<p>Last-minute activity reached into the late hours of 5 June 1944. Broad black-and-white wing and fuselage bands—'invasion stripes'—had been painted on fighters, light and medium bombers, and gliders. Bombs had been loaded, engines checked, ammunition boxes filled, and guns boresighted.
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<p>At midnight, the port propeller of a Douglas C-47 turned, urged by a whining starter. The engine caught, coughed and roared into life. Its sound was echoed again and again in the minutes that followed. Engines warmed, the pathfinder planes trundled out for takeoff. Aboard were the drop teams who would mark the landing zones for the airborne assault.
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<p>The RAF was out that night with its heavy bombers, pounding the coastal batteries with almost 6,000 tons of high explosives. At 1:45 a.m. on the morning of 6 June, IX Troop Carrier Command began the takeoff and aerial assembly of 813 transports holding paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. On other bases, 237 RAF transports were lifting into the night skies carrying the British 6th Airborne Division. By early light, the invasion fleet of thousands of boats and ships of all types was off the beaches under the cover of 171 fighter squadrons. Supporting fire from warships was greatly augmented by the heavy bombers of the Eighth AF, unloading more than 2,700 tons of high explosives on the shore defenses. The bombs were fuzed to burst on contact, so that cratering was minimized and Allied tank movements would be least hampered by the terrain.
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<p>That single day, the USAAF flew 8,772 combat sorties and the RAF flew 5,676. The Luftwaffe was hardly to be seen; it had been overwhelmed, and managed to get only a few dozen sorties over the beaches. Eisenhower had predicted just that; he had told his troops the night before not to worry if they saw any aircraft, because they'd be Allied.
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<p>It was a costly landing, but far less so than it would have been without the effective air support and the complete domination of the air by the USAAF and RAF. The Allies had landed eight divisions, two of them dropped behind Utah beach to help cut off the Cherbourg peninsula. The Luftwaffe was denied air bases within striking distance; 67,000 tons of bombs neutralized potentially useful airfields. Rail centers and bridges had been hit with 76,000 tons, and German reinforcements were cut off from their normal transportation to the front. They started to walk, and some troops confiscated bicycles and automobiles from the French. Straggling Wehrmacht troops were still heading north to battle 10 days to two weeks after the invasion.
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<p>June became a 'Big Month', during which the USAAF flew 82,369 combat sorties. That's a daily average of 923 heavy bomber missions, 297 light and medium bomber sorties, and 1,692 fighter flights.
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<p>Five days after the landings, the Allied forces had put 16 full divisions ashore, equipped and manned. Tactical air units were moving into new bases in Normandy, and now were only a five-minute flight from the front.
