“It began when 12-year-old Marthe encountered a ‘tall’ paratrooper without a helmet or weapons who asked for shelter. Marthe went to the nearby home of her grandfather, seeking advice. The old man cautioned the girl. ‘We will all be shot,’ he warned her.”

By Stephen G. Rabe

WHAT HAPPENED between June 6 and June 16, 1944 in Graignes, Normandy, a village of 900 people situated about six miles south of the port town of Carentan, is one of the more amazing (yet forgotten) chapters of Operation Overlord.

Graignes curious part of the story began at 2:38 a.m. on D-Day. That’s when a formation of Allied C-47 transport planes dropped nine “sticks” of paratroopers from the 82^nd Airborne and one stick from the 101^st Airborne into the marshes or marais near Graignes. It was not the intended drop zone; the paratroopers, many from the 507^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, were more than 20 miles off-target.

Despite being far from where they were supposed to be, the ranking officer on the ground gathered what men he could find and opted to defend the unoccupied village and wait for the infantry soon to be pushing inland from Omaha Beach. The villagers in Graignes were overjoyed by the decision. Many waded into the marais to retrieve the paratroopers’ equipment, while gathering intelligence and carrying out their own impromptu reconnaissance of the surrounding area.

The women of the village launched a round-the-clock cooking campaign to feed their liberators, who now numbered about 165 uniformed personnel. Since food was scarce, many slipped into nearby towns to forage – a risky undertaking considering the battle for Normandy was now underway and enemy soldiers might very well have mistaken them for spies or the French underground.

To be sure, the people of Graignes despised the Nazis. Middle-aged men, including the parish priest, were proud veterans of the First World War, while the young men from the village who had been in the French army were still being held as POWs inside Germany itself. Worse, the occupiers were seizing other young men to work as forced labourers. Children went hungry under the Nazi-imposed food rationing system. And if that wasn’t enough, German troops were also stealing the region’s renowned Normande cows.

The American paratroopers held the town for five days until the enemy launched a series of counter-attacks. Over the course of Sunday, June 11, the airborne fended off three German assaults. The defenders of Graignes, armed with rifles, five light machine-guns and two 81mm mortars, easily repulsed the morning attack launched by German forces in the area. The afternoon and evening saw much fiercer onslaughts carried out by a battalion of troops from the 17^th Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier Division. This time, the enemy brought heavier weapons with them, including artillery. Realizing his troops were outnumbered, outgunned and now out of ammunition, the American commander ordered the paratroopers to withdraw from the village., leaving many of their casualties behind.

Graignes fell back into German hands. Once in the town, the SS troops carried out ruthless reprisals against the civilians. In addition to murdering four villagers, including the parish priest, for the crime of ministering to wounded GIs, they tortured and executed 19 injured paratroopers, including the medics left to care for them. The Germans further threatened to slaughter prominent citizens for collaborating. Despite this, the villagers refused to cooperate. Other German forces arrived and evacuated Graignes before burning much of the town to the ground.

But the resistance of the residents didn’t end there; some villagers would lend a hand to other American paratroopers in the area.

When a column of 90 airborne troops, led by a captain named David Brummitt, made their way through 10 miles of marais to reach Carentan, which was in the process of being liberated by the 101^st Airborne, Graignes villagers provided food and vital intelligence. Brummitt and his men reached U.S. forces there on Tuesday, June 13. The captain earned the Silver Star for his leadership. The people of Graignes helped other bands of lost airborne as well.

One large group of paratroopers hid in the barn of Gustave and Marthe Rigault near Graignes for several days after the chaotic June 6 drops into France. The Rigault children, Odette and Marthe, saved the lives of 21 paratroopers in all.

It began when 12-year-old Marthe encountered a “tall” paratrooper without a helmet or weapons who asked for shelter. Marthe went to the nearby home of her grandfather, seeking advice. The old man cautioned the girl. “We will all be shot,” he warned her. Marthe disobeyed however and brought the American to the family’s barn. Upon entering, he found four other paratroopers already hiding there. It turned out Marthe’s older sister, Odette, had herself been busy rounding up the scattered defenders of Graignes. When the number of paratroops in the barn reached 10, the sisters had to tell their parents what they were doing.

The girls need not have worried about their parents refusing to help. Their father Gustave had seen two paratroopers emerging from the marais and brought them to the barn himself. The family patriarch, who carried German shrapnel in his knee from the First World War, had also aided British soldiers fleeing the Germans in 1940.

As the days wore on, the family did their best to feed their growing number of guests with what little they had. Fearing any Germans watching the farm from the surrounding countryside might suspect the barn was full of fugitive paratroopers, one of the girls would pretend to be doing chores in the yard while sneaking food into the barn. She would cough to signal her approach and one of the famished Americans would sneak down from the loft and retrieve the food.

One of the paratroopers, S/Sgt. Rene Rabe, would forever proclaim that his portion of boiled cabbage with melting butter was the best meal of his life. 

As the paratroopers ran out of cigarettes, Sgt. Frank Costa, a non-smoker in the group, recalled the men sharing the last butt they had between them.

“It was sad and at the same time funny to see 11 men taking a deep drag, holding the smoke in their mouths, reluctant to let it out,” he remembered. “It was like taking their last breath, hanging on for dear life.”

At one point, the paratroops were very nearly discovered when two enemy infantrymen, searching for lost U.S. soldiers, walked into the barn. The paratroopers, hiding in the hayloft, trained their rifles on the intruders and one of them, T/4 Eddie Page, pulled the pin on a hand grenade. After a cursory search, the two Germans left.

“It’s a good thing that the Krauts goldbrick sometimes; just like we do,” Page later recalled.

One of Page’s buddies had to help him put the pin back into the spoon of the grenade.

Had the Americans been discovered, it would have meant summary execution for the Rigault family.

That was not the only close brush the Rigaults and the Americans had with the enemy. The shrewd family matriarch, Madame Marthe, averted another potential disaster as a patrol of 30 German soldiers moved toward the barn. Posing as a friendly civilian, she gave the enemy directions that sent them off in another direction.

“We were all so afraid once more,” recalled the young Marthe.

And the anxiety and pressure continued to mount.

“We were living, but we no longer had any notion of the passage of time,” Odette remembered. “We lived only to save these people and wondered what would become of them.”

But a point came when the family decided the risks were growing too great; the Americans would have to go.

Unfortunately, the paratrooper’s first escape went awry. On June 14, Madame Rigault drew up a map for them to find the canals that would lead them to Carentan. The family provided the soldiers with some small flat boats to get through the marshes. After bracing themselves with a final shot of calvados, a local apple brandy, the Americans set out. The gambit ended in failure however when troopers became lost and their tiny craft filled with water.

The Rigaults were shocked to find that the paratroopers had returned to the barn.

A better plan was soon hatched. A single large, flat boat, of seven to eight meters in length, known as a gabare, was anchored on the water nearby. It was normally used to transport heavy loads, like bags of sand.

The family recruited neighbour Joseph Folliot to punt the gabare. Marthe placed a white flower in the lapels of each of the paratroopers and before they departed, the Americans all signed a letter commending the Rigault family to U.S. military authorities. The GIs clambered into the vessel, with some of them lying in the bottom. Gustave and his two girls formed a human chain to push the gabare through the marais until it reached the current of a river.

The perilous voyage proved to be remarkably unremarkable. The men left at dusk and arrived before midnight on Thursday, June 15.  Folliot guided the gabare through the canals, arriving at St. Hilaire, a hamlet just 300 meters south of Carentan. The fugitives encountered no hostile forces. Once on shore, the paratroopers were challenged by sentries and were soon transported by truck back to the command post of the 82^nd Airborne. On Saturday, June 16, the men were safe and enjoying a meal of pork and beans.

Sadly, Joseph Folliot paid the ultimate price for his heroism. The French patriot returned safely, but the Germans discovered that the gabare had been moved.  They arrested him and reportedly executed him.

The villagers of Graignes contributed to Allied victory. The 507^th Parachute Infantry Regiment continued the fight in Normandy and would go on to participate in the Battle of the Bulge. Later they’d be part of Operation Varsity, the Allied jump over the Rhine River on March 24, 1945.  While fighting in the Rhineland region, the paratroopers liberated thousands of Eastern European slave laborers. Fortunately, almost all of the paratroopers who escaped Graignes, survived the war.

Through the efforts of Col. Frank Naughton and Lt. Col. Earcle Reed, both of whom served at Graignes and became career military officers, the people of Graignes eventually received high honours.  In a grand ceremony in Graignes in 1986, Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh awarded eleven Distinguished Service Medals.  Honourees included the Rigault sisters, Joseph Folliot, and the murdered parish priest, Father Albert Le Blastier.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Stephen G. Rabe is the author of The Lost Paratroopers of Normandy. The Ashbel Smith Chair in History (emeritus) at the University of Texas at Dallas, he taught for 40 years after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1970 to 1976.  His paratrooper father, S/Sgt. Rene E. Rabe, made the epic journey from Normandy to Berlin from 1944 to 1945.  S/Sgt. Rabe was awarded multiple Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars. The Lost Paratroopers is Dr. Rabe’s 13th book and is published by Cambridge University Press.