 The Allied invasion of Europe began at precisely 15 minutes after midnight on June 6, 1944. At that moment, a few specially chosen men of the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions stepped out of their planes into the Moonlight Night over Normandy. The Allied Airborne armies clearly marked the extreme limits of the Normandy battlefield. Between them, and along the French coastline, lie five invasion beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sore. Through the pre-dawn hours as paratroopers fought in the dark hedgerows of Normandy, the greatest armada the world has ever known began to assemble off those beaches, almost 5,000 ships carrying more than 200,000 soldiers, sailors, and coast guardsmen. Early at 6.30 a.m. and preceded by a massive navel and air bombardment, a few thousand of these men waited ashore in the first wave of the invasion. What follows is not a military history, it's a story of the men of the Allied forces. And this story is told by a man who lived it, who answered the call when his country needed him. After the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, followed by a series of U.S. defeats in the Pacific, left to many Americans feeling demoralized, vulnerable, and afraid. The country wasn't ready to fight in another war in Europe after the severe toll of World War I. After the war began in Europe in 1939, the American people were divided on whether their country should take part or stay out. Most Americans hoped the Allies would win, but they also hoped to keep the United States out of war. The isolationists wanted the country to stay out of the war at almost any cost. Another group, the interventionists, wanted the United States to do all in its power to aid the Allies. America's armed forces consisted largely of citizen soldiers, men and women drawn from civilian life. They came from every state in the nation, an all economic and social strata. There were those who were drafted, but many were volunteers. But Jim Martin, a 22-year-old machinist working in a tool and die manufacturing company in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio. This is Jim's story, a young man who wanted to be the best, who, on D-Day, jumped into Normandy with a 101st airborne, secured the small town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and was there at the end, at the Eagles Nest, in Birchesgaden, Germany. In his hometown of Dayton, inside the National Museum of the Air Force, at age 93, Jim Martin recalls the beginning of his journey and how he broke the news to his parents that he joined the Army. When I announced I was going to do that, my dad cried. He had been in the 69th Division of World War I, and he didn't want me to go. My mother, now my dad was French heritage, so I could understand their emotion. My mother is very pragmatic, she's Irish and English, didn't bother her in the least. She wished me well, my dad wished me well, and they want to know if they want to go down to the station with me next morning, see me off, I said no, I don't want that. I'll walk down, I'll walk down to the train station, got on the train, went to Indianapolis, from Indianapolis, then we went to Toquah, Georgia. In July 1942, 5,000 men arrived at a remote training camp five miles outside of Toquah, Georgia at Kurahee Mountain for training as a new type of soldier, a paratrooper. When they started this thing down there in Toquah, it was strictly voluntary, it could not draft you into the paratrooper if you had to ask to be in, 6,500 people signed up. From the middle of July until the 1st of December, we did what Colonel St. the Commander called Airborne Basic, they had never done that before, it was really tough. In that few months that we trained there, by the time we went to jump school on the 1st of December, we had 1,650 left, I mean the discipline was terrible, the food was awful, not much of it, and any infraction is all and you're gone. Unlike basic training at other army camps, training at Toquah included orientation with parachute equipment, exit training from a mocked up C-47 aircraft door, and jumps from a 34 foot tower. At 130 pounds, Jim was the smallest soldier in the entire regiment. He was nicknamed Pee Week, which is still a name he's proud to be called, but despite his small stature, he took whatever they dished out. Jim says from the earliest days of the 506th, he remembers the punishing physical training which was the hallmark of Toquah, and especially one particular workout. Then you had runs, the runs would be anywhere from 5 miles to 25 miles, sometimes with full pack and weapons, sometimes in swimming trunks, then there was the mountain, now the elevation of the bottom of the mountain was at 5,000 feet, then you went up and altitude went up to 6,000 feet in 3 and a half miles. We ran that in formation four and five times a week, that's in 45 to 50 minutes, that took a lot of the people out, it was miserable, people hated that mountain. Colonel Robert Sink commanded the 506th beginning at Toquah and throughout World War II, turning down two promotions during the war to remain with the unit. The 506th soon became the 506th. Colonel Sink's demands on the trainees began to affect morale, and the men began to despise him. We thought he was a devil incarnate, and it got so bad that he had a formation out on the hillside one day, and he walked back and forth, he was a mild mannered guy, he didn't raise his voice ever. He walked back and forth and he said, I understand you people aren't happy in every way, yeah, you don't like the food, yeah, you think I'm too hard on you, yeah, I'm going to tell you, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets any better. That was it. The attrition rate at Toquah was close to 90% due to the mental and physical demands, so only the very best earned their jump wings. That's what their commander wanted and needed. And once the members of the 506th experienced the rigors of war, they realized what a tremendous commander they had in Colonel Sink. Then when we got to combat, we saw why he did all of this, because every man, due to the fact that we got rid of the people that really weren't passionate about it, every man that you had there was going to be there when you needed him. And he probably was the most loved commander in the whole army after we went to combat. We would have gone through hell with him at any time at all without any problem. In September of 1943, the men of the 506th boarded the British ship SS Samaria and headed for England. 5,000 men on a ship that could accommodate 1,000. Jim recalls his first day on board. I was on K.P. It took us down in the hole with this British cook. There was a big wooden barrel with the heads knocked off. He reached down in that slimy stuff with his big hairy hand and pulled out a big piece of meat, horse meat. He was crawling with maggots and somebody said, hey, it's got maggots on. He said, it's live meat ain't it, man? Well, I ate one meal there and in ten days I didn't eat any more. Once they arrived, the 506th was stationed in Wiltshire County with units in such villages as Aldborn, Ramsbury, Frocksfield and Chilton Foliac. It was here for the next eight months the soldiers prepared for the coming invasion of occupied Europe. We did some really tough training. It was about 15, 16 hours a day. We got up at four o'clock in the morning and didn't quit. Had night problems, night after night. Of course, drizzly rain all the time and cold. And after about seven or eight months of training and a lot of drive runs, we finally got to the marshaling area. And 11 o'clock in the evening, my group took off at Exeter Airfield at 12.30 in the morning. We went at the 5th of June is when we took off. At 12.30 we made our initial jump into France. Operation Overlord, beginning on D-Day, was the largest combined land, sea and air operation the world had ever seen. And at the tip of the spear was Private Jim Martin, as he and his fellow soldiers from the 101st prepared to board the C-47 Dakotas. The men were loaded down with an enormous amount of equipment. Paratroopers carried an average of 70 pounds of equipment. Officers averaged 90 pounds of gear with the parachute. Jim recalls the journey. There were a few SARS clouds up above. Just enough so she still saw shadows down below and you saw all those ships. It was just unbelievable to see as many ships as there were down there. We got to the coast. It closed in. You couldn't see anything at all. As the C-47's got near the French coastline, the fog, along with the enormous amount of anti-aircraft fire, created a recipe for disaster for the loaded down paratroopers. We had lost most of our equipment because when they scattered and the plaque came they didn't slow down to 90 miles an hour. Most of them jumped us at 150. Most people lost a lot of their equipment. Jim's unit landed behind Utah Beach. He had a safe landing and it was just a few minutes before someone came along. Jim tells us who it was. My sergeant came and all he had on was a knife. He lost everything else. He didn't have another thing on him. He and his sergeant were able to gather other soldiers into a small group but overall the airborne units were scattered all over Normandy. For many the first struggle of combat was to find their units. 1500 soldiers from the division were killed or captured. The soldiers persevered and proceeded with their assigned missions as best they could. By nightfall, soldiers from the 101st had secured the beach exits in their zone and contacted the landing forces of the 4th division. Jim's unit, the 3rd battalion at the 506th, objective was to capture the two bridges over the Dove River to prevent the Germans from reinforcing the beaches. Jim and his unit made it to the bridges but things changed as they tend to do in combat. We had lost all of our communication equipment and division thought we'd been wiped out so they ordered the bridges bombed and here we are right there at the bridges. Sergeant Shames, later Colonel Shames and Chaplain McGee were standing up on the dyke waving series panels and here come these Air Force planes, the P-47s flying down there with machine's gun going, dropping bombs and they straddle those two guys and you just see the ground just erupting around them. We only lost one guy killed fortunately. The mission of Operation Market Garden, a plan designed by British Field Marshal Montgomery, was for the airborne divisions to jump in a daring daylight drop into Holland. The airborne Allied troops were to seize roads, bridges and the key communication cities of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem thus cutting Holland in half and clearing a corridor for British armored and motorized columns all the way to the German border. The eventual goal was to cross the Rhine River and breach the German West Wall defenses. Jim has a clear memory of what happened on the way to the drop zone. Beautiful day, jumped at a thousand feet. We did hit really heavy flak going in. They said we took another route a long way around to keep from having flak and I said at the time I don't know where the hell that came from. I said this is about a heavier flak we've ever seen and every water tower had a couple of machine guns on top of it. We got hit and our plane was on fire and the co-pilot came back and said you guys want to jump now or you want to try to make the jump field. We said how far is it? He said about 20 minutes. We said we're going to the jump field. We want to go where everybody else is going to be. So our plane did crash on the jump field and of course it went down across the fields, get across some guys. You know everybody's on the ground already. The co-pilot did but the radio man didn't. He jumped and it was too low. He got killed. But a couple sergeants went over and knocked in the windshield and pulled the pilot and co-pilot out. When Jim and the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion reached Dynhoven, they came under direct fire from two German 88s and mortars positioned in the Main Street, effectively stopping all movement. Colonel Sink flanked the guns from the left with the 2nd Battalion. Jim says the Dutch citizens of Dynhoven were so happy to see the American soldiers that it made it taking out the 88s a challenge. And the people in the houses on each side of the street were coming out and giving them milk and wine and fruit and whatever they had and every time one of these guns would shoot, everybody would run back in the house and then right back the guys could hardly fight because of it. Eventually, with the help of the Dutch citizens, the guns were knocked out. However, as the German ground troops left, their aircraft bombed the central part of the city indiscriminately. Eindhoven, a city of 130,000 suffered more than 1,000 civilian casualties that night, including 200 dead. Jim says the Dutch citizens do not fault the Americans for the death and destruction of their homes. But even the people who had family killed today have said that they felt bad about them getting killed but didn't feel bad that we were there causing it to happen because we did free them. In December of 1944, the Battle of the Bulge was the last major German offensive on the Western Front during World War II. It was an unsuccessful attempt to push the Allies back from the German home territory. Seven main roads in the Ardennes Forest converged on the small town of Bastone. Control of its crossroads was vital to the German attack. Jim and the members of the 101st were in France and were told they were going to the Pacific to invade Japan. That all changed very quickly. Sergeant Command turned lights on and said, get up, get up. There's been a breakthrough. We're going. And I said, oh, he's full of s***. We're not going to any place. We don't have any winter clothing. We don't have any ammunition or weapons are turned in. After a long ride in uncovered trucks, the 101st made it to the small town in Belgium. They dumped us out in the field. After a short time, officers put us in position and we made roughly a 20 mile diameter or circumference circle around this little city of Bastone. 11 roads come together there and the Germans had to have that to run their tanks and trucks sure they couldn't go across country. They told us to go and hold it and hold it. They did. But the soldiers were not prepared for one of the coldest winters on record for 10 days. Planes couldn't fly at all. And all we had on was just what you see right here. We had a raincoat. We had everybody had his raincoat. Now the first three days it drizzled rain and then the temperature dropped and the snow came. Then it got down close to zero. Then when the weather broke, they brought started bringing in cereals of planes and dump and supplies. Of course, the first thing they brought you was ammunition. Later, they brought some food. In the first 10 days, whatever you had when you went in is all you had. Some guys might have got three boxes of cave rations, which is a day's feed. Some guys might have had none. But that's all you had when you went in. And that's what you had to exist on. The soldiers held off several enemy attacks during December, including many artillery barrages. But the tide turned for the 101st when Patton made a strategic move. Now you've also heard that Patton saved us. He didn't save us. We didn't need any saving. But he did one of the most magnificent thing that's ever been done in combat. He turned the whole army 90 degrees and brought him 100 miles and broke through. And what that did allow was us to take our wounded and dead out and bring ammunition and supplies in. We did have aerial supply, but we could have survived it. It would have been absolutely miserable, but we could have stayed there forever with only resupply from the air. But by him doing that, then we got adequate supplies. During the last days of the war, the 101st Airborne Division was in Birch's Garden, Adolf Hitler's vacation retreat. The airborne soldiers spent their days hunting members of the Nazi leadership that had gone into hiding. These are photos of Jim and members of the 101st in the Bavarian Alps. After Germany's surrender, Jim says the men were not celebrating. We felt a sense of relief that we made it. And in the last few weeks of the war, people began to get jumpy about it because you knew it was winding down and who wants to be the last guy killed. On August 1st, the 42nd Infantry Division relieved the 101st, which moved back to France to train for a possible airborne assault on Japan. These plans were canceled after the Japanese surrender and the division was deactivated November 30th, 1945 in France. The 101st lost over 2,000 soldiers during the war in Europe and suffered over 9,000 casualties. Jim says he has no regrets over what had to be done. People say it was a sacrifice. It was, to me, it was no sacrifice. I think I've said it often. It was an honor and a privilege to have been a part of history. It'll never happen that way again. The country is never going to be that united and we're not going to fight those kinds of wars. So those of us who went and came back should be very appreciative of what we went through and what we did. And I still feel that way. Jim Martin is one of many of the citizen soldiers who volunteered to put the needs of the nation before themselves. Their sacrifices made it possible for all of us to enjoy the freedom for which they shed their blood and gave their lives.