the French and made V for Victory signs. When the Ortskommandant appeared, the mayor could not resist asking him if he needed any workers that day for erecting the ‘Rommel asparagus’ poles against glider landings. ‘It is not necessary,’ he replied stiffly. The Germans, they noticed, were very nervous.
The 82nd Airborne Division had taken its chief objective of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, but it had landed close to the main units of the 91st Luftlande-Division and would suffer numerous counter-attacks. Its other task was to secure the line of the River Merderet in preparation for VII Corps to advance right across the peninsula. This proved hard, since its units were so scattered. Many small groups of paratroopers made their way to the La Fiere crossing by following the railway embankment. Brigadier General James Gavin, the second in command of the division, took a large group further south to help the attack on Chef du Pont and the bridge there.
When a small bridgehead had been taken across the Merderet at Chef du Pont, the regimental surgeon of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment had to operate in the field with the barest equipment. All their medical bundles had been lost in the drop. ‘A soldier had his leg blown off right by the knee and the only thing left attached was his patellar tendon. And I had him down there in this ditch and I said: “Son, I’m gonna have to cut the rest of your leg off and you’re back to bullet-biting time because I don’t have anything to use for an anesthetic.” And he said: “Go ahead, Doc.” I cut the patellar tendon and he didn’t even whimper.’
Another medical officer in the same regiment, who had found himself having to hold up plasma bags while being shot at, was soon captured by the Germans. They took him to the 91st Luftlande-Division’s Feldlazarett, or field hospital, set up in the Chateau de Hauteville, five miles west of Sainte-Mere-Eglise. The German medics treated him as a friend, and he went about his work tending wounded American paratroopers assisted by a German sergeant who was a Catholic priest in civilian life.
Although the Americans were superior in numbers, the capture of the bridge and causeway at La Fiere proved very difficult. It was later taken and then lost again. The Germans had sited machine guns on the far side with excellent fields of fire. The river made it impossible to outflank them. The French family who had saved so many paratroopers with their rowing boat had told an airborne officer about a nearby ford across the Merderet, yet for some reason he never passed on the information. The ford was only put to good use later after it was discovered accidentally by another soldier.
Other widely scattered groups had dropped in the marshy area on the west side of the Merderet. They found the hedgerows thick with bramble and thorn, and small German detachments ensconced in Norman farms whose solid stone walls provided natural defensive positions. Once again, the lack of communication with the main American forces on the east of the river made it impossible to coordinate their efforts.
While the 82nd was responsible for holding the western flank, the 101st Airborne Division’s task was to assist the landings at Utah on the east coast of the peninsula. This included suppressing German batteries and seizing causeways across the marshes just inland from the beach. Lieutenant Colonel Cole’s group occupied the German battery position at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, which they found abandoned. They then seized the western end of the causeway leading from Utah beach across the flooded area. Other groups, meanwhile, protected the northern flank by aggressive action, which convinced the isolated German defenders that they were heavily outnumbered. Attempts to seize the southern causeways from the beach to Saine-Marie-du-Mont and Pouppeville were, however, delayed by well-sited German machine guns.
Apart from securing the causeways ready for the 4th Infantry Division’s advance from Utah beach, the other task of the 101st Airborne was to seize the lock on the River Douve at La Barquette and also take two bridges north-east of Carentan. This would later allow the American forces on the Cotentin and the 29th Division advancing from Omaha to link up. The biggest threat in the area was the unexpectedly large German force in Saint-Come-du- Mont on the Carentan- Cherbourg road.
Major von der Heydte, a veteran of the German airborne invasion of Crete three years before, had pushed forward two battalions of his 6th Paratroop Regiment from Carentan. His men, among the most experienced of the Luftwaffe’s Paratroop Army, were to prove formidable opponents. When dawn broke, they gazed in amazement at all the different coloured parachutes lying in the fields. They wondered at first whether they represented different units, but soon got out their knives to cut themselves silk scarves. Heydte himself went forward to Saint-Come-du- Mont later in the morning and climbed the church tower. From there he could see the huge armada of ships lying offshore.
For American paratroopers, the sound of the naval bombardment of Utah beach provided the first reassurance that the invasion was proceeding according to plan. But with the loss of so much equipment and ammunition in the drop, and the increasing concentration of German forces against them, everything depended on how quickly the 4th Infantry Division would arrive.
The landings at Utah proved the most successful of all, largely due to good fortune. The naval bombardment force, commanded by Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk in the heavy cruiser USS
The gunfire, while failing to hit many of the German positions, cleared large parts of the minefields on which the enemy had relied. Meanwhile the medium bombers of the Ninth Air Force dropped their loads much closer to the target area at Utah than the Eighth had at Omaha, but even so the effect on German positions was negligible. The rocket ships were also inaccurate, but none of this seemed to matter.
Utah was the responsibility of VII Corps, commanded by Major General J. Lawton Collins, a dynamic leader known to his men as ‘Lightning Joe’. The assault was led by the 8th Infantry Regiment in Major General Raymond O. Barton’s 4th Infantry Division. Luck certainly played a large part when the current pushed the landing craft towards the Vire estuary. Colonel Van Fleet’s 8th Infantry came ashore 2,000 yards further south than planned, but on a stretch of beach which turned out to be far more lightly defended than where they were supposed to have landed.
The calmer waters meant also that none of the DD tanks were lost, except for four destroyed on a landing craft which struck a mine. One of the landing craft crewmen described them as ‘odd-shaped sea-monsters depending upon huge, doughnut-like, canvas balloons for flotation, wallowing through heavy waves, and struggling to keep in formation as they followed us’. In fact the light resistance presented few targets for the tanks to attack. Even the artillery was landed without loss. Altogether, the 4th Infantry Division’s 200 casualties on D-Day were far fewer than the 700 losses caused by an E-boat attack during Exercise Tiger off Slapton Sands in Devon that April.
The first senior officer ashore at Utah was the irrepressible Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr, son of a former president and a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Teddy Jr had named his Jeep ‘Rough Rider’ in his father’s honour. On seeing that the 8th Infantry Regiment had landed in the wrong place, Roosevelt rightly decided that it would be stupid to try to redeploy. ‘We’ll start the war from here!’ he announced.
Roosevelt, who stalked around fearlessly under fire with his walking stick, was loved by GIs for his constant jokes with them and his extraordinary courage. Many suspected that he secretly hoped to die in battle. A major who landed without his vehicle made for the beach, where he first sought cover and then ‘met General Roosevelt, walking the beach wall oblivious to the fire’. ‘General Teddy’ was also known for preferring to wear the olive drab knitted cap and not a helmet, a habit for which he was often upbraided by more senior generals because it set a bad example.
The assault on Utah beach against isolated German riflemen and machine-gunners was ‘more like guerrilla fighting’, as an officer in the 4th Division put it. One young officer was amused when a colonel came over in the midst of heavy fire and said, ‘Captain, how in the hell do you load this rifle?’ In contrast to Omaha, the Germans had no ‘observed fire’. Instead they just ‘walked their fire up and down the beach, always maintaining a different pattern’. But the comparatively easy fighting did not mean that men were not ready for dirty tricks by the enemy. A soldier in the 8th Infantry Regiment recorded that their officers had ordered them to shoot any SS soldiers they captured on the grounds that ‘they could not be trusted’ and might be concealing a bomb or grenade. Another stated that ‘during the briefings, we were informed that all civilians found along the beach area and for a certain distance inland were to be dealt with as enemy soldiers, shot or rounded up’.
