IF ONE COULD have had an elevated view of the entire Normandy invasion area from 6–12 June, it would have resembled some giant, sixty-mile-long version of a Hollywood Western brawl, with Germans, Americans, British, and Canadian soldiers playing the roles of cowboy stuntmen duking it out in a saloon—some combatants bashing each other over the head with whiskey bottles, some throwing their opponents through windows, smashing them across the back with chairs, or sending them tumbling down a staircase or through a balcony railing to crash down upon the melée below.
But what was taking place in Normandy—scattered conglomerations of paratroopers simultaneously fighting a series of unrelated skirmishes in Bénouville, Varaville, Troarn, Bréville, Le Mesnil, the Merville battery, Sainte-Mère-Église, Sainte Marie-du-Mont, La Fière, and scores of other locations while seaborne divisions were wading ashore and warships and airplanes were bombarding enemy positions—was no faux fight for the entertainment of an audience. It was a very real and desperate struggle to gain a foothold on a continent that had, for nearly five years, been ruled by one of the most ruthless and criminal regimes of all time—Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Certainly the battles for Carentan and Graignes exemplified this kind of free-swinging, no-holds-barred type of fighting that was taking place all across Normandy.
IT STARTED BADLY. In the early, chaotic hours of D-Day, twelve C-47s misdropped their sticks of paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 507th PIR, 82nd Airborne, in the vicinity of Graignes* and Tribehou—south of Carentan and nearly ten miles from their intended DZ “N” near Am-fréville West and the La Fière Bridge. Although a number of the troops drowned in the swamps, the survivors pulled themselves together, took up positions in and around Graignes’ 12th century stone church and cemetery, and tried to figure out where they were and what to do next.
As the highest-ranking officer present, Major Charles D. Johnston took command of the group and set up his command post in the boys’ school. Other officers present included the battalion S-3 Captain Leroy D. Brummitt, Captain Richard H. Chapman, Lieutenants Elmer F. Hoff-man and Earcle R. “Pip” Reed, and the battalion surgeon Captain Abraham Sophian, Jr. They had a relatively formidable arsenal with them—besides rifles, pistols, carbines, and sub-machine guns, the group was also well armed with two 81mm mortars and five M1919A4 .30-caliber machine guns.
Although Brummitt suggested that the force should head for its assigned objective, Johnston decided that it was too dangerous to try moving through the swampy, unfamiliar, enemy-controlled terrain. Thus, they would make a stand at Graignes and try to interdict any German units that might pass their way. Luckily the Germans were initially unaware of the paratroopers’ presence, which gave Johnston time to establish a strong defense.
Many of the supply bundles—filled with ammunition and crewserved weapons—that had been dropped with the paratroopers ended up in the swampy marches around Graignes. This vital equipment would have been lost had not a couple of local residents rowed their boat into the swamp to retrieve the bundles and hide them in a barn for the paratroopers’ use.
As the day wore on, more and more lost Americans wandered into the town, including about twenty men from the 501st PIR. By the end of the day, some twelve officers and 170 enlisted men were in Graignes—virtually an entire infantry company. As more Yanks arrived, Johnston assigned roles to them—riflemen, BAR teams, and machine gunners circled the town; the two mortars were set up in a field south of the cemetery; spotters were in the bell tower of the church (where an aid station was established); and telephone wires were strung to all the positions. Anti-tank mines were laid on each road leading into the village and fire teams were positioned to guard every likely approach. It began to look like the climactic village battle scene in Saving Private Ryan. Johnston felt that his team was well prepared to hold off any enemy force that might try to evict them.
The townspeople saw their village being turned into a fortified combat zone, but despite knowing that the Germans would likely exact retribution against them if they helped the Americans, they did so anyway. The mayor, Alphonse Voydie, met with Johnston and they discussed the situation. Voydie then called a meeting of all the heads of household in the village and requested that they provide as much assistance and cooperation to their American liberators as possible, even though by so doing their lives would be in danger. The owner of the local grocery store and café, Mme. Germaine Boursier, provided one example of this assistance: she traveled to nearby villages to collect food for the soldiers, which she and other women of the town then prepared.
While the unexpected seizure of Graignes was thus far without incident, in the coming days it would turn out to be one of Operation Overlord’s toughest, most tragic battles. In fact, Graignes would become known as the “Alamo of the Swamps.”1
FIVE-AND-A-HALF miles down the highway that leads from Sainte-Mère-Église to Carentan lies the little town of Saint-Côme-du-Mont, which on D-Day was held by elements of the 1058th Regiment and von der Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment. On 7 June Colonel Robert Sink’s 506th PIR arrived at the outskirts, studied the scene, tried penetrating, and got repulsed. To get to the all-important city of Carentan, Sink’s American paratroopers would have to take Saint-Côme-du-Mont away from the Germans.
Meeting that night with his battalion commanders, Sink decided to renew the attack before dawn the next day. The 506th’s 1st and 2nd Battalions would drive straight into town while Ray C. Allen’s 3rd Battalion of the 327th GIR (which had arrived by sea), Lieutenant Colonel Julian Ewell’s 3rd Battalion of Jumpy Johnson’s 501st PIR, the 70th Tank Battalion (Light), and the independent 65th Armored Field Artillery Battalion would act in support.
The plan called for an opening artillery barrage on the town. This would be followed by the 506th’s 1st and 2nd Battalions hitting the town while Ewell’s battalion and the 70th Tank Battalion moved from their present location at Les Droueries and cut the main highway south of Saint-Côme-du-Mont to prevent the Germans from escaping. Allen’s battalion of glider infantrymen would skirt the east side of the town, proceed down the highway, and blow the bridges on the raised causeway that led to Carentan to keep the Germans from attacking them.2
June 8 dawned rainy and misty. Receiving the brunt of the American artillery and infantry assault in Saint-Côme-du-Mont was the 3rd Battalion, 1058th Regiment, and the 3rd Battalion, 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment. A short distance south of town, at the intersection of the main highway with the road to Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, stands a two-and-a-half-story house with distinctive red-and-white stonework around the door and windows. On 8 June the house was serving as an aid station and von der Heydte’s headquarters, and as such, was heavily defended. Cautiously coming from the beachhead to this intersection was a line of eight Stuart tanks of the 70th Tank Battalion with Minnesotan First Lieutenant Walter T. Anderson in the lead. As he reached the intersection, an anti-tank weapon was fired, disabling the tank and killing Anderson. For several days Anderson’s body remained hanging from the turret as fighting swirled around the intersection. The paratroopers thereafter referred to the crossroads as “Dead Man’s Corner.”3
Staff Sergeant Raymond Geddes, Jr. was a radioman with G/501/101. He moved into the back yard of the building at Dead Man’s Corner, which was now doubling as Lieutenant Colonel Julian Ewell’s command post as well as an aid station still being manned by Germans. Geddes was directed to take over for Ewell’s radio operator, who had been wounded. Geddes said, “Colonel Ewell had me calling in artillery fire on nearby German positions when a round landed in the yard and I was struck in the left eye by a piece of shrapnel. It felt like I had been slapped. There were no American medics around. The Germans had a big red cross on the roof, so I went inside to see if I could get some help. A German medic sat me down and looked at my eye. After a few seconds he said, ‘Nicht kaput.’ He put some powder on the wound and left. Then, to my amazement, someone started talking to me in English. It was a German doctor from their 6th Parachute Regiment. I commented on his excellent English and he said, ‘I should, I got my medical degree in England.’ As he moved on to help his wounded German soldiers, I noticed that he had left his hat next to me. I walked out with it—and still have it today.”4
Back in Saint-Côme-du-Mont, the German defenders had endured the pummeling for several hours and then abandoned the town, heading west across open fields where Ewell’s battalion engaged them before they finally broke contact and fled. The Americans finally controlled Saint-Côme-du-Mont, and Carentan was only two miles away. Once Carentan fell, the Allied beachhead and airhead at the base of the Cotentin could be joined with the beachheads and airheads all the way to east of the Orne. Easier said than done.
THE CITY OF Carentan had a wartime population of approximately 4,000 residents.
Because of its strategic location deep in the “Baie des Veys”—where the Douve and Taute Rivers empty into the English Channel—and the fact that five highways and a railroad run through it, the Allies made the capture of Carentan one of the highest priorities. Seizing it would be a sole 101st operation.5
Unlike the 101st’s other battles for the various towns in the Cotentin that devolved into haphazard affairs—no one could have anticipated the extent of the misdrops and the helter-skelter nature of the fighting—the plan for taking Carentan had been carefully worked out in England many weeks earlier. It had been decided then that the attack would be launched from Brévands, two-and-a-half miles northeast of Carentan, across the river flats. The 502nd and 506th would attack from the northeast while the 327th would hit Carentan from the east; the 501st would be in reserve. But what actually transpired, like most of what took place in Normandy, did not resemble pre-invasion plans.
On 9 June, Colonel Robert Sink, commanding the 506th PIR, 101st, decided to see for himself what the situation in Carentan was; it nearly cost him his life. Leading a patrol across the causeway into the city, Sink and his men were stopped by a fusillade of fire and pulled back. Faced with this concerted defense, VII Corps drew up a new plan that would have Colonel Joe Harper’s 327th GIR cross the Douve near Brévands and clear the enemy from the area between Carentan and Isigny, then link up with V Corps, streaming ashore at Omaha Beach, near the highway bridge over the Vire. The 327th would then attack Carentan from the east while the rest of the 101st, minus Ewell’s 3rd Battalion, 502nd PIR (which would cross the Douve and come to the rescue of Shanley’s men at Hill 30 on 12 June), would strike Carentan from the west. Luckily, the 327th was one of the first airborne/glider units to link up with one of the seaborne forces.6
The U.S. Army’s official history of the Normandy Campaign says:
In the early morning hours of 10 June all three battalions of the 327th Glider Infantry were across the Douve near Brévands. One company, reconnoitering to Auville-sur-le Vey, met the 29th Reconnaissance Troop and Company K of the 175th Infantry. The 175th Infantry (29th Division) had followed up the capture of Isigny by sending Company K to take the Vire bridge at Auville-sur-le Vey while the main body of the regiment moved toward objectives in the Lison-la Fotelaie area to the south. The bridge was found to have been destroyed and the company, reinforced with the reconnaissance troop and a platoon of tanks, had fought most of the day of 9 June to force a crossing. They forded the river late in the afternoon, seized Auville-sur-le Vey, and held it during the night while engineers built the bridge behind them. Contact with the airborne unit the next day was only the beginning of the link between the corps.7
Meanwhile, Michaelis’ 502nd PIR was closing in on Carentan from the west. One of the 502nd troopers, Kenneth Cordry, Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, remembered the overwhelming stench of death—the rotting carcasses of dead cows and humans. He also remembered his unit’s effort to reach Carentan: “Our orders were to move down the causeway over several small bridges into the city. The causeway was a raised roadway with marshland on either side. In the marshes were small raised areas that concealed German machine-gun nests zeroed in on the causeway. At the Carentan end of the road were German 88 guns which controlled movement on the causeway and prohibited any vehicle movement. While in this position, two German dive bombers came down and bombed us, one strafing the riverbank where I was and the other attacking the troops lying on the road. Our position along the riverbanks was not hit as hard as those who were on the causeway.”
Once darkness fell, Cordry was sent out on litter-bearing details to pick up the wounded. “Most had been hit in the back and buttocks and were semi-conscious as we packed them back to the aid station,” he said. “Some we carried as far as a quarter mile. We continued to carry wounded until dawn; I was fired on continually all morning and there is no explanation why I wasn’t hit. After several hours, I decided to get up and make a dash up onto the causeway and across a plank bridge. As I made a crouching dash across the bridge, I found the Germans didn’t hesitate in firing an 88 artillery shell at a single individual; I could feel the air turbulence of the shell as it passed under my arm. I slid down to the marsh on the other side and found no more cover than where I’d been, but much less enemy fire.”
All the firing abruptly ceased at noon and Cordry saw a vehicle approaching with a white flag displayed and German and American wounded piled onboard. “Several of our wounded were limping back to the lines,” he noted. “After a few minutes, the firing resumed with as much intensity as it had all morning. It continued until darkness began to close in.”
A brief cease-fire took place so that Major Douglas Davidson, a regimental surgeon, could go forward, meet with von der Heydte in Carentan, and make a request that both sides be allowed to retrieve their wounded. The German commander rejected the request and sent David-son back to the American lines. He had no sooner reached the area of a farmhouse when von der Heydte underscored his rejection with an intense mortar and artillery bombardment, followed by an infantry assault.8
THE 101st’s ATTEMPTS to push its way into Carentan were stalled by the fanatical defense put up for days by elements of the 6th Fall schirmjäger and 1058th Regiments. As Kenneth Cordry had already discovered, men trying to advance on or beside the causeway—which became known as Purple Heart Lane—were easily picked off, and the marshes and open fields offered neither cover nor concealment. The Germans had installed a “Belgian Gate” on the last bridge before the city—a steel obstacle that was mostly used to stop the landing craft on the invasion beaches. It filled the width of the roadway and soldiers could only squeeze by it one at a time—which made them ideal targets for German snipers.
Much of the fire near this obstacle seemed to be coming from a large farmhouse on an elevated piece of ground just west of the causeway. Despite repeated shelling by American artillery, the sturdy building, owned by the Ingouf family, still stood. At one point early on the morning of 11 June, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole knew there was only one way to eliminate this impediment to his battalion’s advance—a bayonet charge across a large, open field. Passing the word to the nearest company, Cole and his executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Stopka, had everyone fix bayonets. Then, upon his order to charge, the men got up and dashed across the field toward the farmhouse. Some hesitated, but Cole, armed with only his pistol, urged everyone on.9
Dalton Einhorn noted, “As men ran towards the farmhouse, Private Edward Sowder of I Company was hit in the head…. Before he died, he passed his bayoneted rifle to Cole who continued ahead. Some controversy exists about whether Sowder actually passed his M-1 Garand to Cole or whether Cole picked up the weapon from the falling man, but in either case it is documented that Cole ran forward with the private’s rifle.”10
One of the charging soldiers, Walter Lucasavage of I/506/101st, claimed that he and Harry Westerberg “were in the first [American] bayonet attack of World War II. Many men lost their lives in that attack. Harry was wounded and I ended up in a large ditch with German machine guns firing over me.”11
Another of the charging paratroopers, Donald Burgett, recalled that the men around him “were being killed and wounded in large numbers, some of them horribly maimed, with limbs and parts of their bodies being shredded or shot away. I could feel the muzzle blasts of the men behind me as they fired from the hip. I was nearly as concerned about getting shot in the back by a fellow trooper as I was about the Germans in front. Mortar shells blanketed the field. At least six machine guns were cross firing on us and that terrible 88 was shredding everything in sight….
“We were being annihilated, our ranks disintegrating as we ran…. A trooper in front of and to the right of me was hit in the chest by an 88 shell. His body disappeared from the waist up….”12
The bayonet charge was a foolhardy, unbelievably courageous act—like something out of Waterloo or Gettysburg—but somehow, incredibly, it worked. Although Cole’s men discovered that the Ingouf farmhouse was not occupied, a nearby hedgerow was, and the paratroopers overran the position, killing the Germans there with grenades and bayonets and bare hands.
His battalion was exhausted, not to mention depleted, so Cole radioed back to regiment to have Lieutenant Colonel Pat Cassidy’s 1st Battalion come forward and continue the attack. But the enemy fire was still intense and 1st Battalion made it only as far as Cole’s position in the hedgerow; the two hardhit battalions spent the rest of the day and night there, holding off repeated counterattacks.*13
ON 10 JUNE, while the 101st was closing in on Carentan, the three days of relative quiet in Graignes were about to come to a crashing end. The Germans had made some probes toward the town, and the resulting skirmishes convinced the Germans that Americans were indeed there in force and were determined to stay. To cut one of the access roads into Graignes, Major Johnston sent a demolition party out to destroy the bridge across the Canal de Vire to the north when, from the direction of Le Port des Planques, came a formidable detachment of enemy troops. One man with a BAR on the north side of the bridge, Sergeant Frank Costa, held off the Germans while the Americans finished preparing the bridge for destruction. The sappers scrambled off the road and attached wires leading from the charges to the detonator just as Costa dashed across the bridge to safety. Once the lead element of the German column stepped onto the bridge, a sapper cranked the key, sending the bridge and the troops up in a huge fiery blast and causing the rest of the column to fall back—but only a short distance. They would soon exact revenge for their fallen Kamaraden.
Although their northern route had just been severed, the Germans continued to probe the other avenues into Graignes. Later that afternoon, another enemy patrol was stopped; that night the Germans again tried finding a way into the village but without success. It was becoming clear to them that it would take a major assault to capture the town before the forces that landed at Utah Beach could drive that far inland.
On Sunday, 11 June, all was quiet around Graignes, giving the false impression that the Germans had given up trying to enter. During this window of inactivity, Major Johnston allowed the troops who wanted to attend Father Albert Leblastier’s Mass to do so. About this time, as paratroopers were burying German soldiers who had been killed in a probe the night before, the perimeter came under heavy small-arms fire. Going to investigate, Captain Brummitt saw a large enemy force gathering to the south—elements of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen—preparing to attack.
Meanwhile, a woman dashed into the church, interrupting the service with the news that the Germans had advanced to within 200 yards of the church. Panicked, the parishioners bolted from the chapel, only to be driven back inside when the Germans opened fire on them. One of the parishioners, a terrified teenaged girl named Odette Rigault, who lived in nearby Le Port Saint Pierre, took cover behind the stone altar with her twelve-year-old sister Marthe. “If the Germans had gotten into the church, we would have all been shot to death,” Odette said.
Some of the parishioners managed to flee the church and the town, only to be captured and put to work by the Germans to dig graves for their comrades who had been killed during the previous days’ probing attacks.
A small enemy force then managed to penetrate into the center of Graignes and was engaged by the Americans; a ten-minute gun battle ensued before the attackers pulled back. Johnston knew that it was only a matter of time before the Germans returned in force.
The next assault began at about 1400 hours with an intense mortar barrage that damaged or destroyed much of the town, followed by infantry probes against various points around town. The attackers were sent fleeing when the Americans replied with accurate mortar and auto-matic-weapons fire. Still, the Germans did not give up. The perimeter defenses again came under assault and American casualties began to mount. Captain Sophian, the battalion surgeon, turned the church into an aid station, and some of the townspeople acted as nurses. Father Leblastier, along with a visiting priest, Father R. P. Louis Lebarbanchon, calmly provided spiritual comfort to the wounded men while the fighting swirled around them.
After this second attempt to dislodge his men, Johnston heard the sound of heavy vehicles—a sound that meant the Germans were bringing up reinforcements and maybe armor. The major told the townsfolk who had spent all day in the church to return to their homes and take cover; he then shrank his defensive perimeter around the town and distributed the last of the ammunition. Through binoculars, Lieutenant “Pip” Reed saw the Germans setting up two artillery pieces, probably the 10.5cm LeFH 18 howitzers. Once the enemy started shelling Graignes, no one would be safe.
No sooner had the civilians left the church than the howitzers opened up, their shells crashing into the town’s stone buildings and exploding around the church and Johnston’s CP at the school. Men ducked for cover as shell splinters and pieces of stone were hurled about the streets. One round hit the school, instantly killing Major Johnston and a lieutenant named Maxwell.
Pip Reed knew that Lieutenant Elmer Farnham and an enlisted man were up in the church’s bell tower spotting for the mortars and machine guns—and was horrified to see the belfry take a direct hit from one of the howitzers. With the observation team knocked out and Major Johnston dead, the various clusters of paratroopers around town were leaderless and without mortar support. Each position became its own battleground and the outgunned and overmatched paratroops, low on ammunition, fought off the advancing enemy as best they could, but it was obvious they could not hold out much longer. As evening descended upon Graignes, Captain Brummitt, now the ranking officer, ordered the men to slip out of the village, evade capture, and try to make for Sainte-Mère-Église or Carentan. Amazingly, most of the defenders managed to do just that.
Brummitt also ordered Captain Sophian to leave but the surgeon declined. Perhaps thinking that the Germans would take him and the wounded prisoners of war, he told Brummitt that he couldn’t go; his place was with the injured men. Brummitt understood, wished him luck, and departed.
Things then took a tragic turn for the nineteen wounded in the church who were left in Sophian’s care. Angered by the high casualties the Americans had inflicted on them, the men of Generalmajor der Waf-fen-SS Werner Ostendorff’s 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers herded Sophian and ten walking-wounded paratroopers outside, marched them to a pond behind Mme. Boursier’s grocery store and café, bayoneted them, and threw their bodies into the water. The other nine wounded men were marched four kilometers south to a field near the village of Le Mesnil Angot and ordered to dig a pit. When they were done, each man was shot at point-blank range and tossed into the common grave.
The agony was not over. Back in Graignes, the furious Germans rounded up the civilians whom they suspected of having aided the Americans. The first civilians they went after were the two priests, Fathers Leblastier and Lebarbanchon, dragging them out of the rectory and executing both of them. The body of one of them was thrown into the pond with the other American corpses. Forty-four other villagers were rounded up and ordered to disclose the identities of everyone who had assisted the paratroopers. The villagers played dumb and said nothing. The Germans marched them south to the village of Le-Haut-Vernay, where they were forced to carry wounded German soldiers and bury the dead. Inexplicably, the lives of these forty-four civilians were spared.*14
BACK ALONG THE Douve canal, north of Carentan, the fighting was still intense. Jake McNiece noted that the American troops who had landed at Utah Beach had pushed the German defenders south toward Carentan and right towards his group. He said that on the afternoon of the fifth day (11 June) they had fallen back to the edge of the flooded area near the bridge that was intercut with submerged ditches. “Every time they would show themselves,” McNiece said, “we shot at them. When they realized [how small our force was] they sent an officer and a sergeant in there under a white flag and demanded that we surrender. They knew there was not very many of us in there.”
McNiece’s group included a lieutenant who had joined them a few days earlier. The lieutenant said to the German envoys, “What in the hell do you mean—us surrender? You’ve got to surrender to us. If you stay where you are, those Yankees coming from the beachhead will eat you up. You’ve retreated up to here already. If you come out in that water, we will kill you like a bunch of ducks. If you would all like to surrender intact, stack your rifles and all your weapons over there and just put up a white flag and surrender to them boys coming in.”
McNiece recalled that the German officer became haughty, saying, “Why, we would not surrender to thirty or forty people. I’ve got a whole battalion.” The American lieutenant—not knowing when or if any seaborne forces would be coming his way—was not about to take any prisoners, especially if the enemy force was of battalion size. So he ordered the officer and sergeant once more to surrender. They refused, turned away, and waded back across the marsh to their men. McNiece felt an attack was brewing.
The lieutenant said to McNiece, “You let them come out in the water and cross the first ditch. When they get halfway to the second ditch, I will blow this whistle and we will all open up. Then you pick out the thickest bunch and shoot into them. They will not have anywhere to go and nothing to get into.”
Within a few minutes, the Germans, several hundred strong, rose up and began charging at the Americans, firing as they came. “We did not fire a shot until they got right in between those two ditches,” said Mc-Niece. “Then we went to work on those bastards. We cut them down by the hundreds with the first salvo, then we just picked them off one by one. All they could do was get down in that water that was anywhere from calf to knee deep.” It was a mass slaughter. “We killed off nearly the whole bunch.”15
THE EFFORT TO capture Carentan had begun on 9 June 1944, and it was now three days later with no end in sight. One battalion of von der Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger was in the city, but the colonel knew they could not hold out by themselves, and so he called for reinforcements. The last great battle of Operation Overlord was about to take place.
Lieutenant Buck Compton, E/506/101st, noted Carentan’s importance: “Basically, controlling Carentan was the key to controlling the important road network…. Our boys from behind us shelled the bejesus out of the town with artillery. The shelling lasted a couple of days, maybe more.”16
Sergeant Hugh Nibley, Order of Battle Team, Headquarters, 101st Airborne, was one of the first Americans actually to enter Carentan—by accident. He said that on 12 June, “Because we were in Intelligence, we were supposed to set up a camp in the town of Carentan on the other side of the road. Officers weren’t allowed to drive, even in battle, so Major Sommerfield told me I had to drive him through Carentan and set up the camp. But Carentan hadn’t been taken yet. Right after the bridge was taken we drove our jeep over it into Carentan. I was driving—it was the first jeep to go in there—and [the Germans] started shooting from windows all around. It was just electric—the bullets flying, just zipping around there; they sounded like bees buzzing. One of the windows they were shooting from was the French hospital full of nuns.” Nibley made a sharp U-turn and quickly retreated.17
AFTER A FEW days of watching Carentan shuddering under a deluge of artillery and air strikes, at dawn on 12 June Sink’s 506th PIR received orders to enter the city—despite the knowledge that the place was still crawling with Germans. Don Malarkey of E Company noted that one or two German soldiers at the town’s edge suddenly stepped out into plain view and hosed down the roadway with machine-gun fire. Then mortar and tank rounds were unleashed on the attackers. Taking cover in a hedge row, Malarkey marveled at the intensity of the enemy response. “They virtually stripped the hedgerow and we clung to the earth, cussing and praying in equal measure. The enemy fire split our platoon; the Germans were in perfect position to wipe out not only our platoon, but the entire company. We scrambled to the ditches along the road, next to the hedgerows, so panicked we were all but digging foxholes with our fingers. You had the feeling if you popped your head up, it’d soon be gone. It was almost as if the Germans were mowing down that entire hedgerow to get to us. It was the heaviest fire I would ever experience in war. Period.”
Incredibly, during this intense tornado of steel and lead, Winters stood up and shouted, “Move out!” Nobody moved. Again he repeated his orders and again no one moved. He began going from man to man, booting them in the ass and shouting at them to move forward. Some-how, with Winters setting the example, his men found the courage to get up and advance.
Somebody threw a grenade into the machine-gun nest, knocking it out, and the E Company men rushed forward and grabbed whatever cover they could in the rubble of the intersection. Although hit in the lower leg, Winters never faltered and kept urging his men forward.
At the height of the battle, Father John Maloney, a Catholic chaplain accompanying E Company, knelt by dying soldiers in the roadway and administered last rites, bullets hitting all around him. Miraculously, Chaplain Maloney was not hit and would later be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery under fire. German reinforcements, coming up from the south, tried to drive the Americans back. “We rained down everything we had on the Germans; they did the same to us,” said Malarkey. “At some point, E Company was the only force holding the line; units on either side had fallen back under fire, leaving us out there like sitting ducks.”18
The Germans refused to allow Carentan to be taken cheaply, so they invested considerable human capital to hold onto it. On 13 June, elements of the 37th and 38th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiments, and the 17th SS Panzer Battalion with heavy, self-propelled guns—all from the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division—moved up from Thouars, southwest of the city, to counterattack the Americans and reinforce von der Heydte’s paratroopers.
The attack slammed into the 506th’s positions and drove to within about a half mile from the outskirts of town. The 2nd Battalion, 502nd PIR, moved down to the 506th’s right flank and helped to regain some of the lost ground. Then, the 501st arrived at Carentan. But so serious was the attack to the junction of the V and VII Corps beachheads that First Army decided to send armor to repel it. It was not until this armor from the 2nd Armored Division had arrived that the German threat was eliminated and the Carentan link between the two corps firmly secured. Avoiding annihilation, von der Heydte’s men, after suffering 500 casualties, slipped away to fight another day.19
With the battle for Carentan ended, Dick Winters’ E Company was one of the units that moved cautiously through the city, which, by that time, was little more than piles of rubble with the mangled bodies of dead German soldiers lying everywhere. As Buck Compton put it, “Carentan was like a ghost town, just a vacant city…. When we walked through, we didn’t have to fire a shot. It was already slaughter alley…. I’m not sure, but I’d estimate we saw a dead body every ten feet or less.”20
Dick Winters reflected on the battle of Carentan. He wrote, “Without a doubt the toughest fight of the war was the German counterattack on Carentan on June 13, 1944. On this day the regiment was pushed back and almost overrun by the enemy…. [Easy Company] had ten casualties on June 12 in the attack on Carentan and another nine on June 13 in the defense of Carentan. All told, our ranks had been reduced 47 percent, having incurred sixty-five casualties, either killed, wounded, or sick since D-Day…. That we held our position when the other companies ran served as a tribute to the fighting spirit of the American paratrooper.”21
THERE WAS STILL time for one more tragedy in Normandy. On Tuesday, 13 June, the Germans burned the village of Graignes to the ground. They poured gasoline over the bodies of the two priests and the two women shot who had worked at the rectory, then set them on fire. The ensuing blaze was allowed to burn out of control, destroying sixty-six homes, the boys’ school, Mme. Boursier’s café, and the church.* Of the more than 200 buildings in Graignes that stood before the battle, some 159 were damaged, either as a result of that fire or the fighting. Only two houses survived unscathed.
After hiding out in farm buildings (including a barn owned by the parents of the Rigault sisters) on their escape route, Captain Brummitt and his men managed to reach friendly lines on 13 June.
Oddly enough, the battle of Graignes is seldom mentioned in books and documentaries about the Normandy Campaign. The Army’s official history of the war fails to include an account, and such esteemed authors as S.L.A. Marshall (Night Drop) or Stephen Ambrose (D-Day: June 6 1944) did not include it in their works. Only a handful of historians have taken note of it. As one of them, Martin K. A. Morgan, wrote in Down to Earth: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy, the battle for Graignes was “one of the most dramatic yet tragic stories of indomitable human courage and sacrifice that would come out of the battle for Normandy.”22