Prelude

The massive preparation for invasion thundered through its 16th straight day into a new month of fantastic statistics of destruction.

In April, U.S. and R.A.F. planes from Britain and Italy had dropped some 100,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries on enemy targets.

In one week at month's end, 24,500 Allied aircraft bombed, fought, strafed.

Air war had reached such a peak that the Berlin radio said: "The invasion air force is now actually in the fight." Berlin claimed that Allied prisoners, who had parachuted from crippled planes, included highly trained invasion airmen never sent on routine attacks until the week before.

Solid Pattern. In reality, the pattern of air attack, while growing in scope, had not yet fully shifted to the ferocious concentration on German military communications which would be the logical "attack bar rage" directly before invasion. Main Allied air objectives were still: 1) German air industry, 2) air power in being, 3) other industry, 4) Western Europe's railroad system.

These objectives were being hotly at tacked. Lieut. General James H. Doolittle, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, had a striking monthly report of his own : more than 1,300 Nazi fighter planes destroyed in April by his planes -- 800 in air combat and 500 on the ground. The total, said Jimmie Doolittle, was more than Germany's entire aircraft production for the month.

Bomb targets hit included 28 factories producing aircraft parts. U.S. attacking forces had lost 359 bombers and 144 fighters ; nearly half the fighters were lost in low-level slashes to beat up German airfields.

The behavior of the Luftwaffe fighter command was still unpredictable. Its commander, General Hans Stumpff, sometimes met Allied attacks with the old massive fury, but more often his fighter power looked threadbare.

For a week Allied planes cruised over Germany, meeting only moderate air resistance. On Wednesday 2,000 attackers met almost no resistance at all, and a U.S. air task force hit Brunswick through heavy cloud cover without losing a bomber.

Solid Battle. But on Saturday, when 2,000 U.S. bombers and fighters struck at Berlin, the Luftwaffe reaction was different. Hundreds of fighters rose to the attack, in air combats as bitter as any the war had seen. Eighty-eight Nazi ships were shot down; 63 U.S. bombers and 14 fighters were lost. From that raid Lieut. John M. Gibbons, of Jefferson City, Mo., returned with one of the strange stories of the war: his bomber, the lone survivor of its formation, had nearly been knocked down by a dead enemy. Eighty German fighters had attacked straight into Gibbons' formation. Said Gibbons:

"Our guys fired like mad. On the first pass we bagged 14 fighters. They were so thick all we had to do was fire in practically any direction. They swept around front again and made two more passes. . . . When I looked around, I was the only one left in the formation. I was sure scared to death. ..

"Then I saw an Me-109 coming in ... boring straight at me without firing a shot. I wondered: 'When will that crazy guy ever turn off?' He kept coming. Then I knew why. That Messerschmitt was piloted by a dead one. At the last second I shoved the wheel forward and prayed. . .. He couldn't have missed by much, because he took off our aerial."

Luftwaffe pilots, dead or alive, still packed a punch. The point of air knockout, which some military writers regarded as essential for invasion, had not yet been attained. But the Luftwaffe had been heavily bled.

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