Читать книгу Remembering D-day: Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes - Martin Bowman - Страница 71

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st US Airborne standing in the door of his plane as it passed over Ste-Mere-Eglise.

‘We were about 400 feet up and I could see fires burning and Krauts running about. There seemed to be total confusion on the ground. All hell broken loose. Flak and small arms fire was coming up and those poor guys were caught right in the middle of it.’

Lt Colonel Benjamin H. ‘Vandy’ Vandervoort, 505th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Commander (left) and Major William J. Hagan. Vandervoort broke his ankle on the jump into Ste-Mere Eglise but carried on with his jump boot tightly laced and a rifle as a crutch. He later “persuaded” two 101st Airborne Sergeants to pull him rickshaw fashion on a collapsible ammunition cart until he transferred to a jeep and managed to borrow crutches from a crippled French housewife in Ste-Mère-Eglise!

Major Edward C. “Cannonball” Krause, CO, Third Battalion, 505th Regiment, 82nd Airborne Divison. By the end of the first day Krause had been wounded three times but his humour never deserted him. One morning while his men were in their foxholes he took the roll call in German, “scaring his men to hell.”

L–R Lt General Matthew B. Ridgway, 82nd Airborne Commander; Brigadier General James Gavin, Captain Neal Lane McRoberts, and 101st Airborne Division Commander, Maj General Maxwell D. Taylor, on the occasion of the presentation of the first of two Silver Star awards to Captain McRoberts, commander of the 82nd Airborne pathfinders. General Taylor could only assemble little over 100 men, most of them officers, before he set out to secure one of the causeways leading to Utah Beach. Referring to his brass-heavy group, General Taylor said, ‘Never were so few led by so many’.