Sainte-Mere-Eglise is a lovely French village located around 12 kilometres straight inland from the famed D-Day beaches at Normandy.
Some 80-years ago, Sainte-Mere-Eglise and its surroundings was a strategic area along the national road connecting Cherbourg to Paris, at a key road junction between five departmental roads.
Early on the morning of June 6th, 1944 Saint-Mere-Eglise would become the first town in Europe to be liberated from more than four years of German occupation.
Welcome to Saint-Mere-Eglise
Google map showing the closeness (12 klms) Sainte-Mere-Eglise is to the D. Day Beaches of Normandy
Saint-Mere-Eglise – June 1944
On the night of 5th and 6th June, 1944 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Division, and the 101st known affectionately as the ‘Screaming Eagles‘, were set to be dropped in the area around the town but instead found themselves falling to earth right over the town, headed for a landing right in the town’s square.
German soldiers were in the Sainte-Mere-Eglise town square overseeing efforts by the locals to put out a fire, so you can imagine everyone’s surprise to see paratroophers with the US flag on the shoulder of their uniforms falling out of the night sky.
Sadly, many of the Americans were shot dead before they landed however there was one lucky American paratrooper – John Steele – whose parachute got caught on one of the steeples of the Our Lady of the Assumption church.
Private John Steele
Our Lady of the Assumption church.
D-Day Anniversary 2014 – A mannequin of US 82nd Airborne paratrooper John Steele in Sainte-Mere-Eglise in Normandy.
Steele of the 82nd Division was hit by shrapnel shortly after he began his descent. He could not use his leg and with his ‘shute catching one of the church towers in the early hours of the 6th June. Beneath him, a battle was raging. Steele spent two and a half hours hanging from the church steeple.
After trying to cut free with a knife, he accidentally dropped his knife and decided to play dead to avoid becoming a target of the Germans. He was finally cut free by a German soldier named Rudolf May who happened to be atop of the church when Steele was notice. May actually stopped a fellow soldier who had rasied his rifle, intending to shoot Steele. Instead Steele was lowered to the ground using a rope, and treated for his wounds, and taken prisoner by the Germans.
See this YouTube video of a scene from the excellent black-and-white movie ‘The Longest Day’ and with ‘Red’ Buttons playing the part of Steele.
Fortunately, Steele managed to escape three days later. He rejoined the Allies and was transferred to a hospital in England.
Steele later participated in the liberation of the Netherlands, at the Battle of the Bulge near Reims, and arrived in the area of Frankfurt (Germany) at the end the Second World War. He was then reassigned to the 17th Airborne Division and sailed from Marseilles to return to the United States and finally resumed a normal life in September 1945.
John Steele on one of his many visits in returning to Saint-Mere-Eglise
John returned several times to Sainte-Mere-Eglise, to attend commemorations of the 1944 Allied landings. He died of throat cancer in 1969 at the age of 57, in his small town in North Carolina and expressed the wish to be buried in Normandy… this unfortunately did not happen.
As you saw in the YouTube video above, Steele was not the only paratrooper caught on church steeples though there is a scene just a little further on in the movie and with John Wayne playing the part of Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, who on June 1st had been appointed commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, during the American airborne landings in Normandy.
It was 4.30am on the 6th June when Vandervoort, and laid-out in a stretcher having broken his foot in parachuting into France, led his men into Saint-Mere-Eglise to raise the ‘stars-and-stripes. However in entering the badly-damaged town, Vandervoot was alarmed at the sight of deceased US-born paratroophers hanging from church steeples, so much so he called for those carrying him to stop, ordering his men ‘cut down their colleagues’ hanging lifelessly in sight of the American troops who had only just landed in Normandy.
After the war, Vandervoot would twice be awarded a US Distinguished Service Cross for his leadership in re-taking Saint-Mere-Eglise, and the first town in France to be liberated by the Allies on D-Day.
It was not till 7th June that Saint-Mere-Eglise was finally liberated.
Sherman tanks landing on nearby Utah Beach with the US VII Corps were soon passing through the newly liberated town on the way to the front.
The John Steele restaurant/hotel in Saint-Mere-Eglise
