Murphy, so the story long went, landed in the backyard of the schoolmistress in the Normandy village of Ste. Mere Eglise on the night before D-Day.
Murphy, whose American backyard was in Massachusetts, was attached to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. He was what allied military planners euphemistically dubbed a “pathfinder.”
In reality, he was an 18-year-old kid who was little more than a dangling target for jumpy German soldiers of roughly the same age.
Murphy went down in numerous accounts as the first identifiable U.S. soldier to hit French soil that night.
He himself has taken issue with that. It seems that he lost his ammunition box on the way down and one was found in the pea patch. Murphy reckoned it was someone else’s ammo box.
Either way, what is fact is that at an age when he should have been getting nervous about girls and little else, Bob Murphy threw himself into a death-dealing unknown and fought his way through the following days with courage and more than a little Irish luck.
He would later write down his experiences in a book that read like a template for “Band of Brothers,” replete as it was with tales of holding off German panzers with bazookas, and fighting alongside comrades such as Lt. John “Red Dog” Dolan and under commanders of the caliber of Gen. James Gavin, known as the “Jumping General” because he threw himself out of planes and into combat alongside his men.
Murphy and fellow paratroopers in “A” Company, 505, were not dropped into France just to reach the ground and create random havoc in the German lines. They had a specific mission. In this case it was to seize and defend a bridge crossing the Merderet River on the road that ran east to west from Ste. Mere Eglise.
The goal of the mission was to prevent the movement of German troops down to the Utah Beach landing zone.
The resulting firefight would be used as a model for the bridge battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan.” It would be just one of many missions carried out in those crucial hours, some successfully, some not.
War is wrong, war is immoral. But there are times in history when it can’t be avoided. Such was the case with World War II. What also couldn’t be avoided was the bloody frontal assault on Hitler’s fortress Europe, carried out with zeal and aplomb after an uncertain beginning 60 years ago this weekend.
The invasion was on, and then on hold due to bad weather. Then it was on again after Eisenhower uttered the immortal words, “OK, let’s go.”
Many veterans of the invasion will tell you that the waiting was as nerve wracking as actual combat. The Longest Day was, for sure, preceded by the longest of night.
The American forces that landed during the night and hit the beaches at dawn on June 6, 1944 could draw a bead to just about every ethnic group in the Europe they were setting out to liberate.
This was no less the case with Irish Americans, who made up a significant proportion of the U.S. invading force.
Sixty years on we remember them, the Murphys, Dolans, Gavins and all the rest. They fought and died in part so that newspapers like this one could write words such as these.
And that, we are certain, is no small thing.