NEVER HAD THE skies over the English Channel been as crowded with anything other than flocks of migrating birds as they were in the pre-dawn hours of 6 June 1944. Not even the great Luftwaffe bombing raids during the Battle of Britain and London Blitz back in 1940 could compare to what was taking place on that dark, partly cloudy June morning.
Following a precisely designed timetable, the rest of the 101st left their English airfields—Exeter, Merryfield, Welford Park, Membury, Greenham Common, Upottery—shortly after the pathfinders departed and a few minutes ahead of the 82nd.
After taking off at 2315 hours, and during the nearly two hours that it took to fly from RAF Upottery—located near the Devon village of Smeatharpe—to Normandy, Flight Engineer Sergeant Elmer Wisherd had a lot of time to think. As he studied the faces of the young men seated across from each other, he thought about his own youth and how he happened to be here with them at this exact moment. He thought about growing up on the family farm in Bruce, Wisconsin, with his six siblings: brothers Robert, Ray, and Iven, and sisters Mary, Ruby, and Leona. He thought about his government-sponsored travels ever since he enlisted in the Army in September 1942—from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to Bowman Field, Kentucky, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Alliance, Nebraska, then to aircraft and engine school at Gulfport, Mississippi—where he got his mechanic’s license—then to Fort Benning, where he was made crew chief on a C-47 and took part in numerous training drops there. Then it was overseas, and a few months in North Africa before heading off to Upottery, where he had been stationed since March 1944, getting ready for the “big day.” The training was nonstop. “We were up every day that it was flyable,” he recalled, the training becoming so routine that he was sure he could perform his tasks in his sleep.
During these training missions, and now during the actual combat jump, the determination as to when to disgorge the paratroopers came from the lead ship. The planes practiced flying in a three-plane, V-shaped formation known as a “vic of vics,” and the lead ship would have a navigator on board. The flight engineer stood up in the plexiglass astrodome over the navigator’s station and flashed a light to the other two trailing planes as they approached the DZ. Wisherd said, “This signal told the other planes when to go from red to green, and then the paratroops would start jumping. While we were training, my [C-47] crew was the same, but the paratroopers were different each time. I really didn’t have a chance to develop a rapport or friendship with the paratroopers. Usually my main job was to monitor the gauges and the engines, and I also had duty back with the paratroopers and the jumpmaster. Normally we would takeoff with the [fuselage] door on and, just before we got to the drop zone, I would take off the door. After they jumped, I would pull the static lines back in to keep them from flapping against the sides of the fuselage.”
“A lot of the practice jumps were in daylight,” Wisherd continued, “but, as D-Day got nearer, we started doing a lot of night drops. I remember once or twice during a night drop that the wind would come up too much on the ground and it wasn’t safe to drop the troops and we had to bring ‘em back. Oh, boy—did the paratroopers ever gripe about that! They had to land in an airplane! ‘Let me out of this thing!’ they howled. They had trained to jump and that’s what they wanted to do.”1 But now that the invasion was underway, the pilots were under strict orders that no paratroopers, unless they were dead or wounded or had some sort of equipment malfunction that prevented them from jumping, were to be brought back to England aboard the planes. “Freezing in the door” was not an option; anyone who refused to jump would be court-martialed.2
Lieutenant Edward Mehosky, H/506/101st, said, “We took off at 2330 hours. The battalion’s formation consisted of forty-five planes known as Serial 10. At the time of emplaning, the 3rd Battalion combat group comprised 630 men and 50 officers. Company H had 132 men and 8 officers. I was the jumpmaster of our plane that carried a stick of 19 men, which was half of 1st Platoon…. The interior of the cabin was fairly dark, yet you could see down the row to the last man. There wasn’t much talking; each man was wrapped in his own thoughts. You could sense the mood, a mood of great anticipation and eagerness, a wanting to get at the enemy and get the job done. They shared a confidence you caught glimpses of, reassuring each other with a facial gesture, a hand-shake, or a simple nod, two rows of paratroopers bundled up with all their jump equipment. Some tried catching a few winks, while others smoked cigarettes. It was more of a somber, serious mood that prevailed. The sound of the engines seemed to help keep the focus of my thoughts as I reviewed procedures again.”3
Corporal Earl McClung, E/506/101st, said, “I don’t think any of us were scared. We were just young kids and we’d been training for this moment. In fact, we were really looking forward to it.”4
HUNDREDS OF C-47s were barreling through the night sky heading flat out for Normandy, each one filled with young men, sweating, praying, vomiting—eager to jump and get on with their role in the war, or wishing they had joined the Services of Supply. For the most part, the flight across the English Channel was without serious incident. No Luftwaffe fighters rose up to challenge the aerial armada. A few C-47s had to turn back because of mechanical problems, but they were a precious few. Flight engineer Sergeant Elmer Wisherd recalled, “At night you couldn’t see the formations of airplanes—the number, the miles and miles of airplanes. At night all you had were the very dim recognition lights that were on the tops of the wings.”5
Then the formations reached “Hoboken”—a stationary submarine positioned northwest of the German-occupied Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney. From the submarine, the formation of C-47s picked up a signal that the pilots had been briefed would indicate where to begin a turn to the southeast on headings of 135 and 140 degrees (for the planes carrying the 82nd and 101st, respectively) toward the Cotentin. Shortly after making the turn, the formations skirted the Channel Islands, where they started to pick up some harassing anti-aircraft fire. Mission Boston, the flight of the 101st Airborne Division, turned east-ward, crossing the coast near Denneyville-Plage—a point code-named “Muleshoe.”
The last moments of peace were just about over; twenty more minutes would bring the formations over their objectives. Then the planes hit an unexpected fog bank. Julian Rice, C-47 pilot, said, “Just as we started to cross the beach area, we flew into a 1,500-foot high wall of heavy land fog that blanketed our entire portion of the formation. Not only did the critical blue [wing-tip] lights vanish from sight, but also the entire planes in the formation disappeared. It was impossible for me to see my own wing. Now the fear of enemy fire was secondary. The immediate concern was midair collisions from the planes all around.”
“This is where another part of pilot training automatically kicks in,” Rice continued, “Emergency Dispersal Procedure! Spread out! I shoved the fuel mixture to rich, boosted throttle setting and rpms to climb mode, synchronized prop pitch, kicked hard left rudder, pulled back the yoke to a climb rate of 500 feet per minute. Forty-five seconds later I leveled out at 1,400 feet, still locked inside the pitch-dark fog. I continued to hold the approach leg compass heading to the DZ, and prayed no other planes were in my path. It was eerie in the dark, listening to nothing but the heartbeat of my plane’s engines. Although I could see or hear nothing through the fog outside the windows, I could sense the nearness of other planes. Concentrate! I glued my focus on the instrument panel and kept a tight grip on the controls.”6
Elmer Wisherd recalled the heart-stopping moments when his plane was engulfed in clouds: “I can’t figure out how we went through those clouds without collisions or damage to the planes. Then we came out and started getting AA fire. I could see the other planes around us taking ground fire. We went back up through the clouds; it was quite a layer of clouds. And we came out in formation! How we did it I have no idea. Our pilots were the best, all instrument-rated pilots. There was no talking between planes whatsoever—complete radio silence. But I’ll tell you, it was ‘pucker’ when you’re going through clouds and you can’t see the air-planes around you and all at once you pop out on top and here you are, still in formation. Then we dropped to 800 feet. It was clear over the drop zone.”7
Wisherd’s plane, one of a staggering number of 822 C-47s that were ferrying the American airborne divisions to France,8 was cruising at about 130 miles per hour, but the pilot throttled it back to about 110 mph as they neared the DZ. Luckily, the plane sustained no battle damage from all the enemy ordnance flying up to greet them. He said, “Everybody got up, hooked up, and, when the lead ship turned on the light in the astrodome, the rest of us did the same. Then the green light came on and that was it.”
The 101st Airborne Division was making its rendezvous with destiny. In the black, tracer-laced sky above the Cotentin, hundreds of young men began streaming from their aircraft, hoping to land safely and begin doing their part in taking back the continent from the Nazi occupiers. Wisherd’s stick began tumbling out the door into the night, and within seconds had disappeared into the bright spiderweb of tracers. “We made a quick left turn to get out of there,” said Wisherd. “Some of the planes climbed and some dove; we dove. We were down low and heading back to England. When we got back, we refueled and hooked up the gliders and made another trip to France, towing gliders. If we didn’t get shot down, we were supposed to return the next day and drop supplies.”9
Jumping from one of the first planes over France was the 101st’s commander, Maxwell Taylor. After he landed he began snapping his toy cricket to find other Americans: “The first man I met in the darkness I thought was a German until he cricketed. He was the most beautiful soldier I’d ever seen. We threw our arms around each other, and from that moment I knew we had won the war.”10
UP IN THE sky the clouds were bad enough, but the flak was worse. Jack Agnew, Headquarters Company, 506/101st, recalled that, after their formation of C-47s passed the Channel Islands and crossed the French coast, they started catching a lot of flak—above, below, and beside them. Some pilots, unaccustomed to being shot at, began twisting and turning, diving and rising, speeding up and performing aerial maneuvers in the hopes of being missed by the thousands of bullets and shells coming up at them. Not realizing that they were still far from their intended drop zone (their mission was to take the bridges over the Douve River, from Carentan to the beaches), the paratroops in Agnew’s plane started hurrying toward the door when the green light came on near Saint-Cômedu-Mont, two miles north-northwest of Carentan.
“As we were making our approach,” Agnew recalled, “flak came up through the floor and broke Billy Green’s chute open. It billowed all over the place, so we pushed him to the side to get out of there. We jumped right over Saint-Côme-du-Mont, where there was a whole battalion of Germans. Everybody that went out before us was dumped right there on Saint-Côme-du-Mont. All of our buddies in that first group were either killed or captured.”11
Ray Hood, of Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 502/101st, said that after his stick had stood up and hooked up in preparation for getting the green light, “The slam of exploding shells, the accelerated roar of the engines, our staggering efforts to remain erect at last brought home, in a very graphic way, the fact that the cards had been dealt and all the money was in the pot. Our pilot, against orders, was taking extreme evasive action, and the insane swing of the plane, the sudden surges of power, and the changes in altitude made us show a sense of balance and agility that we hadn’t known we possessed.”
As the plane was punctured by bullets and jagged shards of shrapnel from exploding anti-aircraft shells, Hood looked up as the flash of a nearby explosion illuminated the plane’s interior and saw a sight that made his blood freeze. A shell fragment had severed the static line between his parachute pack and the steel anchor cable to which it was hooked. “Had I not discovered this frightening fact,” he noted, “I would have gone out the door of that aircraft and would be still waiting for my chute to open. After a three-second wait, there would have certainly been no possibility of deploying my reserve chute before I smashed into the ground.”
Armed with this knowledge, as the plane was flying at an altitude well below 700 feet, Hood pulled the ripcord of his reserve chute as he left the plane. The canopy opened just a few seconds before he landed, but he broke his left fibula in the process.12
Earl McClung, E/506/101st, was jumping with a leg bag full of machine-gun and mortar rounds that weighed more than sixty pounds. “I couldn’t lift it,” he said. When he jumped, he noticed that he was coming down above a town where a major fire was burning—it was Sainte-Mère-Église, and he was many miles from his intended DZ. “I landed on the roof of a small Catholic shrine about a block and a half west of the church. I hit that roof and bounced off. It was pretty hectic for the first few seconds. Two Germans were running toward me. I guess they saw me coming down, but they were shooting at my chute that was on this little roof. I jumped with my M-1 assembled and in my hands. It was no contest—they were only a few feet away and I took care of those guys. At least I think I did; I didn’t wait around long enough to make sure. I went on by them and headed out of town. I ran through the graveyard and ran into a kid named Payne from the 501st. Later that morning he got shot through the ankle, so I was looking for a medic. We joined up with the 505th of the 82nd for about the next nine days. I rejoined my unit at Carentan.”13
Elsewhere in that tracer-streaked night sky, Private first class Bill True, 506/101st, was also dazzled by the deadly sound-and-light show. “Suddenly, there is a loud explosion and the bright flash of red and orange colors appears just outside the door of the plane,” he recalled. “Tracer bullets are also sweeping the sky next to us and our C-47 dives to start evasive maneuvers. The violent drop and jarring motions of the plan have us clinging to our metal bucket seats, and now there is no question of whether anyone is praying. More than one trooper is voicing “‘Hail Mary, full of grace….’”
True continued, “The light from the German artillery and tracer bullets outside the plane door is steady bright now, and I’m sure our tail is on fire. Shrapnel striking the ship sounds like rocks rattling on a tin roof. My thoughts are a jumble of terror, but one surprising idea is dominant: ‘Those people down on the ground are trying to kill me. Me! Bill True! Personally.’ And the possibility that they might succeed is becoming very apparent.”14
Private Donald Burgett of the 506th recalled that the pilots were flying so low when the men jumped, that some parachutes barely had time to open. In fact, some parachutes didn’t open. He noted that once he was on the ground, he could hear the sounds of other paratroopers whose chutes didn’t open hitting the earth, making a sickening thud “like large, ripe pumpkins being thrown against the ground.”15
“We were all loaded so heavily,” said Lieutenant Joe Doughty, G/506/101st, recalling his stick’s last minutes before taking off. “We all had on summer uniforms and ODs, to boot. And our [anti-] gas-impregnated jumpsuit. We had a Hawkins mine strapped to our leg, blasting caps, K rations—we all had about eighty pounds of stuff on us. We were bound so tight, it was terrible. I had an old Springfield rifle—why, I don’t know. I also had a knife, but no sidearm.”
“Our stick was eighteen men. My men were the greatest guys in the world, all of them. Of course they were afraid; everybody was afraid. You just sucked it up and you did it. We took off over the Channel and we flew very, very low—below radar level. We went past the islands of Guernsey and Jersey, and then we started to get some flak over the coast.
I was in the door, the red light was on, and we were close to getting the green light. First thing I saw down below was a barn on fire. Just about that time a piece of a 20mm anti-aircraft shell hit the tail of the plane, and then I went out. I led the stick out, and everybody got out; we were fortunate.”
“Your well-being depended on where you landed,” Doughty continued. “We landed right on top of a German division we didn’t know was there. There was a lot of fire as we were coming down. We assembled what we could. Captain Harold van Antwerp was missing. There were only Lieutenant Kennedy and Lieutenant Chambliss and myself and a few GIs. Instead of 200 men, we had eleven. I knew about where we were, and we made it to our objective, the bridge. I didn’t know then that I was the senior officer left in the company.”16
One Screaming Eagle, David Webster, jumped at an altitude he estimated as 300 feet and landed in three feet of dark, brackish water. He immediately had people shooting at him and he panicked. “My courage, which had flared up briefly, died down again. My God, I thought, only the Germans are shooting. They must have been expecting us. We’re done for; the invasion will fail. We’ll be rounded up and butchered by the SS.”17
Other troopers never reached France alive. As it was approaching the drop zone, tragedy struck C-47, chalk #66, with 1st Lieutenant Thomas Meehan III and seventeen other members of E/506/101st on board. Carrying a load of Bangalore torpedoes, the plane was hit by ground fire and exploded, the wreckage plunging into a field at Beuzeville-au-Plain and killing everyone on board.18
Robert Cone, a member of Headquarters Company, 506/101st, had no problems with his jump—except for being far from his intended DZ. He landed perfectly in an open field somewhere in the vicinity of Saint Lô, got out of his chute easily, and looked around to see if he could find any of his mates or any landmarks in the predawn darkness of northern France. He couldn’t.
“I couldn’t find a soul,” Cone said, “save one guy that I did not know who was not even a paratrooper. We landed near a hedgerow, from which the Germans were firing at us, and the guy I was with was killed.”
Cone’s war was over almost before it began. A machine-gun bullet slammed into his right shoulder, breaking his arm all the way down to the forearm. “I was able to get away, though, but could not hold my rifle.” The firing stopped, but he was in pain and losing a lot of blood. “I ran away from the hedgerows up to a little farm. A French guy let me in and put me up for the night. The next morning the door opened, and there stood a German soldier with a gun. Evidently, the Frenchman called him—you know, they were afraid of the Germans. That was how I got captured.” Cone would sit out the rest of the war in German POW camps.19
Another member of Cone’s company was Jack Womer. He came down in a swamp and almost drowned. Somehow, thoroughly drenched, he managed to pull himself out. He got his toy cricket out and began snapping away to see if he could get an answering click-clack. “Another guy started clicking off in the distance. I could hear him but I couldn’t see a thing. Finally we found our way to each other. We were circling around the swamp, going nowhere. Thinking back to my commando training, they said that if you saw trees growing in the water, you are not far from the edge of the swamp. The only light we had was when a plane blew up; it gave us light for about thirty seconds or so. When there was a flash of light and I was able to see a tree, I started toward the trees, making my way through them until I ended up out on a road.”
Womer soon found other paratroopers sloshing around in the swamp, lost and leaderless. One of them was a captain from the 501st PIR, who said to Womer, “Oh, you’ve done fine. Take us out.” Womer said, “Now I didn’t realize if you do anything that appears to be heroic, you automatically become a leader.” He obeyed the order and soon a small group of sopping-wet paratroopers had assembled on the road. The captain directed Womer to lead some of the men in one direction while he took the others the opposite way.
“But we did not know we had a 20mm following us—a German,” said Womer. “All of a sudden he opened up on us. Both the captain and I came running back to where we had started. Thank heavens none of us got hit! He pointed in one direction and said we should go that way. Right then, a plane exploded and we could see that it was all wide-open ground ahead. We would have been easy targets.”
Womer convinced the captain to follow one of the ditches and found himself the leader again. “At this point, there were a number of us bunched up. I was worried that we would make easy targets. Now, in some training manuals, it says that if a flare goes off in the dark, you should freeze. Well, that is dead wrong. The commando doctrine says if a flare goes up and you are in enemy country, you hit the ground and wait until it goes out, then you take off. I wasn’t about to argue with that!”
“Well, for some reason,” Womer continued, “there was a Navy man there next to me, even though there weren’t any damn boats around there. He said that he wanted to try and move around and outflank the Germans.” A flare suddenly burst overhead, illuminating the group. Just as Womer hit the ground, “The 20mm opened up and started cutting our guys in half. It was so close that dirt was kicking up and hitting me in the head. As soon as the flare went out, I jumped up and looked around. The only ones standing were me, the Navy man, and two paratroopers—the rest were dead.”20
Sergeant Don Malarkey, E/506/101st, landed in a tree but was otherwise unhurt. Such was not the case for one of his buddies, Joe Toye. Toye had jumped with a leg bag, but the rope that secured it was wound around his arm. When the chute deployed, it yanked the bag and rope violently downward, nearly peeling all the skin off his arm—from elbow to wrist. Despite the painful injury, Toye carried on with the mission.*21
After leaping from his C-47, Chaplain Francis Sampson, 501/101st, splashed down into a stream where the water was over his head. He grabbed his knife to cut away the bags that held his Communion kit and medical supplies, “but I could scarcely move to free myself. The canopy of my chute stayed open, and the strong wind blew me downstream about a hundred yards into shallow water. I lay there a few minutes exhausted and as securely pinned down by equipment as if I had been in a strait jacket. None of our men was near. It took about ten minutes to get out of my chute—it seemed an hour, for, judging from the fire, I thought that we had landed in the middle of a target range. I crawled back to the edge of the stream near the spot where I landed, and started diving for my Mass equipment. By pure luck I recovered it after the fifth or sixth dive.”22
For the chaplain—as well as for the pathfinders, combat troops, and medics—D-Day was beginning to look like a disaster. Units were scattered all across the Cotentin; many had died by drowning in the flooded areas or by engagement with an alert, if startled, enemy. Many others had been injured in the drop or had been taken prisoner. Others, completely lost and alone and unable to orient themselves as to their location, lay hidden in the hedgerows and farm buildings to await the dawn.
Dwayne Burns and his small band of lost paratroopers were moving toward a town they thought was Picauville when, “around the next curve a Jerry roadblock appeared. It became our introduction to the enemy. With no other preset plan we rushed toward the few German guards, opening fire as we ran. Perhaps the idea was to surprise them and get a quick upper hand, but the Germans were ready for us. We discovered they were alert and on the lookout and they immediately began shooting back; their small arms fire was overwhelming. More Germans were hidden or sitting out of view who quickly rose to fight. We continued our firing but started hitting the road ditch for cover all in the same motion.” With the Germans closing in with their superior firepower, Burns and his group pulled back, starting what he termed, “a long string of events best described as evasion and survival.”23
Lieutenant Al Hassenzahl, C/506/101st, was the jumpmaster in his C-47. When he hit the soft, muddy ground of northern France in the pitch-blackness of night, he was all alone and overcome by the odd feeling that he “was the only GI to land on the coast of Normandy.” Gradually, though, he began to encounter other men from his outfit and they quickly galvanized into a small fighting unit.
There were a few firefights with isolated pockets of enemy soldiers as the group, searching for their objectives, stumbled down unmarked lanes, through hedgerows and across fields. At one point in a skirmish, Hassenzahl was hit in the side and was losing a lot of blood. “Punchy” Zettwich, a sergeant in C Company and a former boxer, pulled him to safety and bandaged his wound. Father Maloney, a chaplain who had attached himself to the group, started giving Hassenzahl last rites but the lieutenant told him to knock it off; he wasn’t planning on dying.*24
IN THE LEAD plane carrying the 502nd PIR into battle was the regiment’s firebrand commander, thirty-nine-year-old Colonel George Van Horn Moseley, Jr. The 502nd’s assignment was to neutralize a German coast artillery battery of 122mm howitzers at Sainte Martin-de-Varreville, a mile behind Utah Beach. But “Old Moe” shattered his leg upon landing and had to be carted around in a wheelbarrow by some of his troops. Upon hearing of Moseley’s accident, General Taylor replaced him with the 502nd’s youthful-looking executive officer, John H. “Iron Mike” Michaelis, and sent Moe back to England to convalesce.* Under Michaelis’ command, the regiment, although badly scattered during the jump, would accomplish its initial mission.25
IN THE MEANTIME, a few miles to the north, the paratroopers of Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne Division—and the pilots carrying them—were experiencing the same sort of fear and agony that was, at that very moment, going through the transports carrying the 101st Airborne.
Had they been able to compare notes with the Screaming Eagles, the troopers of Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne would have thought that they existed in a parallel universe, so similar were their experiences. The para-troopers that comprised Mission Boston had the same difficulty hauling their overloaded bodies into their C-47s as did the 101st troopers, heard the same roaring of aircraft engines that made conversation impossible, felt their anxiety meters pegging on the high end of the scale, and sensed their aircraft lifting off, circling, and then heading on a one-way trip to possible oblivion.
In the C-47 that was carrying eighteen paratroopers from H/508/82nd, Lieutenant Victor Grabbe was leading his men in song, even though the tune and lyrics were swallowed up by the sound of the engines. One of his men, Lew Milkovics, recalled, “All was quiet for a time while we were flying over the Channel. Most of us, like myself, I am sure had our thoughts on our loved ones, and no doubt were feeling sorry for ourselves, as we knew what would soon be happening. We wondered how many of us would survive. Lieutenant Grabbe sensed the tension and he loudly shouted, ‘Hey, fellows, how about some songs?’ That broke the silence. Someone started with ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart,’ then ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me,’ then ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas.’ And so it went as we sang many more oldies for the next ten or so minutes. It was great, as it relaxed us, and took our minds off ourselves and the coming danger.”
Milkovics continued, “I sat there thinking, ‘Boy, that Grabbe—he is one smart cookie.’ Under our kind of pressure, I doubt if any other stick leader thought to do this. I will never forget the intelligence and smart thinking of our lieutenant.”*26
Sergeant Otis Sampson, E/505/82nd, remembered his flight being quiet, no singing, “each man with his own thoughts as the plane winged its way to our rendezvous; each second drew us closer. As we crossed the coast of Normandy we stood up and hooked up. I saw no guns firing below. Everything was going good, too good for my liking—it seemed we were going into a trap. Being near the open door, I could see the moon-drenched countryside below, with no sign of life. I stood with perfect control of my mind and body as the plane went into a dive…. We leveled off and then went into another dive. By this time we were well inland; the plane slowed down. It looked so peaceful below. I never expected it to be that way.”27
In the lead ship was the 82nd’s assistant division commander Jumpin’ Jim Gavin, who had taken off from Cottesmore; he would be jumping with the 508th.28 He wrote in his memoirs, “We began to receive small arms fire from the ground. It seemed harmless enough; it sounded like pebbles landing on a tin roof. I had experienced it before [over Sicily] and knew what it was. So far none of us had been hit. Then, quite some distance away, another airplane or two could be seen. Directly ahead of us there was a tremendous amount of small arms fire, and apparently buildings were burning. That almost certainly had to be Sainte-Mère-Église. The 505th by now should have landed and should be attacking the Germans in the town.”29
At the controls of a C-47 (with the name “Terror of the Ozarks” painted on its nose) from the 436th Troop Carrier Group, was First Lieutenant Bill Thompson. He recalled that despite the months of training—just for a moment—many of the other pilots panicked when they were swallowed by a bank of clouds, with the ground fire beginning to reach up for them. Many broke formation, swerving wildly, suddenly accelerating, or violently going into steep dives or sudden climbs to avoid the ordnance.
“I could see the tracers in front of us,” Thompson said. “They were leading us too much since they probably were not used to firing at slow-flying aircraft. We did not get hit, so finally I let down some more and broke out of the clouds. I could see the water on the other side…. My right wingman, flying off of me, saw the water and I guess he got excited and started dropping [his paratroopers] before I signaled him to.”30
Lieutenant Edward V. Ott, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 508th PIR, said that he felt the drop “was doomed to be a disaster when the C-47 pilot began to take evasive action to avoid the heavy flak. He gave us the green light when the plane was in a climbing attitude as the engines roared at top speed. When I jumped, the prop blast was so severe that it tore off my pack and equipment so that when I hit the ground, the only weapon I had was my jump knife. I didn’t see any other member of my stick.”31
Sergeant Ed Barnes, a communications section leader in 3/507/82nd, had dozed off during the hour-long flight but was awakened as the aircraft closed in on France. “We were alerted about ten minutes before jump time that we were approaching the coast of Normandy,” he said. Then the red warning light near the door came on. “We were given the signal to stand up and hook up and check one another’s equipment. We were all standing there poised and looking at the red light, waiting for it to turn green. As we peered out the door, we could see the flak and tracer bullets coming up out of the darkness. Then the light turned green and we started to pile out the door.”32
As the jumpmaster in his plane, Lieutenant J. Phil Richardson, H/508/82nd, recalled, “When we arrived at the drop zone in France, I looked down at the DZ and saw it was covered with tracers. I felt that we should not land in that area and I told the pilot not to slow down but to keep going, which he did. Soon, the English Channel became visible on the other side of the peninsula. We had an order that no airborne troops could return to England [by plane] once they had left. The area that I looked at then was clear of tracers and we did the jump there; this was near the small city of Bayeux.” But Bayeux was over thirty miles from H Company’s drop zone.33
James Eads, another 82nd paratrooper, remembered vividly that his C-47 was receiving heavy AA fire on the run in. “We had been hit at the worst time by flak and machine-gun fire. We were off target. The green light came on and the troopers started out of the plane. The fifteenth man had equipment trouble. After some delay trying to fix his rig, I—being the sixteenth and last man to go out—bailed out on a dead run.”34
Archie Archambault, a medic with B/508/82nd, also had problems: “When we jumped, the second man in front of me jammed the end of his rifle in the door and couldn’t get it loose. I took a leap at both men and we went out together.” (Once on the ground, Archambault was captured and spent several months in a POW camp before he escaped.)35
David Thomas, another medic, recalled that his plane “hit the clouds over the coast and when we came out of those clouds we were all alone in the sky. We could not see another airplane. The pilot had no idea where he was. So we were looking and looking, trying to find something we could recognize, and finally we recognized the Merderet River, which flows into the Douve down by Chef-du-Pont. That was where we were supposed to rally around and hold the bridge over the Merderet to keep [German] reinforcements from reaching the beaches. We figured that was as close as we were going to get, so we jumped.”36
Hooked up and ready to jump, Wheatley “Chris” Christensen, G/505, was having difficulty standing, what with the pilot making all sorts of evasive maneuvers—not realizing that he might just as easily fly into the path of a shell as avoid one—and the plane being buffeted by nearby explosions of 88s. From his position back from the door, Christensen could see the flares that the Germans were shooting into the sky to illuminate the aerial armada and make it easier for the gunners to find their targets. He couldn’t wait to get out the door.37
Glen C. Drake, H/508, said, “I knew there was no one more anxious to get out of the plane than I. After hooking my static line to the steel cable that ran the length of the plane, I had to hang on to the cable and the side of the plane to stay on my feet. I was next to last of our stick, and I was wondering if I would get out.” At last the green light came on and the line of heavily laden men began moving toward the door and disappearing into the night. “It seemed to take forever,” said Drake. “All the way back to the door we had to struggle to stay on our feet and I was thinking, ‘Goddamn it, let’s go, let’s go, let’s get the hell out of this damn plane before it goes down!’ When I finally went out the door, I knew right away I had jumped from the frying pan into the fire! It was a night jump, but the hundreds of white phosphorous flares floating on small parachutes turned the night into day. What a field day those Krauts had—like shooting fish in a barrel!”38
Sergeant Spencer Wurst, a squad leader in F/505/82nd, heading to Sainte-Mère-Église, wasn’t happy about the haphazard nature of the drop. The discipline acquired over many months of training with the C-47 crews seemed to have evaporated in the heat of the moment, as pilot after pilot broke formation in an effort to avoid the ground fire. Hopelessly lost, and under orders not to bring any paratroopers back to England with them, some pilots simply flipped the switch that turned on the green “jump” light—whether they were over their designated DZ or not. Wurst said, “As it turned out, 2nd Battalion, 505, had the best drop of all six regiments in the American airborne effort. We knew exactly where we were, we knew what we had to do, and we proceeded to do just that.”39
In his C-47, Dwayne Burns, F/508/82nd, was becoming more and more anxious as the moment to jump grew nearer. The red warning light by the door suddenly came on, meaning that they were just minutes away from being given the “go” signal. The jumpmaster in Burns’s plane “was hanging out the door, trying to see how far we were from land, when our airship entered a cloud cover and the pilots started to spread out. Most pulled up and tried going over the top. It was going to be bad for jumpers because we would be widely dispersed at landing, but the aircrew needed to avoid possible collisions. No one wanted to be taken out of action that way.”
“It seems we stood in position for a long time before our flight began picking up flak,” Burns continued. “It was light at the beginning. At least I knew we were finally over the coastline. Then our waiting for the green light really started. The flak grew quickly and became really heavy while we tried to wait it out. The ship was getting pinged from all sides. The noise became awesome, an indeterminate mix of twin engines, flak hitting the wings and fuselage, and men yelling, ‘Let’s go!’ But still the green light did not come on.”
To Burns, the aircraft “was bouncing like some wild bronco. A ticking sound danced across the bottom side of the plane as machine-gun rounds found us. It became hard to stand up while the pilots tried to maneuver, and troopers lost their footing and fell down. They fought to get back up. Other jumpers had to help them but they could hardly remain standing themselves. Some were getting sick, I know, because the stench of vomit drifted my way from somewhere else. It was one hell of a ride. With all the training we’d had, there was still nothing that could have prepared a soldier for this event. I wondered if anyone of us would get out of the plane alive.”
Some men watched from the small porthole windows as planes on either side of them took direct hits from the anti-aircraft guns, exploded in a bright ball of fire, and scorched a flaming path downward through the blackness of night. In other planes, bullets and shell fragments tore through the sides and floors of the aircraft, wounding and killing men waiting to jump into battle. There was screaming and panic. The questions in everyone’s mind were: Who the hell came up with this stupid idea, anyway? Why the hell did I volunteer for this assignment? Would anyone survive the maelstrom? But it was way too late to back out now.
Dwayne Burns hit hard on solid ground, rolled over onto his back, and became entangled in his parachute shroud lines. “I found myself quite alone; no one else had landed in the field with me. It was very quiet. One chute went down behind the trees on the far side of the field—it was a good feeling to know I had another trooper there. Lying in the grass, I fought to get out of the harness. In my mind’s eye I saw visions of Germans running out of the shadows with fixed bayonets, eager to kill, and here I was having trouble with the harness buckles.” At last Burns got free and met up with the other trooper who had landed close to him. The two of them met up with a few others and the small ad hoc squad roamed the hedgerows for hours trying to figure out where they were—while avoiding enemy patrols.40
Water was an obstacle for which the Allies had failed to properly alert and train their paratroopers. By flooding large areas of Normandy, the Germans had created an effective and deadly anti-airborne obstacle, one that didn’t show up well on aerial photos because grass and plants grew up through the water, giving the impression in photos of solid, green fields. As the overloaded paratroops dropped into this man-made swamp, it was a disaster no longer waiting to happen; it was happening.41
Glen Drake recalled that his plane, like so many others that morning, overshot the drop zone. “The reflection of the light from the flares showed the water in the flooded areas was behind us. This wasn’t good, but it didn’t concern me as much as it probably should have, because I knew there was no way I was going to hit the ground alive…. In addition to the anti-aircraft fire, the sky seemed to be literally filled with tracers. And between each of those tracers were about a dozen regular slugs. Under different circumstances, such a display would have been fantastic on the Fourth of July, but on that night, from our grandstand seats, it was more like a nightmare in Technicolor.”42
When he jumped, Sergeant Ralph Busson, in the same company as Drake, said, “As I watched the tracers going all around me, I was thinking of looking for a landing spot. All I saw was water. I made one big splash with a sixteen-pound landmine that we all carried with us to set up roadblocks. My mine got no further. Luck was on my side, for the water was only chest deep. Chester Stephens landed close by, and the two of us managed to get out of the swamp just before daybreak. I had told Chet that if we were not out by daybreak, we were dead ducks.”43
John Delury, H/508/82nd, jumped somewhere over Normandy. After he had cut his way out of his chute, he looked up. “There was an American C-47 on fire overhead and it was going into a death bank towards the earth and made the loudest, weirdest sound as it fell through the sky. I don’t know if it was full of troopers or not, but the shadowy, orange light it threw on the ground and the engine scream was eerie!”
Lost and alone, Delury eventually ran into another trooper, Glenn A. “Red” Fately, of I Company. “A few days later he would be by my side dying of machine-gun bullets in his stomach,” Delury said. “Death was so common that there was no time for mourning. You almost develop an emotional callousness that borders on the maxim, ‘Better him than me.’”44
IN ADDITION TO being the dining area for Norman cows, the fields fenced by the hedgerows were also the cows’ latrines, and it is somewhat surprising that so few of the airborne troops have commented on landing in, or crawling through, the piles of cow dung that most of them must have encountered upon landing. Lew Milkovics, H/508/82nd, is one of those few. “As I was approaching the ground,” he recalled, “due to all the weight I was carrying, I turned sideways, bent my knees, and hit the ground rather hard. There was a bad smell and no wonder—I hit a nice fresh pile of cow poo-poo. Go ahead and laugh, but my first words were, ‘Goddamn it!’ I freed myself very fast [from my harness], assembled my ’03 Springfield rifle, and took off for the nearest hedgerow. I smelled something awful and, of course, it was me. Ever smell fresh cow poo-poo? Well, when it’s smeared all over your side, it’s twice as bad! I could have killed that cow—believe me.”
Milkovics moved on, found a few other equally lost troopers, and soon tried as best they could to accomplish their mission—an attack on Chef-du-Pont. He also found some water that he used to wash the cow dung off his uniform.45
Ed Barnes 507/82nd, had his own encounter with a cow. After he hit the ground and was starting to climb out of his harness, he heard footsteps approaching. “Not knowing whether it was friend or enemy,” he said, “I grabbed my carbine and spun around. In the darkness I could see nothing, so I again started to take off the chute. Again I heard the same sound of footsteps. I grabbed my carbine and peered into the darkness, but this time I could make out a figure approaching. I lay on the ground, ready to fire, trying to make out the number of men in the party, when to my amazement the footsteps turned out to be an old brown cow. I guess she was just curious to see who had invaded her domain. I was so relieved I just had to sit there and chuckle to myself.”
All alone except for his bovine companion, Barnes then heard the rattle of small arms fire off in the distance and decided to march to the sound of the guns; none of the landmarks he could see even faintly resembled the sand table he had studied and memorized. “By the time I got to where I thought the firefight was taking place, there was silence and no one about,” he said, deciding to ditch the heavy switchboard he was still lugging about.46
There were plenty of other places where there was anything but silence.