STE. MERE-EGLISE, France — While a high school band played in a square where dozens of American paratroopers were slaughtered 40 years ago, the 101st Airborne Div made a memorial drop two miles from the town center.
On June 6, 1944, the Screaming Eagles of the 101st drifted from their targets behind Utah Beach, many falling into heavy German resistance in the town square.
Tuesday, paratroopers of the 101st made several jumps while veterans of the original drop and other D-Day veterans gathered in the square to listen to music and look at the famous church where paratrooper John Steele watched the massacre while hanging from the steeple by his parachute.
Steele, a regular participant in the annual Normandy commemorations before his death several years ago, was represented by a life-size mannequin in a World War II uniform hanging by a parachute from the church steeple.
At the John Steele Bar across the street from the church, veterans of the airdrop gathered to share memories and renew wartime acquaintances.
Six-ship formations of U.S. Air Force C-130 transports passed over the village throughout the day, dropping 15 to 20 paratroopers from each plane.
Robert L. Jackson Jr. was one of the central figures in the reunion, but this paratrooper didn’t drop from the skies 40 years ago. He waded ashore with the infantry.
"I was a captain at the time. I commanded a machine-gun company," said the retired Army colonel. "We had decided, because of intelligence reports, that we would not be able to safely make our glider assault."
Jackson said that obstructions built by German forces would have cost too many paratroopers’ lives. He was ordered to form three machine-gun companies and retrain them for a sea assault.
"We had about 600 men in 36 assault landing craft. Each craft had a 50-caliber machine gun mounted on it. Teddy Roosevelt came in on one of our assault craft," Jackson said. Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the Roughrider president, led the 4th Inf Div in its assault at Utah Beach.
"It was really unusual that part of the 101st came ashore with the infantry," Jackson said.
The 65-year-old veteran was one of 100 elderly Screaming Eagles who received a red-carpet welcome from this small French village.
"We were the first town in France to be liberated from the Nazis. And we owe it to these men," an old Frenchman said, motioning at the American veterans filling the square.
Also filling the town square were dozens of World War II U.S. Army vehicles, but the men in American World War II uniforms driving the vehicles were not American. They were French, German, British and Scottish.
Several American visitors who approached the "American soldiers" were surprised to find that many of the uniformed drivers spoke little or no English.
The cars and their passengers arc members of clubs throughout Europe whose restored World War II vehicles have been filling the narrow streets of Normandy.
