DAWN OF D-DAY
The American Air Drop
Alexandre Renaud - Sainte-Mére-Eglise
Sainte-Mére-Eglise is a little market town of grey stone houses which stand on each side of the main road from Cherbourg to the south. It has relics of the time when Roman legions marched up that road, and of William the Conqueror’s armies; but for six or seven centuries it traded humbly in farm implements and horses and cattle and cheese, and had no military interest. Even on the night when it suddenly formed the stage of high drama, its importance was only fortuitous. It was the beach, the roads and the rivers which were important. Sainte-Mére-Eglise just had the luck, good or bad, to be there, at a cross-roads on the map, in the middle of the area of the airborne forces’ drop, and so to win the double-edged honour of being the first town in France which the Allied forces planned to liberate.
For precisely four years, an enormous swastika flag had flown from the flagstaff outside the town hall, and Sainte-Mére-Eglise, patient and cynical, had watched the progress of the German occupation. It remembered the early days in 1940 when the pick of the German Army, proud and confident, had marched up the road singing “Wie fahren gegen England,” and promising that Britain in three weeks would be kaput. These German soldiers compelled some grudging admiration from the people who watched them pass; but even then, the town’s small boys had perfected a technique of making sea-sick and drowning noises which ruined displays of military pomp; and the town witnessed the first tarnishing of German pride when the invasion of England had had to be postponed. Since then, the occupation of Sainte-Mére-Eglise had mirrored the creeping defeat of the German Army. Little by little, the finer troops had disappeared to face their doom in Russia or North Africa or Italy; old men and boys replaced them, men who were sick or partly disabled by wounds, and finally the dregs of the foreign conscripts.
Through the B.B.C., Sainte-Mére-Eglise followed the news of the war and waited from season to season for its liberation. At first, it clutched at every hint that the invasion was coming, and so it often suffered disappointment. As early as the spring of 1943, the B.B.C. told people to move from the coasts. A great spring offensive was expected. Churchill broadcast, and people understood him to mean that France would be invaded before the leaves fell in autumn. But the leavs fell, and no invasion came, and Sainte-Mére-Eglise found it hard to maintain its faith through another winter.
In March and April of 1944, there were signs of new German activity. Exerciss were held continuously. These were the local results of the arrival of the new division which upset airborne plan, and of Rommel’s energy. The Frenchmen were astonished to learn that the Germans really thought the district might be invaded; for they themselves, by then, hardly believed that the Bristish would ever invade, and were certain that if they did, they would go to the district of Calais, or else to Holland. Not even the increasing air bombardment of the coast in the first days of June made them change their opinion. The swastika flag had flown so long outside their town hall that people hardly dared to hope to see it hauled down again. But on June 5th, at an airfield in england, the commander of a parachute regiment showed his men an American flag, and told them it was the flag which the regiment had hoisted in Naples when it fell; and he promised them they would fly it in Sainte-Mére-Eglise before the morning
The delicate task of representing the town in its relations with the Germans had fallen upon the mayor, Alexandre Renaud, proprietor of the chemist’s shop in the square in the centre of the town. Chemists usually know their townsmen well, and so do mayors; being both, M. Renaud knew almost everything there was to know about Sainte-Mére-Eglise.
The night began with a house on fire on the opposite side of the square to the chemist’s shop. M. Renaud had just gone to bed, uneasy in his mind, for he had spent the evening at an upstairs window, watching the flashes and flares of a tremendous raid somewhere in the direction of the coast. he was roused by somebody banging on his front door; the fire brigade wanted all the men they could muster to help them by carrying water. He dressed quickly and leaving his wife to look after the children, he crossed the familiar square, beneath the chestnut and lime trees in front of the church. The house was blazing. Nobody knew how it had started. it might have been just an accident, but the sky was full of aircraft and it seemed more likely that something - not a bomb, but a flare perhaps - had fallen on the roof, which was well alight.
The flames lit up the bell-tower of the church, where German machine-gunners, posted on the roof, were shooting aimlessly at the aircraft overhead, filling the sky with arches of tracer bullets. The earth below the trees vibrated with the explosion of distant bombs.
Then above the sounds of war, the church bell rang. It continued to ring, urgently and quickly: the tocsin, the ancient signal of alarm. m. Renaud stopped on his way to the pump, with a new clutch at the heart as he asked himself what more disaster the clamour of the bell foretold. He instinctively looked up towards the tower, and so he saw what was coming: low over the rooftops and the the trees, almost in silence, a host of aircraft sweeping across the town, their lights burning, their wings and bodies black against the moon; and then as the first of the waves of them receded, the giant confetti which drifted in their wake.
M. Renaud and the firemen stood amazed, neglecting the fire, unable to believe that the thing they had thought about for so long was really happening, and was happening in Sainte-Mére-Eglise itself. High up, parachutes were seen in silhouette against the sky; as they fell, the men on them were also seen, in the light of the fire. The machine-gunners on the church tower and in the square saw them too and fired lower. The watchers, horrified, saw the convulsion of a man who was shot as he was falling. They saw a parachute which draped an old tree: the parachutist began to climb down, the machine-gunners saw him and left him swinging limply in his harness. They also saw a man fall into the fire and crash through the burning roof. Sparks sprted out, and the flames blazed up afresh. More squadrons of planes were passing over: the bell still ringing; shots cracking through the square. the German soldiers ordered the Frenchmen indoors, and m. renaud, anxious for his wife and children, hurried home. A German beneath the trees, pointing at the body of a parachutist, shouted to him with satisfaction: “Tommies - all kaput.”
This fatuous optimism may have been shared, for the moment, by other Germans in the square of Sainte-Mére-Eglise, for the few parachutists who had the bad luck to drop within the firelight presented easy targets. it was not the intention, of course to frop on the roofs of the town itself. The men who did so were only stragglers from a whole regiment which landed between the town and the river, and this regiment had the most accurate drop of any parachute unit that night. A thousand of its 2,200 men fell in the dropping zone and assembled at once. Most of the rest were not very far away, and came in before daylight. Within an hour of dropping; the regiment had begun its first task of clearing Sainte-Mére-Eglise and blocking the road to the north and south of it.
The old soldier in M.Renaud made him sally forth before long to see what was going on, and he happened to pass a pond, which had once been the public laundry, in the nick of time to seize the lines of a parachute and haul out a man who had had a ducking there. But after that adventure, he spent the rest of the night indoors with his wife and children, listening and trying to interpret the sounds from the streets of the town; for the moon had set, and it was too dark to see anything from the windows.
The firing had died away, except for the machine guns on the church. he heard cars and motor cycles in the square, but saw no lights, and he guessed that the anti-aircraft battery was retreating. For almost an hour from two o’clock to three, there was a strange and ominous silence. About three, he saw matches lit below the chestnut trees, and the glow of cigarettes, and the light of a flashlamp, and he and his family debated who was there: the germans, or the “Tommies.” And at last, day began to break, and as the light penetrated below the trees, he was astonished to see that his square was occupied not by Germans, or by “Tommies,” but by men in the round helmets he had seen on American troops in German newspaper pictures. The people of Sainte-Mére-Eglise, through all their years of listening to the B.B.C., had never dreamed that their liberators, in the end, would be American.
Very soon after dawn, a parachute captain knocked on the door, and introduced himself, and offered the mayor a piece of chewing gum. The new regime had started. The captain asked the way to the headquarters of the german commander of the town. M. Renaud escorted him there himself; but during the night the German commander and all his men had gone. The swastika flag had gone too; the American flag from Naples flew instead.
So Sainte-Mére-Eglise received the honour of being the first town in France which was liberated; an honour which it proudly remembers still, especially at its annual fete on the sixth of June. But the honour was costly, and the price had still to be paid; for during the next two days, till tanks and reinforcements came from Utah beach, the Germans turned their batteries on the town and shelled it heavily; and many of M. renaud’s townspeople who had lived through four dark years were killed in the first two days of the freedom for which they had hoped so long.
Extracted from Dawn of D-Day by David Howarth
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Cotentin Peninsula Facing the Allied landing at Utah beach were the 709th German Division and the parts of the newly-arrived 91st, with the 243rd which was several miles away on the Western shore. The 709th and the 243rd were "static" units which were little more than non-mobile coastal defenses manned by relatively lower quality troops. A large number of the battalions in the peninsula were either very young, or very old, and several were composed of Russian ethnic minorities (Cossacks, Tartars, etc.). In contrast, the 91st, which had recently arrived to the peninsula from the eastern front, was much better trained and mobile equipped. No armor was immediately available in the area except for the 100th Panzer battalion which was equipped with older and captured equipment. Also of consequence was the German 6th Parachute Regiment, commanded by Colonel Frederick von der Heydt - a highly-trained and experienced fighting unit which closely resembled their American airborne counterparts. The Flight Starting at around 11 PM on June 5th, approximately 13,000 American parachutists would descend upon the peninsula via hundreds of twin-engined C-47s. The C-47 was a DC-3 aircraft that held 18 parachutists (known as a "stick" to the men). At the low speed of 120 mph, the flight would take them over an hour. The parachutists were weighed down with nearly their body weight in equipment and weapons. They would be prepared as much as possible since they would be dropping behind enemy lines - cutoff from the invading force. Whatever weapons they would fight with would be carried on their backs or strapped to their harnesses. The exception to this would be the artillery battalion of twelve 75 mm howitzers which would accompany the division. Later, heavy mortars and heavier anti-tank could be brought in by glider. In any case, there was no guarantee that the parachutist would form up with his unit once soon after he left the plane - if at all. The planes took off and flew at 500 feet for about half and hour to avoid detection by German radar. After a slight ascent to make landfall and avoid the AAA guns, the final approach would be at 700 feet. Meteorologists had called for a calm night and nearly the entire flight was without incident. But, as the flights approached the coast of France, they encountered a cloud bank that dispersed many of the planes...only a few minutes before the dropzone. Between the chaotic mess that followed the dispersal and the enemy flak, several planes were damaged or destroyed...along with numerous injured parachutists within. In addition, because of flak, many pilots increased their speed and varied their altitude dramatically. Despite these dangerous conditions, the green light was given for the crew to jump. Aircraft speeds had reached as high as 150 mph (normal jump speed was 90 mph) - which led to numerous injuries. At 700 feet, the descent took less than one minute. By this time, German flak artillery and AAA were shooting at anything in the sky...including the parachutists themselves. Many were hit on their way down or drowned upon landing in the flooded plains of the Douve and Merderet rivers. Although the plains were mostly only 2 to 3 feet deep (in some places more), the weight of the men, in conjunction with the dragging of the parachute could easily prove fatal. In contrast, unopened chutes among the Americans were very uncommon with their static-line parachutes. In addition, the Americans carried a reserve chute just in case. Of course, trees, buildings, anti-glider poles and other obstacles lent to a large number of injuries. But, many were injured from the impact of the landing itself - which resulted in usually sprains and broken legs. But, by far, the potentially most dangerous situation arose from the unexpected turbulence and the resulting dispersal of the units. The Landings Ste Mere-Eglise The commander of 3rd Battalion, 505th, Lt. Col. Ed Krause, had landed one mile west of the village and quickly began gathering stray men. Within an hour, he had managed to round up around 180 men and began heading straight into the village. As mentioned above, after all the immediate paratroopers were either killed or captured, and the fire had been put out, the German garrison went back to bed. Krause entered the town unhindered and was shown the German billets by a local Frenchman whom they ran across. 30 Germans were captured and about 10 were killed - while others fled to the nearby woods. By 6 A.M. Krause had secured the village and thus, cut off German communication and the main route between Cherbourg and the rest of the German Army.
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