THE LUFTWAFFE FACES THE LANDINGS - Normandy, 6 June–31 August 1944

Cinema shapes history more often than not!

Who has not seen that now-famous scene from Darryl F. Zanuck's film The Longest Day, in which two Luftwaffe fighter aircraft, alone against the Allied naval and air armada, made a brief strafing run over Sword Beach — leaving several hundred Tommies as astonished as they were bewildered — before turning east and landing undamaged at a base north of Paris? That image endured and for decades shaped the notion that the Luftwaffe was conspicuously absent from the skies of Normandy while the liberation of France and the destruction of the armies of the Third Reich hung in the balance.

It was in 1999 that a substantial work published by Heimdal set the record straight and provided, with a wealth of information, detail and photographs, an exhaustive panorama of the intervention of the German fighter arm over Normandy and the Île-de-France, and then over Provence following the Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast.

While, compared to the 15,000 sorties carried out by American and British aircraft during 6 June alone, the Luftwaffe had managed to mount barely more than 300, four days later 1,300 aircraft bearing black crosses — including nearly 500 fighters belonging to some twenty Jagdgruppen — would be in a position to intervene. A peak was recorded on 20 August, with 580 Focke-Wulf 190 As and Messerschmitt 109 Gs present on the front as the Wehrmacht was in full retreat.

Fighting most of the time at odds of one to ten, the German fighter pilots paid for their interventions over France in blood — more than a thousand of them being shot down with their aircraft during the hundreds of aerial combats in which they faced Mustangs, Thunderbolts, Typhoons and Spitfires bearing white stars or roundels.

The counterpart to these terrible losses is that those same German pilots fulfilled their duty as soldiers to the very limits of their moral and physical endurance: more than 1,200 aerial victory claims recorded between 6 June and 31 August bear witness to their determination and courage.

The success of the first edition of the historical album La Luftwaffe face au débarquement allié – 6 juin 1944 au 31 août 1944 quickly found its audience and has since become virtually unobtainable. Accordingly, nearly twenty years later, Heimdal chose to offer a new generation of readers a revised, corrected and expanded edition, richly illustrated with photographs, some never previously published, and enhanced with dozens of colour profiles depicting the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts that operated over France during that terrible summer of 1944.