Art-Sainte-Mère-Église Window TB02

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

Sainte-Mère-Église is a small community in Normandy,France. The town was founded in 1080-82. It was significantly involved in the Hundred Years' War as well as the Wars of Religion. More recently, the town's claim to fame is that it played a significant part in the World War II Normandy landings because the village stood right in the middle of route N13, which the Germans would have most likely used on any significant counterattack on the troops landing on Utah and Omaha Beaches.

In the early morning of 6 June 1944 mixed units of the U.S. 82nd Airborne and U.S. 101st Airborne Divisions occupied the town giving it the claim to be one of the first towns liberated in the invasion. The early landings on the town resulted in heavy casualties for the paratroopers. Some buildings in town were on fire that night, and they illuminated the sky, making easy targets of the descending men. Many hanging from trees and utility poles were shot before they could cut loose.

A famous incident involved paratrooper John Steele, whose parachute caught on the spire of the town church, and could only observe the fighting going on below. He hung there limply for two hours, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped from the Germans and rejoined his division. In commemoration, the town still maintains a dummy paratrooper hanging from a church spire. Moreover, a large stained-glass window was replaced with images of paratroopers descending. This TB is made from my photo of that window in October 2012.