Vwegba Blogging World

The Story of John Steele, the Sainte-Mère-Eglise Paratrooper An American paratrooper hanging dead on a tree in the German village of Hamminkeln, 1945. Steele hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. He escaped four hours later from the Germans and Private John Marvin Steele (November 29, 1912 – May 16, 1969) was the American paratrooper who landed on the pinnacle of the church tower in Sainte-Mère-Église, the first village to be liberated by the United States Army during Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944. On the night before D-Day (June 6, 1944), American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne were parachuting into the area west of Sainte-Mère-Église in successive waves. The town had been the target of an aerial attack, during which a stray incendiary bomb had set fire to a house east of the town square. The church bell was rung to alert the town to the emergency, and townspeople turned out in large numbers to form a bucket brigade supervise