Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 434 - The Battle of Graignes

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Joe and Nate discuss the 1944 airborne insertion in Normandy, the absolute chaos on the ground, and a very strangely cobbled-together American unit that somehow wound up holding off a German division in a small town called Graignes. SOURCES REFERENCED: Morgan, Martin K.A. Down to Earth: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy, Ibid. Battle of Graignes: An HQ Company Heroic Last Stand in Normandy. WWII Quarterly. Vol 5, no 3 O'Leary, Margaret R.; O'Leary, Dennis S. (24 February 2011). Tragedy at Graignes: The Bud Sophian Story Rabe SG. The Longest Day in Graignes. In: The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy: A Story of Resistance, Courage, and Solidarity in a French Village. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/battle-of-graignes.html https://www.normandyamericanheroes.com/blog/graignes-bloody-sunday

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audio books, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys

and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions up by Donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe. With me is Nate. Tom has been kidnapped once again by the denim samurai and we cannot bind him. Nate, how you doing, buddy? I'm doing all right.

I'm enjoying perfectly clear, nice, early autumn, cloudless September days, which always sounds like a prelude to telling a story about 9-11. But it's like, if 9-11 hadn't happened, that would have just been like a really nice day in New York. So I'm basically just having them. I mean, it's really nice weather that I'm appreciating a lot while I'm basically melding my face with computer screens to handle writing podcasts. Not for this show, but for others.

So, yeah, I'm doing okay. How are you? I'm good. You know, I think one of the secrets to putting in long work hours and never looking out the window is living in the Netherlands past like July normally. It all just looks like slate gray concrete outside. Could be any time of year. The only determinant is whether there are leaves on the trees or not. Yeah, exactly.

That's the United Kingdom, too, believe me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm close enough. We pretty much share the same weather. Yeah. I think you guys actually have may have worse weather. You are further north than London.

We get more rain, which is unsurprising. but it's dry today so no complaints I was able to cycle into the studio I did not as a lot of people discovered

in our last episode together have to Akira slide through horses shit but you know all is well this is coming out a little bit

in the future but we have our live show this weekend I'm really looking more to that that's gonna be fun I know you're listening

to this after our live show it was great in case you're wondering thumbs up thumbs way up that's me trying to

manifest some positive thoughts about me not fucking up on stage. Everything has always gone fine at every single show we've ever done. Oh, for sure. And that wasn't your fault. And that never happened. Yeah, it actually was just a bad dream. And so, like, why, yeah, why you shouldn't worry? If anything, I should worry, because if, like, something doesn't plug in right, you

be like, Nate, that's your one job and you'll fucking get out the Bushito blade and punish me. So I think the day that I stopped being nervous about the live shows going off well as, like, the guy who writes the script is the time everybody needs to start worrying. because then I'm too comfortable. Like, I have to be uncomfortable. Otherwise, my work sucks. I know that feeling. I mean, yeah, there's a level of, for me,

it's also the kind of attention to detail thing. I'll give you a funny story, though, before we start, just as a nice little laugh, because I don't know if this is going to be a fun episode or a grim episode, because Joe never lets me see it. I'm going to say 80-20. Okay. So we have this running joke,

my partner and I, about how there are some apps where it's so obvious that there's some kind of, like, spying on you going on in order to target you with ads and target you with content. and I think Instagram is the one that, like, I can't say for certain. And everything I'm going to say here is probably coincidental. Like, there's no way of saying for certain. But there's this joke that like, well, you just got to speak your wishes and desires into your phone when it's on lock and tell Instagram and meta what to do.

And then it'll because it does seem to be like, I have an errant conversation with my partner about something. And then it's like, everything we were talking about, suddenly shows up in targeted ads. That's just happening now. I keep getting annoying, kind of like, annoyingly earnest parenting content that I just, don't want to see. And for some reason, they've decided I have a son and not a daughter. So it's all about like, oh, stuff you need to teach your boys. Like, God, how to be, make your, make your son, you know, better at handling mental health than you or your dad or whatever. And it's like, I don't care. This is way too, like, Tweed and fucking, you know, like, I don't know,

just not particularly useful to me. Very, very American. I mean, it always takes one to no one, and I don't live in America anymore. And so finally, I was like, phone lock. Hi, meta. Please don't show me any more parenting content, specifically, please don't show me any parenting content for, you know, fathers wanting to know about parenting their sons. I don't have a son. Please just don't show me any parenting content whatsoever. Thank you. Anyway, next time I'm open up Instagram, no more parenting content. It switched to nothing but stuff about 9-11. I don't know why it thinks that's the substitute. Like, well, we're sensing an American accent, so. Yeah, Swiss IP address, American accent, doesn't want to see parenting content. All right,

9-11 it is. My algorithm has me 100% clocked. I get nothing, but, like, like protein supplements, pre-workout powder ads. Earlier this year, I want to say, earlier in 2026, where there's all of these workout ads for like Tai Chi and you'd have like the most AI looking jacked grandpa. Yeah. Doing these really shitty ads are like the red curtain behind him. So it looks like Joe Rogan and shit. I never really got those.

I only heard about those because Tom kept sending them to me. Yeah. I get like ads for new gyms that open literally anywhere in the Netherlands, which is really, really funny because, like, I live in a small town connected to the Hague. So it's like, why am I getting this brand new powerlifting gym ad in, like, Eindhoven? It's hours away from me. Yeah, no kidding, right?

Well, it's probably because, like, the catchment area or whatever for how they're going to target the ads. It's like people in the Netherlands, and that's what they're paying for, not realizing that it's completely impossible. You know what's targeted, but not with ads? What's that? The beaches of Normandy. See, I wanted to tell you about the seeing the weird AI thing. who were sort of like incredibly jacked Chris Pratt-looking guy, like hugging various animals about

like your spirit animal workout. Oh, I've seen those. Anthropomorphic bears and wolves. Like, just like, but doing like really intimate bro hugs. Like it's very odd. It's sensual. What's that how I like my workouts? Yeah, I don't want my workout is not that I go and I hug an anthropomorphic animal.

This is not what I meant by bear. I would go to a furry convention. I'm just trying to go to the gym so I can hate myself five percent less. Yeah, exactly. So the beaches of Normandy where it didn't matter how much you hated yourself because the world did the hating of you for you. And today we're not necessarily going to be talking about the beaches of Normandy, but rather the skies over it, because we are talking about paratroopers.

Oh. I told you this is for us. Yeah. You're airborne qualified, aren't you? Qualified, but never did anything outside of that. You've done it, though. I mean, like, you've done the five jumps. I mean, yeah, I can't even remember how many jumps I had in my jump plug.

In my mind, it's like, somewhere between, it's either 14 or 17. I can't really remember. I was in an airborne unit. We had to do qualifying jumps, and then I was a S3 air. So I was often like, hey, we need another person to fill this seat on a fucking helicopter. Or was it a C-10 or C-20, the Sherpas, the weird planes made in Northern Ireland, or jump out of a Chinook or, yeah, jump out of a Blackhawk. Jump out of a Cessna. I can't remember why.

So I've done it, but I certainly wasn't doing it. I think I've done one combat equipment jump for trying to exercise when I was in an airborne unit. And other than that, they were all Hollywood jumps because who fucking cares. Yeah, exactly. For the sake of our listeners, I'll say you were actually a paratrooper and I was a guy who got some promotion points. Also, just to clarify what I just said, when you think about the paratrooper, like, parachute insertions in World War II, obviously the famous ones in Normandy, but then also in the

Netherlands and then elsewhere in Europe and then also in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, when it's an actual combat jump, you are carrying a lot of equipment that is strapped onto you when you jump. It damn to your body weight. Yeah, it can be more than your body weight if you're like jumping mortar base plates and stuff like that. Especially during World War II,

or those guys are quite small. Yeah, agreed. But basically, jumping with combat equipment is much more complicated for a million reasons. I mean, obviously, because of the rigging and the inspection involved, it's much more likely people are going to get hurt. You have to drop your equipment

and have it land on the ground, which, God willing, you know, the path of how jumpers fall, you would hope that they're not going to land on people. But in general, it's so much more complicated, especially if you're doing it at night, that typically for airborne units where you have to jump once every three months in order to maintain your airborne pay, they typically, in my experience, just do jumps where it's just you and the parachute and reserve parachute, no weapon, no combat equipment, nothing.

So when it's just jump to jump because you need the jump proficiency, the slang term for that is called a Hollywood jump. And I think that I did however many combat equipment jumps you have to do in airborne school, I did. And then I want to say I did maybe one, if not, perhaps two combat equipment jumps in the entire time that was a paratrooper and when I was in the special forces course. Other than that, it was all just proficiency. So that's my paratrooper story.

The injury rate is very high. Yeah. And it's high on Hollywood jumps too. Yeah. It's not exactly great for unit readiness for everybody's ankles to be exploded, especially in a paratrooper unit when your ankles and knees are already fucked up. Yeah, because they make you run infinity fucking miles of the time. They sure do.

Then also there's the fact that you could probably do a whole, you know, like neuroscience research laboratory based around the numbers of concussions that your average airborne brigade gets in a year. So, yeah, there's a reason why they don't use it very much. There is complete diminishing returns. Also, paratroopers are an anachronism. They don't need to exist anymore. The point I was going to make before we move on to this is that the reason why it was such a thing, in World War II in Korea was because they didn't really have any...

In the World War II, they did not, and in Korea, they barely had helicopters that could do anything. And helicopters are so much better for that same purpose up until the point where you're dropping tens of thousands of dudes and doing like an entire, you know, regiments and divisions worth of airborne insertions. At that point, there just aren't enough helicopters that can hold that many people.

But before that point, and outside of that situation, it just doesn't make sense. So that's why it's the thing we do because it looks cool, but as Joe said, it's an anachronism and doesn't make any sense. So let's talk about a time where they were pretty useful. Operation Overlord, otherwise, simply known as D-Day, might be one of the greatest, most complex military operations in human history, when the Allies invaded Fortress Europe

and began the long, bloody process of resting control of Western Europe out of the hands of the Nazis. And no, this is not my intro into a very, very long series in Operation Overlord, though that will be coming at some point in the future, and may God help us all when that happens. Instead, today we're talking about the airborne landings, but not all of them. Really just one company, because in my head, the airborne and sea landings in D-Day are two different series, so I can cover them more completely and also so I don't drive the boys insane. Today, out of all of the thousands of landings that took place and accidentally,

through one of the countless misdrops of American paratroopers that day changed the course of the entire D-Day operation. This little-known battle was never planned. The town it took place in was never meant to be taken by any American paratroopers. And you probably know it best

as being one of the inspirations for the final battle in Saving Private Ryan, the Battle of Grenier. But first, the misdrop of context. Have you ever heard of this battle before? I don't think I have, actually. I obviously have seen Saving Private Ryan, don't get me wrong.

Yeah, who hasn't? Yeah, I was aware of this area. I mean, obviously in the Normandy landings, there was the trying to get to Cannes, trying to get to Carantan. Yeah, Carantan or Carantan. Looking at the information about it on the map, I know where San Luis, the sort of department that it's in the sort of way that it's governed in France now. maybe I've seen a road sign for a town called

De Crenu before but I have never been there or read anything about the battle so that's one of the more interesting parts as well for how important this battle accidentally ends up becoming there's really not a lot written about it and not to spoil the ending of this episode because the final battle in saving Private Ryan is not a one for one. The battle they're fighting is not

Grenier also because they win that battle in that movie that is not how this episode ends And obviously, this is not the place to go into the complexity required to drop thousands of dudes out of planes over France. And we're going to start off this episode with the assumption that you kind of know what happened on that day in June of 1944. So instead, we'll talk a little bit about that and more, at least a little bit, about the misdrops that the airborne operation has probably become best known for. Well, that and band of brothers, I guess. In fairness, Band of Brothers did a pretty good representation of how it would have been for pilots with no night vision, with flack everywhere, navigating by compass.

And then it's like, wait until you're over the place you're supposed to drop your paratroopers, but it's like, well, what do you do when, you know, in one situation like windshield explodes and your co-pilot dies? You know, what happens if like the plane is going to go down? Yeah, just hit the green light to get your men out on there. There's a lot of really interesting stories about those pilots. And as much as I wanted to put them in this episode, I'm holding on to them for dear life for our eventual series.

My favorite part about Band of Brothers is that the book it's based on by Stephen Ambrose is full of bullshit. Yeah. And the show itself has several glaring errors, like claiming someone in Easy Company died when they didn't. Yeah. His name is escaping my. head at the moment. If you watch Band of Brothers, he's the blonde guy who gets like...

Hysterical blindness. Yeah, hysterical blindness. And then gets shot in the throat. Yeah. In the show, it claims that he dies from his injuries a couple months later. He doesn't. He ends up fighting in Korea and living for years. He even goes to Easy Company reunions afterwards. Dick Winner simply didn't remember. And Ambrose just took everything Dick Winter said as gospel. So he's like, oh, well, he must be dead. There's no reason to look into this. It was what was it? It was private Blythe, wasn't it?

Yes. Yes, it's Blythe. He does not die in World War II. It says that he died, like, he died of his injuries in like 1947 or something. Yeah, which isn't true. Like, he fought in Korea. There's a few other things as well. Like, they don't examine why the men of Easy Company hated Captain Searle so much.

It's because he was Jewish. Yeah. Sobel, by all accounts, was not an asshole. He was just kind of not really qualified to be a captain quite yet. But like, they pile a bunch of bullshit. I'm just based on like 1940s anti-Semitism. And they completely leave out the tragic consequences of his death. Yeah, he attempted suicide. He died from starvation in a nursing home.

Wow. Yeah, they just leave all that out. Because I know he attempted suicide and he actually just wanted blinding himself. Yeah. Yeah. He dies of like exposes. in a nursing home. He's just abandoned. Yeah, it's real bad.

Anyway, Ambrose sucks, movie guy. Yeah, yeah, man. The airborne operation on D-Day, despite what people kind of think of in popular memory, it's not the largest in history. Depending on what we talk about,

it's like third. Whatever metrics you use for largest airborne operation, Operation Varsity would be the largest for most men thrown out in one location, right? But Market Garden is larger for pure numbers of dudes chucked out of planes by about 10,000. I would, you know, wager that people like to remember the D-Day one because it was successful,

which Market Garden was not. We'll eventually talk about that in a series as well. The airborne insertion part of Market Garden went great, quite frankly. That's fair. Yes, but the operation itself was a failure. It was a failure. It was a fucking disaster, yes. Whereas, like, the opposite case is true for D-Day, where the airborne insertion was a

shit show. An absolute nightmare. And if it wasn't for the beach landing is going as arguably as smoothly as they did, ooh boy, it would have been real bad. Well, it's kind of like, we've made this comment before that the way that people look at the stuff based on how the operation goes, also it depends on who's looking at it in the sense that the Allies saw the Nazi Falstrom Yeager operation in the invasion of Crete. And they were like, all right, paratroopers is where it's at. Whereas the Nazis were like, fuck that shit. That's a nightmare. Yeah, exactly. The same when the Nazis jumped on the Hague during their invasion of the Netherlands. Their full Schemacher operation went fucking terribly. The parachute landings required thousands of planes,

over 20,000 men, American, British, and Canadian, all meant to be dropped over a wide swath of Normandy, France prior to the beach landings. The point was to gun for several important points in order to destroy important Nazi defense infrastructure, take town, seize bridges, set up blocking positions, and just generally make the beach landings easier. It is kind of like a jab for the eventual knockout blow. Obviously, there's a lot of problems that come with throwing thousands of men out of planes, into the air and through enemy gunfire, and hoping somehow everything ends up between points A and B.

And that brings us to the infamous misdrops of D-Day. And when we're talking about misdrops, the definition is very simple. It means when a transport for one reason or another flies off course leading to the paratroopers who in 1944 really only had a vague idea of where the plane is heading. And also, remember, this is happening at night to jump out and then land in the wrong place. Yeah, so just having a really quick summary of nowadays, obviously this is aided significantly by things like GPS. And in the event of a combat drop, the doctrinal way that you would try to get this. done is that the drop zones would be scouted, probably by UAVs, sometimes by helicopters, and if possible, you would actually deploy Pathfinders to go in, more or less infiltrate and

set up some degree of marking. And they did on D-Day as well. They sent in Pathfinders, and the Pathfinders put down a beacon. However, the beacons that they were using at the time were incredibly shitty. Half the time, that's not an exact percentage, but a lot of the time, they simply didn't work. Yep. You didn't have infrared. You didn't have radar. You certainly didn't have GPS.

You didn't have satellites. You didn't have any of that. So what this effectively means is when the drops happen, the pilots take off. The various shocks go at they have certain checkpoints they hit in their airborne navigation. And then they turn on a drop heading, compass bearing basically in azimuth. And after a certain point, they look for certain checkpoints. They look for certain. There's a part at which they say, okay, we're at where we're supposed to be.

green light, which means, you know, all the paratroopers jump masters get jumpers out the door. But that's all based on, were you at the right checkpoint? Are you on the right heading based on that checkpoint? Are you actually over the training feature you're supposed to be? Are you in the position to do the drop? And, you know, did you see it correctly? And then does your number one jumper actually hit where they're supposed to hit? If not, it can put anything from, I mean, I've been on a chalk that was completely misdirected and I was one of maybe three who didn't wind up in the trees. I got really lucky. It's just it was a daytime drop. from a Chinook. So it was high enough that we could at least see where we were going and you'd pull a

slip as hard as you possibly could to try to get away from the trees. In this case, night, you have no idea. It was picked to be one of the darkest nights of that lunar cycle. On purpose. So the planes were harder to see. So the planes were visible because you have so much air defense. And that also meant that the pilots had significantly fewer reference points. 100%. They were given checkpoints on a paper map. Yep. And a compass. And this is where things immediately begin to go wrong. Yeah. So basically just so people understand this, in those kinds of situations, it would be, you take off, you go to a certain direction, and then it's, you're going at this speed for this long, you mark the time of it where you think you're going to be, and then you make whatever course correction

you're supposed to make turns, et cetera. But like, sometimes there are visual markers you look for. That's typically how it's done. Major train features like lakes, rivers, buildings, not so much because it's a wartime. So they would oftentimes black cities out for this exact purpose. Well, mostly for the purpose of bombers couldn't use them for navigation, but general. air navigation. And misdrops were such a common thing during the D-Day operation that, let's say we're both paratroopers on that fateful day in 1944. Statistically, you had a much higher chance of being flung out somewhere completely random than actually landing in your drop zone. Correct. According to the official history of the U.S. Air Force, airborne operations in World War II,

at best, 25% of paratroopers landed within one mile of their targeted drop. drop zone. Yeah. And the devil here is really in the details, though, because some of these sticks, as they're known, that being the paratroopers load into a single plane, were dropped behind Nazi lines into forests to get stuck in trees, where many of them were then shot into flooded marshes and swamps, which were near death sentences due to the fact that they are carrying their body weight or more in equipment and then would brown.

And there were as many ways these misdrops could kill a paratrooper than there were reasons for the misdrops in the first place. And the reasons for these misdrops were countless. And we kind of don't have the time to go into all the reasons. Again, this will be covered whenever we cover it in a series. And it's easy to talk about an operational fuck up when just one thing goes wrong. But honestly, pretty much everything from the second that these transport planes left the ground and in some cases gliders, you know, we love a good glider on this show. Pretty much everything from the second their wheels left the ground to the point that men started hitting the ground

went wrong. So much went so badly we do just kind of have to wait because there's going to be several episodes where we have to talk about all the reasons why this went bad and why a lot of people thought that the operations should not take place. I don't think we've ever talked about anything that went so wrong from beginning to end

but still technically ended in success. Virtually everyone, other than the paratroopers themselves, fucked this up. and honestly, they would have probably fucked it up too, but 99% of your job as a paratrooper boils down to getting to the ground as unbroken as you can. A lot is just out of your hands.

Yeah, and then basically link up as many friendly elements as you possibly can, just go after any target you can while trying to get to your assembly point. As we'll discover, some of those targets are just like, hey, look, something in the distance. We have no idea where we are, but that looks important. Yeah, because I mean, the way that it works even in a controlled environment is that everyone's supposed to, you know, land wherever you land, lands as safely as you can, get all your equipment together and then go to your assembly area and it's like a squad, go to your platoon assembly area, go to your company assembly area, go to your battalion assembly area. But like, you can't really do that when, as Joe just described, you're doing with a massive, massive operation with division levels of paratroop units and no one knows where they are and everyone's in the wrong place or just effectively no person. place at all as regards to the combat plan. Thousands of men are lost, and they have no idea the size, strength, or location of the enemy.

Yeah. And also you're in Bekaj territory. You're basically in that part of Normandy, you know, over centuries of agriculture, large rocks had basically been pulled out of the ground, and they had grown huge hedge rows and rock walls along the properties of farm fields, but also to protect against the wind, to stop it from damaging crops. And so, like, you have what is basically like a fucking maze. And lots of... swamps and marshes, which will become important later on. And on the night of June 5th, 1944, 12C-47 transport planes loaded with paratroopers from the 3rd Battalion, 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division took off from Barkston Heath Air Base in Grantham, England.

This was part of Mission Boston, where 370 planes and over 6,000 paratroopers were aiming to land in one of three landing zones, T, N, or O, with the goals of blocking the approaches to a nearby River and, infamously, capturing the town of St. Mary Glees. Of all of the flights that went wrong that day, this went the worst. It had all the things that the other flights had already had working against it. Bad weather, bad technology, mismarked drop zones, and incredibly inexperienced pilots. But in this case, there's a little added spice, and that was the paratroopers of the 507th were the last ones being dropped, meaning Nazi anti-aircraft batteries were very much awake and ready to turn the sky into the world's most kinetic mass grave.

According to the paratroopers in some of these planes, they began taking anti-aircraft fire literally as soon as they crossed into Normandy. The pilots immediately changed course to get away from the incoming fire, which makes sense. However, this is the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do. Transport pilots on drop day were ordered to, no matter what, remain on course to drop their human payload on target, even if it meant possibly being shot down. Swerving, changing course, or most importantly, breaking formation would make the paratroopers job virtually impossible.

And to be fair, I'm not shitting on the pilots here at all. Long story short, because we will cover this in depth in the future. Transport pilots were the most inexperienced pilots in the U.S. Army Air Force. It's not a job that people wanted. They wanted to be bomber pilots. And the last part that I talked about, breaking formation, meant that if your lead plane swerved the change course, all the other pilots decided keeping formation was more important than remaining on course.

So it was kind of like follow the leader. It was the right thing to do. Yeah. It's also incredibly dangerous in that kind of environment. Yeah, you'll just run into each other. Because you run into each other. Yeah. It's pitch black and you have no optics.

You're just looking out the glass of this plane that was slapped together, by like a half illiterate factory worker in Detroit. Yeah, and also, I mean, I don't know if you wanted to talk about flak, but like the German anti-aircraft weapon that was used quite significantly was effectively, these were explosive shells that fire into the air. They would perforate the plane. The concussion would damage the plane. They also put out a ton of smoke.

So it's like it makes, it obscures and it's riddling the plane with shrapnel, enough that if you took a direct hit, it could easily bring the plane down. But also like, it makes it. visual navigation even more challenging than it already was. From my understanding, the only time the pilots were allowed to break formation was if they believe that their plane was so damaged, it was going to compromise the formation. So they were ordered to take it out of formation while still under control and then die. So they didn't take out another plane with them or more than one plane.

So at around 2.30 a.m., Captain Leroy Brummet was shocked to see the red light inside of his plane go on. Now, this is the signal for the men in his plane to stand up and get ready to jump and start checking their equipment and all this other stuff, right? These lights are only controlled by the flight crew and the airborne guys in the back have no communication with the men flying the plane. Correct. Because the plane is so fucking loud, they can't talk to one another and they don't have headsets. That's why they do all the hand signals and also like the touch signals because, yeah, you can't talk. And in those days, it was even worse than it is now. Yep. And when he looked out the plane's door, he noticed he didn't see a single landmark that he had been studying in preparation for his jump.

The paratroopers in the plane couldn't tell the pilot they were in the wrong place. Also, they weren't entirely sure themselves. But at this point of the operation, they only had one job. Get out the fucking plane when the light turns green. You have no other job. However, the plane just kept flying once the light turned red. It never turned green. That's not supposed to happen.

No. Each stick commander was given what was known as a critical jump time to follow, meaning they absolutely had to jump by the plane at this time and no later then if they hope to remain on target. These are static line jumps. So they're hooking up to a cable inside the plane and the tension that's created when you jump out by the plane continuing to move, deploy to a parachute. You can, in a worst case scenario, self-deploy, but it's very difficult because a combat jump altitude is basically the minimum altitude possible while still letting you survive. because you want to fly as low as possible. Hence all the broken legs and shit.

Incredibly unlikely. It's very, very difficult. I don't really think how to do it in my mind's eye. You would have to pull your reserve shoot. It's incredibly dangerous. And so the thing here is, is that another part about the red light and the green light, is the plane is supposed to slow down a little bit. A little bit.

Because if you jump too fast to opening shock and rip your shit apart, break your bones. And you level the plane out as well. Like, make it as survivable as possible for the dudes inside. Yeah, because there are. actually some aircraft you can jump out of that the minimum speed they can get to for you to jump without stalling is still really, really fucking fast, and it makes the jumps incredibly painful and also challenging to keep control of. So can only imagine an environment like this, because you know, the pilots are supposed to slow down, but they're getting shot at and they think

they're going to die. Are they going to follow every step? You don't know. And if they don't. And remember, these are incredibly inexperienced pilots who have never dropped airborne soldiers before. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is not an enviable position to be in. And while Brummit is standing there as his critical jump time approaches, he sees planes in formation begin to release their paratroopers. But the light in his plane stayed red. Brummit just decided the pilot fucked up. So he ordered his men to stand up and go without the light turning green. In some tellings of the story, because not every history fully agrees on what happened. The pilot, pilots simply got lost, changing course, mistook one river for a different one, and then only

realized they were so terribly off course, they didn't switch the lights on deciding that keeping the paratroopers on the plane was the better choice, despite their orders to the contrary of no matter what, get these fucking dudes in the air. However, in the middle of everything that was happening, Brummet figured it was safer to be on the ground and in the wrong place than in that plane that was actively getting fucking shot at. And I do not blame him for that. With that, our story is going to narrow in scope to focus on one very unfortunate company of paratroopers.

Now, Brumitz is one of nine planes, holding 150 men of the headquarters company of the 3rd Battalion, that for whatever reason flew way off target, way more than anybody else. For people who don't know what a headquarters company is, maybe it's best I let Nate explain it to you. As the former headquarters company XO. I was never at a headquarters company. Yeah.

Because you weren't fucking elite enough. You weren't in the scout platoon, Joe. Come on. No, I was in the armor platoon. We were better. So basically a headquarters company, almost all my experiences with light infantry and then also in mechanized infantry. But typically in those kinds of units, your headquarters company is the home of the specialty platoon. which, for example, your medics, mortars, fires, etc. But also, technically speaking, every person

who's in an army unit, a military unit has to be assigned to a company that they go to their company formation. They're accountable to. They have a company commander. So even if you're a battalion commander, you're the literal head in charge of a 600-person battalion, 700 person, who knows, you technically have a company commander who is the headquarters company commander and you are task organized under that company. So the headquarters company is going to be larger than a regular line company would be, and you'll have all of your staff officers, all of your staff, NCOs and soldiers who are assigned to it, even if medics are parceled out to a, to line companies, similarly with fires, similar with mortars, whatever, any kind of specialty job like that.

Technically speaking, they report to that. So it's going to be in my case, I want to say we had like 200-ish people in our company. I can't quite remember. Yeah, I think they were supposed to have about 200, but they don't, but they're supposed to. Whereas your normal infantry, airborne Infantry Company was about 120 people. Your headquarters company was larger, and it would, you know, it would be, yeah, the battalion commander, all the staff officers, all the staffs, whether it's privates all the way up to, you know, captains. But it's a mixed bag.

You got a lot of people, a lot of different jobs. And also, more importantly, they don't typically work together as a company very often because most of them are parceled out to mine companies or they work on staff. So the idea of being like, you know, I go find, find the fucking guide on for your company commander. It's like, well, which one? If you're a medic, you're assigned to the A co or the B co or the B co. or the C co.

If you're a staff officer, it's like, go find your senior staff officer. But like the idea of it having the cohesion of a regular line company, well, it's not designed to. That's what I was looking for is this is not a company that A, fights as a company. B, has any rifleman at all? No. And C is a complete mashup of like 10 different jobs. This is not a company that's jumping in. to combat in a company out.

Like, they would land, make contact with other units. Like, for example, what other guys is carrying a typewriter? Another guy is carrying a fucking telephone switchboard. Yeah. This is not a paratrooper company that's meant to rush out and fight Nazis. We genuinely, in our headquarters company on our property book, would have everything from, like, we had a reconnaissance scout platoon. So that was an actual, like, infantry combat platoon specifically designed, you know,

they were supposed to go do reconnaissance. Well, that would have been useful in this case. to be... On their books, they would have had things like sniper rifles and lots of specials equipment for their job. But also, we had, like you were describing, you know, like a router for radios to go to different headsets in the operating center. All this, like, mega equipment for like IT stuff.

Like, that's technically on your property book. And in an environment like this, just as you have, you know, for 81 millimeter or 120 millimeter more, typically would assign that to be a thing, a person wore with their parachute to jump. someone's got to wear the fucking typewriter. Someone's got to wear the binders of all of the fucking personnel files about like, this guy sucks shit and we should kick him out of the army. That's how it works.

Pay slips even, you know. Yeah. There's a pay clerk jumping with them. There's mechanics. Yeah. Like, these guys are not the ones you want to be on their own. And the thing is, is that obviously a lot of stuff is going to be set aside to be brought in once you've established control and you have like an assembly or you have an operating center.

But there's a bare minimum that needs to be functional in order for that. to happen. And basically that tranche of shit that's got to be, you know, brought on site, you got to wear it. Like, they did do heavy drops, but not the way we do nowadays. And quite frankly, given the environment, it would have been really stupid to rely on heavy drops of log logistics, big parachute drops of like equipment and no people. Because how the fuck are you going to find it? And what happens if you lose it? To bring things back to saving private Ryan, this entire company is up them. Yeah. And it would turn out that this headquarters company would be the most mistropped of any unit on that fateful day. Now they were supposed to lend near drop zone

T, 15 to 18 miles north of the town of Amphraville. Instead, they landed 23 miles away, south of a town that would become important during D-Day, Carrantan, scattered across the flooded chest-deep marshes. Brumet landed with the rest of a stick, and he immediately had no idea where he was. So he waited until first light, he saw a church steeple in the distance, decided that must be maybe the town he's supposed to go to, and he just started walking to it. He only collected about 25 of his men, and in the middle of the darkness,

they gathered together, moved towards a town at first light, to the total and complete surprise of the people who live there, who then told him by pointing on a map where he was, and it was a town that he had never heard of, and was not in anybody's planning for the drops that day. And this is the case for a lot of mistrops. Men landed nearby, saw the town, and began trickling in it individually or in small groups,

because it's the only landmark around them, and Carantan is too far away. Brumet posted a small security detachment and scouted around the area, found there was no Germans at all between him and Carantan, which was about five miles away. He figured his best bet was to sit there until it was dark out again and then go towards Karen Tan where he knew there was going to be combat elements of the 101st Airborne, at least nearby because it was their job to capture it. He didn't know that he was way far ahead the 101st timeline. So there he waited.

And while he waited, a major showed up. Charles Johnston, 3rd Battalion's executive officer, meaning he was now the senior officer of the lost in the town and was now in charge over Brummit. Johnson thought moving them in through the darkness towards Carantan when they had no knowledge of where the enemy was or their strength, It was probably a very tactically stupid decision. And to that, I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with a major.

Instead, he believed they should hunker down, defend Grinier, and wait until they're relieved, either from the beach or from another airborne unit. And this is where things get interesting because the mayor of the town, Alphonse Voyer, approached Johnston and kind of they tried to communicate. Because the mayor doesn't speak English. Obviously, Johnson doesn't speak French. but he kind of threw shadow puppets and very, very, very miscommunicated words told him that he could make his headquarters at a nearby school. And then he like introduces him to the town's Catholic priests.

And it's very clear that we're friends, right? But thankfully for everybody, one soldier strolls into town. Who does speak French? Enter Sergeant Breton Brassard. He had been born to a deeply impoverished Cajun family in Louisiana and hadn't even learned English until he was in middle school because then it became mandatory. They got a dude who is just fed on crocodile meat.

Yeah, crocodile meat, gumbo. And he shows up and he's like, okay, I'm going to hit you with the wildest 17th century French fucking, you know, like archaisms you can possibly imagine. That's what the thing is to me. It's like, yes, Brissar definitely kind of. of speaks French, but he also doesn't. Because the mayor of Grignay, obviously has a very hard time understanding him because he's speaking like archaic French. So the thing about Cajun French

or Akadian, because it's people who are Cajians or people who were originally French settlers in what became British Canada who were forcibly depatriated into American territory. is that Canadian French, Asian French, all of the sort of North American French, comes from the French that was spoken at the time of colonization and because they were quite isolated. And in the case of Canada, there was quite a bit of effort to not let French language culture proliferate. While they are mutually intelligible and they're entirely mutually intelligible and the written language is basically the same, when you get into an environment like this person, Broussard would have been where people were raised in these communities where they weren't formally educated, especially at the this time, you are basically dealing with a very old-timey kind of French using expressions that they don't use anymore because modern European French had evolved, just like all languages do. So this puts you in a very strange situation even today when there is a lot more homogeneity. When I, for example, hear people who speak Shiak, which is in New Brunswick, and it's like one-third English, two-thirds French, it's insane. It's like my brain doesn't process it because

it's so weird. So I can imagine in a situation like this, where you also have to presume Broussard is not going to have military vocabulary or sort of like... At all, because why would he be like no regular civilian knows that shit until you're trained in English anyway?

So you're having to approximate and that's with the best comparison I could make is like imagine, you know, old-timey 49er guy who's like, you know, panning for gold in free statehood, California. has to talk to someone who's like a village priest in northern Scotland. They can talk, but it's going to be fucking weird.

Yeah, and that's kind of what happened. I'm in what must be the most aggravating translator the mayor has ever met. But they do communicate in a very complicated way, but the mayor is able to tell him everything that he knows about Nazi troop movements in the air, which is admittedly not much, other than telling him like, well,

we haven't seen them around here, at all. But Johnston did realize he was going to need more firepower if the Nazis did show up. He also knew that there would be more equipment dropped by planes and most importantly accidentally dropped by paratroopers all over the marshes, which are obviously too deep to be walking through. The mayor volunteered his townspeople with the boats that they had to go out and fetch them. Johnson agreed and sued French children as young as 12 were gathering. Machine guns, mortars, thousands of rounds of ammunition and mortar shells as well as field telephones, wires, and yes, the whole switchboard.

All right. All right. We're doing some mob bell shit in France. Let's get it. And in case you're wondering, like, did the soldiers pay them for these services? And interestingly, they did. They told them, look, the parachutes, which are made out of silk, you can keep them. Yeah.

Because that's worth a lot of fucking money. Yeah. It was worth a ton of money at a time. Yes. The mayor then asked Johnson something that Johnson admittedly hadn't thought about. How are you going to feed your men? Johnson admitted he did not know. Now, paratroopers on D-Day carried one K ration on them, which equated to 24 hours of food,

along with a few emergency rations known as D-rations. Now, despite their name, a D-Ration was a little bit more than a fortified, calorically dense chocolate bar that had been made on purpose to taste bad, so soldiers would not eat them unless it was actually an emergency. one person compared it to slightly worse than a raw potato in flavor. I don't know how you do that with chocolate. And you want to claim that America

is not a definitionally Protestant country. Come on. It does make sense. It does. We've all dealt with soldiers. If you give them something that's chocolate, they're going to eat it way too soon. They're going to be out of food. Yeah, exactly. So you have to make it taste like shit. Now, how it's made out of chocolate

and ends up tasting like a semi-rottent raw potato. That is a magic that only the U.S. military could devise. At best, each man had enough food for 48 hours per man. But like I said, at best, after 48 hours, they were expected to have linked up with some larger unit that could resupply them. But obviously, that 48 hour rating becomes a little fluid when dudes are flying out of planes, losing their equipment left, right, and center, and just some of them not packing it because they wanted to save weight. We don't know how many men in Grenier actually had four to eight hours worth of food, but it was not many. So the mayor called the town meeting and asked the townspeople to donate, whatever they could

spare out of their house, and to everyone in the American side's surprise, everybody just opened up their houses. And remember, these are French people in the countryside in the middle of Nazi occupation and rationing. They're not doing great themselves. And there's another added wrinkle to this. You might think it's a no-brainer for these people to help the men who just fell out of the sky to liberate them.

They're living under brutal Nazi occupation after all right. But, like we talked about during our Peter Ortiz episode, should go and listen to it. If a town was found helping the French resistance, or in this case, liberation forces by the Nazis, there's a very good chance that town was going to be

fucking slaughtered. And they knew that. And the worst of these slaughters, the most infamous of them, was only a few days away at this point. Like, this is something that was very actively happening throughout the French countryside. But the town agreed to not only feed the Americans, but the

women of the town piled into the local cafe and then turned it into an organized mess hall. They cooked at least two hot meals per day and then we're working around the clock running food out to forward American positions and then like collecting up the empty dishes and bringing them back. That brings us

to the paratroopers. Like we explained, these are dudes and headquarters company. They had one platoon of machine guns and one mortar platoon and a field hospital. More on that in a little bit. Everything outside of that was support troops. I mean, arguably, yes, heavy weapons troops are technically support troops, blah, blah, but when I say support, I mean non-combat roles. Well, yeah, in the sense that all of these people are going to have gone through basic training and they're going to have some degree of basic rifle marksmanship, but their job is not doing riflemanship. Their job is running the telephone, doing medical care, running to tell all the intelligence gathering, all of the collection and processing, you know, like you said, pay slips.

And all the administrative functions, like, you have to have people who do that too. And the problem is, is that like, yeah, they all know how to use rifles, but like, when you think about shoot, move and communicate stuff, that's not their job. Yeah, they're not so good at the moving and communicating part because it's not something they train on. Like, they didn't do advanced infantry training. They fired the rifle a couple of times. God knows how long ago. And back in those days, nowadays, there are some differences in the sense that there are sort of a bare minimum of like squad level infantry stuff that they incorporate into the non-commissioned officer courses as well as some of the training for soldiers after basically

training. But it's not their job. No. And that did not exist back then. No, of course not. No. The support platoons within headquarters company weren't even divided into squads. They had no defined squad leaders. They had no fire teams, nothing. Their job was support operations. So outside of their machine guns and mortars, you just kind of have some guys. And it's not like they're going to have time to train for this. You know, they have, God knows how long until the Nazis shows up. You can't start running training lanes in Grenier. Well, I was thinking about this. There's a quite good novel by William Wharton called A Midnight Clear that's set in World War II. It's basically about like a sort of intelligence unit in the U.S. military who's been selected because they

have high IQs and they have to go on this sort of like weird magical intelligence unit adventures and they get stuck in a castle during a blizzard. And that sounds ridiculous, but like it's plausible enough that some weird-ass unit with no actual combat training could be out doing that back in those days. And most importantly, this doesn't go as badly as you think It does. I don't want to put too much of the credit on Major Johnston, but he's a pretty good commander, despite the fact he's pretty green. He quickly divides his mid into fire teams, squads, and platoons. He puts NCOs and officers in charge of them. Again, these NCOs and officers are from support jobs for the most part, but he gets them to start digging in with the main line just in front of the church. Anti-take mines are thrown on the approaches. He sends machine guns to forward observation points. to make sure they create intersecting fields of fire and he sends riflemen with them

hoping that the machine gunners could like kind of tell them what that word means. The mortar platoon digs a pit in the church cemetery which apparently just the worst mortar pit of all time. Setting up your base plate

in the bone pit. It's like you put us in the one place where there's definitely stuff under the dirt. Thanks, sir. Yeah, I love the sepulchral mortars. Some Warhammer shit. And then the spotters for the mortars are stuck up in the bell tower

of the church, which is the highest point in the whole town. Yeah. Also, it makes them really good giant targets, but more of that a little bit. Yeah. The switchboard in the command center, which is in the boys school, is commanded by, honestly, only name alert in the whole episode here. Loyal Bogart, as opposed to, I don't know, disloyal.

Disloyal Bogart is when you huff that joint way too long if I can keep from other people. Loyal Bogart is when you snatch it from other people so you and the boys can share it. A disloyal Bogart is his personal Waluigi. He had busted his leg while landing, so he couldn't really walk. His leg was at a split, so like whatever you're in charge comes, even though we're not in communication with anybody. His job ended up being the relay point because they ran field telephones with wires out to the forward positions.

So all those just went back to the switchboard because they didn't have communications with anybody else. But as time passed, more random misdropers kept showing up in town from various different units. including guys from the 101st who slammed down to Earth and the Marshes while riding at a glider. And Johnson was so hard up for officers to lead his men that he took the glider pilots, both lieutenants, Irwin Morales and Thomas Ahmad, and just gave them a platoon to command. And in some militaries, this was normal, like the British glider pilots were trained as infantry as well. Not the case in the U.S. Army. These guys were in the U.S. Army Air Force. But they're like,

I guess I'm a platoon leader now. Shit. I really wish I died on impact. The D-Day landing soon began and all around Grenier firefights were popping off as the Nazis begin to react to the beach operation

but as well as pockets of paratroopers have been scattered all over the countryside fucking up Nazi shit and this goes on for three days. Grenier remains the calm Nuggety center of the battlefield universe.

Nothing happens there. Then things get weirder. as the larger invasion begins to unfold around them. A few soldiers from the 29th Infantry Division, and for real D-Day heads out there, you know they landed on Omaha Beach. Oh my God. Just wander into town.

They got separated. They managed to stumble and get lost through Nazi lines and end up in a French town, miles behind enemy lines. Two escape Spanish prisoners from a nearby Nazi force labor camp wander into town. who thankfully speak Spanish, French, and English so they can, you know, relieve Brassard of translation duties.

And if this collection of people wasn't weird enough for you, a few miles away, an R-A-F plane is shot down, the locals save the pilot from the burning wreckage, and then bring him into town because they do the Americans who are there. Hello, chap. So Major Johnson is in command of one of the weirdest, but not the weirdest group of defenders of a place we've ever seen. That award still goes to Castle Ider, hands down.

But by the 9th, there was only 182 men for multiple different countries, services, and in one case, a prison camp in Grenier. But the calm of the town was about to be broken. Moving towards them was the entire 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, or 13,000 mechanized infantry. You can kind of see flavors of saving Private Ryan. and fury in this. And both of them take a little bit of inspiration from Grenier.

Now, they're under the command of Werner Austendorf. The division, nicknamed Goths of the Iron Hand, after an old German knight who lost his hand after being shot with a cannon and replaced it

with an old iron prosthetic. Sounds pretty terrifying. I hate it when the Goths the Iron Hand shows up and just comes to my bucolic French town where we're having like a fucking, you know,

isn't life weird sort of lasse, Halmström, strong experience of World War II. Yeah, it's like, oh, SS Panzer Grandin Division, this couldn't possibly get worse. Gauts of the Iron Hand. Fuck. And I'm not taking anything away from the numbers here, obviously. There's 13,000 of them.

But they are arguably even more inexperienced as the American sitting in Grenier. Neither side had seen combat, with the 17th division being formed a year before, out of SS conscripts and foreign volunteers, mainly from Romanian Germans, French, and Italians. Obviously, most of French SS volunteers ended up in famously SS Charlemagne, one of the last SS units fighting to the death in the Battle of Berlin, but some also ended up here. These were not the best of the best.

These are not the ones they put on the fucking crazy racist posters. But it's commander, Ostendor. Now, he did have much more experience than, Major Johnston. He had just been fighting in the Eastern Front until about six months before. And he was given his first divisional command, which in turn led him to occupation duty in France. He had not been there very long. The division was also badly under strength, undersupplied and undertrained, with not enough NCOs or officers. And you can imagine why. It's a unit on garrison duty. The Eastern Front is sucking away their resources. Despite on paper being a

Panzer Grenadier division or the Nazi nomenclature for mechanized infantry, two of their six infantry battalions, you want to guess what they're riding into combat? Jeeps, motorcycles. Oh, bicycles, wow. I was thinking the bicycles with a sidecar or the motorcycles with the sidecar is the German such so much. That would have been a better option, but those again had been sucked away to the eastern front. So the jaunty bicycle infantry, but you're rated as Panzer Grenadier.

So we're expecting, yeah, we're basically expecting tanks. and armor personnel carriers and we're getting the tour to Normandy. Yeah, a Panzer Grenadier Division was supposed to have units of armor, armor infantry support,

armor carriers, like half-tracks. They did not have any tanks. They had zero tanks. They had the fucking Panzer bicycle companies. They did have, however,

40 Sturmgachuts. These are Sturmgachetz, fours, which, you know, for our, tank heads at home looks like a tank. However, very important difference. This was a vehicle specifically made for infantry supporting in an anti-tank role.

That meant they did not have a rotating turret. They did not have coaxal machine guns because those roles, those anti-infantry rules, were supposed to be taken by the infantry they were supporting. But does have a big fuck you cannon on it. And the Sturmgassauts 4, an assault gun, is pretty well known for being really good at supporting infantry. And again, the paratroopers have no tanks. Uh, they have nothing to fight this thing with, let alone 40 of them. It's kind of annoying because when you said, uh, Stomgerchitz, I was thinking, I was like, that kind of sounds like storm support. And I realized, yeah, like,

yeah, that's exactly what it means. Exactly what it means. But it was like, yeah, it's a stupid Nazi bullshit. Like, oh, yeah, it's not, it's not infantry. It's the storm troopers. I'm gonna fuck you, whatever. Yeah, everything has to be storm something. Suck my dick, Richard Wagner bullshit, whatever. Who cares? And the 17th was given orders to respond to the Karen Tan, sector and secure it, traveling in four different groups over the very small network of roads around that area. Like, Nate, you talked about the hedgerows. Famously, the hedgerodes are a huge bastard for any kind of maneuver warfare. But also the marshes. So there's very few roads that a large force can travel over. Correct. Which makes things easy for the defenders in Grenier.

There's a few bridges they have to defend, place bombs on, which they do make themselves, slipped something out of saving private Ryan, but, you know, marching towards them is at least 2,000 men charged with taking Grenier to secure the larger Karen Tan sector. Yeah, meanwhile, you're got an infantry company cobbled together with basically the cast

of what's eating Gilbert Grape. And you're like, we're gonna fucking hold this goddamn bridge if it means dying on it. We will blow this shit. The glider pilots really disappointed that happen to be the only ones not to die like a meteor coming out of the sky.

I was gonna say you were like the pilots. Like, I wish I died on impact. They may be a platoon leader. It's like, well, statistically, well, statistically, well, statistically, so don't worry. Yeah, if you're both of those things, you're definitely not making it out. The first SS scouts appeared on the outside of town on June 10th, and they were ambushed by a group of Americans, wiping them out.

You might remember this is the scene from saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks' Ranger unit stumbles upon the paratroopers as they ambush a Nazi half-track. Unfortunately, for the actual Nazis, they did not have half-tracks. they were just walking around. We got fucking the T. Mu Panzer-Gredadier division. You're an American paratrooper waiting in the bushes and he's here, ring, ring, ring, and it's Nazis peddling down the road on their OV feats. I love, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, here's the thing. You're trained to do a certain job, and if the enemy wants to be stupid as fuck, then this makes your job easier.

That's the way it goes. That's the part of that Sun Su didn't put it in the art of war. Yeah. When your enemy is stupid, don't interrupt your enemy when he's being dumb as fuck. I think it was a Klaus Witser Yomini, I can't remember. But like, that doesn't give the quite, make a mistake is one thing. Being dumber than fuck is a whole different category. Yeah, simply pray that your enemy's dumber than shit.

In modern warfare, hope for bicycles. Elsewhere, elements of the SS regiment again to fan out in the general area, the sector around Grenier and Carantan. As they approached the north, Americans blew the bridge and retreated. But the attack didn't come that day or that night. They effectively stopped an entire divisional advance. The reason for this is that the SS were as surprised to see the Americans there as the Americans were to see them. Why the fuck are you in Grinier?

Yeah. Instead, the SS sent for only small probing teams, just trying to figure out how many Americans were in the town. Like, this town is not strategically important. Either the Nazis or the Americans believe that this place was anything of note. Johnston assumed a larger force, either from the 101st or from the beach, would be coming up to relieve them before the Nazis came. But now it's clear the Nazis beat them to the punch. And bear in mind at this point, this early in the operation,

they're not going to have communication of any meaningful sense with hire. Because they don't have RF communications. They don't have land communications. They don't have lines that they can pass through to be able to get to a high. higher element. They're just waiting for people with American flags on their uniforms and vehicles to show up. Yeah. Imagine how relieved they were when the two guys from the beach wandered into town. Like, oh, are you at the head of like a brigade or a division? What are you ahead of like? Uh, we're lost. Uh, yeah, sorry. Um, no, no one, no one's actually coming to save you. Uh,

we just, uh, we smelled that food they're cooking and smells good as shit. So we figured we'd just come say hi. We haven't eaten in so long. Uh, could we like join you guys here? Oh, this looks like a stand. Fuck. Shit. Damn, these stute leaks are good as

fuck, though. God damn. On the morning of the 11th, right after the bin finished Sunday Mass in the town church,

the Nazis attacked from the South. But we don't know, like, obviously we don't have the battle plans or the

memoirs from Ostendorf, right? We don't know what he's planning here. It was either a probing maneuver or the Nazis

were surprised to see such a large dug-in force in Grenier. Because the shooting only lasts about 15 minutes. The

Nazis pull back and they just start hitting the town in general with mortar fire. Then came an all-out infantry assault to the Southern line. Despite being heavily, heavily outnumbered. Like, we don't know exactly how many Nazis attacked. It's thought to be at least 2,000 people, probably more. Because after Ostendorf discovers there's an entrenched American position in the town, he starts pulling resources away from the rest of the SS division to feed them in and support this attack. because so far, he hasn't found any other Americans.

He thinks Grenier is the main thrust. He doesn't know it's Carantan, which hasn't happened yet. And this is when those classic situations where terrain becomes a defender's best friend. Like we already said, Grenier is dominated by marshes and hedgerows. This creates a situation where paths into the town from outside follow a very defined route. Because outside of them, waste-deep marshes, sometimes deep marshes, sometimes deep. and impenetrable hedgerows. And I know a hedge row doesn't sound that impenetrable.

It sounds like a bush, but it's not. Just trust us on that. Like the Allies and the Nazis had to fit specially equipped bulldozers to get through these things. Infantry is not getting through that. You absolutely cannot get through them with your standard sort of like stuff you would, for a light infantry unit would use to clear obstacles. It's just, like I said, centuries worth of piling up rocks as you find in your

farm fields and also planting, you know, basically really tall bushes around the perimeter as a windbreak creates a situation where it's like, it's fully like a like a living wall with. Yeah, they're really cool. I went to Normandy last summer. Got to see all this area that we're talking about. It's fantastic. Cutting them would be quite a large amount of work just to cut the hedges themselves for personnel to pass through. But clearing them enough that vehicles can move through when you think about like this succession of grids would be so much fucking work. Like that it just, hence the bocage campaign. Yep. Which is, you know, it's like, what of trench warfare that you grew rather than Doug?

Yeah. Yeah, basically it's like, uh, you're, we built a wall out of the giving tree. And you have to break it up somehow. If that's the giving tree, it's Wad Luigi. Yeah, exactly. The giving trees while Luigi. It's the taking tree. Yes. The bocash country. side in Normandy is actually one big sentient Walloichi. Yeah, exactly. Wow. So this means the Nazi advance into Grenier can only follow very defined lines

which Johnson of course knew and placed his machine guns. The mortars in pre-bracketed setups were able to wreak absolute havoc because they only had to move the mortars into three different locations targeting-wise. And they could

move very quickly. Not to mention that every path is covered by at least one machine gun, sometimes two. All of this allowed the American defenders to harvest more meat per bullet than the otherwise would have been able to. The Americans fought off the second attack of the day, but casualties finally began to pile up into field hospital they created inside of the church, commanded by their field surgeon, Abraham Sofian. That's right, for the first time ever, rather than a random Irish guy, we got a random Armenian guy in the middle of all this. Let me guess, he's probably from Michigan. No, no, there's barely. any Armenians in Michigan. He's from L.A. Come on.

All right. All right. And bearably, it's always like, yeah, the Greek Armenian guy from Detroit seems to be like a thing because they just wind up there. In this era, they're either from Massachusetts or L.A. He's from L.A. Specifically, Watertown, Massachusetts. But different story.

Now, joining Sophian and his few medics were two Catholic priests who ran around keeping the wounded calm and giving last rights to the dying. Brumit and Johnston ran around checking to see how the lines were holding up. Ammo, however, was already running low for the machine guns and mortars, which is unfortunate because those are not only their most casualty-producing weapons, they're also the only weapons being held by actually trained combat soldiers.

Yeah, correct. But rifle ammo was okay. He assumed they could hold off another attack, maybe long enough to be relieved, but he heard the thing that no infantryman wants to hear, the sound of tracked vehicles moving around in the distance. They have no anti-tank weapons other than the mines they have put out. Johnston ordered every civilian who could to get the fuck out of town. Because, you know, the previous bombardment of mortars told him that the Germans didn't give a single shit about civilian casualties. And once you start throwing an assault gun, a tank, fine. Get thrown into the mix. Shit's about to get real

ugly. And they would not be able to protect the civilians. No. One French civilian said Johnston told her straight up. They did not have the ammo to last the night, but they would hold on for as long as they could to give the townspeople as much time as they needed to get away. As if that wasn't bad enough, one of the observation post stationed in nearby Hilltop reported that, hey, if you thought the tanks were bad, uh, the Nazis are moving in a battery of artillery, 105 millimeter guns. That's not good. No, it's really bad. They're only a mile away as well, so they're pretty much direct firing. Yeah, yeah. And it's just in terms of their ability to correct stuff, it's just going to be, once they're dialed in, it's going to be really, really bad. And, you know,

you have the ability to get some cover here, but like... They have no counter battery possibility. No, and they can't assault out and take the guns. You can't really have an effective fighting force where everyone hides in the basements of buildings when there's an artillery bombardment taking place and then resumes fighting after. That's not going to work. And basements of civilian buildings are probably the only place in terms of what you can build or have available that could give you any real cover from that kind of artillery. Yeah, pretty much the sellers in town were all they had because the trenches they dug weren't. You don't want to be in one of those when 105 millimeter shell hits. It's better than nothing in terms of like if you can, you can, you know,

hunker down as low as you can get to avoid shrap. But if you take a close hit to that, you're just going to die or you're just going to get so fucked up, you'll be combat and effective. Yeah. The percussive force of an artillery shell will kill you and leave your body looking untouched because your insides have been loquified. It's horrible. At 7 p.m. the Nazi artillery opened fire, smashing the church bell tower and killing the mortar observer immediately.

From there, they began to bombard every other position they could see for nearly an hour before an even larger attack was sent into town. Without the observers and trying desperately to give the infantry any kind of support they could, the mortar crews just kind of eye-fucked it. They're like, oh, I think there's Germans coming

from this area. We're firing over there. Like, they just moved. There's called target reference points for our non-gun heads out there. The mortar crews knew their target reference points. These are something that any fires crew has down. We use them in tanks as well. And even without their observers, they just decide, we'll just cycle through the target reference points. We'll probably hit something. Yeah. That's a good mortar crew. They're literally doing everything right here. Like, that's the thing that hearing this is like, this sucks. This is a horrible situation that, like, what you're describing, like, yeah, this is, I mean, this is what I do? You don't want to be in the

situation, but what can you do other than like, you've got a thing that's kind of an asset to you to help it be more effective to not just spray and prey and waste ammo? They're doing it. And for a mortar crew to know there's armor moving in, that 105 millimeter guns are firing at them, they're like, uh, we'll just keep firing mortars. Like, those dudes are harder than shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck me, man. Yeah. I mean, like, yeah, it's really, really like, you're in an unenviable position, but what can you do? Yeah. They just kept on plunked on. rounds off. At one point, their tubes were virtually straight up to try to drop rounds as close as they could onto the Germans without hitting their own men. But the two mortar teams just could not

hope to keep up the amount of fire that they needed. Yeah, of course. American positions running low on ammo got holes smashed straight through them by advancing Nazis. And this is the last thing you want as a defender is your continuous line of defense to be broken down into isolated chunks, unable to support one another. So Johnston made the call, everyone to fall back to the final defensive position, the trench in front of the church, and the school-turned-command-center, the alamo, if you will, for my saving Private Ryan fans out there. Brummet ran out to pass the order to anyone because field telephone wires were cut. They couldn't really communicate anymore, so he had to use his Chevro legs. He found one of the machine gun teams completely cut off, told them to run for it,

but they both got shot as they got up to go. So he dropped his rifle, picked up the machine gun, and just began running through the town, firing the sturdy caliber machine gun from the hip through the streets of Grenier, fighting his way from one group of soldiers to the next, making sure they could fall back. Brumet finally made it back to the command center

only for a Nazi shell to land directly on top of it, killing both Major Johnston and poor old loyal Bogart. Brassard, the Cajun translator, ran out of the burn building, his uniform burning on his back, only to get plastered by the next shell and kill him instantly. Command now fell to Brummit in about five seconds flat, and the sun began to go down. He knew all hope of holding the town, the hope of any relief at all, was not real. It wasn't going to happen. So he ordered the town evacuated. But he didn't like give like, you know, an order we talk about on this show from time as like, every man for yourself, just get the

fuck out of here. He had an orderly withdrawal to some extent. And he made sure to get a lot of civilians out of there, though some civilians refuse to leave. But what he didn't know, due to the general chaos of, you know, everything that I just said, the town exploding and being attacked by thousands of Nazis, Abraham Sofian, his medics and 14 wounded men had been left behind in the church. By some accounts, he wasn't left behind. Sophian refused to leave the wounded because they were too wounded to walk. And it was his job, as the doctor, to surrender to the Nazis and make sure their care was continued. I know that sounds crazy to some people listening, but this is how things were supposed to work under the generally accepted laws of land warfare against two warring

nations. He was an unarmed field medic, and the wounded men under his charge were to be cared for. And in most cases, in the Western Front, that is what happened. in most cases. In the Eastern Front, never. In the Pacific campaign, fuck no. But in the Western front, that is generally what happened. Though Brumet, in his own writing, said that he didn't know Sophian and his staff didn't leave, rather than Sofian refusing any orders. So he admits to accidentally leaving him behind. Though since leaving would require Sophian anasmetics to abandon the wounded that were unable to move, I could see both of these things being true. people related to Sofian and people went to medical school with him said he would absolutely never leave a patient behind.

Like he would just get captured. So like personality wise, it's fitting that he refused any order to leave his men. I could see Brumet forgetting Sophian seeing everybody leaving and then just deciding to stay. The Nazis marched into town around midnight, took Sofine and the wounded out behind the church and murdered them all and chucked their bodies into a ditch. I figured you were going to say it generally happened this way, but not this time. Yep. This was often the case during the D-Day landings, and obviously there's also other famous massacres of Allied prisoners of war on the Western Front, but they were generally an outlier. Like, Sopheon only stayed and his medics only stayed because the idea of being murdered was unthinkable. Surprise, I guess. For some reason, Sophean has never been awarded anything for his sacrifice, same with his medic.

not sure why. The Nazis, knowing the church had been something of a nexus for the American resistance in the town, hunted down and killed anybody connected to it. This included the priests, as well as the guy whose job was just to clean the rectory. They just went on a killing spree. Even after all of that, not every American had evacuated the town. Some cut off in the darkness and no way to get out simply hid. A soldier, private first class Frank Giuliano, was one of them. He hid inside the girls' school and inside the kitchen's industrial oven, coming out only at night to forage for food, a lot of which was left for him by townspeople.

He did this for weeks. He only left town in late July. He was the fucking kitchen oven goblin. Whoa. Also, what a time to be a short king. You know, if that was me, I'm not fitting in anything. I'm fucked. I just have to learn firsthand.

French really quick and pretend I'm a farmer. By the end of it all, 32 Americans were killed and 26 civilians were executed. The number of Nazi casualties are completely unknown. But if you want to go with first-hand accounts, both French civilians and American soldiers said they saw hundreds of corpses on the ground before they retreated. So that makes us, as always, ask the question, was all this worth it? And honestly, for the first time, I can say it was. The Battle of Grenier accidentally became the most important battle of the entire D-Day operation. These loss misdropped and slapped together soldiers waylaid first one regiment, then two, and then an entire division from their push on Carantan.

The battle eventually required so many resources from the 17th SS division that the entire divisional advance was slowed down to the point that the 101st Airborne could fight their way into Carantan and take it before the 17th could get there on the 12th of June. This opened a connection between Utah and Omaha Beach and allowed a breakout from the beachhead. Because these lost paratroopers defended a town that nobody had ever heard of, this was made maybe not possible, but way, way easier. In closing, the Battle of Grenier, a battle where not a single medal of honor was awarded, might just be the most important Battle of D-Day that you have never heard of.

I have to say that I'm really taken aback by what you've described with Major Johnston in the sense that like every single thing that you've recounted in the story, you're like, yeah, that's the right answer. That's all you can do. Like, it sounds as though this is, you know, there's a great big thing about looking at squad sized or detachment size assault sort of thing like when they talk about break over manor and stuff like that. But this is another thing here too, where instead of it being like, here's where you place machine guns and sharpshooters and observers and, you know, moving through on axes. Here's a situation of like, everything's fucked and you have to make decisions. What are you going to do? This is something that you read this and hearing about this. It's like, I honestly wish I had heard this story before I was in charge of soldiers in combat,

frankly. Yeah, Major Johnston is legitimately one the best exos have ever heard. Yeah, this is an incredible story. I mean, this is an incredible example of like, there's a way to make something hold together and it won't last forever, but it will potentially help the overall mission and the downstream effects of it can be, as you've described, massive.

Because if it's just been like a fuck, what do we do? Shit, fuck. I don't know. And then you just get rolled over immediately. Like, well, then this doesn't happen. And we don't, you know, it's a counterfactual. But this is really a genuinely example of like, it's not my job, but I'm going to do it anyway. And actually doing a really good job of that.

I'm genuinely interested in learning more in detail about this now. That's one the downsides to it. It's not written about very often. I found a few pretty good peer review. papers, some excerpts from books, but it's not written about like the other major battles of that operation. Obviously, Utah and Omaha Beach is a different matter all entirely, but specifically the hairdrops. There's been entire books written about Samar Aglis, Sanlo, Karen Tan, Braycor Manor. All of these things have libraries dedicated to them. This,

not so much. Yeah, because in the end, the Nazis win, but like at what cost to them, though, Like, this is an incredible example of, you know, just making the best of the situation and actually being effective. I mean, everything you described is sort of like, whoa, that makes sense. Yeah, that's what I would do. That's what I hope anyone in charge of me would do. Like, it's crazy. You don't hear that very often, especially not in World War II, especially not in the aftermath of big fuckup, like the drops in Normandy. I can't think of a single thing that Johnson could have done better, which is, you know, the unfortunate case of just how history works sometimes.

he got taken out by an artillery shell. And honestly, if Brumet had gotten his way, and I'm not faulting Brumet for anything, he did a lot of incredible things that day too. But if he would have done what he wanted to do, and that is go across the marshes towards Carantan, it would have been a lot different because they would have been pushed out.

And then the 17th would have occupied the town before the 101st got there. And that would have changed a lot. But Johnson did everything he could and still died and they still lost. But, you know, tactical victim. for sure. And not to mention, he saved a lot of civilians. Also, like, massively outgunned. No task organization to speak of besides the one you created.

No resources besides the one you've cobbled up and paid school children to fucking collect out in the fields for you. Right. And you hold off a division. And it sounds like you inflict something on the order of like 20 to 30 fold casualties on them. Yeah. That's incredible. That's incredible. You have to think the Americans took 32 killed. About over half of those were executed wounded people. So like, the vast majority of majority of their losses did not occur on the fighting line. This is a platoon. Yeah.

Holding off a division. And like I said, if the estimates are five to six hundred, as you described, that's something along the lines of 20 to 30-fold combat losses on the enemy side versus the defenders. And it's like, and that's just, those are estimates of bodies, but that's just killed. You don't even know about casualties like wounded. Right. How many did they wound?

How much did they fuck up the momentum of this Panzer Grenadier division? And there's also, you know, the. added layer to it of it really does go to show by 1944 what the Nazi army looked like. You know, you have a Panzer Grenadier division. There's no fucking panzers. Yeah.

You have dudes riding bicycles into combat. You can see like going back to our series, not only on Curse, but also Stalingrad, you can see this massive amount of resource terrain that the Eastern Front is having on their war machines. Because any fully equipped, but also

inexperienced division, would have steamrolled these guys. 100%. Another thing with two, though, is that at the end of the day, even if they show up on bicycles and have fake tanks that are just infantry support vehicles, if they get to Karen Tan and are able to embed and set up defensive positions, get inside buildings, everything changes. Suddenly, it's not dudes on bicycles. It's thousands of guys with way more munitions, way more resources dug in, holding you off.

They wouldn't have to be trooping down little tracks of dirt in between marshes and hedgerows. That would have been you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You would have been doing the approach on the, like, you can only go on the road. The road's been dialed in by like a comical degree of shit. Like, they fucking got straight up, you just like travel through time levels of like, they might as well just have UAVs on you level of observation because there's nothing.

Just to you, yeah, that would be an incredibly unpleasant situation to be in. So that is the battle of Grenier. And to that, I say, give Abraham Sophie in the Medal of Honor. But Nate, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. I'd like to ask us a question. You can support the show on Patreon. This is a completely independent podcast. We have no sponsors, no corporate money.

You're never going to hear me read off an ad for some fucking AI mental health app. And you can support that by supporting us on Patreon and keeping us ad free and under our own control for almost a decade now. And today's question is, this is some real tonal whiplash here. You have to select one first generation poker. to eat. Which are you eating? Chigley puff. I don't know. I didn't play Pokemon. That'd be like a candy version. See, that's the thing about like the first generation of Pokemon. I definitely grew up in that generation is some things are just like animals you're already eating.

I mean, Charizard then. I don't know. I remember literally I don't know because like I was just a little too old for it. Like my friend's little brothers were into it. But like I just absorbed a bit by osmosis, but that was it. I got three choices. I'm going to go the, the, this. simple route. For my meat, I'm going Taurus. It's just a cow. If I'm a vegetarian, eat Otis. It's just lettuce. If I want to eat the forbidden fruit,

Mutu. Because that's almost a person. Or the forbidden prey, Mr. Mime. The only Pokemon-related joke that I can make is something that's completely kind of tangential to this, which is, I mean, it's a positive in the sense that living here, I feel like in Switzerland and in Geneva, in particular, like, kids, it's a safe

place in the sense, like, both because there's not really cry, but also it's safe in, like, road crossings and sidewalks and shit. Kids can do stuff for kids. Kids can go places. So kids are quite independent, pretty young. You know, like you see kids out on their own, like, at eight, like nine or ten. You see kids like, you know, walking their younger siblings home at about the same age.

And it's funny because like you see them in groups and sometimes like I'm not the best eyeballing. Like, I think I know how old these kids are like just because, you know, at the point when you get to be 40s. I'm fucking terrible at that. It's like, yeah, you can have, you know, 13 year olds who look like 10 year olds and 10 girls who look like 13 year olds. I don't know.

What you can tell is how they dress because I've made the joke that, like, Like, kids seem to dress like little kids up until about 12 or 13 here. And then suddenly they go from looking like Ash Ketchum to looking like Billy Elish. And so that's the way that you tell. It's just from their clothing. And so Ash Ketchum as Pokemon hero is the only, only Pokemon reference I can possibly make where I'm like, I know actually what I'm talking about. The rest, like I said, late 90s, early 2000s osmosis that I barely remember. Yes, I guess in closing, I'm going to lightly saute me a Mr. Mime.

Nate, thank you so much for joining me here. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be part of this show, and this is a great episode, I think. Well, thank you. And for all of our listeners, thank you for listening. Consider supporting us on Patreon. Leave us a review on wherever you listen to podcasts.

And Nate, you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. Yeah, so I am the co-host and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about the UK and the tech industry globally, both being really bad. I, a producer of Kill James Bond, a feminist film podcast that is extremely funny. And I am in a band called Second Homes. Our debut album is called Find a Way to Hate It. It's available everywhere on streaming or on Bandcamp if you feel like buying a digital download.

And hopefully we are working hard to try to get physical media available before Christmas this year. So stay tuned. And until next time, everybody, drop mortars on the heads of Nazis.