LITMIR.BIZ

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      REVISING D-DAY

      The British Spitfire swooped in low, only a few feet above the waves as it flew towards the Normandy coastline, armed not with cannon but with camera. This was a reconnaissance sortie, not a fighting one. Once over the shoreline the pilot banked the aircraft to starboard (right), gained height and careful not to maintain a continuous straight flight path, instead a swerving irregular one, continued on his course. The cameras capturing image after image of the landscape and what it contained: the architecture of the Atlantic Wall, the coastal defence constructions of ‘Fortress Europe’. Gone before the Germans realised the Spitfire was flying overhead or could otherwise react, the pilot and his valuable cargo headed back across the Channel towards England.

      The Spitfires of No. 4 Squadron and the American P-51 Mustangs of No. 2 and No. 268 Squadrons, all of No. 35 (Reconnaissance) Wing RAF, conducted over 3,000 (3,200) low-level oblique and high-level vertical ‘photo recce’ sorties in April and May 1944, all along the northern French coastline and beyond. They were careful to ensure that as many passed over the Pas-de-Calais as ventured over Normandy and so continued to feed German uncertainty about where exactly the imminent invasion point would be. It was important to maintain a state of confusion and keep the Germans guessing in order to keep their troop disposition dispersed, their tank divisions not concentrated and their eyes not centred on where the invasion would actually appear.

      The main objective of the ‘recce’ sorties was, of course, to provide photographic images for the eyes of the interpreters who, with their stereoscopes, could render a 3D view from two overlapping photographs of the same image. This revealed details not otherwise perceptible and unlocked raw intelligence from 30,000 feet. The information gathered in turn underpinned the planning and provided a wealth of information about gun positions and types, construction of coastal batteries and bunkers, strong points, minefields, flooded areas, roads and hinterlands. It allowed intelligence from other sources (resistance agents, etc.) to be confirmed and supplemented, facilitating better planning options, recommendations and decision making about where to land to best penetrate the Atlantic Wall and secure a lodgement in areas suitable for expansion and reinforcement.

      This was a valuable activity and helped create a substantial overview of German defences in specific detail and facilitated comparisons in relative terms, and from which recommendations resulted. Not that the photo interpreters always knew exactly what they were looking at. One alert intelligence officer noticed something unusual, and correctly sensing it might have importance brought the curious discovery to the attention of his superior officer. The image was examined, discussed and reconsidered, but it still remained a mystery. What was apparent, though, was that this mysterious object was along the coastline the Allies were planning to assault, and they needed to know what it was. It was for this scenario, among others, that the new warriors were created, Churchill initiating the ‘Commandos’ to be ‘trained to act like packs of hounds’. Under the command of Combined Operations, paratroopers were inserted covertly from above, or commandos by amphibious means (submarines and canoes), to skilfully, stealthily and daringly execute a raid to capture whatever they were looking at. The successful raid recovered radar equipment and a detector that would provide the Germans with a warning of aerial attack. It was a significant discovery to learn that such apparatus was in their possession.

      Not that this technology would make up for the lost air parity the Germans had suffered as a result of their losses at the Battle of Britain and since. The RAF, with some thirty-three Irish pilots among them, the most famous being Pat Finucane from Dublin, inflicted a significant defeat on the Luftwaffe sufficient to persuade Hitler and his generals to postpone Operation Sea Lion (Unternehmen Seelöwe), their planned cross-channel invasion of the United Kingdom and Fall Grün (Case Green), the subsequent invasion of Ireland. The invasion, if ordered, was to take place by sea, with five to six German divisions landing on a broad front between Cork and Waterford. The area between Cork and Cobh was listed as a specific ‘gateway of entrance’ and described as: ‘Offering itself especially for the case of a peaceful or completely surprise landing, in which the considerable natural obstacle of the hinterland can be overcome before the development of any strong enemy counter-operation.’

      Some of the German bombers that flew over Ireland after dropping their bombs on Britain during the early years of the war did not do so as a result of navigational error or because they were forced out over the Irish sea by the RAF. It is clear that these aircraft flew over Ireland on photoreconnaissance missions as part of the preparation for a possible invasion. At the very start of the war, on 4 September 1939, the day after hostilities began, 23-year-old pilot officer William Murphy, the son of William and Katherine Murphy of Mitchelstown, County Cork, was shot down and killed as he led a wave of RAF bombers in an attack on the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven. All four bombers were lost. The sole survivor was Irishman Laurence Slattery of Thurles, County Tipperary. Willie Murphy’s death was thus both the first Irish and British military death of the Second World War and Laurence Slattery became the first and longest serving western Allied prisoner of war.

      In the event, Germany invaded neither England nor Ireland, but Russia instead and now Allied troops were massing along the south coast of England to invade northern France. And so it was, in Marrakesh, Morocco, on the last day of December 1943, a month after the Tehran meeting of the ‘Big Three’, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, subsequently appointed Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, and General Bernard Law Montgomery, appointed 21st Army Group (the land component commander for the invasion of northwestern Europe). Monty was one of the best known British generals of the Second World War, distinctive for his

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