D-Day: Invasion Stripes

An example of invasion stripes
on a Lockheed P-38 Lightning

It was 68 years ago today that the Allied armies began the largest amphibious invasion in history on the beaches of Normandy, France. Many books and movies have been made to commemorate the stories of those brave men who fought and died on the five beaches, but mostly passing mention is made of the men who flew over the beaches, specifically how they were kept safe. This is the subject of this post: the invasion stripes.

The invasion stripes themselves are very simple: just five stripes alternating white and black. However, the reason for the implementation of these stripes are more complex. In the planning stages of the invasion, Allied top brass found that IFF (Identification Friend Foe, still a relatively new technology at the time) would be ineffective when come invasion day thousands of Allied planes and possibly thousands more German planes would all be in the same sky at the same time. This greatly increased the danger of friendly ground fire.

So the Allies came up with a way for ground personnel to distinguish between friendly aircraft and enemy aircraft. Some aircraft, such as the British Hawker Typhoon and the German Focke-Wolfe Fw190 looked so similar from the ground that friendly fire was a real danger, as the Hawker Typhoon would end up playing an important role during the invasion in attacking enemy ground units with its heavy machine guns and state-of-the-art HVARs (High Velocity Aircraft Rockets). Nevertheless, the invasion stripes were not put on all planes; four-engine heavy bombers did not get them, as the Germans did not have any such aircraft and mistaking them for enemies was highly unlikely.

When the invasion finally happened, however, German air resistance was far less than originally feared, and the invasion stripes, while highly successful in identifying friendly aircraft from the ground, proved effectively useless. Furthermore, in the months following D-Day the stripes were eventually phased off of Allied aircraft due to the risk of German planes adding them and creating confusion, deadly in an air battle, so they were phased out by the end of 1944.

While this piece of minutia may seem trivial, it is an important detail as it visibly marked a new phase in the war in Europe: In less than one year after the Normandy landings Germany would surrender unconditionally to the Allies. Also, when viewing aircraft in museums, if you see one with these stripes on its wings and fuselage, you know where it was on June 6, 1944. Until next time, take care, and thanks for reading.