Each battalion of the 505 PIR had its specific mission. The men immediately formed up in battalion strength. The only things missing that night were some para-container bundles that may have overshot their landing area. The rule was to pick up any bundle you found, take everything inside, and later find the rightful owner of the light machine gun, 60mm or 81mm mortar, bazooka or ammunition you’d acquired and make a swap. So it was that a machine gunner who found a bazooka man would later swap weapons and vice versa.

By dawn almost every 505 trooper had the right equipment plus the recoverable weapons and Jeeps brought in at 0405 hours by the 80th AA and 82d Division Artillery gliders. Several God-sent gifts like the small 57mm artillery cannon were hauled out and put to excellent use against the tanks from the 1057th and 1058th Grenadier Infantry Regiments and tank battalions of the enemy 91st Division. The 57mm cannon is like an oversized rifle. It is very accurate and can be fired from a short or medium distance: but the trouble with firing a 57mm is that once you have the enemy in sight, the enemy too has a line of sight on you. Generally, the guns did not long stay hidden behind the hedgerows, but were instead situated out front, where the crew (or any soldier) could get a direct shot at a tank or opposing cannon.

Corporal Francis C. Buck of Headquarters Company, 1/505 PIR, was in the same plane with our battalion commander, Maj. Frederick Caesar Augustus Kellam. After landing on the DZ, Major Kellam had Buck set up the 1/505 assembly light. On leaving the DZ, they moved along the road and at the hamlet of La Fière (not the bridge and Manoir area) they saw a light on in a house. Major Kellam sent a French-speaking trooper to get specific directions from a rather frightened but elated farmer, who pointed in the direction of La Fière bridge and said that there might be Germans on the railroad and by the road crossing. Kellam had not yet located his executive officer, Major McGinity, who was with A Company, so his group moved out, heading for the 1st Battalion objective, La Fière bridge. They were right on time and only a few hedgerows away from Red Dog Dolan and A Company.

Dolan, a veteran of the early 505 misdrop in Sicily, had ordered a training program on nighttime parachute assembly. Assembly was the key. He was law school trained and an aggressive combat leader of few words. But when he did converse, it was worthwhile to pay attention and follow his orders. He was one of the best, an out-front combat leader, not a follower, who commanded A Company through Normandy and part of the way through Holland until severe wounds at Mook caused a long hospitalization and his eventual retirement.⁽¹⁾