Allied bomber pilots flying over Germany after the Normandy invasion began seeing something in the skies they had never seen before. A small Messerschmitt fighter seemed to come up at them out of nowhere, spitting .50-caliber bullets, then zooming off as fast as they had come. The jet age in aviation had begun.
Few American pilots would fly a jet into combat during the rest of the war, but Barbara learned that a WASP, Ann Baumgartner, a 21-year-old former New York journalist, had become one of America's first jet pilots, test-flying a YP-57 at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. How she envied her.
What followed over London after the invasion were not Nazi planes dropping more bombs on the city as they had four years earlier. In retaliation for the Normandy Invasion, the Germans targeted England with a new terror: missiles. Over a period of a few months in late summer, in London and other cities and towns, over a thousand small, pilotless expendable "flying bombs" containing high explosives killed over 5,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes and other buildings. Incendiary missiles, meanwhile, started fires all over London.
As June passed into July, Londoners took the missiles in their stride as they had every other terror with which the Germans had plagued them. By August, the missiles that fell on the city became fewer. The worst was yet to come.
V1 missiles were soon augmented by deadlier long-range V2's that caused even more damage. Barbara watched as the missiles caused a second exodus of almost a quarter of a million children from London and other cities to the countryside or to Scotland.
Over a thousand V2 rockets fell on England between autumn and the following spring, half of them hitting London. Just before Christmas, a Woolworth's dime store in New Cross Road that was crowded with shoppers was hit by a V2 rocket and 168 people were killed.
Adding to the missile misery, the winter in England was the coldest in fifty years. Stephen and other GIs fighting in Belgium's Ardennes Forest in bitterly cold and snowy December knew that all too well in what became called "the Battle of the Bulge," fought at the cost of 77,000 Allied killed or injured.
The battle began on December 16 when two German Panzer armies took advantage of the severe winter weather that had grounded Allied planes. They hit hard and shattered two American divisions at the cost of thousands of GI lives. General Patton counter-attacked and, though surrounded and outnumbered, saved the city of Bastogne which deprived the Germans of capturing much-needed fuel supplies there.
On Christmas Eve, Stephen, a company commander in one of Patton's Third Army reconnaissance battalions, was temporarily stalled with his unit in a snow-covered French forest because of extremely heavy enemy gunfire and no air support. While writing a letter to Barbara in his freezing-cold tent, he heard the sound of bombers overhead. First fearing an enemy attack, he looked out and was relieved to see that a break in the weather was permitting Allied pilots to aid the ground troops' counterattacks against the Germans.