Leonard Katzenmeyer talks about his days as a pilot in World War II. In the foreground is his service photo.(Jon Giffin The Vicksburg Post)

[6/6/04]A Vicksburg fighter pilot stationed in England was returning from France when he spotted an unmistakable sign that the Allied invasion of Europe was near.

Leonard Katzenmeyer, then 21, was flying his Army Air Force P-47 fighter-bomber across the English Channel on June 5, 1944, when he saw “just thousands upon thousands of boats” in the water, he said.

“We had a bombing mission to bomb a bridge in France and the weather was so bad we couldn’t see the ground so we had to abort the mission,” the 81-year-old Katzenmeyer said last week. “When we came back and saw all those ships circling in the channel, why, we knew the invasion was the next day.”

The timing of the invasion had been kept secret from all pilots flying missions over France, which was occupied by Germany then, during World War II.

“We didn’t have any idea when the invasion was going to happen,” Katzenmeyer said of the pilots.

“Anybody (who knew the invasion time) prior to that time was what they call bigoted.’ They could not fly if they knew the time of the invasion.”

Katzenmeyer and his P-47 squadron spotted the ships about 10 miles from their base near the Isle of Wight in Southern England. Many of the ships were carrying ground troops and amphibious craft that would land them on the French coast early the next morning.

Until D-Day, Katzenmeyer’s 9th Tactical Air Force had been escorting bombers on missions into France and Germany. After the invasion began, they flew shorter missions at lower altitudes, supporting ground forces.

Katzenmeyer’s squadron flew its first D-Day mission before dawn. It was their only non-daylight flight, he said.

“The Germans had watered the ground there so that the gliders and the paratroopers, if we invaded, would land and drown,” he explained. “And what our first missions were were to bomb the culverts in there that were holding this water up.”

When the invasion began, command of the 9th Air Force was shifted to ground commanders, Katzenmeyer said.

“In fact, that’s what Operation Overlord was,” he said. “The minute the invasion started, we were no longer a unit that was commanded by the 9th Tac; we were commanded by the ground forces, the ground commanders.”

Other pilots from the Air Force took turns riding in tanks on the ground, helping guide comrades in the air.

The ground-support missions flown after D-Day lasted about 45 minutes to about 2 1/2 hours, he said.

His fighter bomber group, nicknamed “Hell Hawks,” advanced with the front lines. After moving from Southern England on June 27, 1944, it was based at six places in France, three in Belgium and two in Germany until Aug. 22, 1945.

Katzenmeyer flew 89 combat missions and 24 armed-reconnaisance missions during his year in Europe.

He was awarded the Army’s Distinguished Flying Cross for one of those missions, when he destroyed a target in France that German troops had used to launch B-1 “buzz-bomb” rockets into London, he said.

“They wanted to see if we could take them out because the heavy bombers were unable to take them out,” he said.

One of the three other pilots on that mission was struck by a delayed-explosion bomb that exploded sooner than expected, he said.

“He was passing out when he was coming in and he would open up his canopy. What we were doing is flying right next to him and talking to him and we would, once in a while, put a wing under his wing to make sure he didn’t go down.”

Katzenmeyer was also awarded 16 Bronze Oak Leaf Clusters to the Army Air Medal for his service.

Attacking fighter-bomber pilots were at a disadvantage on those missions because the Germans could counterattack from above, Katzenmeyer said.

“When you were pulling off your dive run you pulled up, and you were losing speed and everything, and here they came down through the middle of you,” he said.

The bomber-escort missions Katzenmeyer flew had lasted about six hours each and were generally easier for fighter pilots, he said.

“The German fighters were after the bombers, and they didn’t pay any attention to the escorts,” he said.

Katzenmeyer, a graduate of St. Aloysius High School, said he joined the Air Force shortly after the United States entered the war in December 1941. His late brother, Brent, who was two years older, was already in the service.

“So there wasn’t much choice,” Katzenmeyer said. “I was determined I was going to be in the Air Force.”

The Army was engaged in a buildup, from 170,000 strong in 1940 to 7.2 million three years later, including 2.3 million in the Air Force.

Katzenmeyer took Civilian Pilot Training at Ole Miss, where he was a law student when the war started and after it finished.

After training in the States, Katzenmeyer and other members of the 9th Air Force were taken to England from New York on the Queen Elizabeth II ship in December 1943, he said.

Brent Katzenmeyer flew bombers over Europe from Italy during the war, and after Leonard Katzenmeyer returned home he learned through a news article, that Brent had heard Leonard’s voice on the radio while both were in the air over Europe.

“The bombers had good radios and they were high,” Katzenmeyer said. “We were always low, and we didn’t have good radios. Of course, they had radio operators, too.”

The night of D-Day he said he flew a mission, which he said he could only guess must have been an attempt to trick the Germans into thinking the U.S. pilots had nighttime-fighting capability.

“That night everything was over, it was dark and they got four of us to fly over the beachhead at night in a P-47, which is not a night fighter,” he said. “And we had terrible vision problems over there,” he said. “But when we got over the beachhead, it was a beautiful sight. We could see the tracers going from the American lines over to the Germans and then the tracers going back, the bombs blasting out and everything else.”

After the war, Leonard Katzenmeyer was a flight instructor in Bryan, Texas.

He returned to Vicksburg, where he became head of a savings bank and retired in 1984.