Normandy Memories Still Sharp

We stepped off the tour bus in the square of Sainte-Mere-Eglise. It was a bright, sunny morning and the French countryside was peaceful and cool.

Some of our fellow passengers lit cigarettes while others walked around, cameras at the ready, looking for the “picturesque” and glad for the chance to stretch their legs.

“Hear anything?”

“Just birds,” Joyce said.

I don’t know why, but I had expected to hear small arms fire. Yet Joyce was right--there were just birds and maybe a dog, a few hundred yards away, barking at a French mailman.

-- -- --

Some months before, when I was helping my son John put a sprinkler system in the front yard, he had gone across the alley and asked Dick Young to stop over “just to make sure we were doing everything right.”

Dick is famous around the neighborhood for knowing how to fix things and for his willingness to help out. He brought his shovel and pipe wrenches, “just in case.”

The three of us had been working for a while when the conversation got around to the trip Joyce and I were planning to the Normandy Coast.

“Maybe the biggest day of my life took place right where you’re going,” Dick said, leaning on his shovel. “I was at Sainte-Mere-Eglise. I don’t talk about it much.”

This seemed to indicate he was about to. John and I sat on the edge of the trench. Joyce, curious about the apparent work slowdown, wandered out and sat down, too.

Dick was 23 years old and newly married when the United States entered World War II. Figuring the Army had him for the duration and that he might as well do everything he could to get the war over as soon as possible, he volunteered for the 101st Airborne.

His bride, Faye, wasn’t crazy about the idea but it seemed to work for Dick. After little more than a year and 25 jumps, he was a platoon sergeant in Company E in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was also overseas.

The regiment was on extended training at Newberry, in southern England, when the word came down. It was in a personal note from Gen. Eisenhower. Everybody who was to be involved in the invasion got one.

“It started out with, ‘Men, you are about to take part in a great crusade. . . .’ ” Dick said. “Of course, Eisenhower was talking about the invasion. It really was a great crusade, you know. Nobody ever has to be ashamed of fighting in that war.”

“Were you in the invasion?” Joyce asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Dick. “Airborne Infantry, you bet we were. We were all told we’d be jumping at night on the 4th of June, at least I remember it that way. And they also told us that for our own safety there’d be no mail, no phone calls and we’d all be confined to the post till we left.”

“But you didn’t leave on the 4th, did you?” John asked.

Dick shook his head. “The weather fouled us up. Almost fouled up the whole invasion. We didn’t leave until the 6th.”

“Just before midnight the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment boarded the planes, C-47s they were. Shoot, it was the whole 101st Division, all 6,000 of us. We circled till we got our formation together and then started across the channel.

“There’d been a lot of bad weather, the air was still bumpy and some of the guys weren’t feeling so good. But it was a short flight. Maybe a half hour.

“On the way over we were checking our gear and our weapons. We were each jumping with about 50 pounds, M1 rifle, bayonet, steel helmet, bandoleers of ammunition, blanket, K rations and pockets full of maybe 10 grenades.

“Not talking much, just sitting there in the dark. Little bit of a dim light from up front and a red light over the door. We had a Mexican fellow who sang a few songs and that eased things a little.”

“Did you know the name of the place where you were going?”

Dick told us that they all knew the name and they’d had a good briefing by good officers, one of whom, his captain, Robert MacDonald, was from West Point.

“They’d said to look out for the bone yard,” Dick said, “some kind of slough, near Sainte-Mere, running down to the ocean, where they processed animal bones for fertilizer or some such. They’d told us not to come down in it. We were thinking about things like that when we lined up and hitched up our static lines. There was just no time to be scared.

“And we were jumping from 800 feet, which doesn’t leave you a whole lot of time to worry while you’re on the way to the ground, either. I tell you, when that door opened there was nothing else in the world but a big black hole with a lot of stuff coming up. Tracers . . . Lord, there were lots of different colors of tracer bullets and flack exploding everywhere.

“But the brightest thing was that little red light. You could hear and feel the wind coming in, but . . . you couldn’t look away from that little red light over the open door.

“And when that red light popped out and the green came on and the man said ‘Go!’ we went, one after the other. Not one of the 25 jumps I’d had before was anything like that.”

No one spoke for a moment as Dick kicked the dirt off his shovel and shook his head.

“Did you all make it?” I asked.

“Naw,” he said, shaking his head. “All my platoon landed OK. Most of Company E, 2nd Battalion, got down all right, but some of the 506th hit the bone yard. And like the 82nd and part of the British 6th Airborne up the line, we were scattered all to hell and gone over the French countryside.

“Me and my bunch landed in a field, got together in a hedgerow and then, well, I guess you could say we went to war. Maybe 25% of our people died there in those little French towns and in Belgium. We even lost Capt. MacDonald, but come to think of it, that wasn’t at Sainte-Mere-Eglise. That wasn’t till the Rhine.

“But that little village figured pretty big in my life at one time. I guess, since it’s a part of me, you could say it figures pretty big in my life all the time.”

-- -- --

Joyce and I walked toward our tour bus. There really wasn’t much to see in Sainte-Mere-Eglise. The village was just the square, a few shops, a church and the steeple. That was a landmark; there had been a paratrooper whose chute had fouled on that steeple. He’d hung there most of the night, watching the fighting and trying not to be noticed by the Germans.

It must have worked. Either that or the enemy didn’t figure a man hanging by a parachute from a church steeple constituted enough of a threat to shoot at.

A few walls in Sainte-Mere-Eglise still showed the scars of battle, divots in the masonry from bullets fired more than 40 years before. Joyce used her long lens and took pictures of them in case Dick might figure he’d made some of those holes.

Deter, who was our official tour guide, joined us. “Looks like just another beautiful little French village, doesn’t it? One of thousands, eh? But the names--Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Saint-Lo, Carentan, Caen. You see the marks of the bullets in the walls?”

We both nodded. “The names of the places and the bullet holes, they remind us,” Deter said, “of the battlefield this was, that almost all of France has been, time and time again.

“The old song about the Allies having to come over every few years to fight France’s wars is foolishness, eh? We come over to fight for ourselves. France is just the battlefield. Always the battlefield for thousands of years. Is it any wonder the French don’t always seem to trust strangers?”

Some time after we got back, Dick came over. “About Sainte-Mere-Eglise. You remember you asked me if I was scared that day and I said I wasn’t. Well, I’ve been thinking back on it. How Faye and me hadn’t been married that long, and how the invasion had been delayed and all of us had that extra time to think.

“Then, jumping out that door into what we thought would be the whole German Army. Well, I got to remembering that feeling in the pit of my stomach. Yeah, I was scared.”

I walked with him back to his house. “I meant to go back to that village after the war,” he said. “And when we got our final leave, some of us started that way from Germany but somehow we got sidetracked.”

“How so?”

“Youth. We went to Paris, then the Riviera. Maybe someday I’ll make it back to Sainte-Mere-Eglise. Then I’d like to go to the American Cemetery at Normandy, you know, to pay my respects. I got a lot of friends there.”

I believe more people should see Sainte-Mere-Eglise and the other beautiful little villages of Normandy and Picardy, Ardennes-Champagne and the other provinces. Perhaps if enough people see them at peace in the morning sun, then maybe we’ll never let them be part of a battleground again.