THE NIGHT OF 5–6 June 1944 was pretty much like every other night since the Germans had occupied Normandy and the Cotentin peninsula in the summer of 1940: dark, quiet, chilly, and mostly boring. While there had been innumerable overflights by Allied aircraft (probably taking reconnaissance photos) and the occasional aerial bombing, Normandy was still considered good duty for anyone who had had his fill of war on the Eastern Front or was recovering from psychological or physical wounds. Here in Normandy there was plenty to eat and drink (especially the apple brandy, Calvados), scenery that hadn’t been mostly destroyed by heavy fighting, and French people who seemed to, if not exactly warmly welcome, at least be resigned to and tolerate the presence of foreign soldiers on their soil.
When not on actual watch—looking for the first signs of an invasion that might or might not come to this location—the soldiers in Normandy had busied themselves by following Rommel’s orders to so fortify the coast that the Allied invaders would not stand a chance; that they would, as Rommel had put it, be driven back into the sea.
On this night, with the peninsula cloaked in darkness, the farmers and villagers fast asleep and the German soldiers—who were on watch in their observation bunkers, straining with the help of strong French coffee to keep their eyelids open, or sound asleep in their barracks or making love to their French mistresses—had no idea what was about to hit them.
A GLANCE AT a map of northwest France reveals a basic truth: there are no large cities in the arc between Cherbourg and Caen—only Carentan, Montebourg, Bayeux, and Valognes can be regarded as sizeable. A spider web of roads connects one town and village and hamlet to another, making it relatively easy for a motorist to travel in nearly every direction. One town at the center of a web of roads is Sainte-Mère-Église. But the roads—mostly narrow farm roads suitable for bringing produce to market or for driving herds of slow-moving cows from the barn to the fields and back again—also made it hard to move large formations of military vehicles and large numbers of troops.
For centuries—ever since the Vikings or Normans first set foot here, giving the region its name of Normandie—the region has been pastoral and bucolic, with time measured by seasons rather than by the clock. The sturdy homes, shops, and churches are built solidly of stone—a whitish-grayish-yellowish limestone native to the region, capable of fending off the strong winds that blow in fiercely from the North Atlantic. Although treated to the same warm currents that can give southern England a semi-tropical feel (there are, after all, palm trees that grow along the English Channel), the winds can sometimes be bitter, and the cold can penetrate through multiple layers of fabric like a gunshot.
Like their buildings, the people, too, are a sturdy lot. Hardworking like any agrarian populace, the dour Normans typically rise at or before dawn, put in a full day’s worth of physical work, eat a hearty dinner topped off with a glass or two of Calvados, and retire at sunset.
The stolid citizens of Normandy were not happy, when, in June 1940, the gray-uniformed Germans marched in and took over, but they accepted their fate the way they accepted most everything that came their way. For the most part, they did not go out of their way to welcome the occupiers, nor did they collaborate with them. They merely tolerated them, and went about their usual business of growing their apples, which went into the making of Calvados, pulling fish from the Channel, and pasturing their cows, extracting the milk to make into cheese.
IT WAS THE town of Sainte-Mère-Église, roughly halfway between Montebourg and Carantan that had caught the eye of American military planners as early as 1942. Control Sainte-Mère-Église and you control the Cotentin. No fewer than five roads pass through it, plus it was only seven miles from the westernmost amphibious landing beach known as Utah. Drop an airborne division or two—along with their glider-infantry regiments—into the area and you stood a good chance of preventing German reinforcements from Cherbourg in the north and Brittany in the west from slamming into the troops coming ashore at Utah. The western end of the sixty-mile-long beachhead that ran from La Madeleine to Ouistre-ham would thus be secure and the seaborne troops could move inland after overcoming local German opposition. Yes, Sainte-Mère-Église would definitely have to be taken in the early hours of D-Day.
AS A LATE spring storm churned the waters in the English Channel and battered the Normandy coast with high winds, the chance of an Allied invasion in early June seemed remote to the Germans. On 3 June, Rommel’s aide-de-camp wrote in his journal: “[Rommel] is planning a trip to Germany.” After the event, the aide wrote, “5–8 June 1944. Fears of an invasion during this period were all the less by the fact that tides were very unfavorable for the days following, and the fact that no amount of air reconnaissance had given the slightest indication that a landing was imminent. The most urgent need was [for Rommel] to speak personally to the Führer on the Obersalzburg, convey to him the extent of the man-power and material inferiority we would suffer in the event of a landing, and request the dispatch of two further panzer divisions, an A.A. corps, and a Nebelwerfer brigade to Normandy.”1
Thus, on the morning of 5 June 1944, the day before arguably the most important date in the history of the war, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the commander-in-chief of Army Group B, climbed into his staff car, absented himself from his headquarters at La Roche Guyon, and began the long drive back to Bavaria, with a planned stop at his home in Herrlingen for a brief celebration of his wife’s birthday.
Other important commanders were also absent from their posts at this critical time. A map exercise—war games simulating an Allied airborne landing—was scheduled to take place on 6 June in Rennes, some ninety miles south of the Norman coast. Several division commanders were already there or on their way: Generalleutnant Wilhelm Falley of the 91st Luftlande Division, Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben of the 709th, and Generalleutnant Heinz Hellmich of the 243rd Division. Also away from their posts were Oberst Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, von Rundstedt’s intelligence officer; Oberst Hans Georg von Tempelhof, Army Group B’s operations officer; Sepp Dietrich, commander of the 1st SS Panzer Corps, was in Brussels; Admiral Theodor Krancke, commander of the German navy in the west, was on his way to Bordeaux; and Generalleutnant Edgar Feuchtinger, head of the 21st Panzer Division—the nearest panzer division to Normandy—was in Paris with his French mistress.2
AT 2130 HOURS on 5 June, some 200 American pathfinders and their security teams—the very tip of the Allied spearpoint—began lifting off in twenty C-47s from North Witham, headed for the Cotentin.3 Tension in the planes ran high, as the strapped-in men sat in the dark—the roar of the engines filling their ears—and thoughts of the coming mission filled their minds. Would they—this vanguard of men and aircraft—catch the Germans unawares? Would they be able to slip into Normandy without being detected and fired upon? Or would the very act of crossing the coastline set off the alarms, provoking a response from the Germans like a burglar arousing a pack of junkyard dogs? And, if that happened, would it put the entire German garrison in Normandy on the alert, ready to blast the main body of parachutists out of the sky? They would soon have their answer.
Tall, lanky Captain Frank Lewis Lillyman, of Skaneateles, New York, was the leader of the 101st Pathfinder Company (Provisional), 502nd PIR, heading to France. He was riding in C-47 number 293098, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Joel Crouch, commander of the Pathfinder Group, IX Troop Carrier Command. Lillyman, in charge of 120 men, had been training for this moment since December 1943, and if any unit could accomplish its mission, it was he and his pathfinder company of eleven sticks of pathfinders. A team of three sticks were assigned to each of the drop zones, while the mission of two other sticks was to find and mark the glider landing zones.
Security teams would also jump with the pathfinders to secure the DZs and LZs, and guard the pathfinders against enemy attacks while they set up the Eureka sets, Holofane lights, SCR-536 radios, and all the other homing equipment. A 101st trooper, George Koskimaki, described the set-up of the Holofane lights: “Seven of the lights were used in a ‘T’ arrangement. The tail of the ‘T’ pointed in the direction of the jump; the crossbar of the ‘T’ indicated the ‘go’ point. These lights were set in a position where they were easily visible from the air, but almost completely hidden from ground observers.”
When the pathfinders on the ground heard the engines of the approaching aircraft carrying the main force, the lights would be switched on. The “tail” of the “T” would blink out a signal telling the pilots what DZ or LZ this was. For example, on DZ “A,” the light blinked out the Morse code symbol for the letter A. Each DZ also had its own color; DZ “A” was yellow, “C” was green, and “D” was red.4
In another of the aircraft, Pathfinder Bud Warnecke, B/508/82nd, was looking at the bicycle that his 1st Battalion C.O., Lieutenant Colonel Shields Warren, wanted delivered for his use in Normandy. Warnecke said, “When we were over the middle of the English Channel looking out the door, [my captain] or I said, ‘What the hell are we going to do with the bicycle?’ We simultaneously kicked it into the Channel without hooking up the chute.”5
Elsewhere in the formation, in a C-47 with the number “4” chalked on its side, Richard M. Wright, a pathfinder with the 506th, sat nervously with seventeen other troopers, staring blankly at the dim forms of the men seated across from him. At the controls of this C-47 were pilot Captain Clyde E. Taylor and co-pilot Harold H. Sperber of the IX Troop Carrier Command Pathfinder Group, U.S. Ninth Air Force.
After departing their base, they had headed south in a tight “V” formation and crossed the Isle of Wight, the last bit of friendly territory they would see for some time to come—if ever again. As they reached France, any hopes of sneaking into French airspace undetected were quickly vanquished by the violent eruption of anti-aircraft munitions all around their plane. “ Suddenly all hell broke loose with all sorts of anti-aircraft fire with blue, green, and red hot tracer bullets coming up to greet us,” said Wright.
Without warning, the plane’s left engine exploded and the pilot pushed the Skytrain’s nose down to avoid hitting another plane in their formation. The plane was severely overloaded, and the one remaining good engine, now badly overheating, was straining to maintain altitude. Practically skimming the treetops, the pathfinders began dumping their heavy equipment out the plane’s door. Realizing he had only a few seconds to remain airborne, Taylor banked sharply and headed for the sea—perhaps he could make an emergency landing in the water.
The waves of the Channel were suddenly below them, and then the plane hit, coming to a violent stop. The men quickly unbuckled themselves and ran for the fuselage door through which cold water was pouring, inflating their Mae Wests as they left the sinking aircraft. Somehow, someone found a life raft and the men swam toward it and grabbed on. By some unexplained miracle, everyone aboard the plane survived—a little banged up and badly frightened, but alive. After daylight, the men clinging to the life raft were picked up a British destroyer, HMS Tartar. Their assigned DZ, however, would go unmarked.6
AT TWELVE MINUTES past midnight on 6 June, Lillyman and his men jumped over Drop Zone “A” near Mésières. As he had done so many times before in training, Lillyman landed without incident in the dark, his ubiquitous cigar clamped between his teeth. But instead of landing in a safe British field, he was now in a hostile land, a place where, lurking in the shadows, men with guns were ready to kill him and anyone else who dared trespass into their realm.7
Lillyman and his team came under fire seconds after they hit the ground. With the security team doing its best to neutralize the German defenders, the pathfinders—while dodging bullets—set about putting the homing devices into operation. The Germans who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time were either killed or run off, and Lillyman’s men accomplished their mission.8
A short distance away, C-47s were also delierving pathfinders of the 82nd Division into Normandy, but many had trouble dropping in the right locations. When his plane got over France, pathfinder Bud Warnecke recalled that Captain Royal Taylor said something like, “I don’t know where we are.” Then the green light came on and the stick jumped, Warnecke right behind Taylor. “It only took a second to realize somebody did not like us. It was unbelievable the number of green, blue, and orange tracers. We jumped from about 400 feet.” Warnecke landed softly—“Up to then the easiest landing I ever had”—but he found Taylor lying injured with a broken foot in a ditch, and the captain told him to find Lieutenant Jones and tell him that he was now the company commander. The invasion had gotten off to a rough start.9
The first few planes flying over Normandy caused little concern for the Germans. Perhaps the Allies were taking photos or dropping supplies or saboteurs for the benefit of the French underground; that sort of thing happened all the time. Nothing to get too alarmed about, the local commanders would send out patrols to round up whatever or whoever had been dropped.
But then reports began to filter in about large numbers of paratroopers drifting to earth here and there, accompanied by the sounds of gunfire and explosions. When patrols went to investigate, all they found were burlap dummies filled with straw and perhaps a phonograph record player and vinyl disks with battle sound effects.
Some patrols also found other paratroopers that were real. They had with them all sorts of unusual gear—things called Eureka beacons, Rebecca receivers, Holophane and Aldis lights, brightly colored signal panels, and pole-mounted Keeler lights. Some of the paratroopers put up a fight and were killed; others surrendered but refused to talk. What did it all mean?
A half hour after the pathfinders’ planes had delivered them to Normandy, the German soldiers on the ground heard it, the low rumbling sound of aircraft engines far off in the distance beating the still night air, sounding at first like the dull, steady buzzing of bumblebees, bumblebees that seemed to grow exponentially in number as the seconds ticked by. Soldiers stationed at their guns—the heavy machine guns, the 20mm anti-aircraft guns, and, what was widely regarded as the best heavy weapons of the war: the 8.8cm FlaK 18, 36, and 37 guns, and the formidable 12.8 cm FlaK 40 and 10.5 cm FlaK 39—all variations of the feared 88mm gun—tried to understand what was happening.*
Officers at the coastal batteries heard the sound and knew immediately that it was not bumblebees but rather Allied aircraft, and a great number of them. The Germans didn’t know immediately whether it was a flotilla of bombers coming to make mischief or hundreds of unarmed, unarmored transport planes carrying thousands of paratroopers, but that was unimportant. What was important was that there were a lot of planes and they needed to be shot down. Klaxon horns were sounded and the well-trained gun crews were jarred out of their slumber in their barracks and ready rooms, pulling on their boots and uniforms as quickly as possible, and sprinting for their positions.
The low rumbling sound had now turned into a raging, vibrating torrent of noise—the sound that thousands of 1,200 hp Pratt and Whitney R-1830-90C Twin Wasp fourteen-cylinder radial engines make when they are only a few hundred feet overhead. The murky shapes of the transport planes became visible. Men looked into their rangefinders to calculate the height of the planes, then transmitted the information to the gunners, who began setting the fuses on their shells, loading and firing as quickly as they could. If this wasn’t the opening round of the long-awaited invasion, some of the gunners no doubt thought, it was a pretty damned good imitation. Some of the AA guns were loaded with flares that would explode in midair to illuminate the targets and then slowly float back to earth, dangling beneath small parachutes. The AA guns began barking.
All across the Cotentin, officers were reaching for their radios and telephones and informing their higher headquarters that something—something very big—was at that very moment taking place in the black sky above them. Reports went up the chain of command, but the night duty officers were as clueless as the soldiers in the field. A few guessed that it was the long-anticipated invasion, but others weren’t so sure. After all, they had been constantly briefed that the Allies’ main invasion thrust would take place at the Pas de Calais, not here in the backwater of the Cotentin Peninsula. And so the reports went up to the next level, where no one of authority was present to make sense of it all.
BECAUSE OF THE German-imposed curfew, the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, like all the towns in Normandy, was dark and shuttered tightly on the night of 5 June 1944. Mayor Renaud was awakened shortly after midnight by the distant thumping of anti-aircraft batteries located in Saint Marcouf and Saint Martin-de-Varreville. As a precaution, he herded his wife and children into the family’s makeshift bomb shelter when someone started pounding on his door. Renaud opened it to find the town’s fire chief standing there in his shiny brass helmet, anxiously informing him that the two-story home belonging to the Hairon family, just off the southeast corner of the town square, was on fire. “I think it was hit by a stray incendiary bomb from one of the planes,” said the chief. “The fire is spreading fast. Can you get the commandant to lift the curfew?” Renaud said he would try.
He hurried to the German headquarters at the town hall, explained the situation to the duty sergeant who, without waking the commandant, gave Renaud permission to call out the volunteer fire department and citizen bucket brigade to help extinguish the blaze. German guards were also called out to stand watch over the volunteers and make sure no acts of sabotage were committed. Renaud then dashed to the parish house and asked Father Louis Roulland to have the sexton toll the bell as a means of alerting the citizenry. Soon, more than a hundred men and women, some still in their nightclothes, had assembled to form a line of buckets from the pump at one end of the Place de l’Église to the firemen at the scene of the fire some fifty yards away. Approximately thirty well-armed German soldiers stood watch over them.
The fire was not anywhere close to being contained. And then they heard it, the citizens and the soldiers. Above the church bells and the noise of the fire and the people fighting it came the sound of aircraft, at first far off to the west but quickly growing closer and louder until it was a wall of thunder beating the air directly overhead. People looked up and out of the blackness there came human forms floating down beneath mottled green parachutes! They were the paratroopers of the 505th PIR, 82nd Airborne, and the 101st Airborne’s 506th PIR, and they had come to liberate a continent.10