67TH TACTICAL RECON GROUP

CHAPTER 9

World War II aircraft, look at the letters and numbers on the side and you might be able to find out what the plane was actually used for.

Another fun fact, the 67th Tactical Recon Group flew antisubmarine patrols along the East coast of the United States after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Like I said in the Preface, my grandfather was assigned to support the 67th Recon Group and they were the first ones to equip P-51 Mustangs with reconnaissance equipment. As also noted earlier, there was a book published about them called “Peck’s Bad Boys of the 67th Reconnaissance Group”. Their unit Commander during the Normandy invasion was Colonel George W. Peck.

In the book, I found some interesting information and I will share a brief sample without giving the whole book away. In the book, I found a quote from a newspaper article from The Stars and Stripes, by a gentleman by the name of Quesada who discussed the installation of the first surveillance equipment. According to Quesada, “They fell flat on their faces trying to install a camera in a Mustang back home. They’ve been fooling around with it for almost a year. These kids here (soldiers in Europe prepping for the invasion) did it in just a few days. It’s a good recon plane now.”

Also in the book I found some interesting statements by Colonel Peck. According to Colonel Peck, “The day before the invasion, a German recon pilot was allowed to fly over Dover without interruption by our anti-aircraft guns. We had planted imitation rubber tanks and guns there and even dummy gliders. Plus, we made sure that he noticed the area was swarming with troops. As soon as he left with his photos, we moved our troops down to Portsmouth. That was just prior to crossing the channel for Normandy on June 6.” If you didn’t know this interesting fact about the invasion at Normandy, yes, we tricked the Germans thinking we were mounting an assault at a dummy location. We utilized blow-up balloons that looked like tanks and other vehicles to make it look real, while we were really getting ready somewhere else. On the day of the invasion, we even utilized small toy soldiers attached to little parachutes and dropped them out of planes at a different location in France. From a distance, those toys look like thousands of soldiers paratrooping to the ground below. In fact, those little toy soldiers with parachutes became an actual toy sold in the United States after the war, but a much smaller version. If you are old enough, you probably remember them. Now you know where they came from.

Peck continued to discuss D-Day and the round the clock work that his boys completed. According to Peck, “On D-Day we were taking pictures around the clock. Continuous strip cameras were used on our low-flying planes, giving an uninterrupted flow of pictures which could even determine the depth of the water along the invasion beaches. These photos also gave us beach gradients, tide levels, and the height of obstacles on the beach.”

In my online research pursuits, I found one of those surveillance photos taken by a pilot of the 67th Recon Group showing German soldiers running from the beach as they were placing Czech “hedgehogs” in the sand to stop the flow of a potential invasion. The hedgehogs were static anti-tank obstacles made of steel with angled beams and points invented by the Czechs. The Germans placed them on the