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    82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944
    82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944
    82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944
    Ebook135 pages33 minutes

    82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944

    By Stephen Smith and Simon Forty

    ()

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    About this ebook

    An account of the heroic D-Day actions of the US Army’s first airborne division in the series that brings World War II battles to life.

    Since its formation on August 15, 1942, the 82nd Airborne, commanded by Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, trained exhaustively for their new role, which involved parachuting from C-47s and insertion by Waco CG-4A gliders. After participating in the invasion of Sicily and performing night parachute drops onto the Salerno beachhead in September 1943, the bulk of the division left for the United Kingdom and training for D-Day.

    Reorganized with two new parachute infantry regiments, the 507th and the 508th, joining the 505th, the division dropped onto the Cotentin peninsula between Ste-Mère-Église and Carentan on the night of June 5–6, in a mission codenamed Boston. Their glider-borne component, the 325th GIR, arrived the next day. Widely dispersed on landing, the division overcame its problems and strong German defenses to take the important town of Ste-Mère-Église. Further intense action along the Merderet River ensured that the Utah beachhead wasn’t compromised, and subsequently, the division fought on losing 5,245 troopers killed, wounded, or missing. When withdrawn after 33 days of action, the division could be satisfied it had performed heroically and helped establish the Allied forces’ foothold in France.

    The Past & Present Series reconstructs historical battles by using photography, juxtaposing modern views with those of the past together with concise explanatory text. It shows how much infrastructure has remained and how much such as outfits, uniforms, and ephemera has changed, providing a coherent link between now and then.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCasemate Publishers
    Release dateAug 19, 2017
    ISBN9781612005379
    82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944

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      Book preview

      82nd Airborne - Stephen Smith

      Introduction

      Insignia for the 82nd Airborne, the All Americans.

      James M. Gavin, assistant division commander of the 82nd in Normandy.

      Operation Overlord was doubtless the most meticulously planned military assault of all time, and the longest in gestation. The Americans had wanted a cross-Channel attack as early as 1942, but had been persuaded to first test the Axis waters in North Africa. They had wanted it again in 1943, but cooler heads advised them to attack Sicily, and then Italy, instead.

      Keeping the Allied armies occupied in the Mediterranean during those years may have played to Berlin’s game, giving the Germans time to win their war in Russia— or not. But by late spring of 1944 both sides knew that the great Anglo-American invasion of France was finally coming. It would be the key to the war. If defeated, the English-speaking Allies would dare not try it again; if it succeeded, Germany would be caught between two fires, East and West, with no escape from ruin.

      From the start, Allied planners counted on employing their elite airborne divisions—a surprise cudgel that could penetrate, disrupt, or at least confuse the German defenses before their main forces hit the beaches.

      Nevertheless, there was still trepidation about the losses the airborne troops would incur. The Germans had proved unable to stop constant bomber streams from overflying their occupied territory; neither were they capable of stopping a 5,000-ship naval fleet. But lightly armed companies or battalions of paratroopers dropping within their own lines? These could be handled.

      The Germans, after all, had written the book on airborne warfare, which the Allies had sought to copy. In May 1940 a few dozen glider-borne troops had neutralized the mighty Belgian fortress of Eban Emael, thus jumpstarting the initial Allied debacle in the West. In May 1941, German paratroops and air-landed battalions achieved the greatest strategic victory in the history of airborne, when they assaulted and conquered the island of Crete. This achievement spurred the Allies to accelerate the creation of their own airborne capability, while unbeknownst to them, Crete had signaled to Hitler that the days of large-scale airborne attacks were over. It wasn’t simply the 4,500 casualties incurred on Crete—it was the fact that the first wave had dropped into a charnelhouse, entire companies wiped out to a man upon landing. The ghastly evidence of the para-drop slaughter remained a feature of the Cretan landscape for weeks after the battle.

      Allied planners naturally wondered whether the Germans, having pioneered airborne assaults, had also now become the experts in defending them. British Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory warned Dwight Eisenhower of a potential massacre of the US airborne. Certainly the previous record of Allied airborne drops provided mixed reasons for confidence. In the Mediterranean there had been a number of deadly miscues as well as mass confusion. The good news was that once on the ground, the hard-trained, volunteer paratroopers turned out to be the most ferocious fighters on either side. Ike kept to his original plan to thrust the airborne divisions into the midst of the German defenses in Normandy, in the

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