D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [36]
The most successful ambush took place not far from the command post of the German 91st Luftlande-Division near Picauville. Men from the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment opened fire on a staff car bringing the divisional commander, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Falley, back from the command post exercise in Rennes. Falley was thrown from the vehicle wounded and, as he crawled to retrieve his pistol, an American lieutenant shot him dead.
The plan was for the 82nd Airborne to drop on both sides of the River Merderet and secure the town of Sainte-Mère-Eglise. This would cut the road and rail link to Cherbourg. They were also to capture bridges over the Merderet so that the forces arriving by sea could advance rapidly across the peninsula and cut it off, before advancing north on the port of Cherbourg. The 101st, dropping closer to Utah beach, would seize the causeways leading to it across the flooded marshes and also take the bridges and a lock on the River Douve, between the town of Carentan and the sea.
Several platoons of the 82nd Airborne dropped in and around Sainte-Mère-Eglise as planned. One paratrooper’s chute caught on the church tower, where he hung helplessly, pretending to be dead while the bells deafened him. They were ringing in alarm because a house on the square by the church had caught fire and the townsfolk were passing buckets of water in a human chain. The scene below was chaotic. Soldiers from the local anti-aircraft unit under the command of an Austrian officer were firing in all directions as paratroopers dropped. Many Americans were riddled with bullets before they reached the ground. Those caught in trees stood little chance. One paratrooper dropped straight on to the blazing house. But with great determination, other rapidly formed groups who had landed outside the town began to advance towards its centre, dashing from cover to cover. Within an hour they had forced the Germans to withdraw. Sainte-Mère-Eglise was thus the first town in France to be liberated.
Sainte-Mère-Eglise became a focal point for many scattered detachments. One member of the 82nd Airborne was amazed to see two troopers from the 101st come riding bareback down the road on horses they had taken from a field. Another appeared driving a captured half-track motorcycle. Only a small number of paratroopers lost in the countryside appear to have been inactive. A few bedded down in ditches wrapped in their chutes, waiting for the dawn to find their bearings. The large majority, however, could not wait to get into the fighting. With nerves still taut after the jump, their blood was up. A trooper in the 82nd remembered his instructions only too clearly: ‘Get to the drop zone as fast as possible. Take no prisoners because they will slow you down.’
The fighting became pitiless on both sides; in fact that night probably saw the most vicious fighting of the whole war on the western front. One German soldier, justifying the annihilation of an American platoon which landed on his battalion’s heavy-weapons company, said later, ‘They didn’t come down to give us candies, you know. They came down to kill us, to fight.’ German soldiers had certainly been lectured by their officers about the ‘criminals’ recruited to the US Airborne forces and their fears were transformed into violence. But it is hard to establish the accuracy of horror stories about