The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • •

  In Ste.-Mère-Église, the fire was raging out of control. The men of the 506th who had landed in and near the town had scattered. At 0145, the second platoon of F Company, 505th, had the bad luck to jump right over the town, where the German garrison was fully alerted.

  Ken Russell was in that stick. “Coming down,” he recalled, “I looked to my right and I saw this guy, and instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down.” Evidently a shell had hit his Gammon grenades.

  Horrified, Russell looked to his left. He saw another member of his stick, Pvt. Charles Blankenship, being drawn into the fire (the fire was sucking in oxygen and drawing the parachutists toward it). “I heard him scream once, then again before he hit the fire, and he didn’t scream anymore.”

  The Germans filled the sky with tracers. Russell was trying “to hide behind my reserve chute because we were all sitting ducks.” He got hit in the hand. He saw Lt. Harold Cadish and Pvts. H. T. Bryant and Ladislaw Tlapa land on telephone poles around the church square. The Germans shot them before they could cut themselves loose. “It was like they were crucified there.”36

  Pvt. Penrose Shearer landed in a tree opposite the church and was killed while hanging there. Pvt. John Blanchard, also hung up in a tree, managed to get his trench knife out and cut his risers. In the process he cut one of his fingers off “and didn’t even know it until later.”37

  Russell jerked on his risers to avoid the fire and came down on the slate roof of the church. “I hit and a couple of my suspension lines went around the church steeple and I slid off the roof.” He was hanging off the edge. “And Steele, [Pvt.] John Steele, whom you’ve heard a lot about [in the book and movie The Longest Day], he came down and his chute covered the steeple.” Steele was hit in the foot.

  Sgt. John Ray landed in the church square, just past Russell and Steele. A German soldier came around the corner. “I’ll never forget him,” Russell related. “He was red-haired, and as he came around he shot Sergeant Ray in the stomach.” Then he turned toward Russell and Steele and brought his machine pistol up to shoot them. “And Sergeant Ray, while he was dying in agony, he got his .45 out and he shot the German soldier in the back of the head and killed him.”

  Through all this the church bell was constantly ringing. Russell could not remember hearing the bell. Steele, who was hanging right outside the belfry, was deaf for some weeks thereafter because of it. (He was hauled in by a German observer in the belfry, made prisoner, but escaped a few days later.)

  Russell, “scared to death,” managed to reach his trench knife and cut himself loose. He fell to the ground and “dashed across the street and the machine gun fire was knocking up pieces of earth all around me, and I ran over into a grove of trees on the edge of town and I was the loneliest man in the world. Strange country, and just a boy, I should have been graduating from high school rather than in a strange country.”

  There was a flak wagon in the grove, shooting at passing Dakotas. “I got my Gammon grenade out and I threw it on the gun and the gun stopped.” He moved away from town. A German soldier on a bicycle came down the road. Russell shot him. Then he found an American, from the 101st (probably a trooper from the 506th who had landed in Ste.-Mère-Église a half-hour earlier).

  Russell asked, “Do you know where you are?”

  “No,” the trooper replied. They set out to find someone who did know.38, III

  • •

  Pvt. James Eads of the 82nd landed in an enormous manure pile, typical of Normandy. At least it was a soft landing. Three German soldiers came out of the farmhouse and ran toward him. “Oh hell,” Eads said to himself, “out of the frying pan, into a latrine, now this.” His rifle was still strapped to his chest. He couldn’t get out of his harness (the British airborne had a quick-release device, but the Americans had to unbuckle their straps, a difficult proposition in the best of circumstances). Eads pulled his .45, thumbed back the hammer, and started firing. The first two men fell, the third kept coming. Eads had one bullet left. He dropped the last man right at his feet.

  Still stuck in his harness in the manure, Eads was trying to cut himself loose when a German machine gun opened up on him. “Damn,” he said aloud, “is the whole Kraut army after me, just one scared red-headed trooper?” Bullets ripped into his musette bag. He tried to bury himself in the manure. He heard an explosion and the firing stopped. He cut himself loose and began moving. He heard a noise behind him, decided to take a chance, and snapped his cricket. Two answering clicks came back at once.

  “I could have kissed him,” Eads recalled. “His first words were ‘I got those overanxious Kraut machine gunners with a grenade, but it blew off my helmet and I can’t find it.’ Then he took a breath and exclaimed, ‘Holy cow—you stink!’ ”39

  • •

  For many of the men of the 82nd Airborne, whose drop zones were to the west of Ste.-Mère-Église, astride the Merderet River, there was a special hell. Rommel had ordered the locks near the mouth of the river, down by Carentan, opened at high tide, closed at low tide, so as to flood the valley. Because the grass had grown above the flooded area, Allied air-reconnaissance photographs failed to reveal the trap. The water generally was not more than a meter deep, but that was deep enough to drown an overloaded paratrooper who couldn’t get up or cut himself out of his harness.

  Private Porcella was especially unlucky. He landed in the river itself, in water over his head. He had to jump up to take a breath. “My heart was beating so rapidly that I thought it would burst. I pleaded, ‘Oh, God, please don’t let me drown in this damn water.’ ” He bent over to remove his leg straps, but the buckle wouldn’t open. He jumped up for more air, then found that if he stood on his toes he could get his nose just above the water.

  Calming down a bit, he decided to cut the straps. He bent below the water and pulled his knife from his right boot. He jumped up, took a deep breath, bent down and slipped the knife between his leg and the strap, working the knife back and forth in an upward motion.

  “Nothing happened. I was in panic. I came up for another breath of air and thought my heart was going to burst with fright. I wanted to scream for help but I knew that would make matters worse. I told myself, ‘Think! I must think! Why won’t this knife cut the strap, it’s razor sharp?’ ”

  Porcella jumped up for more air and managed to say a Hail Mary. Then he realized that he had the blade backward. He reversed it and cut himself loose.

  That helped, but the weight of the musette bag and the land mine he was carrying still held him down. A few more strokes of the knife and they were gone. He moved slowly into somewhat shallower water, until it was only chest high. Then he became aware of rifle and machine-gun fire going over his head. “All the training I had received had not prepared me for this.”

  Suddenly there was a huge burst of orange flames in the sky. A C-47 had taken a direct hit and was a ball of flames. “Oh, my God. It’s coming toward me!” Porcella cried out.

  The plane was making a screaming noise that sounded like a horse about to die. Porcella tried to run away. The plane crashed beside him. “Suddenly it was dark again and it became very quiet.”

  Porcella resumed moving toward the high ground. He heard a voice call out “Flash.” He couldn’t believe it. “I thought I was the only fool in the world in this predicament.” He recognized the voice. It was his buddy, Dale Cable. Porcella reached out his right hand to touch Cable, who hollered this time “Flash!” Simultaneously Cable flipped the safety off his M-l. The muzzle was within inches of Porcella’s face. Porcella remembered the response and shouted back “Thunder!”

  Together, they began to encounter other troopers, also sloshing around in the flooded area. After further adventures, they finally made it to high ground.40

  Lt. Ralph De Weese of the 508th landed on his back in three feet of water. Before he had a chance to cut himself loose the wind inflated his canopy and started to drag him. The heavy equipment on
his stomach (reserve chute, rifle, mine, and field bag) prevented him from turning over. His riser was across his helmet and his helmet was fastened by the chin strap so he could not get it off. His head was under water. The chute dragged him several hundred yards.

  “Several times I thought it was no use and decided to open my mouth and drown, but each time the wind would slack up enough for me to put my head out of the water and catch a breath. I must have swallowed a lot of water because I didn’t take a drink for two days afterward.”

  With his last bit of energy he pulled out his trench knife and cut the risers. “Bullets were singing over my head from machine guns and rifles, but it didn’t bother me because at that point I didn’t care.”

  De Weese finally got out, found a couple of his men, and started down a road. He saw two Frenchmen and asked if they had seen any other Americans. They couldn’t understand him. He pointed to the American flag on his sleeve. One of the Frenchmen nodded happily, pulled out a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and pointed down the road. “I was one happy fellow to see those Luckies.”

  (Two months later, back in England, De Weese wrote his mother to describe his D-Day experiences. He told her the worst part was he had no dry cigarettes himself but felt he couldn’t relieve the Frenchman of those Luckies. He added that his pockets were full of little fish.)IV

  Pvt. David Jones of the 508th was also aquaplaned across the flooded area. He was blown to the edge; his chute wrapped around a tree and he was able to drag himself out of the water by the suspension lines. When he cut loose and climbed to the high ground, he had another fright. Back in England, during a night exercise, he had gone into a roadside pub and got into “a fairly good fistfight” with another trooper. After their buddies separated them, that trooper had vowed that once they got into combat “he was going to get my ass.” Now, in Normandy, “wouldn’t you know, the first person I met on the edge of that flood was that same trooper. He had me looking into the barrel of his tommy gun. Well, after we hugged and slapped each other on the back telling each other how fortunate we were to have made it through this far, we started off together.”41

  Altogether, thirty-six troopers of the 82nd drowned that night. An after-action report prepared on July 25, 1944, noted that “one complete stick from the 507th is still missing.” Another 173 troopers had broken a leg or arm when landing; sixty-three men had been taken prisoner.42

  • •

  Most of the POWs were taken before they could cut loose from their harness. Among them was Pvt. Paul Bouchereau, a Louisiana Cajun. He was taken to a German command post where other POWs were being harshly interrogated. The German captain, speaking English, was demanding to know how many Americans had jumped into the area.

  “Millions and millions of us,” one GI replied.

  The angry captain asked Bouchereau the same question. With his strong Cajun accent, Bouchereau answered, “Jus’ me!”

  Furious, the captain had the Americans clasp their hands over their heads and marched them off, under guard. After a few minutes, for no apparent reason, the German sergeant in charge opened fire on his prisoners with his machine pistol.

  “I can still recall his appearance,” Bouchereau said. “He was short and stocky and mean looking. His most striking feature was a scar on the right side of his face.” Bouchereau was hit near his left knee. “It felt like a severe bee sting.”

  The German sergeant calmed down and the march resumed. Bouchereau tried to keep up despite the squish of blood in his boot with every other step. He fell to the ground.

  “A Kraut came over and rolled me on my back. He cocked his rifle and put the business end to my head. I set a speed record for saying the rosary, but instead of pulling the trigger, the German laughed, then bent over and offered me an American cigarette. I suppose I should have been grateful that my life had been spared, but instead I was furious at the physical and mental torture to which I had been subjected. My mind and heart were filled with hate. I dreamed of the day when I would repay them in full measure for my suffering.”V

  Lt. Briand Beaudin, a surgeon in the 508th, had a happier experience as a POW. At about 0300 he was tending to wounded men in a farmhouse set up as an aid station when it was attacked by Germans. He stuck his helmet with its red cross on a long pole and pushed it out the door. The Germans stopped firing and took the American wounded to a German aid station, “where we medics were treated as friends by the German medical personnel.” The doctors worked together through the night and the following days. Although a prisoner for some weeks, Beaudin found his stay at the 91st Feldlazarett to be “most interesting.” He learned German techniques and taught them American methods.43

  • •

  The Germans manning the antiaircraft batteries had done a creditable job against the Allied air armada, but the reaction on the ground against the paratroopers was confused and hesitant. Partly this was because all the division and many of the regimental commanders were in Rennes for the map exercise, but there were many additional reasons. The most important was the failure of Troop Carrier Command to drop the parachutists in tight drop zones where they were supposed to be. At 0130, headquarters of the German Seventh Army had reports of paratroop landings east and northwest of Caen, at St.-Marcove, at Montebourg, on both sides of the Vire River, on the east coast of the Cotentin, and elsewhere. There was no discernible pattern to the drops, no concentrated force—just two men here, four there, a half-dozen somewhere else.44

  The Germans were further confused by the dummy parachutists dropped by the two SAS teams Captain Foote had organized. One party went in just before midnight between Le Havre and Rouen. An hour or so later, the commandant at Le Havre sent an agitated telegram to Seventh Army headquarters, repeated to Berlin, saying there had been a major landing upstream of him and he feared he was cut off. The second party dropped its dummies and set up its recordings of firefights southeast of Isigny. The German reserve regiment in the area, about 2,000 men strong, spent the small hours of June 6 beating the woods looking for a major airborne landing that was not there. For the Allies this was an extraordinarily profitable payoff from a small investment.45

  The Germans could not tell whether this was the invasion or a series of scattered raids or a diversion to precede landings in the Pas-de-Calais or a supply operation to the Resistance. In general, therefore, although they fired at passing airplanes they failed completely to deal with the real threat. Here and there local company commanders sent out patrols to investigate reports of paratroopers in the area, but for the most part the Wehrmacht stayed put in its barracks. Wehrmacht doctrine was to counterattack immediately against any offensive movement, but not on this night.

  Communications was a factor in the German failure. The American paratroopers had been told that if they could not do anything else, they could at least cut communication lines. The Germans in Normandy had been using secure telephone and cable lines for years and consequently had become complacent about their system. But on June 6, between 0100 and dawn, troopers acting alone or in small teams were knocking down telephone poles with their grenades, cutting lines with their knives, isolating the German units scattered in the villages.

  At around 0130 the signal officer at Colonel Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment HQ picked up a German message that indicated enemy paratroopers were landing in the vicinity of Ste.-Mère-Église. “I tried to reach General Marcks, but the whole telephone network was down,” Heydte recalled.46

  In most cases the cutting of wires was done on targets of opportunity, but in some instances it was planned. Lt. Col. Robert Wolverton, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 506th, had been given the mission of destroying the critical communication link between Carentan and the German forces in the Cotentin. Wolverton assigned the task to Captain Shettle, CO of Company I. Shettle said he needed to know the exact location, so in late May the intelligence people had plucked a French resister out of Carentan and brought him to England. He had pinpointed for Shettle the place where the Germa
ns had buried communication lines and a concrete casement that could be opened to gain access to it.

  Within a half hour of his drop, Shettle had gathered fifteen men from Company I. He set out, found the casement, placed the charges, and destroyed it. (Years later an officer from the German 6th Parachute Regiment, deployed in the area, told Shettle that the Germans were “astounded that the American had been able to disrupt their primary source of communication so quickly.”47)

  Colonel Heydte commanded the 6th Parachute Regiment. He was a professional soldier with a worldwide reputation earned in Poland, France, Russia, Crete, and North Africa. Heydte had his command post at Périers, his battalions scattered between there and Carentan. At 0030 he put his men on alert, but confusion caused by reports of landings all around the peninsula kept him from giving orders more specific than “Stay alert!” He desperately needed to get in touch with General Marcks but still could not get through.48

  Unknown to Heydte, one platoon of his regiment, billeted in a village near Périers, was having a party. Pvt. Wolfgang Geritzlehner recalled, “All of a sudden a courier ran toward us shouting, ‘Alert, alert, enemy paratroops!’ We laughed as we told him not to excite himself like that. ‘Here, sit down and drink a little Calvados with us.’ But then the sky was filled with planes. That sobered us up! At one stroke there were soldiers coming out of all the corners. It was like a swarm of maddened bees.”

  The 3,500 men of the German 6th Parachute Regiment began to form up. It did not go quickly. They were scattered in villages throughout the area, they had only seventy trucks at their disposal, many of them more museum pieces than working vehicles. Those seventy trucks were of fifty different makes, so it was impossible to provide replacement parts for broken equipment. Heydte’s elite troops would have to walk into the battle. Nor would they have much in the way of heavy weapons, just hand-held material. When the colonel had requested heavy mortars and antitank guns from the General Staff, he was told with a smile, “But come now, Heydte, for paratroops a dagger is enough.”