What D-Day Really Looked Like From Inside a Burning P-51 Mustang’s Own Cockpit

There is a page in a young pilot’s flight log that should not exist. Throughout March and April of 1944, every single entry reads almost the same way. Highalt alitude escort. Highalt alitude escort. Highalt alitude escort. Then in May, without a word of explanation, two new terms appear. Divebombing practice.

Nobody told the pilots of the 355th Fighter Group why seasoned combat veterans were suddenly relearning how to fly, calculating wind and angle and pitch like rookies again, wasting precious hours that seasoned airmen never had to spare in the middle of a war. But something enormous was coming. In a few short weeks, a 20-year-old lieutenant named Thomas Foster would accidentally fire the machine guns that set his own flight leader wing on fire 6,000 ft above the coast of Normandy.

One single day later, that same young man would be dead, his family line ending with him in a burst of flame over a French railway. This is the story of Ed McNab, a P-51 Mustang pilot who flew into the chaos of D-Day not once but twice in a single day. Who watched a German fighter nearly kill his commanding officer who caught fire in midair and lived and who then watched 24 hours later as the war took the very wingman who had almost killed him first.

This is what the 6th of June 1944 looked like from inside a cockpit. Make yourself comfortable with your favorite drink. Then check the time and tell us exactly what your clock says right now. We’d love to know what time people around the world are joining us. In the early summer of 1944, both sides of the war in Europe could feel it. Something was coming.

German commanders felt it in the frantic pace of their coastal defenses. the endless pouring of concrete, the barbed wire strung across every beach that faced the English Channel. American and British soldiers felt it in the crowded ports of southern England, where more men, more tanks, and more ships had gathered in one place than at any other time in human history.

And high above all of it, in the cockpit of a fighter plane, a young American pilot named Ed McNab felt it too, though he did not yet know exactly what it meant. McNab flew a P-51 Mustang with the 355th Fighter Group, part of the Eighth Air Force based at an airfield called Steeple Morton in the English countryside.

The base itself was little more than a scattering of Nissen huts and steel matting laid across what had once been farmland, ringed by hedge and the low gray skies that seemed to hang over England for most of the year. Mud clung to boots on the walk to the flight line. The smell of aviation fuel and damp wool blankets filled the huts where pilots slept, ate, wrote letters home, and tried not to think too hard about the friends who did not come back from the last mission.

By the spring of 1944, the Mustang had already earned its reputation as the finest fighter in the European theater, a long range escort that could finally accompany American bombers deep into Germany and fight their way home again. Pilot spoke of it with a kind of quiet pride, the way a man might speak of a horse that had never once let him down.

For McNab and pilots like him, the war so far had meant one thing above all else. High altitude escort. Fly above the bomber formations, watch for German fighters, protect the big four engine aircraft as they drop their loads on factories and rail yards, then turn for home. It was dangerous work, cold and exhausting at 30,000 ft, where a man’s breath fogged inside his oxygen mask and his fingers went numb around the control stick.

But it was work with a rhythm, a pattern the pilots had come to understand. And understanding in combat was its own kind of comfort. That rhythm is written plainly across the pages of Ed McNab’s flight log. Turn to March or April of 1944 and nearly every combat entry reads the same way. Highaltitude escort. Highaltitude escort.

Highaltitude escort. Again and again, mission after mission, the routine of a fighter group doing exactly what it was built to do. But turn the page to May and something changes. Suddenly, entries appear that have nothing to do with escort duty at all. dive bombing practice. Then a few days later, dive bombing practice again.

It was an unusual thing to see in the middle of a war. Dive bombing was not the role that came to mind when people thought of the Mustang in Europe. The aircraft had built its legend in the sky, hunting German fighters at altitude, not screaming down toward the earth with a bomb slung beneath its wing.

Yet here it was taking up valuable hours of flight time for pilots who had already proven themselves in combat. Pilots who did not need practice, or so it seemed, something was clearly being prepared. Something big. No one briefed the pilots on exactly why. That was simply how the war worked. from where a fighter pilot sat.

Orders came down, training changed, and a man learned to read the shifting winds of the war the same way he read the actual wind before a mission. By watching, by paying attention to small details, and by trusting his instincts about what they meant. Rumors moved through the officer’s mess and the pilot’s huts faster than any official announcement ever could.

Talk of ships gathering along the southern coast. talk of roads clogged with tanks and trucks moving only at night to avoid German reconnaissance planes. Every man on that airfield had his own theory, but none of them knew the date, and none of them knew their exact role until it was time. That something was Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France that history would come to know simply as D-Day.

With an invasion of this scale approaching, the Mustangs of the 355th Fighter Group would be needed for a new and very different kind of mission. Lowaltitude bombing and strafing aimed at disrupting German supply lines and knocking out defensive positions before Allied soldiers ever set foot on the beaches.

On paper, it might have sounded like a simple task, a step down from the complexity of high alitude air combat. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth. Diving down toward the ground exposed a fighter to a different kind of danger altogether. Anti-aircraft fire, hidden machine gun positions, and the constant risk of misjudging the approach all waited for a pilot the moment he committed to a dive.

And dive bombing itself was a skill that took real mastery to perform correctly. It demanded precise calculation of wind, of angle, of timing, and above all a careful feel for the pitch of the aircraft during the descent, because even a small variation in that angle could send a bomb sailing far off its intended target, doing the ground troops below no good at all.

Meanwhile, the enemy on the ground was rarely idle. Pilots of this era told stories, later captured on gun camera footage, of lining up to strafe an ordinaryl looking freight train only to watch its side panels fall away to reveal a hidden machine gun nest firing directly back up at the attacking aircraft. Hitting the target was only half the job.

Surviving the attempt was the other half. With only a matter of weeks remaining before the invasion, there was simply not enough time for the pilots of the 355th to become true experts in this demanding new form of attack. They would have to learn quickly, and they would have to learn well enough to survive. Every training flight ended the same way, with instructors gathering the young pilots on the ground afterward to walk through what had gone wrong.

too shallow an angle and the bomb would skip harmlessly off its target. Too steep and a pilot risk flying his own aircraft straight into the ground while his attention stayed fixed on the earth rushing up to meet him. It was a skill built on feel as much as on calculation, the kind of feel that could only come from repetition, and repetition was the one thing the calendar would not allow them much of.

As May drew to a close, another significant change arrived at the airfield. A newer version of the Mustang began showing up on the flight line, the P-51D, an improvement over the earlier B model that most pilots, including McNab, had been flying throughout the spring. Alongside the new aircraft came a striking and unmistakable feature, broad black and white stripes painted across the wings and fuselage of nearly every Allied fighter and bomber in England.

These invasion stripes existed for one purpose only, to prevent Allied ships and ground gunners, jumpy and trigger-happy in the chaos of a massive amphibious landing from mistaking their own aircraft for the enemy and shooting them down by accident. Yet the new Dmodel Mustangs did not arrive all at once.

They came in gradually, distributed on an asneeded basis as more aircraft became available. For McNab and many other pilots in his squadron, that meant continuing to fly the older B model for the time being, waiting their turn while the invasion drew ever closer. By early June, the buildup across southern England had reached a fever pitch.

Invasion forces filled every port and airfield. Columns of trucks and armor stretching for miles along country lanes, never meant to hold so much steel. Barrage balloons floated above the harbors like silver whales, and the roads leading south grew so crowded that farmers driving cattle sometimes waited hours just to cross. The relentless Allied bombing of targets across France, bridges, railards, coastal gun imp placements made it plain to anyone paying attention that the long- awaited invasion of Fortress Europe could not be far off. The pilots

had lived through false alarms before, missions scrubbed at the last moment, briefings that led nowhere, orders given and then quietly withdrawn. This time felt different. There was a tension in the air that no one could quite put into words. The particular quiet of men who suspect they are standing at the edge of something historic and are trying very hard not to think about it too much.

On the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of June, McNab and his squadron flew escort missions, familiar work that gave little hint of what was coming. Then, on the 5th of June, the pace suddenly slowed. The pilots were given a day of rest, a pause that felt less like relaxation and more like the held breath before a plunge. Some men slept.

Others wrote letters they hoped would not need to be the last ones their families ever received. A few simply sat outside their huts in the pale evening light, smoking, watching the sky, saying very little. Many of them suspected what the sudden stillness meant. After so many false starts, so many nights of uncertainty, this pause could only mean one thing.

Tomorrow was the day. Late that night, the pilots were called together and finally told the truth. The maps came out, the models of the beaches, the code names that had meant nothing until that moment. Normandy, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno Sword. For the first time, the young men of the 355th understood exactly what all those weeks of dive bombing practice had been preparing them for.

There was no time left for nerves, no time left for anything but final checks and a few hours of restless sleep before the earliest briefing any of them had ever attended. When the sun rose on the 6th of June 1944, Ed McNab and the pilots of the 355th Fighter Group would find out just how right they were and just how little their months of training could truly prepare them for what waited above the beaches of Normandy.

The morning of the 6th of June, 1944 began before the sun did. Ed McNab was pulled from a thin sleep somewhere around 3:30 in the morning, dressed in the dark, and made his way across the wet grass to the briefing hut, where the news he and every other pilot on the base had been waiting weeks to hear was finally spoken aloud. This was it.

Operation Overlord, the invasion of France had begun, and the 355th Fighter Group would be in the air before most of the soldiers below ever set foot on the sand. Inside the briefing hut, the mood was different from anything the pilots had experienced before. Gone were the vague hints and rumors that had circulated for weeks.

In their place stood a large map of the Normandy coastline, marked with beach codes and target zones, and an intelligence officer speaking in a low, steady voice about the scale of what was about to unfold. Thousands of ships, thousands of aircraft, more men committed to a single operation than any of them had ever imagined possible.

For pilots who had spent months escorting bombers at 30,000 ft, rarely seeing more than a handful of aircraft around them at once, the numbers being described that morning were almost impossible to picture. They would not have to imagine it for long. As an eighth Air Force Fighter pilot, McNab had no direct assignment down at the beaches themselves.

His squadron was given patrol duty instead, a broad sweep of the skies above the invasion fleet and the coastline beyond it, watching for any sign of the German fighters that had so far been strangely absent. Around 4:30 in the morning, still well before dawn, McNab led his flight into the air. Three other pilots flew on his wing, taking off in pairs before joining into formation, climbing together through total darkness toward their assigned patrol area.

The sky that morning was no simple thing to fly through. Three separate layers of clouds stretched above the airfield, the lowest sitting at around 800 ft, with two more layers stacked higher still, each of them thin but persistent. McNab and his flight climbed through the MC using dead reckoning, timing their heading and air speed carefully to estimate when they had reached the patrol area, since visual landmarks were nearly useless in the dark.

But even through the broken clouds, there was no mistaking what lay ahead. A dull orange glow rose up from the horizon, seeping through the gaps in the overcast, the unmistakable light of naval gunfire and shelling pounding the beaches of Normandy far below. It was still dark, and already the invasion had announced itself in fire.

They found what they believed to be their assigned patrol sector and settled into a long oval track, circling steadily, watching, waiting to be called upon if trouble arose. For a long while nothing did, as the sky slowly began to lighten with the first hints of dawn, McNab looked down through the breaks in the cloud and caught his first real glimpse of what lay beneath him.

The English Channel, usually empty gray water stretching toward France, was now crowded from horizon to horizon with ships of every size. Transports, destroyers, battleships, landing craft churning white wakes toward the coast. It was a sight none of them had words for at the time, and one that few of them would ever forget.

McNab looked out and realized just how crowded the air itself had become, as well. Another patrol here. Another one there. Squadron after squadron of Allied fighters all crossing the same stretch of sky above the invasion fleet. All searching for a German threat that that morning largely failed to appear. In fact, the single greatest danger McNab and his fellow pilots faced during that first patrol was not the Luftwafa at all.

It was each other. Dozens of aircraft sharing the same crowded airspace in poor visibility, any one of them capable of drifting into a mid-air collision without ever seeing another Mustang until it was far too late. Every pilot in the sky that morning understood the math of it instinctively. With this many aircraft packed into so little airspace, a moment of carelessness was every bit as dangerous as an enemy fighter, and there would be no German pilot to blame if two Mustangs found each other in the clouds instead. The patrol itself passed

without incident. Poor cloud cover made it difficult to see much of anything happening on the beaches below. And after several hours of circling, McNab and his flight turned back toward England, landing at Steeple Morton, with nothing more dramatic to report than thick clouds and crowded skies. For the soldiers hitting the beaches that morning, the war was already turning into the deadliest fight of their lives.

For the pilots of the 355th, the first mission of D-Day had been almost entirely uneventful. That would not last. Almost as soon as McNab’s flight touched down, ground crews swarmed the aircraft, refueling them and loading bombs beneath their wings in place of the fuel tanks they normally carried.

There was no time to rest, barely enough time for a quick meal and a change of gloves before climbing back into the same cockpit that had only hours earlier carried them through the cold darkness above the invasion fleet. A second mission was already being prepared, and this one would be dive bombing, the very skill the squadron had spent the last several weeks of May hastily learning under pressure.

never quite certain until this moment whether that training would prove to be enough. Their targets were anything of value moving toward the beaches, vehicles, supply columns, reinforcements that the German army desperately needed to push the invasion back into the sea before it could gain a foothold. Intelligence officers had made the stakes plain during the second briefing of the day.

Every hour that German reinforcements were delayed on the roads behind the coastline was another hour for the soldiers below to dig in to consolidate the ground they had already paid for in blood. Suppressing that enemy fire by air, by land, and by sea was the entire purpose of the invasion’s opening hours. Every bomb dropped from a Mustang, every shell fired from a battleship offshore, every round from a soldier’s rifle, all of it worked toward one single goal, carving out enough of a beach head that the Allies could finally get a foothold in

France and begin pushing inland. Most of the pilots preparing for this second mission had at best only a handful of practice flights behind them. The training in May had covered the fundamentals, the mathematics of angle and wind and pitch. But there was a wide gulf between diving at a marked target on an empty range in the English countryside and diving at a real target defended by real anti-aircraft guns with real consequences waiting on the other side of a miscalculation.

Every pilot climbing back into his cockpit that late morning understood, at least somewhere in the back of his mind, that this next mission would be the truest test yet of everything they had rushed to learn. For McNab personally, this second mission carried an added weight. In his nearly four months of combat flying, he had served almost entirely as a wingman, his job to protect his flight leader and follow orders.

Now seasoned by those months of experience, he had been elevated to flight leader himself, given command of blue flight. It was a milestone earned through skill and survival, but it came at the worst possible moment to be untested in a role on the single most complicated and dangerous day of the war so far. Flying on McNab’s wing for this mission was Lieutenant Thomas J.

Foster, a 20-year-old from Mississippi who had joined the 355th only in May. Young as he was, Foster had already proven he belonged in the cockpit of a fighter. On the 24th of May, he had shot down a German Messersmid for his very first aerial victory, a mark of real skill for a pilot so new to combat. Now only a couple of weeks later, he found himself flying on the wing of an experienced leader, a young man ready to learn everything McNab could teach him about survival in the air.

There was a particular kind of trust required in that arrangement, one that few outside a fighter cockpit ever fully understand. A wingman’s entire job was to watch his leader’s back, to stay close enough to protect him from an enemy attack, yet disciplined enough never to become a hazard himself. It required constant awareness of another aircraft’s position, speed, and intentions, all while managing the demands of navigation, fuel, and an approaching target.

For a pilot with only a few weeks of combat experience, flying that kind of close formation during a high-pressure attack run was as much a test of nerve as it was of skill. Foster had passed every test so far. This mission would ask more of him than any before it. The pair crossed the English Channel sometime around 11 in the morning, arriving in their assigned target area southwest of Paris.

As the different squadrons of the 355th fanned out across France, one group encountered a formation of German Junker’s J87 dive bombers known to Allied pilots as Stucas, attempting to slip beneath the low clouds and strike directly at the invasion beaches. Those German aircraft never reached their target. Allied pilots in the area caught them beneath the overcast and shot them down before they could do any damage.

But McNab and Foster squadron was operating in a different sector, and they pressed on toward their own assigned targets on the ground. Thick cloud cover forced the entire formation to fly dangerously low, close enough to maintain visual contact with the terrain below, but low enough to be exposed to any threat that found them.

Flying low meant trading one danger for another. At altitude, a Mustang pilot had room to maneuver, room to dive away from trouble or climb out of it. Down near the treetops, there was no such room left to spare. Every decision had to be made faster with less margin for error, and the ground itself became almost as dangerous as any enemy fighter.

It did not take long for one to appear. A single German Faula Wolf 190 used the cover of the clouds to its full advantage, diving out of the overcast and opening fire directly on the aircraft of the squadron leader, Colonel William Cummings, nearly shooting him out of the sky in a matter of seconds. Just as quickly as he had appeared, the skilled German pilot recognized he was badly outnumbered and pulled his aircraft back up into the safety of the clouds before any of the surrounding Mustangs could react and turn the fight in their favor. It was over almost

before anyone fully registered it had happened. A stark reminder that death could arrive from the clouds in an instant, and that no pilot could afford to stop watching the sky, even for a moment. Even on a day already full of chaos, for McNab, flying just behind and to the side of his commanding officer, the encounter was a jolt of adrenaline that cut straight through the fatigue of an already long day.

One moment, the sky had been quiet, filled only with the drone of engines and the gray wall of cloud around them. The next tracer fire had streaked past a fellow pilot’s cockpit, and just as suddenly, the threat had vanished again, swallowed back into the overcast as though it had never existed at all. There was no time to process it, no time to chase the attacker, no time for anything but tightening formation and pressing on toward the target that had brought them across the channel in the first place.

Not long after that encounter, the squadron spotted their assigned target beneath the thick clouds of June V 6th, a train moving steadily toward the coast, almost certainly loaded with supplies or reinforcements bound for the German defenses. McNab turned his flight toward it and led Foster down into the attack.

From altitude, the train looked almost insignificant, a thin, dark line crawling along a ribbon of track through the French countryside. up close, diving toward it at speed, it became something else entirely, a target that grew larger and more detailed with every passing second. Box cars and engine and the ground rushing up around it all at once.

Pass after pass, they unloaded their bombs on the train below, then swept back in low with their 50 caliber machine guns blazing, doing as much damage as they possibly could to slow the flow of German men and material toward the fighting on the beaches. Each pass demanded the same brutal sequence of judgment.

Roll in, line up the sights, hold the dive steady, despite every instinct screaming to pull up sooner, release and pull hard out of the dive before the ground closed the distance for good. There was no room in that sequence for anything but total concentration, no space left over to track the position of another aircraft with the same care a pilot might give it during a calmer moment.

It was during one of these strafing passes that everything went wrong. As the two Mustangs bore down on the train together, McNab leading and Foster following close behind, the two aircraft drifted slowly closer to one another than either pilot fully realized. McNab, focused entirely on his target, on his altitude, on the timing of his attack, did not notice that he had drifted directly into the line of fire of his own wingman’s guns.

Foster, equally consumed by the demands of the attack, could not react in time to correct the error. One of the rounds from his 50 caliber machine guns tore into the wing of the aircraft flying just ahead of him. The aircraft of his own flight leader. In the cockpit, McNab felt it before he understood it. A sudden jolt, a plunk against the airframe that did not belong.

He looked out at his wing and saw fire. A jet of flame burning out of the top of it like a blowtorrch had been set loose against the metal. For a fraction of a second, his mind simply refused the sight in front of him. Fire on the wing of a fighter plane thousands of feet in the air was the kind of thing pilots joked about in the safety of the officer’s mess.

A dark joke, the kind meant to keep the real fear at a distance. Now it was not a joke at all. It was 6 feet from his shoulder, bright and hungry against the metal skin of his own aircraft. His mind raced through the possibilities in an instant. It was burning, yes, but it seemed to be hydraulic fluid rather than fuel, and critically it did not appear to be spreading toward the wing tanks.

There was a chance, a real chance, to save the aircraft and himself, if he could find a way to starve the fire of what it needed to keep burning. He had only seconds to decide and no time at all to second-guess whatever he chose. Bail out over enemy held territory with a wounded aircraft still flying or gamble everything on a maneuver that had never been part of any training manual.

McNab made an immediate decision. He pulled back on the stick and began climbing, aiming for 20,000 ft, an altitude where the air itself grew thin enough that oxygen became scarce, both for a pilot’s lungs and for a fire looking for fuel. It was a desperate gamble, trading the danger of hypoxia at high altitude for the certainty of a fire that, left unchecked, could have consumed the entire wing and sent him down in flames over enemy territory.

As the Mustang climbed higher and higher, the thinning air did exactly what McNab had hoped. Starved of oxygen, the flames guttering along his wings slowly weakened, flickered, and finally went out entirely. The immediate danger had passed, but McNab quickly discovered a new problem. The damage to his aircraft had destroyed his brakes.

He would be able to fly the plane and even bring it down for a landing. But stopping it safely once he touched the ground was another matter entirely. There was only one sensible option. He turned his damaged Mustang toward Royal Air Force Manston, an airfield on the southeastern coast of England, known for its enormous grass landing field, wide open and long enough to give a damaged aircraft room to roll to a stop without brakes, without a functioning undercarriage, without any of the usual safety margins a pilot could normally count on. McNab

brought the crippled Mustang in over the coast of England, the long grass runway stretching out ahead of him. wider and more forgiving than any paved strip could have been. He held the aircraft steady, watching his air speed bleed away as the wheels touched down, then let it roll and roll and roll across the open ground with no brakes to slow it until at last friction and grass did what his own aircraft no longer could, and the Mustang shuddered to a stop.

For a moment, he simply sat there in the cockpit, engine ticking as it cooled, hands still gripping the controls, before finally allowing himself to breathe out. He had survived a friendly fire incident thousands of feet above Normandy, guided a burning aircraft to safety through nothing more than instinct and a desperate gamble on thin oxygen starved air, and walked away from the landing without serious injury.

It was by any measure an extraordinary piece of flying under pressure, the kind of story that would follow him for the rest of his life. But McNab had no way of knowing as he climbed down from the cockpit at Manston that afternoon, legs unsteady on the solid ground beneath him, that the fighting connected to D-Day was really just beginning, and that the following day would prove to be even harder than the one he had just survived.

getting back to his own squadron took a strange, almost forgotten detour. Buried in McNab’s flight log is a single unusual entry, noting that he flew a Royal Air Force aircraft listed only as an Oxford, a twin engine trainer and light transport plane commonly used by the RAF at the time. It was almost certainly his ride back from Manston to steeple Mortyn, a quiet, unremarkable flight sandwiched between two of the most dramatic days of his entire war.

Evidence of just how quickly the machinery of war moved a pilot from crisis to safety and back toward the fight again. There was something almost strange about it. climbing into the cramped, slowmoving cabin of a training aircraft, only hours after fighting to keep a burning Mustang in the air, a small, quiet postcript to a day that had already asked everything of him.

By the time McNab rejoined his squadron, the 6th of June had drawn to a close. Word moved through the base that evening, pilot to pilot, crew chief to crew chief, of a rough and difficult day across the group. Some aircraft had returned riddled with flack damage. Others had not returned at all. Yet against all of that, the larger picture was one of hard one success.

Thousands of Allied soldiers were now ashore in France, fighting to hold and expand the beach heads they had fought so hard to secure. And for all the chaos and danger of the day, the invasion itself had not failed. That knowledge offered a small measure of comfort to exhausted men settling in for whatever sleep they could manage before the next morning’s briefing.

But the battle for France and the battle for the skies above it was only just getting started. When the sun rose again the next morning, Ed McNab would need an entirely new aircraft, and he would find out just how much worse a single day of this war could still become. Back at Steeple Morton, McNab’s damaged P-51B was written off, its wing torn open by the accidental fire from a friendly gun, its brakes gone, its short and violent story over.

There was no ceremony to any of it, no time set aside to mourn the loss of an aircraft that had carried him safely through months of combat and one very close call. That was simply how the war worked. A damaged machine was replaced, and the men who flew it moved forward without pause, because the fighting on the ground below could not afford to wait for anyone’s grief.

Waiting for him on the flight line was a replacement, a brand new P-51D, one of the newer aircraft that had been arriving gradually throughout the previous weeks. It offered him something his old aircraft never had. A bubble canopy that gave far better visibility in every direction, sweeping away the small blind spots that had always existed behind and below the older framed canopy of the B model.

And two additional 50 caliber machine guns bolted into the wings alongside the original four, giving him considerably more firepower for the ground attack missions that now defined his war. Without much time to reflect on the aircraft he had just lost, or the fire that had so nearly ended his life a few hours earlier, McNab climbed into the cockpit of his new Mustang and prepared to take it into combat for the very first time.

The morning of the 7th of June, D-Day plus one, brought no rest for the men of the 355th. On the ground, Allied soldiers were pushing inland from the beaches, trying to link up the separate landing zones into a single continuous front, and that effort depended heavily on continued pressure from the air. Once again, as the flight log for that day makes clear, the mission would be dive bombing.

McNab could only hope that this time the outcome would be less costly than the day before. Flying on his wing again was Lieutenant Thomas Foster, who by all accounts was simply glad to have his flight leader back after the events of the previous afternoon. There was likely some quiet, uneasy humor shared between the two of them about what had happened, a young wingman who had very nearly shot down his own leader, and a leader who had lived to fly another day because of a fast climb and a stroke of good fortune. Whatever words passed between

them that morning, the two mustangs were soon back in the air together, crossing the channel once more toward the fighting in France. Just as it had been the day before, the 6th of June’s weather had not improved much by the 7th. Cloud cover remained thick, the ceiling low, forcing the formation down close to the Earth once again as they searched for their assigned targets.

Before long, they located a convoy and a scattering of other targets on the ground below, vehicles and equipment that needed to be destroyed before they could reach the fighting near the coast. McNab radioed his flight, calling for Foster to follow him down, and the two pilots rolled their aircraft over and began the attack exactly as they had trained.

Below them sat a train, and this time their Mustangs carried 500-lb bombs, heavier and far more destructive than the ordinance they had used the day before. Heavier bombs meant a heavier aircraft during the dive, a slightly different feel on the controls, and an even smaller margin for error in the timing of the pull out.

It was exactly the kind of detail that took real experience to judge correctly. experience that most of the pilots making this run, Foster included, simply did not yet have. McNab led the dive, aiming carefully, releasing his bomb at the calculated moment, then pulling back hard on the stick to bring his aircraft up and away from the blast building beneath him.

As he climbed clear and looked back to check on his wingman, as any experienced flight leader instinctively would, he saw something that stopped his breath entirely. Foster’s aircraft was not climbing behind him. It was rolling inexplicably and diving straight toward the earth. There was no time to react, no time to call out a warning over the radio, no time for anything at all except to watch it happen.

Foster’s Mustang struck the ground and exploded on impact. The young pilot killed instantly, only seconds after flying safely through the very same dive his own leader had just completed. According to McNab’s own account of that terrible moment, Foster had not pulled out of his dive quickly enough, and it is believed, though not proven with absolute certainty, that he was caught in the explosion of the bomb below him, whether it was his own or the one McNab had just dropped moments earlier.

One source close to the incident has suggested that the train itself may have been carrying ammunition, which could explain a blast large enough and violent enough to catch a climbing aircraft in its shockwave. The precise cause may never be known for certain, and any account of it should be told with that uncertainty left intact rather than smoothed over for the sake of a cleaner story.

What is certain is that Thomas J. Foster, 20 years old, a young man from Mississippi who had scored his first aerial victory less than two weeks earlier, was killed in action on the 7th of June, 1944, one single day after the friendly fire incident that had so nearly claimed his flight leader’s life instead. There was a bitter, almost unbearable irony to the timing of it.

The wingman whose stray bullets had set his leader’s wing on fire was now gone, while the leader he had nearly killed flew on, forced to carry both memories at once for the rest of his life. The tragedy of that morning did not end with Foster. Elsewhere in the same mission, another flight from McNab’s squadron was jumped from above by German Faula Wolf.

190 fighters bursting suddenly out of the clouds. the same tactic that had so narrowly failed to bring down Colonel Cummings the day before. This time, the German pilots found their mark. Two Mustangs were shot down almost immediately, and a third vanished into the clouds shortly afterward, its fate unclear to the men who witnessed it disappear.

By the time the squadron’s surviving aircraft returned to steeple morton that day, it had become painfully clear that the 7th of June 1944 was the single worst day of the entire war for the 355th fighter group in terms of pilots lost. The mood back at the airfield that evening was heavy in a way that no amount of professional discipline could fully hide.

Men who had shared meals, jokes, and countless hours of training with the pilots now missing sat quietly, processing losses that had come so quickly and so senselessly. And yet, even amid that grief, there was a larger truth that could not be ignored. On the ground, the Allied invasion was succeeding. Soldiers continued to push deeper inland from the beaches with every passing hour, expanding the foothold that men like McNab and Foster had risked, and in Fosters’s case given, everything to help secure.

For all the cost of those first two days, it was beginning to look very much like the start of the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany’s grip on Western Europe. In researching this story, one additional detail emerged that adds an even deeper layer of sorrow to what happened on the 7th of June. An attempt to trace surviving family members of Lieutenant Thomas J.

Foster revealed that he appears to have been the only son of his parents who themselves had no other children of their own. With his death over that French railway line, an entire family’s line came to its end in a single sudden moment. a quiet and almost invisible consequence of war that rarely makes it into the official record of any battle.

Somewhere in Mississippi, a mother and father who had said goodbye to their only son only months earlier now faced the rest of their lives with no one left to carry their name forward. A loss that no telegram from the War Department could ever fully explain. It is a stark reminder that the price of a war fought on this scale was never paid only in the young men who died, but often in the families, the futures, and the generations that died along with them, though no one at the time could have counted that cost in any official casualty report. A number on a report

could record one pilot lost on the 7th of June, 1944. It could not record the empty chair at a table in Mississippi for every holiday that followed, or the name that would never be passed down to a child of his own. Thankfully, not every story from those two brutal days ended the same way.

Ed McNab survived the friendly fire incident of the 6th of June and the brutal missions of the 7th, going on to fly further combat missions in the months that followed as the allies pushed across France and eventually deep into Germany itself. Missions that carried their own dangers, but that he lived to complete one after another until the war in Europe finally came to its end.

He, like so many other veterans of that war, carried the memory of Thomas Foster and the other pilots lost that terrible week for the rest of his life. A weight he would eventually choose to share, so that their story and the true cost of those two days above Normandy would not simply fade away and be forgotten.

It is because of survivors like Ed McNab willing to open their flight logs and their memories to those who ask that stories like this one can still be told with the accuracy and the respect that the men who lived and died in them deserve. curve.