The cinema most often shapes history! Who has never seen this now famous scene from Darryl F. Zanuck's film "The Longest Day", where two Luftwaffe fighter planes, facing the naval and air armada of the allies, carried out a brief strafing from Sword Beach, leaving astonished as pantois a few hundred tommys, before heading east again to rest without damage on a base in the north of Paris. This image remained and conditioned for decades during the idea that the Luftwaffe was particularly absent from the sky of Normandy while the liberation of France and the annihilation of the armies of the Third Reich were played out.
It was in 1999 that a substantial book published by Heimdal Publishing came to put things in their proper place and provide with a wealth of information, details and photos a comprehensive overview of the German hunting intervention in the world. Normandy and Île de France skies then in Provence, after the Allied landing on the Mediterranean coasts. If, compared to the 15,000 sorties made by American and British aircraft during the day of June 6, the Luftwaffe could only organize a little more than 300, four days later it is 1300 aircraft to black crosses including nearly 500 hunters belonging to about twenty hunting groups that will be able to intervene, a peak being recorded on August 20 following with 580 Focke Wulf 190 A and Messerschmitt 109 G present on the front while the Wehrmacht is in full retreat. Fighting most of the time in a ratio of 1 to 10, the German fighter pilots will have paid the price of blood their interventions in the skies of France, more than a thousand of them, having been shot down with their devices during hundreds of aerial combat against the Mustang, Thunderbolt, Typhoon and other Spitfires with white stars or cockades. In return for these terrible losses, these same German pilots will have accomplished to the end of their moral and physical strength their duty as soldiers: more than 1200 claims of aerial victories, recorded between June 6 and August 31, testify to their determination and their courage.
The success of the first edition of the historic album The Luftwaffe against the Allied landings - June 6, 1944 to August 31, 1944 quickly interested his audience to become nowadays virtually untraceable. Also, the Heimdal editions have chosen to propose to readers of a new generation, almost twenty years later, a revised, corrected and expanded reissue, largely illustrated with partially unpublished photographs, enriched with dozens of profiles. colors representing Focke Wulf and Messerschmitt who operated in the skies of France during this terrible summer of 1944.
