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The Campaign in CFS3
Part II - The Invasion: off the beaches—and into the bocage

Once the invasion was under way, the Allied tactical air forces took on their toughest task: direct participation in the land battle. This included attacking enemy forces and providing close air support for friendly troops and armor on the ground.

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops stormed ashore on the Calvados coast of Normandy. A cloud of Allied aircraft, newly adorned in black and white "invasion stripes" to make their identity clear to nervous gunners on the ground, controlled the air over the beachhead. American and British fighters flew continuously over the invasion area, ending their patrols with attacks on coastal defenses, enemy strong points, bridges, and rail targets. These attacks slowed the arrival of German reinforcements, giving the invading armies additional time to consolidate their toehold on the Continent.

Both invading armies made initial progress inland, but they soon ground to a halt as German resistance stiffened. The British were stuck outside Caen, blocked by the armor of Panzer Group West. The Americans punched their way off the beaches only to find themselves stymied north of Saint-Lô by what General Omar Bradley called "the damnedest country I've seen": the Norman hedgerow country, or bocage.

This 20-mile swath of small fields enclosed by towering ancient hedges saw some of the most vicious infantry combat of the war. American troops groped their way into the maze of hedgerows, which the Germans had already infiltrated, and came under attack from three sides in each gloomy enclosure. Every field was like a small fortress with pre-arranged fields of machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire.

With no more than a hundred yards of visibility this determined defense was unnerving. The bocage had been there for a thousand years, but nothing in the Allied planning had addressed fighting through this nightmarish terrain.

Ending the impasse
Goals set to be attained within days by the Allied command remained out of reach for weeks, and each small gain of ground came at a staggering cost. To end this impasse, the Allies once again turned to air power. Two operations, code-named GOODWOOD and COBRA, were intended to break the stalemate on the ground by pouring ordnance onto the battlefield from the air.

GOODWOOD was designed to help the British break out of the stalemate around Caen and into the open country to the east, where tanks could operate effectively. The operation began on July 18 when 4,500 aircraft from RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces attacked the area held by Panzer Group West.

This enormous bombardment, violent enough to flip 60-ton tanks and drive hardened combat veterans into hysteria, allowed the British to force their way onto the Caen-Falaise plain. This forward movement was supported by the tactical air forces, which blasted enemy tanks, suppressed mortar and antitank fire, and delivered ordnance beyond the range of friendly artillery.

However, within two days the advance lost its momentum. This was partly a result of this operation's success in achieving a secondary goal—drawing German armor eastward, away from the American sector, where Bradley's forces were stuck in the bocage.

In the American sector, operation COBRA benefited from the British breakout effort, which drew German forces to the east. Devised by General Omar Bradley, the operation began with a massive but botched aerial bombardment on July 25 that blasted holes in the enemy lines and sent German forces reeling, but also killed or wounded hundreds of U.S. troops.

Bradley quickly capitalized on these gaps; his First Army forces attacked across a moonscape of bomb craters in an advance that moved four armored divisions almost 35 miles—all the way from the hedgerows around Saint-Lô to the open country near Avranches. As the speed of the assault increased, good weather allowed IX Tactical Air Command fighter-bombers, under the command of General Elwood "Pete" Quesada, to provide devastating close air support.

Guided onto targets by Army Air Force liaison officers riding in command tanks, Thunderbolts and Mustangs littered the roads with the burning wrecks of German vehicles. This air-ground teamwork proved to be a winning combination that would come into its own in the Allied dash across France and into Germany.

The breakout: air-ground teamwork and the dash across France
With the momentum of the breakout growing, on August 1, Bradley activated the Third Army under the command of General George S. Patton. From now on, Weyland's XIX TAC would support the Third Army advance, while Quesada's IX TAC was assigned to aid Bradley and the First Army.

Patton's forces raced west from Normandy into Brittany, and then pushed south into the Loire valley before swinging east toward Le Mans. Bradley's First Army also swung to the east to provide added pressure on the Germans. Meanwhile, General Bernard Montgomery coordinated the advance of his British and Canadian forces in a drive south from Caen, catching German General von Kluge's Seventh Army between Allied pincers and effectively encircling it.

To support this increasingly rapid movement, the tactical air commands had to revise their priorities and methods. The planned missions didn't work in a fluid and rapidly changing situation—by the time the fighter-bombers arrived at their objective, friendly forces might already have taken it. Two types of impromptu missions proved especially effective in this environment:

• Flying armed reconnaissance missions, pilots received radioed updates on the current location of the "bomb line" that marked the boundary between friendly and hostile territory, reported threats on the ground, and hammered enemy troops, tanks, and guns wherever they found them.
• At the same time, armored column cover missions coordinated air power with tanks by radio to protect the advance of friendly armor while suppressing enemy resistance. With little air opposition, pilots were often given permission to sweep the roads up to 30 miles ahead of the columns they were assigned to protect, clearing the way for a rapid advance.

The result of using these two new types of missions was a far more rapid advance than even the Allies had anticipated, creating a growing threat to all German forces west of the Seine. This threat became reality when the Germans planned a counterattack.

The Allies intercepted and decrypted von Kluge's orders and, combining resistance on the ground with air strikes, they stopped the German counterattack at Mortain.