“It was a routine, daily operation,” George Sutcliffe recalled this week, but the time and place made it far from routine.

A week after Allied troops stormed ashore in Normandy on June 6, 1944, Sutcliffe was flying a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter, one of a flight of four. “Our boys were starting to make a move through Normandy, over [Lt. Gen. George S.] Patton and his tanks. We’d fly for an hour and if they ran into trouble the guys in his column would say where they getting shot at — it might be a German Tiger tank or a building — then we’d go down and dive bomb — we had 500-pound bombs under each wing — and strafe.”

George Sutcliffe as a young fighter pilot with the 368th Fighter Group in 1944.

What happened next, one of the wildest air battles over Normandy, will be the subject of an episode of Dogfights, a partly animated History Channel series that will air at 9 p.m. tomorrow. Sutcliffe is one of three pilots to be interviewed.

This latest chapter in the life of the decorated fighter pilot began in February when Sutcliffe, who has spent his postwar years in the insurance business in quiet Greenville, answered the phone. “A fellow called and asked a couple questions about World War II and dogfighting,” he said. “I thought it was one of my buddies pulling my leg.”

But it was no leg pull. Sutcliffe soon found himself on an airliner winging to Hollywood.

“They sat me down in a pretty large studio, with the wall a brilliant green,” he said. “They said when they were finished shooting whatever is green disappears. One of the problems I had was they said it was up to me what to wear, and I went out there with a beautiful white sweater. They just got started and the camera guy says hold it, that they were getting a reflection from my glasses.”

Sutcliffe doffed the glasses, but then the camera operator said he was now getting a green reflection from the sweater. “He told me, ‘Whatever’s green disappears. You’ll end up with half an arm there, half a shoulder. That sweater’s got to go.’  ”

He wound up being interviewed in a golf shirt.

Sutcliffe has a picture of his younger self, standing in flying gear next to the gigantic radial engine of his Republic Thunderbolt.

The “Jug,” as it was nicknamed, supposedly because it looked like an old-fashioned milk bottle when stood on its nose, was the heaviest single-engine, one-man fighter of World War II. It carried a fearsome armament of eight .50-caliber machine guns. The engine design, with cylinders mounted in a ring around the nose, provided excellent protection against any fire coming from the front.

“It was kind of a hairy thing,” Sutcliffe said of the battle to be reviewed in the TV program.

“We were flying out of England,” he said, a daily task during which he and his squadron mates would look for enemy vehicles, guns or locomotives — anything that could be bombed and strafed.

The day’s mission, however, was to guard Patton and his Third Army, so Sutcliffe’s flight of four were circling below a layer of clouds only 2,000 feet from the ground — narrow quarters.

“My job as wingman was to keep my head on a swivel to see we don’t get jumped by German fighters,” he said. “The colonel is looking for targets, talking away on the radio, so he can’t see anything. He says, “Here, Sut, we’re going to have to head home.’ ”

“Just about that time I got my head on the swivel. I turn back, and out of the clouds in back of us came dozens of Me-109s. We estimated 30 to 40.”

Sutcliffe believes that the Me-109s, a frontline fighter throughout the war, had been vectored by German radar, because they otherwise would not have known the handful of Thunderbolts was below the cloud deck.

“I immediately got on the radio. The lead man for the Germans and his wingman were coming up pretty fast, almost side by side with me, but he was after the colonel, because the colonel had a brand new silver Thunderbolt. The rest of us had olive drab-painted ones.

“He broke left. The Germans broke left. I broke left. I got some hits on one of guys who were trying to shoot the colonel down. I was still in a tight turn, so I kept turning 180 degrees and head-on into the rest of the Germans — 20 to 30 of them. I just kept shooting whenever I could. I don’t know whether I hit anybody. They were taking potshots at me. As soon as the colonel pulled up he hollered, ‘Get the hell out of here — there’s too many of them.’ He and number-three man pulled up into the clouds. I had already committed to going into the rest of the Germans, and the other wingman was involved with the German planes. After a few seconds I realized that this was a matter of life and death, so I better not plan to shoot down a half dozen guys and get killed myself. I figured I’d come back another day when the odds were a little better.

“I was trying to get into the clouds and they cut me off, taking shots. All I could do was dive for the treetops, which were pretty close, because I was only 2,000 feet in the air. I put it into a tight spiral to climb up through the Germans. They had two circles on each side of me, and no matter which way I turned one of those guys would be on my tail.”

Sutcliffe looked around to see what was happening to the other remaining Thunderbolt, only to see his aircraft get hit and catch fire. The pilot bailed out and was taken prisoner.

“So they all concentrated on me,” Sutcliffe said. “Perhaps 20 stayed under the clouds trying to nail me.”

He held his plane in a tight corkscrew, but that caused his speed to drop to near stalling, while his objective was to climb into the protective clouds and escape.

“I had to level off to build speed, and then they’d take shots at me. I got shot up pretty good.”

A 20mm cannon shell severed a control cable leading to the elevators on the tail.

“The controls became very heavy. I had to use two hands most of the time to bring this thing out of the dives I kept making. I guess I did that for 15 minutes. I had some pretty narrow escapes. One German plane pulled alongside. He looked at me, shook his head. I shook mine. He tried to back up to get a shot. As soon as I saw him slide down to hit me I rolled right over his canopy, with just enough energy to go over him and go for the deck and come back up. That happened four or five times.”

Three more cannon shells struck his left wing. He could hear others chewing at his tail.

Sutcliffe finally made it to the haven of the cloud bank, and headed home at all available speed. But after he broke out of the cloud bank at the English Channel he realized he did not have enough fuel to reach England.

Fortunately, army engineers had laid a strip of Marsden matting, a kind of rolled-up metal runway component used to construct emergency airfields. The one Sutcliffe spotted was on blood-soaked Omaha Beach. It was either hit the beach or bail out. He opted to land.

The engineers were still working on the end of the emergency strip when Sutcliffe’s battered fighter rolled to a stop.

As if it were a matter of expected routine, the engineers came over with a pair of shears and trimmed away the jagged edges of the fighter’s damaged control surfaces. The battered material had been hampering Sutcliffe’s ability to maneuver the aircraft.

Others filled his fuel tanks with five-gallon cans.

Sutcliffe took off. When he landed as his home base he discovered his wingmates had assumed he had been shot down.

“I went back to my barracks and two or three pilots were trying on my clothes.”

That, however, was “pretty normal,” he explained. “Hey, if it fit them, they had a nice pair of boots or a jacket,” he said. “But they always left a full uniform and any personal belongings to send home.”

He plans to watch tomorrow’s show at his grandson’s house. He confessed that he does not know how to record a program.

Dogfights will be on the History Channel tomorrow night at 9.

tmorgan@projo.com