Two of Winters’ .30-caliber machine guns opened up on the Germans while he and Compton crawled forward with their men. Compton was carrying a borrowed Thompson sub-machine gun, and at the moment of attack, it malfunctioned. He said that he jumped into the trench and ran down it toward two Germans, aimed the gun, and heard it misfire (the firing pin was broken). “I looked at the Germans. They looked at me in surprise. They were armed to the hilt. I wasn’t.”

At that moment a burst of submachine-gun fire rang out behind him; it was Wild Bill Guarnere shooting one of the Germans. His comrade took off running across the field. Compton then pulled the pin on a grenade and lobbed it at the running soldier. His previous life as a star college baseball player had given him an accurate arm. The grenade detonated right over the German and killed him instantly. It was the first time Compton had killed another human being, and he later reflected on the moment, wondering if the German had a family, what he had done in civilian life, and other existential questions. He came to the conclusion, “A man is trying to kill you, and you either kill him first or be killed waiting to assess the situation.”⁸

Compton began flinging more grenades at targets in the trench. Winters said, “I started across the field with the rest of the assault team so that we jumped into the position together as the grenades exploded. Simultaneously, we hurled grenades at the next position. In return we received substantial small arms fire and grenades from the enemy.” One of Winters’ men, “Popeye” Wynn, was wounded in the buttocks but not seriously.⁹

“Then,” said Guarnere, “one of the Germans threw a stick grenade at the attacking force and everyone hit the ground. The grenade landed between Joe Toye’s legs but the blast was deflected by Toye’s rifle. He was lucky; the rifle took the brunt of it. Otherwise he’d be singing soprano.” Winters’ men began blasting away and tossing grenades at the defenders, who broke and ran across the field. Winters and Gerald Lorraine dropped two of the running Germans but Guarnere was furious at himself for missing the moving target with his first few shots: “I never missed! Never missed! But I made up for it. That Kraut was full of bullets when I got done with him. No one got away.”

The Germans at the second position had a machine gun and they turned it on the Americans but hit no one. Grenades and small-arms fire finished off the gun crew. Then Winters’ men attacked the third gun in line. Guarnere said, “We had to make sure every shot or grenade counted, because if we ran out, we were done. We were under constant fire. I don’t know how more of us didn’t get hit.” He recalled that a soldier named Hall, who was from another company, raised his head above the rim of the trench and suddenly fell back dead. “His head must have gone above the ditch, and bang, a sniper got him, killed him instantly.”

Nobody stopped to care for the casualties. They kept going, wiping out the third gun position. Then elements of D Company showed up and took care of the fourth. It was all over. What Germans weren’t lying dead or seriously wounded in the wet pasture were high-tailing it to somewhere else; twelve were prisoners of the Yanks. Troops from battalion headquarters arrived, spiked the guns with explosives, and blew them apart.¹⁰

Don Malarkey observed, “Only later would we learn that taking out those guns had probably saved scores of soldiers coming ashore at Utah Beach…. Lots of things went wrong in our air operation that day. But one thing went right. Because we took care of business on the ground, our boys had an easier time getting inland, and the Germans couldn’t get reinforcements near the coast.”¹¹

Buck Compton similarly observed, “If our actions saved any of our boys’ lives, that’s part of what we were there to do.”^*12

NORTH OF CARENTAN Sergeant Jake McNiece, Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 506/101st, was a man on a mission. He was also lost and alone—a common ailment on D-Day. He said that before the jump into Normandy, “General Maxwell Taylor wanted the 506th Parachute Infantry to blow all the bridges below the Douve Canal, then seize and hold the main bridge.” As a demolitions specialist, McNiece had been temporarily assigned to lead the sappers from the 3rd Battalion in order to carry out this mission. “Regiment wanted me to clear out the passages, roadways, and bridges from near Saint-Côme-du-Mont on up to Carentan and then hold that bridge if we could.” McNiece got permission to take his own section with him, along with several other trained demolitions experts. By the time of the jump on 6 June, he had over twenty men under his command.”

“We believed we could accomplish any assignment that came our way,” McNiece said. “I do not know if I had any man who was more physically fit than I, but there were probably better soldiers. I did not live because I was the best soldier. I think I lived because I took advantage of everything that I could. If a soldier is not aggressive, he is going to get killed.”

After the jump (during which he was separated from the rest of his men), McNiece used his wits to fight off Germans who were trying to kill or capture him. In the darkness of D-Day morning he found a paratrooper from another unit—a machine gunner with a belt of ammo but no machine gun. McNiece was equally disadvantaged: “All I had was thirty-six pounds of Composition C-2, a thousand feet of wire, blasting caps, and a ten-cap detonator and not a man in my demolition section.” Despite this, he continued on, picking up more paratroops—including three from his own section—from various units along the way.

Moving cross country from north of Sainte-Mère-Église to the Carentan bridges, McNiece and his ten men came to what he assumed was a German headquarters. “It was possibly a regiment or might even have been a division,” he said. “We knew that because a lot of big brass were there. It had never been mentioned as a target in our training. We did not even know where we were. We were just as surprised as the Germans were. All we did was blast them from every side, then scattered. This was a beautiful part about paratrooping. It was a commando-type operation. If we bumped into a company of Krauts marching along through there, two of us would just lay in and kill fifteen to thirty of them and then we were gone. They could not interrupt an operation just to hunt down two paratroopers. That is what we did to this headquarters. We just went right on through them, just like a bunch of bobcats.”

McNiece and his group then continued on in an easterly direction from Saint-Côme-du-Mont toward the Douve canal across from Brévands. He said, “My primary assignment was to blow the two wooden bridges upstream. One was just a footbridge that did not show up on the map. Then we would move on up and place charges underneath the girders of the big bridge at Carentan. I was to hold it if possible and not blow it unless the Germans started to cross it with armor. The Allies wanted to hold that bridge so they could make an exit out of the Cherbourg Peninsula en masse. But if the Germans started to cross it with tanks, we were supposed to wait until they got two or three tanks on it, then blow the whole thing. We were to keep the Germans from reinforcing their men down on the beachhead.”

McNiece and his group, which numbered thirteen by this time, reached the first of the bridges at about 0300 hours on 6 June. As part of his group he had three mortar crewmen whom he had picked up. He then used their mortar rounds to augment the explosives he and his men wired to the wooden bridges and detonated. After these bridges were destroyed, he moved on to the large steel girder bridge across from Brévands. “The bridge was unguarded since the Germans were not anticipating anyone being in that deep behind the lines.” McNiece said. “We had it wired up and ready to blow before daybreak.”

The Germans discovered the presence of McNiece and his men and began laying in mortar fire; he was nicked in the face and hand but didn’t allow a few wounds to slow him down. The group also came under sniper fire and began losing men. McNiece figured that the sniper was in a two story building that overlooked his position. One of his men, Jack Agnew, was given the assignment to take out the sniper. After a few more of the paratroopers fell victim, Agnew spotted and shot him. McNiece said, “[Jack] jumped up on the causeway and said, ‘I got that son-of-a-bitch!’ I think it was the first man he had really killed. I grabbed him by the ankle and jerked him down.” It was not a moment too soon, because, as McNiece pulled Agnew down, a burst of machine-gun fire tore up the causeway’s pavement.

The Yanks turned their attention back to the steel girder bridge, which was some seventy-five yards from end to end. “The Germans did not try to cross that bridge with infantry that first morning,” said Mc-Niece. “We killed them as soon as they got on the bridge. The next day they tried to move troops out on it but we blew them away as they assembled. The Germans never tried to cross that bridge again.”

Over the course of the next couple of days, more and more para-troopers straggled into McNiece’s position, drawn by the sound of gun-fire. “The invasion forces on Utah Beach were supposed to have reached us at that bridge by dusk the first day,” McNiece recalled. “Well, they did not make it on the first day and they did not make it the second day and they did not make it the third day. We did not have any contact or communications with anybody outside the bridge area. I am sure they did not think it was possible for anyone to be in there for three days and still be moving around. I guess they thought that we had been eliminated because late in the afternoon on the third day, here comes these four P-51s. They circled and came in on us single file. I thought, ‘We’re screwed.’”

McNiece continued, “The first one missed the bridge and the second one hit it, man, just head on and blew that thing sky high. At first I was filled with a surge of anger. We had been guarding that bridge for three days and three nights against terrific odds and then our own air force came in and bombed it…. Well, when that second [plane] hit it, the last two peeled off. They were so low that they could see us in our foxholes and the Germans in their foxholes on either end of the bridge, but they just figured we were all Germans and two of them took us. They came in and dropped the rest of their bombs, then strafed us with machine guns.”

McNiece said that he was first filled with fear at the sight of American planes zeroing in on his position. “Then I had a sense of calm. There was nothing any of us could do but wait for the bombs to fall. One old guy had dug a seven-foot standing foxhole. A big chunk of that bridge came right down in that foxhole and drove through his head. After the planes flew away, I was shocked at the loss. Out of the forty or so men we had in there, we probably lost fifteen to our own air force. So we did not have anything to do. We did not have a bridge to worry about any-more. It was gone. No tanks were going to come across there, so all we were dealing with then were those German soldiers. In that respect we were still in good shape.”¹³

WHILE THE SKIRMISHES raged below, transports were still bringing in more paratroopers. Sergeant Michael N. Ingrisano, Jr., the radioman on a C-47 in the 37th Troop Carrier Squadron, 316th TCG, carrying a load of 505/82nd paratroopers, had a most unusual experience on his way to DZ “O.” “When I looked down and out, I could see the vast armada sitting off the coast. Then I was astonished to see a woman, dressed in a white gown, sitting on our left wing tip. I immediately recognized her as my fiancée. She turned toward me, smiled, and said: ‘Mike, don’t worry. You’ll be OK.’ With that she disappeared.”¹⁴

COLONEL LEROY “ROY” Lindquist’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division was supposed to have landed on DZ “N,” between Pont l’Abbe (also known as Etienville) and Cauquigny, in order to seize a small stone bridge over the Merderet at Manoir de la Fière, but most of the 2,000 men of the 508th missed the DZ by a wide margin.

Lindquist’s 2nd Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J.B. Shanley, had the mission of assaulting another bridge—the one over the Douve south of Pont l’Abbe. Able to round up only 300 paratroopers, many of whom were not even of his battalion, Shanley decided not to wait and moved toward his assigned objective. Halted by heavy fire from a larger enemy force about a mile short of his objective, Shanley realized he would not be able to take the bridge. So he retrieved his wounded and withdrew eastward toward the battalion rendezvous point: an orchard-covered feature near Caponnet marked on the map as “Hill 30”—meaning it was thirty meters above sea level—and located about two miles west of Chef-du-Pont.

On the way, while being pursued by elements of the 1057th Regiment, 91st Luftlande Division, Shanley was joined by a small group of paratroopers—but not before these men, thinking Shanley’s force was the enemy, opened fire on them. Not an auspicious beginning, thought Shanley. But things were about to get worse.¹⁵

Continuing his march eastward, Shanley discovered a group of para-troopers sitting in a field—leaderless—waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do; they had been there since before dawn. This was most unusual, for lost and leaderless paratroopers had been taking the initiative all morning long. Incorporating these 200 men into his entourage—plus another 200 that Major Shields Warren, XO of 1/508th, found near Haut Guetteville—Shanley went on, finally reaching Picauville at 2100 hours that evening. Colonel Lindquist reached Shanley by radio and told him to halt for the night at Hill 30 and begin preparing defensive positions among the apple trees and hedgerows in case the Germans attacked. Lindquist told Shanley he would try to send a force to him the next day.¹⁶

The historian Joseph Balkoski remarked in Utah Beach that Shanley’s force “occupied the utterly misnamed Hill 30 on the evening of D-Day, only to discover that this position, marked so prominently on U.S. Army maps, possessed virtually no military value.” Pushed up against the Merderet swamps and flanked on three sides by the enemy, Shanley and his men had no option but to dig in, absorb a pounding, and hope a relief unit would soon come to their rescue.¹⁷

Hill 30 may not have been “militarily valueless.” Surrounded as it was by German forces, in the coming days it would become an aggravating impediment to the 91st Luftlande Division trying to cross the cause-way and reach Chef-du-Pont, Sainte-Mère-Église, or Carentan—an impediment that had to be eliminated. Shanley, too, recognized the strategic importance of his position and knew he must do everything possible to retain it.¹⁸

ON THAT SAME morning, First Lieutenant Malcolm D. Brannen of Headquarters Company, 3/508/82nd, had landed between Picauville and Pont l’Abbe and picked up about a dozen troopers and another lieutenant. Brannen stopped at a farmhouse and asked a Frenchman to point out his location on a map when a German staff car approached, heading east toward Sainte-Mère-Église. Brannen stepped out into the middle of the road and ordered it to halt, but it picked up speed and dashed past him. At that moment Brannen’s troops, who had taken cover behind a stone wall, rose up and blasted the Mercedes, bringing it to a crashing halt against a wall and throwing out its occupants—a corporal and an officer.

Brannen recalled that the officer lying in the road was hurt but alive, and trying to crawl toward his Luger pistol that lay a few feet away. Brannen said, “He looked at me as I stood … fifteen feet to his right and as he inched closer and closer to his weapon, he pleaded to me in German and also in English, ‘Don’t kill, don’t kill.’ I thought, ‘I’m not a cold-hearted killer, I’m human—but if he gets that Luger, it is either him or me or one or more of my men.’ So I shot. He was hit in the forehead and never knew it. He suffered none. The blood spurted from his forehead about six feet high and, like water in a fountain when it is shut off, it gradually subsided.”

The Americans took the driver prisoner and noticed that there was someone else in the car slumped over in the passenger seat, dead. A check of the corpse’s identification revealed that it was Lieutenant-General Wilhelm Falley, commander of the 91st Luftlande Division. He was on his way back from the war games in Rennes when he was ambushed. Brannen also found a considerable number of documents that he planned to turn over to 508th Headquarters—if and when he found 508th Headquarters. The group headed south, toward Etienville.¹⁹

MAJOR FRIEDRICH-AUGUST Freiherr von der Heydte, commander of the 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment, was not unduly troubled by the frantic reports of widespread Allied landings on the morning of 6 June. Traveling from his command post north of Periers to Carentan, he found the German garrison there relaxed. No attacks were taking place, and no bombs or shells were falling, although the rumble of artillery could be heard in the distance. Just to be safe, he phoned his headquarters and ordered his battalions to assemble southwest of Carentan. He then got in his staff car and drove up the road toward Sainte-Mère-Église, stopping at Saint-Côme-du-Mont where, at about noon, he climbed the steeple of the church that would afford him a good view of the English Channel. What he saw from that perch took his breath away: the horizon was a solid line of ships, and smoke from the Utah beachhead was drifting over the beaches.

Von der Heydte made a hurried call back to his CP and issued new orders: his regiment was to proceed at once to Sainte Côme-du-Mont; from there Battalion I would head to Sainte Marie-du-Mont, Battalion II would go to Sainte-Mère-Église, and Battalion III would reinforce Carentan. The attached Battalion III, 1058th Regiment, of the 91st Luftlande Division, would garrison Sainte Côme-du-Mont. But, as with so much of the German response on D-Day, it took time to organize the movements and get underway; Battalions I and II did not leave Periers until 1900 hours that evening. Strangely enough, Battalion I of the 6th Fallschirmjäger marched without serious incident through the 101st Airborne’s lines and reached Sainte Marie-du-Mont by midnight. Battalion II also had luck and reached Fauville, on the southern fringe of Sainte-Mère-Église, with very little opposition.

During the evening of 7 June, though, American gliders came down in the area with supplies and reinforcements, and the 4th Infantry Division’s 8th Infantry Regiment had marched far enough inland to cut off and isolate von der Heydte’s Battalion I. The major ordered both battalions to fall back to Sainte Côme-du-Mont—an order Battalion II acknowledged; there was no acknowledgement by Battalion I. Earlier that day, Battalion I, withdrawing south toward Carentan, had encountered the Screaming Eagles and surrendered with barely a skirmish.²⁰

AS THE DRAMA continued, on the far eastern end of the invasion area the British 6th Airborne units were engaged in the same kind of all-out battles for survival against a determined foe that marked the Americans’ ordeal.