Remembering D-day: Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes

‘A fire broke out in a house at about 10 p.m. (midnight British time). A German sergeant gave Mayor Alexandre Renaud permission to rouse the populace and for the priest to ring the church bell. The people set up a bucket brigade in the light of the flames. As they were fighting the fire, American planes appeared low overhead, so low that I could see their open doors. Paratroopers began jumping out by the hundreds. I saw one paratrooper drop on the road, but a German killed him before he could get untangled from his parachute. Another was killed near me. I will never forget the sight.’

Private Ken Russell

F Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

‘I jumped with the 2nd Platoon, it was commanded by 2nd Lieutenant Harold Cadish. I don’t remember all the stick in our plane but I know Private H. T. Bryant, Private Ladislaw ‘Laddie’ Tlapa and Lieutenant Cadish were most unfortunate. They were the fellows who were shot on the power poles. My close friend Private 1st class Charles Blankenship was shot still in his chute, hanging in a tree, a little distance down the street. When we jumped, there was a huge fire in a building in town. I didn’t know that the heat would suck a parachute towards the fire. I fought the chute all the way down to avoid the fire. One trooper [Private 1st Class A. J. Van Holsbeck of F Company] Who had joined our Company shortly before D-Day landed in the fire. Facing the church from the front, I landed on the right side of the roof, luckily in the shadow side from the fire. Some of my suspension lines went over the steeple and I slid down over to the edge of the roof. This other trooper came down and really got entangled on the steeple, I didn’t know it was Steele. Almost immediately a Nazi soldier came running from the back side of the church shooting at everything. Sergeant John Ray had landed in the churchyard almost directly below Steele. This Nazi shot him in the stomach while he was still in his chute. While Ray was dying he somehow got his .45 out (sergeants jumped with a .45-calibre pistol) and shot the Nazi in the back of the head, killing him. He saved my life as well as Steele’s. It was one of the bravest things I have ever witnessed.

‘I finally got to my trench knife and cut my suspension lines and fell to the ground. I looked up at the steeple but there was not a movement or a sound and I thought the trooper was dead. I got my M-1 assembled and ducked around several places in that part of town hoping to find some troopers, but all of them were dead. I got off several rounds at different Germans before they drove me to a different position with intense gunfire.’

Van Holsbeck died falling into the house, which was on fire on the south side of the town square. The Germans allowed the villagers, under guard, to break the curfew to fight it.

Tense and anxious, a Platoon from the Third Battalion, 82nd Airborne barely manage a smile just before they boarded their C-47 for D-Day.

U.S Army

Major Frederick C. A. Kellam, First Battalion Commander (left) and Colonel William E. Ekman, CO, 505th Regiment, 82nd Airborne, at Cottesmore waiting for D-Day. Kellam, whose nickname was the “Jack of Diamonds” (note the Diamond insignia on their helmets) was KIA by an exploding mortar shell.

U.S Army

General Eisenhower talking with paratroops of the 502nd Parachute Regiment, 101st Airborne Division at RAF Greenham Common on 5 June. At centre is Lt Wallace C. Strobel, the jumpmaster (for plane number 23) of Company E whose 22nd birthday it was on 5 June. Ike asked Strobel what was his name and where did he come from (Michigan)? Eisenhower, his round of visits to the paratroopers completed, shook hands with General Maxwell Taylor and wished him good luck before walking to his waiting staff limousine to return to invasion headquarters at Portsmouth. An aide noticed that there was a tear in Eisenhower’s eye.

National Archives

Chief-corporal Rudolph May

German soldier who commanded a patrol of ten men, cut the parachute lines with his pocket knife to release Private John ‘Buck’ Steele, F Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, so he could be taken captive.

‘On the evening of 5 June my friends and I were enjoying ourselves trying to break a cycle speed record around the church at Ste-Mère-Eglise, just to kill time. At 10 p.m. I resumed my post in the steeple – a telephone at my side. Around midnight (2 a.m. British time) I heard planes passing overhead and saw “objects” falling from the sky. During this period a house began to burn. It was the light from this fire that made it possible for me to see hundreds of parachutes falling from the sky as the airplane motors droned on. They fell on the roofs, in the streets and even in the trees of the church square. The sky was studded with parachutes.

‘Suddenly everything in the steeple became dark. Through an opening I saw that a parachutist had fallen on the steeple, hanging by the ropes. He appeared to be dead, but after a moment I heard his voice. There were two of us on duty at the post, and my companion wanted to shoot him. “Are you crazy?” I said. “If you shoot we’ll be discovered.”’

2nd Lieutenant Leon E. Mendel

Interrogation Officer, proficient in seven languages, 325th Glider Infantry, Mission ‘Galveston’ on D+I at Landing Zone ‘W’.

‘My glider made a beautiful landing at Ecoqueneauville and I made my way south to my assembly point at Les Forges crossroads. Here I got the bad news that I had lost half of my six-man team in glider crashes. The good news was the others had already eight German prisoners for interrogation. I started off with German but with little response, so I switched to Russian with the question, “Vj Russkij chelovek?” (Are you a Russian?). Their reply was immediate, “Da, ya khochu ekhat’ na Ameriku” (Yes, I want to go to America). I slapped both my hands on top of my helmet and shouted at them, “Durak, durak. Ya tozhe!” (Crazy, crazy. Me too!).”’

The enemy included ‘volunteers’ from Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia. The Seventh Army had 13 ‘Ost’ battalions made up of non-Germans.

C-47s of the 34th Troop Carrier Squadron, 315th Troop Carrier Group at Cottesmore waiting to load 82nd Airborne paratroopers for D-Day.

U.S Army

George Rosie

101st Airborne. Captured, he spent II months in PoW camps before being liberated by the Russians south of Berlin.

‘We boarded the planes at about 22:30 on 5 June. With two chutes and full combat equipment, we could hardly walk. Some of the men looked like they were scared to death. I was certainly uptight but had no thoughts of being killed. I had the feeling we were part of a big chunk of history. Out of the window, there were planes in every direction and, below, hundreds of ships. As we crossed the French coast, a plane on our right was hit by flak and blew up, wiping out 18 to 20 men. Welcome to the real war.

‘The green light came on and we jumped. I hit a road and went head first through a wooden fence, knocking out two teeth. Then I took cover in a hedgerow. A minute later 40 Germans came marching past. I could have reached out and touched them. Being alone behind enemy lines is a unique experience. You feel so helpless, so alone. After a bit I ran into John Gibson, our medic, and Charles Lee, a mortarman. It was as if I had found a long-lost brother.

‘I looked up and there was a C-47 transport plane at about 800 feet with the left engine on fire and troopers bailing out. The last one bailed out at not more than 200 feet and the plane went right over the top of our heads, hit the adjoining field and burst into a million flaming pieces. From the direction of the crash, four men came running towards us. We discovered they were from our troop – Phil Abbie, Francis Swanson, Leo Krebs and my high school pal Francis Ronzani. The downed plane had damn near got them.

‘We now had an army of seven but we ran into about 100 Germans as daylight was breaking. Abbie and Ronzani were killed and the rest of us were pinned down in a field. Bullets were flying all over the place and Leo Krebs remarked, “God, these guys are lousy shots.” A German officer was running back and forth and Krebs said, “What the hell is wrong with that guy? Is he nuts?” We shot at him and he went down. But we were in a hopeless position and were captured in no time.

Dead American soldier near his glider.

National Archives

‘Lee had got away into a wood and, a short time later, began shooting at the Germans who were guarding us. I told Leo I still had a hand grenade the Germans had missed. If Leo hit one of the guards I was going to throw the grenade at the other one. But the Germans circled behind Lee and killed him. I left the grenade in the ditch.

‘Ronzani had been hit in the chest three, four, five, or six times. I’m sure he never knew what hit him. When I returned to the States after the war and visited his mother and father, one of the things that seemed to be of great relief to them was that Francis had not suffered.’

Brigadier General “Slim” Jim Gavin, assistant division commander, 82nd Airborne, who at about noon on D+1 met Gen Matthew B. Ridgway at the point where the Ste-Mère- Eglise road crosses the railway line just east of the Merderet and as far as they knew, were on their own. Ridgway and Gavin decided right there and then that if the seaborne assault had been called off or been beaten back, then they would continue to fight to the end. Gavin, nicknamed “Slim Jim” by his men because of his slim, boyish looks, assumed command of the 82nd Airborne on 15 August 1944 at the age of 37, the youngest American division commander in WWII and the youngest since the Civil War.

U.S Army

Air landing Brigade troops give the thumbs up before departure.

Imperial War Museum 11 (H39182)

3 Winged Pegasus (#ulink_7e846c55-bb9f-53f9-8d90-2791b6ab9d78)

Brigadier S. J. L. Hill

Commanding 3rd Parachute Brigade.

‘Do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will.’

Major General Richard Gale

6th Airborne Division Commander; his orders to Brigadier Nigel Poett, 5th Parachute Brigade, for the capture of the parallel bridges over the Canal de Caen at Bénouville and the River Orne at Ranville.

‘The seizing of the crossing intact is of the utmost importance to the conduct of future operations. As the bridges will certainly have been prepared for demolition, the speedy overpowering of the bridge defences should be your first object. They must therefore be seized by a coup-de-main party, landed in gliders as near to the bridges as is humanly possible. You must accept risks to achieve this.’

Major John Howard commanded the coup-de-main party of six platoons (150 men) of D Company, 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckingham-shire Light Infantry, and 30 men of 249 Field Company (Airborne) Royal Engineers. After capture their task was to hold the bridges until relieved.

Red Beret and the Winged Pegasus.

Author title page

Imperial War Museum 11 (3923)

Brigadier Nigel Poett

Commander 5th Parachute Brigade.

‘As my small aircraft skimmed over the defences of the Atlantic Wall, not a shot was fired. The red light came on and then the green. I was out, seconds later bump. It was the soil of France. The time some 20 minutes after midnight. The darkness was complete; the silence unbroken except for sound of my disappearing aircraft. A few minutes later the sky to the west lit up – firing, explosions, all the sights and sounds of battle. It was John Howard’s assault. He also had been timed to land at 20 minutes after midnight.