SEVEN JUNE WAS a strange day. The adrenaline-powered euphoria of D-Day had worn off. The airborne and glider troops who had come in on 6 June were exhausted; many had not slept for nearly forty-eight hours. The majority of them had experienced their first day of combat and the excitement that accompanied catching the Germans by surprise was now replaced by the sobering thoughts of close calls, confusion (some troops still had no idea where they were), and the shock of seeing comrades maimed or killed. The welcome cloak of darkness that had hidden the Allies’ moves and added to the enemy’s bewilderment was now replaced by the harsh, revealing light of day. Many of the men were also nursing wounds, ranging from flesh to life-threatening. In addition, the Germans were quickly recovering from the surprise and were fighting back with skill and determination.
The men of the 82nd and 101st, hiding in towns, villages, single buildings, ditches, and hedgerows, knew that 7 June would bring a fresh aerial wave of troops delivered by glider, and they scanned the skies, hoping to see the reinforcements winging their way in. They wouldn’t have long to wait. On their way were two additional glider lifts—dubbed “Galveston” (150 gliders) and “Hackensack” (100 gliders)—bringing in Colonel Harry L. Lewis’ 325th GIR Regiment, 82nd Airborne.
Halfway across the Channel, gliderman Clinton Riddle was in a Horsa when something went wrong with the tow plane’s engines. “Our tow plane began to miss and sputter,” said Riddle, “then finally quit and began to lose altitude. The glider pilot tried to keep the glider riding as high as possible, and we were moving faster than the plane. The pilot of the plane continued to crank the engine until we were down within a hundred feet of the water. We could see the waves churning up to meet us. All we could hear was the rushing of the wind as it swept past the glider, and the groaning of the men in the glider—‘Oooh, something’s wrong.’”
“When the gilder tilted up on one wing, almost in a half roll, we knew what was going on. The slack in the tow rope had become tangled in the landing gear. The order was given to stand by for a crash landing,” said Riddle. Equipment of all sorts was thrown out and a sergeant grabbed an ax in case an escape hatch had to be chopped in the plywood fuselage. Just as a crash into the Channel seemed imminent, somehow the glider pilot managed to maneuver the glider in such a way that the rope came loose, and at that same moment the C-47’s engines caught, the tow rope went taut, and a tremendous jerk told the panicked troops that things were working again. “It was a miracle that our glider pilot was able to get the rope unfastened [from around the landing gear] without having to hit the tow rope release lever,” Riddle said. “If he had hit the lever, we still would have gone down into the Channel.”
Everything after that was anticlimactic; the glider landed roughly, but safely, in a French field. “The pilot brought the glider in low over the first hedgerow, cutting the tops out of some trees with the wing. The glider hit the ground, bounced a time or two, then rolled to a stop. The pilot had done a great job in bringing the glider down without crashing into the hedgerow. We were the only glider in the company that landed without mishap,” said Riddle.1
The morning sky was now filled with C-47s and gliders searching for a landing spot. Some machines caught a skid in the soft turf and spun to a violent stop. Others rammed into cows or hedgerows or had their wings sheared off by “Rommel’s Asparagus.” Some completely flipped over or smashed into other gliders already on the ground. It was carnage on a large scale that often had nothing to do with the enemy’s efforts, although the Germans contributed plenty to the casualty toll. As one account of the battle states, “Most of the 325 GIR gliders crash-landed or were severely damaged by the intense German anti-aircraft fire, or destroyed by anti-glider mines erected by the Germans throughout Normandy.”2
Once the gliders skidded, slammed, flipped, or jolted to a stop, it was time for the infantrymen inside them to spring into action—if they were still alive and functional. For those who had just survived the worst flight of their lives, they were thrown into an even worse situation: combat.
“We landed right in the middle of a fierce enemy counterattack,” recalled Edgar Schroeder, 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion, 101st Airborne. “I was seated directly behind the pilot’s compartment and over the area of the nose landing gear. I had heard somewhere that on a hard landing the nose-wheel strut tended to come up through the floor and could be hazardous to one’s health. I found out the hard way that they were right. We banged down hard in the middle of the field and bounced into the hedgerow trees. For a few moments I thought I might have a broken leg; however, after shoving aside a ton of debris from my prone position, I managed to crawl through what was left of the nose section and get on my feet. Of course, there were many bruises and contusions, plus a slight concussion that put me into a rather happy state of mind…. Unfortunately, the co-pilot was badly smashed up…. My unit’s designated area was southeast of the town [Sainte-Mère-Église], but I arrived on the northeast side. Oh, well, at least it was the right country.”3
After nearly drowning in a flooded field and almost being killed by a crashing C-47, Private Thomas Porcella, H/508/82nd, along with three other paratroopers, came upon a glider that looked like it had been hit by a train. “Immediately we went to see if there were any wounded inside,” he said. “To our surprise there was a medic attending the wounded in there. Except for one, all the glidermen had died in the crash. His leg was crushed and the medic was about to remove it. The glidermen didn’t have much of a chance. I hadn’t seen a glider that wasn’t badly damaged or which hadn’t crashed. Paratroopers have a great admiration and respect for the glidermen. They had it a lot tougher than us.”4
IN ANOTHER OF the Wacos coming in on that harrowing morning was a forty-one-year-old former circuit judge from South Carolina by the name of James Strom Thurmond. After Pearl Harbor, Thurmond—already a member of the U.S. Army Reserves—gave up his legal career for the duration and volunteered for active duty. He initially was made a captain in a Military Police unit.
Now, as a lieutenant colonel with the Civil Affairs Section of the First Army Group, he wanted to go in with the 82nd Airborne’s glider force. His glider, with a jeep and eight other men on board, crash-landed in a field near Sainte-Mère-Église and Thurmond was slightly injured. Four days after the landing, Thurmond, armed with only a pistol, captured a German motorcyclist and commandeered the bike for his section’s use. Many years later, Thurmond declared, “I must confess that my one and only ride in that particular aircraft is not one of my favorite memories.”*5
MORE AND MORE gliders came in, bolstering American numbers on the ground while additional troops were arriving over the beaches, strengthening the Allies’ tenuous foothold on the continent. The seaborne landings, too, had been a success, and by 7 June the grasp on Normandy was secure. Allied fears that the American airborne operation would be a disaster began to melt, but Omar Bradley noted in his memoir that, “It was still too early to evaluate the success of the airborne drop. The dispersal had so shaken our confidence in nighttime airborne operations that we never again attempted a nighttime drop. In the initial count casualties looked excessively high and some feared that Leigh-Mallory might be vindicated in his prediction. But as ‘lost’ units trickled in through our lines, we discovered that airborne losses for the drop and the first day aground did not exceed 20 percent. Not until we had turned the Utah force north toward Cherbourg did we learn how effectively those airborne troops had paralyzed the enemy’s rear.”6
Back in England, the reports coming into Southwick House were still sketchy but optimistic. The amphibious landings had—for the most part—gone better than expected. Only at Omaha Beach—where the U.S. 1st Infantry Division and the attached regiments of the 29th were located—was there real danger of the assault being forced back into the sea. But, by noon on 6 June, the Atlantic Wall that Nazi Germany had expended so many years and billions of reichsmarks to construct had been cracked wide open by the Allied armies now pouring through the breaches.
On 7 June, shortly after it was learned that the American airborne operation appeared to have succeeded, Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide, noted in his diary, “In typical British sporting fashion, Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory has written General Ike to admit that he was wrong about the airborne operation. The Marshal frankly said that it is sometimes difficult in this life to admit that one was wrong, but he has never had a greater pleasure than in doing so on this occasion. He congratulated General Ike on the wisdom of his command decision. You simply can’t stay mad at people like this.”7
Once the gliders deposited their human cargo in Normandy, the pilots and co-pilots were under orders to make their way to Utah Beach, where transports would take them back to England in the event their services were needed again. After the ordeal they had just gone through, it was a safe bet that not many of them wanted to repeat their experiences any time soon.8
FORTUNATELY, DURING THE night of 6–7 June, more lost members of Tom Shanley’s 2nd Battalion, 508/82nd—including from one-third to one-half of the pathfinders who had been dropped at DZ “N”—showed up at Hill 30, outside Caponnet; some showed up with mortars and machine guns, others with just rifles and an odd grenade or two. Nevertheless, the defenses of the little tree-covered island in the middle of the German Seventh Army sea continued to strengthen. Shanley’s radio stopped working, however, and he lost contact with higher headquarters. That morning, though, his SCR-300 unexpectedly came to life and he learned that an American force of unknown size had taken and was holding the western end of the causeway at nearby Chef-du-Pont.9
That morning the Germans hit Shanley’s battalion with infantry probes, mortars, artillery, and tank fire. Ken Merritt, a sergeant in HQ, 1st Battalion, 508th PIR, had about seventeen men and was pinned down by a German machine gun. Ordered by a lieutenant to take two men and knock out the enemy gun, Merritt and the two others—Wilbur James and “Pappy” Fairbanks—crawled to within a hundred yards of the German position and discovered that it was actually two guns: an MG-34 and an MG-42. Merritt said, “We had a short conference and Fairbanks suggested that two of us lay down a base of fire while the other trooper with Gammon grenades crawled around the machine-gun nests to get close enough to use them. Anyone familiar with the [two-pound] Gammon grenade knows that you can’t throw one very far—maybe fifty feet at most. Wilbur James was the one who crawled on his belly for over a hundred yards and knocked out both machine-gun nests.”10
At one point during the battalion’s stay at Hill 30, some Germans were captured and turned over to a paratrooper/interpreter who spoke German—a Jew who had escaped Germany in 1939. Chet Graham, F/508/82nd, recalled, “The interrogator asked for a particular prisoner and to be left alone. The PW later showed up with a broken nose and black eyes. Our interrogator explained that this PW used to chase and beat him in Munich when he was a little boy. The beating was something the German had coming.”11
MEANWHILE, ON 7 June, Sainte-Mère-Église was still in 82nd Division hands, but no one knew how long the Yanks could hold if the Germans decided to attack in force. Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 505th was supposed to have moved up to Neuville-au-Plain to prevent the enemy from attacking from the north, but a German assault from the south compelled Ridgway to order the bulk of 2nd Battalion to remain in Sainte-Mère-Église and reinforce Krause’s 3rd Battalion there. Vandervoort decided on his own, however, to send a reinforced platoon to Neuville-au-Plain to forestall any attack from that direction. General Gavin later called Vandervoort’s move “one of the best tactical decisions in the battle of Normandy,” for it was there that the Germans were gathering for a panzer-and-infantry assault.12
First Lieutenant Turner B. Turnbull III, a half-Cherokee, took forty-four men up the N-13 highway to Neuville-au-Plain, pushed out the German defenders, and then prepared for the counterattack. Vandervoort, in a jeep towing a 57mm gun, joined him. Receiving word from a French-man that a group of paratroopers were approaching from the north with a captured self-propelled gun and a large number of German POWs, Turnbull and his colonel watched and waited. Before long, the aforementioned group was seen coming down the road.
It was a trick. The “POWs” turned out to be well-armed Germans, and the “paratroopers” were either Germans in American uniforms that had been stripped from the dead or were real Americans who had been captured by the Germans. At any rate, the SP gun, and more behind it, began firing at Turnbill’s positions in Neuville-au-Plain, along with mortars and small arms. Vandervoort told Turnbull to delay the enemy for as long as possible, then withdraw back to Sainte-Mère-Église; the colonel then departed to alert the troops in Sainte-Mère-Église that the enemy was coming.13
Turnbull’s men fought off the assault by the 1058th Infantry Regiment, reinforced, 91st Luftlande Division. The battle lasted all day, with Turnbull’s outnumbered force giving as good as it got. At one point a soldier, Private John Atchley, manning a 57mm gun he had never fired before, knocked out a German SP gun, but the enemy was flanking the Americans on both sides.14 Sergeant Otis Sampson, mortar squad leader located south of Neuville, personally dropped rounds on the enemy threatening Turnbull’s platoon. His aim was on target and his platoon leader, Lieutenant Ted Peterson, called Sampson, “the greatest and most accurate mortar sergeant in the business.”15
At about 1700 hours the time to withdraw—given the fact that Turn-bull had only sixteen effectives out of his original number—had come. But it was too late for him. Lieutenant James J. Coyle, a platoon leader in E/505, recalled, “We engaged the enemy and prevented him from going any further in his plan of encirclement. We were able to hold them even though we were outnumbered, while Turnbull got his surviving men out of Neuville-au-Plain and on the way back to Sainte-Mère-Église.”16
Turnbull never made it. Private first class Stanley Kotlarz remembered a terrible shelling during the pull-back: “I got hit in the wrist and in the arm. A guy by the name of Brown got hit in the head. And Lieutenant Turnbull, it sheered the top of his head right off. When [the shell] hit, all of us seemed to go up in the air. When I got up, I saw Brown crawling away, staggering. Turnbull was lying there with his brains peeling out of his head.”17
The 82nd retook Neuville-au-Plain the following day with the help of armor that had landed at Utah Beach. Turnbull’s delaying action had given the 505th time to consolidate its position and likely saved the men in Sainte-Mère-Église. Turnbull was recommended for a posthumous DSC but received the Silver Star.18
During this time, the British and Canadians were just as heavily engaged seventy miles to the east.