The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Nevertheless, the German paratroops were confident. “Frankly, we weren’t afraid,” Geritzlehner recalled. “We were so convinced that everything would be settled in a few hours that [when we formed up] we didn’t even take our personal effects. Only our weapons, ammunition and some food. Everyone was confident.”49

  • •

  To the east, where the British and Canadian gliderborne and paratroops were landing, the Germans were also immobilized, not by what the Allies were doing but because of their own command structure. Col. Hans von Luck’s 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division was the one Rommel counted on to counterattack any invading forces on the east of the Orne Canal and River. At 0130 Luck got his first reports of landings. He immediately assembled his regiment and within the hour his officers and men were standing beside their tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.

  But although Luck had prepared for exactly this moment, knew where he wanted to go—to the Orne Canal bridge, to take it back from Major Howard—over what routes, with what alternatives, he could not give the order to go. Only Hitler could release the panzers, and Hitler was sleeping. So was Rundstedt. Rommel was with his wife. General Dollmann was in Rennes. General Feuchtinger was in Paris. Seventh Army headquarters couldn’t make out what was happening.

  At 0240, the acting commander of Rundstedt’s Army Group West contended, “We are not confronted by a major action.” His chief of staff replied, “It can be nothing less than that in view of the depth of the penetration.” The argument went on without resolution.50

  Luck had no doubts. “My idea,” he said forty years later, “was to counterattack before the British could organize their defenses, before their air force people could come, before the British navy could hit us. We were quite familiar with the ground and I think that we could have been able to get through to the bridges.” Had he done so, Howard’s company had only hand-held Piat antitank rockets to stop him with, and only a couple of those. But Luck could not act on his own initiative, so there he sat, a senior officer in the division Rommel most counted on to drive the Allies into the sea if they attacked near Caen, personally quite certain of what he could accomplish, rendered immobile by the intricacies of the leadership principle in the Third Reich.51

  • •

  Beginning at 0300, the gliders began to come in to reinforce the paratroopers. On the left flank, sixty-nine gliders brought in a regiment and the commander of the 6th Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Richard Gale. They landed near Ranville on fields that had been cleared by paratroopers who had dropped a couple of hours earlier. Forty-nine of the gliders landed safely on the correct landing zone. They brought jeeps and antitank guns.

  On the right flank, fifty-two American gliders swooped down on Hiesville, six kilometers from Ste.-Mère-Église. They were carrying troops, jeeps, antitank guns, and a small bulldozer. Brig. Gen. Don Pratt, assistant division commander of the 101st, was in the lead glider. Lt. Robert Butler was the pilot in the second glider. As the gliders approached the landing zone, German antiaircraft fire caused the tug pilots in their Dakotas to climb, so that when Butler and the others cut loose from their 300-yard-long nylon tow ropes they had to “circle and circle.” Planes and gliders were being shot down.

  For those who survived the antiaircraft fire the problem became the Norman hedgerows. The fields they enclosed were too small for a decent landing zone. Worse, the trees were much higher than expected. (This was one of the great failures of Allied intelligence. As Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd put it, “No one had informed us of the immense size of the French hedgerows. We were of course told that we would be in hedgerow country, but we assumed that they would be similar to the English hedgerows, which were like small fences that the fox hunters jumped over.”52) In Normandy, the hedgerows were six feet or more high, virtually impenetrable. The roads between the hedgerows were sunken, meaning that the Germans had what amounted to a vast field of ready-made trenches. Why intelligence missed this obvious major feature of the battlefield is a mystery.

  If the glider pilots came in low, they would see trees looming in front of them, try to pull up to go over, stall out, and crash. If they came in high, they couldn’t get the gliders down in the small fields in time to avoid the hedgerow at the far end. The result, in the words of Sgt. James Elmo Jones of the 82nd, a pathfinder who was marking a field for the gliders, “was tragic. There’s never been a greater slaughter than what took place that night. It was the most horrible thing that a person could see.”53

  In front of Lieutenant Butler, Col. Mike Murphy had the controls of the lead glider. Butler watched it take some hits from a German machine gun—General Pratt was killed, the first general officer on either side to die that day—and Murphy crashed into a hedgerow, breaking both his legs.54

  Sgt. Leonard Lebenson of the 82nd was in a glider that hit a treetop, bounced off, hit the ground, glanced off the corner of a farmhouse, and finally crashed into another tree. “There were pieces of our glider strewn over the confines of this relatively small field, but miraculously only one guy was hurt.”55

  Lt. Charles Skidmore, a pilot, landed safely in a flooded area. He managed to get out of the water and immediately came under rifle fire. It came from a bunker holding a dozen conscripted Polish soldiers with one German sergeant in charge. The men Skidmore had brought in joined him and began firing back. There was a lull in the firefight. Then a single shot. Then shouts and laughter. Then the Poles emerged with their hands held high to surrender. They had shot the German sergeant.56

  Private Reisenleiter of the 508th was in a field across from one where a glider came down. In the dark, with the hedgerows looming above him, he could hardly tell what was going on. He heard some crashing about on the other side and called out, “Flash.”

  “Flash your ass,” the answer came back. “They’re killing us out here and we’re getting the hell out of here.” Reisenleiter let them go; he figured only an American could have given such a response to the challenge.57, VI

  Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR watched the glider landing. “We could hear the sounds of planes in the distance, then no sounds at all. This was followed by a series of swishing noises. Adding to the swelling crescendo of sounds was the tearing of branches and trees followed by loud crashes and intermittent screams. The gliders were coming in rapidly, one after the other, from all different directions. Many overshot the field and landed in the surrounding woods, while others crashed into nearby farmhouses and stone walls.

  “In a moment, the field was complete chaos. Equipment broke away and catapulted as it hit the ground, plowing up huge mounds of earth. Bodies and bundles were thrown all along the length of the field. Some of the glider troopers were impaled by the splintering wood of the fragile plywood gliders. We immediately tried to aid the injured, but knew we would first have to decide who could be helped and who could not. A makeshift aid station was set up and we began the grim process of separating the living from the dead. I saw one man with his legs and buttocks sticking out of the canvas fuselage of a glider. I tried to pull him out. He would not budge. When I looked inside the wreckage, I could see his upper torso had been crushed by a jeep.”58

  Some of the gliders carried bulldozers, to be used to make landing strips for later glider landings. Sgt. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th PIR recalled that “the sound of one glider hitting a tree was similar to smashing a thousand matchboxes all at once, and I could just visualize the poor pilot with that baby bulldozer smashing into him.”59

  The glider casualties for the 82nd were heavy. Of the 957 men who went into Normandy that night, twenty-five were killed, 118 wounded, fourteen missing (a 16 percent casualty rate). Nineteen of 111 jeeps were unserviceable, as were four of seventeen antitank guns.

  Anytime a unit takes 16 percent casualties before it even gets into action, somebody had to have made a big mistake. But Leigh Mallory had feared that the gliderborne troops might take 70 percent casualties, primarily because of Rommel’s asparagus. In t
he event, those poles in the ground were inconsequential; it was the hedgerows that caused the problems. And the jeeps and antitank guns that did survive proved to be invaluable.

  • •

  By 0400, the American paratroopers and gliderborne troops were scattered to hell and gone across the Cotentin. With few exceptions, they were lost. Except for Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 505th, they were alone or gathered into groups of three, five, ten, at the most thirty men. They had lost the bulk of their equipment bundles; the little blue lights attached to the bundles had mostly failed to work. Most men had lost their leg bags, containing extra ammunition, field radios, tripods for the machine guns, and the like. The few radios that they had recovered had either got soaked in the flooded areas or damaged on hitting the ground and did not work. They had taken heavy casualties, from the opening shock, from hitting the ground too hard as a result of jumping too low, from German fire, from glider crashes.

  Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st landed in a marsh. His company was supposed to assemble on a bugle call, but the bugler drowned. He found Pvt. John Fordik and a Private Smith. Smith could not walk—he had broken his back. Others in the stick had drowned. Cartledge gathered together ten men from his platoon. They carried Smith to high ground and covered him with brush. He insisted on retaining the two homing pigeons he had with him. One had a message on its leg saying the battalion was being wiped out; the other said it was accomplishing its mission. Smith had been told to release one or the other at daylight.

  As the platoon prepared to move out, Smith’s last words to Cartledge were, “I’ll send the right message. Don’t make me out a liar.”

  As the platoon left, a German machine gun opened up. The men dove back into the marsh. Cartledge had no radio. He was lost, chest deep in water, taking fire without being able to return it. Private Fordik, “a tough Pennsylvania coal miner,” leaned over to whisper in his ear, “You know, Lieutenant Cartledge, I think the Germans are winning this war.”60

  • •

  Ten weeks later, when the airborne troops were back in England, preparing for another jump, possibly at night, the regimental and battalion commanders of the 82nd gathered at Glebe Mount House, Leicester, for a debriefing conference. They did an analysis of what went wrong, what went right.

  They started with the pilots. In the future the paratroop commanders wanted the pilots trained for combat and bad-weather missions. They wanted them forced to slow down—one suggestion was that every pilot of Troop Carrier Command be made to jump from a plane going 150 miles per hour. They wanted the pilots told that evasive action in a sky full of tracers did no good and caused much harm.

  They did not say so, but it seems clear that radio silence also did more harm than good. The German antiaircraft crews were fully alerted by the pathfinder planes anyway. Had the pathfinder pilots sent back word of the cloud bank, the pilots in the main train would have been alerted. Had they been able to talk to each other on the radio, the dispersion of aircraft would not have been so great.

  Only the battalion commanders of the 505th had anything good to say about the lighted-T system—Lt. Col. Edward Krause, CO of the 3rd Battalion, said that when he saw his T, “I felt that I had found the Holy Grail.” None of the others had seen their Ts (which in most cases had not been set up because the pathfinders were not sure they were in the right place). No one expressed faith in the Eureka system.

  There was general agreement that equipment bundles had to be tied together and a better lighting system devised. The commanders wanted every man to carry a mine (and put it to immediate use by placing it on a road; the men should be instructed to stay off the roads otherwise). Some way had to be devised to bring in a bazooka with each squad. The Gammon grenade “was very satisfactory.” Each man should be issued a .45 “so as to be available immediately upon landing.”

  As to assembly, the commanders thought that flares would be the most effective method—but not too many. One per battalion, carried by the CO, would be sufficient. Whistles, bugles, and the like had been unsatisfactory, partly because of the noise from antiaircraft fire, partly because in hedgerow country the sound did not carry. The rolling-up-the-stick method was a failure because of the hedgerows and the scattered nature of the drops. Better radios and more of them would be a great help. The men had to be taught how to get out of their chutes faster (the simple solution to that was to get rid of those buckles and adopt the British quick-release mechanism, which was done).61

  • •

  So the paratroop commanders found much to criticize in the operation. Still, contrary to the fear Private Fordik had expressed to Lieutenant Cartledge, the Germans were not winning the war. Scattered though they were, the paratroopers and gliderborne troops were about to go into action while the Germans, for the most part, were still holed up, badly confused.

  * * *

  I. Bortzfield’s plane had to make an emergency landing in England, with the left engine gone and no hydraulic pressure left. An ambulance picked him up on the runway and rushed him to a hospital. He recalled, “I was a real celebrity because at this moment I was their only patient. All their patients had been evacuated and they were waiting for D-Day casualties. I was in the ward by 0600 when the boys were hitting the beaches. The doctors really interrogated me” (Charles Bortzfield oral history, EC).

  II. Davis was killed a few days later outside Carentan. William True had been in a quonset hut with Davis in England. There were sixteen men in the hut; only three returned unscathed to England in mid-July (William True oral history, EC).

  III. M. Andre Mace, a resident of Ste.-Mère-Église, wrote that night in his diary: “ALERTE! A great number of low flying planes fly over the town—shaving the roof tops, it is like a thunderous noise, suddenly, the alarm is given, there is a fire in town. In the meantime the Germans fire all they can at the planes. We go into hiding, what is going on? Thousands [sic] of paratroopers are landing everywhere amid gun fire.

  “We are huddled in M. Besselievre’s garage with our friends. Our liberators are here!”

  (Original in the Parachute Museum, Ste.-Mère-Église; copy in EC.)

  IV. De Weese was killed in action in Holland on September 23, 1944. A copy of his letter is in EC.

  V. Bouchereau was liberated later that month and got his revenge in Holland (Paul Bouchereau oral history, EC).

  VI. The first thing glider troops were taught to do after a landing was to run for cover in the woods or whatever surrounded the landing zone—they were never to stay in the open. That may explain the response to Reisenleiter.

  12

  “LET’S GET THOSE BASTARDS”

  The Airborne Night Attack

  AT THE GLEBE MOUNT HOUSE debriefing in August 1944, the 82nd’s regimental and battalion commanders concluded that the troops should be trained to assemble more quickly and to send out search parties for the equipment bundles. “It is most important, however, that the hours of darkness be used for the seizure of key points and objectives. The enemy reaction becomes increasingly violent with daylight.”

  Further, “prompt aggressive action by each individual is imperative immediately upon landing. An individual or small unit that ‘holes up’ and does nothing is ultimately isolated and destroyed. An airborne unit has the initiative upon landing; it must retain it. This is the essence of successful reorganization and accomplishment of a mission.”1

  Obviously, the commanders were unhappy with some of their troopers. Too many had hunkered down in hedgerows to await the dawn; a few had even gone to sleep. Pvt. Francis Palys of the 506th saw what was perhaps the worst dereliction of duty. He had gathered a squad near Vierville. Hearing “all kinds of noise and singing from a distance,” he and his men sneaked up on a farmhouse. In it was a mixed group from both American divisions. The paratroopers had found the Calvados barrel in the cellar (there was one in virtually every Norman cellar) and “they were drunker than a bunch of hillbillies on a Saturday night wingding. Unbelievable.”2

&
nbsp; The 505th’s historian, Allen Langdon, attempted to explain the actions of these and other men who were not acting aggressively. He wrote, “A parachute jump and in particular a combat jump (if you survived it) was so exhilarating that first-timers were apt to forget the real reason they were there—to kill Germans. The feeling was: ‘We’ve made the jump, now the Germans should roll over and play dead.’ In every regiment it seemed to take one combat jump to instill the idea that jumping was only a means of transportation. Another phenomenon noted . . . was the shock of the quick transition from a peaceful . . . situation to a war zone. Because of it, troopers were ofttimes reluctant to shoot.”3

  Pvt. Dwayne Burns was crouched beside a hedgerow. He heard a noise on the other side. “I climbed up and slowly looked over, and as I did, a German on the other side raised up and looked over. In the dark I could barely see his features. We stood there looking at each other, then slowly each of us went back down.” They moved off in opposite directions.4

  Others had similar experiences. Lt. Lynn Tomlinson of the 508th was moving down a hedgerow. He looked across at a low point in the hedge and saw four German soldiers going in the opposite direction. “They were kids. I was within five feet of them.” The moon had come out, and “One of these kids saw me and smiled. I decided that if they would stay out of our way, we would stay out of theirs.”5

  Pvt. R. J. Nieblas of the 508th was crouched beside a hedgerow with a paved road on the other side. His company CO had ordered him not to fire. He heard hobnailed boots on the road, then saw a German patrol marching past. “These were young fellows, kids—well, we were too—and their sharp uniforms impressed me. We didn’t fire and I thought at the time, God, I don’t know if I could fire point blank at an unsuspecting man.”I