There were some unusual junior officers on the front. One was Lieutenant Ed Gesner of the 4th Infantry Division. He knew survival tricks that he taught his platoon, such as how to create a foxhole in frozen ground: he shot eight rounds into the same spot, dug out the loose dirt with his trench knife, placed a half stick of TNT in the hole, lit the fuse, ran, hit the dirt, got up, ran back, and dug with his trench shovel. Within minutes a habitable foxhole.

The junior officers coming over from the States were another matter. Pink cheeked youth, they were bewildered by everything around them.

FIRST LIGHT came to Ste. Mere-Eglise around 0510. Twenty-four hours earlier it had been just another Norman village, with more than a millennium behind it. By nightfall of June 6,1944, it was a name known around the world-the village where the invasion began and now headquarters for the 82nd Airborne Division.

At dawn on June 7 Lieutenant Waverly Wray, executive officer in Company D, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), who had jumped into the night sky over Normandy 28 hours earlier, was on the northwestern outskirts of the village. He peered intently into the lifting gloom. What he couldn't see, he could sense. From the sounds of the movement of personnel and vehicles to the north, he could feel and figure that the major German counterattack-the one the Germans counted on to drive the Americans into the sea, the one the paratroopers had been expecting-was coming at Ste. Mere-Eglise.

It was indeed. Six thousand German soldiers were on the move, with infantry, artillery, tanks, and self-propelled guns-more than a match for the 600 or so lightly armed paratroopers in Ste. Mere-Eglise. A German breakthrough to the beaches seemed imminent. And Lieutenant Wray was at the point of attack.