German Luftwaffe
What happend to the Luftwaffe on D-Day?
In the movie, The Longest Day, there was a scene where 2 ME-109s made one pass at the beach, did some strafing and flew away. The pilot was muttering something about the last of the Luftwaffe. I thought that this was just Hollywood and recently, I read a book about D-Day which mentioned that there were only 2 sorties by the Luftwaffe on D-Day. I find it hard to believe that in the whole of western Europe in 1944, the Germans only had 2 airplanes.
Yes, the Luftwaffe didn’t provide much of a threat at that point. It wasn’t quite two aircraft, though any given location might only have seen a couple. On D-Day “Allied planes fly about 14000 sorties June 6, against about 250 by Luftwaffe”.
Very shortly after D-Day it was decided to stop flying barrage balloons over the landing ships: they weren’t needed to deter low-level bomber attacks and they were providing aiming marks for German artillery.
Some self-propelled anti-aircraft units were also withdrawn, for the less positive reason that there was a more pressing need for their personnel as replacement tank crews.
For the last desperate mass attack of the Luftwaffe in WW2, see “Bodenplatte” when 900 aircraft attacked, on New Year’s Day 1945, in an attempt to catch allied aircraft on the ground.
Modern German Luftwaffe
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