Ambush At Cauquigny

After passing the manoir, Captain Ben Schwarzwalder pressed on across the causeway. On the far bank, he found Lieutenant Louis Levy in charge of a mixed group of 507th and 508 paratroopers. Assuming wrongly, and tragically, that the bridgehead was …

1944-06-06

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After passing the manoir, Captain Ben Schwarzwalder pressed on across the causeway. On the far bank, he found Lieutenant Louis Levy in charge of a mixed group of 507th and 508 paratroopers. Assuming wrongly, and tragically, that the bridgehead was under no threat, Schwarzwalder moved out to the north, intent enjoining Colonel Timmes’ 2/507th in their orchard stronghold. After Schwai'zwalder followed the greater part of Levy’s group, with them the sole bazooka team, leaving him with barely a dozen men to carry out Timmes’ order to ‘hold the bridge’. From the east, instead of sending the battalion of 505th P.I.R. that Levy was expecting, Lindquist advanced ‘Company B’, a motley collection of forty ill-armed headquarters and artillery men. Levy’s position was unexpectedly compromised by the appearance of a German ambulance, waving a Red Cross flag, that raced from the P4 road junction towards Amfreville before the Americans could react. Shortly after, ominous rumblings from the west turned out to be the head of a German column from Amfreville. Lieutenants Levy, Kormylo, and their colleagues fired and threw gammon bombs until their ammunition and resolve were exhausted, then withdrew to the north. They had held up the German advance and destroyed a number of enemy tanks. But they could not save ‘Company B’, whose few survivors sought sanctuary in the flooded marsh.

Cauquigny, France

Mission Boston was a parachute combat assault at night by Major General Matthew Ridgway's U.S. 82nd "All American" Airborne Division on June 6, 1944, part of the American airborne landings in Normandy during World War II. Boston was a component element of Operation Neptune, the assault portion of the Allied invasion of Normandy, codenamed Operation Overlord. 6,420 paratroopers jumped from nearly 370 C-47 Skytrain troop carrier aircraft into an intended objective area of roughly 10 square miles (26 km2) located on either side of the Merderet river on the Cotentin Peninsula of France, five hours ahead of the D-Day landings. The drops were scattered by bad weather and German anti-aircraft fire over an area three to four times as large as that planned. Two inexperienced units of the 82nd, the 507th and 508th Parachute Infantry Regiments (PIR), were given the mission of blocking approaches west of the Merderet River, but most of their paratroops missed their drop zones entirely. The veteran 505th PIR jumped accurately and captured its objective, the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, which proved essential to the success of the division.

Wikipedia: Mission Boston

German

American