82nd Airborne: Normandy 1944

Stephen Smith · Simon Forty

ago 2017 · Casemate Publishers

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An account of the heroic D-Day actions of the US Army’s first airborne division in the series that brings World War II battles to life.

Since its formation on August 15, 1942, the 82nd Airborne, commanded by Major General Matthew B. Ridgway, trained exhaustively for their new role, which involved parachuting from C-47s and insertion by Waco CG-4A gliders. After participating in the invasion of Sicily and performing night parachute drops onto the Salerno beachhead in September 1943, the bulk of the division left for the United Kingdom and training for D-Day.

Reorganized with two new parachute infantry regiments, the 507th and the 508th, joining the 505th, the division dropped onto the Cotentin peninsula between Ste-Mère-Église and Carentan on the night of June 5–6, in a mission codenamed Boston. Their glider-borne component, the 325th GIR, arrived the next day. Widely dispersed on landing, the division overcame its problems and strong German defenses to take the important town of Ste-Mère-Église. Further intense action along the Merderet River ensured that the Utah beachhead wasn’t compromised, and subsequently, the division fought on losing 5,245 troopers killed, wounded, or missing. When withdrawn after 33 days of action, the division could be satisfied it had performed heroically and helped establish the Allied forces’ foothold in France.

The Past & Present Series reconstructs historical battles by using photography, juxtaposing modern views with those of the past together with concise explanatory text. It shows how much infrastructure has remained and how much such as outfits, uniforms, and ephemera has changed, providing a coherent link between now and then.

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Stephen Smith, a veteran of over a thousand armed operations during his twenty-two years with the Metropolitan Police specialist firearms command, was born in south London in 1960. He joined the Met at nineteen and after twelve years in uniform passed selection for PT17, the Mets firearms unit, where he was selected to work on the specialist firearms teams, experiencing firsthand the explosive and controversial world of police firearms operations.Between operational postings, Stephen has taught most aspects of armed policing. He left the Met in 2013 after 33 years service and now instructs firearms and tactics with a non-Home Office police force.Stephen Smith recently featured on Channel 5, in the four-part documentary series Armed and Dangerous and previously HBO's Secrets of New Scotland Yard. He has also advised on numerous films and TV police dramas.Simon Forty was educated in Dorset and the north of England before reading history at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He has been involved in publishing since the mid-1970s, first as editor and latterly as author. Son of author and RAC Tank Museum curator George Forty, he has continued in the family tradition writing mainly on historical and military subjects including books on the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars. Recently he has produced a range of highly illustrated books on the Normandy battlefields, the Atlantic Wall and the liberation of the Low Countries with co-author Leo Marriott.