D-Day False Alarms

Lt. Charles Steinberg was aviation ordnance and bomb disposal officer for the 586th Bombardment Squadron, which flew Martin B-26 Marauders, twin-engine planes that carried a two-ton payload. Depending on weather, Marauders could fly 4 to 5 hours at up to 250 mph. Since Steinberg was also rated as an aerial gunner, he was later designated squadron gunnery officer.

"We arrived in England in February 1944 and were operational early in March," he remembers. "Our major targets were bridges, rail yards, fuel dumps, and mysterious targets that looked like toboggan slides and turned out to be launch platforms for the pilotless bombs the Germans used after June 6, 1944."

Around May 15, Steinberg and some 20 other officers were summoned to Command Headquarters, where they were briefed on the D-Day invasion. All they were told about the date was that it would be the day after they were ordered to prepare 250-pound bombs with instantaneous nose fuses.

"Sure enough," Steinberg recalls, "on the afternoon of June 4, the field order came down. We loaded each of the 12 bombers in my squadron with 16 bombs, and I fused them with instantaneous fuses."

But no sooner had they finished the job than the mission was aborted, which meant Steinberg had to defuse the 192 bombs, unload them, and store them away from the bombers.

"On June 5, we got the same order again, and we repeated the loading and fusing, but with more haste since we were scheduled for a briefing at 2:15 am on the 6th, with takeoff set for 4:15 am. But by takeoff, the weather was terrible, with a heavy fog bank down to about 200 feet."

The bombers took off on schedule, but while forming up, two planes collided and all 12 crew members were killed, one of them, T. Sgt. Edward Monaghan, a gunner from Rochester.

On the way to their target in Verreville, France, one of the B-26s iced up over England and, as it plunged downward, crashed into a bomber below it. Only one of the 12 crew members managed to ball out.

"Our target was a gun position about a quarter mile inland from Omaha Beach. The bomb run was classified 'excellent' - thirtyfour planes from my group dropped nearly 70 tons of bombs, and all the remaining planes returned to base before 8 am.

"As soon as they landed, we had to reload them for a run at another gun position, at Benerville, also near Omaha Beach, that same afternoon."

A number of ground personnel had snuck aboard planes for the historic invasion, but Steinberg wasn't among them because he was sleeping off the exhausting work of the previous 48 hours. He didn't get to see the invasion beaches until two weeks later while a crew member on a bombing run on the port of Le Havre.

"By the time we were over the city, the smoke from earlier attacks rose up over 8,000 feet."

From Rochester, NY newspaper
June 6, 1994