Unlike the paratroopers’ planes the gliders came in from the Channel and approached the peninsula from the east. They were only seconds past the coast when they saw the lights of the landing zone at Hiesville, four miles from Ste.-Mère-Église. One by one the three-hundred-yard-long nylon tow ropes parted and the gliders came soughing down. Natalle’s glider oveshot the zone and crashed into a field studded with “Rommel’s asparagus”—lines of heavy posts embedded in the ground as antiglider obstacles. Sitting in a jeep inside the glider, Natalle gazed out through one of the small windows and watched with horrified fascination as the wings sheared off and the posts whizzed past. Then there was a ripping sound and the glider broke in two—directly behind the jeep in which Natalle was sitting. “It made it very easy to get out,” he recalls.
A short distance away lay the wreckage of glider No. 1. Skidding down a sloping pasture, its brakes unable to halt its one-hundred-mile-an-hour rush, it had smashed headlong into a hedgerow. Natalle found the pilot, who had been hurled from the cockpit, lying in the hedgerow with both legs broken. General Pratt had been killed instantly, crushed by the crumpled framework of the cockpit. He was the first general officer on either side to be killed on D Day.
Pratt was one of the few casualities in the 101st landings. Almost all of the division’s gliders came down on or close to the field at Hiesville. Although most of them were totally wrecked, their equipment arrived largely intact. It was a remarkable achievement. Few of the pilots had made more than three or four practice landings and these had all been in daylight.*
Although the 101st was lucky, the 82nd was not. The inexperience of the pilots produced near-disaster in the 82nd’s fifty-glider train. Fewer than half their formations found the right landing zone northwest of Ste.-Mère-Église; the remainder plowed into hedgerows and buildings, dove into rivers or came down in the marshes of the Merderet. Equipment and vehicles so urgently needed were strewn everywhere and casualities were high. Eighteen pilots alone were killed within the first few minutes. One glider loaded with troops sailed directly over the head of Captain Robert Piper, the 505th Regiment’s adjutant and, to his horror, “careened off the chimney of a house, dropped into the backyard, cartwheeled across the ground and smashed into a thick stone wall. There was not even a moan from the wreckage.”
For the hard-pressed 82nd, the wide dispersion of the glider train was calamitous. It would take hours to salvage and collect the few guns and supplies that had arrived safely. In the meantime, troopers would have to fight on with the weapons they had carried with them. But this, after all, was standard operating procedure for paratroopers: They fought with what they had until relieved.
Now the 82nd men holding the rear of the airhead—the bridges over the Douve and the Merderet—were in position and already encountering the Germans’ first probings. These paratroopers had no vehicles, no antitank guns, few bazookas, machine guns or mortars. Worse, they had no communications. They did not know what was happening around them, what positions were being held, what objectives had been taken. It was the same with the men of the 101st, except that the fortunes of war had given them most of their equipment. The soldiers of both divisions were still scattered and isolated, but little groups were fighting toward the principal objectives—and strongholds were beginning to fall.
In Ste.-Mère-Église, as the stunned townspeople watched from behind their shuttered windows, paratroopers of the 82nd’s 505th Regiment slipped cautiously through the empty streets. The church bell was silent now. On the steeple Private John Steele’s empty parachute hung limp, and every now and then the glowing embers of M. Hairon’s villa erupted, briefly outlining the trees in the square. Occasionally a sniper’s bullet whined angrily into the night, but that was the only sound; everywhere there was an uneasy silence.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause, leading the attack, had expected to fight hard for Ste.-Mère-Église, but apart from a few snipers it appeared that the German garrison had pulled out. Krause’s men swiftly took advantage of the situation: They occupied buildings, set up road blocks and machine-gun posts, cut telephone cables and wires. Other squads continued the slow sweep through the town, moving like shadows from hedge to hedge and doorway to doorway, all converging on the town’s center, the Place de I’Église.
Passing around the back of the church, Private First Class William Tucker reached the square and set up his machine gun behind a tree. Then as he looked out on the moonlit square he saw a parachute and, lying next to him, a dead German. On the far side were the crumpled, sprawled shapes of other bodies. As Tucker sat there in the semi-darkness trying to figure out what had happened, he began to feel that he was not alone—that somebody was standing behind him. Grabbing the cumbersome machine gun, he whirled around. His eyes came level with a pair of boots slowly swaying back and forth. Tucker hastily stepped back. A dead paratrooper was hanging in the tree looking down at him.
Now other paratroopers came into the square and suddenly they, too, saw the bodies hanging in the trees. Lieutenant Gus Sanders remembers that “men just stood there staring, filled with a terrible anger.” Lieutenant Colonel Krause reached the square. As he stood looking at the dead troops, he said just three words: “Oh, my God.”
Then Krause pulled an American flag from his pocket. It was old and worn—the same flag that the 505th had raised over Naples. Krause had promised his men that “before dawn of D Day this flag will fly over Ste.-Mère-Église.” He walked to the town hall and, on the flagpole by the side of the door, ran up the colors. There was no ceremony. In the square of the dead paratroopers the fighting was over. The Stars and Stripes flew over the first town to be liberated by the Americans in France.
At the German Seventh Army headquarters in Le Mans a message was received from General Marcks’s 84th Corps. It read “Communications with Ste.-Mère-Église cut off …” The time was 4:30 A.M.
The Îles-St.-Marcouf are two barren piles of rock just three miles off Utah Beach. In the vast and intricate invasion plan the islands had gone unnoticed until three weeks before D Day. Then Supreme Headquarters had decided that they could be the sites of heavy gun batteries. To ignore the islands, then, was a risk that no one was prepared to take. Hurriedly, 132 men of the U.S. 4th and 24th cavalry squadrons were trained for a pre-H-Hour assault. These men had landed on the isles at about 4:30 A.M. They found no guns, no troops—only sudden death. For as Lieutenant Colonel Edward C. Dunn’s men moved off the beaches they were trapped in a hideous labyrinth of mine fields. S mines—which bound into the air when stepped on and gut the attacker with bulletlike ball bearings—had been sown like grass seed. Within minutes the night was ripped by the flash of explosions, the screams of mangled men. Three lieutenants were injured almost immediately, two enlisted men were killed and Lieutenant Alfred Rubin, who was also a casualty, would never forget “the sight of one man lying on the ground spitting up ball bearings.” By the end of the day their losses would be nineteen killed and wounded. Surrounded by the dead and the dying, Lietuenant Colonel Dunn sent out the success signal, “Mission accomplished.” These were the first Allied troops to invade Hitler’s Europe from the sea. But in the scheme of things, their action was merely a D-Day footnote, a bitter and useless victory.
In the British zone, almost on the coast and just three miles east of Sword Beach, Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway and his men lay under heavy machine-gun fire at the edge of the barbed wire and the mine fields protecting the massive Merville battery. Otway’s situation was desperate. In all the months of training he had never expected every phase of his elaborate land-and-air assault of the coastal battery to work out exactly as planned. But neither had he been prepared for its total disintegration. Yet, somehow, it had happened.
The bombing attack had failed. The special glider train had been lost and with it artillery, flame throwers, mortars, mine detectors and scaling ladders. Of his seven-hundred-man battalion, Otway had found only 150 soldiers and, to take the battery with its garrison of two h
undred, these soldiers had only their rifles, Sten guns, grenades, a few Bangalore torpedoes and one heavy machine gun. Despite these handicaps, Otway’s men had grappled with each problem, improvising brilliantly.
With wire cutters they had already cut gaps through the outer barricade of wire and placed their few Bangalore torpedoes in position ready to blow the rest. One group of men had cleared a path through the mine fields. It had been a hair-raising job. They had crawled on hands and knees across the moonlit approaches to the battery, feeling for trip wires and prodding the ground ahead of them with bayonets. Now Otway’s 150 men crouched in ditches and bomb craters and along the sides of hedges, waiting for the order to attack. The 6th Airborne’s commander, General Gale, had instructed Otway, “Your attitude of mind must be that you cannot contemplate failure in the direct assault …” As he looked around at his men, Otway knew that his casualties would be high. But the guns of the battery had to be silenced—they could slaughter the troops crossing Sword Beach. The situation was, he thought, desperately unfair, but there was no alternative. He had to attack. He knew this even as he knew that the last part of his carefully detailed plan was also doomed to failure. The three gliders due to crash-land on the battery as the ground attack went in would not come down unless they received a special signal—a star shell fired from a mortar. Otway had neither the shell nor the mortar. He did have flares for a Very pistol, but they were to be used only to signal the success of the assault. His last chance for help was gone.
The gliders were on time. The tow planes signaled with their landing lights and then cast off the machines. There were only two gliders, each carrying about twenty men. The third, parting from its tow rope over the Channel, had glided safely back to England. Now the paratroopers heard the soft rustle of the machines as they came over the battery. Helplessly Otway watched as the gliders, silhouetted against the moon, gradually lost height and wheeled back and forth, their pilots searching desperately for the signal he could not send. As the gliders circled lower the Germans opened up. The machine guns which had pinned down the troopers now turned on the gliders. Streams of 20-millimeter tracers ripped into the unprotected canvas sides. Still the gliders circled, following the plan, doggedly looking for the signal. And Otway, agonized, almost in tears, could do nothing.
Then the gliders gave it up. One veered off, to land four miles away. The other passed so low over the waiting, anxious men that Privates Alan Mower and Pat Hawkins thought it was going to smash into the battery. At the last moment it lifted and crashed instead into a wood some distance away. Instinctively a few men pushed themselves up from hiding to go help the survivors. But they were stopped immediately. “Don’t move! Don’t leave your positions!” whispered their harassed officers. There was now nothing more to wait for. Otway ordered the attack. Private Mower heard him yell, “Everybody in! We’re going to take this bloody battery!”
And in they went.
With a blinding roar the Bangalore torpedoes blasted great gaps in the wire. Lieutenant Mike Dowling yelled, “Move up! Move up!” Once again a hunting horn sounded in the night. Yelling and firing, Otway’s paratroopers plunged into the smoke of the explosions and through the wire. Ahead of them, across the no-man’s-land of mine fields, manned trenches and gun pits, loomed the battery. Suddenly red flares burst over the heads of the advancing paratroopers and immediately machine-gun, Schmeisser and rifle fire poured out to meet them. Through the deadly barrage, the paratroopers crouched and crawled, ran, dropped to the ground, got up and ran some more. They dived into shell craters, pulled themselves out and went forward again. Mines exploded. Private Mower heard a scream and then someone yelled, “Stop! Stop! There’s mines everywhere!” Over on his right, Mower saw a badly wounded corporal sitting on the ground waving men away, and shouting, “Don’t come near me! Don’t come near me!”
Above the firing the bursting of mines and the yells of the men, Lieutenant Alan Jefferson, out ahead, continued to blow his hunting horn. Suddenly Private Sid Capon heard a mine explode and saw Jefferson go down. He ran toward the lieutenant, but Jefferson shouted at him, “Get in! Get in!” Then, lying on the ground, Jefferson raised the horn to his lips and began blowing it again. Now there were yells and screams and the flash of grenades as paratroopers piled into the trenches and fought hand to hand with the enemy. Private Capon, reaching one of the trenches, suddenly found himself facing two Germans. One of them hastily raised a Red Cross box high above his head in a token of surrender and said, “Russki, Russki.” They were Russian “volunteers.” For a moment, Capon didn’t know what to do. Then he saw other Germans surrendering and paratroopers leading them down the trench. He handed over his two captives and continued on toward the battery.
There Otway, Lieutenant Dowling and about forty men were already fighting fiercely. Troopers who had cleaned out trenches and gun pits were running around the sides of the earth-banked concrete fortifications, emptying their Sten guns and tossing grenades into the apertures. The battle was gory and wild. Privates Mower, Hawkins and a Bren gunner, racing through a torrent of mortar and machine-gun fire, reached one side of the battery, found a door open and plunged inside. A dead German gunner was lying in the passageway; there seemed to be nobody else around. Mower left the other two men by the door and went along the passage. He came to a large room and saw a heavy field piece on a platform. Next to it great stacks of shells were piled. Mower rushed back to his friends and excitedly outlined his plan to “blow the whole business up by detonating grenades among the shells.” But they didn’t get the chance. As the three men stood talking there was the blast of an explosion. The Bren gunner died instantly. Hawkins was hit in the stomach. Mower thought his back had been “ripped open by a thousand red-hot needles.” He couldn’t control his legs. They twitched involuntarily—the way he had seen dead bodies twitch. He was sure he was going to die and he didn’t want to end this way and he began to call out for help. He called for his mother.
Elsewhere in the battery Germans were surrendering. Private Capon caught up with Dowling’s men just in time to see “Germans pushing each other out of a doorway and almost begging to surrender.” Dowling’s party split the barrels of two guns by firing two shells simultaneously through each barrel, and temporarily knocked out the other two. Then Dowling found Otway. He stood before the colonel, his right hand holding the left side of his chest. He said, “Battery taken as ordered, sir. Guns destroyed.” The battle was over; it had taken just fifteen minutes. Otway fired a yellow flare—the success signal—from the Very pistol. It was seen by a R.A.F. spotting plane and radioed to H.M.S. Arethusa offshore exactly a quarter of an hour before the cruiser was to start bombarding the battery. At the same time Otway’s signal officer sent a confirming message out by pigeon. He had carried the bird all through the battle. On its leg in a plastic capsule was a strip of paper with the code word “Hammer.” Moments later Otway found the lifeless body of Lieutenant Dowling. He had been dying at the time he made his report.
Otway led his battered battalion out of the bloody Merville battery. He had not been told to hold the battery once the guns were knocked out. His men had other D-Day missions. They took only twenty-two prisoners. Of the two hundred Germans, no fewer than 178 were dead or dying, and Otway had lost almost half of his own men—seventy killed or wounded. Ironically, the four guns were only half the reported size. And within forty-eight hours the Germans would be back in the battery and two of the guns would be firing on the beaches. But for the critical few hours ahead the Merville battery would be silent and deserted.
Most of the badly injured had to be left behind, for Otway’s men had neither sufficient medical supplies nor transport to carry them. Mower was carried out on a board. Hawkins was too terribly wounded to be moved. Both men would survive—even Mower, with fifty-seven pieces of shrapnel in his body. The last thing Mower remembers as they moved away from the battery was Hawkins yelling, “Mates, for God’s sake, don’t leave me!” Then the voice grew fainter and f
ainter and Mower mercifully drifted into unconsciousness.
It was nearly dawn—the dawn that eighteen thousand paratroopers had been fighting toward. In less than five hours they had more than fulfilled the expectations of General Eisenhower and his commanders. The airborne armies had confused the enemy and disrupted his communications, and now, holding the flanks at either end of the Normandy invasion area, they had to a great extent blocked the movement of enemy reinforcements.
In the British zone Major Howard’s glider-borne troops were firmly astride the vital Caen and Orne bridges. By dawn the five crossings over the Dives would be demolished. Lieutenant Colonel Otway and his emaciated battalion had knocked out the Merville battery, and paratroopers were now in position on the heights overlooking Caen. Thus the principal British assignments had been completed, and as long as the various arteries could be held German counterattacks would be slowed down or stopped altogether.
At the other end of Normandy’s five invasion beaches the Americans, despite more difficult terrain and a greater variety of missions, had done equally well. Lieutenant Colonel Krause’s men held the key communications center of Ste.-Mère-Église. North of the town Lieutenant Colonel Vandervoort’s battalion had cut the main Cherbourg highway running down the peninsula and stood ready to repel attacks driving in from there. Brigadier General Gavin and his troops were dug in around the strategic Merderet and Douve crossings and were holding the rear of the Utah invasion beachhead. General Maxwell Taylor’s 101st was still widely scattered; by dawn the division’s assembled strength would be only 1,100 out of a total of 6,600 men. Despite this handicap troopers had reached the St.-Martin-de-Varreville gun battery, only to discover that the guns had been removed. Others were in sight of the vital La Barquette locks, the key to the flooding across the neck of the peninsula. And although none of the causeways leading off Utah had been reached, groups of soldiers were driving for them and already held the western edge of the inundated areas back of the beach itself.