D-Day reflections
Heroes Remember
D-Day reflections
Well, just prior to D-Day a lot of the emphasis was on the
targets. We did a lot of daylight runs on V-1 targets.These were
these rockets they were launching at, self propelled rockets,
that they were launching at London. And the V-2 sites, a lot of
the targets were the shorter ones, I'm just trying to go back
a bit. We were aware that D-Day was coming up only about
48 hours, at least in my capacity. People, the aircrew and so on
probably had a bit more. We were actually confined to barracks,
the whole base, 48 hours before D-Day. The aircraft were painted
with invasion stripes, big black and white stripes around to,
for easy identification. As were the aircraft that, the fighter
aircraft that provided convoy as escort duties, were all painted.
We had to do all of that in a matter of 24 hours, get them,
these invasion stripes painted on. We knew something big was
coming. I still remember this day waking up, going to work
and looking up, and the sky was full of airplanes with gliders
behind them. It just, I just can't describe how, how many
aircraft had been towed. Like there was one airplane, the DC-2,
it towed two or three of these gliders and there were just masses
of them going over. So we knew then, of course, that something
had happened. We, I think our squadron, again I don't know that
to all persons, probably did some preemptive bombing, they might
have done some diversionary bombing, to deflect the attention
away. But one of the jobs that we had to do was bomb,
after D-Day, was to get the Falaise Gap cleared, it blocked up
there and the bomber command went over and dropped something
like 4,000 tonnes of bombs on this tank regiment and everything
that was holding up the, the Allied troops, and that was
one of the big events post D-Day. Things quieted down.
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