Background of the XIX Tactical Air Command

By 1 August most elements of General Weyland's command had fought the enemy for at least 5 months, and some had been in combat since December. XIX TAC joined the Third Army with a backlog of combat experience in all three of its tactical assignments: neutralization of enemy air power; interdiction of enemy movement on roads, rails, and rivers to and from the battle zone; and close cooperation with ground forces.

General Weyland took command of XIX TAC, then one of the two components of IX Fighter Command, on 4 February 1944. His first headquarters was at Aldermaston Court, near Reading in Berkshire, from where he directed the administration and helped to plot the operations of Thunderbirds and Mustangs flying from East Anglian bases with Eighth Air Force Fortresses and Liberators. Soon after its activation XIX TAC consisted of two fighter wings, the 100th and 303d, embracing five groups of Thunderbolts and two of Mustangs.

Gradually the aircraft of IX Fighter Command shifted from long-distance escort missions, protecting the heavies against the Luftwaffe, to fighter-bomber operations against all types of enemy defensive and logistic targets in northern France, the Lowlands, and within the borders of the Reich. As invasion drew close, General Weyland's seven groups moved to advanced landing strips in Kent, a few minutes' flying time from the enemy, the better to carry out their part in the softening of the German garrison armies in France.

In the weeks of furious air warfare before D-day, XIX TAC's operations were coordinated with those of its sister organization, IX Tactical Air Command, under Maj. Gen Elwood R. Quesada. XIX TAC participated in the preinvasion rail- and road-smashing campaigns and helped to destroy bridges across the Seine, the Meuse, and the Oise to divide from each other all possible invasion sectors and to make transportation from the big German weapons and materiel factories to the Westwall difficult and perilous. To take one obvious example, the destruction of all bridges across the Seine from Paris to the sea separated the German Seventh Army in Brittany and Normandy from the enemy Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais.

Fighter-bomber pilots, learning their trade the hard way during April and May, returned to base each day with new techniques for sealing tunnels, blowing up bridges, blocking tracks, and derailing railway cars. they approached their targets from a dozen different angles, ranging from a horizontal, almost zero-degree bomb run, to the nearly perpendicular approach of straight dive bombing. Their record of enemy vehicles destroyed and rails severed ran into impressive figures.

From D-day to 1 August, when the First Army was the only American army operating in France, XIX TAC groups, based first in England, then in Normandy, were under operational control of IX TAC. General Weyland's airmen participated in all the close cooperation missions of those first 2 invasion months--the3-, 4-, 5-missions-a-day schedule of the assault stage; the interdiction of traffic across the Loire and through the Paris-Orleans gap; the harrying of enemy movement inside Normandy and Brittany; the concentrated 2-hour bomber and fighter-bomber attack on the pyramidal forts ringing Cherbourg; and the historic operations south of St. Lo.

On 2 July General Weyland's field headquarters were set up at Cricqueville in Normandy. A few days later he moved to Nehou, near the secret command post of the still secret Third Army. Until 1 August, while XIX TAC's Thunderbolts and Mustangs continued to fly in cooperation with the First Army, the operations and intelligence personnel of XIX TAC and Third Army made plans for their independent air-ground campaign, to start with the activation of General Patton's forces.