As Allied forces established themselves on the Normandy beaches and fought inland on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the Luftwaffe put up a brave, futile, and limited air defence. As Chris Goss recounts, it was a doomed and bloody affair.
WAR IN THE AIR
As dawn broke over the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944, the Luftwaffe were notable by their relative absence, although the well-known strafing by Oberstleutnant ‘Pips’ Priller and his wingman, Unteroffizier Heinz Wodarczyk, of II./JG 26 over Sword Beach was an event which has given rise to a popular misconception that the Luftwaffe were almost entirely absent in the skies above the landing beaches. That might well have been the case initially, and certainly as the invasion began, but as the day progressed, so increasing numbers of German aircraft became active. For one German fighter-bomber unit, the day was a particularly harrowing one for pilots and groundcrew alike.
The III Gruppe/Schlachtgeschwader 4 (III./ SG 4) was formed from Major Fritz Schröter’s III./ Schnellkampfgeschwader 10 (III./SKG 10) in October 1943, its role being a Jabo (Jagdbomber) or fighter-bomber/ground attack unit. Flying the Focke-Wulf 190A, it moved from Graz in Austria to Beaumont-sur-Oise in France at the end of 1943. Then, from February 1944 onwards, the unit was based at Clastres, close to St Quentin in northeast France.
For much of 1944, III./SG 4 was commanded by Major Gerhard Weyert who had flown Junkers 87 Stukas in Spain with the Legion Condor, and for the first two years of the war he had flown operations with and then commanded 11.(Stuka)./Lehrgeschwader 1. Then, in 1941, he joined SKG 210 and went on to fly Jabo missions with II./Zerstörergeschwader 2 (II./ZG 2) and then II./ZG 1, eventually taking command of III./SG 4 in January 1944.
It appears that III./SG 4 saw very little real warfare while at Clastres, although on 18 May 1944, 12 Focke-Wulf 190s of Oberleutnant Heinrich Hesse’s 9./SG 4 were detached to Le Luc, near Toulon in southern France, on what were fruitless anti-submarine missions. Hesse had previously flown Bf 109s with 7./JG 53, and had been shot down into the Mediterranean on 14 June 1942, before being rescued from the sea by a Dornier 24 of 7 Seenotstaffel which then crashed on takeoff. He a
