Stars and Stripes was there: 'This Was the Invasion'

June 7, 1944

Six thousand feet below invasion surged over the beaches of France and against Hitler's Atlantic Wall, and, as the first black dots moved over the white sand, a gunner said over the interphone: "Jesus Christ, at last."

On the dirty, dark green of the channel waters battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and more man-carrying craft than you could count rolled steadily toward the green fields and the white towns the Nazis had taken from France.

Through a smoke screen the wraithlike shapes of warships loomed a moment, chameleoned into blobs of flame as another broadside roared off to find some Wehrmacht strongpoint beyond the coast. This was the invasion.

7,000 Planes in Raids

North and south all across the channel and deep into the reaches beyond, the concrete-bound coasts of the continent some 7,000 American and Allied warplanes flew in the greatest aerial armada in history.

Fighter-Bombers Go In

Fountains of smoke and flame and Nazi-poured concrete leaped up along the ridges behind the beaches.Before the debris had settled wave after wave of American fighter-bombers was peeling off from formation and screaming toward the deck with guns blazing.

The airmen had been told that on them would rest the task of making the foot soldiers' job less bloody. They did, and the measure of the airmen's devotion was that they bombed from half the altitude they knew could give them a fighting chance of getting home so that their explosives would not miss. To do that job they had gone through a nightmare of flight before they came to the targets.

For long months, the bombers and the fighters have woven a pattern of craters across the ramparts of the Atlantic Wall. The pattern was cut for invasion.

Tired, weary, but ready, the bomber men went back to base. They ate and went to bed. At one o'clock in "the morning they were called.

Sleepy, worn with the strain of two hauls a day, almost every day for two months, they walked through the wet night to the briefing. In a plain, undramatic Texas voice, Wilson Wood told them: "Thirty-three seconds after your bombs hit the target, hundreds of thousands of American boys, just a you, are going ashore in France. This is the invasion."

He talked some more and ended: "Let's kick the hell out of everything that's left." Then they cheered and went out to work. There was no 'day when the bombers went down the runways and followed the winking lights of planes ahead into the air. They went up through bitter cold and clashing rain and headed for France.

Ships Fill Channel

The clouds broke over the Channel and suddenly there were more ships than you could see, with the white wakes of them streaming back to the English coast, and the dark green, of the channel flat before them to the coast of Europe.

The flak began to come up, but for once the bomber men weren't watching it, because through the murk above the waters off the coast there burst the angry red of warship broadsides, and inland came the answering crimson a few moments later as the shells hit home. At half the height they've used for bombing, the Marauders swept in.

The heavy flak burst around the formations, and tracers from machine guns streaked up past the wings — that's how low they flew.

We went away from the flak and began the long journey home, and talked too much over the interphone, because this had been The Day.