IN THE SPRIN of 1942, the United States Army, which had not even seen action against the German foe, started planning how best to invade the European continent. Lieutenant General Leslie McNair, head of Army Ground Forces, considered transporting troops by air as part of the overall scheme and so dispatched Bill Lee, now a brigadier general, to England to observe Britain’s airborne program; Lee was astonished at what he found. Rather than just transporting regular infantry battalions by air, the British were actually dropping them from planes.
On 15 August 1942, General McNair, inspired by Bill Lee’s report, directed that two American airborne divisions be formed. The 82nd and 101st Infantry Divisions, both “straight leg” (i.e., “regular”) infantry divisions, were selected to be transformed into full airborne units of 8,505 men each.*
Both divisions at the time were stationed at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, but the 101st would be transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in October. Bill Lee was promoted to major general and given command of the 101st. On 19 August 1942, he told his men, “The 101st Airborne Division has no history, but it has a rendezvous with destiny!” A lack of combat history did not bother the boys who suddenly found themselves declared paratroopers; they would make their own.1
Commanding the 82nd when it and the 101st were transformed into airborne divisions was Major General Omar Bradley. In October 1942, when the 101st left Claiborne so did the 82nd, departing for Benning. Initially, the U.S. Army decided that each airborne division would have one parachute regiment and two glider-infantry regiments. Eventually the ratio was reversed. By the time the 82nd deployed overseas, the division would be made up of the 504th and 505th Parachute Infantry Regiments and the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment; a third PIR, the 508th, would be added later and join the division in the U.K.2
IT WAS IMPERATIVE that a suitable aircraft be found that could not only deliver paratroopers but also tow combat gliders to the battlefield. Fortunately, by the time the United States entered the war, it already had such a vehicle. The workhorse of the Allied forces and arguably the most famous of all the transport planes of World War II was the C-47.
Known officially as the Skytrain by the Americans, it was designated the Dakota by the British and nicknamed the “Gooney Bird” by almost everyone. Far sleeker and more aerodynamic than the Germans’ boxy Junkers Ju 52 transport plane, the C-47, created in the 1930s as a civilian passenger airliner (DC-3) by the Douglas Aircraft Corporation of Long Beach, California, set new levels of performance for the commercial aircraft of its day. The C-47 had a length of 63.75 feet, a wingspan of 95.5 feet, and, with its carrying capacity of 7,800 pounds, could carry twenty-seven passengers in addition to its three-man crew. Each of the two Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 fourteen-cylinder radial piston engines delivered 1,200 horsepower, providing a top speed of 230 miles per hour. The maximum range was 1,600 miles, and the C-47 had a service ceiling of 23,999 feet, or 4.5 miles.3
By contrast, Germany’s three-engined Ju 52, which was virtually the same size as the C-47, could muster a maximum speed of only 165 mph, had a service ceiling of 18,000 feet, and a range of just 540 miles.4
In October 1942, the British airborne effort suffered a tragic blow when John Rock, the “father” of the Parachute Regiment, was killed when the glider in which he was a passenger plunged to the ground during training. George Chatterton, commander of The Glider Pilot Regiment, recalled the circumstances of Rock’s death: “One night he decided to take a night flight with a second pilot who had just recently returned from the Glider Pilot School. They were towed off by a Hector tug [a British biplane], and unfortunately as they were taking off the rope parted from the tug. In trying to make a landing in the dark the pilot hit an obstacle, the sandbag load in the back of the glider broke through the bulwark, and both Colonel Rock and the pilot were badly crushed.”5
Despite these setbacks, the time had arrived for the British paras to be employed in something bigger than small-scale commando raids. That something turned out to be North Africa. The 1st Parachute Brigade, detached from the 1st Airborne Division and commanded by Colonel Edwin Flavell, was selected as part of the invading forces for the operation, code-named “Torch,” under the overall command of U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Flown all the way from their bases in Britain to Gibraltar in American C-47s, the men of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Geoffrey Pine-Coffin’s 3rd Battalion, 1st Parachute Brigade, 1st Parachute Regiment, were dropped on the bright morning of 12 November 1942 over the airfield at the port of Bone on the Algerian coast, over 200 miles east of Algiers. Their mission was to seize the airfield and hold it until No. 6 Commando could arrive by sea to secure it. It was a close-run thing; as coincidence would have it, German parachutists were under orders to do the very same thing, but the British beat the Germans to Bone by just a few minutes. Arriving in their Ju 52s, the Fallschirmjäger saw the 3rd Battalion floating to earth, realized that the British had won the race, turned around, and returned to their base in Tunis.
On 15 November 1942, British 1st Army commander Lieutenant-General Sir Kenneth A. N. Anderson, with three brigades of infantry and one of armor, began marching eastward to engage the forces of General Jürgen von Arnim. The paras were in the thick of fighting with another combat jump, this time by Lieutenant Colonel S. James Hill’s 1st Battalion, at Souk el Arba. So eager were the men to get into battle that about twenty of them, left behind at the departure airfield because there was no room for them on the transport planes, ran behind the planes until they were pulled aboard by their mates. As the battalion’s historian wrote, “It is not every man who will disobey orders to parachute into battle.”
Within a month, all three battalions of the 1st Parachute Brigade had taken part in heavy combat, had suffered grievous losses, and had won important victories. Much of the credit for the Allies’ success in North Africa must be bestowed upon the determined, aggressive men in the maroon berets.6
While the battles for Algeria and Tunisia were still raging, the British were mounting another airborne operation, this one in far northern Europe and called “Freshman.” Flying in two gliders on 19 November 1942, thirty sappers took part in a raid to destroy the Norsk “heavy water” facility near Vermork, some sixty miles west of Oslo, Norway—a plant that was deemed crucial to Nazi Germany’s quest to build an atomic bomb. It was Britain’s first glider-borne assault but it ended in disaster. Flying in terrible weather, the Halifax bomber tugs released the gliders into a blizzard. Both gliders crash landed, killing many of the sappers. The force failed to reach its objective; the men were captured, interrogated by the Gestapo, and executed in accordance with Hitler’s infamous “Commando Order.”*7
IN THE HEAVILY forested Blue Ridge Mountains of northeastern Georgia, there exists a small, quiet town called Toccoa. In November 1942, the town turned into a bustling, vibrant base for Camp Toccoa, a short distance to the north, built by the War Department into a military encampment of over 200 tents and buildings. But Camp Toccoa was miserable in the summer and even worse in the winter.
It was here that the independent 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, under its no-nonsense Colonel Robert Sink, was activated. It was here also that the martinet Captain Herbert Sobel, reviled by his men of E Company and known by everyone familiar with the story of the “Band of Brothers,” plied his brutal trade and whipped them into shape, and beyond.8
Don Malarkey, a new member of E/506/101st, recalled his first run up and down Mount Currahee: “After a half mile up the three-mile-long logging road twisting through the pines [Rod Bain] and [Tom] Burgess were gliding along and I was sucking eggs. Near the top I thought I was going to lose my dinner. On the way down I thought I was going to lose everything I’d eaten since high school.” Through the camaraderie of his fellow sufferers, he soon learned the meaning of the 506th’s battle cry, “Currahee!”—“We stand alone together.”
Malarkey soon came to realize that his company—run by Captain Sobel, a disciplinarian whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to gain a reputation as the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the Army—was like none other. Sobel was, in Malarkey’s words, “the man who demanded the fifty-milers, the hog-guts-in-your-face obstacle courses, and the no-blinking-on-a-run-or-I’ll-kick-your-ass rule on the Currahee runs.”9
Although Lieutenant Dick Winters, a platoon leader in E Company, felt Sobel was unduly harsh, unfair, and mean, he also realized that the company commander had the task of turning a bunch of civilians into a strong fighting unit capable of withstanding any adversity. In that, Winters said, Sobel was successful and E Company was “magnificent.”10
Joe Doughty, a newly commissioned second lieutenant from St. Louis in G Company, 506th, said, “We only stayed at Toccoa for a short time. Colonel Sink wanted his officers to get their jump training there. We had an old C-47 that we were using for jumps, but one day it ended up in a cornfield. After that we had to do our jumps at Fort Benning. At Toccoa we did a lot of running. We were all really young guys and in good shape; we ran all the time. Mount Currahee was there and we were always running up and down it—three miles up and three miles down.”11
In June 1943, the 101st was reorganized: the 401st Glider Infantry Regiment was dropped and the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had been training as an independent parachute regiment along with the 507th PIR at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, 175 miles north of Benning, was added; the 507th would be assigned to the 82nd.12
As Doughty said, training at Toccoa did not last long. Soon the 506th was off to Benning, then in late February 1943 to Camp Mackall, North Carolina (a sub-installation of nearby Fort Bragg), then Camp Shanks, New York.13 In May 1943, the 101st conducted division maneuvers against the 82nd.14
In the meantime, the glider infantry and artillery troops, along with glider pilots and C-47 crews, were being taught their craft at Laurinburg-Maxton Army Air Base, North Carolina—home to 630 officers and 6,400 enlisted men.15
On April 17, 1943, the 82nd Airborne Division left Fort Bragg by troop train and was moved to Camp Edwards, Massachusetts, and from there to New York, where it boarded a ship on 29 April and sailed in convoy to North Africa, landing at Casablanca, French Morocco, on 10 May. After marching through the exotic but filthy city, the division camped in tents on the sandy, windlblown outskirts. A few days later the 82nd departed Casablanca, passed through the detritus of earlier battles, and set up camp at the even more desolate towns of Oujda and Marnia.16
General Ridgway noted that the division began training during the day, but it was so hot that the training was rescheduled for the cooler nights. He wrote, “The wind and terrain were our worst enemies. Even on the rare calm days, jumping was a hazard, for the ground was hard, and covered with loose boulders, from the size of a man’s fist to the size of his head.”17
Luckily, the men did not have to endure the harsh conditions much longer; they soon would be heading for their first battle—Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily.
In September 1943 the 101st was also on the move—down to New York City and Pier 88 on the Hudson River, where the troopship SS Samaria took the division across the rough, U-boat-infested waters of the North Atlantic to England. The 506th, as well as the entire 101st, was off to Britain.18