First D-Day Operation

So we got up, of course, early the next morning and we went down, it was dark. I remember we took off in the dark. And headed south and got, as we came towards, got about three quarters of the way across the channel, we could see, we could see, oh ships, merchant ships and battleships, you never saw a battleship, you know, well, that close to the shore. It was just unbelievable to see them. And they were firing at the shore. Just a mass, mass of ships. So we went up and down the beach, along it, just under the clouds, it was cloudy the whole damn channel was cloudy. But there was enough ceiling that we could operate two thousand feet above the reef or something. And we, it was a, we thought there would be hundreds of German aircraft and there weren’t any and then suddenly four of them appeared from over Normandy heading towards the beach from south, it would be over France, towards the beach four 190’s and we turned and ran after them and they immediately, before they even got to, just about as they reached the water’s edge, they turned back and we chased them back into Normandy for several miles and then they pulled up into the cloud and that was it. And we didn’t know it but that was about almost the only time anybody saw any fighters on the Normandy Beach. They were virtually absent.