THE ASSAULT ON EUROPE 

OVERLORD 

The huge and complex Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, known as Operation OVERLORD, included crucial operations of airborne troops. The Ninth Air Force included the IX Troop Carrier Command, the unit given the job of carrying the U.S. 82d and 101st Airborne Divisions into combat. In the days prior to the invasion, the AAF collected over nine hundred aircraft, mostly C–47 transports, plus some one hundred gliders. Their objective was to secure the southern flank of the Normandy beach invasion sector. Loaded during the night of June 5–6, thirteen thousand U.S. paratroopers began their flight across the English Channel, scheduled to reach six drop zones during the early morning hours and under cover of darkness. At the same time, several thousand British airborne troops de-parted for additional drop zones along the northern flank of the Normandy landing areas. 

The initial wave of U.S. transports crossed the coast in good shape, al-though their arrival alerted German gunners and heavy antiaircraft fire affected all the transports that followed. Additionally, a shift in weather patterns generated clouds, fog, and adverse winds. Formations began to drift and break up; confusion mounted in the darkness as dozens of airplanes lost contact with their original formations. Analysts later concluded that only 10 percent of the U.S. airborne forces hit their drop zones; some 50 percent of the troops parachuted one or two miles away from their intended zones. Confused and disoriented, they wasted many hours trying to find their own units, often straggling along with whatever U.S. paratroops they found. The confusion in the darkness was compounded by the towering hedgerows of the Normandy region. The hedgerows, impenetrable tangles of bushes and undergrowth, lined roads and fields at a height of five to twelve feet, making cross-country sighting and travel difficult even in daylight. 

There was one advantage in all this. For the Germans, with reports of enemy paratroopers cascading in from all points of the compass, organizing a logical, effective counterattack against the airborne forces proved temporarily daunting. This gave U.S. troops some additional time to try to lash together effective combat units, but the general dispersion under-mined a central tenet of airborne operations of keeping their modest forces concentrated in one area. Of the sixty-six hundred men in the 101st Airborne Division, only one-third were under a central command at the end of the day. 

The night operations also affected glider missions. The temperamental gliders, in the hands of comparatively inexperienced pilots, were tricky to land in daylight on a calm day. Bringing them down safely at night, in extremely poor visibility and on a hedgerow-carpeted terrain, appeared unusually foolhardy. But senior officers in the Allied planning committees insisted on it, citing potentially extreme casualties from German anti-aircraft fire during daylight. Despite bitter objections from officers in airborne squadrons, planners held to their decision to land the gliders at night. 

The Normandy landings involved several hundred CG–4A types and British Horsa gliders. Invasion timetables called for glider assaults in the predawn hours of D-Day, about five hours before the main force of troops hit the beaches. The total complement of glider and airborne troops came to three full airborne divisions, and their objectives involved occupying key areas at either end of the Normandy beachhead as well as holding important bridges and roads to choke off early counterattacks. All glider pilots received intensive briefings about their landing zones in order to minimize confusion in identifying assigned objectives. When there was light enough to see, this procedure worked well. As one glider pilot recalled later, he felt as though he were driving to his own farm; coming in for his landing, he recognized trees, fences, and houses. Nonetheless, intelligence misled a number of pilots, who found that twenty-foot-high trees marked on briefing charts turned out to be eighty feet high. Pilots were also told to use hedgerows as a pliant barrier to slow them down on landing, only to find that hedgerows were generally unyielding and often covered stone walls. The dangers in landing included “Rommel’s asparagus,” long rows of twelve-foot posts, many wired to mines, placed to rip apart gliders steering for apparently usable landing zones. 

In retrospect, the OVERLORD experience underscored the usefulness of airborne troops and the possibilities of aerial resupply. Nonetheless, many officers became discouraged about mounting nighttime operations, and airborne assaults held little chance of success unless favorable weather held and air superiority remained inviolate.