Quote:
Originally Posted by RSwank
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Thank you, RSwank. An obvious source which I did not check!
This information allowed me to find the following, reasonably definitive, text, in the
Report by the Supreme Commander to the Combined Chiefs of Staff on the Operations in Europe of the Allied Expeditionary Force 6 June 1944 to 8 May 1945. It is available online at
https://history.army.mil/html/books/...-58/index.html:
"During the 24 hours of 6 June, the Strategic Air Forces flew 5,309 sorties to drop 10,395 tons of bombs, while aircraft of the tactical forces flew a further 5,276 sorties"
These are US, or short, tons, so the
equivalent weight in metric tonnes is 9,430.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Laurent Rizzotti
From memory, many of the missions flown in the night of June 5-6 were in the hours before dawn, while a good part of those flown in the night of 6-7 were in the evening of the 6th. As the bombing effort on the second night was bigger than on the first (1065 Bomber Command aircraft vs 1012), this would add some thousand more tons of bombs. According to the BC War diaries by Middlebrook and Everitt, 3488 tons of bombs were dropped that night.
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Laurent, the text that I found adds the following detail to that already mentioned above:
"Shortly after midnight the bombing commenced, and
by dawn 1,136 aircraft of RAF Bomber Command had dropped 5,853 tons of bombs on 10 selected coastal batteries lining the Bay of the Seine between Cherbourg and Le Havre. As the day broke, the bombers of the U. S. Eighth Air Force took up the attacks, 1,083 aircraft dropping 1,763 tons on the shore defenses during the half-hour preceding the touchdown."
Thus, the piece of the puzzle that is missing is the tonnage dropped by tactical aircraft. Given their much lower bomb-carrying capacity and the fact that many fighters did not carry any bombs at all, I would estimate that they dropped no more than about 3,000 metric tonnes on D-Day. It would be good to have precise figures, of course.
Kind regards,
Dan