I didn’t know where we were going until I was briefed in the session held for platoon leaders and NCOs. Throughout the week we spent a lot of time with the sand tables, maps, aerial photos, and pictures of the terrain. We went with our squads, one at a time, so there was plenty of opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the entire mission. We would then formulate our plans on how to accomplish our particular tasks.

On Monday, June 5th, we had gotten back from our showers about four o’clock and we were told that we would go tonight. I remember we had ice cream at our evening meal—a rare treat—but I tell you, I wasn’t thinking much about ice cream, and I don’t think anyone else was either.

We set our time, blackened our faces with smut, and moved on down to the planes. We got our chutes out of the planes, got them on with the rest of our equipment, and it wasn’t long until word came to get aboard. We were really loaded down. I weighed about 178, stripped, and with my equipment, plus chute, I bet I weighed about 300 lbs. We all had a lot of ammo, and I had an extra box of ammo on me. Someone had to get behind you and boost you up, while the crew had to pull you in. We took a motion sickness pill about an hour before take-off. I know I had some butterflies, but I had made my mind up sometime back that if I had any doubts about jumping that would be before I got on the plane, but once I got on the plane, I was there. And it seemed to me that once I got on, the commitment was made, and I could pretty well settle down to whatever was ahead. I looked at my watch as we took off. It was 11:07 pm.

The stick on our airplane consisted of Lt. Semon, Haney and Waters, Grodowski and Robbins, Passino, Hoganmiller, Watkins, Ochowa, Tom, Trimble, Provenzano, Gillespie, Colvin, a medic, Jack Borden and myself: 17 men. Lt. Semon was the team leader. Haney was the No. 2 man (machine gunner), Waters was No. 3, Borden was last, and I was next to last. [See photos of this stick, along with the aircrew of Chalk No. 77.]

We were in the air roughly two hours, as it took a while for the planes to assemble. You might think that we flew right in over Utah Beach, but this was not the case. We flew around the tip and came in almost from the back side of the Cherbourg Peninsula and flew in with the planes exiting over Utah Beach. As I recall, we were to be over enemy territory for 11 minutes before we jumped.

As we looked out toward the coast of France, we could see quite a bit of tracer fire coming up toward us. Then we got into some flak, and sometimes we saw light flashes, which we knew were airplanes that had gotten hit. We got the red light, hooked up, and then we got the green light, and I watched the whole process. The jump went well, technically. A fine jump. And I imagine every guy felt just like I did: I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that airplane and take my chances on the ground.

My chute opened and I went through my regular checks, and looked down into a haze, probably at about 400 feet. The sight I saw shocked me: there appeared to be a mirror on a large area of the ground. Water! I  knew we were in trouble. Things began to happen real quickly. My first thought was to get my equipment off. I reached down on my leg for my knife, but it was gone. I had either failed to put it on tight, or the opening shock had jerked it loose. Either way, I knew I couldn’t get the equipment off. [Ed. Note: According to John R. Galvin's scholarly Air Assault, The Development of Air Mobile Warfare: "... the water in the streams and marshes was much higher than expected. The Germans had opened the locks near Carentan, allowing the sea to flood the meadows bordering the Douve and Merderet rivers, and rapidly growing grasses had covered the rise of the water, fooling the Allied photo interpreters. Paratroopers who expected to strike a soft turf ended their night descent with a splash in marshes that were over six feet deep in places" (Galvin, 143).]

I slipped the chute as much as I could to miss the water, and fortunately, was successful. I landed about two hedgerows over, and hit pretty hard. The box of machine gun ammo had really hit into my leg, and I thought for an instant it might be broken.

In the field where I landed were Joe Gillespie, Bernard B. Tom and Ray Colvin, and that was all we could find that night. Gillespie had fractured an ankle, so we had to make him comfortable and make plans about what to do.

I figured that we were in the wrong place, as there wasn’t supposed to be any water here. It wasn’t the Channel, or the coast, so I assumed we must have dropped early and I worked from that point.

Now, here I am, a buck sergeant with three Pfc’s in enemy-held country in the middle of the night, couldn’t speak German, couldn’t speak French, with 50 francs of endangered money in my pocket. This was the real thing. I knew the first thing I had to do was to pinpoint our location.

I remembered in the briefing that the planes were coming in on about 80 degrees. I got down in a trench with my flashlight and map and compass and checked my azimuth while the boys covered me. I confirmed that the planes were moving generally in that direction, so we moved that way also, as we wanted to head toward Utah Beach.

After crossing a couple of hedgerows we came to a little road, and I could see that it forked not far from us. I looked down the hedgerow until I saw a little sign that said Vierville. I checked the map again, and found that we were moving the right direction, toward Sainte Marie du Mont.

We found out later that Lt. Semon, the first man out on our stick, had drowned. Haney, the No. 2 man out had landed on a railroad that cut across the flooded area, and had cut his gear off and got out okay. Waters, the third man out, had the tripod and ammunition, and he hit the water and drowned.

As we moved toward Sainte Marie du Mont, we crossed the main road between Saint Lô and Sainte Mère Eglise, listened for approaching vehicles or troops and kept moving. Traveling through the hedgerows was difficult, and just before dawn we heard some noise, and we could tell it was American troops. We got out our metal crickets, which we used to identify ourselves, gave them a cricket, and moved on over there. They were in a field where several gliders had just landed, and a number of them had come from the gliders. One of those gliders had carried Brig. Gen. Donald F. Pratt, 101st assistant division commander, who had been killed when the glider crashed into a hedgerow. We asked these guys what their plans were, and they said they were going to stay put.

We decided to move on, and took off just as the sun was coming up. We spotted two troopers, and we could see a big house, an estate, in the distance. They told us that this was the Regimental CP, and that Col. Sink was there. They had been sent out to round up anybody coming in, so we went back with them. We asked them if they had any word about the 2d Battalion. They hadn’t. I believe this was about the time that Col. Sink took off on his run down through the horse lot and ran into all the Germans (see “Jeep Attack,” Chapter 6).

We went on a probing mission later to round up anybody we could find and give them directions. About ten o’clock that morning, we ran into a fire fight at a little place called Holdey. It was Capt. Patch, I believe, from 1st Battalion, who had some German machine gunners caught in the hedgerow. They sent us around on one flank. A German was running up and down the hedgerow with this machine gun, evidently. Pretty quick, I heard the sound of an American automatic weapon cut loose, and we didn’t hear the German machine gun anymore.

Haney turned up around noon, with not much more than his clothes and his carbine.

By then, we knew where the Germans were and we were trying to get the gliders to land away from them. We put up some orange smoke and some panels, but they landed over on the German side and we saw quite a fire fight over there. [Ed. Note: There were no designated signals during NEPTUNE for waving gliders off.]

We had a good defense set up around the Regimental CP, and about midnight I went over to ask about 2d Battalion again. One of the officers told me that they had gotten a report that part of the 2d Battalion had moved through here before daylight. That was good news.

My leg was about to kill me, so I went into the big barn on the old estate, and climbed up in an empty wine barrel, dropped my pants and took a look at my leg. It was black and blue from up to my hips down to my knee. (Twenty-five years to the day, I returned to this place, opened the door of the barn and there was that same old wine barrel sitting there just like it was before.)

About three or four that morning, we moved up the lane to a house with a defense set up all around, just to see if 2d Battalion people came that way. Sure enough, about the crack of dawn, a column was moving up the road, and it was a big part of the 2d Battalion. I got back with the company early in the morning on D-plus-one.

On that morning, we began moving toward Vierville, which was the first village we came to in the direction of Carentan.

I was on the left flank of my squad going through the hedgerows. Along the road there was a little fire fighting going into Vierville, but not much. However, moving through these hedgerows was a challenging and nerve-wracking situation, since you did not know who or what was behind each one.

When we got into Vierville, I was mighty thirsty. In the center of town there was a little churchyard. There was a big house across from it with a lot of people standing around, so I went over there to see if I could get a drink of water. About that time a couple of our troopers double-timed some German prisoners out and up the road. Then from somewhere in that group, I don’t know where, a grenade fell to the ground. I saw it, I heard it pop, so I knew it was live, and I yelled, “Live grenade!” I made a quick dive behind a fence and I think everyone else did too. It had about a five-second fuse, and as no one was hurt, I know it must have been a concussion grenade. If it had been a fragmentation grenade, we’d have had some injuries.

That woke me up real fast, and I may have forgotten all about the water, too, because right after that a fire fight broke out.

Some guy had spotted a bunch of Germans down in a gully and opened up on them, and it wasn’t long before we had twenty or so German prisoners.

We moved through Vierville down the road into the next little village, which was Angoville au Plain. This place was just a cluster of very old stone buildings that the road went through. There was not much of a fight there, as I believe the Germans were pulling back into the defense of Carentan. We got held up there behind a hedgerow, and in a few minutes I was told to go back to battalion HQ in Vierville and get briefed on a patrol.

They told me to get over to the right flank, find out who was over there and what was going on. There were four of us, as I recall, on that patrol. We headed along a road which was going toward the main road into Sainte Mère Eglise. We knew from our map that we would get to a crossroads before intersecting the main highway. As we got closer, the fire got more intense. We crawled up a hedgerow and got into the yard of a house with a masonry wall, and right away started drawing fire. Mortars were falling into the yard as quick as we got there. I found Maj. Franklin Foster, 1st Battalion Exec, and he explained the situation. 1st Battalion was moving down toward Saint Côme du Mont, and they had run into some very stiff resistance. It was about this time that Lt. Col. William Turner, CO of 1st Battalion, pulled up in a tank he had gotten somewhere. He was standing up in that tank at the crossroads, and was killed right there. Maj. Foster took over, and I understand that he was wounded himself shortly after we left to report back.

That night, pretty close to midnight, we heard stuff going overhead that sounded like freight trains, it was so big. We found out later it was from the battleship Texas’ 16-inch guns, and some other ships, too, evidently. At that time, of course, we had never heard anything like this.

The next night we were crossing the locks on the far side of the river across from Carentan. It was about three in the morning when we got to a house with a barn which was about 800-1000 yards from the town, with a good view. Lt. Hall was the platoon leader at this point; squad leaders were Charlie Jacobs, Frank Griffin and me. Haney and Hoganmiller were set up to watch the locks: we had been told to fire on anything coming down the river. The reasoning here was that the Germans would try to get down the river and blow the locks. I finally saw an opportunity to get some sleep, since I had really not had any since the beginning of the operation. I laid down, went right to sleep and woke up immediately to the sound of machine gun fire. Haney and Hoganmiller had opened up on something coming down the river, but it turned out to be driftwood. Well, so much for sleep. The sound of a machine gun wakes you up pretty thoroughly.

The next morning an artillery observer arrived at our position, and we removed a few shingles from the roof of the house so he could install his range finder. This was a periscope-like device, and you could really get a good view into Carentan with it. A number of Germans had moved into this area to make a stand, and we could see German troops moving around very clearly. After he got it zeroed in we moved it around a bit, and about 300 or 400 yards away we saw somebody on the ground. It looked like an American, and he would move every now and then. We got the medic and a stretcher and sent two men out there, and sure enough, it was a trooper who had busted his leg on the jump.

The Germans had found him, took his watch, cigarettes and other personal items, and had left him there. He had been there since Monday night, and it was Friday or maybe even Saturday when we found him. He was in pretty good shape though, didn’t seem rattled. He was just glad to see us.

We had been living on K-rations up to this point, such as we had them, and we were pretty hungry. About then we found a yearling, and we took it to the barn and butchered it. I remember that “Blackdog” Hurling was on his way back from the barn with a hindquarter when four or five Me-109s came across the edge of Carentan and right down on our position on a strafing run. Blackdog took off running and never missed a beat, carrying that hindquarter the whole way. They hit their guns, but were shooting at another position, so we had beef. Just after dark as we were cooking it, all of a sudden it sounded like the earth caved in. Some German planes, Heinkel 111s I believe, had come in on a bombing run, and one had hit not 200 yards from the house. We all hit the door and dove into our holes. Not long after that there was a big explosion when one of our anti-aircraft positions got one of the German planes, and he crashed about a mile away. So we got to enjoy our meat, finally.

By Sunday we got to see some of the artillery bombardment of Carentan which our observer directed. We got the word pretty quick to head on into the town of Carentan. We moved out Sunday night, and my squad was the last to move. We couldn’t find any of the rest of the company, but we met up with Capt. Peters from Regimental HQ. We attached ourselves to him and moved into town, moving quietly through backyards. We worked our way down to where we could hear Germans talking, but neither Capt. Peters or I knew exactly where we were (it turned out we were almost downtown), so we decided we better pull back.

At daylight we found out that the rest of the company had flanked to the right of Carentan and slipped in from that direction. Nick McKelski had been killed in town that night.

We caught up to the rest of the company, and when we moved into downtown again, we met up with the 401st battalion of the 327th.* My friend Col. Ray Allen, of Marshall, Texas, commanded the 401. We cleaned up Carentan pretty fast. The Germans had decided to give up the place and get out. [Ed. Note: The Germans knew that Carentan was an important American objective. In a strange twist of fate, the Germans had found a detailed copy of the battle plans for the the the XXX Corps of the British Second Army, the U. S. V Corps, and U. S. VII Corps (which, in conjunction with airborne troops were ultimately supposed to “cut off the Cotentin peninsula and seize Cherbourg”). These plans had washed up on D-Day in a boat containing the bodies of several dead Americans, one of whom had been a Beachmaster. Also found was a detailed American assessment of German military strengths and weaknesses. Lt. Col. Freiherr von der Heydte, commander of the German 6th Parachute Regiment which had the task of defending Carentan, made a personal reconnaissance trip on Sunday, June 11. While out, he encountered Brigadeführer Ostendorff, commander of the 17 SS Panzer Grenadier Division, who informed Heydte that the 6th Paratroop Regiment was now under Ostendorff’s command. They were needed, he was told, for a coordinated attack on the American bridgehead. Heydte, who believed his troops were not properly equipped for such an operation, expressed his concerns to Ostendorff and asked for reinforcements until Monday. Ostendorff declined. When Heydte returned to Carentan he found that his advance HQ had fallen and his regiment was in danger of encirclement. He withdrew. Thus, even with the plans of large portions of the invasion in hand, including timetables, the Germans could not turn the tide. One central reason: Allied airpower. The next day Ostendorff and his 17 SS Panzer Grenadiers tried in vain to move in on Carentan, and to prevent the Americans from opening the road between Utah and Omaha (Carell, 131f; Britannica, 768). John Taylor’s story takes up here.]

Next, we headed out from Carentan as part of an operation to clean out an area in the gap between Utah and Omaha Beaches. We were on the right flank of this effort which came down pretty close to the river, and bordered the railroad. This was kind of touchy. We were moving through hedgerows again, searching them, and checking out all the houses along the way, and it was pretty slow going. We spotted some Germans up ahead several hundred yards. I could see their black uniforms through my field glasses. We moved on, and drew some mortar fire, and this is where Raymond Dickey, in Jake’s squad, was killed that afternoon.

Late in the afternoon we pulled up behind a hedgerow, probably about a half mile from Carentan, and got some water, rations and ammo in by night. They told us to get ready to attack in the morning. We heard rumors they were going to send us back to England after we finished clearing this area.

At the crack of dawn we got the word to move out, and this is when all hell broke loose. We had a couple of scouts out, Hoganmiller and Robbins or Watkins, and we were just beginning to get ourselves into position for attack. By definition we were at our most vulnerable point right then, when two German tanks came up fast around the corner to our right, and cut loose on the hedgerow where all our people were. Tommy Wilker was killed; Les Haglan and Lt. Hall were wounded. They caught us off balance, and they caught us quick. I’ve been back to this place, and I still don’t know how those tanks got around whoever was over on our right without us getting any warning.

This German outfit, we were told later, was a reinforced regiment from the 17 SS Panzer Grenadier Division. They had a lot of automatic weapons, and it was a tough fight. We got Bob Neady and another guy in there with bazookas and got one of the tanks. We pulled back to improve our position, then later in the morning some of our tanks came in right behind us and set up. This didn’t prove to be so damn good right then, though, as tanks draw all kinds of fire, and we started getting a bunch of artillery shells coming in on us pretty hard. We lost Johnny Subco and Don Davis, and more wounded. Jack Borden and I almost got it there, when we raised our heads up above the hedgerow and a machine gunner opened up and splattered dirt in our faces. If his aim had been a few inches higher, he would have torn our heads off. It doesn’t take long to get your head down in those circumstances, though.

Later that night another unit came up and relieved us and we went back into Carentan to help stabilize various defensive positions there until more men and equipment could get ashore. We dug in along a hedgerow finally, and a big storm blew in and filled up all our holes.

We were there for several days, and finally they started pulling us back, one unit at a time, bringing in units to relieve us.

As we were leaving, we passed a couple of platoons of the 83d, coming in to combat, probably for the first time. Robbins, I believe it was, got right along beside them, flipped his safety off and fired his rifle. He didn’t even unsling it, he just fired it all of a sudden. Everyone of those guys hit the ditch, and we all got a big laugh out of it.

We were pulled back to the area outside of Cherbourg and held in reserve. We finally got to catch up on a little sleep. We found some German pillboxes, huge concrete things, where the Germans had actually been living. We got some food out of these, and found an old cow with shrapnel in her leg. We drove her back to our area and butchered her and had some fine meat. As we were eating it one evening—we had the meat hanging in a tree and a fire going in a little dugout—we received a visit. I was eating an inch thick steak, and sure enjoying it.

“Sergeant, that’s a fine looking piece of beef you got there.” It was Col. Chase, our Regimental Executive Officer. With him was a French farmer and a French paratrooper in uniform. They sent for Capt. Mulrey, and Blackjack Borden also came over, as he was our platoon leader now, since we’d lost Lt. Hall. The farmer claimed we’d killed two of his cows, but the truth was this cow didn’t even belong to him. And we’d only killed one. Anyway, the Colonel said we had to get $120 up to Regimental Headquarters by 0900 tomorrow, to pay the farmer for the cows. We didn’t have that kind of money. We had 50 invasion Francs a piece, but didn’t know until then what they were worth. Gordon, over in the 1st Platoon, had found a whole bag of Francs in one of those pillboxes, so he bankrolled us.

We headed down through Pouppeville, which had been part of our original objectives, on our way to the beach to head back to England.

The morning we were leaving, Gordon came over and said he wanted his money. He had Capt. Mulrey in on it, who said it was a legal debt. We had just gotten paid, in brand new English pounds, and we had to take up a collection from the 2d Platoon, which we weren’t very happy about. Money was pretty hard to come by the way we were earning it. We started across for England around July 14.

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