Dangling from a church steeple probably wasn't the way Pvt. John Steele ever imagined himself in the fight to liberate France from the grip of Nazi domination, but that's what happened. He, like hundreds of other paratroopers from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, made the jump into occupied France on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Steele had already jumped into combat in places like Sicily and the Italian Peninsula by the time he jumped into Operation Overlord. None of those jumps ever ended like that one. His trajectory took him over the town square of Sainte-Mère-Église that morning. His parachute took him by surprise when it became caught on the church steeple in the middle of the French commune.
There he hung, pretending to be dead, trying to figure out what to do next.
Steele was one of 12,000 men from the 82nd Airborne to land in France as part of the D-Day invasion. Some 6,000 paratroopers and 6,000 glidermen boarded hundreds of planes with the mission of capturing Sainte-Mère-Église and securing the bridges over the rivers behind Utah Beach.
