Jahnke locked his prisoners into a pillbox and placed a guard in front of it. At 0400 the guard came to inform him that the prisoners were nervous and kept insisting that they be transferred to the rear. Jahnke could not understand; there would be a low tide at dawn and Rommel had told him the Allies would only come on a high tide. What were the captured men afraid of?35
• •
In Ste.-Mère-Église, the fire was raging out of control. The men of the 506th who had landed in and near the town had scattered. At 0145, the second platoon of F Company, 505th, had the bad luck to jump right over the town, where the German garrison was fully alerted.
Ken Russell was in that stick. “Coming down,” he recalled, “I looked to my right and I saw this guy, and instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down.” Evidently a shell had hit his Gammon grenades.
Horrified, Russell looked to his left. He saw another member of his stick, Pvt. Charles Blankenship, being drawn into the fire (the fire was sucking in oxygen and drawing the parachutists toward it). “I heard him scream once, then again before he hit the fire, and he didn’t scream anymore.”
The Germans filled the sky with tracers. Russell was trying “to hide behind my reserve chute because we were all sitting ducks.” He got hit in the hand. He saw Lt. Harold Cadish and Pvts. H. T. Bryant and Ladislaw Tlapa land on telephone poles around the church square. The Germans shot them before they could cut themselves loose. “It was like they were crucified there.”36
Pvt. Penrose Shearer landed in a tree opposite the church and was killed while hanging there. Pvt. John Blanchard, also hung up in a tree, managed to get his trench knife out and cut his risers. In the process he cut one of his fingers off “and didn’t even know it until later.”37
Russell jerked on his risers to avoid the fire and came down on the slate roof of the church. “I hit and a couple of my suspension lines went around the church steeple and I slid off the roof.” He was hanging off the edge. “And Steele, [Pvt.] John Steele, whom you’ve heard a lot about [in the book and movie The Longest Day], he came down and his chute covered the steeple.” Steele was hit in the foot.
Sgt. John Ray landed in the church square, just past Russell and Steele. A German soldier came around the corner. “I’ll never forget him,” Russell related. “He was red-haired, and as he came around he shot Sergeant Ray in the stomach.” Then he turned toward Russell and Steele and brought his machine pistol up to shoot them. “And Sergeant Ray, while he was dying in agony, he got his .45 out and he shot the German soldier in the back of the head and killed him.”
Through all this the church bell was constantly ringing. Russell could not remember hearing the bell. Steele, who was hanging right outside the belfry, was deaf for some weeks thereafter because of it. (He was hauled in by a German observer in the belfry, made prisoner, but escaped a few days later.)
Russell, “scared to death,” managed to reach his trench knife and cut himself loose. He fell to the ground and “dashed across the street and the machine gun fire was knocking up pieces of earth all around me, and I ran over into a grove of trees on the edge of town and I was the loneliest man in the world. Strange country, and just a boy, I should have been graduating from high school rather than in a strange country.”
There was a flak wagon in the grove, shooting at passing Dakotas. “I got my Gammon grenade out and I threw it on the gun and the gun stopped.” He moved away from town. A German soldier on a bicycle came down the road. Russell shot him. Then he found an American, from the 101st (probably a trooper from the 506th who had landed in Ste.-Mère-Église a half-hour earlier).
Russell asked, “Do you know where you are?”
“No,” the trooper replied. They set out to find someone who did know.38, III
• •
Pvt. James Eads of the 82nd landed in an enormous manure pile, typical of Normandy. At least it was a soft landing. Three German soldiers came out of the farmhouse and ran toward him. “Oh hell,” Eads said to himself, “out of the frying pan, into a latrine, now this.” His rifle was still strapped to his chest. He couldn’t get out of his harness (the British airborne had a quick-release device, but the Americans had to unbuckle their straps, a difficult proposition in the best of circumstances). Eads pulled his .45, thumbed back the hammer, and started firing. The first two men fell, the third kept coming. Eads had one bullet left. He dropped the last man right at his feet.
Still stuck in his harness in the manure, Eads was trying to cut himself loose when a German machine gun opened up on him. “Damn,” he said aloud, “is the whole Kraut army after me, just one scared red-headed trooper?” Bullets ripped into his musette bag. He tried to bury himself in the manure. He heard an explosion and the firing stopped. He cut himself loose and began moving. He heard a noise behind him, decided to take a chance, and snapped his cricket. Two answering clicks came back at once.
“I could have kissed him,” Eads recalled. “His first words were ‘I got those overanxious Kraut machine gunners with a grenade, but it blew off my helmet and I can’t find it.’ Then he took a breath and exclaimed, ‘Holy cow—you stink!’ ”39
• •
For many of the men of the 82nd Airborne, whose drop zones were to the west of Ste.-Mère-Église, astride the Merderet River, there was a special hell. Rommel had ordered the locks near the mouth of the river, down by Carentan, opened at high tide, closed at low tide, so as to flood the valley. Because the grass had grown above the flooded area, Allied air-reconnaissance photographs failed to reveal the trap. The water generally was not more than a meter deep, but that was deep enough to drown an overloaded paratrooper who couldn’t get up or cut himself out of his harness.
Private Porcella was especially unlucky. He landed in the river itself, in water over his head. He had to jump up to take a breath. “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.’ ” He bent over to remove his leg straps, but the buckle wouldn’t open. He jumped up for more air, then found that if he stood on his toes he could get his nose just above the water.
Calming down a bit, he decided to cut the straps. He bent below the water and pulled his knife from his right boot. He jumped up, took a deep breath, bent down and slipped the knife between his leg and the strap, working the knife back and forth in an upward motion.
“Nothing happened. I was in panic. I came up for another breath of air and thought my heart was going to burst with fright. I wanted to scream for help but I knew that would make matters worse. I told myself, ‘Think! I must think! Why won’t this knife cut the strap, it’s razor sharp?’ ”
Porcella jumped up for more air and managed to say a Hail Mary. Then he realized that he had the blade backward. He reversed it and cut himself loose.
That helped, but the weight of the musette bag and the land mine he was carrying still held him down. A few more strokes of the knife and they were gone. He moved slowly into somewhat shallower water, until it was only chest high. Then he became aware of rifle and machine-gun fire going over his head. “All the training I had received had not prepared me for this.”
Suddenly there was a huge burst of orange flames in the sky. A C-47 had taken a direct hit and was a ball of flames. “Oh, my God. It’s coming toward me!” Porcella cried out.
The plane was making a screaming noise that sounded like a horse about to die. Porcella tried to run away. The plane crashed beside him. “Suddenly it was dark again and it became very quiet.”
Porcella resumed moving toward the high ground. He heard a voice call out “Flash.” He couldn’t believe it. “I thought I was the only fool in the world in this predicament.” He recognized the voice. It was his buddy, Dale Cable. Porcella reached out his right hand to touch Cable, who hollered this time “Flash!” Simultaneously Cable flipped the safety off his M-l. The muzzle was within inches of Porcella’s face. Porcella remembered the response and shouted back “Thunder!”
Together, they began to encounter other troopers, also sloshing around in the flooded area. After further adventures, they finally made it to high ground.40
Lt. Ralph De Weese of the 508th landed on his back in three feet of water. Before he had a chance to cut himself loose the wind inflated his canopy and started to drag him. The heavy equipment on his stomach (reserve chute, rifle, mine, and field bag) prevented him from turning over. His riser was across his helmet and his helmet was fastened by the chin strap so he could not get it off. His head was under water. The chute dragged him several hundred yards.
“Several times I thought it was no use and decided to open my mouth and drown, but each time the wind would slack up enough for me to put my head out of the water and catch a breath. I must have swallowed a lot of water because I didn’t take a drink for two days afterward.”
With his last bit of energy he pulled out his trench knife and cut the risers. “Bullets were singing over my head from machine guns and rifles, but it didn’t bother me because at that point I didn’t care.”
De Weese finally got out, found a couple of his men, and started down a road. He saw two Frenchmen and asked if they had seen any other Americans. They couldn’t understand him. He pointed to the American flag on his sleeve. One of the Frenchmen nodded happily, pulled out a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and pointed down the road. “I was one happy fellow to see those Luckies.”
(Two months later, back in England, De Weese wrote his mother to describe his D-Day experiences. He told her the worst part was he had no dry cigarettes himself but felt he couldn’t relieve the Frenchman of those Luckies. He added that his pockets were full of little fish.)IV
Pvt. David Jones of the 508th was also aquaplaned across the flooded area. He was blown to the edge; his chute wrapped around a tree and he was able to drag himself out of the water by the suspension lines. When he cut loose and climbed to the high ground, he had another fright. Back in England, during a night exercise, he had gone into a roadside pub and got into “a fairly good fistfight” with another trooper. After their buddies separated them, that trooper had vowed that once they got into combat “he was going to get my ass.” Now, in Normandy, “wouldn’t you know, the first person I met on the edge of that flood was that same trooper. He had me looking into the barrel of his tommy gun. Well, after we hugged and slapped each other on the back telling each other how fortunate we were to have made it through this far, we started off together.”41
Altogether, thirty-six troopers of the 82nd drowned that night. An after-action report prepared on July 25, 1944, noted that “one complete stick from the 507th is still missing.” Another 173 troopers had broken a leg or arm when landing; sixty-three men had been taken prisoner.42
• •
Most of the POWs were taken before they could cut loose from their harness. Among them was Pvt. Paul Bouchereau, a Louisiana Cajun. He was taken to a German command post where other POWs were being harshly interrogated. The German captain, speaking English, was demanding to know how many Americans had jumped into the area.
“Millions and millions of us,” one GI replied.
The angry captain asked Bouchereau the same question. With his strong Cajun accent, Bouchereau answered, “Jus’ me!”
Furious, the captain had the Americans clasp their hands over their heads and marched them off, under guard. After a few minutes, for no apparent reason, the German sergeant in charge opened fire on his prisoners with his machine pistol.
“I can still recall his appearance,” Bouchereau said. “He was short and stocky and mean looking. His most striking feature was a scar on the right side of his face.” Bouchereau was hit near his left knee. “It felt like a severe bee sting.”
The German sergeant calmed down and the march resumed. Bouchereau tried to keep up despite the squish of blood in his boot with every other step. He fell to the ground.
“A Kraut came over and rolled me on my back. He cocked his rifle and put the business end to my head. I set a speed record for saying the rosary, but instead of pulling the trigger, the German laughed, then bent over and offered me an American cigarette. I suppose I should have been grateful that my life had been spared, but instead I was furious at the physical and mental torture to which I had been subjected. My mind and heart were filled with hate. I dreamed of the day when I would repay them in full measure for my suffering.”V
Lt. Briand Beaudin, a surgeon in the 508th, had a happier experience as a POW. At about 0300 he was tending to wounded men in a farmhouse set up as an aid station when it was attacked by Germans. He stuck his helmet with its red cross on a long pole and pushed it out the door. The Germans stopped firing and took the American wounded to a German aid station, “where we medics were treated as friends by the German medical personnel.” The doctors worked together through the night and the following days. Although a prisoner for some weeks, Beaudin found his stay at the 91st Feldlazarett to be “most interesting.” He learned German techniques and taught them American methods.43
• •
The Germans manning the antiaircraft batteries had done a creditable job against the Allied air armada, but the reaction on the ground against the paratroopers was confused and hesitant. Partly this was because all the division and many of the regimental commanders were in Rennes for the map exercise, but there were many additional reasons. The most important was the failure of Troop Carrier Command to drop the parachutists in tight drop zones where they were supposed to be. At 0130, headquarters of the German Seventh Army had reports of paratroop landings east and northwest of Caen, at St.-Marcove, at Montebourg, on both sides of the Vire River, on the east coast of the Cotentin, and elsewhere. There was no discernible pattern to the drops, no concentrated force—just two men here, four there, a half-dozen somewhere else.44
The Germans were further confused by the dummy parachutists dropped by the two SAS teams Captain Foote had organized. One party went in just before midnight between Le Havre and Rouen. An hour or so later, the commandant at Le Havre sent an agitated telegram to Seventh Army headquarters, repeated to Berlin, saying there had been a major landing upstream of him and he feared he was cut off. The second party dropped its dummies and set up its recordings of firefights southeast of Isigny. The German reserve regiment in the area, about 2,000 men strong, spent the small hours of June 6 beating the woods looking for a major airborne landing that was not there. For the Allies this was an extraordinarily profitable payoff from a small investment.45
The Germans could not tell whether this was the invasion or a series of scattered raids or a diversion to precede landings in the Pas-de-Calais or a supply operation to the Resistance. In general, therefore, although they fired at passing airplanes they failed completely to deal with the real threat. Here and there local company commanders sent out patrols to investigate reports of paratroopers in the area, but for the most part the Wehrmacht stayed put in its barracks. Wehrmacht doctrine was to counterattack immediately against any offensive movement, but not on this night.
Communications was a factor in the German failure. The American paratroopers had been told that if they could not do anything else, they could at least cut communication lines. The Germans in Normandy had been using secure telephone and cable lines for years and consequently had become complacent about their system. But on June 6, between 0100 and dawn, troopers acting alone or in small teams were knocking down telephone poles with their grenades, cutting lines with their knives, isolating the German units scattered in the villages.
At around 0130 the signal officer at Colonel Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment HQ picked up a German message that indicated enemy paratroopers were landing in the vicinity of Ste.-Mère-Église. “I tried to reach General Marcks, but the whole telephone network was down,” Heydte recalled.46
In most cases the cutting of wires was done on targets of opportunity, but in some instances it was planned. Lt. Col. Robert Wolverton, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 506th, had been given the mission of destroying the critical communication link between Carentan and the German forces in the Cotentin. Wolverton assigned the task to Captain Shettle, CO of Company I. Shettle said he needed to know the exact location, so in late May the intelligence people had plucked a French resister out of Carentan and brought him to England. He had pinpointed for Shettle the place where the Germans had buried communication lines and a concrete casement that could be opened to gain access to it.
Within a half hour of his drop, Shettle had gathered fifteen men from Company I. He set out, found the casement, placed the charges, and destroyed it. (Years later an officer from the German 6th Parachute Regiment, deployed in the area, told Shettle that the Germans were “astounded that the American had been able to disrupt their primary source of communication so quickly.”47)
Colonel Heydte commanded the 6th Parachute Regiment. He was a professional soldier with a worldwide reputation earned in Poland, France, Russia, Crete, and North Africa. Heydte had his command post at Périers, his battalions scattered between there and Carentan. At 0030 he put his men on alert, but confusion caused by reports of landings all around the peninsula kept him from giving orders more specific than “Stay alert!” He desperately needed to get in touch with General Marcks but still could not get through.48
Unknown to Heydte, one platoon of his regiment, billeted in a village near Périers, was having a party. Pvt. Wolfgang Geritzlehner recalled, “All of a sudden a courier ran toward us shouting, ‘Alert, alert, enemy paratroops!’ We laughed as we told him not to excite himself like that. ‘Here, sit down and drink a little Calvados with us.’ But then the sky was filled with planes. That sobered us up! At one stroke there were soldiers coming out of all the corners. It was like a swarm of maddened bees.”
The 3,500 men of the German 6th Parachute Regiment began to form up. It did not go quickly. They were scattered in villages throughout the area, they had only seventy trucks at their disposal, many of them more museum pieces than working vehicles. Those seventy trucks were of fifty different makes, so it was impossible to provide replacement parts for broken equipment. Heydte’s elite troops would have to walk into the battle. Nor would they have much in the way of heavy weapons, just hand-held material. When the colonel had requested heavy mortars and antitank guns from the General Staff, he was told with a smile, “But come now, Heydte, for paratroops a dagger is enough.”
Nevertheless, the German paratroops were confident. “Frankly, we weren’t afraid,” Geritzlehner recalled. “We were so convinced that everything would be settled in a few hours that [when we formed up] we didn’t even take our personal effects. Only our weapons, ammunition and some food. Everyone was confident.”49
• •
To the east, where the British and Canadian gliderborne and paratroops were landing, the Germans were also immobilized, not by what the Allies were doing but because of their own command structure. Col. Hans von Luck’s 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division was the one Rommel counted on to counterattack any invading forces on the east of the Orne Canal and River. At 0130 Luck got his first reports of landings. He immediately assembled his regiment and within the hour his officers and men were standing beside their tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.
But although Luck had prepared for exactly this moment, knew where he wanted to go—to the Orne Canal bridge, to take it back from Major Howard—over what routes, with what alternatives, he could not give the order to go. Only Hitler could release the panzers, and Hitler was sleeping. So was Rundstedt. Rommel was with his wife. General Dollmann was in Rennes. General Feuchtinger was in Paris. Seventh Army headquarters couldn’t make out what was happening.
At 0240, the acting commander of Rundstedt’s Army Group West contended, “We are not confronted by a major action.” His chief of staff replied, “It can be nothing less than that in view of the depth of the penetration.” The argument went on without resolution.50
Luck had no doubts. “My idea,” he said forty years later, “was to counterattack before the British could organize their defenses, before their air force people could come, before the British navy could hit us. We were quite familiar with the ground and I think that we could have been able to get through to the bridges.” Had he done so, Howard’s company had only hand-held Piat antitank rockets to stop him with, and only a couple of those. But Luck could not act on his own initiative, so there he sat, a senior officer in the division Rommel most counted on to drive the Allies into the sea if they attacked near Caen, personally quite certain of what he could accomplish, rendered immobile by the intricacies of the leadership principle in the Third Reich.51
• •
Beginning at 0300, the gliders began to come in to reinforce the paratroopers. On the left flank, sixty-nine gliders brought in a regiment and the commander of the 6th Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Richard Gale. They landed near Ranville on fields that had been cleared by paratroopers who had dropped a couple of hours earlier. Forty-nine of the gliders landed safely on the correct landing zone. They brought jeeps and antitank guns.
On the right flank, fifty-two American gliders swooped down on Hiesville, six kilometers from Ste.-Mère-Église. They were carrying troops, jeeps, antitank guns, and a small bulldozer. Brig. Gen. Don Pratt, assistant division commander of the 101st, was in the lead glider. Lt. Robert Butler was the pilot in the second glider. As the gliders approached the landing zone, German antiaircraft fire caused the tug pilots in their Dakotas to climb, so that when Butler and the others cut loose from their 300-yard-long nylon tow ropes they had to “circle and circle.” Planes and gliders were being shot down.
For those who survived the antiaircraft fire the problem became the Norman hedgerows. The fields they enclosed were too small for a decent landing zone. Worse, the trees were much higher than expected. (This was one of the great failures of Allied intelligence. As Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd put it, “No one had informed us of the immense size of the French hedgerows. We were of course told that we would be in hedgerow country, but we assumed that they would be similar to the English hedgerows, which were like small fences that the fox hunters jumped over.”52) In Normandy, the hedgerows were six feet or more high, virtually impenetrable. The roads between the hedgerows were sunken, meaning that the Germans had what amounted to a vast field of ready-made trenches. Why intelligence missed this obvious major feature of the battlefield is a mystery.
If the glider pilots came in low, they would see trees looming in front of them, try to pull up to go over, stall out, and crash. If they came in high, they couldn’t get the gliders down in the small fields in time to avoid the hedgerow at the far end. The result, in the words of Sgt. James Elmo Jones of the 82nd, a pathfinder who was marking a field for the gliders, “was tragic. There’s never been a greater slaughter than what took place that night. It was the most horrible thing that a person could see.”53
In front of Lieutenant Butler, Col. Mike Murphy had the controls of the lead glider. Butler watched it take some hits from a German machine gun—General Pratt was killed, the first general officer on either side to die that day—and Murphy crashed into a hedgerow, breaking both his legs.54
Sgt. Leonard Lebenson of the 82nd was in a glider that hit a treetop, bounced off, hit the ground, glanced off the corner of a farmhouse, and finally crashed into another tree. “There were pieces of our glider strewn over the confines of this relatively small field, but miraculously only one guy was hurt.”55
Lt. Charles Skidmore, a pilot, landed safely in a flooded area. He managed to get out of the water and immediately came under rifle fire. It came from a bunker holding a dozen conscripted Polish soldiers with one German sergeant in charge. The men Skidmore had brought in joined him and began firing back. There was a lull in the firefight. Then a single shot. Then shouts and laughter. Then the Poles emerged with their hands held high to surrender. They had shot the German sergeant.56
Private Reisenleiter of the 508th was in a field across from one where a glider came down. In the dark, with the hedgerows looming above him, he could hardly tell what was going on. He heard some crashing about on the other side and called out, “Flash.”
“Flash your ass,” the answer came back. “They’re killing us out here and we’re getting the hell out of here.” Reisenleiter let them go; he figured only an American could have given such a response to the challenge.57, VI
Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR watched the glider landing. “We could hear the sounds of planes in the distance, then no sounds at all. This was followed by a series of swishing noises. Adding to the swelling crescendo of sounds was the tearing of branches and trees followed by loud crashes and intermittent screams. The gliders were coming in rapidly, one after the other, from all different directions. Many overshot the field and landed in the surrounding woods, while others crashed into nearby farmhouses and stone walls.
“In a moment, the field was complete chaos. Equipment broke away and catapulted as it hit the ground, plowing up huge mounds of earth. Bodies and bundles were thrown all along the length of the field. Some of the glider troopers were impaled by the splintering wood of the fragile plywood gliders. We immediately tried to aid the injured, but knew we would first have to decide who could be helped and who could not. A makeshift aid station was set up and we began the grim process of separating the living from the dead. I saw one man with his legs and buttocks sticking out of the canvas fuselage of a glider. I tried to pull him out. He would not budge. When I looked inside the wreckage, I could see his upper torso had been crushed by a jeep.”58
Some of the gliders carried bulldozers, to be used to make landing strips for later glider landings. Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th PIR recalled that “the sound of one glider hitting a tree was similar to smashing a thousand matchboxes all at once, and I could just visualize the poor pilot with that baby bulldozer smashing into him.”59
The glider casualties for the 82nd were heavy. Of the 957 men who went into Normandy that night, twenty-five were killed, 118 wounded, fourteen missing (a 16 percent casualty rate). Nineteen of 111 jeeps were unserviceable, as were four of seventeen antitank guns.
Anytime a unit takes 16 percent casualties before it even gets into action, somebody had to have made a big mistake. But Leigh Mallory had feared that the gliderborne troops might take 70 percent casualties, primarily because of Rommel’s asparagus. In the event, those poles in the ground were inconsequential; it was the hedgerows that caused the problems. And the jeeps and antitank guns that did survive proved to be invaluable.
• •
By 0400, the American paratroopers and gliderborne troops were scattered to hell and gone across the Cotentin. With few exceptions, they were lost. Except for Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 505th, they were alone or gathered into groups of three, five, ten, at the most thirty men. They had lost the bulk of their equipment bundles; the little blue lights attached to the bundles had mostly failed to work. Most men had lost their leg bags, containing extra ammunition, field radios, tripods for the machine guns, and the like. The few radios that they had recovered had either got soaked in the flooded areas or damaged on hitting the ground and did not work. They had taken heavy casualties, from the opening shock, from hitting the ground too hard as a result of jumping too low, from German fire, from glider crashes.
Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st landed in a marsh. His company was supposed to assemble on a bugle call, but the bugler drowned. He found Pvt. John Fordik and a Private Smith. Smith could not walk—he had broken his back. Others in the stick had drowned. Cartledge gathered together ten men from his platoon. They carried Smith to high ground and covered him with brush. He insisted on retaining the two homing pigeons he had with him. One had a message on its leg saying the battalion was being wiped out; the other said it was accomplishing its mission. Smith had been told to release one or the other at daylight.
As the platoon prepared to move out, Smith’s last words to Cartledge were, “I’ll send the right message. Don’t make me out a liar.”
As the platoon left, a German machine gun opened up. The men dove back into the marsh. Cartledge had no radio. He was lost, chest deep in water, taking fire without being able to return it. Private Fordik, “a tough Pennsylvania coal miner,” leaned over to whisper in his ear, “You know, Lieutenant Cartledge, I think the Germans are winning this war.”60
• •
Ten weeks later, when the airborne troops were back in England, preparing for another jump, possibly at night, the regimental and battalion commanders of the 82nd gathered at Glebe Mount House, Leicester, for a debriefing conference. They did an analysis of what went wrong, what went right.
They started with the pilots. In the future the paratroop commanders wanted the pilots trained for combat and bad-weather missions. They wanted them forced to slow down—one suggestion was that every pilot of Troop Carrier Command be made to jump from a plane going 150 miles per hour. They wanted the pilots told that evasive action in a sky full of tracers did no good and caused much harm.
They did not say so, but it seems clear that radio silence also did more harm than good. The German antiaircraft crews were fully alerted by the pathfinder planes anyway. Had the pathfinder pilots sent back word of the cloud bank, the pilots in the main train would have been alerted. Had they been able to talk to each other on the radio, the dispersion of aircraft would not have been so great.
Only the battalion commanders of the 505th had anything good to say about the lighted-T system—Lt. Col. Edward Krause, CO of the 3rd Battalion, said that when he saw his T, “I felt that I had found the Holy Grail.” None of the others had seen their Ts (which in most cases had not been set up because the pathfinders were not sure they were in the right place). No one expressed faith in the Eureka system.
There was general agreement that equipment bundles had to be tied together and a better lighting system devised. The commanders wanted every man to carry a mine (and put it to immediate use by placing it on a road; the men should be instructed to stay off the roads otherwise). Some way had to be devised to bring in a bazooka with each squad. The Gammon grenade “was very satisfactory.” Each man should be issued a .45 “so as to be available immediately upon landing.”
As to assembly, the commanders thought that flares would be the most effective method—but not too many. One per battalion, carried by the CO, would be sufficient. Whistles, bugles, and the like had been unsatisfactory, partly because of the noise from antiaircraft fire, partly because in hedgerow country the sound did not carry. The rolling-up-the-stick method was a failure because of the hedgerows and the scattered nature of the drops. Better radios and more of them would be a great help. The men had to be taught how to get out of their chutes faster (the simple solution to that was to get rid of those buckles and adopt the British quick-release mechanism, which was done).61
• •
So the paratroop commanders found much to criticize in the operation. Still, contrary to the fear Private Fordik had expressed to Lieutenant Cartledge, the Germans were not winning the war. Scattered though they were, the paratroopers and gliderborne troops were about to go into action while the Germans, for the most part, were still holed up, badly confused.
I. Bortzfield’s plane had to make an emergency landing in England, with the left engine gone and no hydraulic pressure left. An ambulance picked him up on the runway and rushed him to a hospital. He recalled, “I was a real celebrity because at this moment I was their only patient. All their patients had been evacuated and they were waiting for D-Day casualties. I was in the ward by 0600 when the boys were hitting the beaches. The doctors really interrogated me” (Charles Bortzfield oral history, EC).
II. Davis was killed a few days later outside Carentan. William True had been in a quonset hut with Davis in England. There were sixteen men in the hut; only three returned unscathed to England in mid-July (William True oral history, EC).
III. M. Andre Mace, a resident of Ste.-Mère-Église, wrote that night in his diary: “ALERTE! A great number of low flying planes fly over the town—shaving the roof tops, it is like a thunderous noise, suddenly, the alarm is given, there is a fire in town. In the meantime the Germans fire all they can at the planes. We go into hiding, what is going on? Thousands [sic] of paratroopers are landing everywhere amid gun fire.
“We are huddled in M. Besselievre’s garage with our friends. Our liberators are here!”
(Original in the Parachute Museum, Ste.-Mère-Église; copy in EC.)
IV. De Weese was killed in action in Holland on September 23, 1944. A copy of his letter is in EC.
V. Bouchereau was liberated later that month and got his revenge in Holland (Paul Bouchereau oral history, EC).
VI. The first thing glider troops were taught to do after a landing was to run for cover in the woods or whatever surrounded the landing zone—they were never to stay in the open. That may explain the response to Reisenleiter.