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Show ROBERT THAYER B R 20 2 the order was in. That's all I had to tell him and from them on boy that plac like a beehive. We briefed and flew two missions that day. We didn t lose any aircraft but they were close to the troops. And this little Colonel Hall flew both missions. Th fir t one that he told me-l asked him about it- 1 said, "What could you see?' And he said "It was all overcast; we couldn't see anything." But he said on the second one he got to see some of the ships in the channel going across. He said it just looked like you could walk across there on ships that were involved in it. But they dropped their bombs, and they dropped their bombs ahead of the troops, of course. In fact, in back, quite a little ways ahead of the people landing on the beach, and we did that, we flew for two or three days, strictly in support. Most of ours, being heavy bombers, we weren't equipped or trained to give close support to the troops. Our type of bombing wasn't that accurate. In fact we had, during the war-and it wasn't our group, thank hell-but they had a malfunction of the bomb bay, and the leader dropped the bombs too soon, it was after the troops were going ahead into Europe, and they actually dropped one group's bombs on our lines; it was terrible. But it was one of those casualties of war. But D-day was something special. Our spirits went up a hundred-fold because we felt like up until then, you didn't know when you were going home, you didn't feel like this thing could ever end because the Germans were very resourceful. They would come up with new things all the time. Then, of course, they started to get jet aircraft, which we didn't have, and when our bombers would run into them, it was tough going. They flew so fast; the only thing about them was that they didn't have enough of them, the pilots weren't trained well enough, and they couldn't stay in the air long enough. They were so much faster than propeller-driven aircraft that it wasn't even funny. 44 |
