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 were 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
Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 508th PIR recalled, “Here we sat, each man alone in the dark. These men around me were the best friends I will ever know. I wondered how many would die before the sun came up. ‘Lord, I pray, please let me do everything right. Don’t let me get anybody killed and don’t let me get killed either. I really think I’m too young for this.’ ”5
Pvt. Ken Russell of the 505th had just made it onto his C-47. Two weeks earlier he had been running a high fever, a result of his vaccinations, and was sent to a hospital. On June 4 he still had a high fever, but “like everyone else, I had been looking forward to D-Day since 1940—when I was still in grammar school. Now I was so afraid I would miss it.” He begged his way out of the hospital and managed to rejoin his company on June 5. Flying over the Channel, he was struck by the thought that his high-school class back in Tennessee was graduating that night.6
Like many of the Catholic troopers, “Dutch” Schultz was “totally engrossed in my rosaries.” Clayton Storeby was sitting next to George Dickson, who “was going around that rosary, giving a lot of Hail Marys. After about ten minutes, it seemed like it was helping him, so I said, ‘George, when you’re through with that, would you loan it to a buddy?’ ”7
“It was a time of prayer,” Pvt. Harry Reisenleiter of the 508th PIR recalled, “and I guess we all made some rash promises to God.” He said that so far as he could tell everyone was afraid—“fear of being injured yourself, fear of having to inflict injury on other people to survive, and the most powerful feeling of all, fear of being afraid.”8
• •
The pilots were afraid. For most of the pilots of Troop Carrier Command this was their first combat mission. They had not been trained for night flying, or for flak or bad weather. Their C-47s were designed to carry cargo or passengers. They were neither armed nor armored. Their gas tanks were neither protected nor self-sealing.
The possibility of a midair collision was on every pilot’s mind. The pilots were part of a gigantic air armada: it took 432 C-47s to carry the 101st Airborne to Normandy, about the same number for the 82nd. They were flying in a V-of-Vs formation, stretched out across the sky, 300 miles long, nine planes wide, without radio communication. Only the lead pilot in each serial of forty-five had a Eureka set, with a show of lights from the Plexiglas astrodome for guidance for the following planes. The planes were 100 feet from wingtip to wingtip in their groups of nine, 1,000 feet from one group to another, with no lights except little blue dots on the tail of the plane ahead. That was a tight formation for night flying in planes that were sixty-five feet long and ninety-five feet from wingtip to wingtip.
They crossed the Channel at 500 feet or less to escape German radar detection, then climbed to 1,500 feet to escape antiaircraft batteries on the Channel Islands (which did fire on them, without effect, except to wake sleeping troopers—the airsickness pills the medics had handed out at the airfields had caused many men, including Ken Russell, to doze off). As they approached the Cotentin coast, they descended to 600 feet or so, the designated jump altitude (designed to reduce the time the trooper was helplessly descending).
When they crossed the coastline they hit the cloud bank and lost their visibility altogether. The pilots instinctively separated, some descending, some rising, all peeling off to the right or left to avoid a midair collision. When they emerged from the clouds, within seconds or at the most minutes, they were hopelessly separated. Lt. Harold Young of the 326th Parachute Engineers recalled that as his plane came out of the clouds, “We were all alone. I remember my amazement. Where had all those C-47s gone?”9
Simultaneously, to use the words of many of the pilots, “all hell broke loose.” Searchlights, tracers, and explosions filled the sky. Pilot Sidney Ulan of the 99th Troop Carrier Squadron was chewing gum, “and the saliva in my mouth completely dried up from the fright. It seemed almost impossible to fly through that wall of fire without getting shot down, but I had no choice. There was no turning back.”10
They could speed up, which most of them did. They were supposed to throttle back to ninety miles per hour or less, to reduce the opening shock for the paratroopers, but ninety miles per hour at 600 feet made them easy targets for the Germans on the ground, so they pushed the throttle forward and sped up to 150 miles per hour, meanwhile either descending to 300 feet or climbing to 2,000 feet and more. They twisted and turned, spilling their passengers and cargo. They got hit by machine-gun fire, 20mm shells, and the heavier 88mm shells. They saw planes going down to their right and left, above and below them. They saw planes explode. They had no idea where they were, except that they were over the Cotentin.
The pilots had turned on the red lights over the doors when they crossed the Channel Islands. That was the signal to the jump-masters to order their men to “Stand up and hook up.” The pilots turned on the green light when they guessed that they were somewhere near the drop zone. That was the signal to go.
Many troopers saw planes below them as they jumped. At least one plane was hit by an equipment bundle; it tore off almost three feet of wing tip. Virtually every plane got hit by something. One pilot broke radio silence to call out in desperation, “I’ve got a paratrooper hung up on my wing.” Another pilot came on the air with advice: “Slow down and he’ll slide off.”11
“In this frightful madness of gunfire and sky mixed with parachuting men and screaming planes,” pilot Chuck Ratliff remembered, “we found we had missed the drop zone and were now back out over the water. We were dumbfounded. What to do?”
Ratliff “turned that sucker around and circled back.” He dropped to 600 feet. The jumpmaster pressed his way into the cockpit to help locate the drop zone. He saw what he thought was it. “We pulled back throttles to a semistall,” Ratliff said, “hit the green light and the troopers jumped out into the black night. We dove that plane to 100 feet off the ground and took off for England, full bore, like a scalded dog.”12
Sgt. Charles Bortzfield of the 100th Troop Carrier Squadron was standing near the jump door, wearing a headset for the intercom radio, passing on information to the jumpmaster. As the green light went on he was hit by shrapnel. As he fell from four wounds in his arm and hand he broke his leg. One trooper asked him, just before jumping, “Are you hit?”
“I think so,” Bortzfield replied.
“Me too,” the trooper called over his shoulder as he leaped into the night.I
• •
In the body of the planes the troopers were terrified, not at what was ahead of them but because of the hopeless feeling of getting shot at and tumbled around and being unable to do anything about it. As the planes twisted and turned, climbed or dove, many sticks (one planeload of paratroopers) were thrown to the floor in a hopeless mess of arms, legs, and equipment. Meanwhile, bullets were ripping through the wings and fuselage. To Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR, “they made a sound like corn popping as they passed through.” Lt. Carl Cartledge likened the sound to “rocks in a tin can.”13
Out the open doors, the men could see tracers sweeping by in graceful, slow-motion arcs. They were orange, red, blue, yellow. They were frightening, mesmerizing, beautiful. Most troopers who tried to describe the tracers used some variation of “the greatest Fourth of July fireworks display I ever saw.” They add that when they remembered that only one in six of the bullets coming up at them were tracers, they couldn’t see how they could possibly survive the jump.
For Pvt. William True of the 506th, it was “unbelievable” that there were people down there “shooting at me! Trying to kill Bill True!” Lt. Parker Alford, an artillery officer assigned to the 501st, was watching the tracers. “I looked around the airplane and saw some kid across the aisle who grinned. I tried to grin back but my face was frozen.”14 Private Porcella’s heart was pounding. “I was so scared that my knees were shaking and just to relieve the tension, I had to say something, so I shouted, ’What time is it.’ ” Someone called back, “0130.”15
The pilots turned on the red light and the jumpmaster shouted the order “Stand up and hook up.” The men hooked the lines attached to the backpack covers of their main chutes to the anchor line running down the middle of the top of the fuselage.
“Sound off for equipment check.” From the rear of the plane would come the call, “sixteen OK!” then “fifteen OK!” and so on. The men in the rear began pressing forward. They knew the Germans were waiting for them, but never in their lives had they been so eager to jump out of an airplane.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” they shouted, but the jumpmasters held them back, waiting for the green light.
“My plane was bouncing like something gone wild,” Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 508th remembered. “I could hear the machine-gun rounds walking across the wings. It was hard to stand up and troopers were falling down and getting up; some were throwing up. Of all the training we had, there was not anything that had prepared us for this.”16
In training, the troopers could anticipate the green light; before the pilot turned it on he would throttle back and raise the tail of the plane. Not this night. Most pilots throttled forward and began to dive. “Dutch” Schultz and every man in his stick fell to the floor. They regained their feet and resumed shouting “Let’s go!”
Sgt. Dan Furlong’s plane got hit by three 88mm shells. The first struck the left wing, taking about three feet off the tip. The second hit alongside the door and knocked out the light panel. The third came up through the floor. It blew a hole about two feet across, hit the ceiling, and exploded, creating a hole four feet around, killing three men and wounding four others. Furlong recalled, “Basically the Krauts just about cut that plane in half.
“I was in the back, assistant jumpmaster. I was screaming ‘Let’s go!’ ” The troopers, including three of the four wounded men, dove head first out of the plane. The pilot was able to get control of the plane and head back for the nearest base in England for an emergency landing (those Dakotas could take a terrific punishment and still keep flying). The fourth wounded man had been knocked unconscious; when he came to over the Channel he was delirious. He tried to jump out. The crew chief had to sit on him until they landed.17
On planes still flying more or less on the level, when the green light went on the troopers set a record for exiting. Still, many of them remembered all their lives their thoughts as they got to the door and leaped out. Eager as they were to go, the sky full of tracers gave them pause. Four men in the 505th, two in the 508th, and one each in the 506th and 507th “refused.” They preferred, in John Keegan’s words, “to face the savage disciplinary consequences and total social ignominy of remaining with the aeroplane to stepping into the darkness of the Normandy night.”18
Every other able-bodied man jumped. Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd had taken a cold shower every morning for two years to prepare himself for this moment. Pvt. Arthur DeFilippo of the 505th could see the tracers coming straight at him “and all I did was pray to God that he would get me down safely and then I would take care of myself.”19 Pvt. John Taylor of the 508th was appalled when he got to the door; his plane was so low that his thought was “We don’t need a parachute for this; all we need is a step ladder.”20 Private Oyler, the Kansas boy who had forgotten his name when General Eisenhower spoke to him, remembered his hometown as he got to the door. His thought was “I wish the gang at Wellington High could see me now—at Wellington High.”21
When Pvt. Len Griffing of the 501st got to the door, “I looked out into what looked like a solid wall of tracer bullets. I remember this as clearly as if it happened this morning. It’s engraved in the cells of my brain. I said to myself, ‘Len, you’re in as much trouble now as you’re ever going to be. If you get out of this, nobody can ever do anything to you that you ever have to worry about.’ ”
At that instant an 88mm shell hit the left wing and the plane went into a sharp roll. Griffing was thrown to the floor, then managed to pull himself up and leap into the night.22
• •
Most of the sticks jumped much too low from planes going much too fast. The opening shock was intense. In hundreds if not thousands of cases the troopers swung once, then hit the ground. Others jumped from too high up; for them it seemed an eternity before they hit the ground.
Because of the way his plane rolled, Private Griffing’s stick was badly separated. The man who went before him was a half mile back; the man who jumped after Griffing was a half mile forward. “My chute popped open and I was the only parachute in the sky. It took me one hundred years to get down.” Below him, a German flak wagon with four 20mm guns was pumping out shells “and I was the only thing they had to shoot at. Tracers went under me and I couldn’t help but pull my legs up.” The flak wagon kept shooting at him even after he hit the ground. “I would have been hit through sheer Teutonic perseverance if the next flight of planes hadn’t arrived and they gave up shooting at me to shoot at them.”23
Pvt. Fitzgerald “looked up to check my canopy and watched in detached amazement as bullets ripped through my chute. I was mesmerized by the scene around me. Every color of the rainbow was flashing through the sky. Equipment bundles attached to chutes that did not fully open came hurtling past me, helmets that had been ripped off by the opening shock, troopers floated past. Below me, figures were running in all directions. I thought, Christ, I’m going to land right in the middle of a bunch of Germans! My chute floated into the branches of an apple tree and dumped me to the ground with a thud. The trees were in full bloom and added a strange sweet scent to this improbable scene.” To Fitzgerald’s relief, the “Germans” turned out to be cows running for cover. “I felt a strange surge of elation: I was alive!”24
The 506th was supposed to land ten kilometers or so southwest of Ste.-Mère-Église, but a couple of sticks from the regiment came down in the town. It was 0115. A small hay barn on the south side of the church square was on fire, evidently caused by a tracer. Mayor Alexandre Renaud had called out the residents to form a bucket brigade to get water from the town pump to the fire. The German garrison sent out a squad to oversee the infraction of the curfew.
Sgt. Ray Aebischer was the first to hit. He landed in the church square, behind the fire-brigade line and unnoticed by the German guards (the great brass bell in the church tower was ringing to rouse the citizens, drowning out the noise of his landing). He cut himself loose, then began moving slowly toward the church door, hoping to find sanctuary. The door was locked. He crawled around the church to the rear, then along a high cement wall. The Germans began firing, not at him but at his buddies coming down. He saw one man whose chute had caught in a tree get riddled by a machine pistol. Altogether, four men were killed by German fire.25
Pvt. Don Davis landed in the church square; he played dead, got rolled over by a suspicious German, and got away with it.II Aebischer meanwhile took advantage of the confusion to make his escape. Within a few minutes, it was quiet again over Ste.-Mère-Église; on the ground the fire-fighting effort resumed. But the German guards were now alert for any further paratroop drops.
Sgt. Carwood Lipton and Lt. Dick Winters of Company E, 506th, landed on the outskirts of the town. Lipton figured out where they were by reading the signpost in the moonlight, one letter at a time. Winters gathered together a group of squad size or less and began hiking for his company’s objective, Ste.-Marie-du-Mont.
Winters did not know it, but his CO was dead. Lt. Thomas Meehan and Headquarters Company had been flying in the lead plane in stick 66. It was hit with bullets going through it and out the top, throwing sparks. The plane maintained course and speed for a moment or two, then did a slow wingover to the right. Pilot Frank DeFlita, just behind, remembered that “the plane’s landing lights came on, and it appeared they were going to make it, when the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded.” There were no survivors.26
Sgt. McCallum, one of the pathfinders for the 506th, was on the ground, about ten kilometers from Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. The Germans had anticipated that the field he was in might be used as a drop zone, so they had machine guns and mortars around three sides of it. On the fourth side, they had soaked a barn with kerosene. When the planes carrying Capt. Charles Shettle and his company came overhead and the men started jumping out, the Germans set a torch to the barn. It lit up the whole area. As the troopers came down, the Germans commenced firing. Sgt. McCallum said, “I’ll never forget the sadness in my heart as I saw my fellow troopers descend into this death trap.”
Captain Shettle got down safely, despite mortar shells exploding and tracer bullets crisscrossing the field. Shettle was battalion S-3; the company he had jumped with was supposed to assemble at the barn, but that was obviously impossible; Shettle moved quickly to the alternate assembly point and began blowing his whistle. In a half hour he had fifty men around him—but only fifteen were from the 506th. The others were members of the 501st.
That kind of confusion and mixing of units was going on all over the Cotentin. A single company, E of the 506th, had men scattered from Carentan to Ravenoville, a distance of twenty kilometers. Men of the 82nd were in the 101st drop zone and vice versa. Standard drill for the paratroopers, practiced countless times, was to assemble by “rolling up the stick.” The first men out would follow the line of flight of the airplane; the men in the middle would stay put; the last men out would move in the opposite direction from the airplane’s route. In practice maneuvers it worked well. In combat that night it worked only for a fortunate few.
Capt. Sam Gibbons of the 501st (later long-term congressman from Florida) was alone for his first hour in France. Finally he saw a figure, clicked his cricket, got a two-click answer, and “suddenly I felt a thousand years younger. Both of us moved forward so we could touch each other. I whispered my name and he whispered his. To my surprise, he was not from my plane. In fact, he was not even from my division.”27
Lt. Guy Remington fell into the flooded area near the Douve River. He was pulling up the bank when he heard a noise. He froze, pulled his tommy gun, then clicked his cricket. No response. He prepared to fire when he heard a voice saying “friend.” He parted some bushes and there was an embarrassed Colonel Johnson, his CO, who explained, “I lost my damn cricket.”28
Some men were alone all night. “Dutch” Schultz was one of them. When Schultz used his cricket in desperation, hoping to find someone, “I got a machine-gun burst. I brought my M-l up and pointed it toward the Germans only to discover that I had failed to load my rifle.” He crept off, thinking, I’m totally unprepared for this.29
Private Griffing recalled, “There were so many clicks and counterclicks that night that nobody could tell who was clicking at whom.”30 Private Storeby landed in a ditch. After cutting himself loose, he crawled to the top and heard a click. Not from a cricket; it was the distinctive sound of someone taking the safety off an M-l. Storeby pulled out his cricket “and I just clicked the living hell out of that cricket, and finally this guy told me to come on out with my hands up. I recognized his voice; it was Harold Conway from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I said, ‘I don’t have any idea where we are or what we’re doing here or nothing.’ ” They set out to find friends.31
In contrast to almost every other battalion, the 2nd of the 505th had an excellent drop. Its pathfinders had landed in the right spot and set up their Eurekas and lights. The lead pilot, in a Dakota carrying the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, saw the lighted T exactly where he expected it. At 0145 hours, twenty-seven of the thirty-six sticks of the battalion either hit the drop zone or landed within a mile of it. Vandervoort broke his ankle when he landed; he laced his boot tighter, used his rifle as a crutch, verified his location, and began sending up green flares as a signal for his battalion to assemble on him. Within half an hour he had 600 men around him; no other unit of similar size had so complete an assembly so quickly.
The 2nd Battalion’s mission was to secure Neuville-au-Plain, just north of Ste.-Mère-Église. It was a long hike; Vandervoort was much too big a man to be carried; he spotted two sergeants pulling a collapsible ammunition cart. Vandervoort asked if they would mind giving him a lift. One of the sergeants replied that “they hadn’t come all the way to Normandy to pull any damn colonel around.” Vandervoort noted later, “I persuaded them otherwise.”32
• •
General Taylor was not as fortunate as Vandervoort. The commander of the 101st landed alone, outside Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. For twenty minutes he wandered around, trying to find his assembly point. He finally encountered his first trooper, a private from the 501st, established identity with his clicker, and hugged the man. A few minutes later Taylor’s aide, Lieutenant Brierre, came up. The three-man group wandered around until Taylor, in the dark, physically collided with his artillery commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe. He didn’t know where they were either.
Brierre pulled out a flashlight, the generals pulled out a map, the three men ducked into a hedgerow, studied the map, and came to three different conclusions as to where they were.
• •
Lt. Parker Alford and his radio operator (without his radio, lost on the drop, a typical experience) joined Taylor’s group. By this time it consisted of two generals, a full colonel, three lieutenant colonels, four lieutenants, several NCO radio operators, and a dozen or so privates. Taylor looked around, grinned, and said, “Never in the annals of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.” He decided to set off in a direction that he hoped would take him to his primary objective, the village of Pouppeville, the foot of causeway 1.33
• •
Lt. Col. Louis Mendez, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 508th, was even worse off than Taylor. He jumped at 2,100 feet, “which was too much of a ride. I landed about 0230 and didn’t see anybody for five days.” In that time he may have killed more of the enemy than any other lieutenant colonel in the war: “I got three Heinies with three shots from my pistol, two Heinies with a carbine, and one Heinie with a hand grenade.” He estimated that he walked ninety miles across the western Cotentin looking for another American, without success.34
• •
At La Madeleine, in his blockhouse, Lt. Arthur Jahnke was confused. The airplanes overhead did not particularly worry him even though the numbers of planes flying through the night were greater than usual. But what was the meaning of the bursts of automatic and machine-gun fire he was hearing to his rear? Jahnke alerted his men, doubled the guards, and ordered a patrol to go out and reconnoiter.
Simultaneously, Pvt. Louis Merlano of the 101st, second man in his stick, landed on the dunes a few meters away from Jahnke’s position. Horrified, he heard the cries of eleven of his comrades as they fell into the Channel and drowned. Half an hour later, the German patrol returned to La Madeleine with nineteen American paratroopers, including Merlano, picked up on the beach. Delighted with his catch, Jahnke tried to telephone his battalion commander, but just as he began to report the line went dead. A paratrooper somewhere inland had cut the line.