The attack on the two bridges over the River Orne and the Caen Channel didn’t seem to alarm German commanders at either the corps or the army level. However, increased enemy aircraft activity throughout the evening put the entire staff of the 84th Army Corps on high alert at eleven o’clock that evening, and the corps commander was awakened.[1] What exactly was happening was still unclear. The 84th German Army Corps, which was part of the 7th German Army, had not received the message that was intercepted by Meyer and his men in Tourcoing.
***
Under cover of darkness, there was now a myriad of activity on both ends of the planned invasion area. American and British pathfinders carefully made their way through the night heading for drop zones that were to be marked for paratroopers already enroute. So far, they had managed to avoid fighting. However, watchful German eyes caught sight of intruding shadows that refused to halt when the enemy called out. As angry machinegun rounds lit up the night sky, the shadows disappeared. It seemed the rain and wind had erased all traces. Perhaps the wind had stirred the bushes, creating faceless shapes in the night. Perhaps it was just imagination.
In St. Lô, the clock in the old cathedral struck midnight (1 a.m. British time). Two characteristically grey clock towers, illuminated by the moon, faded into darkness as low-lying clouds blocked out the light. Originally, the village was called Briovère, which is Gaelic for “the Bridge by the River Vire.” Now called St. Lô, it was a strategically important hub for German troops in the area. It was also headquarters of the 84th German Army Corps.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7eaa3bf-2fb2-45cb-9267-e28f9361e307_160x243.jpeg)
As chimes of the cathedral’s bells were fading in the wind, a door to the operation room in Château de Chiffrevast opened. Erick Marcks, Commander of the 84th German Army Corps, lifted his head as he stood hunched over a table of maps. He turned toward the door, his eyes cold and narrow behind round glasses. His thin lips formed a hard line. Three staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich von Criegern, Major Viebig, and Major Friedrich Hayn, stood in the doorway with a tray of glasses and a bottle of Chablis. The General, who had lost a leg during the Russian campaign, stood straight on a wooden leg and received congratulations from the three officers. The Commander’s stoic face expressed surprise. Today, June 6, 1944, Erick Marcks turned fifty-three. It would be his last birthday.
The glasses were filled, and the men toasted the highly respected corps commander. For a fleeting, few moments they enjoyed the wine and forgot the war. Then the General returned his attention to the table and the maps that lay there. He was occupied with preparations for an exercise in Rennes the following day, and a possible invasion of Normandy. He was unaware that the invasion had already begun.
Southern England, late evening, June 5th
Back in England, twenty-year-old Vice Corporal Leslie Palmer Cruise, Jr. from Philadelphia was preparing for the invasion, together with his fellow soldiers Richard Vargas and Larry Kilroy and several thousand paratroopers. With his youthful face, he was perhaps the least intimidating paratrooper in the regiment. Cruise, Vargas, and Kilroy belonged to the 505th Regiment of the 82nd American Airborne Division. The regiment’s assignment was to secure the little Norman village Sainte-Mère-Église that was situated between Carentan and Cherbourg.
Leslie had a good relationship with his two comrades. They’d stuck together through thick and thin. They leaned on each other and were there for each other when it counted. They laughed and joked like young men do when they enjoy each other’s company. Vargas was the strongest of the three. He wasn’t tall, but he was well-built. He had high cheekbones and hair as black as coal. He filled his pockets and backpack with extra ammunition, clothing, rations, and personal belongings, and, lastly, a nine-inch landmine. Fully loaded with gear, the three men headed toward dozens of planes waiting to deliver them to war. The invasion was finally underway now and they had received their final briefing. Burdened down with crisscrossed straps and bandoleers, knives strapped to their legs, and faces blackened, they were ready to go. When the order to board the planes finally came in, almost everyone needed help getting up the steps and through the door.[2]
There were twenty-one men aboard the plane, among them, the head of the 3rd Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause. The engines churned, coughed, and spewed out a cloud of smoke before starting with a roar. Pilots revved the engines and checked their instruments. The roar of engines grew to a deafening crescendo. Cruise’s plane shook violently. He wondered how the plane could take off with all of the heavily armed paratroopers aboard. Nerves began to show, and Cruise chewed gum as never before. The plane rose slowly to its cruising altitude. In the bright western sky, the men saw silhouettes of dozens of planes heading for occupied France. The regiment's mission was to secure the small Norman town of Sainte- Mere-Église, located between Carentan and Cherbourg on- the Cotentin Peninsula.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6535653-4876-42a3-85df-1342d3e8258e_612x454.jpeg)
***
Seated in another plane, heading for Normandy, was Vice Corporal Raider Nelson[3] of the 507th Parachute Regiment, a regiment that just a few months earlier had become part of the 82nd Airborne Division. He was hoping the invasion would be focused on Norway. He had been born in Oslo in 1921 and had emigrated to the United States with his parents when he was four years old.
Nelson, who was born Reidar Eugene Nilsen, was no towering warrior at five-feet-six-inches and one-hundred-sixty-five pounds. As a paratrooper, however, he was tough and enduring. His dark blond hair and bright blue eyes hinted at his Nordic heritage and foretold his fortitude.
Nelson was raised in Chicago near its Little Italy neighborhood, which during the 1930s had close to eighty-thousand Italian immigrants. There he had met a young girl from Sicily and married her on July 29, 1943, just three months before he was sent to Europe. During Nelson’s training in England, he dreamed of descending into Norway by parachute. It would have been an appropriate homecoming. But it was not meant to be; he was destined to jump into France.
The burden of waiting was over. Planes carrying paratroopers roared ahead in a southwestern direction. Formation after formation pulled out over the English Channel. Raider Nelson, like most others in the Allied invasion force, looked forward to this day with a strange and fearful mix of emotions. They knew that the sooner they started, the sooner they could put an end to a war that was overshadowing the lives of millions of people. Every day for months they’d felt a growing, gnawing tension. Now they were about to confront the real thing. With this jump, there were high hopes that this would be the beginning of the end for the Nazis. Nelson tried to find a more comfortable position; his harnesses and straps chafed. He felt enormous burdened with all his equipment. The nearly ten-pound tank mine pressed against his abdomen. Each of the men in the 507th carried one. The mines would be used to defend an area along the Merderet River, buried approximately twenty yards west of it.
Nelson dreaded the consequences if an unlucky bullet or piece of shrapnel hit him. They all did. They were a mixed bunch of men in the plane alongside Nelson—a collection of the world’s finest soldiers, in his opinion. Some prayed, some sang, and some joked. Others just stared. God only knows how many times they checked and re-checked their equipment. Nelson found himself thinking about his young wife he’d left behind in Chicago.
Normandy, 1:30 am, 6 June
The German troops stationed on the northern part of the Cherbourg peninsula were occupied by matters other than the General’s map exercise this night. They could sense something going on. In the area of the 709th Infantry Division on the right flank of the invasion coast, innumerable planes could be heard overhead. Colored tracers lit up their paths in the dark. The sound of aircraft artillery and engines were deafening. At 1:30 a.m. on June 6, Lieutenant Colonel Hoffmann, head of the 3rd Battalion of the 919th Regiment, stood on the lawn outside his headquarters in St. Floxel, just east of Montebourg, staring at the dark sky above him. From time to time the moon cast its shimmering silvery light on the landscape. The flow of planes seemed endless. This was no ordinary bomb raid; something extraordinary was happening. He envied the Allies’ demonstration of power as he watched wave upon wave of aircraft sweeping overhead. Suddenly, six planes passed at a very low altitude, and paratroopers jumped from directly above them.
“Fallshirmjäger!”
The cry was nearly drowned out by the noise of aircraft engines. Large parachutes burst open with powerful gusts in the night sky. Beneath them dangled the silhouettes of rapidly-descending soldiers. In the minutes that followed, a shootout developed between security guards, Hoffman’s staff, and paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division.[4] The invasion was now undeniable. For the German soldiers in Cotentin, the wait was over.
***
On the opposite flank of the invasion front, in the 711th Infantry Division’s staff mess hall, Lieutenant General Joseph Reichert and his colleagues were getting ready to turn in for the night. The Division belonged to the 15th Army and was located east of the River Orne. The men here also heard the sounds of many low-flying planes passing rapidly overhead. Aircraft, both Allied and German, flew over the headquarters frequently on their path over the Channel, thus the roar of engines was little cause for alarm.
It happened almost every night. The fact that the planes were flying so low, however, surprised them. Powerful winds blowing in from the Channel caused trees to sway bewitchingly in the moonlit night. Between scattered low clouds, the men saw a swarm of large planes silhouetted against the darkness. They didn’t seem set on a course, but instead circled the area surrounding the command post. General Reichert did not like what he saw and hurried into the mess hall to retrieve his pistol. Then he heard someone shout, “Fallshirmjäger!”[5] Reichert grabbed his gun and stormed out onto the terrace, where he saw several parachutes descending nearby. Several twenty-millimeter antiaircraft canons had started firing. The battle was becoming intense.
Reichert quickly ordered the manning of fortifications around the headquarters with every man and weapon available. Clerks, orderlies, drivers, and so on rushed to duty. The whole division was put on alert and a message was sent to their superior in Rouen, the 81st Army Corps. Shortly thereafter, the first two captives were presented to the General. They were most likely pathfinders from the 6th British Paratrooper Division. and his men got nothing out of them. Soon shooting around the headquarters subsided and the planes were gone. Just as though someone had flipped a switch, the whole ordeal was over. The dark skies became silent again and tranquility returned. Only the wind was audible.
***
Back in St. Lô at Château de Chiffrevast, headquarters of the 84th Army Corps, the clock struck 1 a.m. (2 a.m. British time) when the phone rang.[6] Erich Marcks lifted the handset and listened. At once, he straightened up and his wooden leg clacked the floor. His thin, slender body tensed as he listened. General Major Wilhelm Richter of the 716th Infantry Division was reporting airborne enemy landings in the area northwest of Caen. The message struck the officers in the map room like a bolt from the blue. In the minutes that followed, messages kept coming in. Both the 709th Infantry Division and the 91st Airborne Division reported similar landings in the area around Montebourg, on both sides of the Vire, and along the eastern coast of Cotentin. The messages were forwarded to the headquarters of the 7th Army in Le Mans.
Clouds drifted rapidly across the skies that night in Normandy. Wind that tore at the treetops around the three-story castle Château du Molay moved shadows around mysteriously. The full moon reappeared momentarily and bathed the château in moonlight before the shadows once again settled over the area. A wealthy banker from Rouen, Jacques-Jean le Coulteux du Molay, built the castle in 1758. Twenty-six miles west of Caen, and a few miles from the beach that soon would be known as Omaha Beach, lay the headquarters of the 352nd Infantry Division. The blinds were drawn so tightly that not even a splinter of light could escape into the dark night. Outside the château, grey-clad guards moved about uneasily, their gazes nervously scouring the park and forest in front of the castle. Their eyes, nearly covered by steel helmets, had to work hard at piercing the darkness. Their hands, clenching their Mausers, were beginning to cramp. In the direction of Cherbourg and Caen, aircraft noise could be heard while remote explosions illuminated the night sky.
[1] Friedrich von Criegern, “MS # B-784.”
[2] Leslie Palmer Cruise, Jr., letter to author
[3] Raider Nelson, letter to author; and interview by author, Chicago, 1990.
[4] Hoffmann Report. Seventh Army, KTB Anlagen 1.I-30.VI.44.
[5] MS # B-403 The 711th Infantry Division and the Airborne Invasion by Generalleutnant Joseph Reichert.
[6] MS # B-784 LXXXIV Corps on D-Day: The Landing Battles by Oberstleutnant Friedrich von Criegern. I his book “Die Invasion. Von Cotentin bis Falaise” Major Friedrich Hayn sett the time to 01:11 (02:11 British double summer time)
Thanks John for you kind words.
John, I am grateful for your kind words, which warm my heart and inspire me to continue writing. Feedback from readers is crucial to me, and I am thrilled that the stories of these veterans, who so generously shared their personal experiences with me many years ago, are now being read.