Greenlawn man one of 13,000 paratroopers remembered on 80th anniversary of D-Day

Shortly before 0200 hours on June 6, 1944, the C-47 transport plane neared Normandy and the anti-aircraft fire started to stream up.

“What was I doing here?” Sgt. Major Joseph Kissane of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division asked himself.

Kissane, 25, would go on to a life that some might say was the suburban idyll — wife and six kids, house in Greenlawn — but at that moment his prospects appeared uncertain. He hooked his static line, ran half the length of the plane and jumped.

Kissane’s D-Day had begun.

The largest amphibious invasion in military history — conducted 80 years ago on June 6 — established beachheads from which the Allies pushed inland, opening a western front in Europe and driving German Nazi forces from France.

"In company with our brace Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world," Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, wrote in a statement distributed to the troops the day of the invasion.

In another message, written in the event of defeat but never distributed, he said: "I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available … If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."

Jumping behind enemy lines

Kissane was one of 13,000 paratroopers who took part in the assault. Their planes took off from English bases. The men jumped into the Cotentin Peninsula at night behind enemy lines, hours before the naval landings, to protect the main force’s flanks and facilitate Utah landing force’s movement from the coast.

An after action report for the 82nd, declassified and published in the Eisenhower Library’s electronic archives, rated the division’s combat efficiency as “excellent” and noted “every mission accomplished.”

But Kissane, who died in 2003 and wrote his memoirs in the early 1990s, from which his quotations are taken, recalled a more complicated experience not necessarily representative of all who jumped in: “much confusion but little enemy action.” 

Author Cornelius Ryan, in his classic 1959 account of the invasion, "The Longest Day," described the experience of the first men to jump into Normandy: "Hundreds of men found themselves in small fields, surrounded on all sides by hedgerows. The fields were silent little worlds, isolated and scary. In them every shadow, every rustle, every breaking twig was the enemy." 

Heavy fog, flak and enemy fighters disrupted the transport plane formation, and by the time they reached the drop zones, many were flying at “excessive speeds and at altitudes higher than those ideal for jumping,” according to the report. The 508th was to have landed west of the Merderet River but most of its men landed east of the drop zone and were “scattered widely.” 

Kissane, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions in the Allied forces’ capture of Thier du Mont, Belgium, wrote that D-Day’s airborne component followed a model that, from a grunt’s perspective, became all too familiar: “Meticulously planned to be followed by complete chaos.”

He landed in two feet of standing water and hurriedly hacked off his parachute suspension lines with a jump knife, expecting an “imminent visit by a hostile German.” None came, which was good because his rifle was soaked. Of the light machine guns and mortars his company carried, “almost everything” was lost in the water.

Kissane joined other paratroopers. Two men on point “shot up a beach house from which we had received fire” but the group encountered no significant resistance as the sun rose and they probed toward Chef Du Pont, a dairy farm community that was a 508th objective and was close to Sainte-Mère-Église. That town, which sat along one of the peninsula’s main roads, was the first French town the Allies liberated in the invasion.

According to the after-action report, groups of the 508th set up defensive positions at a key bridge in Chef Du Pont and at a nearby rail line. An officer with another group of 508th paratroopers, fighting near the Merderet River, shot and killed the commanding general of the German 91st Division.

Garrett Graff, author of an oral history of D-Day, “When the Sea Came Alive,” said in an interview that the paratroopers’ fighting had helped “block German reinforcements from being able to race in and obliterate the beach landings” and later cross the rivers that lay between the invading force and the strategically important port town Cherbourg.

If the dispersed drops led to Allied confusion in those initial hours, the effect on the Germans was similar or even greater he said. “It took them quite a while to understand the size and scale and scope of the Allied paratroop landing … The Germans had a hard time calculating where the center of gravity of the invasion was.”

The Allies compounded that confusion by airdropping dummy paratroopers equipped with firecrackers to mimic small-arms fire when they landed, Ryan wrote.

High cost of the invasion

D-Day was only the start. In the weeks that followed, the Allies used their beachhead to land more than 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies. The Allies were on the offense in Europe. Germany, which had dominated the continent in 1941 and 1942, now faced pressure from the Allies on the west and from Russians on the east, and would surrender in May 1945.

But the portions of Kissane’s memoirs covering the period after D-Day show no trace of triumphalism. Across the entire 82nd, D-Day losses were 156 known killed and 756 missing, presumed captured or killed, according to an Army history.

On July 10, Kissane was trucked back to Utah Beach, where he saw “many prisoners in barbed wire enclosures, very docile. Probably glad to be out of it eating good GI chow.” He returned to Nottingham July 14. “At a regimental memorial service the names of the KIA’s were tolled,” he wrote. “Some Companies were decimated. Wisely, this function was never repeated.”

On Sept. 14 he jumped into Nijmegen, Holland. By December, he was fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, which was, for the United States, the single deadliest battle of the war.

The memoirs remaining text describes, in matter-of-fact fashion, the deaths of several companions, the discovery of frozen S.S. corpses.

Kissane was honorably discharged in November 1945, with numerous decorations and citations. He died in 2003, at 83, having married and built a family with Emily Kissane, and worked as an accountant, first with the IRS, then with the U.S. Department of Labor investigating corruption in labor unions, then as a tax investigator for the Suffolk County district attorney.

He was a longtime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and other veterans groups, including some for paratroopers whose reunions included parachute jumps. He jumped into his 60s.

In interviews, two of his children, Patty and Gerry Kissane, said he’d been selective in the stories he told them.

“He wasn’t a braggart, and we never heard the bad parts of being in the Army — it was more the fun, the camaraderie,” said Patty Kissane, of Huntington Village, director of retail marketing for Leviton, the Melville-based electrical company. One part of combat he did talk about was the confusion, she recalled. He told her “there was so much happening around you that all you thought about was, ‘keep moving, keep moving,’” she said.