Captain John Sauls crouched low behind a stone wall, the rest of G Company, 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, strung out alongside him, as scores of shells rattled over their heads toward the Germans. Twelve M4 Sherman medium tanks, lined up on a ridge behind the soldiers, bombarded the opposite shore of the little Merderet River in Normandy. There, German troops had taken up defensive positions at the end of a 500-yard causeway–the only means of crossing the flooded plain beyond the swollen river. It was June 9, 1944, three days after D-Day, and the paratroopers were fighting to capture the La Fiére causeway.

Mortars, Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs), bazookas and machine guns helped the tanks plaster the German positions. But what Sauls and his men really needed was a smoke screen. Even though heavy fire was being concentrated on the enemy, crossing that causeway, which offered no cover for its entire length, would be near suicide once the Germans opened up with their own weapons. Nevertheless, at 10:45 a.m. Sauls yelled out ‘Go! Go! Go! and began running for all he was worth, never looking back to see if anyone followed him. The company was to split into two columns, one on each side of the macadam roadway, as soon as they crossed the narrow bridge that spanned the river. After traversing the flooded area, each column would then peel off left and right to roll up the enemy positions along the edge of the flood area.

But Sauls’ plan began to come apart as soon as the men started across the bridge. The Germans opened up with a barrage of mortar, artillery and machine-gun fire that transformed the narrow roadway into a gantlet of destruction. Men fell by the score; some rolled into the river and drowned. The fallen men began to clog the path, and the attack slowed. Soon 100 men were down. Those who were left dashed for what little cover they could find. Sauls, against all odds, had reached the far side, but when he turnedaround to signal his men into position, he found himself alone.

La Fiére causeway became the linchpin in the larger struggle for the U.S. Army VII Corps’ operational objectives. But if all had gone according to plan, the battle at La Fiére, which cost the U.S. Army 60 killed and 529 wounded, captured or missing, need never have happened.

After years of planning, the D-Day operation was set by early 1944. The massive invasion forces would gather in England and then dash across the Channel to France. British, American and Canadian infantry would land on five Normandy beaches, code-named Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

The Normandy invasion was preceded by extensive paratrooper drops, including the insertion of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions onto the Cotentin Peninsula. Their mission was to seize important crossroads, bridges and towns north of the Douve River, playing havoc with enemy communication lines and clearing the way for the advance of Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps, which was coming inland from Utah Beach. The 82nd was to capture the crossings over the Merderet River at the tiny hamlets of La Fiére and Chef-du Pont.

Facing the 82nd were some of the toughest units in the German Seventh Army. Although squabbling among the German high command helped the invaders, the Normandy landscape itself proved to be a difficult hurdle for the Americans to overcome. Centuries-old hedgerows of impassable thorn bushes and tangled trees divided the countryside into sections and could actually prevent combat units from hearing or seeing one another, even in adjoining sections. To make matters worse, the Merderet was three or four times its usual size because the Germans had opened the locks at Carentan at high tide to flood the peninsula. Since tufts of tall grass still showed above the water surface, reconnaissance aircraft were unable to spot the flooding before D-Day, resulting in the deaths of many paratroopers who landed in the water and were dragged down by the weight of their equipment.

Luck was not with the nearly 13,000 paratroopers who drifted to earth in the early morning hours of June 6. A second wave of 3,000 glider-borne troops was to arrive later that morning. The first to land were the men of the 101st, whose objective was to secure four exit routes from Utah Beach for VII Corps. The paratroopers were scattered all over the countryside, coming down in orchards and town squares. Half of the division’s gliders crashed or sank in the flooded fields, along with its much-needed 105mm howitzers and jeeps. When the 82nd landed through lingering low clouds, they too were scattered.

On paper, the objectives of the 82nd’s three parachute regiments looked clear. The 505th would take the important crossroads town of Ste. Mére-Eglise and the eastern ends of two crucial crossings over the Merderet River at Chef-du-Pont and La Fiére. The 507th would seize the western end of La Fiére at the village of Cauquigny, and the 508th would secure crossings over the Douve River at the southwestern end of the drop zone. On the ground, things turned out quite differently.

The confusion of missed drop zones and rendezvous areas was compounded by a crippling lack of radio communication and difficulty with the terrain. All over the Merderet area, men sloshed across swamps, thrashed through thorny hedgerows or moved warily along darkened roads, vainly looking for landmarks and each other. Fortunately for them, there was almost as much confusion in the enemy camp. After constant rumors of imminent invasion, the Germans had grown somewhat complacent. Two of their division commanders, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Falley ofthe 91st and Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben of the 709th, were attending war games in Rennes when the landings occurred. When reports of the invasion began to reach German headquarters, they first sought verification before putting troops on general alert. Schlieben did not reach his headquarters at Valognes until noon on June 6, and Falley was killed by some of the widely scattered American paratroopers just as he was returning to take charge of his division. Meanwhile, hundreds of American pathfinders, who had parachuted in ahead of the air-borne divisions, had been busy for hours cutting communications wires, and thousands of dummy parachutists created false alarms and provoked the Germans to launch wasteful counterattacks.

Still, for most of the American paratroopers, their troubles began immediately after they entered French airspace. Not only did they miss their drop zones by nearly two miles, but because of the flooding, many were convinced that they had come down somewhere south of the Douve River instead of in the Merderet region. One of those paratroopers was Colonel Leroy Lindquist of the 508th, who landed in 2 feet of water on the correct side of the Merderet but north of his objective, the town of Etienville. Assembling his scattered men, he made his way to a raised railroad embankment that ran north and south of La Fiére. Lindquist had landed west of the Merderet and then followed the railroad, but he did not realize that the railroad crossed the river at this more northern point. He unknowingly led his men to the east side of the river, severely weakening that portion of the force that had managed to come down on the west side and whose mission was to seize and hold Cauquigny on the west end of the La Fiére causeway.

Meanwhile, slightly north of Lindquist’s position, the ramrod of the 82nd Division, Brig. Gen. James M. Gavin, landed in an orchard, saw the same embankment and, hearing heavy firing from the east, guessed correctly that he was somewhere just west of Ste. Mére-Eglise and that by following the railroad south he would arrive at the east end of the La Fiére causeway.

He set off with nearly 200 men in tow, hoping to reach it before dawn.

As the most prominent landmark in the flat expanse of flooded fields, the railroad embankment drew paratroopers like a magnet. Soon there were more than 500 men moving south along the embankment toward La Fiére.

What was left of the 507th on the west side of the Merderet was just emerging from the cold flood waters. Its most senior officer, Lt. Col. Charles J. Timmes, had been dragged across the river before cutting himself free of his parachute harness. Even without the aid of a railroad embankment, Timmes was able to figure out that he was just a mile east of his objective, Amfreville.

Picking up men as he headed south, he reached Cauquigny at first light. Miraculously, although the Gemmans had prepared defensive positions at the west end of the causeway, they had yet to deploy in the area.

From Cauquigny, Timmes headed for Amfreville, joining up along the way with Lieutenant Louis Levy and 30 more men. Out side Amfreville, he ran into stiff resistance and retreated to a nearby apple orchard. The next morning, with his immediate objective out of reach, Timmes decided to send Levy and l0 men to occupy Cauquigny. There, Levy was unexpectedly reinforced by another 39 men whose lieutenant, upon seeing how Levy had disposed his tiny force to cover the bridgehead, exclaimed, If we can hold this, we’ve got it made! As he spoke, heavy fire could be heard across the river around a group of buildings called the Manoir de La Fiére that overlooked the east end of the causeway. Constructed with heavy stone walls, some of the half-dozen farm buildings rose two or three stories, and most were connected and enclosed by a 5-foot wall strong enough to withstand mortar fire.

Of all the scattered airborne groups gravitating to the La Fiére causeway, only the 505th’s A Company knew exactly what it was doing from the start. Its assigned objective was the Manoir. It hit the ground in the same landing zone as the force that was to assault Ste. Mére-Eglise, 700 yards to the east. Everything went according to plan, and the company proceeded toward its target soon after completing an orderly assembly. Within a few hundred yards of the Manoir, however, they came under sniper and machine-gun fire.

Led by Lieutenant John J. Dolan, A Company halted and hit the ground while lieutenant George Presnell took a squad of men around to the right along the river. When they were stopped by a burst from the same machine gun, they lobbed a grenade in the general direction of the enemy and drew back. But even as Dolan’s group sat in the predawn darkness deciding what to do next, other American units were closing in on the La Fiére bridgehead from all directions. As Dolan approached from the north, Captain Ben Schwartzwalder led more than 40 men of the 507th to the south side of the Manoir, where he was also stopped by machine-gun fire. Lindquist was coming in from the east, and Levy was ensconced in a graveyard across the river at Cauquigny. At dawn, Schwartzwalder was joined briefly by Gavin, who decided, based on incomplete information, that the situation a La Fiére was under control, so he oted to take his 300 men south to seize the lower causeway at Chef-du-Pont.

Pages: 1 2