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The first to leave on the 7th for its assigned patrol (actually the last of the previous night’s patrols) was 224 Squadron Liberator “B-Baker” (BZ915) commanded by 21-year-old Australian Flying Officer Ronald Henry Buchan-Hepburn (of Atherton, Queensland) and his largely Aussie crew. Throughout the long day of 7 June 1944, six 224 Squadron Coastal Command Liberator GR-V (B-24) crews, comprising 60 young men of the Commonwealth, left Royal Air Force Station St Eval on the north coast of Cornwall, England and headed towards the Celtic Sea or the Bay of Biscay. David’s, and Pembroke Dock). From the night of 5–6 June, 19 Group stepped up their patrols and successfully kept the U-boats from molesting the invasion ships-but not without cost. The group was spread out across 11 Royal Air Force bases in Devon and Cornwall ( St Eval, Davidstow Moor, Chivenor, Predennack, Portreath, Mount Batten, Perranporth, Harrowbeer and Dunkeswell) and in Wales: ( St. The threat posed by all these U-boats and S-boats was taken very seriously and the task of sweeping the approaches to the English Channel and preventing the swarm from breaking through fell to the crews and aircraft of Coastal Command and in particular 19 Group of the Royal Air Force.ġ9 Group in the summer of 1944 was a massive organization, with five Liberator squadrons (53, 206, 224, 311, 547) three Handley-Page Halifax squadrons (58, 502, 517 (meteorological)) three Bristol Beaufighter squadrons (144, 235, and 404 RCAF) seven Vickers Wellington/Warwick squadrons (172, 179, 282, 304 (Polish), 407 RCAF, 524 and 612) four Short Sunderland squadrons (201, 228, 461 RAAF, 10 RAAF) one Mosquito squadron (248) two Fairey Swordfish squadrons (816 and 838 Squadrons, Fleet Air Arm) two Grumman Avenger squadrons (849 and 850 Fleet Air Arm) and four US Navy Consolidated Privateer squadrons (VPB-103, 105, 110 and 114). But soon, Schnellboote and their underwater counterparts, the Unterseeboote would swarm out of their pens along the French coast like angry wasps.Īt the time of the landings, there were close to three dozen U-boats in pens on the coast of the Bay of Biscay (Bordeaux, Brest, La Rochelle, Lorient, and Saint-Nazaire), others returning from patrols and still others ready to sail from northern submarine bases in Norway (Bergen, Hammerfest, Kirkenes, Narvik, and Trondheim). Once they realized the immensity of the fleet, they let go their torpedoes from a distance and left the area. As soon as the Germans understood that the invasion was on, Schnellboote from Cherbourg were the first Kriegsmarine combat vessels to engage the invasion fleet. On the seas, supply, trooping and combat vessels had no real threat from German capital ships, but U-boats and S-Boats (Schnellboote -the fast attack torpedo vessels called E-boats by the Allies) were another matter.
Success required absolute air and sea superiority. This surprise was an advantage that could not be squandered by allowing attacks from the air and the sea on the supply line to the beachheads. In the early hours of 6 June 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, which had been in the planning for years, took the Germans by complete surprise, despite the massive buildup on the littoral of southern Great Britain.