The story of this place
In the pre-dawn hours of 6 June 1944, American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne dropped around Sainte-Mère-Église to seize road junctions behind Utah Beach. Some men fell straight into the town square, lit by a burning building, and were shot as they descended. Private John Steele's parachute snagged on the church steeple, leaving him hanging helplessly for hours, feigning death while the battle raged below—an episode immortalised in the film The Longest Day. By morning the town was in American hands, the first in France to be liberated. A dummy paratrooper still hangs from the church tower in tribute.