The amphibious landings in Normandy on D-Day, 1944, were preceded by a corps-sized, night parachute assault by American and British airborne units. Many of the thousands of aircraft that delivered the 82d and 101st (US) Airborne Divisions to Normandy on the night of 5-6 June 1944 were blown off course. Some wound up in the wrong place because of enemy fire; others were simply lost. Thousands of paratroopers, the spearhead of the Allied invasion of Western Europe, found themselves scattered across unfamiliar countryside, many of them miles from their drop zones. They wandered about in the night, searching for their units, their buddies, their leaders, and their objectives. In those first few hours, the fate of the invasion hung in the balance; if the airborne forces did not cut the roads leading to the beaches, the Germans could counterattack the landing forces at the water’s edge, crushing the invasion before it even began.Fortunately for the Allies and the soldiers in the landing craft, the leaders in these airborne forces had trained their subordinate leaders well, encouraging their initiative, allowing them to do their jobs. Small unit leaders scattered around the darkened, unfamiliar countryside knew they were part of a larger effort, and they knew its success was up to them. They had been trained to act instead of waiting to be told what to do; they knew that if the invasion was to succeed, their small units had to accomplish their individual missions.Among these leaders were men like CPT Sam Gibbons of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He gathered a group of 12 soldiers-from different commands-and liberated a tiny village-which turned out to be outside the division area of operations-before heading south toward his original objective, the Douve River bridges. CPT Gibbons set off with a dozen people he had never seen before and no demolition equipment to destroy a bridge nearly 15 kilometers away. Later, he remarked, "...
