dispersal of units during the chaotic drop had proved an unexpected advantage in one way: ‘The Germans thought we were all over creation.’ But the paratroopers were only slightly less confused themselves. As a lost group approached a well to refill their canteens, an old farmer appeared from his house. One of them asked him in bad French, ‘Ou es Alamon?’ He shrugged and pointed north, then south, east and west.
The most successful ambush took place not far from the command post of the German 91st Luftlande- Division near Picauville. Men from the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment opened fire on a staff car bringing the divisional commander, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Falley, back from the command post exercise in Rennes. Falley was thrown from the vehicle wounded and, as he crawled to retrieve his pistol, an American lieutenant shot him dead.
The plan was for the 82nd Airborne to drop on both sides of the River Merderet and secure the town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise. This would cut the road and rail link to Cherbourg. They were also to capture bridges over the Merderet so that the forces arriving by sea could advance rapidly across the peninsula and cut it off, before advancing north on the port of Cherbourg. The 101st, dropping closer to Utah beach, would seize the causeways leading to it across the flooded marshes and also take the bridges and a lock on the River Douve, between the town of Carentan and the sea.
Several platoons of the 82nd Airborne dropped in and around Sainte-Mere-Eglise as planned. One paratrooper’s chute caught on the church tower, where he hung helplessly, pretending to be dead while the bells deafened him. They were ringing in alarm because a house on the square by the church had caught fire and the townsfolk were passing buckets of water in a human chain. The scene below was chaotic. Soldiers from the local anti-aircraft unit under the command of an Austrian officer were firing in all directions as paratroopers dropped. Many Americans were riddled with bullets before they reached the ground. Those caught in trees stood little chance. One paratrooper dropped straight on to the blazing house. But with great determination, other rapidly formed groups who had landed outside the town began to advance towards its centre, dashing from cover to cover. Within an hour they had forced the Germans to withdraw. Sainte-Mere-Eglise was thus the first town in France to be liberated.
Sainte-Mere-Eglise became a focal point for many scattered detachments. One member of the 82nd Airborne was amazed to see two troopers from the 101st come riding bareback down the road on horses they had taken from a field. Another appeared driving a captured half-track motorcycle. Only a small number of paratroopers lost in the countryside appear to have been inactive. A few bedded down in ditches wrapped in their chutes, waiting for the dawn to find their bearings. The large majority, however, could not wait to get into the fighting. With nerves still taut after the jump, their blood was up. A trooper in the 82nd remembered his instructions only too clearly: ‘Get to the drop zone as fast as possible. Take no prisoners because they will slow you down.’
The fighting became pitiless on both sides; in fact that night probably saw the most vicious fighting of the whole war on the western front. One German soldier, justifying the annihilation of an American platoon which landed on his battalion’s heavy-weapons company, said later, ‘They didn’t come down to give us candies, you know. They came down to kill us, to fight.’ German soldiers had certainly been lectured by their officers about the ‘criminals’ recruited to the US Airborne forces and their fears were transformed into violence. But it is hard to establish the accuracy of horror stories about German soldiers mutilating paratroopers caught in trees.
Whether or not these accounts were true, American paratroopers sought revenge. There seem to have been a number of cases of soldiers shooting the prisoners taken by others. Apparently, a Jewish sergeant and a corporal took a captured German officer and non-com from a farmyard. Those present heard a burst of automatic fire and, when the sergeant returned, ‘nobody said a thing’. It was also said of another Jewish paratrooper that ‘you didn’t dare trust him with a PoW out of sight’. A soldier in the 101st recounted how, after they had come across two dead paratroopers ‘with their privates cut off and stuck into their mouth’, the captain with them gave the order, ‘Don’t you guys dare take any prisoners! Shoot the bastards!’
One or two men appear to have enjoyed the killing. A paratrooper recalled having come across a member of his company the following morning and being surprised to see that he was wearing red gloves instead of the issued yellow ones. ‘I asked him where he got the red gloves from, and he reached down in his jump pants and pulled out a whole string of ears. He had been ear-hunting all night and had them all sewed on an old boot lace.’ There were a few cases of brutal looting. The commander of the 101st Airborne’s MP platoon came across the body of a German officer and saw that somebody had cut off his finger to take the wedding ring. A sergeant in the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment was horrified when he found that members of his platoon had killed some Germans and then used ‘their bodies for bayonet practice’.
On occasions, the killing of prisoners was prevented. About 02.30 hours, a handful of paratroopers from the 101st, including a lieutenant and a chaplain, were standing in a farmyard talking to the French inhabitants. They were astonished when around a dozen troopers from the 82nd came in at the run, herding a group of very young German orderlies, whom they then told to lie down. The terrified boys pleaded for their lives. The sergeant, who intended to shoot them all, claimed that some of their buddies caught in trees had been turned into ‘Roman candles’ by a German soldier with a flame-thrower.
The sergeant pulled the bolt back on his Thompson sub-machine gun. In desperation, the boys grabbed the legs of the lieutenant and the chaplain as they and the French family shouted at the sergeant not to shoot them. Finally, the sergeant was persuaded to stop. The boys were locked in the farm’s cellar. But the sergeant was not put off his mission of vengeance. ‘Let’s go and find some Krauts to kill!’ he yelled to his men, and they left. The members of the 101st were shaken by what they had witnessed. ‘These people had gone ape,’ a senior non-com remarked later.
As the scattered groups coalesced during the night, officers were able to exert control and concentrate on objectives. Soldiers who could not find their own units attached themselves to any battalion, even if it was from the other division. General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st, had accumulated a group of thirty men, which included four colonels as well as other officers. This prompted him to parody Churchill, with the comment, ‘Never before in the annals of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.’ Another group of troopers were sighted pulling the regimental commander of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, Colonel George Van Horn Mosely Jr, around on a machine-gun cart because he had broken his leg on the jump.
Several soldiers and officers who had broken an ankle on landing just strapped it up and hobbled on, gritting their teeth. Those who could not walk at all were left to guard prisoners. The bravery of the overwhelming majority of men cannot be doubted. Apart from a single battalion commander in the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment who spent the night hiding in a ditch, there were few cases of nervous collapse.
There appear to have been considerably more examples of battle shock on the German side. A soldier called Rainer Hartmetz went back to his company command post for more ammunition. There he found two men in deep shock: ‘They couldn’t talk. They were trembling. They tried to smoke, but they couldn’t get the cigarette to their lips.’ And the company commander, a captain who had apparently been brave on the eastern front, was lying in a foxhole drunk. Whenever anybody appeared with a message from the forward positions, he waved his pistol and muttered, ‘I should execute every man who runs back.’
A mixed force of some seventy-five paratroopers attacked the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. The officer who took command had no idea how many Germans were there, but their training paid off. With machine guns on the flanks to cover them, squads leapfrogged forward. A bazooka team rushed out into the main street and fired at the door of the church with an anti-tank round. A dozen German soldiers, with their leader waving an improvised white flag, appeared out through the smoke and dust with their hands in the air. The village was cleared in less than an hour. Most of the defenders had fled down the road towards Carentan.
Other groups moved to secure the causeways over the flooded areas behind Utah beach. A handful of paratroopers came across fifteen Germans transporting ammunition in three horse-drawn carts. They forced them to surrender and then made them march ahead down the road. A German speaker told them that if they came under fire they were not to move. A short time later a German machine gun opened up. The paratroopers took cover in the ditches. One of the Germans began to run, but was shot down immediately. ‘We threw him in the cart,’ one of the paratroopers recorded. ‘He died later that morning. From then on, we had no problem with the prisoners remaining erect in the road, under any conditions.’ This practice was, of course, a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention.
