Not everything went according to plan that night in June of 1944. Some paratroopers were dropped over the channel only to disappear forever. Weighed down by their heavy equipment, they drowned in the menacing cold sea. Others were lost by tumbling into a deadly maze of swamps and canals, areas put into play per Rommel’s instructions. Some were dropped miles from their intended drop zones into areas that were totally unfamiliar to them.
***
Sergeant Arthur Parker of the HQ battery of the 377th Airborne Field Artillery Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, landed dry, but far from his planned target. When the planes emerged from the clouds, the west coast of Cotentin lay beneath them. They should have been flying at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, but Parker noted that they were actually flying much lower. All around them, shadows of C-47 Dakota aircraft pushed forward through the night on their way to drop zones. The invasion was well underway.
German anti-aircraft artillery flickered to life as they continued to move in over the mainland. Tracers of all colors cut through the darkness, etching fantastic patterns into the sky. Suddenly, the plane began to dive. With its nose pointed slightly downward, the plane maneuvered to the left, and its airspeed exceeded what Parker thought the C-47 could handle. The plane trembled a few times and Parker knew they’d been hit. The clatter of metal against the fuselage sounded like hail on a corrugated tin roof.
When the red light came on the men rose to their feet and hooked up the static line. Three large gear packs were readied and maneuvered over to the hatch, a difficult chore in a plane being tossed around by flak. Airplanes swept through the air all around them now—under, over, in front, and behind. They waited for the pilot to reduce his airspeed so they could safely jump from the plane. They imagined with horror jumping into this inferno of explosions with countless aircraft and half-panicked pilots who were weaving from side to side as flak burst in all directions. Collisions were inevitable at this point. Suddenly, the light came on and covered their tense faces in an eerie shade of green.
“On my ass out,” recalled Arthur Parker[1] many years later, “almost everything we had strapped to us was being ripped off. The jolt of the opening was so powerful that I thought I would break my neck and get my balls ripped off.”
Just before Parker hit the ground, he took a glance around. Not a plane or a parachute to be seen. The ground rushed toward him, and he landed quickly with a jolt. He stayed still, listening for a few seconds before readying his rifle. It took Parker almost half an hour to free himself of the parachute. Once again planes were careening above him in the darkness, but no one came jumping out. He clicked a few times with his clicker without any response. He was alone in the night. Cautiously, he set off in the direction of the disappearing planes. Eleven men had jumped after him and were supposed to be somewhere ahead in the dark. After a while he thought he heard voices. Friend or foe? he wondered. Carefully, he crept closer to the muffled voices, but was still unable to understand the words. Then he pulled out his clicker and squeezed it in breathless suspense.
An unmistakable click, click sounded from the darkness. Four men from the 377th Field Artillery Battalion appeared, but no one from his plane. Sergeant Parker took command of the group, because at twenty-six years old, he was the oldest of the bunch. Together they studied a map by the light of a flashlight that they sheltered with a raincoat. They had no idea where they were and without any landmarks to go by they gave up.
“Where the hell are we?” murmured Parker. One of the paratroopers whispered that he had crossed a paved road. With that man as their guide, they edged forward in the darkness toward the road. With a compass bearing, it would be an excellent indicator of their location. Not long after, another six men appeared out of the darkness, one of them with a serious head wound. He begged them to shoot him if they had to leave him behind.
“You’re coming with wherever we go; no one gets left behind unless they are dead,” replied Arthur.
To the west, where the road disappeared, they saw lights on the horizon and figured the rest of the division was caught up in the fighting. They agreed to keep moving along the road in that direction. They hadn’t gone far before they heard footsteps in front of them. Parker waved to the men to take cover and not to shoot so they wouldn’t be detected. They could see, contoured against the night sky, the silhouettes of four figures strolling down the road as if en route to the cinema—a captain and three enlisted men from the 82nd Airborne Division.
Sergeant Parker called out to them and together they pulled out their maps, but the captain’s map was no help either. They were perplexed about their location.[2] Daylight wasn’t far off now and Parker insisted that they keep away from the road, otherwise they could easily fall prey to the Germans. The captain suggested hiding in a barn they had passed a little way back, at least until they knew what kind of troops were in the area. Parker protested. The barn would be the first place the Germans would look. The men argued and the captain gave in. He had no authority over the men from the 101st Division. Parker’s men supported his idea to stay out of the barn. They felt the hedgerows would offer better protection and room for maneuvering.
So, the two groups split up and Parker led his men to the left of the road, where they went into position by a low hedgerow. Everyone was exhausted, but he ordered one man to keep watch and another to hide in the hedgerow and keep an eye on the road.
German traffic was moving down the road now on their way to combat areas. Nearby, Parker’s men found a 12.7 mm machine gun and ammunition. They’d hoped the airdrop container contained food and water, but it didn’t. They tore an orange parachute into strips. Orange was the color that would identify them as friends to Allied aircraft. While Parker was replacing the bandage on the man with a head wound, he got a signal from the guard in the hedgerow to come and have a look. Parker hurried to have a look at what the guard pointed at in the road. The 82nd Airborne captain and his three men were marching back down the road surrounded by six German guards. They had been taken prisoner. Parker’s decision to avoid the barn turned out to be a wise one. Captain Russell, the 82nd officer, and his three men marched down the road. Captured by the Germans. Six German soldiers guarded them. They had been taken prisoner. Parker’s decision to avoid the barn had turned out to be a wise one.
A couple of hours later, a pair of P-51 Mustang fighters made an attack further up the road. Parker thought that now they had the chance to make contact with their own and brought the men out into the open field. If they were lucky, the pilots would contact their units on the radio and tell them where they were. The Mustangs roared past and waved their wings as a sign that they had seen them, as they stood waving their orange parachute strips. The aircrafts lay over in a gentle turn and came back with full power. Parker and the other paratroopers felt elated and relieved. Maybe the rest of the division was right nearby?
The planes now came straight at them, and suddenly they opened fire with the machine guns. Joy was immediately transformed into fear and anxiety. Everyone threw themselves into cover, while grass and bushes were cut by bullets all around them. Only incredible luck prevented them from being injured or killed.
Eventually the planes disappeared and the dazed men, under the command of Sergeant Parker, decided to go in the same direction as the planes gone. But their trials were not over. A few minutes later they heard the unmistakable sound of incoming heavy grenades.
The planes had admittedly used the radio, as Parker had hoped, but not as he had hoped. Four large grenades struck. Too short. They ran for their lives now. Everyone knew that the next grenades were already on their way.
Breathless, they lifted themselves into cover next to a hedge. Navy artillery! Parker crawled quickly through the hedge and tumbled straight into a hole right into the lap of a German soldier. They were too close for him to use the rifle. In a flash he grabbed the knife he had strapped to his ankle. He was trained to kill instinctively in such a situation. The knife cut into the German. Not a sound came out of the soldier's lips. He died almost instantly.
Shells landed around them on all sides. Only a scout plane could direct the fire so effectively. They later found out that the fire came from the American cruiser USS Quincy. They took food and water from the dead German while discussing what to do. The German's eyes stared as if in in disbelief at the gray sky. The meaningless horror of the war ensured that he never experienced his 15th birthday. According to the service book Parker found on him, the soldier was only 14 years old.
Throughout the day they continued east. Six new men joined them. Now there were 16 of them. Seventeen counting the one who was injured, but he was blind now, and from the wound ran yellow matter. Parker asked him if they could place him on the side of the road so the Germans could find him and give him treatment. The soldier consistently refused. Before, he would shoot himself rather than surrender. He could walk by himself but needed help.
Late in the afternoon, they reached a remote farm, which they watched for over an hour. Nothing happened. Parker had the machine gun mounted to provide cover fire if necessary. Then he took three men with him and carefully approached the house. Parker knocked on the door, and after a while it opened. In the doorway stood an old Frenchman. His face had an expression of gaping astonishment. He had never seen such soldiers before! The uniforms were dirty and baggy. The jump boots, which were the paratroopers' pride, were scratched, dirty and unpolished. There was no brilliance at all on the men behind the four muzzles pointing at him. Parker turned a little to the side and pointed to the American flag sewn to his uniform shoulder. Then there was life in the old man. He shouted something in French into the house. Jumped and danced. An old woman came out and started to dance and laugh in pure joy with her husband. They embraced the four paratroopers and chatted away. They cried with joy. To them, the war seemed over, but for Parker and his friends, it had not really even begun.
***
By now, it was early morning. The unmistakable roar of C-47s broke the silence above the roadblock outside Sainte-Mère-Eglise where Cruise and his comrades lay in hiding. This time planes came with gliders in tow. Anti-aircraft artillery started up again and the sky filled with a deadly fireworks display. Tracers and aircraft engines whirred in a screeching ruckus. Gliders came in from the opposite side of Cotentin from where the paratroopers had landed. They separated from their escorts and circled toward the earth below.
Cruise, Kilroy, and Vargas could hear them whizzing through the air above them. They heard some of the gliders crashing into thickets and hedgerows. Airplanes came down into the hedgerows, too. The sounds were distinctly different.
A glider landed just a few hundred yards in front of them. They couldn’t see it but heard the men shouting and cursing as they tried to get out. Then a jeep started up. Several men by the roadblock stood up to see if there was anything they could do to help the glider soldiers who were apparently busy. Then Cruise and the men heard the jeep charging up the road toward their positions. The paratroopers who had run up the road to meet them waved and shouted for the jeep to stop, but their efforts were futile. With a 37 mm cannon in tow, the jeep raged toward them. In all the madness, the driver probably envisioned the men to be Germans standing in the road waving and shouting for the jeep to surrender.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose. In a flash of multicolored lights, the jeep rose and flew vertically off the road. The explosion was deafening. Cruise threw himself down at the first flash. Everything came crashing back down to earth again as debris rained into the thickets and tall grass. The glider soldiers had been catapulted from the jeep as it left the ground. One man lay on the other side of the road and another was buried in a hedgerow only ten yards from his three stunned comrades. They were the first to fall in this area. Mines laid to stop the enemy had been almost cleared out by the friendly jeep instead. Its burnt wreck now lay smoldering on the roadside. Gunfire could be heard around them, but after the explosion it became relatively quiet.
***
Now the men waited tensely for the dreaded German counterattack. What they feared most was a concentrated armored attack from the Germans during the first phase of the invasion when they were the most vulnerable. Rommel had vehemently argued for the need to have armored forces close to the coast. His experience from the Africa campaign indicated that bringing forward troops and supplies under an Allied air supremacy would be almost impossible and, at best, result in huge losses. Hitler and von Rundstedt decided otherwise.
***
The 21st Panzer Division was the force that lay closest to the coast. The division’s 125th Armored Grenadier Regiment was yanked out of bed around 12:30 a.m. on the morning of June 6. The alarm sounded loudly as rumors of enemy paratroopers swirled through the air. Observations and messages had been forwarded to the headquarter in Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives: Air Landings close to Rauville, Bréville, Escoville, Troan, Truffreville, Bannerville, and Demcuville.[3]
The commands resounded. Grenadiers ran with gear in their hands. The drivers started their half-tracks, gearing them in the dark. Machine guns on the vehicles were ready as soldiers climbed aboard. About half an hour after the first alarm sounded, the first company left their barracks to meet the English. The 6th British Airborne Division, the Red Devils, had parachuted into the midst of the 7th Army Panzer Reserve, so to speak, and the countermeasure initiative began locally. The division’s 22nd Panzer Regiment under the command of Colonel Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski stood ready approximately twenty-five miles south of Caen. They had not yet received any orders to engage. Tank engines and other assorted vehicles waited with engines idling. The division commander had warned Bronikowski just before 3:00 a.m. Feuchtinger had given verbal orders that the 22nd Panzer Regiment should clear the area between Caen and the coast promptly as soon as the division got their marching orders. But the orders didn’t come. To Bronikowski’s despair, the minutes and hours ticked by without incident. Dawn was quickly approaching as the black-clad crew waited by their tanks. They smoked, warmed themselves by the engines, and discussed what was really happening out there on the coast.
Division commander Lieutenant General Edgar Feuchtinger stayed in constant telephone contact with 7th Army Commander General Friedrich Dollmann in Le Mans since the first reports of air landings had been received. It was urgent to release the division and get it ready to battle the enemy paratroopers. However, the army commander didn’t get clearance from Army Group B (Rommel) to insert the 21st Panzer Division. The staff in La Roche-Guyon wasn’t sure the invasion was underway. It could be a diversion. Common sense indicated that the Allies would attack by Calais, across the Channel. The distance was far less there and the road to the German border much shorter. Not until 5:00 a.m. on the morning of June 6 was the 21st Panzer Division notified by Army Group B, subject to the 7th Army, and inserted against air landings at the mouth of the river Orne, with the main effort being on the eastern side of the river.[4] By Allied time, it was 6:00 a.m., half an hour before H-hour for Utah and Omaha.
***
The raging conflict in Normandy could not be heard in Nogent-le-Rotrou, sixty-two miles from the coast. It was here that Panzer Lehr, the best-equipped German armored division, lay in waiting. The headquarters was a hive of activity. At 3:00 a.m., they were notified about air landings in the area surrounding Caen and Bayeux. Division headquarters had issued marching orders immediately. Throughout the area, countless engines sounded through the darkness. The Maybach engines with their twelve cylinders rumbled mildly and menacingly as they revved up. Tank crews and Grenadiers donned combat gear. They packed bags and were given live ammunition. Mark V Panther[5] tanks appeared from every apple orchard and grove around Nogent-le-Rotrou, along with countless armored personnel carriers, tanks, rescue vehicles, workshop vehicles, ammunition vehicles, jeeps, motorcycles, and ambulances—everything for which a prepared division could have wished. All vehicles were camouflaged with nets and branches. The tank commanders in the turrets stood clad in their black uniforms, their faces marked with pride and excitement.
They were the Panzer Lehr and they would fend off the Allies. The Panzer Grenadiers sat tightly packed together in full combat gear in their half-tracks. According to the division commander, Lieutenant General Fritz Bayerlein, the Panzer Lehr division was the best equipped armored division Germany had ever assembled.[6] Even the infantry, the Panzer Grenadiers, were set up with Schützenpanzerwagen armored half-tracks. Covered by darkness, the division gathered along the roads that would lead them toward the coast. But June nights were short in Normandy. One could already see the dawn starting to break in the east. It was critical to get moving.
Lieutenant General Bayerlein sat uneasy in the staff car that coasted along the French country road. He watched the dawn break with great concern. He had been ordered to Le Mans to meet Colonel General Dollmann, commander of 7th Army. The combat experienced Bayerlein had seen action in most places where his countrymen had fought, especially in northern Africa where he had battled the Allies. He knew, just like Rommel, what Allied air supremacy could mean. The day had arrived already, and they had not yet received their final marching orders. The 45-year-old Lieutenant General had been handpicked by the commander of the armored forces, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, to lead the newly assembled Panzer Lehr Division in the fight against the Allies. General Fritz Bayerlein had, during the invasion of Poland in 1939, served as a First General staff officer under Guderian’s command, a position he also kept during the campaign in the west in 1940.
It was then that he, as the commander of 3rd Panzer Division (the Berlin Division), had been in Russia and had been summoned to the headquarters in East Prussia. The Inspector General of the armored forces, Heinz Guderian, had informed him that a new Panzer Division was being formed and activated specifically to meet the Allied invasion. And it was he, Fritz Bayerlein, who was the appointed leader. The reason he had been appointed was that he had previously fought against British and Americans in northern Africa. When he took command of Panzer Lehr during a meeting in East Prussia on January 26, 1944, Guderian was quoted as saying: “With this division alone, you can fend off the Allies at sea. Your goal is the coast. No, not the coast, it’s the ocean.”[7]
Bayerlein had in the weeks and months leading up to the invasion identified possible routes on which to advance out towards the coast. The regiment commanders had thus in the early night hours only been informed about gathering points for the regiments. From there on, they would follow predetermined routes. As he was leaving the area, tanks and other vehicles were waiting along the road with their engines running. Panzer Lehr was ready to go. He was still far from content with the situation. With ninety miles to the coast and a marching speed of six to seven miles per hour, in addition to short summers, they would only clear thirty-five to forty miles under the cover of darkness. Bayerlein and his officers knew what the Allied fighter-bombers could accomplish in good weather. Every mile they put behind them at night would be significant. In only a few hours, the sun would rise over the eastern horizon and swarms of enemy aircraft would take to the air. But OKW hesitated. Was it all a ploy? The marching orders did not materialize.
[1] Arthur Parker, letter to author
[2] Arthur Parker would later find out that he was located 20 km northwest of the planned drop zone. In front of him was 20 km of hostile territory.
[3] MS # B-441 21st Panzer Division (1942 – Jul 1944) by General Lieutenant Edgar Feuchtinger.
[4] 7th German War Diary
[5] Panzerkampfwagen V Panther is considered one of the war's best tanks - good maneuverability, thick front armor and an accurate 75 mm cannon, which could knock out most Allied tanks at a great distance.
[6] Ethint 66 Panser Lehr Jan – 28. july 1944
[7] Fritz Bayerlein, “ETHINT # 66.”