by Barry Hastings
(Normandy, June 6, 1944, 9:30 p.m., double-daylight savings time.)
At six-thirty p.m., two squadrons of U.S. Army Air Force P-51 fighter planes, the 334 and 335 , of the 4 Fighter Group, were airborne, and forming up for their third flight of the day over Normandy.
They headed for the English Channel, then the Rouen/Dreux/Evreux area halfway between Paris and the Normandy coast. Their mission was suppression of German fighters approaching the Normandy invasion beach-head, and interdiction of German soldiers, tanks, trucks, and artillery moving toward the allied invasion force. The pilots were flying their third or fourth mission of a long, high-stress day.
As they crossed the Normandy coastline, they’d flown high above the invasion force, and could clearly see allied soldiers gaining footholds inland from the beaches. They stayed away from the invasion ships, as gunners on those vessels were nervous (trigger-happy), and threw-up a curtain anti-aircraft fire at everything flying within range of their guns, and with good reason.
German fighters were strangely almost absent from the air over Normandy on D-Day. Most of their best (hottest) fighter pilots were already dead. By this time of the war, allied fighters traveled in pairs. The odd duck in a three (rather than two) plane flight, Major Michael George McPharlin (a Hastings boy), veteran of two years air combat with the Royal Air Force #71 ‘Eagle’ Squadron in Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires, two more with the U.S. Fourth Fighter Group in Thunderbolts and Mustangs, had chased and shot down in flames an Me-109 in their first trip across the channel at daylight. On the second trip across, several hours earlier, he’d sent an Fw-190 running toward home, and smoking badly. He needn’t have been there, as he was back in England to make housekeeping arrangements for the new 339th Fighter Group he’d helped train in the U.S. The group was not yet operational, and he’d obtained permission to fly with the 334* squadron, composed mainly of his old teammates of #71 Eagle Squadron, from RAF days.
McPharlin had served in the RAF since mid-1940, after basic flight training in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was one of the earliest (one newspaper claimed the first) American fliers commissioned pilot officer in the RCAF, in January 1940. On completing basic flight training, he was told he’d be further trained to fly heavy bombers. He balked, claiming he’d joined to fly fighters.
He was released from the RCAF, then shipped to England. There he was commissioned flight officer in the Royal Air Force, and sent to an Operational Training Station where he began flying Hawker Hurricane aircraft. Later, he was OK’d for operational (combat) duty with the first all-American RAF fighter squadron (two more were soon to follow), #71 “Eagle” Squadron. There he graduated to the famous Super-marine Spitfire fighter, and shared several kills of 109s and 190s with his
buddy Oscar Coen (Coen was so short he had to sit on two parachute packs to see through his Spit’s windscreen).
Mickey was in on the end of the great Air Battle of Britain. He shot down a Nazi seaplane during the Dieppe raid in August 1942, then had been blown out of the sky himself, by a Fw-190s, and crashed into the Channel. Unhurt, but eight miles from the English shore, he inflated his rubber dinghy and began paddling home. He was shortly rescued by an Air/Sea rescue boat, and was back in combat the next day. By the time the Eagle squadrons were absorbed into the U.S. Forces (Fourth Fighter Group, 8 U.S. Air Force), McPharlin was a skilled veteran pilot with several kills, and many close brushes with the grim reaper.
On D-day, he was flying with an old Eagle Squadron pal, Major Mike Sobanski, and rookie wing man, Lt. Edward Stepp. On their third flight, the three of them flew directly to Abbeville, home of a large Luftwaffe Fighter establishment. Finding no action there, they headed back toward the landing beaches by way of Dreux and Evreux, where the Germans had subsidiary fighter strips. At their altitude the sky was still sunlit, though on the ground, evening darkness was quickly spreading.
In the air above Dreux and Evreux, Major Sobanski saw a railroad steam engine spotting cars on a track leading toward the invasion beaches. He waggled his wings as a signal, and the three powerful Mustangs peeled over and dove for the railroad yard, all 24 (eight in each plane) .50 caliber machine guns blazing. As they neared the surface, someone in the air nearby shouted into his radio, “Watch out for those above you, leader.” At about the same moment, Sobanski, McPharlin and Lt. Stepp all flew into and through high-tension electrical cables, suffering serious damage. Sobanski and Stepp crashed and died immediately, but McPharlin’s voice was heard shouting, “My left magneto is out, I’m aborting!”
As he fought his stuttering engine for power, and the staggering Mustang for control and altitude, his whole, short, adventurous life passed instantaneously before his mind’s eye.
Michael George McPharlin was born in Blue Lake, Ill., on June 13, 1913. He was the son of a U.S. Army veteran of the last Indian wars, who’d also fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and lost a leg there. His father spent the rest of his life in a veterans’ hospital near Toledo. Mickey’s mother and children moved to South Haven for some years, then as Mickey entered high school, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Hastings. He was a bright, athletic student who played football (despite diminutive size), and ran track.
He was best friend of my uncle Bill through school days. I met him in 1939, though I don’t recall the event, being only one year old at the time. I knew him only through a photo sitting atop the family radio (with my dad’s) throughout the war years; and from stories about his adventurous, practical joking young life, from my mom.
During his Hastings school years, Mickey was as adventurous as in his early adult years. He often took long summer trips on a motorcycle he’d salvaged, at least once riding two-track ruts called roads all the way to New Orleans. He traveled to California to visit his older brother, where both scored roles as extras in a successful “western” movie of the day.
He wanted to study medicine, and a Hastings (unknown) benefactor, fronted him for first semester tuition at Bowdoin College in Maine. Lack of funds forced him to withdraw (it was at the height of the Great Depression). He obtained a Merchant Seaman’s ticket, signed on as a seaman aboard a British merchant ship headed for Europe. He entered Germany, applied for a pre-med course at Heidelberg (the ‘Student Prince’) University, where he was accepted and completed his pre-med studies.
While in Germany he occupied the time between terms biking, hiking and motor-cycling around the nation, studying effects of the new Nazi government on citizens and neighboring nations. He was not impressed.
His work at Heidelberg complete, he used his seaman’s ticket and returned to the States as a seaman aboard a British freighter, where he worked building highway M-37 north of Hastings through summer of 1939. In fall of that year, he entered the Duke University Medical School, as, perhaps, the ‘poorest’ student there. The President of Duke, knowing of his poverty and strong desire to serve, offered him free room and board in his official residence. Even so, after the first semester at Duke, Mickey was forced again to withdraw from studies. Then he learned the British ship in which he’d returned from Germany had been torpedoed — lost with all hands. Angry — infuriated, on Jan. 1, 1940, he slipped across the border into Canada, and became the first American citizen to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Besides the adventures covered above, he and a wing man taking off simultaneously (as the common practice was) and fully loaded with fuel and ammo, were struck on the runway by a wounded pilot trying to bring in a battered Spitfire. The wounded pilot died, his aircraft totaled. The planes of Mickey and his wing man were destroyed, though both escaped uninjured.
In September 1942, the three Eagle Squadrons were taken into U.S. Service. Mickey had been promoted to Flight Lieutenant in the RAF. He was promoted to Captain on entering U.S. Service, and shortly thereafter, to Major. He flew with the Fourth Fighter Group, in 334* squadron until late summer of 1943, then returned to the States for a rest, a short assignment as Commander of the 505 ‘ Fighter Squadron, and then made second-in-command of the 339 U.S. Fighter Group.
Mickey, like Major Sobanski and Lt. Stepp, never made it back to Debden base. Their bodies were soon discovered, but McPharlin was not found for many months. His crippled Mustang crashed in a small field near Evreux. Some local people heard the crash, found his body there, and quickly buried it in a tomb of fieldstones. He and the Mustang were found about a year later, and he was identified by the serial number on a machine-gun ripped from the wing on impact.
His body was collected by the Graves Registration people, cremated, and re-interred at the American Cemetery in Normandy. Major Michael George McPharlin, USAAF was one week short of his 31st birthday when he died; his daughter had been born a short time earlier, but he never knew.
After the war, Micky’s friend, Oscar Coen, called on his widow to console her. A year or so later, they were married, and Mike’s friend fulfilled the role of father to his daughter. Oscar made a successful career in the Air force, and they made a happy life, retiring in Oregon.
Same old Eagles –
“Saw him crash in flames!”
“Saw him bale out!”
“Blew his tail off”
“Good hunting, you chaps!” — Anonymous Eagles’ Pilot, 1942