Stars and Stripes at Ste. Mère-Église

To the Allied fighters on D-Day, we will always remember.



Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
0400, June 6, 1944

In Ste. Mère-Église, as the stunned townspeople watched from behind their shuttered windows, paratroopers of the 82nd's 505th Regiment slipped cautiously through the empty streets. The church bell was silent now. On the steeple Private John Steele's empty parachute hung limp, and every now and then the glowing embers of M. Hairon's villa erupted, briefly outlining the trees in the square. Occasionally a sniper's bullet whined angrily into the night, but that was the only sound; everywhere there was an uneasy silence.

Lieutenant Colonel Edward Krause, leading the attack, had expected to fight hard for Ste. Mère-Église, but apart from a few snipers it appeared that the German garrison had pulled out. Krause's men swiftly took advantage of the situation: They occupied buildings, set up roadblocks and machine-gun posts, cut telephone cables and wires. Other squads continued the slow sweeps through the town, moving like shadows from hedge to hedge and doorway to doorway, all converging on the town's center, the Place de l'Église.

Passing around the back of the church, Private First Class William Tucker reached the square and set up his machine gun behind a tree. Then as he looked out on the moonlit square he saw a parachute and, lying next to him, a dead German. On the far side were the crumpled, sprawled shapes of other bodies. As Tucker sat there in the semi-darkness trying to figure out what had happened, he began to feel that he was not alone --- that somebody was standing behind him. Grabbing the cumbersome machine gun, he whirled around. His eyes came level with a pair of boots slowly swaying back and forth. Tucker hastily stepped back. A dead paratrooper was hanging in the tree looking down at him.

Now other paratroopers came into the square and suddenly they, too, saw the bodies hanging in the trees. Lieutenant Gus Sanders remembers that "men just stood there staring, filled with a terrible anger." Lieutenant Colonel Krause reached the square. As he stood looking at the dead troops, he said just three words: "Oh, my God."

Then Krause pulled an American flag from his pocket. It was old and worn --- the same flag that the 505th had raised over Naples. Krause had promised his men that "before dawn on D Day this flag will fly over Ste. Mère-Église." He walked to the town hall and, on the flagpole by the side of the door, ran up the colors. There was no ceremony. In the square of the dead paratroopers the fighting was over. The Stars and Stripes flew over the first town to be liberated by the Americans in France.

At the German Seventh Army headquarters in Le Mans a message was received from General Marcks's 84th Corps. It read "Communications with Ste. Mère-Église cut off . . ." The time was 4:30 A.M.

[pgs. 160-162, "The Longest Day," by Cornelius Ryan]

The unheralded, unceremonious placing of the American flag on French soil on D-Day is symbolically comparable to the raising of the Stars and Stripes by U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, I think.

Companion post