Sainte-Mère-Église

9th August 2026. Fujifilm X-T2, XF18-55mm.

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Forty minutes up the road from Pointe du Hoc, and a completely different kind of remembering.

At Pointe du Hoc the memory is in the ground — craters, concrete, a headland left more or less as the bombs finished with it. At Sainte-Mère-Église it’s in the town. It’s on the houses. It’s on the church. It’s in the street names. The place has woven 6 June 1944 into its daily fabric and left it there for eighty years, and it does it without a hint of embarrassment.

You come into the square and this is what greets you: a granite column with the inscription running round it in bands.

5-6 JUIN 1944 — LES 82e ET 101e DIVISIONS U.S.A. DE PARACHUTISTES LIBÉRÈRENT CE CANTON

5th-6th JUNE 1944 — THE 82ND AND 101ST DIV. U.S.A. OF PARATROOPS LIBERATE THE DISTRICT

If it looks familiar to anyone who read the Omaha post, it should. It’s a Signal Monument — one of ten identical granite monoliths put up along the invasion front by the Comité du Débarquement in the 1950s, designed by the architect Yves-Marie Froidevaux. The one I photographed at Omaha in 2019 is its twin. Same stone, same shape, same idea: one design repeated from Ouistreham to Saint-Martin-de-Varreville — six on the coast, four inland — so the whole invasion front reads as one event. Three of the ten are here in the Manche, and I ended up photographing two of them in the same afternoon without realising it.

The man on the steeple

There is a paratrooper hanging off the church tower, and he has been there, on and off, for most of my lifetime.

The story everyone knows is Private John Steele, F Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne, whose canopy caught on the tower in the early hours of 6 June while the square below was on fire and the church bell was being rung to call people out to fight the flames. He hung there. He was hit in the foot on the way down. The Germans eventually cut him loose and took him prisoner, and he got away.

Now — some honesty, because I’d rather have this right than have it neat.

Steele was a private on the night, not a sergeant; he made staff sergeant later and a lot of accounts quietly promote him backwards. How long he hung there is anyone’s guess — the US Army says about two hours, other accounts stretch it or shrink it. The deafening bell is a detail popularised by Cornelius Ryan’s book. And the mannequin hangs on the side of the tower facing the square, which is where The Longest Day put him in 1962 — but the testimony puts him on the diagonally opposite corner of the tower.

There’s also a man missing from the popular version. Private Kenneth Russell came down on the church roof at the same time and cut himself free with his trench knife. And Sergeant John Ray, who landed in the square, was shot in the stomach by a German soldier, and then drew his .45 and shot that same soldier as he turned his weapon on the two men hanging above him. Ray saved Steele and Russell and was mortally wounded doing it; the Airborne Museum records his death on 13 June. He’s named on a plaque forty yards away, and he’s in almost none of the retellings.

The mannequin, for what it’s worth, belongs to the town. The Airborne Museum lends the uniform and helmet and refreshes them. In the 1960s it only went up for June; now it’s there most of the year, though it still comes down over winter — it was taken in on 19 December and back up in mid-January.

The plaque on the house

This is the reason to come to this town rather than read about it.

On a pillar of a private house at 4 rue Eisenhower, just off the square, there’s a black plaque:

Clifford A. Maughan P.F.C. — F.Co., 505 PIR, 82nd Airborne. Born 1920 – Died 1990.

This plaque is to commemorate P.F.C. Clifford Maughan who parachuted into the garden of this house at approximately 01.45 hours on the morning of 6th June 1944. He was taken prisoner by a German soldier billeted in this house, who then in turn surrendered to him.

Read that twice. A twenty-four-year-old American lands in a stranger’s back garden in the dark. The German billeted in the house takes him prisoner. And then, at some point in the next few hours, as the town changes hands, the German hands his own weapon over and surrenders to the man he’d just captured. Maughan went on through Normandy and Holland and survived the war.

Underneath, under the words Truly their Longest Day, there are ten names — the 2nd Platoon mortar squad of F Company. I photographed it mostly because it was legible, and only worked out afterwards what I’d got.

Lt. H. Cadish · Sgt. J. Ray · PFC C. Blankenship · PFC A. Van Holsbeck · PFC P. Shearer · Pt. H. Bryant · Pt. L. Tlapa · Pt. R. Blanchard · Pt. J. Steele · Pt. K. Russell

There he is, second from the bottom on the right. And Ray, second on the left. And Russell at the end. The man on the steeple, the man who saved him, and the man on the roof are all on a plaque on a house wall, in a list of ten, in no particular order of fame.

Seven of those ten men were killed. Cadish, Bryant and Tlapa were shot while still hanging in their harnesses from poles and trees. Blankenship and Van Holsbeck were both drawn down into the burning house — Russell, hanging on the roof above, heard Blankenship scream twice and then stop. Shearer was killed. Ray died of the wound he took saving the other two. Blanchard cut himself out of a tree, sliced the top off his own thumb doing it, and lived. Steele lived. Russell lived.

That’s what the plaque is. Ten names, three survivors, and one of them the most famous paratrooper in France.

What I missed

The church has two windows by Gabriel Loire of Chartres. One from 1949 shows the Virgin and Child surrounded by descending paratroopers and parachute canopies, made with the help of a local man, Paul Renaud, whose sketch supplied the idea. The other, given by veterans of the 505th and installed in the early seventies, shows Saint Michael — patron saint of paratroopers — with the inscription Ils sont revenus. They have come back.

I didn’t go inside. Eighty-odd frames of the outside of a church and not one of the windows that were specifically put there to say the thing I’ve spent this whole post trying to say. That one stings a bit. The door was locked!

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The tools of the trade that day were the Fujifilm X-T2 and the XF18-55mm, shot in monochrome and finished in Lightroom.

The canopy caught on the church roof is in the shop as a print and as a high-resolution download (download), with the rest of that afternoon. The whole series, Normandy, 1944 — the prints → the downloads →

Any photo on this site is available as a print. → Ask me.

Previously in this series: Pointe du Hoc. Next: Utah Beach, where two different armies came ashore two months apart in the same sand. The 2019 Normandy posts start at Pegasus Bridge.

If you'd rather have one of these on a wall than a screen — prints from €99.99, Ilford or Baryta paper, made by WhiteWall in Berlin. The shop →