Captain John Gwinnett, the chaplain of the 9th Battalion, was completely lost. He, too, had landed in the marshes. He was all alone and the silence around him was unnerving. Gwinnet had to get out of the swamps. He was certain the Merville assault would be a bloody one and he wanted to be with his men. “Fear,” he had told them at the airfield just before take-off, “knocked at the door. Faith opened it, and there was nothing there.” Gwinnet did not know it now, but it would be a full seventeen hours before he found his way out of the swamps.
At this moment the 9th’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, was in a towering rage. He had been dropped miles from the rendezvous point, and he knew that his battalion must have been thoroughly scattered. As Otway marched quickly through the night, small groups of his men appeared everywhere, confirming his worst suspicions. He wondered just how bad the drop had been. Had his special glider train been scattered, too?
Otway badly needed the glider-borne guns and other equipment if his plan of assault was to succeed, for Merville was no ordinary battery. Around it ranged a formidable series of defenses in depth. To get to the heart of the battery—four heavy guns in massive concrete emplacements—the 9th would have to pass through mine fields and over antitank ditches, penetrate a fifteen-foot-thick hedge of barbed wire, cross more mine fields and then fight through a maze of machine-gun-filled trenches. The Germans considered this deadly fortification with its garrison of two hundred men almost impregnable.
Otway didn’t think it was, and his plan to destroy it was elaborate and incredibly detailed. He wanted to leave nothing to chance. One hundred Lancaster bombers were to saturate the battery first with four-thousand-pound bombs. The glider trains were to bring in jeeps, antitank guns, flame throwers, “Bangalore” torpedoes (lengths of explosive-filled pipe to destroy the wire), mine detectors, mortars, and even lightweight aluminum scaling ladders. After collecting this special equipment from the gliders, Otway’s men were to set out for the battery in eleven teams to begin the assault.
This called for dovetailed timing. Reconnaissance teams would lead off and scout the area. “Taping” parties would remove the mines and mark the approaches through the cleared areas. “Breaching” teams with the Bangalore torpedoes would destroy the barbed wire. Snipers, mortar men and machine gunners were to take up positions to cover the main charge.
Otway’s plan had one final surprise: At the same time that his assault troops rushed the battery from the ground, three gliders filled with more troopers were to crash-land on the top of the battery, in a combined massive rush on the defenses from ground and air.
Parts of the plan seemed suicidal, but the risks were worth taking, for the Merville guns could kill thousands of British troops as they touched down on Sword Beach. Even if everything went according to schedule in the next few hours, by the time Otway and his men assembled, moved out and reached the battery they would have barely an hour to destroy the guns. He had been told plainly that if the 9th could not complete the task on time, naval gunfire would try to do it. That meant that Otway and his men had to be away from the battery, no matter what the outcome, by 5:30 A.M. At that time, if the signal of success had not come from Otway, the bombardment would begin.
That was the strategy. But, as Otway hurried anxiously toward the assembly point, the first part of the plan had already misfired. The air attack which had taken place at twelve-thirty had been a complete failure; not one bomb had hit the battery. And the errors were multiplying: The gliders with the vital supplies had failed to arrive.
In the center of the Normandy beachhead, in the German observation bunker overlooking Omaha Beach, Major Werner Pluskat still watched. He saw the white tops of the waves, nothing more. His uneasiness had not lessened; if anything, Pluskat felt more certain than ever that something was happening. Soon after he reached the bunker, formation after formation of planes had thundered over the coast far off to the right; Pluskat thought there must have been hundreds. From the first moment he heard them, he had expected a sudden call from regiment confirming his suspicions that the invasion was in fact beginning. But the phone had remained silent. There had been nothing from Ocker since the first call. Now Pluskat heard something else—the slowly swelling roar of a great number of planes off to his left. This time the sound was coming from behind him. The planes seemed to be approaching the Cherbourg peninsula from the west. Pluskat was more bewildered than ever. Instinctively he looked out through his glasses once again. The bay was completely empty. There was nothing to be seen.
4
IN STE-MÈRE-ÉGLISE the sound of bombing was very close. Alexandre Renaud, the mayor and town pharmacist, could feel the very ground shaking. It seemed to him that planes were attacking the batteries at St.-Marcouf and St.-Martin-de-Varreville, and both places were only a few miles away. He was quite worried about the town and its people. About all the habitants could do was take shelter in garden trenches or cellars, for they could not leave their homes because of the curfew. Renaud herded his wife, Simone, and their three children to the passageway leading off the living room. Its heavy timbers afforded good protection. It was about 1:10 A.M. when the family collected in the makeshift air raid shelter. Renaud remembers the time (it was 12:10 A.M. to him), because just then there was a persistent, urgent knocking at the street door.
Renaud left his family in their living quarters and walked through his darkened pharmacist’s shop, which fronted on the Place de l’Église. Even before he reached the door, he could see what the trouble was. Through the windows of his shop the square, with its edging of chestnut trees and its great Norman church, appeared brilliantly lit up. M. Hairon’s villa across the square was on fire and blazing fiercely.
Renaud got the door open. The town’s fire chief, resplendent in his polished, shoulder-length brass helmet, stood before him. “I think it was hit by a stray incendiary from one of the planes,” the man said without any preamble, motioning toward the burning house. “The fire is spreading fast. Can you get the commandant to lift the curfew? We need as much help as we can get for the bucket brigade.”
The mayor ran to the nearby German headquarters. He quickly explained the situation to the sergeant on duty, who, on his own authority, gave permission. At the same time the German called out the guard, to watch the volunteers when they assembled. Then Renaud went to the parish house and told Father Louis Roulland. The curé sent his sexton to the church to toll the bell, while he, Renaud and the others banged on doors, calling for the inhabitants to help. Above them the bell began to clang, booming out over the town. People started to appear, some in their nightwear, others half dressed, and soon more than one hundred men and women in two long lines were passing buckets of water from hand to hand. Surrounding them were about thirty German guards armed with rifles and Schmeissers.
In the midst of this confusion, Renaud remembers, Father Roulland took him aside. “I must talk to you—something very important,” the priest said. He led Renaud to the kitchen of the parish house. There Madame Angèle Levrault, the aged schoolmistress, awaited them. She was in a state of shock. “A man has landed in my pea patch,” she announced in a wavering voice. Renaud had almost more trouble than he could handle, but he tried to calm her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Please go home and stay indoors.” Then he raced back to the fire.
The noise and confusion had intensified in his absence. The flames were higher now. Showers of sparks had spread to the outbuildings and they were already starting to burn. To Renaud the scene had a nightmarish quality. He stood almost rooted to the spot, seeing the flushed, excited faces of the fire fighters, the overdressed, ponderous German guards with their rifles and machine guns. And above the square the bell still tolled, adding its persistent clanging to the din. It was then they all heard the droning of the planes.
The sound came from the west—a steadily mounting roar, and with it the approaching racket of antiaircraft fire as battery after battery across the peninsula picked up the formations. In the square
of Ste.-Mère-Église everybody looked up, transfixed, the burning house forgotten. Then the guns of the town began firing and the roaring was on top of them. The aircraft swept in, almost wing tip to wing tip, through a crisscrossing barrage of fire that hammered up from the ground. The planes’ lights were on. They came in so low that people in the square instinctively ducked and Renaud remembers that the airplanes cast “great shadows on the ground and red lights seemed to be glowing inside them.”
In wave after wave the formations flew over, the first planes of the biggest airborne operation ever attempted—882 planes carrying thirteen thousand men. These men of the U.S. 101st and veteran 82nd airborne divisions were heading for six drop zones all within a few miles of Ste.-Mère-Église. The troopers tumbled out of their planes, stick after stick. And as those destined for the zone outside the town drifted down, scores of them heard an incongruous sound over the clatter of battle: a church bell tolling in the night. For many it was the last sound they ever heard. Caught by a heavy wind, a number of soldiers floated down toward the inferno of the Place de l’Église—and the guns of the German guards that a twist of fate had placed there. Lieutenant Charles Santarsiero of the 1O1st’s 506th Regiment was standing in the door of his plane as it passed over Ste.-Mère-Église. “We were about four hundred feet up,” he remembers, “and I could see fires burning and Krauts running about. There seemed to be total confusion on the ground. All hell had broken loose. Flak and small-arms fire was coming up and those poor guys were caught right in the middle of it.”
Almost as soon as he left his plane, Private John Steele of the 82nd’s 505th Regiment saw that instead of landing in a lighted drop zone he was heading for the center of a town that seemed to be on fire. Then he saw German soldiers and French civilians running frantically about. Most of them, it seemed to Steele, were looking up at him. The next moment he was hit by something that felt “like the bite of a sharp knife.” A bullet had smashed into his foot. Then Steele saw something that alarmed him even more. Swinging in his harness, unable to veer away from the town, he dangled helplessly as his chute carried him straight toward the church steeple at the edge of the square.
Above Steele, Private First Class Ernest Blanchard heard the church bell ringing and saw the maelstrom of fire coming up all around him. The next minute he watched horrified as a man floating down almost beside him “exploded and completely disintegrated before my eyes,” presumably a victim of the explosives he was carrying.
Blanchard began desperately to swing on his risers, trying to veer away from the mob in the square below. But it was too late. He landed with a crash in one of the trees. Around him men were being machine-gunned to death. There were shouts, yells, screams and moans—sounds that Blanchard will never forget. Frantically, as the machine-gunning came closer, Blanchard sawed at his harness. Then he dropped out of the trees and ran in panic, unaware that he had also sawed off the top of his thumb.
It must have seemed to the Germans that Ste.-Mère-Église was being smothered by paratroop assault, and certainly the townspeople in the square thought that they were at the center of a major battle. Actually very few Americans—perhaps thirty—dropped into the town, and no more than twenty came down in and about the square. But they were enough to cause the German garrison of slightly less than one hundred men to panic. Reinforcements rushed to the square, which seemed to be the focal point of the attack, and there some Germans, coming suddenly upon the bloody, burning scene, seemed to Renaud to lose all control.
About fifteen yards from where the mayor stood in the square a paratrooper plunged into a tree and almost immediately, as he tried frantically to get out of his harness, he was spotted. As Renaud watched, “about half a dozen Germans emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into him and the boy hung there with his eyes open, as though looking down at his own bullet holes.”
Caught up in the slaughter all around them, the people in the square were now oblivious to the mighty airborne armada that was still droning ceaselessly overhead. Thousands of men were jumping for the 82nd’s drop zones northwest of the town, and the 101st’s zones east and slightly west, between Ste.-Mère-Église and the Utah invasion area. But every now and then, because the drop was so widely scattered, stray paratroopers from almost every regiment drifted into the holocaust of the little town. One or two of these men, loaded down with ammunition, grenades and plastic explosives, actually fell into the burning house. There were brief screams and then a fusillade of shots and explosions as the ammunition went up.
In all this horror and confusion one man tenaciously and precariusly clung to life. Private Steele, his parachute draped over the steeple of the church, hung just under the eaves. He heard the shouts and the screams. He saw Germans and Americans firing at each other in the square and the streets. And, almost paralyzed by terror, he saw winking red flashes of machine guns as streams of stray bullets shot past and over him. Steele had tried to cut himself down, but his knife had somehow slipped out of his hand and dropped to the square below. Steele then decided that his only hope lay in playing dead. On the roof, only a few yards away from him, German machine gunners fired at everything in sight, but not at Steele. He hung so realistically “dead” in his harness that Lieutenant Willard Young of the 82nd, who passed by during the height of the fighting, still remembers “the dead man hanging from the steeple.” In all, Steele dangled there for more than two hours before being cut down and taken captive by the Germans. Shocked and in pain from his shattered foot, he has absolutely no recollection of the tolling of the bell, only a few feet from his head.
The encounter at Ste.-Mère-Église was the prelude to the main American airborne assault. But in the scheme of things this initial and bloody skirmish* was quite accidental. Although the town was one of the principal objectives of the 82nd Airborne, the real battle for Ste.-Mère-Église was still to come. Much had to be accomplished before then, for the 101st and 82nd divisions, like the British, were racing the clock.
To the Americans went the job of holding the right flank of the invasion area just as their British counterparts were holding on the left. But much more was riding on the Americans paratroopers: on them hung the fate of the whole Utah Beach operation.
The main obstacle to the success of the Utah landing was a body of water known as the Douve River. As part of their anti-invasion measures Rommel’s engineers had taken brilliant advantage of the Douve and its principal tributary, the Merderet. These water barriers veining the lower part of the thumblike Cherbourg land mass flow south and southeast through low-lying land, link up with the Carentan Canal at the base of the peninsula and, flowing almost parallel with the Vire River, empty into the English Channel. By manipulating the century-old La Barquette locks just a few miles above the town of Carentan, the Germans had inundated so much ground that the peninsula, marshy to begin with, was almost isolated from the remainder of Normandy. Thus, by holding the few roads, bridges and causeways through these wastes, the Germans could bottle up an invading force and eventually wipe it out. In the event of landings on the eastern coast, German forces attacking from the north and west could close the trap and drive the invaders back into the sea.
That, at least, was the general strategy. But the Germans had no intention of allowing an invasion to get even that far; as a further defense measure they had flooded more than twelve square miles of low-lying land behind the beaches on the eastern coast. Utah Beach lay almost in the center of these man-made lakes. There was only one way that the men of the 4th Infantry Division (plus their tanks, guns, vehicles and supplies) could force their way inland: along five causeways running through the floods. And German guns controlled these.
Holding the peninsula and these natural defense barriers were three German divisions: the 709th in the north and along the east coast, the 243rd defending the west coast and the recently arrived 91st in the middle and spread about the base. Also, lying south of Carentan and within striking distance was one of the finest and toughest German un
its in Normandy—Baron von der Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment. Exclusive of naval units manning coastal batteries, Luftwaffe antiaircraft contingents and a variety of personnel in the Cherbourg vicinity, the Germans could throw about forty thousand men almost immediately at an Allied attack of any sort. In this heavily defended area Major General Maxwell D. Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division and Major General Matthew B. Ridgway’s 82nd had been given the enormous task of carving out and holding an “airhead”—an island of defense running from the Utah Beach area to a point far to the west across the base of the peninsula. They were to open up the way for the 4th Division and hold until relieved. In and about the peninsula the American paratroopers were outnumbered more than three to one.
On the map the airhead looked like the imprint of a short, broad left foot with the small toes lying along the coast, the big toe at the La Barquette locks above Carentan and the heel back and beyond the Merderet and Douve marshes. It was roughly twelve miles long, seven miles wide at the toes and four miles in width across the heel. It was a huge area to be held by thirteen thousand men, but it had to be taken in less than five hours.
Taylor’s men were to seize a six-gun battery at St.-Martin-de-Varreville, almost directly behind Utah, and race for four of the five causeways between there and the coastal hamlet of Pouppeville. At the same time, crossings and bridges along the Douve and the Carentan Canal, particularly the La Barquette locks, had to be seized or destroyed. While the Screaming Eagles of the 101st secured these objectives, Ridgway’s men were to hold the heel and the left side of the foot. They were to defend crossings over the Douve and the Merderet, capture Ste.-Mère-Église and hold positions north of the town to prevent counterattacks from driving into the side of the bridgehead.