was a different matter entirely.

  Unlike the rocket-armed fighters flying regular Defence of the Reich missions, which were equipped with a special control panel for firing their missiles, we would have to make do with the red push-button below the instrument panel that was normally used to jettison our belly tanks (and which the electricians were even now busily rewiring). As the spin-stabilized rockets had a tendency to drift to the right in flight, the actual firing instructions we were given were a model of brevity: ‘At a range of 1,000 metres, aim off eighty metres to the left!’

  This was all very well as far as it went, but how to gauge that apparently all-important 1,000 metres? We had no special aiming aids, of course, just our standard Revi 16B reflector gunsight, which projected an illuminated ring in front of the pilot’s eyes. The diameter of this ring represented one-tenth of the distance he was from his target. Say, for example, he was attacking a fighter with an average ten-metre wingspan; when the wings of the enemy machine exactly filled the diameter of his sight, he knew he was 100 metres away from it.

  It was thus theoretically possible to use the Revi to establish how far away we were from any ship we were attacking…if only someone had deigned to tell us the lengths of the damned tubs we were likely to encounter off the beaches! But unfortunately such trivial bits of information were not imparted to us during the pre-op briefing. In the time remaining I therefore tried to formulate a rough rule of thumb by estimating the likely lengths of various allied vessels. I reckoned that a Liberty or Victory-class merchantman would be about 100 metres long. So if I attacked from the side and the target was filling the width of my gunsight, that would automatically mean that I was the required 1,000 metres away.

  All I had to do then was aim off about three-quarters of the ship’s length to the left, and I would have complied with the firing instructions to the letter. There was, however, just one other prerequisite to a successful attack: the enemy fighter umbrella over the beachhead would have to turn a blind eye long enough to allow me to carry it out.

  At around 09.30hrs we took off. We were flying in three Schwarms–twelve aircraft; twenty-four rockets in all. Major Hohagen was not taking part in this mission. Leading the formation in his stead was Hauptmann Josef Wurmheller, the Staffelkapitän of 9./JG 2. Like Kommodore Oberstleutnant Bühligen, ‘Sepp’ Wurmheller was another highly experienced and long-serving member of the Geschwader. His personal score was also standing just short of 100 at this time, and he too was wearing the Oak Leaves.

  With a rocket under each wing, we wer
e unable to carry our usual belly tanks. But these were not required. The Focke-Wulf’s radius of action was some 900 kilometres and the flight to the target area and back was only about half that distance. Our objective was the landing beach to the northeast of Bayeux (which, I later learned, was the one code-named Gold; the westernmost of the three British invasion sectors). The sky was seven-tenths cloud. These were ideal conditions for our purpose. The large gaggles of allied fighters–Spitfires, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and the like, which could be seen patrolling the clear patches of sky–were unlikely to get the drop on our small formation as we flitted in and out of the concealing banks of cumulus.

  After about half an hour we crossed Bayeux, where I could see fires already raging. In an effort to deceive the enemy we continued flying out over the Bay of the Seine for several more minutes, planning to mount our attack from seaward. From our height of 3,000 metres I had a panoramic view of the entire invasion area, stretching from the mouth of the River Orne and Caen to the east, to the Cotentin Peninsula in the west. A whole armada of ships, in the truest sense of the word, was spread out below me.

  Furthest away from the coast was a line of huge battleships, occasionally belching fire and smoke as they sent another broadside deep inland. Next came the destroyers, troop transports and landing ships, protected by numerous dark-hued barrage balloons. Closest to the shore were the smaller landing craft and countless amphibious vehicles, the majority trailing vivid white wakes as they headed directly for the beaches. As I had not experienced any of the previous allied landings in the Mediterranean, I had no way of judging the scope of this latest enemy undertaking. So although not totally overawed by the spectacle, the sheer size of it raised the first serious doubts in my mind. Would we really be able to repel such a powerful force?

  Undisturbed either by fighters or naval flak, we completed our run out over the bay and turned through 180 degrees to head back towards the largest concentration of troopships. Because of the allied fighter umbrella over the beachhead area, we wouldn’t have the time or the opportunity to position ourselves for a beam attack. It would have to be a high-speed dash straight for the shore–the same direction, of course, in which most of the ships were heading–with an attack on the vessels from directly astern as we flashed past low overhead. But as we approached I saw that the ship almost directly in front of me was, in fact, lying in the water practically broadside on to my line of flight. With mounting excitement I laid off three-quarters of the ship’s length to the left and prepared to launch my rockets.

  It was only as I got closer, and the target grew bigger, that I realized from the tiny feather of white water that I could see under the ship’s stern that it wasn’t lying stopped at all, but in fact was moving slowly to the left, and not only that, it was also turning. I quickly reduced speed in order not to overshoot the specified 1,000-metre firing distance and curved fractionally to the left myself, realigning my aim a good full ship’s length ahead of the vessel. When I estimated it was large enough to occupy the ring of my gunsight (had I been aiming straight at it), I pressed the red button.

  For a second I was enveloped in a brilliant ball of flame and the noise of a thousand howling devils assailed my ears. Never having fired a rocket before in my life, it gave me one hell of a fright. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly nothing as terrifying as this. The other pilots were also loosing off their rockets and for a moment it was as if the sky around me was filled with fiery comets. Although the missiles produced no recoil when fired, my aircraft bucked slightly as it was relieved of their combined weight.

  I quickly rammed the nose down again and hared for the shore. As I crossed the beach at a height of 300 metres, I let fly at the mass of men and matériel packed below. After the spectacular and noisy fireworks that had accompanied the launch of the two rockets, the thumping of my cannon, drowned out by the roar of the engine, sounded like the harmless popping of a cap pistol.

  With allied fighters now obviously aware of our presence, it was not advisable to remain over the beachhead area for long. It seemed as if Göring’s plans to send in the ‘entire Luftwaffe’ had yet to materialize, for apart from the twelve of us there wasn’t a single German aircraft to be seen in the sky. Under the circumstances we had to abandon all ideas of a co-ordinated low-level attack. It was high time to get upstairs and start playing hide-and-seek in the clouds again if we wanted to make it back to base in one piece. But we weren’t returning to Creil. We had been ordered instead to head for Senlis, a town some ten kilometres further to the southeast, where the local racecourse had been earmarked as our new landing ground. We touched down there shortly before 11.00hrs.

  After making my way from the racetrack to the small chateau close by that was to serve as both our ops room and our quarters, I was surprised to be congratulated by the Gruppenkommandeur. Apparently Leutnant Walterscheid had witnessed my attack on the ship, which he had identified as a Victory-class transport. His report confirmed that one of my rockets had hit the vessel’s stern and exploded, and that the other had gone into the water just behind it.

  Major Hohagen couldn’t say how many points this would bring me, for, as far as he was aware, the Gruppe had never put in any claims for damage to shipping before. But he was fairly sure that it would be worth the Iron Cross, First Class, at least–especially as I had already been notified that I was to be awarded Iron Cross, Second Class. The latter, incidentally, I would find waiting for me when I returned home from captivity after the war. Of the former there was no sign–perhaps the relevant paperwork had gone astray in the growing chaos and confusion that followed the Normandy landings.

  In the meantime our dozen machines had been fully refuelled, re-armed and hidden away under the trees bordering the racetrack. According to the Reichsmarschall’s order of the day, we should already be climbing back into them and taking off on our next mission. But as had become all too apparent during our recent anti-shipping sortie, there was clearly some delay to the promised massive counter strike by the Luftwaffe.

  Our two Staffeln at Senlis were not even held at readiness. In fact, we were given permission to leave the base. Four of us decided to visit the local municipal swimming pool. And so, incredibly, I spent the afternoon of D-Day sunning myself by the poolside in Senlis, while a lone P-51 circled lazily some 2,000 metres overhead. I presume that it was a reconnaissance machine. But he must have failed to spot our well-camouflaged fighters, for the field was not subjected to any bombing or strafing attacks.

  It was not until the evening, when we were all relaxing in the little chateau’s main salon, that a call came through from our local Jagdfliegerführer (OC Fighter Forces) at Bernay. It was to inform us that five aircraft of III. Gruppe from Creil would shortly be arriving at Senlis and that three of our number were to join them in an attack on enemy gliders reported to be landing in the Caen area. So there was to be another mission after all, albeit one flown by only a fraction of the Geschwader’s available strength.

  The five III. Gruppe machines duly touched down at about 19.30hrs. They were led by their Gruppenkommandeur, Hauptmann Herbert Huppertz, who had already shot down three allied fighters during two missions over Caen earlier in the day. The three Senlis pilots who had been selected to accompany them were Leutnant Eichhoff and Fähnrich Beer, both of 2. Staffel, together with myself as the sole representative of 3. Staffel. With each Focke-Wulf carrying a 300-litre auxiliary tank, which would give us an extra hour’s flying time, the eight of us took off shortly after 20.00hrs and set course almost due west–280 degrees–flying at an altitude of 400 metres.

  We were well over halfway to our objective when, some ten miles to the northeast of Bernay, we sighted a dozen Mustangs strafing a convoy of German military vehicles heading towards the invasion front. All thoughts of the gliders were abandoned. Our first duty lay in helping our comrades on the ground here and now.

  For once the odds were not too bad; only eight to twelve against, and we had the element of sur
prise on our side. The Americans had probably not seen hide or hair of a Luftwaffe aircraft all day long and were perhaps growing careless. Either that, or they were so intent on attacking the troops below that they failed entirely to notice us as we dropped our belly tanks and crept up into position above and behind them.

  At 1,200 metres a light evening mist was already beginning to gather, but from this height we could clearly see the Mustangs as they lined up in turn to make their strafing runs. They were spaced so regularly apart that each of us was able to pick his particular victim before we dived down at them. Mine was just preparing to launch another attack on a section of the convoy that was crossing the bridge over the River Risle. I closed in on him rapidly, but couldn’t get within firing range before he had completed his pass.

  When he pulled sharply up to the left at the end of his run, however, I was sitting snugly on his tail. His steep turn to port forced me to apply so much deflection that he disappeared momentarily behind my engine cowling. Although I didn’t actually see my shots strike home, I knew instinctively that I had hit him. Using the excess of speed built up in my dive, I quickly overhauled him, flying close past his left side to observe the effects of my fire.

  It had been absolutely devastating. My burst had caught the enemy fighter squarely in the middle of the fuselage above the wing trailing edge. The high-explosive shells in my ammunition mix had punched large holes in the Mustang’s metal skin, the edges of which were glowing a deep red. With the pilot slumped lifeless in his seat, the burning P-51 went down in a shallow dive towards the river. It exploded against the base of a tree on the left bank of the Risle. The trunk immediately burst into flames and within seconds the whole tree was blazing from top to bottom like a giant candle.