Go! Go! Go!

George Company was assigned to the assault over the Merderet. In advance of his company, Captain Sauls reconnoitred the way forward, hauled aside the 507th Regiment’s dead from the road ahead, and waited for the promised smoke barrage. The deadline …

1944-06-09

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George Company was assigned to the assault over the Merderet. In advance of his company, Captain Sauls reconnoitred the way forward, hauled aside the 507th Regiment’s dead from the road ahead, and waited for the promised smoke barrage. The deadline for attack passing with no smoke, George Company’s officers stepped off regardless. Sauls yelled ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and advanced, eyes forward. Captain Sauls and his brother officers reached the far shore with barely a single squad. The causeway behind them was empty. Recovering from an all too brief bombardment, the German defenders regrouped and brought down an intense rain of artillery and machine gun fire, all but sealing off the narrow causeway. Successive groups of infantry made the attempt, but for most the causeway proved too long for a single dash. Those that stopped, and those that fell, gradually choked the causeway road. A single Sherman tank ventured forward, only to immobilize itself on the American mines laid three days before.

La Fiere Manoir, 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