La Luftwaffe face au Debarquement Revised Edition question

[Marcel van Heijkop]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

LG 1 was in action over Normandy, so there's the Peter Taghon History as well.

In addition, II./KG 51's Me 410s were treated as a fast bomber force in IX. Fliegerkorps reports and Jan Horn's "Das Flurschadengeschwader" has material on its operations. He also has a section on Kommando Schenck's Me 262s, as does my site.

I./SKG 10 is covered by Frappé's book and was often attacking the same targets as II./KG 51.

Then there were the Mistel operations, described in Rober Forsyth's book for Classic.

Like Chris, I've thought about this as a possible topic (even if I don't have all the losses!) but the daunting bit would be working back from the known land targets to find reports from the Allied units on the ground. I've not done a lot with army material so maybe there are daily air situation reports that would make it easy to discover damage done but I suspect it would mean going to divisional level or below.

There is a passage in Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show, saying how each night the Germans: "… came over in groups of about a dozen every five minutes or so … letting their bombs go more or less anywhere. It didn’t really matter where, as the beachhead was so full of troops, ammunition dumps, convoys of lorries, concentration of tanks and planes that they could scarcely fail to score a bull every time. The nightmare went on until 3 a.m."

The anti-shipping side would easier to deal with since it's relatively straightforward to find which ships were sunk or damaged.

Thanks Nick!

Best regards,

Marcel