AT DAWN the men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions were scattered in small pockets throughout an area that ran ten kilometers southwest from the mouth of the Douve River to the northern edge of Carentan, then twenty kilometers northwest from Carentan to Pont-l’ Abbé, then twenty kilometers northeast to the coast near Ravenoville. Few men knew where they were. Unit cohesion was almost nonexistent. Most of the paratroopers were in groups of a half dozen to fifty men, in some cases all officers, in others all enlisted men. The groups were usually mixed, containing men from different companies, battalions, regiments, and even divisions, strangers to the leaders who were trying to get them to move on objectives to which they had not been assigned and for which they had not been briefed.
As a consequence, the airborne troops fought a score or more different engagements, unconnected to each other, many of them fights for survival rather than battles for planned objectives. For most airborne troopers D-Day was a day of confusion. But precisely because the Americans were so badly confused, the Germans were worse off—they grossly overestimated the size of the force attacking them and they could get nothing coherent or helpful from their POW interrogations.
Thanks to the initiative of individual Americans, some of them general officers, some junior officers, some NCOs, some enlisted, the 82nd and 101st managed to overcome most of their difficulties and complete their most critical missions—seizure of Ste.-Mère-Église and the exits from Utah. The way it was done, however, was hardly textbook fashion, or in accordance with the plan.
There was virtually no overall control because it was impossible for the generals and colonels to give orders to units that had not yet formed up. The groups that had come together were unaware of where they were or where other groups were, a problem that was greatly compounded by the ubiquitous hedgerows.
Radio communication could have overcome that problem, but most radios had been damaged or lost in the drop, and those that were working were inadequate. The SCR (Signal Corps Radio)-300, which weighed thirty-two pounds, had a speaking range of five miles but only under perfect conditions. The much more common SCR-536, weighing only six pounds (and called a “walkie-talkie” because a man could talk into it and walk at the same time), had a range of less than one mile. Worse, they were easily jammed by the Germans.
Sgt. Leonard Lebenson was part of General Ridgway’s headquarters group. He came in by glider and managed to find his way to Ridgway’s command post, near a small farm outside Ste.-Mère-Église. He described the situation: “Ridgway’s aide was there, plus a couple of staff officers and two or three other enlisted men. The command post was trying to be a directional center, but it was not really in control of anything. We were just standing there, waiting for things to develop. Ridgway, a very brave and forceful man, was continually on the move in and out, trying to exercise his control. But what we were doing was just gathering information, trying to find out what was happening. There weren’t any messages, we didn’t have any phones or radios, we didn’t even have a map set up. We were not functioning as a CP.”1
At the other end of the command chain, Pvt. John Delury of the 508th PIR remembered “a feeling of euphoria” as dawn came up. “The dreaded night was over, and I was still alive. But my feeling of euphoria was short-lived. Morning had arrived and with it, I found, we lost our best ally, the concealment afforded us by the night. We couldn’t dig in and do a holding action because the Krauts had the communications, transportation, tanks, artillery, so once they located us they would surround us and just chew us up—so all our actions were evasive. We’d go in one direction, hit Germans, run like hell, and try again at a different route, all the time trying to find our own regiment or any other sizable friendly force.”2
For Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th, “each field became a separate battleground.” He had a sense of intense isolation. In this situation, he found a strange ally in the brown and white Norman cattle. Schlemmer explained: “When there were cows grazing in a field, we were pleased because we could be reasonably certain that the field was not mined. Also by watching the cows, who were by nature quite curious animals, we could tell whether there was anyone else in the field, because the cows would stand, waiting, facing anyone there in anticipation of being milked. Over all these years, I’ve had a place in my heart for those lovely Norman cows with their big eyes and big udders.”
But the cows could only spot Germans for Schlemmer and his small group, not kill them, and the paratroopers had precious little in the way of killing weapons. “By midmorning of D-Day, more troopers had assembled, but we had no mortars, few machine guns, few bazookas, fewer radios, little medical supplies, few medics—really, not much more than a few grenades and our rifles.”3
But despite the lack of heavy weapons they had an aggressive spirit and a can-do attitude. Sgt. Sidney McCallum of the 506th PIR got into a typical hedgerow fight, with Sgt. William Adley beside him. They were setting up when a German machine gun fired on them. McCallum and Adley dove to the ground, but not before Adley got hit in the head. The machine gun kept firing over their bodies but could not depress low enough to hit them.
“As the bullets kept hitting the hedgerow inches above our head, I asked Adley if he was hit bad, and these were his words: ‘I’m dying, Mickey, but we are going to win this damn war, aren’t we! You damn well f—ing A we are.’ When the firing ceased, Bill was dead.” McCallum concluded his story with a question: “How much farther beyond the call of duty can one go than this?”4
• •
The northern exits from Utah, a kilometer or so inland from the beach across the flooded fields, were no. 4 near St.-Martin-de-Varreville and no. 3 near Audouville-la-Hubert. They were assigned to the 502nd PIR. Lt. Col. Robert Cole, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 502nd, was the first to get there. He had landed near Ste.-Mère-Église, wandered through the night, collected a group of about seventy-five men from his own battalion, others from the 506th PIR, plus a handful of men from the 82nd Airborne, and moved out toward St.-Martin-de-Varreville. Along the way he had a skirmish with a German patrol; the Americans killed several of the enemy and took ten prisoners.
At St.-Martin, Cole sent a reconnaissance party to check out the battery there. It had been damaged by bombing and was deserted. Cole then split his force, sending one group to seize exit 3, another to take exit 4. At 0930, near Audouville-la-Hubert, the Americans saw German troops retreating across the causeway from the beach. Without loss to themselves, the Americans killed fifty to seventy-five of the enemy. By noon, the exits were securely in American hands.
Capt. L. “Legs” Johnson led a patrol down the causeway to the beach. He saw German soldiers in one of the batteries waving a white flag. “They were underground, part of the coastal defense group, and they were relatively older men, really not very good soldiers. We accepted their terms of surrender, allowing them to come up only in small groups. We enclosed them with barbed wire fencing, their own barbed wire, and they were pretty well shocked when they learned that there were a lot more of them than there were of us—there were at least fifty of those guys.”
Johnson took his helmet off, set it down, lay on the ground with his helmet as a headrest, “really taking it sort of easy, waiting for the 4th Infantry Division to come up.” At about 1100 the infantry were there, “and it was really sort of amusing, because we were on the beach with our faces all blackened, and these guys would come up in their boats and crash down in front of us and man, when they came off those boats, they were ready for action. We quickly hollered to them and pointed to our American flags.”5
Inland by about a kilometer from St.-Martin-de-Varreville there was a group of buildings holding a German coastal-artillery barracks, known to the Americans from its map signification as WXYZ. Lt. Col. Patrick Cassidy, commanding the 1st Battalion of the 502nd, short of men and with a variety of missions to perform, sent Sgt. Harrison Summers of West Virginia with fifteen men to capture the barracks. That was not much of a force to take on a full-strength German company, but it was all Cassidy could spare.
Summers set out immediately, not even taking the time to learn the names of the men he was leading, who were showing considerable reluctance to follow this unknown sergeant. Summers grabbed one man, Sgt. Leland Baker, and told him, “Go up to the top of this rise and watch in that direction and don’t let anything come over that hill and get on my flank. Stay there until you’re told to come back.” Baker did as ordered.6
Summers then went to work, charging the first farmhouse, hoping his hodgepodge squad would follow. It did not, but he kicked in the door and sprayed the interior with his tommy gun. Four Germans fell dead, others ran out a back door to the next house. Summers, still alone, charged that house; again the Germans fled. His example inspired Pvt. William Burt to come out of the roadside ditch where the group was hiding, set up his light machine gun, and begin laying down a suppressing fire against the third barracks building.
Once more Summers dashed forward. The Germans were ready this time; they shot at him from loopholes but, what with Burt’s machine-gun fire and Summers’s zigzag running, failed to hit him. Summers kicked in the door and sprayed the interior, killing six Germans and driving the remainder out of the building.
Summers dropped to the ground, exhausted and in emotional shock. He rested for half an hour. His squad came up and replenished his ammunition supply. As he rose to go on, an unknown captain from the 101st, misdropped by miles, appeared at his side. “I’ll go with you,” said the captain. At that instant he was shot through the heart and Summers was again alone. He charged another building, killing six more Germans. The rest threw up their hands. Summers’s squad was close behind; he turned the prisoners over to his men.
One of them, Pvt. John Camien from New York City, called out to Summers: “Why are you doing it?”
“I can’t tell you,” Summers replied.
“What about the others?”
“They don’t seem to want to fight,” said Summers, “and I can’t make them. So I’ve got to finish it.”
“OK,” said Camien. “I’m with you.”
Together, Summers and Camien moved from building to building, taking turns charging and giving covering fire. Burt meanwhile moved up with his machine gun. Between the three of them, they killed more Germans.
There were two buildings to go. Summers charged the first and kicked the door open, to see the most improbable sight. Fifteen German artillerymen were seated at mess tables eating breakfast. Summers never paused; he shot them down at the tables.
The last building was the largest. Beside it was a shed and a haystack. Burt used tracer bullets to set them ablaze. The shed was used by the Germans for ammunition storage; it quickly exploded, driving thirty Germans out into the open, where Summers, Camien, and Burt shot some of them down as the others fled.
Another member of Summers’s makeshift squad came up. He had a bazooka, which he used to set the roof of the last building on fire. The Germans on the ground floor were firing a steady fusillade from loopholes in the walls, but as the flames began to build they dashed out. Many died in the open. Thirty-one others emerged with raised hands to offer their surrender.
Summers collapsed, exhausted by his nearly five hours of combat. He lit a cigarette. One of the men asked him, “How do you feel?”
“Not very good,” Summers answered. “It was all kind of crazy. I’m sure I’ll never do anything like that again.”7
Summers got a battlefield commission and a Distinguished Service Cross. He was put in for the Medal of Honor, but the paperwork got lost. In the late 1980s, after Summers’s death from cancer, Pvt. Baker and others made an effort to get the medal awarded posthumously, without success.8 Summers is a legend with American paratroopers nonetheless, the Sergeant York of World War II. His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than ten men saw and reported his exploits.
• •
At 0600, General Taylor made his first D-Day command decision. He had with him Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe (101st artillery commander), Col. Julian Ewell (CO 3rd Battalion, 501st PIR), eighteen other officers, and forty men. With the sunrise, Taylor could see the church steeple at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. “I know the shape of that one,” he said, a payoff from the preinvasion briefing.
He was in position to move his group south, to defend the line of the Douve River, or east to exits 1 and 2. Either way he would be carrying out 101st missions. He decided to go east: “It remains for us to help the 4th Infantry Division in every way possible,” he said. He set off from just south of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont for Pouppeville (called “Poopville” by the GIs) and exit 1.9
Lt. Eugene Brierre was in the lead, with flank guards on both sides out into the fields. As they approached Pouppeville, shots rang out. The village was held by some sixty men of the German 91st Division. They were hunkered down, occasionally firing out of second-story windows. It took Taylor’s small force nearly three hours to complete the house-to-house, really window-to-window fighting. Ewell’s battalion suffered eighteen casualties and inflicted twenty-five on the enemy. Nearly forty Wehrmacht troops surrendered.
In one house, Brierre found a wounded German on the floor. “His gun was near him. I almost shot him when I realized that he was seriously wounded. He signaled to me to hand him something; I saw that he was pointing toward a rosary. I grabbed his gun, unloaded it, threw it aside, picked up the rosary and handed it to him. He had a look of deep appreciation in his eyes and began to pray, passing the beads through his fingers. He died shortly thereafter.”
With Pouppeville taken, Taylor had possession of exit 1. He sent Lieutenant Brierre on an eight-man patrol down the causeway with orders to make contact with the 4th Infantry Division coming in at Utah. A couple of German soldiers had fled Pouppeville headed toward the beach; four German soldiers at Utah had meanwhile fled inland along the causeway. When they met and realized they were caught in a nutcracker, they hid under a bridge. Meanwhile Captain Mabry was advancing inland along the causeway, flooded fields to both sides.
Brierre shot an orange flare up into the air to show that “we were friends. The troops came on; when they got to the bridge, six Germans came out with their hands up and surrendered. I went to the road and met Captain Mabry. I recorded the time; it was 1110.” The linkup at Pouppeville was complete.10
Brierre took Mabry to meet Taylor. When Mabry told him how smoothly the landings at Utah were going, Taylor turned to his chief of staff, Col. Gerald Higgins, and said, “The invasion is succeeding. We don’t have to worry about the causeways. Now we can think about the next move.”11
• •
When the German 6th Parachute Regiment moved out to attack, it was hit almost immediately by naval gun fire. “No one can imagine what it was like,” Pvt. Egon Rohrs declared. “When the ships fired it was like a storm. It was hell. And it lasted, it lasted. It was unendurable. We lay on the ground, pressed against the earth.” Pvt. Wolfgang Geritzlehner was in Rohrs’s unit. Geritzlehner had spent two years worrying that the war would end before he could take part in it. But “at the end of one hour, I wanted only to go home. We were all terrified. There were some who cried and called for their mothers.”12
Colonel Heydte wanted to see the situation for himself, so he set off on his motorcycle and drove from Carentan to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, where he climbed to the top of the church steeple, the one Taylor had spotted an hour earlier. It was fifty meters or so above the ground and gave him a magnificent view of Utah Beach.
What he saw quite took his breath away. “All along the beach,” he recalled, “were these small boats, hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before. Cannons from a single German coastal bunker were firing at the incoming American troops, who had no cover on the gently rising slope. Except for this small fortification, the German defense seemed nonexistent or, in any case, invisible.”
Around the church, in the little village and beyond in the green fields crisscrossed by hedgerows, all was quiet. The Germans had a battery of four 105mm cannon at Brecourt Manor, a couple of kilometers north of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, but the guns were not firing even though they were perfectly situated to lob shells onto the landing craft on Utah and to engage the warships out in the Channel. An identical battery at Holdy, just to the south of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, was also not firing.13
No one ever found out why. As with the Germans eating breakfast at WXYZ when Summers burst in on them, it was and remains inexplicable. Of course these artillerymen were not top quality troops, nothing to match Heydte’s paratroopers; many were overage, some were just kids, few had any heart for fighting American paratroopers. But the biggest problem was the absence of leadership. The junior officers and noncoms in the artillery units either would not or could not take charge and make their men do their duty. They were prepared to defend themselves from their trenches, bunkers, and stone farmhouses; they were not prepared to stand to their guns.
Heydte dashed down the circular stairs from the steeple and got on his radio. He ordered his 1st Battalion to get to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and Holdy as quickly as possible to hold the villages and get those guns shooting.
Thus did the Wehrmacht pay the price for overextending itself. Its best troops were either dead or POWs or invalids or fighting on the Eastern Front. The garrison troops in the Cotentin were almost useless, even a detriment. Heydte’s clear mission was to open the road from Carentan to Ste.-Mère-Église, concentrate his regiment to drive the small 82nd Airborne force in Ste.-Mère-Église out of town, and by such a counterattack throw the Americans on the defensive. That was what he had intended to do, but the sad state of affairs at the batteries at Brecourt Manor and Holdy forced him to divide his force and put one of his battalions on a defensive mission.
Heydte was the only German regimental commander doing his job that morning. The others were in Rennes for the war game. That was one reason for the failure of the Wehrmacht to launch any coordinated counterattacks, even though it had been preparing for this day for the past six months and even though Rommel had insisted on the absolute necessity of immediate strong counterattacks while the invaders were still on the beaches.
But the war game at Rennes was only one small part of the abysmal failure of the Wehrmacht. Paralysis in the high command permeated everything. The BBC radio messages to the French Resistance were more or less ignored (for this failure at least there was an excuse; there had been so many false alarms in the preceding weeks that the German coastal units had become exhausted and exasperated by the continuous alerts; further, the messages did not indicate where the invasion was coming). The dummy paratroopers dropped by SAS convinced some German commanders that the whole operation was a bluff. But the major factor in the Wehrmacht’s failure appears to have been a consequence of the soft life of occupation.
As early as 0615 Gen. Max Pemsel, chief of staff to General Dollmann’s Seventh Army, told General Speidel at La Roche-Guyon of the massive air and naval bombardment; a half hour later Pemsel reported to Rundstedt’s headquarters that the landings were beginning—but he added that Seventh Army would be able to cope with the situation from its own resources. With that news General Salmuth, commanding the Fifteenth Army, went back to bed. So did Speidel and most of Rommel’s staff at La Roche-Guyon. General Blumentritt from Rundstedt’s headquarters told General Jodl at Hitler’s headquarters in Berchtesgaden that a major invasion appeared to be taking place and asked for the release of the armored reserve, I SS Panzer Corps outside Paris. Jodl refused to wake Hitler; permission was denied. General Bayerlein, commanding the Panzer Lehr division, had his tanks ready to move to the coast by 0600, but did not receive permission to do so until late afternoon.
Berlin radio reported landings in Normandy at 0700; SHAEF released its first communiqué announcing the invasion at 0930; but not until 1030 did word reach Rommel at his home in Herrlingen. He left immediately for the long drive to La Roche-Guyon but did not arrive until after dark.14
The cause of all this mess, beyond complacency and divided command responsibility, was the success of Operation Fortitude. As Max Hastings notes, “Every key German commander greeted the news of operations in Normandy as evidence of an invasion, not of the invasion.”15 The Calvados and Cotentin coasts were a long way from La Roche-Guyon, a longer way from Paris, an even longer way from the Pas-de-Calais, and a long, long way from the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. Despite all their postwar claims to the contrary, the Germans just could not believe that the Allies would make their major, much less their sole, landing west of the Seine River. So they decided to wait for the real thing, at the Pas-de-Calais. They were still waiting three months later as the Allied armies overran France and moved into Belgium.
This from an army that claimed to be the best and most professional in the world. In fact, from the supreme commander in Berchtesgaden on down to the field officers in France to the local commanders in Normandy to the men in the barracks at WXYZ, it was an army inferior in all respects (except for weaponry, especially the 88s and the machine guns) to its Allied opponents.
• •
The inferiority was shown again and again on D-Day. At Brecourt Manor, at 0830, just about the time Sergeant Summers started his attack at WXYZ, Lt. Richard Winters and ten men from E Company of the 506th PIR attacked the fifty-man guard at the battery of 105mms. The Germans were dug in behind hedgerows; they had extensive interconnecting trenches; they had machine guns and mortars and clear fields of fire. Winters’s squad-size group had one light mortar, two light machine guns, two tommy guns, and five rifles. But although Winters was outnumbered five to one and was attacking an entrenched enemy, he and his men prevailed. They did so because they used tactics they had learned in training, plus common sense and some calculated courage.
At a cost of four dead, two wounded, Winters and his men killed fifteen Germans, wounded many more, took twelve prisoners, and destroyed four German 105mm cannon. The Americans had done the job through the quickness and audacity of a flanking attack, led by Winters, supported by suppressing fire from mortars and machine guns. One factor in their success was that this was their first combat experience. As Sgt. Carwood Lipton said, he took chances that morning he would never take again. “But we were so full of fire that day. I was sure I would not be killed. I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move.”16
After destroying the guns, Winters’s small group disengaged. Surviving Germans still held the hedgerows around the manor house and were using their machine guns to lay down harassing fire. At about 1200, two Sherman tanks came up from the beach. Winters climbed onto the back of the first tank and told the commander, “I want fire along those hedgerows over there, and there, and there, and against the manor. Clean out anything that’s left.”
The tanks roared ahead. For the tankers, this was their first chance to fire their weapons at the enemy. They had a full load of ammunition for their .50-caliber and the .30-caliber machine guns and for their 75mm cannon.
“They just cut those hedgerows to pieces,” Lt. Harry Welsh of Winters’s company remembered. “You thought they would never stop shooting.”17
At Holdy, members of the 1st Battalion of the 506th carried out a similar attack and destroyed that battery. Then the 506th drove Colonel Heydte’s battalion out of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. With that, the way was clear for the 4th Infantry Division to move further inland and get on with the war. The 101st had carried out its main mission—even though at no place were there more than a platoon of men from the same company gathered together. Taylor, Cassidy, Winters, Summers, and many others had seized the initiative and got the job done.
• •
The 101st did not do so well in carrying out its second major mission, to secure the southern flank by taking the bridges over the Douve and opening the way to Carentan. This was due to the scattered drop; no sizable force of Americans was able to form up to attack. Colonel Johnson did manage to take the lock at La Barquette and establish a small bridgehead on the south bank, but he could not expand it and was pinned down by fire coming from Heydte’s paratroopers in St.-Côme-du-Mont. He had no contact with any other 101st unit.
Capt. Sam Gibbons of the 501st PIR, operating independently, led a small patrol toward St.-Côme-du-Mont. He believed the village was in 501st hands, but he moved cautiously as his visibility was limited by the hedgerows. Before setting out, he shared the two cans of beer he had brought with him, then left the empty cans in the middle of the road “as a monument to the first cans of Schlitz consumed in France.”
The patrol reached the bottom of the hill, with St.-Côme-du-Mont sitting at the crest. Gibbons heard a gun bolt move on the other side of a hedgerow. He looked toward the sound and saw a rifle muzzle pointed at him. “As I dove for the ditch, all hell broke loose. We had been ambushed. The German behind the hedge had his weapon set on full automatic and it sprayed bullets all over the area. Instantaneously, shots started coming from the buildings in St.-Côme-du Mont and from the hedges.”
Gibbons dove to the ground. The German on the other side could not get at him without exposing himself. Gibbons lobbed a grenade over the hedge and the firing stopped. Still Gibbons could not raise his head because when he did he drew fire from the village. His patrol began returning fire, slowly at first but building up the volume as the men got into firing positions.
Gibbons made a dash for a concrete telephone pole, tried to hide behind it, found it did not give him sufficient protection, and made another dash to dive into a ditch. It was deep enough to give him protection so long as he stayed flat on his belly. He began crawling: “I had received such a shot of adrenaline I could have crawled a mile.”
He did not have to go that far. After fifty meters, he found cover and was able to tell his men to slow their fire to conserve ammunition. “It was obvious that we were badly outnumbered and that the Germans were well emplaced and planned to defend St.-Côme-du-Mont stubbornly. So there we were, 200 yards north of St.-Côme-du-Mont meeting superior fire from a major force. We had no automatic weapons, no radios, only our semiautomatic rifles and a few pistols. We hardly knew each other, but we were getting well acquainted, and we were working well together.”
Gibbons consulted with two lieutenants. They decided to break off the action and head north, toward Ste.-Mère-Église, in search of some friendly force. On the way, they discovered that the beer cans were gone, probably picked up by Heydte’s men. At the hamlet of Blosville, although firefights small and big were going on all around the countryside, everything was quiet. “Doors all closed; windows all shuttered; cows in the field; no one stirred. The firing didn’t seem to bother the cows. They just kept on eating. Occasionally one would lift its head and look at us. No one bothered us so we didn’t stop.” Gibbons led his patrol on toward Ste.-Mère-Église.18
Heydte’s paratroopers had beaten off the attack and retained possession of St.-Côme-du-Mont, which blocked the road to Carentan. That was a significant victory for the Germans, as it kept them in possession of the railway and road bridges over the Douve north of Carentan, which made it possible for them to move reinforcements into the eastern Cotentin. Heydte was also able to get his 2nd Battalion to the intersection where the road from Chef-du-Pont to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont crossed the highway from Carentan to Ste.-Mère-Église.
Otherwise, as Heydte said in 1991, “The day did not work out as I expected.” His 1st Battalion was forced out of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and pushed south, where many men drowned in the floods around the mouth of the Douve. With the best regiment in the Cotentin, he was on the defensive, holding crossroads, not launching any coordinated counterattacks.19
One company of Heydte’s men managed to get a battery of 88mms at Beaumont working. They opened fire on Colonel Johnson’s position at La Barquette. Fortunately for Johnson, Lieutenant Farrell, a naval shore-fire-control officer who had jumped with the 501st, had through dogged persistence found an SCR-609 radio. With Farrell was Lt. Parker Alford, a forward observer for the 101st artillery. They tried to contact the cruiser USS Quincy directly, but the Germans jammed the frequency; Alford then discovered that he could reach a shore party at Utah. He asked that it relay a request to Quincy to lay on a barrage against Beaumont.
Quincy asked for verification of Alford’s identity. He replied that he knew a naval officer who had played linebacker with the Nebraska team in the 1940 Rose Bowl game. Name him, Quincy called back through the shore party. Easy, Alford replied; “He is K. C. Roberts and he is a member of the shore party we are speaking through.”
“Roger, Roger, where do you want the fire?” Alford gave the coordinates, Quincy blasted away, Beaumont was obliterated, the 88s fell silent.20
Captain Shettle’s small group from 3rd Battalion, 506th PIR, spent the day isolated at the bridges along the lower Douve. He could not advance; the Germans made no effort to push him back. His only contact with the beach came in the late afternoon when a platoon-sized German force was seen to the rear. Shettle took about half his force and deployed to ambush the enemy. When the Americans opened fire, the “Germans” made no attempt to fight back; they threw up their hands and surrendered. “They turned out to be a Hungarian labor force fleeing from the beachhead.”
As the day was ending, a German patrol came after Shettle’s group. The Americans threw grenades at them. Shettle jumped up to throw one, forgetting that he had dislocated his right shoulder on a practice jump in May: “When I threw my grenade, my shoulder came out of its socket and the grenade landed in my foxhole. Fortunately, the banks of the foxhole protected me, but the next morning I found that I had blown up my prized ‘Bond Street’ trench coat, which was so much lighter and protective than our issue heavy rubber gear. So ended D-Day. Very little sleep, worry about our exposed position, lack of ammunition, and only hard chocolate bars for food.”21
• •
Those D-ration chocolate bars sustained many American paratroopers on June 6, but some found they craved real food. Pvt. Herbert James of the 508th PIR approached a Norman farmer to do some trading. James indicated he wanted eggs, but the farmer did not understand and appeared frightened.
“So I started making noises like a chicken and I hopped around and he thought I wanted a whole chicken and tried to catch one.” James shook his head no and made the shape of an egg with his fingers. The farmer got some eggs; James gave him a chocolate bar in trade. Pleased with the exchange, the farmer called his small daughter from the house and gave her the bar, saying “Chocolate, chocolate” over and over. The girl took her first taste of chocolate ever and was delighted. James went back into the woods and poached his eggs on his entrenching shovel and was delighted.22
Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st PIR was even luckier. He and a few members of his platoon drove some Germans out of a farmhouse, killing six or seven of them in the process. Inside, Cartledge found the dining-room table covered with half-eaten food—Norman cheese, apples, cold meats, and cider. After bolting some food, he searched the dead Germans, looking for paybooks, unit identification, and the like. To get at one paybook, he had to open a dead German’s belt buckle. “I looked at the flying-eagle belt buckle, and on it was inscribed ‘Gott Mit Uns.’ And I said, ‘The hell He is!’ ”
Cartledge was in the Vierville area, northeast of St.-Côme-du-Mont. There he found his company medic, a man named Anderson, who had been caught by the Germans as he came down. “He was hanging in a tree by his feet, his arms down, throat cut, genitals stuffed in his mouth. His medic’s red-cross armband was stained with the blood that had flowed from his hair.”23
The sight infuriated the Americans, but the Germans were not the only ones to commit atrocities that day. Pvt. William Sawyer of the 508th remembered running into one of his buddies. “We had all been issued yellow horsehide gloves. This fellow had on red gloves, and I asked him where he got the red gloves from, and he reached down in his jumppants and pulled out a whole string of ears. He had been ear-hunting all night and had them sewed on an old bootlace.”24
About midmorning, Lt. Jack Isaacs of the 505th PIR pulled three wounded gliderborne Americans into a farmhouse. “Shortly thereafter, we noticed a German soldier step out into the field and approach an injured man that we had left there, intending to go back for him. The German looked him over and then shot him. That Kraut didn’t survive his trip back to the hedgerow.”25
Getting help to the wounded was a major problem. Every trooper carried a first-aid kit, but it contained only bandages, sulfa tablets, and two morphine Syrettes. There were only a handful of doctors who jumped with the troops, and they had precious little equipment. Maj. David Thomas, regimental surgeon for the 508th PIR, set up his aid station in a ditch near the Merderet River.
“The thing that I remember most was a soldier who had his leg blown off right by the knee and the only thing left attached was his patellar tendon. And I had him down there in this ditch and I said, ‘Son, I’m gonna have to cut the rest of your leg off and you’re back to bullet-biting time because I don’t have anything to use for an anesthetic.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead, Doc.’ I cut the patellar tendon and he didn’t even whimper.”26
• •
The confusion that characterized all airborne operations on June 6 was badly compounded for the 82nd Division because it landed astride the Merderet River. As a result of the extensive flooding, the Merderet was more a shallow lake (a kilometer or more wide and ten kilometers long) than a river. There were two crossings, one a raised road (or causeway) and bridge at La Fière, about a kilometer west of Ste.-Mère-Église, and the other a causeway and bridge at Chef-du-Pont, two kilometers south of La Fière. The 82nd had hoped to take La Fière and Chef-du-Pont during the night, then spend the day attacking westward to secure the line of the upper Douve River, but in the event the division had a terrific daylong fight for the two positions. Many of its units were isolated west of the Merderet; some of them remained surrounded and isolated for as long as four days, fighting off German tank and artillery attacks with their hand-held weapons.
Shortly after dawn, Gen. James Gavin, assistant division commander of the 82nd, had assembled nearly 300 men, mainly from the 507th PIR—about as large a group as the Americans had that morning. Gavin moved south along the railroad embankment on the edge of the flooded area to La Fière, decided that the American position on the east bank of the causeway was secure, left part of his force there, and continued on south to Chef-du-Pont with the remainder.
Meanwhile an eighty-man group under Lt. Col. Charles Timmes took possession of the hamlet of Canquigny at the west end of the La Fière causeway. When a patrol of four officers and eight enlisted men under Lt. Lewis Levy of the 507th PIR came into Canquigny, Timmes decided that the twelve-man group could hold the bridgehead. He decided to go on the offensive and moved out with his group toward his original objective, Amfreville.
Sgt. Donald Bosworth was a member of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 507th. He had broken his ankle on the jump. With the aid of five other men from his company, he managed to get to a farmhouse. The farmer’s wife was a schoolteacher who could speak a little English. When she answered a knock on the door, Bosworth showed her the American flag on his right shoulder. She jumped for joy, invited all the men in and hugged each one of them in turn. Then her husband offered Bosworth his small, old flatbed truck, and dug up a five-gallon can of gasoline he had buried in the yard. Bosworth and Sgt. A. J. Carlucci signed a receipt for the truck so that the couple would be able to recover its cost from Uncle Sam and set out for Amfreville. On the way they joined up with Timmes. A medic made a splint for Bosworth’s ankle.
He stayed in the fight. Timmes sent him to check out a farmhouse on the other side of a hedgerow. “I started to crawl over the hedgerow to get to the other side when suddenly I was face-to-face with two Germans, not more than four feet away. They were setting up a machine gun. It seemed like an hour before any of us moved.” Bosworth shot the Germans with his semiautomatic; they shot him. He was hit in the right shoulder, went flying backward off the hedgerow, and lost consciousness. Lt. Robert Law got him to the basement of a farmhouse, where he spent the rest of the day.27 Timmes, meanwhile, was unable to penetrate the German defenses around Amfreville.
Gavin and Timmes had moved their main force out of La Fière and Canquigny on the assumption that the small groups they left behind could hold the positions and that they were mutually supporting. But the Germans held the high ground west of the causeway, which was nearly a kilometer long, and they brought the road under highly accurate sniper and mortar fire, preventing the Americans from using it.
About midmorning, the Germans launched a counterattack led by three tanks against Canquigny. Lieutenant Levy and his handful of men fought it off for over an hour. They managed to disable two enemy tanks with Gammon grenades (how the Yanks loved that British grenade; it was the best antitank weapon they had, far superior to their own bazookas—if they could get close enoughI) but eventually had to withdraw northward.
Thus the bridgehead so handily won was lost. The 82nd’s units were separated, each fighting its own lonely battle on either side of the swollen Merderet. Timmes’s group remained isolated for two days.
To the south, at Chef-du-Pont, General Gavin and a group of about 100 men, mainly from 1st Battalion, 507th PIR, under the command of Lt. Col. Edwin Ostberg moved to seize the bridge about a half kilometer west of the village. At 1000, Ostberg led his force on a dash through the main street, headed for the bridge. The Americans were fired on from several buildings simultaneously, taking four casualties. It took nearly two hours to systematically clear the village of the enemy; retreating Germans headed for the bridge.
“We knew the bridge must be taken before the Germans could organize their defense,” Capt. Roy Creek recalled, “so we made a semiorganized dash for it. We were too late. Two officers reached the bridge and both were shot, one toppling off the bridge into the water, the other falling on the eastern approach. The officer toppling into the river was Ostberg (he was rescued shortly after and lived to fight again; the other officer was dead).”
Lt. Col. Arthur Maloney and some seventy-five men arrived “and we set about dislodging the stubborn enemy.” It proved to be impossible. The Germans had foxholes dug into the shoulders of the causeway and they held the high ground on the west bank. The Americans had only small arms; the Germans had tanks and artillery to supplement their machine gun and mortar fire. Two attempts to storm the bridge proved unsuccessful.28
The Germans counterattacked. Pvt. David Jones of the 508th PIR had just come up to the edge of the causeway. He saw tanks coming across, three French Renault tanks, “probably the smallest tanks used during the entire war, but to me they were larger than life.” The lead tank had its hatch open and the black-capped tank commander was exposed from the waist up, hands resting outside the turret.
Jones turned to a buddy and said, “I think it’s time to get our war started.” He took careful aim and fired at the tank commander. His bullet hit the turret “and I can still remember the sound of that ricochet. The black uniform disappeared, the hatch clanged shut, the tank backed off a few feet, and our little group scattered to the four winds. Not only had I missed my first shot of World War II, but was now confronted with where and how to hide.” He found a place in a vegetable garden behind a farmhouse. The tank fired a 20mm round into the side of the house and Jones and his group took off running to the nearest hedgerow.29
The tank moved on toward Chef-du-Pont. The other two followed. The middle tank stopped in front of the farmhouse; on the second floor, Sgts. Ray Hummle and O. B. Hill were watching. Hill handed Hummle a Gammon grenade.
“Just at that moment,” he remembered, “the hatch of the tank opened and raised back and the tank commander climbed up to where his waist was out of the tank and he was looking around. Hummle dropped the Gammon grenade right into the tank. There was one awful explosion, smoke and fire all around the tank, and the commander who was standing in the hatch went straight up in the air like a champagne cork.”
The other two tanks turned their guns on the farmhouse and blasted away. “The mother and the daughter who were in the building downstairs became quite excited and screamed at us to get out. And we figured that perhaps we should.” Hummel and Hill fled to the nearest hedgerow. The tanks withdrew to the west.30
Now there was stalemate at the causeway. The Americans could not advance and would not retreat. The German infantry dug in along the causeway could fire but could not move. One of them decided to give up. He rose out of the embankment.
S. L. A. Marshall described the scene in his classic book Night Drop. “He called, ‘Kamerad!’ Before anyone could answer, a paratrooper, not more than 20 feet away, shot him dead within clear view of the people on both sides.” Marshall wrote that the shot was terribly stupid; had the man been allowed to surrender, his companions would have followed his lead.31
Captain Creek commented: “Having witnessed this action at close range, I would defy anyone to make a split-second judgment on what to do when an enemy soldier jumps up out of a foxhole twenty feet from you in the heat of heavy firing on both sides and in your own very first fight for your life. To this day, forty-seven years later, I don’t know if the enemy soldier was trying to surrender or not. In my opinion any enemy shot during this intense action had waited too long to surrender. He was committed as the attacker was to a fight for survival.”
Shortly thereafter, around midafternoon, General Gavin, who had gone back to La Fière, sent word for Colonel Maloney to bring his men and join him there. That left Creek in command of thirty-four men, with orders from Gavin to hold Chef-du-Pont at all costs. “It was pretty obvious that it couldn’t cost too much. But at the same time, it was doubtful we could hold something we didn’t have.” Making matters worse, Creek saw a line of German infantry approaching from his left rear, while a German field piece began firing from across the Merderet.
“And then, as from heaven, C-47s began to appear, dropping bundles of weapons and ammunition. One bundle of 60mm mortar ammunition dropped right in our laps.” Next came a glider-delivered 57mm antitank gun. Creek turned the mortars on the German infantry and used the AT to fire at the German fieldpiece on the west bank of the causeway. “We didn’t hit it, I am certain, but we stopped it from firing.”
Creek went over to the offensive. A ten-man patrol began to dash across the causeway. Five German infantrymen jumped up from their foxholes along the embankment and made a run for it. They were shot down. The others surrendered.
“That did it,” Creek said. “The bridge was ours and we knew we could hold it. But as with all victors in war, we shared a let down feeling. We knew it was still a long way to Berlin.”
Creek set about organizing and improving the position, tending to the wounded, gathering up the dead, German and American, and covering them with parachutes. Darkness was approaching. “When would the beach forces come? They should have already done so. Maybe the whole invasion had failed. All we knew was the situation in Chef-du-Pont, and Chef-du-Pont is a very small town.
“At 2400 hours, our fears were dispelled. Reconnaissance elements of the 4th Infantry Division wheeled into town. They shared their rations with us.
“It was D-Day plus one in Normandy. As I sat pondering the day’s events, I reflected upon the details of the fighting and the bravery of every man participating in it. We had done some things badly. But overall, with a hodgepodge of troops from several units who had never trained together, didn’t even know one another, engaged in their first combat, we had done okay. We captured our bridge and we held it.”32
• •
Ste.-Mère-Église was a quiet little village with a couple of hundred gray stone houses. The town square, built around a gray Norman church, contained the usual Norman shops selling eggs, cheese, meat, dresses and suits, cider and wine, newspapers, bread, and a pharmacy. It had a hotel de ville and a hospital. It was a village in which nothing much of consequence had happened for ten centuries. The most exciting times were the festivals and weddings.
The N-13 ran through the village, heading north to Cherbourg, south to Carentan, then east to Caen and on to Paris. Without the use of the N-13 the Germans to the north of Ste.-Mère-Église would be cut off; without control of Ste.-Mère-Église, the American paratroopers along and beyond the Merderet would be cut off and the 4th Infantry Division unable to move west and north.
Thus the battle for Ste.-Mère-Église took on an importance out of all proportion to the intrinsic value of the village. The staff of the 82nd Airborne had agreed during the planning stage of the invasion that the place would be the division’s defensive base. If the 4th Infantry failed to gain a foothold or the linkup was delayed, all the division’s units would fall back on Ste.-Mère-Église until relieved. The village had to be held for an additional reason; the second flight of gliders was scheduled to land around the village just before dusk.
The 3rd Battalion, 505th PIR, commanded by Lt. Col. Edward Krause, had taken possession of the town just before daylight. Lt. James Coyle of Headquarters Company was with Krause. Coyle recalled a Frenchman who came out of his house to talk. “He spoke little or no English and I spoke but a little French, but I understood him well enough to sense his concern: He wanted to know if this was a raid or if it was the invasion.” Coyle reassured him.
“Nous restons ici,” Coyle said (“We are staying here”). “We were not leaving Ste.-Mère-Église.”33
Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR, who had been misdropped, came into town at dawn. He saw troopers hanging in trees. “They looked like rag dolls shot full of holes. Their blood was dripping on this place they came to free.”
On the edge of town, Fitzgerald saw a sight “that has never left my memory. It was a picture story of the death of one 82nd Airborne trooper. He had occupied a German foxhole and made it his personal Alamo. In a half circle around the hole lay the bodies of nine German soldiers. The body closest to the hole was only three feet away, a potato masher [grenade] in its fist.II The other distorted forms lay where they had fallen, testimony to the ferocity of the fight. His ammunition bandoliers were still on his shoulders, empty of M-1 clips. Cartridge cases littered the ground. His rifle stock was broken in two. He had fought alone and, like many others that night, he had died alone.
“I looked at his dog tags. The name read Martin V. Hersh. I wrote the name down in a small prayer book I carried, hoping someday I would meet someone who knew him. I never did.”34
Colonel Vandervoort, despite his broken ankle, was moving his battalion, the 2nd of the 505th, toward Ste.-Mère-Église. His mission was to guard the northern approaches to the village. He therefore detached 3rd Platoon of D Company (Lt. Turner Turnbull commanding) and sent it to Neuville-au-Plain with orders to set up a defense there.
Vandervoort entered Ste.-Mère-Église, where he got lucky. There was a glider-delivered jeep in good working order, which allowed Vandervoort to get out of his wheelbarrow and become more mobile. He conferred with Krause (who had shrapnel wounds in his leg); they agreed that Vandervoort would be responsible for the eastern and northern sides of the village, Krause for the southern and western ends. They did not have enough men to set up an all-around perimeter defense but they could block the roads.
Vandervoort had another piece of luck. Capt. Alfred Ireland of the 80th Airborne Antiaircraft Battalion, who had come in by glider shortly after dawn, reported that he had two working 57mm AT guns. (Commenting later on his ride into Normandy and the crash landing of his glider, paratrooper Ireland said of the gliderborne troops, “Those guys don’t get paid enough.”35 That was literally true; the glider troops did not get the extra $50 per month jump pay the paratroopers received.)
Vandervoort set up one of the AT guns at the northern end of Ste.-Mère-Église and sent the other north to Neuville-au-Plain to support Turnbull.
Turnbull was half Cherokee. His men called him “Chief,” but not in his presence. “He was a good guy,” Pvt. Charles Miller remembered. “I used to box with him.”36 Turnbull had put two of his squads along a hedgerow to the east of Neuville-au-Plain, the third to the west. Vandervoort set up the AT gun in town, pointing north, then talked to Turnbull, who told him nothing much had happened since he set up some four hours earlier. It was now about 1300.
While they were talking, a Frenchman rode his bicycle up to them and announced in English that some American paratroopers were bringing in a large contingent of German prisoners from the north. Sure enough, when Vandervoort and Turnbull looked in that direction there was a column of troops marching in good order right down the middle of the N-13, with what appeared to be paratroopers on either side of them waving orange flags (the American recognition signal on June 6).
But Vandervoort grew suspicious when he noticed two tracked vehicles at the rear of the column. He told Turnbull to have his machine gunner fire a short burst just to the right of the approaching column, which by now was less than a kilometer away.
The burst scattered the column. “Prisoners” and “paratroopers” alike dove into the ditches and returned fire, the perfidious Frenchman pedaled madly away, and the two self-propelled (SP) guns that had aroused Vandervoort’s suspicion began to move forward behind smoke canisters.
At a half kilometer, the SPs opened fire. One of the first shots knocked out Turnbull’s bazooka team, another was a near miss on the American AT gun. Its crew scattered, but with some “encouragement” from Vandervoort the gunners remanned the AT and with some fast and accurate shooting put the German SPs out of action. But the German infantry, a full-strength company from the 91st Luftlande Division, outnumbering Turnbull’s force more than five to one, began moving around his flanks, using hedgerows for cover.
Vandervoort saw that Turnbull would be overrun quickly without reinforcements, so he had his jeep driver take him back to Ste.-Mère-Église, where he dispatched Lt. Theodore Peterson and Lieutenant Coyle with 1st Platoon of E Company to go to Neuville to cover Turnbull’s withdrawal.
Turnbull, meanwhile, was extending his lines to the east and west in order to force the Germans to make a wider flanking move, but by 1600 he had about run out of men and room. He was taking heavy casualties, primarily from accurate German mortar fire. Of the forty-three men he had led into Neuville-au-Plain, only sixteen were in condition to fight, and some of them were wounded. Nine of Turnbull’s men were dead.37
Turnbull was prepared to make a last stand, a sort of Custer at the Little Big Horn in reverse, when the platoon medic, Corp. James Kelly, volunteered to stay behind and look after the wounded. Pvt. Julius Sebastain, Cpl. Ray Smithson, and Sgt. Robert Niland offered to form a rearguard to cover the retreat of the remainder of the platoon, those who could still walk.
Just as Turnbull began the retreat, E Company moved into Neuville-au-Plain. “We hit fast and hard,” Sgt. Otis Sampson recalled. He was handling the mortar and he was good at it. He began placing shells smack in the middle of the German force that was coming in on the flank.
“The Jerries were trying to move some men from the left of a lane to the right. One man at a time would cross at timed intervals. I judged when another would cross and had another round put in the tube. The timing was perfect.”
Sampson kept moving his mortar around “so as not to give Jerry a target.” The rifle squads kept up a steady fire. The momentum of the German advance was halted. Meanwhile Lieutenants Peterson and Coyle took a patrol to meet Turnbull and the few men he had left with him.
“And we started our journey back to Ste.-Mère-Église,” Sampson said. “I could hear the Jerries yelling as we were leaving. It reminded me of an unfinished ball game, and they were yelling for us to come back and finish it. We withdrew in a casual way as one would after a day’s work. I walked alongside Lieutenant Turnbull. He was a good man.”38
The twenty-eight badly wounded men left behind and two of the three volunteers who provided a rearguard were captured. (The third volunteer, Sgt. Bob Niland, was killed at his machine gun. One of his brothers, a platoon leader in the 4th Division, was killed the same morning at Utah Beach. Another brother was killed that week in Burma. Mrs. Niland received all three telegrams from the War Department announcing the deaths of her sons on the same day. Her fourth son, Fritz, was in the 101st Airborne; he was snatched out of the front line by the Army.) The most critical of the wounded were evacuated to a hospital in Cherbourg by the Germans and were eventually freed when that city was taken on June 27. The others were freed on the night of June 7-8 when American tanks overran Neuville-au-Plain. Turnbull was killed in Ste.-Mère-Église on June 7 by an artillery round.39
• •
Turnbull’s heroic stand allowed Krause and Vandervoort to concentrate on an even stronger counterattack from the 795th Regiment south of Ste.-Mère-Église. It was as big a counterattack as the Germans mounted on D-Day, and it was supported by 88mm guns firing from high ground south of the village.
“The impact of the shells threw up mounds of dirt and mud,” Private Fitzgerald recalled. “The ground trembled and my eardrums felt as if they would burst. Dirt was filling my shirt and was getting into my eyes and mouth. Those 88s became a legend. It was said that there were more soldiers converted to Christianity by the 88 than by Peter and Paul combined.
“When the firing finally stopped, it was midafternoon. We still held the town and there was talk of tanks coming up from the beaches to help us. I could not hold a razor steady enough to shave for the next few days.
“Up until now, I had been mentally on the defensive. My introduction to combat had been a shocker but it was beginning to wear off. I found myself pissed off at the Germans, the dirt, the noise, and the idea of being pushed back.”40
Others felt the same. When Colonel Krause sent I Company to strike at the enemy flank, it moved out aggressively. It caught a German convoy in the open and with bazookas and Gammon bombs destroyed some tanks. The accompanying German infantry withdrew under a hail of fire. “With the last light of day,” Fitzgerald said, “the last German attack came to a halt.”41
Reinforcements came in by glider. They tried to land all around Ste.-Mère-Église, but the pilots were taking small-arms fire from the surrounding Germans and in any case the fields were too short and the hedgerows too high. Every glider seemed to end up crashing into a hedgerow.
“I was standing in a ditch when a glider suddenly came crashing through some trees,” Lieutenant Coyle remembered. “I had not seen it coming and of course could not hear it as it made no sound. I just had time to drop face down in the ditch when the glider hit, crashed across the road, and came to rest with its wing over me. I had to crawl on my stomach the length of the wing to get out from under.”42
Sergeant Sampson dove to the ground as a glider crashed into a hedgerow. “The tail end of the glider was sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle. I went to see if I couldn’t help. As I came up, a hole started to appear on the right side of the glider. The men were kicking out an exit. Like bees out of a hive, they came out of that hole, jumped on the ground, ran for the trees and disappeared. I tried to tell them they were in friendly country, but they passed me as if I wasn’t even there.”
During the night, the Germans were firing flares, shooting rifles, mortars, and occasionally 88s at Ste.-Mère-Église, yelling out orders and threats at the Americans. “They seemed to be so sure of themselves,” Sampson said. “A barrage would hit us, and then they would open up with their machine pistols, yelling as if to attack. Then it would quiet down and then burst out anew. I snuggled up close to my mortar and caressed the barrel. How I wanted to fire it. But we were too intermingled; I might have hit some of our own men.
“The enemy never came on. Maybe they thought with all their yelling and firing we would give our positions away by running. I wondered what had happened at the beaches. The infantry should have been with us by now.
“Many things ran through my mind. I was afraid the invasion had been a failure. I was thinking of my country and the people we were trying to help. I was almost certain I would never see daylight again. I can’t say I was afraid. I just wanted a chance to take as many Jerries with me as possible. I wanted them to come where I could see them. I wanted to see a pile of them in front of me before they got me. It would have been so much easier dying that way.”43
• •
Ste.-Mère-Église was secure, if barely. The official history records this as “the most significant operation of the 82d Airborne Division on D-Day.”44 Another victory for the 82nd had been won by Captain Creek at Chef-du-Pont. On the west side of the Merderet, however, the bulk of the 82nd was scattered in small, isolated pockets, surrounded, fighting for survival rather than seizing objectives. Communication between units was almost nonexistent. General Ridgway feared that his division might be destroyed before it could consolidate and before the 4th Infantry reached it.
To the east, toward the beaches, the 101st had opened the causeways and linked up with the seaborne American troops. Many of its men were unaccounted for; of the 6,600 troopers of the 101st who had dropped into Normandy during the night, only 2,500 were fighting together in some kind of organized unit at the end of the day. Some of its units, like Colonel Johnson’s at La Barquette and Captain Shettle’s at the lower Douve bridges, were isolated and vulnerable, but the 101st had accomplished its main mission, opening the way inland for the 4th Infantry.
The casualty rate cannot be stated with accuracy; the airborne records for Normandy do not distinguish between D-Day losses and those suffered in the ensuing weeks. It was perhaps 10 percent, which was much lower than Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory had feared and predicted, but incredibly high for one day of combat.
It would almost seem to have been too high a price, except that, thanks to the airborne, the 4th Division got ashore and inland with an absolute minimum of casualties. That was the payoff for the largest night drop of paratroopers ever made.
Leigh-Mallory had urged Eisenhower to cancel the air drop and bring the airborne divisions into the beaches as follow-up troops. Eisenhower had refused and he was surely right. Without the airborne fighting behind the German lines, the 4th Infantry would, probably, have gotten ashore and over the sand dunes without too much difficulty, as the German defenders on the shoreline were too few and of poor quality and so were badly battered by the Marauders. But getting across the causeways over the flooded area back from the dunes would have been costly, perhaps impossible, without the airborne.
The 101st had accomplished two critical missions; its men had taken the exits from the rear, and they had knocked out German cannon at Brecourt Manor, Holdy, and other places, cannon that could have been used with deadly effectiveness against the infantry and landing craft.
General Marshall had urged Eisenhower to drop the airborne much further inland, as much as sixty kilometers from the beach. Eisenhower had refused to do so. He had reasoned that lightly armed paratroopers far behind German lines would have been more a liability than a help, isolated and vulnerable, unable to act aggressively. The experience of the 82nd Airborne west of the Merderet would seem to show that Eisenhower was right.
I. The Gammon grenade weighed about two pounds and was the size of a softball. It was a plastic explosive, point detonated.
II. The German grenade, with its long handle, could be thrown much more easily and farther than the American oval-shaped fragmentation grenade. But the amount of metal on the potato masher was not nearly as much as on the fragmentation grenade. Thus, as William Tucker of the 505th PIR put it, the Germans could use the potato masher “as an assault weapon. They could throw it and run right after it. We threw that damn frag grenade, we would run for cover ourselves.”