Below is pictured the “scarf” Lawrence P. Belmont of HQ Battery cut from a parachute found in a field near Sainte-Mere-Eglise, France, near the end of June 1944.
He cut a bunch of these for some of the other guys in his unit, since the silk prevented chafing around the neck from the stiff collars of their uniforms, which they literally wore for weeks at a time. The stiffness was caused by the woolen material being treated prior to their departure for Normandy with a chemical called CC-2 chloramide to prevent poison gas from leaking through the material and reaching the skin. The fear that the German defenders might use gas was tangible before the invasion, and for several weeks afterward.
He’d thought he’d lost this in his travels, but I (the Webmaster, and his son) found it several weeks ago in the bottom of a “barracks bag” that was stuck up into the basement ceiling in the workshop (remember when houses had one?), hidden from view by some scrap wood that he’d shoved up there. The bag was probably put up there in the Summer of 1969, some 25 years after it was cut from a camouflage T-5 chute canopy in a Norman cow pasture, undiscovered for almost 53 years.
Considering the number of mis-drops in the early morning hours of D-Day, the chute could’ve belonged to either an 82nd or 101st Airborne paratrooper. All Lawrence remembered about the location was that it was on the road they were on north of Carentan, roughly behind Utah Beach, and that the field was one they stopped at for the night somewhere south of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, on their way up the Cotentin Peninsula to Cherbourg. When push came to shove, he always felt the field was just after or before the small village of Blosville, where a temporary cemetery had been established for American KIAs.
Photograph via U.S. National Archives.