The men threw their kits, parachutes, and leg bags into the waiting trucks, climbed in themselves, and were driven out to the waiting planes.
"With that done," Winters wrote in his diary, "we went to work harnessing up. It's here that a good jump master can do the most for his men. Getting all that equipment on, tied down, make it comfortable and safe, then a parachute over the top, calls for a lot of ingenuity and sales talk to satisfy the men that all's well."
Dressed for battle, they sat under the wings of the planes, waiting. The nervousness increased. "This is the jump where your problems begin after you land," they told one another. It was the "$10,000 jump" (the men had $10,000 G.I. life insurance). Men struggled to their feet to go to the edge of the runway to relieve themselves, got back, sat down, and two minutes later repeated the process. Joe Toye recalled Lieutenant Meehan coming over to his plane to tell the men, "No prisoners. We are not taking any prisoners."
At 2200, mount up. The jumpmasters pushed their men up the steps, each of them carrying at least 100 pounds, many 150 pounds. One 101st trooper spoke for all 13,400 men in the two airborne divisions when he got to the door of his C-47, turned to the east, and called, "Look out, Hitler! Here we come!"
At 2310 the C-47s began roaring down the runway. When they reached 1,000 feet, they began to circle, getting into a V of Vs formation, three planes to each V. As they straightened out for France, most of the men found it difficult to stay awake. This was the effect of those pills. Through that night, and into the next day, paratroopers had trouble staying awake. Joe Toye did fall asleep on his flight: "I was never so calm in all my life," he recalled. "Jesus, I was more excited on practice jumps."
On Winters's plane, Pvt. Joe Hogan tried to get a song going, but it was soon lost in the roar of the motors. On Gordon's plane, as on most, men were lost in their own thoughts or prayers. Pvt. Wayne Sisk of West Virginia broke the mood by calling out, "Does anybody here want to buy a good watch?" That brought a roar of laughter and a lessening of the tension.
Winters prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through it, prayed that he wouldn't fail. "Every man, I think, had in his mind, 'How will I react under fire?' "
With Lieutenant Schmidt in hospital, Sergeant Lipton was jump-master on his plane. The pilot gave the paratroopers a choice; they could ride with the door off, giving them fresh air and a chance to get out if the plane was hit, or ride with the door in place, which would allow them to smoke. They chose to take it off, which allowed Lipton to lie on the floor with his head partly out the door. Most of the men were asleep, or nearly so, a consequence of the airsickness pills.
As the C-47 crossed the Channel, Lipton saw a sight no one had ever seen before, nor would anyone ever see again, a sight that every man who was in the air that night never forgot: the invasion fleet, 6,000 vessels strong, heading toward Normandy.
Gordon Carson was with Lieutenant Welsh. As the plane crossed the Channel, Welsh told the men near the front, "Look down." They did, "and all you could see was wakes. No one ever saw so many ships and boats before." Carson commented, "You had to be a little bit awed that you were part of a thing that was so much greater than you."
At 0100, June 6, the planes passed between the islands of Guernsey and Jersey. In his plane, the pilot called back to Winters, "Twenty minutes out." The crew chief removed the door of the plane, giving Winters, standing No. 1, a rush of fresh air and a view of the coast. "Stand up and hook up," he called out. The red light went on.
At 0110, the planes passed over the coast and into a cloud bank. This caused the formation to break up. The lead V plowed straight ahead, but the Vs to each side veered off, the one to the right breaking away in that direction, the one on the left over the opposite way. This was the natural, inevitable reaction of the pilots, who feared midair collisions. When they broke out of the cloud bank, which was only a mile or two across, every pilot was on his own. Only the lead pilots had the device that would lead them to the Pathfinders' Eureka signals;(4)
4. Pathfinders were specially trained volunteers who dropped in an hour ahead of the main body of troops to set up a radio beacon on the DZ to guide the lead plane. Easy's Pathfinders were Cpl. Richard Wright and Pvt. Carl Fenstermaker.
With the formation gone, none of the others knew when or where to turn on the green light. They could only guess.
Lost, bewildered, frightened, the pilots immediately had another worry. Antiaircraft fire began coming up at them, blue, green, and red tracers indicating its path. It was light stuff, 20 and 40 mm. When it hit the planes, it made a sound like rocks being shaken in a tin can. On Harry Welsh's plane, some ack-ack came through exactly where he had been sitting a minute before.
The pilots were supposed to slow down before turning on the green light, but as Gordon put it, "here they were thrust into the very jaws of this violence and they had never had one minute of combat experience, so they were absolutely terrified. And rather than throttle down, they were kind of like a fellow thinking with his feet, they thought with that throttle. And they said, 'My God, common sense will tell me the quicker I get out of here, the better chance I have of surviving, and that's unfortunate for the boys back there, but be that as it may, I'm getting out of here.' "
So they increased speed, up to 150 miles per hour in many cases, and although they did not have the slightest idea where they were, except that it was somewhere over Normandy, they hit the green light.
Men began shouting, "Let's go, let's go." They wanted out of those planes; never had they thought they would be so eager to jump. Lipton's plane was "bouncing and weaving, and the men were yelling, 'Let's get out of here!' " They were only 600 feet up, the 40 mm antiaircraft tracers coming closer and closer. "About the time the tracers were popping right past the tail of the plane," Lipton remembered, "the green light went on." He leaped out. Pvt. James Alley was No. 2, Pvt. Paul Rogers No. 3. Alley had been told to throw his leg bag out the door and follow it into the night. He did as told and ended up flat on the floor with his head and half his body out of the plane, his bag dangling in the air, about to pull him in half. Rogers, who was "strong as a bull," threw him out the door and jumped right behind.
Leo Boyle was the last man in the stick on his plane. There was this "tremendous turbulence" as the green light went on and the men began leaping out into the night. The plane lurched. Boyle was thrown violently down to the floor. The plane was flying at a tilt. Boyle had to reach up for the bottom of the door, pull himself to it, and roll out of the C-47 into the night.
Tracers were everywhere. The lead plane in stick 66, flown by Lt. Harold Cappelluto, was hit with bullets going through it and out the top, throwing sparks. The plane maintained course and speed for a moment or two, then did a slow wingover to the right. Pilot Frank DeFlita, just behind, remembered that "Cappelluto's landing lights came on, and it appeared they were going to make it, when the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded." It was the plane carrying Lieutenant Meehan, 1st Sergeant Evans, and the rest of the company headquarters section, including Sergeant Murray, who had held that long talk with Lipton about how to handle different combat situations. He never got to experience any of the possibilities he and Lipton had tried to visualize.
Easy Company had not put one man into combat yet, and it had already lost platoon leader Schmitz, company commander Meehan, and its first sergeant.
Pvt. Rod Strohl was one of those so overloaded that he could not put on his reserve chute. "I remember thinking, well, hell, if you need it, and it doesn't open, it's going to be over in a hurry, and if you don't need it, you don't need it." His plane got hit and started going down. As his stick went out, "the pilot and co-pilot came out with us."
George Luz was on Welsh's plane. He had barely made it, as in addition to all the regular gear he was carrying a radio and batteries, and had been unable to get into the plane until a bunch of Air Corps guys pushed him in. Once inside, he had turned to Welsh to say, "Lieutenant, you got me fifth man in the stick, and I'll never
make it to the door." So Welsh had told him to change places with Pvt. Roy Cobb. When the flak started ("you could walk on it," Luz remembered; Carson said "we wanted to get out of there so damn bad it was unbelievable") Cobb called out, "I'm hit!"
"Can you stand up?" Welsh shouted.
"I can't."
"Unhook him," Welsh ordered. Mike Ranney unhooked Cobb from the static line. (Private Rader recalled, "Cobb was some pissed. To have trained so hard for two years and not get to make the big jump was hell.") Just then the red light went on, flashed a second, and was hit by flak. "I had no way of telling anything " Welsh recalled, "so I said 'Go' and jumped." Luz kicked his leg bag containing the radio and other equipment out the door and leaped into the night.
Thus did 13,400 of America's finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler's Fortress Europe.
5 "FOLLOW ME"
*
NORMANDY
June 6,1944
They jumped much too low from planes that were flying much too fast. They were carrying far too much equipment and using an untested technique that turned out to be a major mistake. As they left the plane, the leg bags tore loose and hurtled to the ground, in nearly every case never to be seen again. Simultaneously, the prop blast tossed them this way and that. With all the extra weight and all the extra speed, when the chutes opened, the shock was more than they had ever experienced. Jumping at 500 feet, and even less, they hit the ground within seconds of the opening of the chute, so they hit hard. The men were black and blue for a week or more afterward as a result.
In a diary entry written a few days later, Lieutenant Winters tried to re-create his thoughts in those few seconds he was in the air: "We're doing 150 MPH. O.K., let's go. G-D, there goes my leg pack and every bit of equipment I have. Watch it, boy! Watch it! J-C, they're trying to pick me up with those machine-guns. Slip, slip, try and keep close to that leg pack. There it lands beside that hedge. G-D that machine-gun. There's a road, trees-hope I don't hit them. Thump, well that wasn't too bad, now let's get out of this chute."
Burt Christenson jumped right behind Winters. "I don't think I did anything I had been trained to do, but suddenly I got a tremendous shock when my parachute opened." His leg bag broke loose and "it was history." He could hear a bell ringing in Ste. Mere-Eglise, and see a fire burning in town. Machine-gun bullets "are gaining on me. I climb high into my risers. Christ, I'm headed for that line of trees. I'm descending too rapidly." As he passed over the trees, he pulled his legs up to avoid hitting them. "A moment of terror seized me. 70 ft. below and 20 ft. to my left, a German quad mounted 20 mm antiaircraft gun is firing on the C-47's passing overhead." Lucky enough for Christenson, the Germans' line of fire was such that their backs were to him, and the noise was such that they never heard him hit, although he was only 40 yards or so away.
Christenson cut himself out of his chute, pulled his six-shot revolver, and crouched at the base of an apple tree. He stayed still, moving only his eyes.
"Suddenly I caught movement ten yards away, a silhouette of a helmeted man approaching on all fours. I reached for my cricket and clicked it once, click-clack. There was no response. The figure began to move toward me again."
Christenson pointed his revolver at the man's chest and click-clacked again. The man raised his hands. "For Christ sake, don't shoot." It was Pvt. Woodrow Robbins, Christenson's assistant gunner on the machine-gun.
"You dumb shit, what the hell's wrong with you? Why didn't you use your cricket?" Christenson demanded in a fierce whisper.
"I lost the clicker part of the cricket."
Slowly the adrenalin drained from Christenson's brain, and the two men began backing away from the German position. They ran into Bull Randleman, who had a dead German at his feet. Randleman related that the moment he had gotten free of his chute he had fixed his bayonet. Suddenly a German came charging, his bayonet fixed. Randleman knocked the weapon aside, then impaled the German on his bayonet. "That Kraut picked the wrong guy to play bayonets with," Christenson remarked.
Lieutenant Welsh's plane was at 250 feet, "at the most," when he jumped. As he emerged from the C-47, another plane crashed immediately beneath him. He claimed that the blast from the explosion threw him up and to the side "and that saved my life." His chute opened just in time to check his descent just enough to make the "thump" when he landed painful but not fatal.
Most of the men of Easy had a similar experience. Few of them were in the air long enough to orient themselves with any precision, although they could tell from the direction the planes were flying which was the way to the coast.
They landed to hell and gone. The tight pattern within the DZ near Ste. Marie-du-Mont that they had hoped for, indeed had counted on for quick assembly of the company, was so badly screwed up by the evasive action the pilots had taken when they hit the cloud bank that E Company men were scattered from Carentan to Ravenoville, a distance of 20 kilometers. The Pathfinders, Richard Wright and Carl Fenstermaker, came down in the Channel after their plane was hit (they were picked up by H.M.S. Tartar, transferred to Air Sea Rescue, and taken to England).
Pvt. Tom Burgess came down near Ste. Mere-Eglise. Like most of the paratroopers that night, he did not know where he was. Low-flying planes roared overhead, tracers chasing after them, the sky full of descending Americans, indistinct and unidentifiable figures dashing or creeping through the fields, machine-guns pop-pop-popping all around. After cutting himself out of his chute with his pocket knife, he used his cricket to identify himself to a lieutenant he did not know. Together they started working their way toward the beach, hugging the ubiquitous hedgerows. Other troopers joined them, some from the 82nd (also badly scattered in the jump), some from different regiments of the 101st. They had occasional, brief firefights with German patrols.
The lieutenant made Burgess the lead scout. At first light, he came to a corner of the hedgerow he was following. A German soldier hiding in the junction of hedgerows rose up. Burgess didn't see him. The German fired, downward. The bullet hit Burgess's cheekbone, went through the right cheek, fractured it, tore away the hinge of the jaw, and came out the back of his neck. Blood squirted out his cheek, from the back of his neck, and from his ear. He nearly choked to death.
"I wanted to live," Burgess recalled forty-five years later. "They had hammered into us that the main thing if you get hit is don't get excited, the worst thing you can do is go nuts." So he did his best to stay calm. The guys with him patched him up as best they could, got bandages over the wounds, and helped him into a nearby barn, where he collapsed into the hay. He passed out.
At midnight, a French farmer "came out to the barn and sat there and held my hand. He even kissed my hand." He brought a bottle of wine. On the morning of June 7, the farmer fetched two medics and lent them a horse-drawn cart, which they used to take Burgess down to the beach. He was evacuated to England, then back to the States. He arrived in Boston on New Year's Eve, 1944. He was on a strictly liquid diet until March 1945, when he took his first bite of solid food since his last meal at Uppottery, June 5, 1944.
Private Gordon hit hard. He had no idea where he was, but he had a definite idea of what he was determined to do first—assemble his machine-gun. He tucked himself into a hedgerow and did the job. As he finished, "I noticed this figure coming, and I realized it was John Eubanks from the way he walked." Shortly thereafter Forrest Guth joined them. Another figure loomed in the dark. "Challenge him," Gordon to Eubanks. Before Eubanks could do so, the man called out, "Flash." Eubanks forgot the countersign ("Thunder") and forgot that the clicker was an alternative identification option, and instead said, "Lightning." The man lobbed a grenade in on the three E Company men. They scattered, it went off, fortunately no one was hurt, the soldier disappeared, which was probably good for the group, as he was clearly much too nervous to trust.
Gordon, Eubanks, and Guth started moving down a hedgerow toward the beach. They saw an American paratrooper running
through the field, crouch, and jump into a drainage ditch (there was a three-quarters moon that night, and few clouds over the land, so visibility was fair). Gordon told the others to stay still, he would check it out. He crept to the ditch, where "I encountered these two eyeballs looking up at me and the muzzle of a pistol right in my face."
"Gordon, is that you?" It was Sgt. Floyd Talbert. Now there were four. Together they continued creeping, crawling, moving toward the beach. A half-hour or so before first light, Guth heard what he was certain was the howling and whining of a convoy of 2'/2 ton G.I. trucks going past. How could that be? The seaborne invasion hadn't even started, much less put truck convoys ashore. Some tremendous bursts coming from inland answered the question: the noise Guth heard came from the shells passing overhead, shells from the 16-inch naval guns on the battleships offshore.
The E Company foursome joined up with a group from the 502nd that had just captured a German strong point in a large farm complex that dominated the crossroads north of the beach at Ravenoville. They spent the day defending the fortress from counterattacks. In the morning of D-Day plus one, they set out southward in search of their company.
Jim Alley crashed into a wall behind a house, one of those French walls with broken glass imbedded in the top. He was cut and bleeding in several places. He backed into the corner of a garden and was in the process of cutting himself out of the harness when someone grabbed his arm. It was a young woman, standing in the bushes.
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