The Longest Day/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • "I wonder what 'bitte, bitte!' means?" It means "please, please!"
  • "Two clicks... I heard two clicks!"[1]
  • What happens at St. Mere Eglise. A company of paratroops was supposed to land outside the town, which was occupied by a German garrison, and then assault it overland. However, due to bad winds the paratroopers were scattered all over... and over a dozen of them land directly on top of the town. After its entire garrison has already been mobilized to respond to the earlier bombing. The unlucky paratroopers are floating helplessly directly into the middle of multiple German machine-gun nests, and with one exception -- the man whose parachute was caught on the church steeple and spent the entire night hanging there pretending to be dead -- none of them survive more than a few seconds, or have the slightest chance to defend themselves.
  1. The paratroopers had been given a clicker device to signal to each other in the dark that they were not a German soldier. One click, answered by two clicks. In the scene in question, the dying paratrooper is finding out too late that the two clicks he heard were not a fellow paratrooper using his clicker, but a German sentry reloading his bolt-action rifle.