8
Sainte-Mère-Église

MARCELLE HAMEL WAS having a troubled night. The moon was gleaming through the window of her schoolhouse lodgings, bathing the room in pale light. Outside, the sky had been washed to silver. Her thoughts were with her close friend Jean, who had left for North Africa on just such a June evening four years earlier. Since then, she had received very little news. She didn’t even know if he was still alive.

She tried to make herself comfortable on the sofa bed she shared with her mother. Their living arrangements were far from satisfactory, but they had no choice. They had been evicted from their home in Octeville, near Cherbourg, exactly a year earlier, when it was requisitioned by the Germans. Ever since, twenty-eight-year-old Marcelle and her family (her mother, aunt and grandparents) had been living in rented lodgings in the village of Neuville.

The nocturnal stillness was broken by the faint hum of planes. The Hamels had grown used to such a noise, for bombing raids had been a regular occurrence for weeks. Nor was Mademoiselle Hamel particularly afraid. The Neuville schoolhouse was a solid stone building that lay some distance from any obvious military targets. The small German garrison at Sainte-Mère-Église was almost two miles away and the railway station even further.

But on this occasion the noise was more persistent than usual and she noticed that the sky to the north was glowing a reddish-brown colour. She was sufficiently disturbed to wake her mother: the two of them went down into the yard to see if they could work out what was being bombed. But by the time they were outside there was only ‘the faint rumble of a bombardment near Quinéville’. Even that soon faded to nothing and an all-pervading silence once again took hold.

‘It’s just like last time,’ said Madame Hamel. ‘They must have bombed the blockhouses [strongpoints] on the coast.’

They returned to the darkened house and climbed back into bed. But Marcelle Hamel still couldn’t sleep and stared blankly at the dim rectangle of window-light. In this ‘sort of semi-consciousness’ she had the impression of seeing ‘fantastic shadows appearing from nowhere, dark against the chiaroscuro of the sky, like huge black parasols’. They seemed ‘to rain softly down on to the fields opposite and disappear behind the black line of the hedgerow’. She pinched herself to check she was not dreaming.

She threw on some clothes, went downstairs again and stepped outside. The sky was filled with the drone of engines and the hedges seemed to be alive with curious snapping sounds.

She noticed that Monsieur Dumont, a local widower, was also outside. He shuffled over and pointed ‘to the material of a parachute hanging from the roof of the covered playground’.¹

Others in Neuville had also been woken by the noise. Denise Lecourtois, daughter of the café owner, had been jolted from sleep by the ‘loud bellowing of the aircraft that passed overhead’. She peered anxiously out of the first-floor window and was astonished to see paratroopers descending in the nearby fields. From behind the curtains, she watched them ‘slowly enter the village, hugging the walls of the houses’.² She was terrified and clambered back into bed, pulling the eiderdown over her head in the hope that all would be well in the morning.

Intrigued by the parachute, Mademoiselle Hamel decided to investigate, stepping out from the schoolyard and walking a short distance along the lane. Here, she was met by an unexpected sight. Seated on her neighbour’s front wall was a young man, heavily armed with rifle, gun and knife. As she stared at him, the silhouetted figure beckoned her over.

Her curiosity got the better of her. She asked him in her near-fluent English if his plane had been shot down. Answering in excellent French, but speaking in a whisper, he broke the news she had been awaiting for four long years. ‘It is the great invasion. Thousands and thousands of parachutists are descending here tonight. I am an American soldier, but I speak your language well, for my mother is French. She’s from the Basse-Pyrenees.’

Mademoiselle Hamel found it hard to take in everything she was being told. Excited, frightened and confused, she stuttered a series of questions. ‘What’s happening on the shore? Is there a landing? What about the Germans?’

The soldier declined to answer. Instead, and with urgency in his voice, he asked her for information about the Germans in the area.

‘There are no Germans here. The nearest ones are stationed in Sainte-Mère-Église, about two kilometres away.’

The soldier nodded and asked if there was somewhere safe for him to look at his map. He was lost and wanted to find out precisely where he had landed. When Mademoiselle Hamel suggested the schoolhouse, he said he didn’t want to place her at risk.

‘Monsieur Dumont and my old aunt will keep watch over the school,’ she said. ‘One in front, the other at the back.’

This seemed to reassure the soldier, for he now followed her into the house. She noticed he was limping and asked if he was hurt. He said he had sprained his ankle, but declined to have it bandaged. He pulled out a highly detailed Ordnance Survey map, along with a torch, and flashed his light on to the coastal area, asking her to show him where he had landed. When Marcelle pointed her finger to Neuville, the soldier expressed surprise at being so far from where he was supposed to be.

Once she had shown him how to reach his landing zone, a few kilometres to the west, the soldier refolded the map, packed it into his rucksack and then delved into his pocket for some bars of chocolate. He gave them to Monsieur Dumont’s children, who had just entered the schoolhouse. They were ‘so astonished’ they neglected to eat them.

Mademoiselle Hamel was surprised that the man appeared so calm. He seemed in complete control of everything. But when he shook her hand to thank her, she noticed that his palm was sweaty, even though the night was cool. Now, without further ado, he turned to leave.

‘Goodnight to you all!’ he said in French. And then he turned to Mademoiselle Hamel and added in whispered English, ‘The coming days will be terrible. Good luck to you, miss. Thank you. I will think of you all my life.’

She couldn’t quite believe what was happening and had to pinch herself for the second time that night. The man abruptly vanished into the night ‘as if he were but a vision in a dream’.³

Marcelle Hamel was not alone in receiving an unexpected visitor in those early morning hours. In the nearby village of Videcosville, the farmstead of Saint-Laurent was also playing host to a guest from the sky, albeit in more grisly fashion. Charles Levaillant and his eighteen-year-old brother, Hubert, were both sleeping deeply that night, having spent the previous evening carousing with friends. They first knew something was awry when they were woken by a sharp cry from one of the domestic staff.

‘Hurry up! There’s an American!’

The two brothers sat up in their beds for a moment, still groggy-headed, then threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs. A horrific sight greeted them. An American paratrooper stood by the front door, pale, exhausted and bearing terrible wounds. As twenty-year-old Charles stared at him in the moonlight, he noticed that ‘his two hands had been torn off by a grenade and were transformed into bloody pieces of flesh.’⁴ He pulled the man inside, sat him down and gave him a large shot of Calvados.

The commotion had by now wakened their mother, Madame Levaillant, who came downstairs and looked over the injured youth before ordering a bed to be brought into the living room. She was seemingly unfazed by the sight of the terrible wounds and gave him a dose of morphine from the phial she found in his kitbag. But she could also see that the poor lad needed more than morphine if his life was to be saved. His wounds required professional medical attention – and fast.

Charles offered to go for help, lacing his shoes and fetching his bicycle from the barn. He then made a spirited dash along the country lanes towards the nearby village of Quettehou, where he banged on the door of Monsieur Cardet, the trustworthy assistant pharmacist. Cardet got dressed and hurried back to the farm with Charles, but he shook his head when he saw the extent of the man’s wounds. There was no option but to inform the Germans and get the soldier transported to hospital.

With great reluctance, Charles got back on his bike and cycled over to the German command post, where the local kommandantur was stationed. He felt bitterly sorry for the paratrooper. He was so young, perhaps the same age as him.

In the chaos of landing, and with radios broken or malfunctioning, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause was unaware that a small group of fellow Americans had seized the initiative and were engaged in hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Sainte-Mère-Église. Among them was Ronald Snyder, a plucky twenty-year-old sergeant whose unit had spearheaded the invasions of both Sicily and Salerno. This, his third combat jump, had been the worst. He had fallen out of the plane head first and the jolt of the opening chute had sent a violent jerk through his body. ‘Vast tracers lit the sky like silver confetti,’ an exploding firework display that might have been exhilarating had it not been so uncomfortably close. To his alarm, Snyder realized that the tracer fire was ‘ripping through my canopy’. He was still gaining speed when he hit the ground ‘and slammed into a cow pasture like a sack of cement’.

His intense training now reaped dividends. He picked himself up, brushed off the wet mud and began looking around for anyone he could find. ‘It was very dark, bewildered cows were everywhere and confusion reigned.’ But he soon located his comrade, Lieutenant Orman, and the two of them lit their Very lights as a signal for fellow paratroopers. After assembling a small group, Snyder led them through the shadows towards the outskirts of town. As they reached the first buildings, another wave of C-47s passed overhead. The men watched, ‘sickened and enraged, as volumes of silver tracer ripped through the fuselages’. Snyder whispered to his ten men: they would have their revenge by creeping into town and killing the Germans still manning the guns.

Krause had prepared them for exactly this sort of guerrilla attack. ‘We moved quickly, filing past the darkened houses that lined the street named Chef-du-Pont. Enemy vehicles were roaring by on the main road ahead and suddenly one truck braked to a stop and troops from the back began firing wildly down the street.’ Snyder split his men into two, ordering one group to cover the truck while he led the others down a connecting street so as to attack from a more secure position. ‘This was always the main principle of our tactics. Never attack the strongpoint head on, but circle around and hit it from the flank.’

The first truck had left by the time they re-entered the main street, but other vehicles were coming and going as the Germans tried to make sense of the confusion. Snyder shouted the order to shoot, and ‘we directed all of our fire and drove them out of town in a hail of bullets.’⁵

He and his band felt as if they were engaged in a lonely battle for Sainte-Mère-Église, but other parachutists were also converging on the town. Not for nothing were these men known as the elite. Among the more audacious of this advance guard was James Eads, a twenty-one-year-old engineering student from Illinois, whose original mission had been to capture one of the four raised causeways connecting Utah Beach and Sainte-Mère-Église. But like so many parachutists that night, Eads had been dropped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Scarcely had he landed (in a heap of cow manure) when he glimpsed three soldiers running towards him. ‘I could see the coal-bucket-style helmet and thought, Oh hell.’ But his intensive training kicked in. He reached for his pistol, which was already loaded with a round in the chamber and seven in the clip. ‘I thumbed back the hammer and started firing.’ He was a good shot and the Germans were easy targets. ‘The third man fell with my eighth round, right at my feet.’

Eads’s ordeal was far from over. A German machine-gun nest opened up at him from a position seventy-five yards away. It was so accurate that the rounds were snapping through the leaves just above his head. ‘Dammit,’ he swore, ‘is the whole Kraut army after me?’ A bullet tore through his musette bag and another ripped through his map case. And then came an unexpected boom as the German position erupted into a sheet of flame.

‘I got those over-anxious Kraut machine gunners with a grenade,’ said a paratrooper who had appeared from nowhere. He looked down at Eads, still sprawled in the manure. ‘Holy cow! You stink!’

In common with Snyder and his men, Eads and his companion now headed into Sainte-Mère-Église, vowing that nothing would stop them from accomplishing their mission. At one point they heard the stomp of hobnailed boots rounding a curve in the road. Eads reached for his gun and ‘started firing short bursts at the last man, then the second. All three fell.’ Shortly afterwards, he spied a further ten Germans approaching. ‘They were almost on top of us when we opened fire. All fell. Our surprise was complete.’

Surprise had always been the key element in the Americans’ favour and Eads and his comrade used it to deadly effect in those early morning hours, playing a vicious game of guerrilla warfare. Although the situation on the ground was chaotic, they had but one goal – to wrest the little French town from its German occupiers. Adrenalin provided added impetus to their turbo-charged sense of purpose; it also overrode any feelings of fear. As the two of them darted through the outskirts of town, they were horrified to see ‘troopers lying everywhere, almost all of them still in their chutes’. On approaching the main square, Eads even noticed one ‘hanging from the spire of the church’. This was John Steele, who was wondering if he would ever make it down alive.

As the two men crouched in the shadows, a German troop-carrier roared into sight and advanced towards them at speed. Both began firing, aware that it was kill or be killed. ‘One of us got the driver of the truck and it stopped and out of it the Krauts came.’ Eads reloaded and was about to start firing again ‘when I heard my buddy grunt and saw him fall’. He had been hit – fatally so – bringing their two-man spectacular to a deadly close.

Eads was now alone, with 600 rounds of ammunition and a keen will to survive. He had landed just ninety minutes earlier, yet those minutes had already carried him to hell and back. As he sidled across the square looking for comrades, he spied the hiding place of four German soldiers. He crept up and double-checked that his tommy gun was fully loaded before shooting them all down. He had rapidly learned to appreciate that gun. ‘It’s just like a garden hose. You aim it in the general direction of your target, hold on the trigger and wave it back and forth.’ Some ammunition was invariably wasted, ‘but you can’t hardly miss hitting with some of them’.

Soon after, Eads noticed a group of fellow paratroopers hiding behind a low wall. There were eight of them, two of whom had been hit. Eads looked at their wounds and found that one was already dead ‘and the other was past help’.⁶

This beleaguered group of men now tried to take stock of their situation, but with no working radio it was impossible to get any clarity. Sainte-Mère-Église was in a state of utter confusion, with no one in control and no one knowing what to do next.

The plan for capturing the town was more complex than simply driving out the Germans. It was imperative that the inevitable counter-attack be halted before it reached the outskirts, and this meant seizing the main road that led both north and south.

The northern approach had been assigned to Benjamin ‘Vandy’ Vandervoort, 3rd battalion commander of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He ticked the checklist of every attribute required by an officer of the Airborne: steel nerves, a sharp brain and a total insensibility to pain. He had imposed such a punishing training regime on his men that they cursed and damned him behind his back. But he would also earn their grudging respect. In the words of one stalwart who accompanied him to Normandy, ‘if he had told us to follow him to hell, we would have gone with him.’⁷ Such loyalty was fortunate, for he was indeed leading them into hell.

Vandervoort had suffered a disastrous landing. His plane had been flying too high and too fast when the moment came to jump. His chute opened so violently that it tore his neck and ‘snapped blinding flashes in front of my eyes’. He landed heavily on a steep slope and felt a sharp pain in his ankle. He ‘knew at once it was broken’. Frustrated but undeterred, he crawled into a hedgerow and ‘shot myself in the leg with a morphine syrette [syringe with flexible tube] carried in our paratrooper’s first aid kit’.

His injury would have put many men out of action, but Vandervoort was determined to see the night through. He reached for his Very pistol, loaded it and ‘began to shoot up the green flares that were the visual assembly signal for my battalion’.⁸

One of those who saw the flare was Lyle Putnam, the battalion’s medic. He made his way towards it and found his commander ‘seated with a rain cape over him, reading a map by flashlight’. Vandervoort described his injuries and asked Putnam to examine his ankle ‘with as little demonstration as possible’. It didn’t take long to determine that the bone had ‘a simple rather than a compound fracture’. When Vandervoort heard this, ‘he insisted on replacing his jump-boot, laced it tightly, formed a makeshift crutch from a stick and moved with the outfit as an equal and a leader, without complaint.’ Putnam had never warmed to Vandervoort, finding him ‘a very proud individual’.⁹ But even he was impressed at the manner in which he shook off the pain of the fracture.

By 2.30 a.m., Vandervoort had gathered together some fifty men. These now headed north, with orders to dig entrenched positions along the main road to Cherbourg. Vandervoort was unable to make the hike with a broken ankle, but he spotted two young parachutists with an ammunition cart and ordered them to wheel him there. They were indignant, telling him that they hadn’t ‘come all the way to Normandy to pull any damn colonel around’. They soon regretted their outburst. ‘I persuaded them otherwise,’¹⁰ said Vandervoort in typically laconic fashion. His men soon established an effective roadblock on the route out of town. Long before Sainte-Mère-Église itself was in Allied hands, the road to the north was secure.

Soon afterwards, the southern approaches were also sealed off with roadblocks, as was the country lane leading west to the little village of Chef-du-Pont. Leslie Palmer Cruise helped his twenty comrades place three rows of landmines in the road; they then dug themselves into foxholes. Sainte-Mère-Église was being squeezed from all sides.

They had not been there long when they heard the welcome thrum of an American jeep, one of many hundreds landed by glider that night. But their spirits were soon to take a knock. The jeep’s driver had spied the roadblock and assumed it to be German. Only when it was too late did Cruise realize he was going to try to force his way through. ‘Down the road they rode on full throttle.’ He waved frantically into the darkness, but the vehicle was approaching at a terrific speed.

‘Hit the ground!’

Cruise shoved his head into his foxhole as the jeep bowled towards him. It all happened in seconds. The engine roared like a beast and then the earth was rocked by a thunderous explosion.

‘Kapow! Boom!’ Cruise’s eardrums almost burst. There was ‘a deafening crescendo of explosive sounds as a number of our mines blew the jeep and its troopers into the air’. He lifted his head just in time to catch a glimpse of the unfolding catastrophe. ‘Hell broke loose’ as the jeep’s trajectory changed from horizontal to vertical. Its chassis was blown to the heavens and fragmented into chunks of twisted steel. Then, ‘in an arching skyward path, they landed in the hedgerow beyond.’ Seconds later, the smaller lumps fell to earth and Cruise once again buried his head to avoid ‘pieces of jeep and mine fragments raining down around us’. When all the mangled wreckage had landed, he and his comrades emerged to examine the damage. ‘The smoking remains of the jeep were lying in the ditch of the roadside’¹¹ and all its occupants had been blown to shreds.

The Airborne Division’s drop from the sky had gone spectacularly awry for many of the 13,000 paratroopers that night. Some had landed in the sea and been dragged to a watery grave. Others had drowned in the inundated meadows around Sainte-Mère-Église. Men had also been scattered many miles from their drop zones and found themselves with neither weapons nor equipment. They felt helpless and useless – the jokers in the pack – and yet these frightened stragglers were destined to play a vital role that night.

Tom Porcella was one of many whose first hour in France was particularly woeful. Even before he jumped, he was torn with anguish about what lay ahead. A devout Christian, he found the same question repeating itself in his head. ‘Will I be able to kill a man?’

As it transpired, killing was the very last thing on his mind when he splashed down into one of the flooded meadows. His feet squelched deep into the mud and he was sucked beneath the surface of the water: he ‘thought he was going to drown’. But if he lifted himself on to tiptoe, he could just about clutch at short gasps of air through his nostrils. ‘My heart was beating so rapidly that I thought it would burst. I pleaded, “Oh God, please don’t let me drown in this damn water in the middle of nowhere.” ’

His boots slurped even deeper into the mud as he attempted to cut the leg straps of the chute that was pulling him down. ‘I came up for another breath of air … I wanted to scream for help … As I was gasping for air, I kept on saying Hail Marys.’ His prayers were eventually answered, for he managed to extract his boots from the glue-like mud and heave himself into shallower water. But now he faced a new danger: a crippled plane was hurtling towards him at high speed and it ‘sounded like the scream of a human being about to die’.

He lurched forward, desperate to escape its trajectory. The water held him back. ‘Oh my God! It’s coming towards me!’ But it bucked as it passed overhead and crashed into an adjacent field, exploding into a sheet of flame.

Porcella was still in shoulder-high water when he heard a voice.

‘Flash …?’

It was his battalion’s password, for which the answer ought to have been ‘Thunder’. But he neglected to answer, for he recognized the voice as belonging to his buddy, Dale Cable. It was a near-fatal mistake. ‘Pushing the weeds from side to side, my right hand hit against an object and I heard the click of a trigger.’ Cable repeated the password and this time Porcella gave the requisite reply. He was met with a torrent of abuse. Cable was furious ‘and proceeded to give me hell for not answering the first time’.

Other comrades had also landed in that flooded meadow. Tommy Horne had come down close by, along with Tommy Lott and Kenneth High. As the four of them emerged from the water, they were hit by a blast of German machine-gun fire. They all scattered in the darkness. When the fire-fight was over, Porcella was once again alone.

But not for long. By now it seemed as if there were an American paratrooper in every field and Porcella found himself teaming up with a young soldier named Cantenberry. They were making their way along a country lane when they heard the unmistakable sound of an approaching German motorcycle. Porcella’s instinct was to hide but Cantenberry took a rather different approach. ‘I’ll shoot the son of a bitch.’ He meant it. Porcella watched in appalled fascination as Cantenberry raised his rifle and waited until the motorcyclist was about fifty feet from where he was standing. ‘Gee,’ he thought. ‘The Ten Commandments say “Thou shalt not kill.” There is either something wrong with the Ten Commandments or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today.’

Cantenberry fired a single shot and scored a direct hit. ‘The German was suspended in mid-air, while the motorcycle continued to go on and crashed into the side of the road.’ It was like the scene from a cartoon, only far more deadly. Out of morbid curiosity, Porcella went to take a look. The blond-haired German soldier ‘just laid there in the middle of the road, laying on his back, his arms were outstretched’. He guessed the youth was about twenty years old, almost the same as him. It was a terrible shock. ‘The first dead German I had seen.’¹²

Like so many paratroopers, Porcella was lost, bedraggled and unable to undertake the mission assigned to him. He felt like an irrelevant wanderer in the unfolding drama. Yet he was unwittingly playing an important role in the events of that night, for the wide scattering of airborne troops was causing considerable confusion among German generals. They could not work out the Allied game plan. Until they knew the answer, they were unable to deploy their troops effectively.

Edward ‘Cannonball’ Krause had spent the previous hour and a half assembling enough men for his assault on Sainte-Mère-Église. In that time, he had gathered a force of almost 200 paratroopers, some from his own battalion and some from units landed far from their intended drop zones. This impromptu band of soldiers now set off along a secluded path that wound its way into town. Leading from the front was ‘a slightly inebriated Frenchman’ who had been seized by one of Krause’s men and forced to show them the way. ‘We made him go first,’ said Krause, ‘so that he would not lead us into any gun position.’¹³

Krause was unaware that other members of his battalion had already converged on Sainte-Mère-Église. Robert Snyder and James Eads were not alone in penetrating the town’s defences: young Chris Christensen had also led a group through the mud-churned fields. It had been tough going, ‘much like running an obstacle course with all those damn hedgerows’. It had also been scary, and Christensen ‘had this eerie feeling of being watched’. As they entered the deserted streets on the outskirts of town, there was the acrid smell of cordite in the air. Christensen noticed strange objects hanging in the trees and went to investigate. The sight was too ghoulish for comfort: dead paratroopers swinging head down from the branches.

He was still reeling from this macabre spectacle when Lieutenant Colonel Krause appeared from nowhere. Krause might have congratulated Christensen for his initiative in leading a frontal advance; instead, he criticized him for getting distracted by corpses. Christensen had never liked Krause and this reprimand was the final straw. He privately hoped there would be ‘an enemy sniper in the vicinity who would see and realize he was an officer and plug him between the eyes’.¹⁴

Krause was unpopular but efficient. He sent a company of men into the heart of town with orders to flush out any remaining Germans. Among those involved in this dangerous operation was Bill Tucker, who now encountered his first French civilians. ‘These were the people that were being liberated,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t look all that joyful at the time.’

Tucker was accompanied by his friend, Larry Leonard, who set up their machine gun under a tree. Tucker felt a shiver of nerves. ‘It was suddenly very quiet and I felt very strange. It seemed as if something was moving very close to me and I swung the gun around, but didn’t see anything until I looked above me.’ Another dead parachutist was hanging from the branches. He had been shot and was ‘swaying back and forth’ like a heavy human pendulum. Tucker was mesmerized. All he could think was that the man ‘had very big hands’.

The two of them now ran across the square in front of the church, looking for a new place to set up their machine gun. As they passed the church door, Tucker stumbled over a dead German. ‘His skin was sort of blue and there was blood on the corner of his mouth running out.’¹⁵ This was probably the soldier killed by John Ray as he lay dying in agony.

The men sent by Edward Krause to sweep through Sainte-Mère-Église achieved their goal in less than one hour. They took some thirty prisoners and killed a handful more. But most of the Germans, like Rudi Escher and his friends, had already fled.

Krause himself headed straight to the town hall, whipped out the American flag from his haversack and hoisted it on to the flagpole. He then radioed a message through to Colonel William Ekman, commander of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. There was more than a touch of self-aggrandisement in his choice of words. ‘I have secured Sainte-Mère-Église.’¹⁶ This was true enough, but he made it sound as if he had achieved it single-handed.

Lieutenant Colonel Krause knew that the Germans were certain to launch a counter-attack within hours. He also knew that he must hold the town until reinforcements arrived from Utah Beach. Winning Sainte-Mère-Église was only half the battle. Holding it looked set to prove rather more difficult.

A staggering 6,939 vessels headed to Normandy on D-Day. Many were moored at Southampton harbour. ‘A mass of shipping stretching right out of sight.’