Stephen Smith - 82nd Airborne

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

O peration 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 Berlins 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 divisionsa 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 wasnt simply the 4,500 casualties incurred on Creteit 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 dark hours prior to the seaborne assault on D-Day.

Specifically, while the British 6th Airborne Division seized objectives toward Caen, the two American divisionsthe 82nd and 101st Airbornewould drop behind the German defenses at Utah Beach. They would simultaneously block German reinforcements from reaching the beach, while seizing bridges to allow main-force US incursion inland. A focal point of American strategy was to saw off the Cotentin Peninsula as soon as possible, thus opening up the great port of Cherbourg to allow for rapid resupply of the invasion.

Detail from the bronze table at La Fire.

PFC Charles DeGlopper, Co C, 325th GIR, was the 82nds only Medal of Honor winner in Normandy, earned during the battle for La Fire bridge. Memorial unveiled June 5, 2015.

The Sainte-Mre-glise Liberation Monument remembers both the 82nd AB and the 101st.