Not far up the flight line from Blanchard was Chalk 37, flown by Lieutenant Langland Van Cleef, who’d skipped his breakfast in favor of just a cup of coffee. Chalk 37 was in good hands. Van Cleef, a twenty-five-year-old from New York’s East Side, had flown jump operations in Sicily, Salerno, Normandy, and Holland. When he and the aircrew arrived, the stick was already chuting up. As the troops went about their business, they traded insults and cursed their equipment, the time of morning, and one another with the casual profanity of GIs. Several made wisecracks offering their willingness to serve as life insurance beneficiaries. Better a buddy should get the money over their girlfriend’s boyfriend back home, right?
As his paratroopers donned their equipment, Colonel Edson Raff drove up the flight line. He stopped at clusters of troopers to stand in his jeep and deliver a short but direct sermon of violence: “Give the goddamned bastards hell, men! You know what to do. Cut out their goddamned guts!”
Raff understood the nature of his profession and the benefits of direct communication. His combat experiences in North Africa and France only served to reinforce his perspective: “Forget good sportsmanship on the battlefield. War is not a refereed football game but the dirtiest game yet devised by human minds. And, if for one moment you feel soft towards that Nazi shooting at you, remember he’s trying to kill you and, if he had the chance, he’d drive your dad into slavery, cut your mother’s throat, and rape your wife, sister, sweetheart or daughter. You’ll get no quarter from him. Give him none!”
Raff’s aircraft, Chalk 1, piloted by Colonel Joel Couch, would be the first in the serial of forty-six departing from A-40. Couch, a veteran pilot who’d flown lead missions into Italy, Southern France, Normandy, and Holland, wagered a case of champagne that he’d drop the Ruffians right on target. Raff, who suspected everyone of incompetence, took the bet.
Underneath Raff’s aircraft, the stick had strapped two bundles carrying 150 pounds each of radio equipment, another with 175 pounds of medical supplies, and a bundle with 200 pounds of anti-tank rounds for the M18 recoilless rifles.
Sergeant Harold Barkley would be jumping after Raff, who’d be the first to exit over Germany. Barkley, like many others, skipped the issued airsick pills, which tended to induce drowsiness. “We had no time for [that] at the moment, especially at a time when we must be at our best physically and mentally.”
By 07:00 the troopers had pulled themselves up the short ladder and into the cabin. Some, saddled with too much equipment, were pushed ungracefully through the cargo door. Jumpmasters stood by, checking each man’s name off the loading manifest as he boarded. The pilots revved their engines, letting them idle while waiting to taxi.
Blanchard was unimpressed with his pilot, who, based on the single camel painted under the cockpit window of Chalk 41, had only completed a single supply run. There was no parachute insignia indicating an operational drop. The kid was green.
We’ll be lucky to even get to Germany, thought Blanchard. The stick had just strapped into their seats when the pilot cranked the engines and started to roll forward.
Dear GOD! Isn’t he even going to warm this thing up? Blanchard almost yelled. He leaned out the jump door to confirm that their pilot really intended to take off, just in time to catch a cloud of exhaust in the face as the left engine sputtered and coughed in protest.
Raff’s aircraft rolled down the runway at 07:25, and within minutes the other forty-five planes of the first serial had climbed into the clear blue sky. They would soon rendezvous with the Ruffians’ other battalions flying in two serials out of A-79.
As the planes turned toward Germany, Bill Consolvo noted that his fellow troopers were quiet, but looked confident. He glanced over at medic and Normandy veteran Henry Lysek, who gave him a wink and grin—We’ll be fine, buddy.
• • •
At 08:12 the cannon cockers of Branigan’s Bastards, Raff’s artillery support, lifted off in forty-two C-47s from airfield A-80 to rendezvous with the Ruffians.
The Bastards were already one man down after a trooper shot himself in the leg. He claimed he had accidently pulled the trigger on his carbine when placing it in its canvas scabbard, but everyone knew better. He was removed quickly. When courage often hung by a thread, any sign of weakness or lack of aggression could be infectious—best to remove the cancer before it spread. Of course, the troopers had heard of such cases before, and perhaps in more desperate moments a few may have even contemplated such a scheme themselves. One of the division’s most notorious self-inflicted exits from combat occurred in the Bulge when a trooper pulled a pin on a grenade and wrapped his arm around a thick tree. The trunk sheltered him from the shrapnel, but his hand evaporated in the blast. His screams could be heard up and down the line before morphine dulled his misery.
Within Branigan’s serial there were three aircraft carrying a small divisional headquarters group, including General Miley himself. With his parachute harness covering the two stars on his epaulettes, he looked like any other officer in the division. He wore the same olive-drab combat uniform and had tied his first-aid pack onto the front of his helmet and safety-pinned a large oilcloth US flag on his right shoulder. He wore a standard-issue khaki cotton tie and binoculars slung across his chest. He’d donned a kit cap under his helmet against the morning chill. With a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, he exuded a nonchalant calm. But he had plenty on his mind.
Miley had decided to establish his command post on the edge of Diersfordt Forest, bordering the Ruffians’ DZ. He knew that the initial pandemonium would likely delay by hours his ability to directly influence his units. Unlike ground divisions, whose commanders controlled events from a relatively safe distance, Miley would be surrounded by the enemy and fighting for his life along with every trooper on the DZ. It would be up to the division’s junior officers and sergeants to take charge until wider command could be established.
Since it was possible that Miley’s plane would get shot down, the division’s chain of command was split up, with the rest of the headquarters group, commanded by Miley’s chief of staff, headed into LZ N on gliders. Landing first, Miley would command from his temporary CP and move to the LZ once local resistance had been overcome.
• • •
Next to take off were the Thirteeners at B-54, on their way to DZ X. As the engines of the massive C-46s coughed to life, the troopers in back were engulfed by the smell of oil, gasoline, and hot metal. At 08:00 the first of seventy-two C-46s lumbered down the runway. But after a dozen of the transports took off, the Thirteeners’ flouting of superstition finally caught up with them. The pilot of Chalk 13, with thirty-four troopers on board, lost control of his plane when a strong gust of crosswind pushed him off course. The aircraft careened off the runway, just missed the control tower, and plowed through several parked trucks and jeeps. Undaunted, the pilot of Chalk 14, his path clear, thundered down the runway past the wreck, followed seconds later by Chalk 15.
Transports continued to roar down the runway as medics attended to Chalk 13’s injured, including the jumpmaster, who’d been thrown out the cargo door. The remaining twenty-three able-bodied troopers loaded onto a truck and sped off to board a standby aircraft. With no time to rig the equipment bundles under their new C-46, they stacked them inside the cargo doors to be shoved out over the DZ.
The C-46s flew in wide, lazy circles over Achiet’s airfield while the pilots eased their aircraft into formation. After thirty minutes one of the navigators peered out his glass astral dome and yelled to the passengers in back, “We’re on our way.”
Troopers squirmed into pockets for cigarettes or gum; some wanted both. The noise discouraged conversation, and the crowded conditions made reaching for canteens or turning to look out the small windows next to impossible. Some managed to nod off for a bit of sleep, or at least pretended to, while others read issues of Stars and Stripes or stared straight ahead, focused on nothing.
Their stoic demeanor masked a natural fear. They
were well-trained and disciplined troops who knew that the unspoken rules of their brotherhood required they ignore any misgivings. Some feared they might surrender to self-preservation or fail their comrades through inaction. The most common fears were more immediate: snapping an ankle or breaking a leg in a bad landing. The wisest course was to focus on the task at hand, but that was hard to do when sitting for hours in the back of an aircraft with no distractions.
The men in platoon leader Dean Bressler’s plane occupied their time by unsnapping their reserve parachutes and passing them forward to be piled out of the way. Bressler later wrote, “No one needs a reserve chute at 500–700 feet—you only get one chance at that altitude.” The troopers in several aircraft didn’t bother with stacking their reserves; they simply passed them back to be thrown out the open cargo doors.
Many of the Thirteeners were still leery of the C-46’s double doors. In spite of the obvious advantage of facilitating a faster exit—and hence, landing closer together—nobody wanted to jump from what they called the “fucked-up door.” The unfamiliar starboard door required routing the static line over the right shoulder instead of the left and making a left turn to jump rather than the customary right out of a C-47. In short, it required split-second thinking at a moment when a trooper was rushing for the door and didn’t want to think; rather, he wanted to rely on muscle memory.
Others could care less what door they went out. Sitting in one of the C-46s was twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Stanley Galicki from Cleveland. He’d joined the Thirteeners after having instructed them at jump school. Described by one of his men as “a killer and an instructor of killers,” Galicki had reminded them what they’d volunteered for. His blunt words stuck with many of his awestruck pupils: “In case you gentlemen have forgotten while engaged in the glamorous business of learning how to be a parachutist, you’re being paid to be killers. That is your primary, your only function in life: to be killers! The parachute is only a means of transportation by which you are delivered to the ground. And once you’re there, you do what?”
“Kill!” they yelled.
“What?” Galicki taunted them.
“Kill!” they roared back.
• • •
Flying in behind the Thirteeners and headed into the same DZ would be John Chester’s 466th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion’s serial of forty-five C-47s departing from A-80.
On the back of Chester’s helmet, like those of all combat sergeants, was a three-inch-wide, horizontal white stripe—officers’ were vertical—to help identify leaders in the heat of battle. Chester, who likened it to “wearing a bull’s-eye target on our back,” did his best to blot it out with a black marker.
Before boarding, several of the men observed their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Booth, in an animated conversation with a circle of pilots, pounding his right fist into the open palm of his left hand as an exclamation point. As the group broke up, one of the artillerymen asked a passing pilot, “What was that all about?”
“Your Colonel wants us to drop you from four hundred feet.”
* * *
As the troopers had been finishing their breakfast, both the RAF and the US Air Force were already at work, continuing one of the most wide-ranging aerial interdiction campaigns of the war. The raids flown on the morning of D-Day were the climax of an already staggering three-day effort to distract, decapitate, isolate, frustrate, and hamper the enemy surrounding PLUNDER/VARSITY’s target area.
To counter the threat of German jets, RAF fighters arrived above enemy airfields at dawn, circling overhead and daring the jets to come up to meet them. They kept the 262s buttoned up until the heavies arrived. The heavies came in the form of 1,430 four-engined bombers who dropped over 4,000 tons of ordnance on the sixteen enemy airfields within range of VARSITY. The Air Force lost eight bombers on the raids, which followed attacks that had upended the same airfields three days ago. The airfields were hit again in case the Germans had repaired them.
Another wave of almost 3,500 bombers hit communications centers within fifteen miles of Montgomery’s crossing sites. By targeting the Germans’ ability to disseminate information and coordinate the movement of their reserve troops, the Air Force hoped their attacks would improve VARSITY’s chances of surprise. Another sortie of 2,090 bombers dropped 6,600 tons of bombs on other military facilities, while fighter-bombers swept in, attacking anything that moved on highways or rail lines. Targets within VARSITY’s actual assault zones, however, were excluded from heavy bomber raids for fear of cratering the LZs and DZs.
Adding to the bedlam, a stream of US B-24 bombers flying from their Italian bases made a round-trip of 1,500 miles to pound Berlin, sowing confusion and further hampering communication. The RAF also made diversionary attacks, hitting several oil facilities in the Ruhr area as well as a major rail center fourteen miles southeast of Wesel.
The Allies intended their air raids to overwhelm the German defense system. By striking everywhere at once they planned to stretch the system to the breaking point, rendering it mute.
Over Wavre, Belgium (MARFAK). Saturday morning, March 24, 1945.
Two hours into their flight American transport pilots watched the long string of British aircraft approach from their left. The 6th Airborne Division had departed from eleven airfields in England at 07:09 and slipped into the air route’s western lane for their run into Germany.
Reveille for the British troopers had come early that morning at 02:45. Their serials carried over 7,000 airborne troops and rendezvoused not far from the coastal town of Dover before heading across the English Channel. Their route took them over Waterloo, where their ancestors had fought to turn back Napoleon’s conquest of Europe in 1815.
The British flight hadn’t been without incident—they’d already lost thirty-five gliders en route, owing to snapping towropes or structural failures. Several witnesses watched in horror as one of the massive Hamilcar gliders folded in on itself, with the light tank it was carrying and all those on board pitched into the air as the glider cartwheeled to earth. Like their American counterparts, neither the British glider pilots nor their passengers had parachutes.
• • •
Those on the ground in Wavre had a front-row seat as the two air columns came together to form the war’s largest single-day airborne armada. Close to 500 British and American fighters, darting about like angry hornets on all flanks, added to the impressive display. Drawn outside by the reverberating sound of droning engines, the populace gazed skyward as the aircraft passed overhead at a thousand feet. Those who wanted to watch the entire spectacle would have to wait over three hours for the armada to pass.
First in the American column came the parachute serials. Organized into tight groups of nine aircraft, known as a V of Vs, each group was subdivided into elements of three transports. The lead aircraft of each Vee flew forty feet in front of his two wingmen, who’d positioned themselves fifty feet or so off his wingtips. Behind and flanking the three lead aircraft were the other two Vees, trailing by approximately 160 feet and offset on each side by just 250 feet. A tight formation ensured a tight drop pattern. The next Vee of nine aircraft trailed by a thousand feet, and so on. As one witness observed, “The troop carriers looked sleek and well fed, bobbing up and down in the air currents and propwash like fat men in a gentle surf.”
After the parachute transports came the glider serials. The double-tow formations were first, formed into small elements of two tugs with the lead sixty feet in front of the second, who followed behind and to the right. Carrying the gliders into LZ S, the eight double-tow serials—made up of approximately forty tugs—were spaced ten minutes apart to provide a buffer for the varying speeds.
The single-tow gliders going into LZ N were last in the column. They flew in “pair of pairs” formations: four tugs, staggered to the right. The lead pair, flying slightly offset from each other, led the second pair in an identical formation. The seven single-tow serials of forty to forty-e
ight aircraft flew with a seven-minute gap between each.
• • •
In the gliders, the men watched the parachute serials overtake them. Most had been quiet during the flight due to the overwhelming racket. At a tow speed of 110 miles per hour, with the howling wind slapping at the gliders’ canvas sides, the cacophony made anything but a yell impossible to hear.
Communication between glider pilots and tugs fared little better. The technology was simple enough: a closed-loop intercommunication system, the wire for which was stretched between the two aircraft, attached at points along the towrope. It gave pilots a secure and interference-free method of plane-to-glider communication. But of course it was never that easy.
“To us they were a joke,” said Bill Knickerbocker of the communication systems. As the taxiing C-47 dragged the towrope along the runway, the sets would often short out due to abrasions in the commo wire. If the wire survived takeoff, the noise in the glider’s cockpit made most transmissions inaudible anyway. The setup also required a headset, which prevented wearing a steel helmet against flak. The intercom, when working, allowed tug pilots to communicate their position along the route and advise on distance to the LZ—information any situationally aware glider pilot should have been noting for himself. If the system went out, a member of the tug’s aircrew would stand in the astrodome and flash colored lights back to the glider: steady red for approaching the LZ and green for release. Blinking red meant Do not cut loose, we’ll go around for another pass.
In Private Seymour Tuttle’s glider, the copilot turned back into the cabin and yelled for him to remove the troop door and take a look at the wing—the flaps were not responding as they should. Tuttle did as requested, but his visual inspection failed to reveal the cause. Now Tuttle had his own problem. The outside airstream prevented him from locking the door back in place, so he had to prop it up with his right arm for the rest of the flight. Occasionally, Tuttle’s buddy, buckled in across from him, would express the sentiment of everyone on board by yelling, “Son of a bitch!”
Four Hours of Fury Page 23
