The pathfinders went in first. They preceded the main body of troops by an hour or so. Their mission was to mark the drop zones with automatic direction-finder radios, Eureka sets, and Holophane lights formed into Ts on the ground. But a cloud bank forced pilots to either climb above it or get below it, so the pathfinders jumped from too high or too low an altitude. Further, antiaircraft fire coming from the ground caused pilots to take evasive action, throwing them off course. As a consequence, of the eighteen American pathfinder teams, only one landed where it was supposed to. One team landed in the Channel.
Sgt. Elmo Jones of the 505th PIR jumped at 300 feet or so. Just before exiting the C-47 he said a brief prayer: “Lord, Thy will be done. But if I’m to die please help me die like a man.” His chute popped open, he looked up to check the canopy, and just that quick his feet hit the ground. It was a “soft” landing. (One advantage of a night jump: the men could not see the ground so they did not tense up just before hitting it.) His chute settled over his head “and the first thing that I thought without even trying to get out of my parachute was, ‘Damn, I just cracked the Atlantic Wall.’ ”
Jones assembled his team, got the seven men with the lights in place for their T, told them not to turn on until they could hear the planes coming in, set up his radio, and began sending out his ADF signal. He was one of the few pathfinders in the right place.1
MAJ. JOHN HOWARD’S D Company of the Ox and Bucks was the first to go into action as a unit. Glider pilot Sgt. Jim Wallwork put his Horsa glider down exactly where Howard wanted it to land, beside the Orne Canal bridge. Lt. Brotheridge led 1st Platoon over the bridge. The Horsas carrying 2nd and 3rd platoons landed right behind Wallwork. Within minutes the men secured the area around the bridge, routing about fifty German defenders in the process. Two other platoons landed near the Orne River bridge and secured it. By 0021, June 6, five minutes after landing, D Company had taken its objectives. It was a brilliant feat of arms.2
AS THE PATHFINDERS were setting up and Howard’s men were carrying out their coup de main operation, the 13,400 American and nearly 7,000 British paratroopers were coming on. The Americans were following a precise route, marked at ten-mile intervals with Eureka sets and at thirty-mile intervals with aerial beacons over England. Thirty miles over the Channel a British patrol boat, Gallup, marked the path. It was thirty additional miles to checkpoint “Hoboken,” marked by a light from a British submarine. At that point the aircraft made a sharp turn to the southeast, crossed between the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey (occupied by the Germans, who were sending up some flak), and headed toward their drop zones in the Cotentin. All planes were maintaining radio silence, so none of the pilots was forewarned by the pathfinder groups about the cloud bank over the Cotentin.
In the Dakotas, the men prepared themselves for “the jump in which your troubles begin after you hit the ground.” This was the $10,000 jump (the GIs were required to buy a $10,000 life insurance policy). The flight over England and out over the Channel was a period—two hours and more—that came between the end of training, preparation, and briefing and the beginning of combat. Maj. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, commanding the 82nd Airborne, noted that “the men sat quietly, deep in their own thoughts.”3
Lt. Eugene Brierre of Division headquarters was an aide to Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, commanding the 101st Airborne. This would be Taylor’s qualifying jump (five jumps were required to qualify for paratrooper wings), but he wasn’t in the least excited. He had brought some pillows along and lay them on the floor of the plane. Brierre helped him get out of his chute; Taylor stretched out on the pillows and got in a solid hour’s sleep. When Brierre woke him, it took five minutes to get the chute back on.4