Like the M1, the ’03 could be fired using at least three types of grenades. The antitank grenade was a small, shaped charge that was totally ineffective for penetrating the steel on a tank. Again, we aimed at the bogie wheels to disable the vehicle rather than attempt to kill the occupants. We also had fragmentation grenades on frames that we could mount on the launcher. The frame held the arming device safely until we fired, and the grenade went much farther than we could throw it. This helped us somewhat in hedgerow country. The third type of grenade was a high explosive.
I had pressing personal reasons for feeling less than enthusiastic regarding the ’03 rifle grenade launcher. I was acquainted with the rifle, I was probably the most experienced member of the squad, and I was the leader, so I was more or less volunteered to carry one. This meant that in addition to my personal and squad leader’s gear, I had a rifle grenade launcher, a bag of rifle grenades, and a supply of blank ammunition to haul. But these weren’t the only reasons I didn’t like the ’03. The problem was, it could only load five rounds of ammunition, and it took some time to do this. All stocks of clipped ammunition were maintained with a ratio of about twelve or fourteen to one, so if I ran out of clips, I could not replace them as easily as I could for an M1, simply because there were far fewer ’03s around.
The ’03 rifle also presented me with the very immediate problem of how to get out of the plane. We jumped with our M1s field stripped into three main pieces. We carried the dismounted rifle in a well-padded jump case, worn across our fronts, which permitted us to jump without hampering us. But I had to jump with my ’03 in one piece. If I held it crosswise, I wouldn’t be able to get out the door, so I had to mount it intact almost parallel to my body. The mind boggles at what could happen when landing with a rifle sticking up in one long piece.
This detail only goes to show our larger problem in Normandy. The M1 rifle became standard issue in the early 1940s. But here I was, going into combat with a bolt-action ’03 rifle left over from World War I. I missed my M1 dearly. And yet, as I said, it never occurred to us that we might not be successful.
Chapter 16
D-Day Jump: The Defense of Ste. Mère-Eglise
When we finally got the order to go on D-Day, we moved to our planes, loaded our bundles in the belly racks, and saddled up. I taped together all my loose equipment, anything that could flop or swing out from my body, including my holster, by running tape over it and around my leg or thigh. I did have a .45, and I carried it loaded with a seven-round clip. I had a pistol pouch with two extra magazines, and threw twenty to thirty loose rounds of pistol ammo into my musette bag. I also carried a heavy canvas bag of rifle grenades and the blanks to fire them. By the time I was ready to jump, I was loaded down with nearly my own weight in equipment, one hundred fifty pounds, without including the parachute and the reserve.
After I got everything on, I draped my Mae West life jacket over my head and let it dangle. I was so heavily loaded that the life preserver stuck out nearly horizontally. I couldn’t even fasten the waist strap. There were many jokes about the likely effectiveness of the Mae West if we were forced to land in the English Channel. We then attempted to get in the plane. One soldier would get in, and another would try to climb up while another guy got behind him. One would pull and the other would push, and together they would finally generate enough momentum for the trooper in the middle to get through the door. Then we waddled down the aisle and found our seats.
There wasn’t much joking or fooling around once we got in the plane. We sat down, and everyone was very quiet. When we took off, it was still daylight. We were on English double daylight saving time, so I could see quite a ways from the fenced-in area. A large group of civilians had turned out, some waving wildly, some standing silently watching our departure. Once we got into flight, the rosary beads appeared in the hands of most of our Catholic soldiers. Beads or no beads, I think we all were saying our silent prayers. We had airsickness buckets in case anyone got sick, and some people did.
We did not come in over the invasion beaches. Our flight came from the northwest, taking us in the back door on the northwest side of the peninsula. After the fiasco in Sicily, General Ridgway stuck to his vow never to approve another airborne movement over a naval convoy; when we came in over Normandy, at least we were facing only enemy anti-aircraft fire.
The 2d Battalion of the 505 was leading the 82d Airborne formation. Coming in, our lead pilot saw heavy cloud banks at a low altitude ahead. Being a smart commander, he thought he could fly over the clouds and have enough time and distance to be able to get down to the correct drop altitude and speed before we got to the DZ. From what I understand, he misjudged his time and distance. We did go over most of the clouds, but when he started leveling off, he was already over the drop zone.
We were much, much too high, and going much, much too fast. Instead of jumping at 600 feet, we were at 1,800 to 2,000 feet. Normally the pilot would slow down to about 95 miles per hour and lower the nose of the plane when we jumped. This time he simply had to give the green light. Just before I jumped, I glanced at my watch, which was on the inside of my left wrist, like I always wear it. It was an hour and fifty-one minutes after midnight, June 6, 1944.
The opening shock was the hardest I’ve ever experienced. It ripped my musette bag right off my body, despite the heavy fastenings. I lost that bag and everything in it, including my chewing tobacco. This left me at great disadvantage and put me in a foul mood for at least eleven days. The speed made it impossible for me to get the right position before my chute opened. My body was inverted—head down and feet up.
The first thing I remember seeing as I descended was a large spire in a bunch of buildings that later proved to be Ste. Mère-Eglise. To my surprise, there were fires in the town. Almost immediately after—these things happen in microseconds—I started receiving very heavy light flak and machine gun fire from the ground. This was absolutely terrifying. The tracers looked as if they were going take the top of my head off, but they were actually coming up at an angle. Many rounds tore through my chute only a few feet above my body. The third thing I remember is the explosions on the ground, making me fear the Germans had already zeroed in on our DZ. I later found out that these explosions resulted from our mine bundles. Either the speed of the plane pulled the chutes off, or the bundles dropped faster than expected, and the impact bent the safety clips on the fuses, causing them to explode.
It seemed to me that it took forever to land. A combination of bad body position, heavy load, and that damned ’03 rifle added to the jolt I experienced when I hit the ground. But how good it felt to be rid of those damn tracers.
Only many years after the war did I learn what I now consider the true story of what went wrong on the drop. The flights coming in behind the 2d Battalion, 505, went right through the clouds, instead of going over the tops and attempting to drop down through. Many of the pilots broke formation, scattering plane loads of troopers over the whole Cherbourg peninsula. I know for a fact that the pilots who broke formation and had no idea of their location were still under strict orders not to bring any troopers back. So no matter where they were, they gave the green light, and out the troopers went. As it turned out, the 2d 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.
I landed in a small field with cows over to one side. Because of the bone-rattling opening shock and a very hard landing, my back, hips and joints gave me pain for days. If it had been a training jump, I would have sought medical attention. I didn’t have that luxury. Before I even attempted to get out of my chute, I crawled over to the nearest hedgerow to get some cover. I pulled my pistol out, put it beside me, and went to work on the buckles of my chute. I had some trouble getting the snaps undone because everything was pulled so tightly.
I kept looking up, watching the planes. They were taking a lot of ack-ack fire from Ste. Mère-E
glise, and flying off in all directions. This created difficulties in regrouping, because about our only way of finding each other was to orient ourselves by the plane. Soon I caught sight of a green star-cluster flare and started moving in its direction. It shot high into the air and burst in a brilliant cluster. This was the sign that someone in the battalion command group had reached the battalion assembly location.
It was especially tricky to assemble at night, because Normandy was the first experience of combat for many of the men who made the jump. This was the case for two out of three regiments of the 82d, the 507 and the 508, and all the regiments of the 101st. The 504 did not participate, because it had just returned to England from Italy in late April, and was in no shape to get ready for a new campaign in so little time. The 505 RCT was the only veteran American parachute regiment in the invasion.
Luckily, my group and I didn’t encounter any enemy troops while we were assembling. We each had been issued a little metal cricket, like the ones that used to come in boxes of cereal or Cracker Jacks, which we used to challenge for the first night only. In times of uncertainty, I would signal with one “click-click” of the cricket, then wait for two in return. Of course, the Germans soon caught on to this, and used the crickets too. We also used sign and countersign, challenging with “flash” and counter-signing with “thunder”—two words the Germans found hard to pronounce. Anyone who hollered “halt” was to be shot, no questions asked. The German command sounded much too much like our own.
I brought in eight to ten men from our own battalion. I was surprised to discover that others I encountered were from the 101st Airborne, which had preceded the 82d into Normandy. They were four or five miles off their DZ. I asked them to stay with me, but they all elected to go on their own. I don’t remember anyone in my group bringing in any bundles, and I didn’t hunt for them either. Even if we had known where they were, the hedgerow country would have made it difficult to get to them. High banks full of trees and brush had been built up over the centuries, surrounding the fields. They were much more of a hindrance than barbed wire or rail fences. We had to climb up through a tangle of bushes and trees to come out on the far side of a field. Loaded down as we were, this greatly hampered our movement.
One of my problems as a squad leader was to keep the men I gathered spread out. In combat or under any other kind of threat, humans, like all other animals, bunch up together; the herding instinct takes over. We all, myself included, instinctively wanted the safety of numbers, but I managed to keep the men as far away from one another as possible, without losing control. Finally we saw a green glass lantern hung in the tallest tree in the center of the battalion assembly area, a more permanent assembly marker than the flares. Closer in, we encountered troopers who had been spotted around the perimeter to point out the general direction for each company. I was challenged along the way, and at various times I challenged in turn. It all turned out all right; no one shot anyone else.
Signs of daylight were just beginning as we entered the assembly area. One of the first sights I saw was Colonel Vandervoort. He had broken his ankle in the jump and was hopping around on one leg, using a rifle as a crutch. Most of my squad showed up, but I did lose George Paris, whom I never saw again. He was listed as MIA, but I later discovered he had been found with jump injuries.
While the 3d Platoon of Company F was assembling, we spied an individual down at one end of the field standing on the hedgerow trying to observe some gliders coming in. Our platoon leader, Little Joe Holcomb, said, “Go tell that asshole to get down and take cover.” We didn’t want to give our position away, so I went off in that direction, and hollered at some distance about getting down. I don’t know about the politeness of the language I used. As the individual turned toward me, I saw two big stars. It was General Ridgway. I quickly turned and reported to Lieutenant Holcomb. That was the first and last time I tried to chew out the general.
The glider troops that came in that morning took a terrific beating. This is one of the most sickening things I remember. The Germans still controlled the gliders’ LZ, and the landing had to be diverted at the last minute. There was a lot of confusion, and some of the pilots were forced to find the nearest available spot to land. They were under a lot of heavy small arms fire and flak, and I think they misjudged the size of the fields. If we saw them, or heard them coming in at tree-top level, we just crossed our fingers. There was nothing else we could do. Within a few seconds, they slammed into the hedgerow at the other end of the field. In town, others almost hit the aid station and the schoolhouse, and one actually knocked out Company D’s CP.
I still can hear those gliders hitting the hedgerows, tearing off wings, smashing equipment, and mangling and killing the crews. We picked up only eight of our sixteen 57s. These were brought in by Capt Alfred Ireland, who had been on detached duty with 82d Airborne Division Headquarters for planning the Normandy invasion. He later told me he would have preferred to jump any day.
I suppose it’s miraculous we even got as many guns as we did. But often there was no crew left to operate them, and we now saw the real value of the cross-training we had undertaken back in Northern Ireland because we sometimes had to man the 57s ourselves. We had very few motor vehicles, which meant we pulled them around by hand. Colonel Vandervoort placed one of them near the battalion CP, where a former artilleryman, Pvt John Atchley, single-handedly knocked out a German self-propelled gun only fifty yards from the CP, and disabled the second one behind it.
Shortly after daylight, Colonel Vandervoort decided we had enough of the battalion assembled. We were about 400-strong and close to being completely equipped as we started moving toward our mission area. We went cross-country instead of using the roads. Whenever we saw a farm off to our flank, we sent people to make sure we weren’t under observation from enemy soldiers hiding out in the farmhouses. I was selected for one of these trips and took about half a squad with me to investigate. As we got closer, the inhabitants came running out. I didn’t have a French-speaking soldier in the squad, but I tried to explain to them that we had to search their house. They were quite put out about it, but I had to do the job. We hollered out in our rendition of German, “Kommst du here,” and “Handy hoch, if you’re in there!” No one showed.
Once I got into the close confines of the house, my ’03 rifle wasn’t much use to me. I had to set it down and climb on chairs to get into the crawlspaces. I pushed the trap door up into the second story, thinking to myself, “This is very stupid.” As I stuck my head and .45 over the edge, I wondered what my chances would be if there was a German in there who wanted to resist. Luckily, the worst thing we encountered were indignant Frenchmen insulted by our search of their homes.
The 3d Battalion, 505, had entered the town of Ste. Mère-Eglise at daylight or earlier, taking thirty prisoners among the occupying Germans and killing about ten more. One of their first acts was to hoist over the city hall the same battle-worn American flag that had flown over Naples. Once again, I’m sure “Cannonball” Krause, the commander of the 3d Battalion, meant this symbolic act to sound a note for future historians. In any case, the citizens of Ste. Mère-Eglise have always proudly claimed that theirs was the first French city to be liberated.
The 3d Battalion’s drop had been more scattered than ours, but they occupied the town with what forces they had and managed to hold it. They were subject to attack at almost any point in a circle, except toward the northeast, where the 2d Battalion had landed near Neuville. And receive attacks they did. Colonel Ekman, the regimental commander, ordered Colonel Vandervoort, our battalion commander, to move the 2d in to strengthen the town’s perimeter defense.
Colonel Ekman himself had been dropped in the wrong spot and was unable to radio through to the 3d Battalion in Ste. Mère-Eglise. Our battalion met up with him and his group an hour or so after daylight, very close to our objective near Neuville-au-Plain, and he here decided to reverse our battalion’s course of march. At the squad-leader level, all w
e knew was that now we were going into Ste. Mère-Eglise instead of defending it from Neuville-au-Plain.
As we neared the town, we began to see some of our fellow paratroopers hanging in tree limbs, shot and killed either on the descent or after they had gotten tangled in the branches. This was all the more demoralizing because the majority of a stick from our own company had landed in Ste. Mère-Eglise and most of the men had been lost. For me, the sight of those dead men remains to this day one of the saddest, most vivid, and horrendous scenes of the entire war. As we got into town, one of my most striking memories is of a single dead body. One huge, blond German soldier, a stereotypical superman, lay in the church square. Twenty or thirty yards away, one of our troopers hung shot in a tree.
I had many friends and acquaintances among our own casualties. My friend and a former member of the squad, Blankenship, who had transferred to the 2d Platoon, was found in town, hanging in his chute. Lieutenant Cadish, a platoon leader who joined us just days before the operation, never got out of his chute. According to the regimental history, the trooper in the tree beside the square was Sergeant Ray—Big Ray—with whom I had gone to Glasgow, Scotland. He had landed between the German guard and Privates Steele and Russell, whose parachutes had both become caught up on the church. The dead superman figure we saw had been heading toward them when Big Ray shot him in a last heroic act, saving the lives of Steele and Russell just before he was killed. Like everyone else, I saw John Steele’s empty chute hanging from the steeple in Ste. Mère-Eglise as we passed through town.
As we headed toward the cemetery, we started receiving some small arms fire to our right front. We waited a few minutes, and identified it as a German MG42, a very rapid-fire light machine gun. I suggested to the lieutenant that we better try flanking. Soon we discovered that members of Company G had cleaned out some German machine gun crews and were now in the defensive position using the MG42s. This was nice to know, especially as my squad was the right flank squad of Company F in our preliminary defense, tying in with Company G to our right. I told the troopers in Company G that the German machine guns made us jumpy, that we didn’t know if the fire was friend or foe. But they kept right on using them.
Descending from the Clouds Page 14
