Every parachute hook was still locked. When the crash site near Beuzeville-au-Plain was excavated, that one detail proved none of the men had got out. This is where Easy Company lost its commander before the company fired a shot.
On the night of 5-6 June 1944 a C-47 carrying First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan III and the entire company headquarters group was hit by flak and came down here, north-east of Sainte-Mère-Église.
All twenty-two aboard died, and command of Easy Company passed to Lieutenant Richard Winters. A recovered watch had stopped at 01:12, the moment of the crash.
82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.
What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.
First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.
Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.
June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.
The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.
The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.
So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.
Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.
But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.
So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.
The secret held until the war ended.
Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.
And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.
She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.
D-Day is underway. Some would argue that what's happening right now is the most daring and ultimately successful operation in the history of military Alliances.
Note: the majority of troops are friends of the US from eight countries. Eisenhower has been told that three-quarters of the 23,400 airborne troops will be lost. He's hoping that the prediction will be wrong.
🧵 4/7
Their D-Day mission was as dangerous as any handed out that night.
The Filthy Thirteen jumped with the 3rd Battalion of the 506th. Their orders were to destroy two bridges over the Douve River and to secure a third, to help control the crossings and stop German reinforcements from reaching the invasion beaches.
The drop scattered them across the Normandy countryside in the dark. Roughly half the unit was killed, wounded, or captured on the jump or in the fighting that followed. McNiece later recalled the brutal cost of those first hours in his own blunt way, saying that he jumped in with around 20 men and came out with about two.
The survivors pressed on and accomplished their mission. So many of the 3rd Battalion's leaders had been killed that headquarters lost contact and assumed the whole effort had failed, eventually ordering American aircraft to bomb the bridges the squad had fought and died to hold.
The Filthy Thirteen also helped take the town of Carentan in the days that followed.
🧵 3/7
At the center of them was a sergeant from Oklahoma named Jake McNiece.
McNiece was the son of an Irish father and a Choctaw mother. He was the one who could not be broken or tamed by Army discipline. He was promoted and busted back down so many times that despite being one of the most capable soldiers in the division, he barely held a rank for long. His own men nicknamed him McNasty.
On the night before D-Day, McNiece had an idea drawn from his Choctaw heritage. To psych the squad up for their first combat jump, he had them shave their heads into mohawks and paint each other's faces like warriors going to battle.
An Army Signal Corps photographer captured the moment. In the most famous frame, a paratrooper named Clarence Ware is carefully painting the face of another named Charles Plaudo.
The photograph ran in Stars and Stripes and helped create one of the most enduring images of American airborne culture.
A few hours after it was taken, the men in it jumped into the dark over Normandy.
🧵 2/7
Officially they were the 1st Demolition Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.
Nobody called them that.
They earned the name the Filthy Thirteen while stationed in England before the invasion. The story goes that they refused to waste their weekly water ration on bathing or shaving. Instead they used it to cook the game they poached from the land around their base, including deer taken from a nearby estate. They went around filthy, unshaven, and unbothered by what anyone thought of them.
They drank hard. They fought. They went absent without leave. They ignored almost every rule the Army had except the ones that kept them alive in combat. Their officers were driven to despair trying to discipline them.
But there was a reason the Army put up with them. When it came to the actual job of blowing things up and fighting behind enemy lines, there was no better squad in the regiment.
They refused to bathe. They refused to salute. They poached deer from an English lord's estate and used their washing water ration to cook it.
The night before D-Day they shaved mohawks and painted their faces like warriors.
Then they jumped into Normandy on one of the deadliest missions of the invasion.
This is the story of the Filthy Thirteen..🧵1/7
CANADA🇨🇦 SWEEPS THE USA🇺🇸!!
It's a shocking three sets victory for Canada at home in front of a packed house in Quèbec City!
This is Canada's first win over the U.S. in the Volleyball Nations League. Wild. Highlights below:👇 #VNL2026#TeamCanada