June 6, 1944: D-Day! Boyertown's General Carl A. Spaatz Recognized

By Margaret Leidy Harner from her book One Day at a Time: A Social History of Boyertown, PA.

June 6, 1944: D-Day! The Allied invasion of France has succeeded and Brigadier General Carl A. Spaatz was a pivotal force in the victory. Hitler’s henchman Hermann Goering said after the war, if it had not been for the American Air Force (commanded by Spaatz), the invasion of France at D-Day, which paved the way for the surrender of Germany, would not have succeeded.

Spaatz had talked Eisenhower into allowing his Air Force to conduct daytime raids and to bomb the German oil installations to cripple their ability to continue fighting and this action greatly weakened the internal organization of the enemy supply and maintenance systems that allowed the Allies to successfully land in Normandy.

Many experts believe the war would have lasted at least several months longer and many more American lives would have been lost without Spaatz’s initiatives; he was the key figure in the destruction of the German air power as the director of the strategic Allied bombing operations that virtually flattened Hitler’s Germany and reduced selected German industries to “fantastic ruins.”

Spaatz was awarded the Oak Leaf Cluster for his exceptional service in a position of great responsibility for his strategic bombardment of German-held Europe. In his war memoir, Crusade in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said of Carl Spaatz, “On every succeeding day of almost three years of active war, I had new reasons for thanking the gods of war and the War Department for giving me Tooey Spaatz. He shunned the limelight and was so modest and retiring that the public probably never became fully cognizant of his value.”

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