On May 27, 1944, the paratroopers of 3rd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne waited at the railway station in Hungerford, England, for the trains that would take them to their D-Day marshaling area. The weather was unusually hot for May, and the men sweated as they waited in their steel helmets and jumpsuits.

“Everyone was trying to figure out exactly where we were going,” remembers Amos “Buck” Taylor, a sergeant in the 506th at the time. “We knew it was probably going to be Normandy, but exactly where nobody knew.” Though the location of the invasion had not yet been revealed, the men had some idea of what Gen. Bill Lee, former commander of the 101st, had called “the responsibility ahead of us.” The past nine months had been a blur of grueling training exercises that had tested the mettle even of these men, elite volunteers trained to jump directly into the turbulence of combat. Their training had culminated in Exercise Tiger . . .

a full-scale rehearsal of D-Day that had involved all units of the 101st Airborne.

In a few short hours, at Exeter Airfield, the men of 3rd Battalion would discover their objective: to lead the way on D-Day by seizing and defending two bridges spanning the Canal de Carentan—vital links between the German bases in and around Carentan, a small port city just south of the Cotentin Peninsula, and the American invasion beaches.

On the following pages, the men of the 506th recall the days leading up to the perilous night drop that launched the largest military invasion in history.