How 13,000 American Paratroopers Survived 72 Hours Behind Enemy Lines After D-Day D

Just after 1 in the morning on June 6th, 1944, around 13,000 American paratroopers stepped out of C47 transport planes into the dark over Normandy. Most of them landed nowhere near where they were supposed to. Their radios were gone. Their mortars were gone. Whole companies would not find each other for two days.

But before any of these men fought a battle, they had a smaller and more immediate problem to solve. how to stay alive for 72 hours on nothing but what was strapped to their bodies. Start with the weight because everything that happened afterward came out of it. A paratrooper of the 82nd or the 101st Airborne walked out to the airfields in England on the evening of June 5th carrying somewhere between 70 and 150 lbs of equipment.

The main parachute on his back weighed close to 30 lb. The reserve shoot on his chest added 15 more. Under that, he wore a reinforced jumpsuit treated with a chemical antig- coating that made the fabric stiff and airless. And over the top of that, a May West life vest because a good part of the ground he was jumping onto had been deliberately put underwater.

Then came the load itself. A rifle or a Thompson submachine gun broken down and jammed into a padded canvas case. Bandeliers of ammunition wrapped around the torso. Fragmentation grenades in the leg pockets. anti-tank mines, blocks of explosive, an entrenching tool, a gas mask, a canteen or two, a first aid pouch with a morphine ceret clipped inside it, and 3 days of rations.

Some men strapped extra mortar rounds or machine gun belts across their shoulders because those loads had to reach the ground somehow. Men could not climb into the aircraft unassisted. Photographs from the airfields at Upupaty and North Wam show troopers being pushed up the boarding ladder from behind by two other men.

Some sat down in the fuselage and could not get up again without help. The 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had adopted a British invention for the drop, a canvas leg bag strapped to one ankle and lowered on a rope once the canopy opened. It was a reasonable idea that had not been tested at the speeds the transports were actually flying that night.

When the men went out the door, the propeller blast tore a great many of the bags clean off. Machine guns, radios, medical kits, and mortar rounds fell 400 ft and disappeared into flooded fields and hedges in the dark. So, the first thing a large number of these men discovered in the 90 seconds between the jump and the ground was that most of what they had planned to survive on was already gone.

The drops scattered them across roughly 25 mi of the Cotenine Peninsula. There were three reasons for it and they compounded each other. The transport formations flew into a thick bank of cloud over the peninsula and broke apart to avoid collision. German anti-aircraft fire came up through the cloud and pilots took evasive action.

And a lot of the aircraft were flying faster and lower than the drop plan called for, which stretched every stick of paratroopers into a long thin line across the countryside instead of a tight cluster. The result was that only a small fraction of the men came down on or near their intended drop zones. Estimates vary by unit and by historian, but for the 101st, the commonly cited figure is around one man in 10 landing where he was meant to.

Some sticks came down five miles off. A few landed more than 20 miles from their objective in the wrong division sector entirely and spent the next three days fighting alongside strangers. Then there was the water. The Germans had been flooding the low ground behind the invasion coast for months, damning the DVE and the Murderay Rivers and letting the marshes fill.

From 2,000 ft in the dark, the flooded meadows looked like open pasture. They were not. In many places, the water sat 2 to four feet deep over soft mud and reads, and men hit it carrying a 100 pounds of equipment with a parachute canopy coming down on top of them. A soaked parachute is not a piece of fabric.

It is a sail full of water that will hold a man face down in 18 in of marsh and drown him there. The standard release on the American harness required both hands and a hard punch to the buckle, and a great many men had lost the small knives they were supposed to be able to reach. Some cut themselves free with the switchblade sewn into the collar of the jump jacket.

Some were pulled out by the man who landed nearest to them. Dozens did not get out at all. Bodies were still being recovered from the murderay marshes weeks later. For the men who did get clear, the first hour was spent standing waist deep in cold water in absolute darkness in a country they had only seen on a sand table with no idea where anyone else was.

Which brings up the small object that probably saved more lives that night than any weapon they carried. It was a brass and steel toy, a child’s clicker of the kind sold in English shops before the war. And the 101st had bought them in quantity and issued one to each man. The system was simple. One click meant a question. Two clicks meant the answer.

A trooper moving through a hedger row in the dark clicked once. And if he heard two clicks back, the man in front of him was American. The 82nd used spoken challenge words instead. Flash answered with thunder, confirmed with welcome. The words were chosen because German speakers tend to harden the th sound, and a man who could not say thunder cleanly was probably not from Wisconsin.

Neither system worked perfectly. There are accounts of men clicking and getting a rifle bolt in reply because a rifle bolt makes a very similar noise. There are accounts of Americans shooting Americans in the hedges before dawn. But by first light on June 6th, small mixed groups had formed all across the peninsula. a lieutenant from one regiment, a sergeant from another, four riflemen from three different companies, a Pathfinder, a glider pilot who had walked away from a wreck.

German commanders reporting up the chain that morning described the situation as paratroopers everywhere and no discernable front line, which was accurate and which was accidentally the most effective thing the airborne did that day. Now, the practical question, what did these men actually eat for 3 days? Each trooper jumped with three Kration boxes, waxed cardboard about the size of a paperback, one marked breakfast, one dinner, one supper.

Inside was a small can of meat or chopped egg and pork, four or five hard biscuits, a compressed fruit bar or a packet of hard candy, a powder for coffee or lemon drink, a few lumps of sugar, four cigarettes, a stick of chewing gum, and a short sheet of toilet paper. Three boxes came to somewhere around 2,800 to 3,000 calories, which is a reasonable day’s food for a man in an office and nowhere near enough for a man carrying a 100 lb through Marshand and fighting.

Alongside that was the D-ration Bar, 4 ounces of chocolate, oat flour, and skim milk powder, deliberately formulated by Hershey to be dense, heatresistant, and only marginally more appetizing than a boiled potato. Because the army had worked out that if it tasted good, the men would eat it on the first afternoon. It ran about 600 calories a bar.

Troopers stuffed them into every spare pocket. Some men were carrying six or eight. The plan was 3 days of rations for 3 days of fighting. What actually happened was that a large proportion of the food went into the flooded fields with the leg bags or was cut away in the water or was carried by the men who had come down 12 miles away. So the food got pulled.

A group of nine men who came together at a crossroads at 4 in the morning would count what they had between them and divide it. And if two of them had nothing, that was simply how the arithmetic went. Men ate standing up in ditches one biscuit at a time, stretching a box meant for one meal across an entire day.

Water ran out faster than food. Each man carried one or two cantens, a quart each. in June in wool and canvas moving under load. That is a few hours of supply. There was water everywhere in Normandy and almost all of it was contaminated because the flooded ground was full of livestock. And by the second day it was full of a good deal worse.

Troopers carried hallazone tablets. Chlorine compressed into a small white disc. Two tablets to a canteen. Shake it. Wait half an hour. The taste was strongly of swimming pool. And the weight was the part men skipped when they were dry, which is why dysentery moved through the airborne units in the second week almost as reliably as German artillery.

The other source was the farms. The Norman countryside in June of 1944 was full of small stone farmsteads with cows in the fields and cider in the barns. Paratroopers drank milk straight from the pale, ate eggs raw or fried in mess tins over squares of burning explosive, and traded cigarettes and chocolate to farm families for bread and butter.

In the villages around St. Margle, French civilians brought food out to men they had never seen before while the fighting was still going on in the next field. A number of troopers separated from their units were hidden in barns and cellers by farmers who had no way of knowing whether the invasion would hold. Calvados, the local apple brandy, turns up in almost every memoir of those three days.

It kept nobody warm, and it certainly did not help with the dark, but it was there. And after 40 hours awake, a great many men drank it. If you are getting something out of this, subscribe. This channel covers what the war actually felt like at ground level and there is a new one every week. Now sleep or rather the near total absence of it.

Work out the timeline and the numbers are difficult to believe. Most of these men were woken early on June 5th for briefing. The operation was delayed by weather. So they spent the whole of that day sitting in sealed marshalling areas blackening their faces, sharpening knives, waiting. They boarded the aircraft around 10:00 in the evening and jumped after 1:00 in the morning.

So, by the time a trooper’s boots hit Normandy soil, he had usually been awake for 18 to 20 hours already, and he was now expected to fight. What followed was 3 days of movement, contact, digging, and standing watch with rest taken in fragments of 20 minutes in a ditch, sitting upright, wet through with a rifle across the knees. Men fell asleep standing up against hedro banks.

Officers recorded troopers falling asleep mids sentence during briefings and having to be shaken awake to answer. Some units were issued benzadrine tablets in their escape and evasion kits, and there is enough testimony that men took them to say it happened, though how widely is genuinely unclear and worth treating with caution. What is not in doubt is the cumulative effect.

By the third day, officers were reporting men who could not follow simple instructions, who fired at movement that was not there, and who had to be physically turned around and pointed in the right direction. Exhaustion of that depth does not feel like tiredness. It feels like the world going slightly out of focus and staying there. The single clearest picture we have of what those 72 hours cost is a small stone church in a village called Anggoville Alplan about 3 mi inland from Utah Beach.

Two medics of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Robert Wright and Kenneth Moore, both in their early 20s, set up an aid station inside it on the morning of June 6th because it was the only building with a roof and thick walls. They dragged the wooden pews together and laid the wounded across them. Over the next 3 days, they treated around 80 men, working with morphine ceretses, sulfa powder, plasma, bandages, and whatever they could scavenge.

And for a stretch of it, they had no doctor and no evacuation of any kind. The village changed hands more than once while they worked. German soldiers came through the door, saw what was happening, and left the medics alone. Wounded Germans were carried in and laid on the pews beside wounded Americans. The two medics set one condition and held to it, which was that no weapons came inside the building.

At one point, a mortar round came through the roof and failed to detonate on the floor among the wounded. They also treated a French woman and a child. When the fighting moved on, both men were still standing. The blood stains are still on the pews in that church today. They have never been cleaned off and the village has been careful about that.

Multiply that room by the length of the peninsula and you have the medical picture of those three days. Aid stations in barns and roadside ditches. Wounded men lying under hedges through the night waiting for a jeep that in many cases could not reach them because the roads were held by somebody else. Morphine given by writing the letter M on a man’s forehead in his own blood so the next medic would know not to give him more.

Then there was the ground itself and what it did to men who had to live on it. Normandy in early June is not warm at night. It rained and the men were already soaked from the marshes and stayed soaked because a wool uniform under canvas webbing does not dry on a moving body. The chemical antigas treatment on the jumpsuits made the fabric hold water rather than shed it.

And it also made the suit stink badly enough that men complained about it in letters afterward. A foxhole in that country filled with water almost as fast as a man could dig it because the water table sat about 18 in under the top soil in the low ground. Troopers dug shallow and lined the bottom with hedge cutings or a folded raincoat and slept in the mud on top of that.

They were filthy inside of a day. Nobody washed, nobody shaved, and most of them had blackened their faces with cocoa powder and linseed oil before the jump, which after three days of rain and sweat had turned into a gray crust that made every man look roughly like every other man. The hedge are the last thing, and they shaped everything.

The bage of the cotton tan is not English hedge. It is a bank of packed earth 3 to 12 feet high, centuries old, with trees and dense root growth on top, dividing the fields into a grid of small enclosed boxes with sunken lanes running between them. Standing in one field, a man could not see into the next one.

The Germans had spent weeks sighting machine guns to fire down the length of these lanes. For a scattered paratrooper, this was terrifying, and it was also the reason he lived. The hedgeros hit him. Small groups moved along the ditches and inside the banks, ambushed vehicles, cut telephone wire, blew a bridge, and vanished into the next field.

They fought with what was available, which frequently meant German weapons picked up off the ground because ammunition for their own was running low by the second day, and captured mousers and machine pistols came with ammunition attached. By the morning of June 9th, 72 hours after the jump, the shape of it was clear.

Saint Mare Eglles had been taken in the first hours and held against counterattack, the first town in France liberated. The causeways behind Utah Beach were open. That same morning, men of the 82nd went across the causeway at Lefier over the murder under direct fire at a cost that anyone who was there described in the plainest possible terms for the rest of their lives.

The counting had caught up by then. Of the roughly 6,600 men the 101st put into Normandy, only about 2500 had been assembled under their own officers by the end of the first day. The 82nd was in a similar condition. Both divisions had lost the majority of their radios, mortars, and machine guns in the drop, and several thousand men had spent those three days entirely outside anyone’s chain of command, eating what they found, sleeping when they could not stay upright, and fighting whatever came down the lane. That was the 72 hours, not a plan executed, a plan that came apart in the air. and roughly 13,000 men who solved it individually in ditches, in flooded fields, in a church full of pews with the blood still on them. If you want to know what the next weeks look like for the same men, the video on the fight for Carantan picks up exactly where this one ends. Subscribe and it

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