D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [38]
A mixed force of some seventy-five paratroopers attacked the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. The officer who took command had no idea how many Germans were there, but their training paid off. With machine guns on the flanks to cover them, squads leapfrogged forward. A bazooka team rushed out into the main street and fired at the door of the church with an anti-tank round. A dozen German soldiers, with their leader waving an improvised white flag, appeared out through the smoke and dust with their hands in the air. The village was cleared in less than an hour. Most of the defenders had fled down the road towards Carentan.
Other groups moved to secure the causeways over the flooded areas behind Utah beach. A handful of paratroopers came across fifteen Germans transporting ammunition in three horse-drawn carts. They forced them to surrender and then made them march ahead down the road. A German speaker told them that if they came under fire they were not to move. A short time later a German machine gun opened up. The paratroopers took cover in the ditches. One of the Germans began to run, but was shot down immediately. ‘We threw him in the cart,’ one of the paratroopers recorded. ‘He died later that morning. From then on, we had no problem with the prisoners remaining erect in the road, under any conditions.’ This practice was, of course, a flagrant breach of the Geneva Convention.
As with the British airborne forces, one of the tasks of the paratroopers was to clear and secure the landing zone for the Waco gliders bringing in reinforcements and heavy equipment. But their landing near Sainte-Mère-Eglise was not to pass off so smoothly. ‘After a short march,’ wrote one paratrooper assigned to this duty, ‘we arrived at the field and encountered a small group of Germans who were guarding it. They were quickly routed after a brief firefight. The field was nothing more than a large clearing surrounded by woods and several farmhouses. We were quickly assigned to squads and formed a perimeter defense around it. There was nothing more to do but wait.’
At the appointed moment signal lamps were switched on. ‘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 were the tearing of branches and trees followed by loud crashes and intermittent screams.’ The gliders were coming in rapidly, one after the other, from different directions. Many overshot the field and landed in the surrounding woods, while others crashed into nearby farmhouses and stone walls. The gliders had been loaded with Jeeps, anti-tank guns, and other weapons too large to drop by parachute. The cargo was strapped down and secured to plywood floors. Pilots and glider troops alike had only canvas and light wood to protect them.
In a moment, the field was complete chaos, with gliders ploughing in all directions. Equipment broke away and catapulted through the front of the plane when it hit the ground, often crushing the pilots. Bodies and bundles were scattered the length of the field. Some of the glider troopers were impaled by the splintering wood of the fragile machines. ‘We immediately tried to aid the injured,’ wrote one of the paratroopers who had prepared the landing zone, ‘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