The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  The men of the airborne divisions had one other vital mission. The enemy had to be cleared off glider landing areas, for big glider trains were coming in to reinforce the Americans, just as they were the British, before dawn and again in the evening. The first flight, more than one hundred gliders, was scheduled to arrive at 4:00 A.M.

  From the beginning the Americans worked against staggering odds. Like the British, the U.S. divisions were critically scattered. Only one regiment, the 505th of the 82nd, fell accurately. Sixty percent of all equipment was lost, including most of the radios, mortars and ammunition. Worse still, many of the men were lost, too. They came down miles from any recognizable landmarks, confused and alone. The route of the planes was from west to east and it took just twelve minutes to cross the peninsula. Jumping too late meant landing in the English Channel, too early meant coming down somewhere between the west coast and the flooded areas. Some sticks were dropped so badly they actually landed closer to the western side of the peninsula than to their zones on the east. Hundreds of men, heavily weighted with equipment, fell into the treacherous swamps of the Merderet and the Douve. Many drowned, some in less than two feet of water. Others, jumping too late, fell into the darkness over what they thought was Normandy and were lost in the Channel.

  One entire stick of 101st paratroopers—some fifteen or eighteen soldiers—met such a death. In the next plane Corporal Louis Merlano fell on a sandy beach in front of a sign reading “Achtung Minen!” He had been the second man in his stick to jump. Off in the darkness Merlano could hear the quiet slapping sound of waves. He was lying in sand dunes surrounded by Rommel’s anti-invasion obstacles, just a few yards above Utah Beach. As he lay there, trying to get his breath, he heard screams far off in the distance. Merlano was not to find out until later that the screams were coming from the Channel, where the last eleven men from his plane were at that moment drowning.

  Merlano got off the beach fast, ignoring the possibility that it was mined. He climbed over a barbed-wire fence and ran for a hedgerow. Someone else was already there; Merlano didn’t stop. He ran across a road and started to climb a stone wall. Just then he heard an agonized cry behind him. He whirled around. A flame thrower was hosing the hedgerow he had just passed, and outlined in the flame was the figure of a fellow paratrooper. Stunned, Merlano crouched down by the wall. From the other side came the shouts of German voices and the firing of machine guns. Merlano was caught in a heavily fortified area, with Germans on all sides of him. He prepared to fight for his life. There was one thing he had to do first. Merlano, who was attached to a signal unit, pulled from his pocket a two-by-two-inch communications log containing codes and passwords for three days. Carefully he tore up the log and, page by page, ate it all.

  On the other side of the airhead men were floundering in the dark swamps. The Merderet and the Douve were dotted with parachutes of all colors and the little lights on equipment bundles gleamed eerily from out of the marshes and the water. Men plummeted down from the sky, barely missing one another as they splashed beneath the surface of the water. Some never appeared again. Others came up gasping, fighting for air and sawing desperately at chutes and equipment that could drag them under again.

  Like Chaplain John Gwinnett of the British 6th Airborne fifty miles away, the 101st chaplain, Captain Francis Sampson, landed in the wastes. The water was over his head. The priest was pinned by his equipment and his parachute, caught by a strong wind, remained open above him. Frantically he cut away the equipment hanging from him—including his Mass kit. Then, with his parachute acting like a great sail, he was blown along for about a hundred yards until he finally came to rest in shallow water. Exhausted, he lay there for about twenty minutes. At last, disregarding the machine-gun and mortar fire that was beginning to come in, Father Sampson set out for the area where he had first gone under and doggedly began diving for his Mass kit. He got it on the fifth try.

  It wasn’t until much later that Father Sampson, thinking back about the experience, realized that the Act of Contrition he had so hurriedly said as he struggled in the water was actually the grace before meals.

  In countless small fields and pastures between the Channel and the flooded areas, Americans came together in the night, drawn not by hunting horns but by the sound of a toy cricket. Their lives depended on a few cents’ worth of tin fashioned in the shape of a child’s snapper. One snap of the cricket had to be answered by a double snap and—for the 82nd alone—a password. Two snaps required one in reply. On these signals men came out of hiding, from trees and ditches, around the sides of buildings, to greet one another. Major General Maxwell D. Taylor and a bareheaded, unidentified rifleman met at the corner of a hedgerow and warmly hugged each other. Some paratroopers found their units right away. Others saw strange faces in the night and then the familiar, comforting sight of the tiny American flag stitched above the shoulder patch.

  As confused as things were these men adapted quickly. The battle-tested troopers of the 82nd, with airborne assaults in Sicily and Salerno under their belts, knew what to expect. The 101st, on its first combat jump, was fiercely determined not to be outdone by its more illustrious partner. All these men wasted as little time as possible, for they had no time to waste. The lucky ones who knew where they were assembled promptly and set out for their objectives. The lost ones joined with small groups made up of men from different companies, battalions and regiments. Troopers of the 82nd found themselves being led by 101st officers and vice versa. Men from both divisions fought side by side, often for objectives they had never heard of.

  Hundreds of men found themselves in small fields, surrounded on all sides by tall hedgerows. The fields were silent little worlds, isolated and scary. In them every shadow, every rustle, every breaking twig was the enemy. Private Dutch Schultz, in one such shadowy world, was unable to find his way out. He decided to try his cricket. On the very first click he got a response he hadn’t bargained for: machine-gun fire. He threw himself to the ground, aimed his MI rifle in the direction of the machine-gun position, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened. He had forgotten to load it. The machine gun opened up again and Dutch ran for cover in the nearest hedgerow.

  He made another careful reconnaissance of the field. Then he heard a twig crackle. Dutch felt a moment’s panic, but he calmed down as his company commander, Lieutenant Jack Tallerday, came through the hedgerow. “Is that you, Dutch?” Tallerday called softly. Schultz hurried over to him. Together they left the field and joined a group that Tallerday had already assembled. There were men from the 101st Division and from all three of the 82nd’s regiments. For the first time since the jump Dutch felt easy. He was no longer alone.

  Tallerday moved down along the side of a hedgerow with his little group fanning out behind him. A short while later they heard and then saw a group of men coming toward them. Tallerday snapped his cricket and thought he heard an answering click. “As our two groups approached each other,” Tallerday says, “it was quite evident by the configuration of their steel helmets that they were Germans.” And then there occurred one of those curious and rare happenings in war. Each group silently walked past the other in a kind of frozen shock, without firing a shot. As the distance between them grew, the darkness obliterated the figures as though they had never existed.

  All over Normandy this night paratroopers and German soldiers met unexpectedly. In these encounters men’s lives depended on their keeping their wits and often on the fraction of a second it took to pull a trigger. Three miles from Ste-Mère-Église, Lieutenant John Walas of the 82nd almost tripped over a German sentry who was in front of a machine-gun nest. For a terrible moment, each man stared at the other. Then the German reacted. He fired a shot at Walas at point-blank range. The bullet struck the bolt mechanism of the lieutenant’s rifle, which was directly in front of his stomach, nicked his hand and ricocheted off. Both men turned and fled.

  One man, Major Lawrence Legere of the 101st, talked his way out of trouble. In a field betwe
en Ste.-Mère-Église and Utah Beach, Legere had collected a little group of men and was leading them toward the rendezvous point. Suddenly Legere was challenged in German. He knew no German but he was fluent in French. As the other men were some distance behind him and had not been seen, Legere, in the darkness of the field, posed as a young farmer and explained rapidly in French that he had been visiting his girl and was on his way home. He apologized for being out after curfew. As he talked, he was busily removing a strip of adhesive tape from a grenade, placed there to prevent the accidental release of the pin. Still talking, he yanked the pin, threw the grenade and hit the ground as it went off. He found he had killed three Germans. “When I backtracked to pick up my brave little band,” Legere recalls, “I found they had scattered to the four winds.”

  There were many ludicrous moments. In a dark orchard one mile from Ste.-Mère-Église, Captain Lyle Putnam, one of the 82nd’s battalion surgeons, found himself utterly alone. He gathered up all his medical equipment and began searching for a way out. Near one of the hedgerows he saw a figure approaching cautiously. Putnam froze in his tracks, leaned forward and loudly whispered the 82nd’s password, “Flash.” There was a moment of electric silence as Putnam waited for the countersign, “Thunder.” Instead, to his amazement, Putnam recalls, the other man yelled, “Jesus Christ!” and turned and “fled like a maniac.” The doctor was so angry he forgot to be frightened. Half a mile away his friend Captain George Wood, the 82nd’s chaplain, was also alone and busily snapping his cricket. No one answered him. Then he jumped with fright as a voice behind him said: “For God’s sake, Padre, stop that damn noise.” Chastened, Chaplain Wood followed the paratrooper out of the field.

  By afternoon these two men would be in Madame Angèle Levrault’s schoolhouse in Ste.-Mère-Église fighting their own war—a war where uniforms made no difference. They would be tending the wounded and dying of both sides.

  By 2:00 A.M., although more than an hour would pass before all the paratroopers were on the ground, many small groups of determined men were closing in on their objectives. One group was actually attacking its target, an enemy stronghold of dugouts and machine-gun and antitank-gun positions in the village of Foucarville just above Utah Beach. The position was of extreme importance, for it controlled all movement on the main road running behind the Utah Beach area—a road which enemy tanks would have to use to reach the beachhead. Storming Foucarville called for a full company, but only eleven men under Captain Cleveland Fitzgerald had as yet arrived. So determined were Fitzgerald and his little group that they assaulted the position without waiting for more men. In this, the first recorded 101st unit battle of the D-Day airborne assault, Fitzgerald and his men got as far as the enemy command post. There was a short, bloody battle. Fitzgerald was shot in the lung by a sentry, but as he fell he killed the German. At last the outnumbered Americans had to pull back to the outskirts to await dawn and reinforcements. Unknown to them nine paratroopers had reached Foucarville some forty minutes earlier. They had dropped into the strongpoint itself. Now, under the eyes of their captors, they were sitting in a dugout, oblivious of the battle, listening to a German practicing on his harmonica.

  These were crazy moments for everyone—particularly the generals. They were men without staffs, without communications, and without men to command. Major General Maxwell Taylor found himself with several officers but only two or three enlisted men. “Never,” he told them, “have so few been commanded by so many.”

  Major General Matthew B. Ridgway was alone in a field, pistol in hand, counting himself lucky. As he was later to recall, “at least if no friends were visible neither were any foes.” His assistant, Brigadier General James M. “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, who at this time was in complete charge of the 82nd’s parachute assault, was miles away in the swamps of the Merderet.

  Gavin and a number of paratroopers were trying to salvage equipment bundles from the marshes. In them were the radios, bazookas, mortars and ammunition Gavin so desperately needed. He knew that by dawn the heel of the airhead which his men were to hold would be under heavy attack. As he stood knee-deep in cold water, alongside the troopers, other worries were crowding in on Gavin. He was not sure where he was, and he wondered what to do about the number of injured men who had found their way to his little group and were now lying along the edge of the swamp.

  Nearly an hour earlier, seeing red and green lights on the far edge of the water, Gavin had sent his aide, Lieutenant Hugo Olson, to find out what they meant. He hoped they were the assembly lights of two of the 82nd’s battalions. Olson had not returned and Gavin was getting anxious. One of his officers, Lieutenant John Devine, was out in the middle of the river, stark naked, diving for bundles. “Whenever he came up, he stood out like a white statue,” Gavin recalls, “and I couldn’t help thinking that he’d be a dead turkey if he was spotted by the Germans.”

  Suddenly a lone figure came struggling out of the swamps. He was covered with mud and slime and was wringing wet. It was Olson coming to report that there was a railroad directly across from Gavin and his men, on a high embankment which snaked through the marshes. It was the first good news of the night. Gavin knew there was only one railroad in the district—the Cherbourg-Carentan track, which passed down the Merderet valley. The general began to feel better. For the first time he knew where he was.

  In an apple orchard outside Ste.-Mère-Église, the man who was to hold the northern approaches to the town—the flank of the Utah invasion bridgehead—was in pain and trying not to show it. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort of the 82nd had broken his ankle on the jump, but he had made up his mind to stay in the fighting no matter what happened.

  Bad luck had dogged Vandervoort. He had always taken his job seriously, sometimes too seriously. Unlike many another Army officer, Vandervoort had never had a popular nickname, nor had he permitted himself the kind of close, easy relationship with his men that other officers enjoyed. Normandy was to change all that—and more. It was to make him, as General Matthew B. Ridgway later recalled, “one of the bravest, toughest battle commanders I ever knew.” Vandervoort was to fight on his broken ankle for forty days, side by side with the men whose approval he wanted most.

  Vandervoort’s battalion surgeon, Captain Putnam, still fumbling from his encounter with the strange paratrooper in the hedgerow, came across the colonel and some of his troopers in the orchard. Putnam still vividly remembers his first sight of Vandervoort: “He was seated with a rain cape over him, reading a map by flashlight. He recognized me and, calling me close, quietly asked that I take a look at his ankle with as little demonstration as possible. His ankle was obviously broken. He insisted on replacing his jump boot, and we laced it tightly.” Then, as Putnam watched, Vandervoort picked up his rifle and, using it as a crutch, took a step forward. He looked at the men around him. “Well,” he said, “let’s go.” He moved out across the field.

  Like the British paratroopers to the east, the Americans—in humor, in sorrow, in terror and in pain—began the work they had come to Normandy to do.

  This, then, was the beginning. The first invaders of D Day, almost eighteen thousand Americans, British and Canadians, were on the flanks of the Normandy battlefield. In between lay the five invasion beaches and beyond the horizon, steadily approaching, the mighty five-thousand-ship invasion fleet. The first of the vessels, the U.S.S. Bayfield, carrying the commander of the Navy’s Force U, Rear Admiral D. P. Moon, was now within twelve miles of Utah Beach and preparing to drop anchor.

  Slowly the great invasion plan was beginning to unfold—and still the Germans remained blind. There were many reasons. The weather, their lack of reconnaissance (only a few planes had been sent over the embarkation areas in the preceding weeks, and all had been shot down), their stubborn belief that the invasion must come at the Pas-de-Calais, the confusion and overlapping of their own commands, and their failure to take the decoded underground messages seriously all played a part. Even their radar stations failed them
this night. Those that had not been bombed had been confused by Allied planes flying along the coast dropping bundles of “window”—strips of tinfoil which snowed the screens. Only one station had made a report. It was only “normal Channel traffic.”

  More than two hours had elapsed since the first paratroopers had landed. Only now were the German commanders in Normandy beginning to realize that something important might be happening. The first scattered reports were beginning to come in and slowly, like a patient coming out of anesthetic, the Germans were awakening.

  **I have not been able to determine how many were killed and wounded in the square, because sporadic fighting continued all over the town until the actual attack which resulted in its capture. But the best estimates put casualties at about twelve killed, wounded and missing. Most of these men were from F Company, 2nd Battalion, 505th Regiment, and there is a pathetic little note in their official records which reads: “2nd Lt. Cadish and the following enlisted men dropped in the town and were killed almost instantly: Shearer, Blankenship, Bryant, Van Holsbeck and Tlapa.” Private John Steele saw two men fall into the burning house, and one of those he believes was Private White of his own mortar squad, who dropped behind him.

  Lieutenant Colonel William E. Ekman, commanding the 505th, also says that “one of the chaplains of the regiment … who dropped in Ste.-Mère-Église was captured and executed within minutes.”

  5

  GENERAL ERICH MARCKS stood at a long table studying the war maps spread out before him. He was surrounded by his staff. They had been with him ever since his birthday party, briefing the 84th Corps commander for the war games in Rennes. Every now and then the general called for another map. It seemed to his intelligence officer, Major Friedrich Hayn, that Marcks was preparing for the Kriegsspiel as though it was a real battle, instead of merely a theoretical invasion of Normandy.