Aircrafts Colliding

You could see the aircraft battles. I can remember the first thousand aircraft bomber, bombing raid, that happened. And they formed up just over us, and we could see them all different: Strata, Fortresses and Sterlings, and all these aircraft, a thousand of them. Just imagine the noise. Sometimes, we saw aircraft collide. You know, it takes a lot of space, all those aircraft, to mount an attack. I think it was August the 9th, when we were at Falaise. There was a thousand bomber raid mounted, and instead of dropping the bombs on the Germans, they dropped them on us. It was frightening. People were wounded, yes, and I think all of our vehicles were hit. And I can recall, what’s the name of the aircraft, an artillery spotter aircraft anyway, flying under one of the Fortresses so the Fortress couldn’t drop his bombs. They didn’t have air-to-air contact, I don’t think, anywhere, or air-to-ground. And they didn’t realize they were bombing the wrong side. That was not a good day. We found out afterwards, that the reason why it happened is that the Pathfinder aircraft, who were supposed to spot the target with flares, they did their thing. They went over the target, dropped their flares. But the Germans were smart, and they fired mortar bomb flares that the aircraft saw before they saw the right flares, so they dropped them.