Private Reisenleiter of the 508th was in a field across from one where a glider came down. In the dark, with the hedgerows looming above him, he could hardly tell what was going on. He heard some crashing about on the other side and called out, “Flash.”
“Flash your ass,” the answer came back. “They’re killing us out here and we’re getting the hell out of here.” Reisenleiter let them go; he figured only an American could have given such a response to the challenge.57 VI
Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR watched the glider landing. “We could hear the sounds of planes in the distance, then no sounds at all. This was followed by a series of swishing noises. Adding to the swelling crescendo of sounds was the tearing of branches and trees followed by loud crashes and intermittent screams. The gliders were coming in rapidly, one after the other, from all different directions. Many overshot the field and landed in the surrounding woods, while others crashed into nearby farmhouses and stone walls.
“In a moment, the field was complete chaos. Equipment broke away and catapulted as it hit the ground, plowing up huge mounds of earth. Bodies and bundles were thrown all along the length of the field. Some of the glider troopers were impaled by the splintering wood of the fragile plywood gliders. We immediately tried to aid the injured, but knew we would first have to decide who could be helped and who could not. A makeshift aid station was set up and we began the grim process of separating the living from the dead. I saw one man with his legs and buttocks sticking out of the canvas fuselage of a glider. I tried to pull him out. He would not budge. When I looked inside the wreckage, I could see his upper torso had been crushed by a jeep.”58
Some of the gliders carried bulldozers, to be used to make landing strips for later glider landings. Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th PIR recalled that “the sound of one glider hitting a tree was similar to smashing a thousand matchboxes all at once, and I could just visualize the poor pilot with that baby bulldozer smashing into him.”59
The glider casualties for the 82nd were heavy. Of the 957 men who went into Normandy that night, twenty-five were killed, 118 wounded, fourteen missing (a 16 percent casualty rate). Nineteen of 111 jeeps were unserviceable, as were four of seventeen antitank guns.
Anytime a unit takes 16 percent casualties before it even gets into action, somebody had to have made a big mistake. But Leigh-Mallory had feared that the gliderborne troops might take 70 percent casualties, primarily because of Rommel’s asparagus. In the event, those poles in the ground were inconsequential; it was the hedgerows that caused the problems. And the jeeps and antitank guns that did survive proved to be invaluable.
BY 0400, THE American paratroopers and gliderborne troops were scattered to hell and gone across the Cotentin. With few exceptions, they were lost. Except for Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 505th, they were alone or gathered into groups of three, five, ten, at the most thirty men. They had lost the bulk of their equipment bundles; the little blue lights attached to the bundles had mostly failed to work. Most men had lost their leg bags, containing extra ammunition, field radios, tripods for the machine guns, and the like. The few radios that they had recovered had either got soaked in the flooded areas or damaged on hitting the ground and did not work. They had taken heavy casualties, from the opening shock, from hitting the ground too hard as a result of jumping too low, from German fire, from glider crashes.
Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st landed in a marsh. His company was supposed to assemble on a bugle call, but the bugler drowned. He found Pvt. John Fordik and a Private Smith. Smith could not walk—he had broken his back. Others in the stick had drowned. Cartledge gathered together ten men from his platoon. They carried Smith to high ground and covered him with brush. He insisted on retaining the two homing pigeons he had with him. One had a message on its leg saying the battalion was being wiped out; the other said it was accomplishing its mission. Smith had been told to release one or the other at daylight.
As the platoon prepared to move out, Smith’s last words to Cartledge were, “I’ll send the right message. Don’t make me out a liar.”
As the platoon left, a German machine gun opened up. The men dove back into the marsh. Cartledge had no radio. He was lost, chest deep in water, taking fire without being able to return it. Private Fordik, “a tough Pennsylvania coal miner,” leaned over to whisper in his ear, “You know, Lieutenant Cartledge, I think the Germans are winning this war.”60
TEN WEEKS LATER, when the airborne troops were back in England, preparing for another jump, possibly at night, the regimental and battalion commanders of the 82nd gathered at Glebe Mount House, Leicester, for a debriefing conference. They did an analysis of what went wrong, what went right.
They started with the pilots. In the future the paratroop commanders wanted the pilots trained for combat and bad-weather missions. They wanted them forced to slow down—one suggestion was that every pilot of Troop Carrier Command be made to jump from a plane going 150 miles per hour. They wanted the pilots told that evasive action in a sky full of tracers did no good and caused much harm.
They did not say so, but it seems clear that radio silence also did more harm than good. The German antiaircraft crews were fully alerted by the pathfinder planes anyway. Had the pathfinder pilots sent back word of the cloud bank, the pilots in the main train would have been alerted. Had they been able to talk to each other on the radio, the dispersion of aircraft would not have been so great.
Only the battalion commanders of the 505th had anything good to say about the lighted-T system—Lt. Col. Edward Krause, CO of the 3rd Battalion, said that when he saw his T, “I felt that I had found the Holy Grail.” None of the others had seen their Ts (which in most cases had not been set up because the pathfinders were not sure they were in the right place). No one expressed faith in the Eureka system.
There was general agreement that equipment bundles had to be tied together and a better lighting system devised. The commanders wanted every man to carry a mine (and put it to immediate use by placing it on a road; the men should be instructed to stay off the roads otherwise). Some way had to be devised to bring in a bazooka with each squad. The Gammon grenade “was very satisfactory.” Each man should be issued a .45 “so as to be available immediately upon landing.”
As to assembly, the commanders thought that flares would be the most effective method—but not too many. One per battalion, carried by the CO, would be sufficient. Whistles, bugles, and the like had been unsatisfactory, partly because of the noise from antiaircraft fire, partly because in hedgerow country the sound did not carry. The rolling-up-the-stick method was a failure because of the hedgerows and the scattered nature of the drops. Better radios and more of them would be a great help. The men had to be taught how to get out of their chutes faster (the simple solution to that was to get rid of those buckles and adopt the British quick-release mechanism, which was done).61
SO THE PARATROOP commanders found much to criticize in the operation. Still, contrary to the fear Private Fordik had expressed to Lieutenant Cartledge, the Germans were not winning the war. Scattered though they were, the paratroopers and gliderborne troops were about to go into action while the Germans, for the most part, were still holed up, badly confused.
I. Bortzfield’s plane had to make an emergency landing in England, with the left engine gone and no hydraulic pressure left. An ambulance picked him up on the runway and rushed him to a hospital. He recalled, “I was a real celebrity because at this moment I was their only patient. All their patients had been evacuated and they were waiting for D-Day casualties. I was in the ward by 0600 when the boys were hitting the beaches. The doctors really interrogated me” (Charles Bortzfield oral history, EC).
II. Davis was killed a few days later outside Carentan. William True had been in a Quonset hut with Davis in England. There were sixteen men in the hut; only three returned unscathed to England in mid-July (William True oral history, EC).
III. M. Andre Mace, a resident of Ste.-Mère-Église, wrote that night in his diary: “ALERTE! A great number of low flying planes fly over the town—shaving the roof tops, it is like a thunderous noise, suddenly, the alarm is given, there is a fire in town. In the meantime the Germans fire all they can at the planes. We go into hiding, what is going on? Thousands [sic] of paratroopers are landing everywhere amid gun fire. We are huddled in M. Besselievre’s garage with our friends. Our liberators are here!”(Original in the Parachute Museum, Ste.-Mère-Église; copy in EC.)
IV. De Weese was killed in action in Holland on September 23, 1944. A copy of his letter is in EC.
V. Bouchereau was liberated later that month and got his revenge in Holland (Paul Bouchereau oral history, EC).
VI. The first thing glider troops were taught to do after a landing was to run for cover in the woods or whatever surrounded the landing zone—they were never to stay in the open. That may explain the response to Reisenleiter.