D-Day: Every Man Was a Hero A Military Gamble that Shaped History

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across the English Channel, an armada of shadows, only their lavender wing lights clearly visible in the thin moonlight. They took more than three hours to cross the Channel, then they dropped to 700 ft. to make their landing run. Suddenly they plunged into the turbulence of a thick bank of clouds. The pilots reflexively separated to avoid collision. As they emerged from the blinding clouds, sheets of flak began exploding all around them. Sergeant Louis Truax saw his plane's left wing hit, and then the paratroopers went sprawling. "One man dived out the door headfirst," he said. "I grabbed the ammo belt ... of the man I thought next and gave him a heave out nose first. The next man made it crawling . .. Then I dived."

Some men were dropped miles from their landing sites, some were dropped far out at sea, some were dropped so low that their parachutes never opened. Private Donald Burgett recalled that they "made a sound like large, ripe pumpkins being thrown down against the ground." The 101st's commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was dropped at 500 ft. and said later, "God must have opened the chute."

There was another unforeseen hazard. The Germans had permitted a number of rivers to flood the fields, and many paratroopers landed with their burden of supplies in three or four feet of water. Father Francis Sampson, a Catholic chaplain, sank into water over his head and just barely managed to cut himself free from his chute. Then he had to dive down five or six times to retrieve his equipment for saying Mass. Private John Steele had a different kind of religious problem: his parachute caught on the steeple of the church in Ste.-Mère-Eglise, so he played dead while German patrols prowled the streets below. A stray bullet hit him in the foot. He watched another ammunition-laden paratrooper land on a burning house and explode. Others were shot while hanging in trees. After two hours, a German finally spotted Steele, cut him down and took him prisoner. American forces later rescued him when they occupied the town, the first in France to be liberated.

All night long the scattered paratroopers worked to re-establish contact, snapping cricket noisemakers to locate each other. (Most of their radios had been lost, along with 60% of their other supplies.) Sometimes the cricket sound drew German gunfire, but more often it brought lonely stragglers together into makeshift units (others remained lost for days). "When I began to use my cricket," General Taylor recalled, "the first man I met in the darkness I thought was a German until he cricketed. He was the most beautiful soldier I'd ever seen, before or since. We threw our arms around each other, and from that moment I knew we had won the war."

Sometimes a single man could overcome absurd odds. Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers of the 101st was ordered to take 15 men and attack a German artillery barracks known only as WXYZ, actually a cluster of stone farm buildings. When the 15 showed signs of reluctance, Summers somewhat recklessly decided to goad them by leading the charge himself. He kicked in a door and sprayed the room with his submachine gun. Four Germans fell dead, and the rest ran out a back door. None of Summers' men had followed him, so he alone charged the second building; the Germans fled. By this time, one of Summers'