- 42 minutes ago
A bayonet charge helped break the deadlock at Purple Heart Lane—but the steel was not what shocked German paratroopers. On June 11, 1944, Lt. Col. Robert Cole led a handful of men across open ground toward German positions near Carentan, Normandy, after a day and night pinned down on a narrow causeway.
This WW2 military history story follows the 101st Airborne’s costly advance, the German defenders’ dwindling ammunition, and the supply crisis behind their commander’s decision to leave the town. Discover why the sight of American paratroopers closing in despite confusion and heavy fire challenged German assumptions about their enemy—and how the fight helped open the way to Carentan.
This WW2 military history story follows the 101st Airborne’s costly advance, the German defenders’ dwindling ammunition, and the supply crisis behind their commander’s decision to leave the town. Discover why the sight of American paratroopers closing in despite confusion and heavy fire challenged German assumptions about their enemy—and how the fight helped open the way to Carentan.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00June 11, 1944. 6.15 in the morning. A raised road running across flooded meadows into the town of
00:08Carentan in Normandy. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole is lying in a roadside ditch with a whistle.
00:15He is 29, born on the Army post at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, the son of an
00:22Army doctor. He commands the 3rd Battalion of the 500 and 2nd Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne
00:29Division. Ahead of him, past the last hedgerows, a big farmhouse sits on higher ground to the right
00:36of the road. For most of a day and a night, German fire from that house and the hedges around
00:42it
00:43has nailed his battalion to the causeway. Behind him, in the ditches, lie about 250 American
00:50paratroopers. Every one of them, Cole believes, knows what comes next. American guns have just
00:58laid smoke in a wide arc around the farm. The high-explosive barrage before it seemed to change
01:04nothing. Now the artillery lifts. Cole gets up, blows the whistle, and runs at the farmhouse.
01:11Hold on to this number, because it comes back. Of the 250 men who should have risen with him,
01:18about 20 did. Many never heard the whistle. The order had not reached every man in the ditches.
01:25So for a few long seconds, a battalion commander and a handful of soldiers are running across open
01:32ground, almost alone, toward a line held by German paratroopers. Then, his executive officer,
01:40Major John Stopka, rises, and about 50 more go with him. Then others. Many have bayonets fixed.
01:48They go over the ditches, through the hedgerow, and into the German position. Two men from H Company
01:54reach the farmhouse first, and find it empty. But west of it, the Germans still hold a hedgerow.
02:01And that hedgerow is where the charge lands. Now here is the strange part, and I want you to keep
02:07it in mind for the rest of this story. Very few Germans died on American steel that morning.
02:14Whatever broke behind those hedges, it was not mostly the blade. And yet, by late that same
02:20afternoon, the German commander would give up the town he had been sent to hold.
02:24If you want to see what the American paratroopers on that causeway did next,
02:28and what it cost them, tap like and subscribe. It helps stories like this reach people who still care.
02:36So who was waiting behind those hedges? The 6th Parachute Regiment of the German Luftwaffe,
02:44Fallschirmjäger. Their commander was Oberst Friedrich August von der Heide, 37,
02:49a Bavarian baron with a law degree, who had jumped onto Crete in 1941. The day before Kohl's charge,
02:56General Maxwell Taylor of the 101st had sent him a demand to surrender. Von der Heide refused.
03:03He was not a man who frightened easily, and he was honest on paper. After the war,
03:08he wrote that most of his enlisted men and NCOs had never seen combat, that his weapons situation was
03:15nothing short of deplorable, and that on a front barely two kilometers wide, his men carried seven
03:21different kinds of light machine gun. Seven kinds. Each with its own parts and its own needs.
03:29Remember that detail. It comes back at the worst possible moment for him.
03:35Now the German picture of the men coming at him. Toward the end of 1944, German army training
03:41staffs issued a series of reports called Battle Experiences. They held the official German estimate
03:47of the American soldier. Once he lost the heavy support of his tanks and guns, they said,
03:53his drive in the attack dwindled. And then this line. The American soldier avoids close combat,
04:02dislikes night fighting, and surrenders readily. Look at the date on that. It was written six months
04:09after Quarantin. After this road, this smoke, this whistle. On paper, the German army's picture of the
04:16American infantrymen came through the morning of June 11th untouched. So the question is not just
04:22why a bayonet charge worked. It is what the paratroopers in that hedgerow actually saw, and why
04:29it hit them hard enough that their commander walked away from a town he had been sent to hold.
04:36Quarantin mattered for a simple reason. It sat between Utah Beach and Omaha Beach. Until American
04:43troops held it, the two beachheads could not link up, and a German counterattack could drive a wedge
04:49between them toward the sea. The 101st Airborne had been told to take it. Five days after the landings,
04:57they still did not have it. The only way in from the north was that causeway. One road, raised above
05:05the marsh, water on both sides, four bridges. One bridge had been blown, leaving a 12-foot gap.
05:11Kohl and three men bridged it with engineer planks. At another, a steel Belgian gate dragged across the
05:19road left an opening so narrow that men squeezed through, one at a time, under fire. Off the road,
05:27there was no cover at all. Kohl's men had been on that road since the middle of the previous afternoon.
05:32By the time he blew the whistle, I Company had already been cut from 80 men to 23.
05:39And at 1130 the night before, something had come at them from a direction nobody in those ditches
05:45was watching. The men of the 101st had a name for that stretch of road. What happened on it explains
05:53why Robert Kohl decided the only way off was forward, with bayonets.
05:58June 10, 1944, shortly after midnight. A small patrol is crossing a canal by boat north of
06:05Carenton. Lieutenant Ralph Gehaaf has been sent to answer one question before the battalion moves.
06:10Is anybody waiting at the far end of this road? His men cross at bridge number two, where the span
06:17has been blown away, and walk south along the causeway in the dark. At bridge number four,
06:22they find the road blocked by a Belgian gate, a heavy steel barrier dragged across the roadway.
06:28It can be pushed open only about 18 inches. Think about that number for a second.
06:3418 inches is roughly the width of a man's shoulders. Every American who wants to reach Carenton along
06:40this road will have to turn sideways and squeeze through that opening, one at a time.
06:46Gehaaf's patrol gets through. About 50 yards beyond the bridge, the night opens up. Flares,
06:53mortars, machine guns from the front and from the right front off the higher ground. The patrol hangs
06:58on until around 5.30 in the morning, then pulls back. So now Kohl knows. The Germans are not just
07:06in
07:06Carenton. They are dug in at the end of the causeway, and they have arranged things so that the gate,
07:12the road, and the water do half their work for them. I want you to notice something about that
07:19German defense, because it ties straight back to our question. It assumes something about the
07:25Americans. It assumes they will come down the road slowly, stop when they are hit, and call for their
07:31guns. It is the same picture the German training staffs would still be printing six months later.
07:38And at first, that is exactly what happens. At noon, the 12-foot gap at bridge number two
07:45still isn't spanned. The engineers have been working on it under fire. So Kohl and three other men lay
07:52engineer planks across it themselves. And in the middle of the afternoon, the battalion starts over.
07:58Single file. Low. Many of them crawling along the embankment. An 88 in Carenton keeps shelling the
08:06road. That 88 was close to all the heavy support Fonderheide had. His regiment had no artillery of its
08:13own, just one attached battery of 88s. Everything else was mortars, machine guns, and rifles. On paper,
08:20this is the side that should lose a long-range fight. It isn't losing. Because the causeway turns
08:26every fight into a short one. Off the road, there is nowhere to go. Water on both sides. Ground too
08:34hard to dig. Somewhere along that road, a sniper killed Lieutenant John Larish as he looked around a
08:40tree. Another took Private First Class Theodore Benkowski's eye. When the point has crossed three
08:47bridges, fire comes in from hedgerows and from a large farmhouse on the right front. Three men go
08:52down. Then comes the gate. Each man has to rush it and slip through under direct fire. G Company,
09:01leading the battalion, gets six men through. The seventh is hit. Everything stops.
09:07So the Americans do the expected thing. From 4 in the afternoon until 11.30 at night,
09:13their artillery works over every German position it can find. Self-propelled 105s. Glider-pack
09:20howitzers. Seven and a half hours of it. Hold on to that time. 11.30. Because at 11.30,
09:30I Company is lying near Bridge No. 3 on the exposed right bank where there isn't even grass to hide
09:36in.
09:37Out of the dark, from the direction of Quarantine, a German plane comes in at treetop height, firing along
09:44the road. A second plane drops its bombs near the bridge, onto I Company. I Company had started with
09:5280 men. By the end of that night, 21 men and two officers were left, and they pulled back behind
09:58Bridge No. 2. Nearly three men out of every four, gone, on one strip of road. The paratroopers gave
10:08the causeway the name it still carries in every history of the 101st. Purple Heart Lane. Now put
10:16yourself in Robert Cole's ditch for a moment. His artillery has fired for seven and a half hours,
10:21and the German machine guns are still there. He cannot go around, because there is only water.
10:27If he stays on the road, he loses men every hour to fire he cannot see. If he goes back,
10:34he hands the Germans the bridges, and Quarantine stays shut between the two beaches.
10:40Around midnight, in a lull, H Company starts slipping men through the gate. At four in the morning,
10:47the order comes down from regiment. Continue the attack. In the dark, G Company and Headquarters
10:53Company follow H across. By first light, what is left of the 3rd Battalion is spread along both sides
11:00of the highway, lying in the ditches facing the farmhouse. Then Cole asks his guns for one last
11:07thing. Smoke. Which brings us back to 615, the whistle, and the 20 men who heard it. They went over
11:15the
11:15ditch with almost nobody behind them. Within minutes, the German paratroopers in the hedgerow ahead,
11:21men who had held this road for a day and a night against everything the Americans could fire at it,
11:27would make a choice. The reason behind that choice is the real beginning of our answer,
11:33and it was not the bayonet. Cole has a whistle in one hand and a pistol in the other. He
11:38climbs out of
11:38the ditch and trots toward the farm. Ahead of him is open ground, roughly the length of two football
11:44fields. Grass, a few low hedges, and beyond them the farmhouse and the hedgerows the German fire has
11:52been coming from all night. Every yard of that field can be seen from those hedges. Somewhere out in the
11:59open, Cole kneels and looks back. There is almost no one behind him. Bullets and shell fragments are
12:06zipping through the grass. A few men are trying to cross. Most of the battalion is still lying in the
12:12ditches, waiting for an order that never reached them. Back on the road, Major Stopka had passed the
12:19word only to the men around him. Now he is up and shouting, Come on, let's go, follow the Colonel.
12:26Men start to rise, not as a line, alone, in pairs, in little groups of three and four.
12:33That is how the 3rd Battalion goes into the attack. Not as a wave, but as a trickle that keeps
12:40getting
12:40bigger. Picture what that looks like from the hedgerow. For a day and a night, the Americans on this road
12:46have done one thing when they were hit. They lay down. Now, through the thinning smoke, they are
12:53coming on foot across open grass, in no formation anyone would recognize, and they are not stopping.
13:00Cole fires his pistol as he goes. One account has him shouting, I don't know what I'm shooting at,
13:06but I gotta keep on. He jumps a low hedge and lands in a ditch with water up to his
13:11neck,
13:11and he tells his radioman not to follow him. Stopka goes past him, still yelling, Let's go,
13:18let's go! Then they reach the buildings. First Sergeant Kenneth Sprecher and Private George Roach
13:25shoot the lock off the farmhouse door and go in. The house is empty. The Germans had already left it.
13:32Cole follows the men and makes it his command post. The real fight is not in the house. It is
13:39in the
13:39hedges and the orchard around it. And it is close. This is where the bayonets finally come into it.
13:46Lieutenant Edward Provost leads one of the few true bayonet rushes of the morning,
13:51and comes out of it saying, They squeal when you stick them! One of his own men, Private Bernard
13:57Sternow, would later call him kind of bloodthirsty. Now here is the fact that changes the shape of this
14:04story, the one I warned you about at the start. Most of the German dead around that farm had been
14:10killed by rifle fire, or grenades, at close range. As one detailed account of the fight puts it,
14:17very few of them had been bayoneted, although some had. So the steel did very little of the killing.
14:24What did it do? Look at what the German survivors of that first position did.
14:29They did not surrender. They got out. They fell back west, toward the Cherbourg to Paris Railroad.
14:37That is the first layer of our answer. The German defense on Purple Heart Lane was built for one
14:43particular enemy. A man lying in a ditch a couple of hundred yards away, waiting for his artillery.
14:49Against that man, a machine gun in a hedgerow rules the field. But a machine gun rules by distance.
14:56When the men it is supposed to pin down are suddenly on the other side of the same hedge,
15:01with rifles and grenades, the distance is gone. And so is the advantage.
15:07The fixed bayonet was the visible sign of a decision. These Americans were going to close
15:12the distance. Once they did, it was an even fight, and the Germans in that first hedge chose not to
15:19have
15:19it. Von der Heidt felt it at once. In his own account, he describes the Americans that morning
15:25making a deep penetration at a place he called Pommenach. His assault detachment stopped it and
15:33sealed it off. But they could not clear it. Remember that difference. Sealed, not cleared.
15:41For the first time on this road, the Americans were inside his line, and he could not push them back
15:46out. They paid for it. By mid-morning, the battalion had gathered around the farmhouse,
15:53badly mixed up, units tangled together, with heavy casualties.
15:57Inside the house, Cole was worried. He didn't know what was on his flanks. His communications were out.
16:03He believed his supporting artillery wasn't doing much. Regiment sent the 1st Battalion forward,
16:08not to relieve him, but to reinforce him. Nobody was going back down that road.
16:15Then the Germans tried to take the farm back. Their artillery and mortar fire picked up through
16:20the morning, and a counterattack came through the orchard. American machine guns south of the house
16:25broke it up. And Cole's men noticed something about the fire landing on them. The German artillery
16:31seemed weak. The mortars, they said, never stopped firing. Keep that observation in your pocket.
16:39Weak artillery, endless mortars. It's a clue. A regiment that had held this causeway for a day and a night,
16:47from a strong position, should have been able to throw one battered American battalion out of one farm.
16:53It tried, and it failed. Somewhere behind that orchard, van der Height was facing a problem
16:59that no amount of courage in his hedgerows could fix. In the next part, we cross to his side of
17:05the line,
17:06and look at the numbers he was reading that morning. They are the numbers that turned a bayonet charge
17:11into something much worse for him. June 7, 1944. Four days before the whistle.
17:18Near the village of Saint-Combe-du-Mont, north of Quarentin, van der Height loses a battalion.
17:24His first battalion had been cut off by the American airborne landings. On June 7, it was destroyed,
17:30and its commander surrendered. Two days later, 25 men found their way back to the regiment. 25 from an
17:38entire battalion. So the regiment holding Purple Heart Lane was already missing about a third of
17:44itself before Cole's men ever reached the causeway. Van der Height knew that. But he was also keeping
17:50a second ledger, and that is the one that matters for our question. Here is what he wrote about it
17:56after the war. Pay attention to the order of his worries. Apart from one attached battery of 88s,
18:04he had no artillery. That was bad. But the thing he singles out is the shortage of ammunition,
18:11especially for the heavy infantry weapons, which were the mainstay of the defense.
18:15Heavy infantry weapons means machine guns and mortars. The weapons in the hedgerows. The weapons
18:21that had held the causeway. When he went looking for more, his regiment was assigned an ammunition
18:27supply point. It turned out that point had been destroyed in an enemy air raid. Stop on that for
18:34a second. Before Van der Height's men saw a single American paratrooper come across that field,
18:40Allied air power had already reached the place their bullets were supposed to come from.
18:45Now go back to the clue from the farmhouse. Cole's men said the German artillery seemed weak,
18:51but the mortars never stopped firing. From the American side, that sounded like strength.
18:58From Van der Height's side, it was the opposite. Mortars and machine guns were nearly all he had,
19:04and every round they fired was a round he might never replace.
19:08That is the second layer of our answer, and it changes what the charge means. A defense that is
19:15short of ammunition can still work, but only on its own terms. It needs the enemy to stay at a
19:20distance.
19:21Lie down, and offer targets one at a time, so that every burst counts.
19:27That is exactly what Purple Heart Lane had been for a day and a night. The gate. The single file.
19:35The 18-inch opening. The Americans had been coming to the German guns in small, manageable pieces.
19:42The charge broke those terms. Men running at you in pairs and threes across open grass
19:54And they are inside your hedge, and you have to counterattack to seal them off. And that costs
20:02ammunition too. Van der Height's assault detachments did seal the penetration. Think about what they
20:08spent doing it. By June 11th, the regimental commander was on the radio to the German Parachute Army,
20:15asking for transport planes to drop ammunition to him by air. Inside his own lines, he did something
20:22drastic. All the rifle ammunition of the rifle companies, he wrote, was collected and used for
20:28machine guns. Remember the seven kinds of machine gun? They were the whole defense. And now they were
20:35eating the riflemen's bullets. Then comes the line I'd like you to keep with you for the rest of this
20:41story. As a result, van der Height wrote, the riflemen were reduced to fighting with nothing but hand
20:48weapons. Think about what that means. The German paratroopers facing an American bayonet charge were,
20:56by their own commander's account, being stripped down to close quarters weapons themselves.
21:02The Americans had come at them with bayonets, by choice. The Germans were being pushed the same way,
21:09by arithmetic. On the American side of the orchard, the arithmetic was different,
21:14but it wasn't easy either. At the farm, Captain Simmons of H Company was going from one wounded
21:21man to the next. At one point, he took medical supplies off a dead German to keep going.
21:28Behind the farm lay the causeway. And the causeway was the only way out for anyone who was hit.
21:35Many of the wounded could not be moved at all. So by late morning, both sides on Purple Heart Lane
21:40were running out of something. The Germans were running out of bullets. The Americans were running
21:47out of ways to save the men who had already been shot. Around noon, a garbled message reached the
21:53Americans in the line. Cease fire. General Anthony McAuliffe, the division's artillery commander,
21:59had asked for a truce so the wounded could be cleared. It was the same McAuliffe who, six months
22:05later at Bastogne, would answer a German surrender demand with a single word. Under escort, an American
22:11officer, Major Douglas Davidson, went into Carenton to speak to the German commander. For a short while,
22:18on June 11th, Purple Heart Lane went quiet. But the men in Kohl's line were watching the German side
22:24through that quiet. What they believed the Germans did with that hour is the reason they started shooting
22:29again before anyone gave them permission. Major Davidson never got his meeting. He was taken into
22:35Carenton under escort and asked to see the German commander, and he was refused. The truce held while
22:42he was gone. Both sides used it to carry out wounded, and both sides used it to get a good
22:47look at each
22:47other's positions. The men in Kohl's line could see the German side, and some of them did not like what
22:53they saw. Then Davidson came back across the line. Almost as soon as he did, the Germans opened up
23:00with the heaviest concentration of fire they had put down all day. Kohl radioed for permission to fire
23:06back. He was told to wait. His men didn't. Up and down the hedges around the farm, the paratroopers in
23:14the line started shooting on their own. They were convinced the Germans had used the quiet to strengthen
23:19their positions, and nobody was going to talk them into lying still while it happened. Notice who
23:25these men are. They are the same Americans that German training staffs would describe, six months
23:30later, as soldiers who avoid close combat and surrender readily. On the afternoon of June 11th,
23:37the trouble their officers were having with them was the opposite. They would not stop fighting long
23:42enough to be told to. To their right, along the road, the 1st Battalion had come up into a field
23:49the men called the Cabbage Patch. Lieutenant Delmar Eidel, of A Company, was firing his tommy gun at
23:55Germans moving through the hedges. It was just like shooting at rabbits, he said, and then the part people
24:01usually leave off. Just as hard to hit them. Return fire punched through the helmet of a man beside him.
24:09Remember what we learned in the last part. German riflemen, whose ammunition had gone to the machine
24:14guns, reduced to hand weapons. Even so, late in the afternoon, those paratroopers came again.
24:22They worked their way through the apple orchard, until they were one hedgerow away from Cole's farmhouse.
24:27This is the most dangerous hour of the whole fight, so let me slow down.
24:31Cole had almost no one left to hold his firing line. The battalion that had crossed the causeway
24:37was a fraction of what it had been. By one account, he looked at the men still fighting and felt
24:43real
24:43pride in them. And he also knew they could not hold out much longer. At 6.30 in the evening,
24:51Robert Cole told Regiment he was planning to withdraw. He asked for covering fire and smoke.
24:58Hold on to that moment. The man who led the charge at 6.15 in the morning is 12 hours
25:04later,
25:05asking to give the ground back. The covering fire depended on one officer.
25:11Captain Julian Rosemond was the artillery liaison officer with the battalion, and his radio had been
25:17jammed. For a stretch of the afternoon, he had been out of contact with the batteries behind the causeway.
25:24When he finally got through, he was told the guns were low on ammunition.
25:29Rosemond's answer has come down to us in four words. Then for God's sake, get some.
25:35And here is the detail that changes how you should see this entire day.
25:40They did get some. Ammunition trucks reached the guns in time. Once contact was restored,
25:47every gun the division had in range fired. The shells came down in the orchard just beyond the farmhouse roof.
25:54That close. The fire was adjusted so tight that it killed two Americans. One man said afterward,
26:02We lost some good men, but we had to have that fire. Cole stood listening to it.
26:08Listen to it, he said. Just listen to it. The barrage lasted about five minutes. When it lifted,
26:15the men at the farm could hear the German fire moving away, south. Now put two requests side by side,
26:23because this is the third layer of our answer. That same day, von der Heid asked for ammunition, too.
26:30He had to radio the parachute army and ask for transport planes to drop it to him by air,
26:36at night, if they could get through. Rosemond asked for ammunition, and trucks drove it up a road the
26:41Americans already held. The bayonet charge is what put the Americans inside von der Heid's line.
26:47But a charge only buys ground. Holding it is a question of supply. Every hour after 6.15 that
26:55morning, the fight at the farm turned into a contest between two supply systems, and only one of them
27:00could answer a radio call before dark. At about 8 that evening, the regiment's 2nd battalion came
27:07forward and relieved what was left of the 1st and 3rd. The 502nd was too exhausted to go on,
27:13and it asked to be relieved. The men at the farm believed their artillery had broken the German
27:18attack, and in part it had. But the German fire fading south that evening had another cause,
27:24and it lay inside Carentan. Earlier that same afternoon, von der Heid had made a decision.
27:31One of his own superiors would later call it an incomprehensible and ill-advised step.
27:37What he decided, and why Cole's charge sat at the center of it, is where we go next.
27:43June 11, 1944. Late afternoon.
27:48Inside Carentan, in his command post, Oberst von der Heidt is adding things up.
27:54His own account lets us follow his reasoning almost line by line,
27:58and every line connects to something you've already seen.
28:01Heavy casualties. The 1st Battalion is gone. The rest of the regiment bled for two days on the
28:08causeway. His main line of resistance is now so thin that it barely deserves the name.
28:14The Americans are inside it at Palmenauk, sealed off but not cleared. His riflemen have handed their
28:21ammunition to the machine guns. And he expects, in his words, further breakthroughs the next day,
28:27on June 12. Follow that logic one more step and you arrive where he did. If he stays,
28:34the next American push could take what is left of his regiment.
28:39So in the late afternoon of June 11, von der Heidt decides to evacuate Carentan. He pulls his men
28:45out in broad daylight, and nobody stops him. They fall back to a hill southwest of the town.
28:51The American paratroopers at the farm hear the German fire moving south, and put it down to their
28:57artillery. They have no idea the town behind that fire is being emptied. Now come the two ironies,
29:05and for von der Heidt, they are cruel ones. The 1st arrives the same afternoon. An officer from the 17th
29:13SS Panzergrenadier Division suddenly turns up at his headquarters with news. The division will reach the
29:21Carentan area that very night. Armor. Fresh infantry. Exactly what he needed.
29:29Von der Heidt later wrote that if he had known in advance, he would not have pulled out.
29:34His superior saw it very differently. General Magor Max Pemsel, Chief of Staff of the German 7th Army,
29:41wrote that the Corps had been told about the SS Division by telephone as early as 1 o'clock on
29:47June 10.
29:48He called the evacuation an incomprehensible and ill-advised step. He wrote that neither Army nor
29:57Corps agreed with this independent decision. And then he wrote something few staff officers say about
30:03a colonel in writing. He believed the commander of the 6th Parachute Regiment had suffered a temporary
30:09physical and mental breakdown. Remember that phrase, physical and mental breakdown. It comes from his own
30:18side. And it's as close as any German document gets to the word in this video's title.
30:24The second irony comes after dark. The ammunition von der Heidt had begged for by radio finally arrives.
30:31The parachute army's night drop was carried out, he wrote, in an exemplary fashion.
30:37The containers came down south of the town. Think about the timing. The bullets he needed at 6.15
30:44that morning, when the Americans came across the field, landed that night, behind a line he had
30:50already given up. Rosemond's trucks came up in time. Fonderheidt's aircraft arrived about half a day too late.
30:57And so on June 12th, the Americans walked into Calenton. At 6 in the morning, a glider infantry
31:03battalion attacked out of the woods northeast of town and pushed into the center. The 2nd Battalion
31:09of the 506th came in along the main road from the southwest, taking machine gun fire most of the way.
31:15At about 7.30, the two met near the railroad station, after a short fight with German stragglers.
31:21The army's official history puts it plainly. The trap closed too late to catch most of the defenders.
31:27But Carenton, the hinge between Utah and Omaha, was in American hands.
31:32The Germans were not finished. On June 13th, the 17th SS came, the division that had arrived one
31:39night too late to save the town. It struck along two roads southwest of Carenton, and with it came
31:46the remnants of the 6th Parachute Regiment. The attack got to within 500 yards of the edge of the town.
31:52The paratroopers who had just taken it were tired, short of men, and short of heavy weapons.
31:57At 10.30 that morning, the first elements of Combat Command A of the 2nd Armored Division
32:02rolled into Carenton under Brigadier General Maurice Rose. At two in the afternoon, American tank task
32:10forces attacked west and southwest along both roads, with the 502nd Coles Regiment following the tanks in.
32:19The official history says the attack threw the Germans back several thousand yards, and it estimates
32:26German losses at 500 men. The paratroopers who fought there called the place bloody gulch.
32:33Even von der Heidt noted that the casualties among the SS had been unusually high.
32:40Step back now and look at the chain. A whistle at 6.15. A charge most of the battalion never
32:48heard
32:48ordered. A penetration the Germans could seal but not clear. A regiment burning through ammunition it
32:56couldn't replace, while the other side's trucks kept coming. A commander who decided by late afternoon
33:02that he couldn't risk another day. A town given up hours before the reinforcements that might have
33:08held it. That chain explains what the charge did. It doesn't yet explain what the German paratroopers
33:14made of the men who did it. Because after the war, von der Heidt sat down and wrote his own
33:20verdict on the Americans who came across that field. He had every reason to blame his ammunition,
33:26his superiors, the SS. But one of the sentences he wrote is about the American paratroopers themselves.
33:34It reads nothing like the official German picture of the American soldier. And it tells us what the
33:40men in that hedgerow actually saw. Here is the sentence, written by Friedrich von der Heidt in his
33:46account of the regiment's battle in Normandy, prepared for the American army's own historians.
33:51The caliber of the American paratroopers who fought against the regiment was outstanding.
33:57They were, he went on, excellently trained in combat techniques, and their armament and equipment
34:03were first class. Now put it beside the other German verdict, the official one.
34:10Avoids close combat, dislikes night fighting, and surrenders readily. One was written by staff
34:17officers working from reports. The other was written by the man who commanded the defense
34:23at Pommenach while American paratroopers came through it.
34:27Von der Heidt didn't stop at praise though, and his next sentence is the one that unlocks this whole story.
34:32He wrote that the tactical ability of the American command, from the lower echelons up to and including
34:39division level, did not always appear to be on a par with the excellent combat efficiency of the units.
34:46Read that slowly. Excellent soldiers. A command that didn't always measure up to them.
34:54Now go back over everything you've seen on Purple Heart Lane and notice how much of it was the command
34:59breaking down. The engineers couldn't close the gap at Bridge No. 2, so the battalion commander laid the
35:06planks himself. The order to charge reached only the men near Stopka. 250 men were supposed to rise at
35:14the whistle, and 20 did. A garbled message produced a ceasefire. Kohl was told to wait while the Germans
35:22fired the heaviest concentration of the day at him. The artillery officer's radio was jammed in the worst
35:28hour of the fight. And when he got through, the guns were low on shells. Nearly every link in the
35:34American chain of command failed at some point on June 11th. And still the farm was taken. And still,
35:41it was held. That's what the German paratroopers in that hedgerow saw. And it's the answer to the
35:47question in the title. They didn't see a perfectly drilled assault. They saw something they had no
35:53category for. They saw an attack that by every rule should have died in its first minute. One
35:59colonel and 20 men in open grass. And it didn't die. They saw Americans getting up in pairs and threes
36:07without having heard any order, because the man next to them was going. They watched those men cross
36:14two football fields of open ground under machine gun fire and come through the hedge to rifle and grenade
36:19range, which was the one distance the German defense couldn't afford. They saw men who were told to
36:26hold their fire and fired anyway. The bayonet is what everyone remembers. What it meant was something
36:33else. This American attack did not depend on the American command working. When the command failed,
36:40the men kept going. And the German paratroopers had no answer to that, because each layer we've uncovered
36:46closed off another one. Closing the distance took away their machine gun's advantage. A close fight
36:52burns ammunition, and they were already short. Their riflemen had been stripped down to hand weapons.
36:58Their resupply came by aircraft, at night. The Americans came by truck, before dark. And their
37:06commander, who had jumped onto Crete and was not a man who frightened easily, looked at all of it that
37:12afternoon, and pulled out of a town that reinforcements were about to reach. His own army's chief of staff
37:18called it a physical and mental breakdown. So why did an American bayonet charge shock German
37:25paratroopers? Not because of the steal. Very few of them were killed with it. It shocked them, because
37:32it was the moment American soldiers, men their own army had written off as avoiding close combat,
37:38came to arm's length, on their own, against a defense that could only win at a distance,
37:44belonging to an army that could only resupply in the dark.
37:48And here is the part that should stay with you. The German army as an institution never absorbed it.
37:55Six months after Carantin, its training staffs were still printing that the American soldier avoids
38:01close combat. The lesson stayed with the men who had been in that hedge, and with their commander.
38:08Von der Heidt went further than calling the paratroopers outstanding. He wrote that the 101st
38:14Airborne, and particularly its 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, far surpassed the other American
38:22airborne units. Nobody ranks enemy regiments that carefully unless those regiments have made him think
38:29hard. The Americans paid for every word of that verdict. Nearly three of every four men in I Company
38:36were lost before the charge even began. Two paratroopers at the farm were killed by their own barrage,
38:43the fire that saved everyone else. Captain Rosemond's batteries had been firing until they nearly ran dry.
38:50Behind the farmhouse lay a causeway the men had already named after the medal for the wounded and the dead.
38:57Six months later, in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, Friedrich von der Heidt was on a
39:04frozen moor north of a place called Montriggi in Belgium, holding American prisoners. Before he let
39:11them go, he wrote a note by hand and asked them to deliver it to Maxwell Taylor. It mentions Carantin.
39:20It remembers the surrender demand of June 10th. And by then, the men who had led that charge across the
39:27field
39:27at Pamanoc were meeting fates neither commander could have imagined that morning. North of Montriggi,
39:33Belgium. The week before Christmas, 1944. Friedrich von der Heidt is holding six American prisoners.
39:41He has jumped into the Ardennes with a broken arm strapped in the leather sleeve, his drop has scattered,
39:46and his manner cut off. Before he lets the Americans go, he writes a note by hand and gives it
39:53to one of them to
39:53carry back. It is addressed to General Maxwell D. Taylor, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.
40:01I herewith send you six American soldiers which we have captured, it begins. We have fought against
40:06each others at Carantin and in Holland. Then the line that reaches back across six months to the
40:12causeway. At Carantin, you asked us to surrender. He asks Taylor to treat his wounded paratroopers as
40:20well as his regiment had treated the wounded of Taylor's division. He signs it as the commander
40:25of a paratroop regiment, and he tells Taylor he will remember him. On June 10th, Taylor had asked him
40:30to surrender, and he refused. In December, the man asking for consideration was von der Heidt.
40:37On December 22nd, near Monschau, suffering from trench foot and exposure, he walked into a house and
40:43gave himself up. He spent the rest of the war in American hands. That's where the German side of
40:51this story ends. The American side ends earlier, and it ends harder. September 18th, 1944. Best in the
41:00Netherlands. Operation Market Garden. Robert Cole's 3rd Battalion is fighting in the woods and fields
41:07around best. Cole has called for air support, and he is on the radio with a pilot overhead.
41:13The pilot needs the battalion's position marked with orange identification panels, or he risks
41:18hitting Americans. Someone has to go out into the open with those panels, toward woods where German
41:25snipers are working. Walter Cronkite, reporting for United Press, wrote that Cole carried them
41:31himself rather than send one of his men. He is looking up, trying to spot the plane, when a German
41:37sniper in a farmhouse about a hundred yards away shoots him. He was 29. Remember the first time we
41:45met him? Lying in a ditch on Purple Heart Lane, whistle in his hand, the first man up. At best,
41:53he was again the one who stood up in the open. He never saw his Medal of Honor. It was
41:59presented on
41:59October 30th, 1944, at Fort Sam Houston, the army post in San Antonio where he was born.
42:07He lies today in the American Cemetery at Margroten in the Netherlands. There was a plaque at Carantan,
42:14near the place where he ordered the charge, and another at best, near the place where he died.
42:19Lt. Ralph Watson was a few paces behind Cole when he fell. He passed the word to Major John Stopka,
42:26you were in command of the battalion. The man who got up at Carantan and shouted the others out of
42:33the
42:33ditches when most of them hadn't heard the whistle, received the Distinguished Service Cross for that
42:39morning. He led the 3rd Battalion into Holland and then into the snow around Bastogne. On January 14,
42:481945, near the Belgian village of Michon, John Stopka was killed. He is buried in the American
42:56Cemetery in Luxembourg. Neither of the two men who led that charge lived to see the end of the war.
43:03So let's go back one last time to 6.15 in the morning on June 11, 1944, and the ditch
43:10beside the
43:11causeway. The smoke is drifting. The guns have lifted. 250 men are supposed to rise, and about 20 do.
43:22Then 50 more. Then the rest, in twos and threes, across open grass toward the hedges.
43:29Those German paratroopers were not shocked by a blade. They were shocked that American soldiers,
43:35the ones their own army said avoided close combat, came at them anyway, without an order most of them
43:41heard, and without the support they had been promised, and simply kept coming. The steel was
43:48what people saw. The men behind it were what decided the fight.
43:54Thank you for staying with this story to the end. If it showed you something you didn't know about
43:58the American paratroopers on Purple Heart Lane, please give the video a like. It really does help
44:04stories like this find the people who care about them. Subscribe and turn on the bell so you don't
44:09miss the next one. And tell us in the comments where you're watching from. If your father, grandfather,
44:14or uncle served in the Second World War, write his name and his unit. We read every one. And the
44:21men
44:21who served should be remembered by name.