Yes, if we consider that the 91st
Division, of which he is the commander, is the main German force capable
of reacting to the landings, once decapitated, we understand
that the plans are really thwarted.

They’re going to have a really
hard time reacting.

– Adolf Hitler, by the way, was still
unaware of what was going on here.

– History says he’s asleep.

At 4 in the morning, Field Marshal von Rundstedt
asked the Supreme Command the authorization to deploy
two divisions to the coast.

He would wait a long,
long time for the answer.

Hitler had just gone to bed in
the eagle’s nest in Berchtesgaden.

The Führer listened to Wagner
for a good part of the night.

He specifically requested to
be oaken at 9 am.

And no one was going to dare
to disturb his sleep.

Just as the Führer entered his bed,
off the coast of Normandy, the transshipment of the assault
units into the landing barges began.

In the sky, a new wave of engines
was emerging.

The first airborne reinforcements
would start the battle that was raging on the ground.

Between 4 a.

m.

and 4:10 a.

m.

, a hundred
gliders landed as best they could in the dark.

These are the ones from Operations
Chicago and Detroit.

52 gliders of the 82nd land on the LZ W,
south of Sainte-Mère-Église, but were unable to land
eight anti-tank guns, 11 jeeps and 220 soldiers, gunners, divisional communications
and command team personnel.

49 of the 52 gliders planned
for the 101st landed on the LZE, near Hiesville, bringing 155 men,
16 57 mm anti-tank guns, a small bulldozer, a surgical
post and a radio jeep with a trailer
equipped with a SCR199 station allowing communication with England.

Unfortunately, General Dan Forester
Pratt, second in command of the 101st, died in the crash of his glider.

He is the first senior Allied
officer to die in Normandy.

At 4.

30 am, von Rundstedt ordered
the 12th SS Panzer Division, as well as at the Panzerlehr, to set off immediately for Calvados.

Furious, the Chief of Staff
at the command of the Wehrmacht, General Alfred Jodl, cancelled
the order at 6:30.

He preferred to wait for the Führer
to wake up.

At that time, Sainte-Mère-Église
was already in the hands of the American paratroopers
of the 82nd.

They cut the main cable from
the military telephone to Cherbourg and established roadblocks
to the east and south of the town.

The 101st parachutist, Robert Noody, including the photo taken on the night
of June 5 to 6 would be on the front page of Air Force Magazine,
jumped to Sainte-Mère-Église.

He was 19.

– Almost immediately, I ran into
two guys on my stick.

There was a guy hanging in a tree.

And so, they decided to go cut
the parachute to bring him down.

And that is exactly what they did.

They cut, and the guy fell with
his harness on.

I don’t know how this guy
experienced it at the time.

We were told not to load
our guns right away fearing we would shoot at each other.

But we had to fire on the Germans.

And I immediately loaded my gun.

I was actually behind
the mayor’s house.

I forgot his name now,
but I was in a field right behind her house.

We were, I would say,
six or seven guys when we arrived on the place of Sainte-Mère-Église.

We quickly went behind the church.

I didn’t see guys hanging from
the bell tower or that kind of thing, but they were shooting anyway.

A few guys got hit.

I remember a guy,
I remember his name.

His name was Brown.

He was on the left side of the church
when you came in from the front.

There was a wall there, all the way.

I think it’s still there.

The guy was hiding there
and when he saw us he said: “I didn’t think I would
make it through.

” In fact, he was just as frightened
as we were.

Even though counterattacks
threatened, since 4.

30 am on 6 June 1944, The star-spangled banner flies
over Sainte-Mère-Église.

The Western front is open.

– Régis, do we know Sainte-Mère-
Église thanks to or because of the movie “The longest day”, with this sequence inside
the John Steele movie who clings to the bell tower and
sees his comrades being massacred.

It has become a bit of a myth,
but we often forget that Sainte-Mère-Église was really
one of the objectives of the American airborne troops.

– Cinema and our own imagination
have arranged the historical truth, but Sainte-Mère was
really a main objective.

This was the major objective
for D-Day paratroopers.

It’s a six-road junction.

That’s where all the troops
and reinforcements would pass, at least for the operation to Cherbourg
and other battles, the rest of the Battle of Normandy.

It was the main objective and
the symbol is better understood today.

– How is the capture of
Sainte-Mère-Église really going? Sainte-Mère-Église, during the drop,
it’s three sticks.

Two sticks from the 101st,
one from the 82nd.

Fifty parachutists were dropped
by mistake above Sainte-Mère.

A dozen fell on the village.

The capture of Sainte-Mère, veritable,
took place with two companies of 505 who were dropped properly.

It’s the best D-day drop,
just north of Sainte-Mère.

They entered Sainte-Mère relatively
easily.

At 4:30 in the morning, they cleaned
up the town of Sainte-Mère.

There were a few exchanges,
mainly with grenades.

There were 10 killed on the German
side, about thirty prisoners, and the goal of the Americans,
of the 360 paraswho enter Sainte-Mère, was to quickly install dams
on the exits from Sainte-Mère-Église.

– To deal with German counterattacks? – Exactly, and at dawn, it was time
for landing by sea since all the dams were in use.

Machine gun fire, mortars, artillery.

South of Sainte-Mère,
we saw self-propelled guns and tanks that were beginning
to prepare counterattacks.

– So, the complexity was
not taking Sainte-Mère-Église, it must be defended
and defend this strategic point.

– In fact, it was not about taking it,
but really about holding it, once invested quickly.

Again, from 4:30am until dawn,
the fighting was swift and really sporadic exchanges.

Starting at 5:45am
off the coast of Utah, 18 warships steer their guns to the coast and open fire on
the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall.

At 6:10, the tactical bombardment
of the beach defenses began thanks in particular to 300 B-26
Marauder medium bombers.

The courageous pilots descended
under the cloud ceiling and dropped their bombs
at very low altitudes.

They provided one of the most
effective bombings on D-Day and only lost two planes.

Landing on the beaches
of Normandy began at 6:30am.

At Utah Beach, the men were launched
2 km south of their objective.

As luck would have it, they landed
on the least fortified beach area, bombed from dawn by 100 tons
of explosives.

28 Sherman tanks managed
to reach the shore.

At 8:00, 4 battalions, nearly 1,000
soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were already at the beach.

Inland, the paratroopers
of the 101st, who didn’t hold beach outings, were scrambling to make
the artillery batteries arranged in the second line of defense
that they had just discovered around Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

If the cannons of the Hammermain
were not in battery, and would quickly be neutralized, the Paras would have to engage
in combat in Brécourt and in Holdy, where they have
to seize eight 105mm Howitzer howitzers shooting on the beach in Utah.

In Holdy, around fifty Germans
defended the position.

But a handful of intrepid American
paratroopers decided anyway to storm it.

Jean-Noël Ferrolliet devoted
eight years of his life to an incredible investigation.

He still lives in the house that housed
the German gunners from Holdy, actually Ostruppens,
soldiers from the East.

He reconstructed in every detail the battles of the paratroopers
of the 101st, to get hold of the battery.

– Jean-Noël, here, we are not very
far from Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

It was a parachuting zone for the Americans on the night
of June 6, 1944.

– Yes, just behind Sainte-Marie-du-Mont,
it’s drop zone C.

And by accident, some paratroopers
would fall along the Holdy battery,
that is just behind, and who were literally going
to be massacred.

– Were there any specific goals
for Americans in this zone? – So yes, behind Sainte-Marie-du-Mont,
there is this Holdy battery.

They didn’t really
know where it is.

They located it in Holdy.

It may also be on the road
to Brusvily.

– I have the impression, when you
talk to me about it like that, that there is a small game of hide-and-seek
on the night of June 6.

Americans didn’t necessarily
know where they’re parachuted.

They still have goals.

This Holdy battery is one
of the objectives of the American forces.

– So yes, it is one of the objectives
of American forces.

Why? Because of Holdy, you can shoot
on the beach at Utah Beach.

So you definitely don’t see Utah
Beach from Holdy but the fire adjusters were
in the church of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

So from the church of Sainte-Marie-du-
Mont, you can see Utah beach very well.

It was such a discreet
and invisible battery that was perhaps more dangerous than
the blockhouses for the landing.

– And the battery
is not far from here? – It’s just behind the hedge,
now I’m going to take you there.

– Let’s go.

– Special operation on the Holdy.

– It’s really close.

So this is where the battery was.

That’s where the battery was,
right in the meadow, and the cannons came out exactly between
the trees here.

And it went down almost
to 3/4 of the field.

– How many were there? – Four.

Four Howitzer-type guns, fired by… Those trees were there.

When you look at the vintage photos,
they were a bit smaller.

It’s much more clear because
we still have an artillery position.

The ditches were clean.

You have the same trees, except for
one or two that I saw, that I knew but which fell with the storms.

But you had.

.

.

All the way, like that.

You had a whole defensive system,
you had foxholes on the German side, and you had trenches
like this, you see.

– That’s actually
a trench.

– There you go.

You find this photo,
with… on Mark Bendo’s books, American historian, you find
this photo, where there is Joe Piston, this famous para-American, who is quoted,
where they are like that, and there, you had dead
German soldiers.

If I clear the whole gap, you are
in the same place as in the photo.

– We really are in a trench.

So now we’re really
on the battlefield, actually.

– Now, we’re really
on the battlefield.

This battery, at 6 am, was captured.

They would never be able to shoot
on the beaches of Utah Beach.

– This means that the paratroopers,
finally, by silencing the battery, certainly saved lives on Utah Beach, otherwise, these guns would have
continued to fire on the beach.

– That’s for sure, that’s for sure.

If the battery had been able to fire
on the landing, it would have caused Hundreds of deaths, that’s for sure.

In the 101st sector, the Barquette
lock and the Brévands bridges had been taken and held since early
morning, despite German counterattacks.

At noon, the first beach exit from Utah
beach, not far from Poupeville, fell into the hands of American
paratroopers and contact was established.

with elements of the 4th Infantry
Division disembarked in the morning.

In a few hours, the other three
outings, Oudienville, Audouvile-la-Hubert, Saint-Martin-de-Vareville,
were secured.

But the Germans still held
the Saint-Côme du Mont sector and the road to Carentan.

The situation in the 82nd
was more critical.

Sainte-Mère-Église is occupied,
but its defense was complicated and the establishment of a bridgehead
on both banks of the Merderet failed.

Many units were isolated
on the western shore.

In the early afternoon, the 2nd and 3rd
battalions of the 8th Infantry Regiment left Utah Beach and headed inland by using carriageways number 1 and 2.

Supported by Sherman tanks,
they would participate in the taking of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

But on June 6, around 4 p.

m.

, the Germans counterattacked in
the direction ofof the Pont de la Fière.

The paratroopers of the 82nd
Airborne were facing 200 grenadiers and the Panzers from
an armoured instruction battalion, equipped with French tanks, Renault R35s and Hotchkiss H39s.

Throughout the early afternoon, paratroopers were under
continuous artillery fire.

At 4 p.

m.

, two tanks appeared
on the Chaussée de la Fière.

A 57 mm gun and two teams tank destroyers armed
with bazookas destroy them.

As a third tank approaches dangerously
and threatens the position.

American, two intrepid paratroopers,
yet out of ammunition, manage to destroy it too, thus
stopping the violent German charge.

This scenario was repeated
everywhere.

The paratroopers were not giving up.

Despite their dispersal, men grouped
together and often met again with those of other companies,
other regiments.

Those of the 82nd sometimes
mixed with those of the 101st.

The most highly ranked took control
of these disparate groups.

All are trying to accomplish
their mission, despite their numerical inferiority,
the lack of equipment and ammunition.

When they were unable
to attack strategic points, these men were mining the roads, set up ambushes
and established fortified points that the Germans tried hard
to reduce by drowning them under a flood of fires.

On Hill 30, not far from Picoville, 500
American paratroopers from the 82nd, would remain under siege for several
days, subjected continuously to the shelling of German batteries.

They lacked water, ammunition,
plasma for the injured, but they would hold for five days.

– Beyond the myth and
the Sainte-Mère-Église postcard, can we consider that
the American airborne operation, on the evening of June 6, 1944,
was a success? – If we go back to
the goals one by one, it is difficult to reach
that conclusion.

The 101st sector, the bridges
over the Douve were not destroyed, the Germans were still
in Saint-Côme-du-Mont, the 82nd failed to bridgehead
on the Merderet.

On the other hand, you mentioned it,
Sainte-Mère-Église is taken, was held, and above all, all the pavements,
all the beach exits of Utah Beach were taken,
were secure, and so it would allow a landing of troops by sea which
would be under favorable conditions that they could never have had
it not been for the airborne assault.

So in that sense, it’s a success.

– So in fact, the skydivers made
up a first wave in front of Utah Beach to allow
the advance of ground troops.

That is exactly it.

The losses here are comparable
to Omaha, as already mentioned.

It’s 60% loss for the 82nd,
40% for the 101st.

It is estimated that 90% of the equipment
was lost during the assault.

But for all that, the Para-American
generals, especially in the 82nd, will note that, the action was excellent, the combat
behavior of the paratroopers was very good.

– They really showed
what they could do.

– Yes, they demonstrated that the
para doctrine, vertical wrapping, It was modern warfare,
something really effective to get on a front in front of
a landing.

At 9 pm on 6 June 1944, the Allies launched Operations
Keokuk and Elmira, the sending by gliders of important
reinforcements that would considerably increase the firepower
of American paratroopers.

On the beaches,
operations were continuing.

In Utah, at the end of the day,
more than 23,000 men, 1,700 combat vehicles and 1,695 tons of supplies
have been landed.

At midnight on June 6, 1944, the bridgehead was well
and truly installed in Utah Beach.

But, the routes to St-Sauveur-le-Vicomte
to the west and Carentan to the south to cut the Cotentin and connect
with the troops who landed in Omaha
remained.

The hoped-for beachheads boil
down to large pockets of paratroopers still isolated.

Two groups were separated
on each side of Amfreville.

A group occupied Hill 30 between
Picauville and Chef-du-Pont.

Some against Brévands around La Barquette,
remained threatened by the Germans holding the height of Saint-Côme-du-Mont.

And much further south,
far from any objective, The lost paratroopers of two
regiments are entrenched in Graigne.

The American paratroop divisions
paid a heavy price on June 6, 1944.

2,500 paratroopers were killed
or injured.

The 101st lost 40% of its workforce,
the 82nd lost 60%, many of whom, on the evening
of 6 June, were still lost or isolated in the Normandy countryside.

The people helped them
in any way they could.

Some stray paratroopers
would wander for days, others would never be found because
German reinforcements were coming.

At dawn on Sunday 11 June 1944, the 182 American paratroopers
entrenched in the village of Graigne, were assaulted by 2,000 grenadiers
from the 17th SS Panzer Division.

A first assault was repelled.

The fighting continued all day.

At nightfall, the overwhelmed
Americans broke up the fight and withdrew in a mess.

They left their injured behind and the inhabitants of the village
who did not flee.

Reprisals on the civilian population
who supported their liberators were going to be terrible.

The village was ransacked
and then set on fire.

The Waffen-SS executed the survivors.

32 civilians and at least
50 American soldiers would perish.

The others managed to get away,
but the attitude of the SS said a lot on their state of mind.

They would fight to the end.

Started on the beaches
and in the woods, the battles to liberate France
and Europe had only just begun.

The paratroopers of the 82nd
and the 101st Airborne had not finished fighting.

They participated
in many more battles.

They would be in every fight, in September 1944 in Arnhem, Holland, in December of the same
year in Bastogne, Belgium.

In this month of June 1944,
the Battle of Normandy began.

The Second World War
was far from over.

The angels of victory had just
opened the way.

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