D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (34 page)

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.-Mere-Eglise. "I tried to reach General Marcks, but the whole telephone network was down," Heydte recalled.
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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 Germans 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."
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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 Periers, 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.
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Unknown to Heydte, one platoon of his regiment, billeted

in a village near Periers, was having a party. Pvt. Wolfgang Ger-itzlehner 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."

Nevertheless, the German paratroops were confident. "Frankly, we weren't afraid," Geritzlehner recalled. "We were so convinced that everything would be settled in a few hours that [when we formed up] we didn't even take our personal effects. Only our weapons, ammunition and some food. Everyone was conn-dent."
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To the east, where the British and Canadian gliderborne and paratroops were landing, the Germans were also immobilized, not by what the Allies were doing but because of their own command structure. Col. Hans von Luck's 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division was the one Rommel counted on to counterattack any invading forces on the east of the Orne Canal and River. At 0130 Luck got his first reports of landings. He immediately assembled his regiment and within the hour his officers and men were standing beside their tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.

But although Luck had prepared for exactly this moment, knew where he wanted to go—to the Orne Canal bridge, to take it back from Major Howard—over what routes, with what alternatives, he could not give the order to go. Only Hitler could release the panzers, and Hitler was sleeping. So was Rundstedt. Rommel was with his wife. General Dollmann was in Rennes. General

Feuchtinger was in Paris. Seventh Army headquarters couldn't make out what was happening.

At 0240, the acting commander of Rundstedt's Army Group West contended, "We are not confronted by a major action." His chief of staff replied, "It can be nothing less than that in view of the depth of the penetration." The argument went on without resolu-tion.
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Luck had no doubts. "My idea," he said forty years later, "was to counterattack before the British could organize their defenses, before their air force people could come, before the British navy could hit us. We were quite familiar with the ground and I think that we could have been able to get through to the bridges." Had he done so, Howard's company had only hand-held Piat antitank rockets to stop him with, and only a couple of those. But Luck could not act on his own initiative, so there he sat, a senior officer in the division Rommel most counted on to drive the Allies into the sea if they attacked near Caen, personally quite certain of what he could accomplish, rendered immobile by the intricacies of the leadership principle in the Third Reich.
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Beginning at 0300, the gliders began to come in to reinforce the paratroopers. On the left flank, sixty-nine gliders brought in a regiment and the commander of the 6th Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Richard Gale. They landed near Ranville on fields that had been cleared by paratroopers who had dropped a couple of hours earlier. Forty-nine of the gliders landed safely on the correct landing zone. They brought jeeps and antitank guns.

On the right flank, fifty-two American gliders swooped down on Hiesville, six kilometers from Ste.-Mere-Eglise. They were carrying troops, jeeps, antitank guns, and a small bulldozer. Brig. Gen. Don Pratt, assistant division commander of the 101st, was in the lead glider. Lt. Robert Butler was the pilot in the second glider. As the gliders approached the landing zone, German antiaircraft fire caused the tug pilots in their Dakotas to climb, so that when Butler and the others cut loose from their 300-yard-long nylon tow ropes they had to "circle and circle." Planes and gliders were being shot down.

For those who survived the antiaircraft fire the problem became the Norman hedgerows. The fields they enclosed were too small for a decent landing zone. Worse, the trees were much higher

than expected. (This was one of the great failures of Allied intelligence. As Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd put it, "No one had informed us of the immense size of the French hedgerows. We were of course told that we would be in hedgerow country, but we assumed that they would be similar to the English hedgerows, which were like small fences that the fox hunters jumped over."
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) In Normandy, the hedgerows were six feet or more high, virtually impenetrable. The roads between the hedgerows were sunken, meaning that the Germans had what amounted to a vast field of ready-made trenches. Why intelligence missed this obvious major feature of the battlefield is a mystery.

If the glider pilots came in low, they would see trees looming in front of them, try to pull up to go over, stall out, and crash. If they came in high, they couldn't get the gliders down in the small fields in time to avoid the hedgerow at the far end. The result, in the words of Sgt. James Elmo Jones of the 82nd, a pathfinder who was marking a field for the gliders, "was tragic. There's never been a greater slaughter than what took place that night. It was the most horrible thing that a person could see."
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In front of Lieutenant Butler, Col. Mike Murphy had the controls of the lead glider. Butler watched it take some hits from a German machine gun—General Pratt was killed, the first general officer on either side to die that day—and Murphy crashed into a hedgerow, breaking both his legs.
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Sgt. Leonard Lebenson of the 82nd was in a glider that hit a treetop, bounced off, hit the ground, glanced off the corner of a farmhouse, and finally crashed into another tree. "There were pieces of our glider strewn over the confines of this relatively small field, but miraculously only one guy was hurt."
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Lt. Charles Skidmore, a pilot, landed safely in a flooded area. He managed to get out of the water and immediately came under rifle fire. It came from a bunker holding a dozen conscripted Polish soldiers with one German sergeant in charge. The men Skid-more had brought in joined him and began firing back. There was a lull in the firefight. Then a single shot. Then shouts and laughter. Then the Poles emerged with their hands held high to surrender. They had shot the German sergeant.
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Private Reisenleiter of the 508th was in a field across from one where a glider came down. In the dark, with the hedgerows looming above him, he could hardly tell what was going on. He heard some crashing about on the other side and called out, "Flash."

"Flash your ass," the answer came back. "They're killing us out here and we're getting the hell out of here." Reisenleiter let them go; he figured only an American could have given such a response to the challenge.
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Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR watched the glider landing. "We could hear the sounds of planes in the distance, then no sounds at all. This was followed by a series of swishing noises. Adding to the swelling crescendo of sounds was the tearing of branches and trees followed by loud crashes and intermittent screams. The gliders were coming in rapidly, one after the other, from all different directions. Many overshot the field and landed in the surrounding woods, while others crashed into nearby farmhouses and stone walls.

"In a moment, the field was complete chaos. Equipment broke away and catapulted as it hit the ground, plowing up huge mounds of earth. Bodies and bundles were thrown all along the length of the field. Some of the glider troopers were impaled by the splintering wood of the fragile plywood gliders. We immediately tried to aid the injured, but knew we would first have to decide who could be helped and who could not. A makeshift aid station was set up and we began the grim process of separating the living from the dead. I saw one man with his legs and buttocks sticking out of the canvas fuselage of a glider. I tried to pull him out. He would not budge. When I looked inside the wreckage, I could see his upper torso had been crushed by a jeep."
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Some of the gliders carried bulldozers, to be used to make landing strips for later glider landings. Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th PIR recalled that "the sound of one glider hitting a tree was similar to smashing a thousand matchboxes all at once, and I could just visualize the poor pilot with that baby bulldozer smashing into him."
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The glider casualties for the 82nd were heavy. Of the 957 men who went into Normandy that night, twenty-five were killed, 118 wounded, fourteen missing (a 16 percent casualty rate). Nineteen of 111 jeeps were unserviceable, as were four of seventeen antitank guns.

Anytime a unit takes 16 percent casualties before it even gets into action, somebody had to have made a big mistake. But Leigh-

The first thing glider troops were taught to do after a landing was to run for cover in the woods or whatever surrounded the landing zone—they were
never
to stay in the open. That may explain the response to Reisenleiter.

Mallory had feared that the gliderborne troops might take 70 percent casualties, primarily because of Rommel's asparagus. In the event, those poles in the ground were inconsequential; it was the hedgerows that caused the problems. And the jeeps and antitank guns that did survive proved to be invaluable.

By 0400, the American paratroopers and gliderborne troops were scattered to hell and gone across the Cotentin. With few exceptions, they were lost. Except for Vandervoort's 2nd Battalion of the 505th, they were alone or gathered into groups of three, five, ten, at the most thirty men. They had lost the bulk of their equipment bundles; the little blue lights attached to the bundles had mostly failed to work. Most men had lost their leg bags, containing extra ammunition, field radios, tripods for the machine guns, and the like. The few radios that they had recovered had either got soaked in the flooded areas or damaged on hitting the ground and did not work. They had taken heavy casualties, from the opening shock, from hitting the ground too hard as a result of jumping too low, from German fire, from glider crashes.

Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st landed in a marsh. His company was supposed to assemble on a bugle call, but the bugler drowned. He found Pvt. John Fordik and a Private Smith. Smith could not walk—he had broken his back. Others in the stick had drowned. Cartledge gathered together ten men from his platoon. They carried Smith to high ground and covered him with brush. He insisted on retaining the two homing pigeons he had with him. One had a message on its leg saying the battalion was being wiped out; the other said it was accomplishing its mission. Smith had been told to release one or the other at daylight.