82nd Airborne Division in action in Normandy, 1944 (XX0104)

The 82nd Airborne in Normandy, June 1944

The 82nd Airborne Division dropped into the Cotentin peninsula in the hours before the seaborne landings, with the task of seizing the crossings of the Merderet and holding the western flank of the invasion against counterattack. It was the division’s fourth combat jump and by a considerable margin its most costly.

A Drop That Went Wrong

Cloud banks over the peninsula broke up the transport formations, German flak scattered them further, and the pathfinder beacons were largely misplaced. The result was that the division landed across an area many times larger than planned, with sticks separated by kilometres and units mixed together in the dark. Some men came down in the flooded meadows along the Merderet and drowned under the weight of their equipment. By dawn the division was not so much deployed as dispersed.

Sainte-Mère-Église

The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped closest to its intended zone and took Sainte-Mère-Église in the early hours of 6 June — the first French town liberated in the invasion. The fighting for the Merderet crossings at La Fière and Chef-du-Pont continued for days and was among the heaviest of the Normandy campaign, fought over a causeway a few metres wide.

Thirty-Three Days

The division was meant to be withdrawn after a few days. It stayed in the line for thirty-three, and came out having lost roughly 46 per cent of its strength. The scattered drop, paradoxically, contributed to the confusion of the German response: with small groups of paratroopers appearing across the whole peninsula, the defenders had no clear picture of where the main effort lay.

Giuseppe Rava’s Original Work

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs the American paratrooper of June 1944 from surviving equipment and photographs: the M42 jump uniform with reinforced pockets, the M1C helmet, the reserve chute, the leg bag and the individual load that in many cases exceeded the man’s own body weight.

This is a limited edition fine art print, hand-signed by the artist, produced in SRA3 format on fine art paper. Ships worldwide.