Download Airborne Troops - Countdown To D-day -... Guide

By late afternoon, the airfields of southern England—Greenham Common, Merryfield, Upottery—became staging grounds. Men blackened their faces with burnt cork and greasepaint, not for camouflage but for morale: looking like demons made them feel like demons. They strapped on “assault vests” stuffed with K-rations, fragmentation grenades, extra .45 magazines, and the iconic cricket clickers. Chaplains handed out small communion wafers and shook hands with every man in line. “It’s the shaking that got me,” wrote one paratrooper. “Some grips were iron. Some were wet. None let go first.”

“The green light doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It just burns. And you go.” — Pvt. James “Red” Flaherty, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne Endnote / Author’s Note Eighty years later, the cricket clickers have gone silent. But in French villages, children still place flowers on the graves of men who jumped into eternity before midnight ever struck. This was their countdown. This was their D-Day. Download Airborne Troops - Countdown to D-Day -...

Inside the gut-wrenching, 24-hour countdown that saw 13,000 paratroopers become the first boots on the ground in Normandy. Chaplains handed out small communion wafers and shook

Behind barbed wire and bagged-out maps, the men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions finally learned their objective: Utah Beach’s rear exits, key bridges over the Merderet River, and the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. For weeks, they’d trained on mockup C-47 fuselages. Now, commanders traced red lines on real terrain. “We weren’t told odds,” one sergeant later recalled. “We were told ‘mission success is mandatory.’” Chaplains held mass for 500 men at a time. The poker games stopped. Men sharpened trench knives. Some wrote wills in their helmets. Some were wet