The execution of the mission got off to an agonizingly slow start. It took hours, until dawn and after (in a few cases never that day), for units to come together in battalion strength, and then another week to sort out the 101st men from the 82nd.
Lt. Col. Robert Cole, commanding the 3rd Battalion, 502nd PIR, landed near Ste.-Mère-Église. His objective, the two northern exits from Utah, was ten kilometers away. It took time to figure out where he was, time to gather in the men. By 0400 he had less than fifty men gathered together. He set off. In a couple of hours of moving around Ste.-Mère-Église, the group snowballed to seventy-five men. It made contact with a small German convoy, killed several of the enemy, and took ten prisoners. As dawn came up, Cole was still an hour short of his objective.
For Lieutenant Cartledge, dawn brought a welcome respite. He had thought he was on the Douve River when he was actually on the Merderet. By 0400 he had gathered nine men. His “squad” was representative of many such units across the Cotentin. Cartledge had Lt. Werner Meyer, from intelligence, attached to division HG as an interpreter; a demolition man; three radiomen; one company clerk; two men from his own company. “With only three of us trained to fight,” Cartledge said, “it was imperative we get with a larger group.”
He set off toward what he thought was the coast. “When daylight came, we stopped on a hillside along a dirt road, set out our land mines in a giant circle, and pulled out our D-ration chocolate bars and canteens and ate breakfast. Meyer, Bravo, Fordik and I sat down together and talked it over, deciding which way to go.”12
At that moment, quite a lot of 101st troopers were sitting down, talking it over. Pvt. John Fitzgerald had much to talk about but no one to talk to. Fitzgerald was from the 101st Airborne; at about 0400 he found a captain and a private from the 82nd. They set out in search of others. The gliders were coming in and a German antiaircraft battery opened fire.
“With all the noise, we were able to crawl to within twenty-five yards of the battery,” Fitzgerald related. It was firing continuously. The captain whispered a brief plan of attack, then called out, “Let’s get those bastards!” The private from the 82nd opened up with his BAR, hitting two Germans on the right of the platform. The captain threw a grenade that exploded directly under the gun.
“I emptied my M-1 clip at the two Germans on the left,” Fitzgerald said. “In a moment it was over. Perspiration broke out on my forehead, my hands were trembling. It was the first time I had ever fired at a living thing. I noticed the torn condom hanging loosely from the end of my rifle. I had put it there before the jump to keep the barrel dry, then forgot about it.”13
They came on another, larger battery. They attacked it and were repulsed. In the retreat they got separated. So as dawn broke, Fitzgerald was alone, wondering where he was.
Captain Gibbons of the 501st PIR put together a mixed group of a dozen men and at 0300 set off. They drove off a couple of Germans from a tiny village, roused the French residents, pointed and gestured at the map, and discovered that they had just liberated Carquebut. Gibbons knew that Carquebut was outside the 101st’s sector; it was an 82nd objective. He decided to move south toward his original objective, the bridges across the Douve. It was a long way off. “When we left Carquebut,” Gibbons remembered, “dawn was just beginning.”
He set off with a dozen strangers toward an objective nearly fifteen kilometers away without any equipment for blowing a bridge. Later, Gibbons remarked, “This certainly wasn’t the way I had thought the invasion would go, nor had we ever rehearsed it in this manner.”14
But he was getting on with his assignment. Throughout the Cotentin, junior officers from both divisions were doing the same. This was the payoff for the extensive briefings. The platoon and company leaders knew their battalion assignments. By 0400 many of them had set off to carry out their missions, however far away the target was.
Captain Shettle found his objective before dawn, one of the few to do so. After he had blown up the communication linkup north of Carentan, he moved toward the two bridges over the Douve downstream from the lock. He was to establish a bridgehead on the far bank, not blow the bridges, which would be needed later for the hookup of the far left at Utah (which was Shettle at this moment) and the right flank coming from Omaha.
Shettle had about fifteen men with him. They came to a French farmhouse, surrounded it, called out the family, and discovered that the only German in the place was a paymaster carrying the pay for the entire 6th Parachute Regiment. Shettle made him prisoner and confiscated the money. The farmer led the group to the bridges. They were defended by machine-gun positions on the south bank, but volunteers dashed across and drove the enemy off. As dawn broke, however, German machine gunners forced Shettle’s advance guard to retreat to the north bank.15
Just before dawn, Colonel Johnson, CO of the 501st PIR, had been able to take the La Barquette lock and establish a couple of squads on the far side.
• •
The 82nd’s mission was to seal off the Cotentin from the south by destroying the bridges over the Douve River upstream from its junction with the Merderet, at Pont-l’Abbé and Beuzeville, by occupying and holding both banks of the Merderet River, then protecting the southwest flank of VII Corps by securing the line of the Douve River. To the north, the critical objective was Ste.-Mère-Église.
At 0400 Lt. Col. Ed Krause, 3rd Battalion, 505th PIR, had gathered approximately 180 men. He put them on the road for his objective, Ste.-Mère-Église.
In the village, the fire was out, the residents had gone back to bed, and so had the German garrison. It was astonishing and inexplicable, but true. When Krause got to the edge of town without being challenged, he sent one company to move as quietly as possible through town to set up roadblocks, with mines in front. After giving the men a thirty-minute head start, Krause sent the other company into town to clear it out. A local Frenchman, half-drunk, who had guided the battalion into the town, pointed out the billets of the Germans. Thirty of them surrendered meekly; ten were shot trying to resist.
That quickly, a key objective had been taken. Krause cut the communications cable point. His men held the roads leading into Ste.-Mère-Église, most importantly the main highway from Caen to Cherbourg.II
At dawn, a disaster. A glider-landed jeep towing an antitank gun came barreling down the road from Chef-du-Pont. Before any of Krause’s men could stop it, the jeep hit one of the mines, which not only “blew the hell out of it and the gun,” but also killed the two men in the jeep and destroyed the roadblock.
Fortunately, Krause had already brought in two antitank guns. As the sun rose, he was holding the town the Americans had to have.16
Nowhere else had either American airborne division achieved its predawn objectives. Bridges had not been taken or blown, the causeway exits were not secure. Not a single American company was at full strength; only a handful were at half-strength. An hour and more after sunrise, Americans were still trying to find one another.
It led to the sobering thought that it might have been better to have come in at dawn. A daylight assembly would have been much quicker, so that by 0730 units would have been on the move—the same time or earlier than many of them got on the move in fact. (Twenty-two hours after the drop, at the end of D-Day, the 101st had assembled only about 2,500 of the 6,000 men who had dropped.17)
But despite the time lost and relative failure at assembling, the night drop had accomplished a great deal. It had certainly confused the Germans. The junior officers, taking the initiative, had gathered together however many men they could and were setting out for their company objectives. Ste.-Mère-Église was secure.
But as dawn broke, every commander from company level on up in the American airborne felt cut off and surrounded, and was deeply worried about his unit’s ability to perform its mission. Despite the mixing of personnel, the two divisions were not in contact or communication. This was not a raid. No one was coming to pluck them out. They had to fight to take ground and hold i
t and link up, but they had only about one-third of their men to fight with. What they most feared was being forced to circle the wagons and fight defensive actions, without radios or any idea where other Americans were, rendered passive by their weakness in numbers, perhaps even overwhelmed.
• •
Just before dawn, Colonel Heydte finally got through to General Marcks and received his orders. He should attack with his regiment northward out of Carentan and clean out the area between that city and Ste.-Mère-Église.
Heydte set out confident he could do just that. He had under his command an overstrength regiment that was, in his opinion, worth two American or British divisions. His paratroopers were tough kids, seventeen and a half years old average age. They had been six years old when Hitler took power. They had been raised in a Nazi ideology that had been designed to get them ready for precisely this moment. They had an experienced and renowned commanding officer, a professional soldier with a record of audacity.
The 6th Parachute Regiment was a quintessential creation of Nazi Germany. The Nazis had brought together the professionalism of the German army with the new Nazi youth. They gave it new equipment. They would hurl their best against the best the Americans could put into the field. “Let them come,” Goebbels had sneered.
Now they had come, and they were in scattered pockets, highly vulnerable. As the first of the sun’s rays appeared, Heydte and the elite of the Nazi system marched off to take them on. The first significant counterattack of D-Day was under way. Fittingly, it would pit an American elite force against a German elite force, a trial of systems.
* * *
I. Later that day, Nieblas saw a paratrooper hanging from a tree. Although he was obviously helpless, the Germans had shot him. That made Nieblas furious and “settled my problem about shooting an unsuspecting enemy. If he wore a German uniform, I’d shoot.”
II. M. Andre Mace, hiding in a garage in the village, wrote in his diary: “It is real hell all over with the firing of guns, machine guns, and artillery. Around 3:00 A.M. we risk a peek to see what is going on. The Americans are the only ones in the streets of the town, there are no more Germans. It is an indescrible joy. I was never as happy in all my life.” (Original in the Parachute Museum, Ste.-Mère-Église; copy in EC.)
13
“THE GREATEST SHOW EVER STAGED”
The Air Bombardment
“AS DAWN BROKE,” Captain Shettle of the 506th PIR said, “we could observe one of the most impressive sights of any wartime action. Wave after wave of medium and light bombers could be seen sweeping down the invasion beaches to drop their bombs.”1
It was the largest air armada ever gathered. It was about to enter the fray in fearsome numbers. On D-Day, the Allies flew more than 14,000 sorties to the Luftwaffe’s 250 (most of those against shipping on the fringes of the invasion).I
Many pilots and bomber crews flew three missions that day, nearly every airman flew two. Spaatz, Harris, and Leigh-Mallory put everything that could fly into the attack. They held back no reserves, a sharp reminder of how far they had come in the air war since 1939–42, when the RAF was on the defensive and could not have dreamed of the day they would be leaving Great Britain uncovered.
They had earned their victory in the air war and had paid a price for it, partly in equipment, mainly in human lives. It was the most hazardous service in the war. It was also the most glamorous.
The foot soldiers envied and resented the airmen. To their eyes, the flyboys hung around barracks doing nothing much of anything, went out at night and got the girls, and had an excess of rank.
What the foot soldiers did not see was the Army Air Force in action. From the flyboys’ point of view, they were the veterans who had been at war since 1939 (RAF) or 1942 (U.S.) while the respective armies sat around doing not much of anything.
They lived a strange existence. On bad-weather days, which were a majority, they led quiet barracks lives. On pass, they had their pick of London. On their way to action, for endless hours they were cramped, cold, tense, fearful, and bored. When they entered action they entered hell. With German flak thick enough to walk on coming up from below and German fighters coming in from behind and above, the air crews went through an hour or more of pure terror.
They were not helpless. The Allied bombers bristled with machine guns, in the nose, under the belly, on top, in the rear. Experts told them they would be better off eliminating the weight of those guns and the men who served them. (A B-17 carried thirteen .50-caliber machine guns.) With a lighter airplane, they could fly higher and faster and would be much safer. No, thanks, replied the air crews. They wanted to be able to shoot back.
They took heavy casualties. Statistically, bomber crews could not survive twenty-five missions. Catch-22 was not fiction. Sgt. Roger Lovelace of the 386th Bomb Group had been told that he could go home after twenty-five missions. Then it was thirty, then thirty-five. On D-Day he was on his sixtieth mission (and eventually did a total of seventy-six).2 In the two months preceding D-Day, the Allied air forces lost 12,000 men and over 2,000 planes.
They persevered and triumphed. If how much they accomplished in trying to knock out German war production is a subject of continuing controversy, what they had accomplished in driving the Luftwaffe out of France, forcing it back into Germany and a defensive role, is not. They had gone past air superiority to achieve air supremacy.
• •
The strategic air forces had not been built to provide tactical support for the land armies. But with the climax of the Transportation Plan coming in early June, that became their task. All involved agreed that just preceding and on D-Day every bomber in Britain would participate in pounding the Atlantic Wall. There were disagreements on how specifically to do that.
The final plan was as follows: On D-Day minus two, almost half the bombing effort would be in the Pas-de-Calais as part of the Fortitude plan. The next day, half the crews rested while the others were given so-called “milk runs.” The RAF Bomber Command would open D-Day with a midnight bombing of coastal batteries and Caen. At first light, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, 1,200 B-17s (Flying Fortresses) and B-24s (Liberators) strong, would bomb for one-half hour the beaches on the Calvados coast while B-26s (Marauders) from Ninth Air Force saturated Utah Beach. If the sky was clear, the bombing would cease five minutes before the troops went ashore; if cloudy, ten minutes.
Spaatz, Tedder, and Leigh-Mallory wanted a 1,500-yard safety zone; ground officers wanted 500 yards; they compromised on 1,000 yards.
After the heavies had returned to England from their dawn attack, they would refuel and go out again, this time to hit bridges and crossroads inland, or to hit Carentan, Caen, and other towns. Spaatz argued against this as inhumane and unlikely to have much impact, but Eisenhower supported Leigh-Mallory on this dispute and those were the orders.3
• •
By June 4, Sgt. Roger Lovelace recalled, “the electricity of tension was so thick you could hear it, smell it, feel it.” By the evening of June 5, “We felt like we were sitting on a live bomb with the fuse sizzling.
“And then it started. We heard the aircraft overhead, the Dakotas hauling the airborne. We all stood outside and looked up against the semidark sky. There were so many of them it just boggled your mind.”4
In the briefing rooms at 0200, June 6, the men buzzed with excitement. They agreed that this had to be the invasion. The briefing officers, “grinning like a skunk eating chocolate,” called them to attention, pulled back the curtain covering the map, and announced the target. As Lt. Carl Carden of the 370th Bomb Group remembered it, “Everything exploded and the cheers went up all over the room and there was a long period of joy. Now we were getting down to business and from now on the Americans were on the attack.”5
The details of the briefing kept most spirits high; the crews were told they would be flying high, that flak would be light and the Luftwaffe nonexistent. Nevertheless, what about fighter cover, someone asked. “There will be 3,500 Allie
d fighters over the beach this morning,” one briefer assured them.
“We were told it was our job to prepare the ground to the best of our ability to enable the infantry to get ashore, to stay ashore, and fight and win,” Lt. John Robinson of the 344th Bomb Group, Ninth Air Force said. “We also hoped that while they were about it they’d kill a whole bunch of those damned antiaircraft gunners for whom we had no love or pity.”6
But for the Marauder crews headed for the Cotentin coast, where they would be hitting artillery emplacements, the details of their mission were distinctly discouraging. They would be going in at 500 feet, if necessary.
“Did he say 500 feet?” Sergeant Lovelace asked a buddy. “That shook us some. The last time B-26s had gone down on the deck like that they had lost ten out of ten in a low-level mission in Holland.”7
The Marauder, a two-engine medium bomber built by Martin, had high tail fins, a cigar-shaped body, and short wings. The crews called the B-26 the “flying prostitute” because she had “no visible means of support.” They had an affection for the craft that was well expressed by Lieutenant Robinson: “The Marauders were, without any doubt, the best bombers in the whole wide world.”8
For Lt. J. K. Havener of the Ninth Air Force, the target was the gun position near Barfleur at St.-Martin-de-Varreville. His plane would carry twenty 250-pound general-purpose bombs. “Our mission was not to knock out the gun positions but to stun the German gunners and infantry, keeping them holed up, and to create a network of ready-made foxholes which our troops could use when they gained a foothold on what was to become known as Utah Beach.”9
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys Page 66