The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Around 2000 hours, Axis Sally, the “Bitch of Berlin,” came on the radio. “Good evening, 82nd Airborne Division,” she said. “Tomorrow morning the blood from your guts will grease the bogey wheels on our tanks.” It bothered some of the men; others reassured them—she had been saying something similar for the previous ten days.47

  Still, it made men think. Pvt. John Delury of the 508th PIR talked to his friend Frank Tremblay about their chances of coming through alive. “He thought he’d get a slight wound and survive. I thought I was going to be killed. That was the last time I saw him.”48

  Pvt. Tom Porcella, also of the 508th, was torturing himself with thoughts of killing other human beings (this was common; the chaplains worked overtime assuring soldiers that to kill for their country was not a sin). “Kill or be killed,” Porcella said to himself. “Here I am, brought up as a good Christian, obey this and do that. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”49

  When every man was ready, the regiments gathered around their commanders for a last word. Most COs stuck to basics—assemble quickly was the main point—but one or two added a pep talk. The most famous was delivered by Col. Howard “Jumpy” Johnson, in command of the 501st PIR. Every man in the regiment remembered it vividly and could quote word for word his conclusion. As Lt. Carl Cartledge described Johnson’s talk, “He gave a great battle speech, saying victory and liberation and death to the enemy and some of us would die and peace cost a price and so on. Then he said, ‘I want to shake the hand of each one of you tonight, so line up.’ And with that, he reached down, pulled his knife from his boot and raised it high above his head, promising us in a battle cry: ‘Before the dawn of another day, I’ll sink this knife into the heart of the foulest bastard in Nazi land!’ A resounding yell burst forth from all 2,000 of us as we raised our knives in response.”50

  After the regimental meetings, the companies grouped around their COs and platoon leaders for a final word. The officers gave out the challenge, password, and response: “Flash,” “Thunder,” and “Welcome.” “Welcome” was chosen because the Germans would pronounce it “Velcom.” When Capt. Charles Shettle of the 506th PIR gave out the signals, Dr. Samuel Feiler, the regimental dental officer who had volunteered to accompany the assault echelon, approached him. Feiler was a German Jew who had escaped Berlin in 1938. “Captain Shettle,” Feiler asked, “Vat do I do?”

  “Doc,” Shettle replied, “when you land, don’t open your mouth. Take along some extra crickets and if challenged, snap twice.” Later, as Shettle was inspecting each planeload prior to takeoff, he found Feiler with crickets strapped to both arms, both legs, and an extra supply in his pockets.51

  • •

  At about 1900 hours, General Eisenhower paid a visit to the 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common. He circulated among the men, ostensibly to boost their morale, but as Lt. Wallace Strobel of the 502nd PIR noted, “I honestly think it was his morale that was improved by being with us.” Eisenhower told Capt. L. “Legs” Johnson, “I’ve done all I can, now it is up to you.”52 He told a group of enlisted men not to worry, that they had the best equipment and leaders in the world, with a vast force coming in behind them. A sergeant from Texas piped up, “Hell, we ain’t worried, General. It’s the Krauts that ought to be worrying now.”53

  With one group, Eisenhower asked, “Is there anyone here from Kansas?” Pvt. Sherman Oyler of Topeka replied, “I’m from Kansas, sir.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  Oyler was so stricken by being addressed directly by the supreme commander that he froze up and forgot his name. After an embarrassing pause, his buddies shouted, “Tell him your name, Oyler.”54 Eisenhower gave him a thumbs up and said, “Go get ’em, Kansas.”

  The supreme commander turned to Lieutenant Strobel, who had a sign hanging around his neck with the number 23 on it, indicating that he was jumpmaster for plane number 23, and asked his name and where he was from.

  “Strobel, sir. Michigan.”

  “Oh yes, Michigan. Great fishing there. I like it.” Eisenhower then asked Strobel if he was ready. Strobel replied that they had all been well prepared, well briefed, and were ready. He added that he thought it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Someone called out, “Now quit worrying, General, we’ll take care of this thing for you.”55

  At approximately 2200 hours, as the daylight began to fade, the order rang out, “Chute up.” Each man began the tedious task of buckling on his parachutes and trying to find an empty place to hang or tie on the small mountain of equipment he was carrying into combat. With everything strapped into place, many men found it impossible to take a last-minute pee. They marched to their planes and got their first look at the C-47s’ “war paint,” three bands of white painted around the fuselage and wings. (Every Allied plane involved in D-Day had been thus painted in the previous two days, using up all the white paint in England. The purpose was recognition; in Sicily, Allied ships and troops had fired on their own planes.)

  Pvt. John Richards of the 508th looked at his C-47 and noted that it had a picture of a devil holding a girl in a bathing suit sitting on a tray, with an inscription saying “Heaven can wait.” He thought to himself, Let’s hope so.56

  “Dutch” Schultz of the 505th, who had managed to gamble away his $2,500 in winnings, still had Jerry Columbi’s watch, which he had taken in collateral for a $25 loan. It was Columbi’s high-school graduation present with an inscription on the back from his parents. Columbi was in another stick. Schultz went over to him to hand back the watch, saying, “Here’s your watch back, Jerry. You owe me some money and don’t you forget to pay me.”57

  The 505th was at Spanhoe airfield. As Schultz was lining up to be helped into his C-47 (the men were too heavily loaded to make it into the plane on their own), he heard an explosion. A Gammon grenade carried by one of the men of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, had gone off. It set fire to the plane and killed three men, wounding ten others. Two unhurt survivors were assigned to another plane; they both died in combat before dawn.

  A bit shaken, Schultz found his place on the plane, “and the first thing I did was reach for my rosary, having been raised a Catholic boy I had great faith in the efficacy of prayers to the Blessed Mother. And I proceeded to say one rosary after another, promising the Blessed Mother that I would never, never violate the Sixth Commandment again.”58

  As the twilight turned to darkness, the last men got on board their planes. Eisenhower was out on the runway, calling out “Good luck!” He noticed a short private, in Eisenhower’s words “more equipment than soldier,” who snapped him a salute. Eisenhower returned it. Then the private turned to the east and called out, “Look out, Hitler. Here we come!”59

  The pilots started their engines. A giant cacophony of sound engulfed the airfield as each C-47 in its turn lurched into line on the taxi strip. At the head of the runway, the pilots locked the brakes and ran up the engines until they screamed. Then, at ten-second intervals, they released the brakes and started down the runway, slowly at first, gathering speed, so overloaded that they barely made it into the sky.

  When the last plane roared off, Eisenhower turned to his driver, Kay Summersby. She saw tears in his eyes. He began to walk slowly toward his car. “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s on.”60

  • •

  Before going to bed, Admiral Ramsay made a final entry in his handwritten diary: “Monday, June 5, 1944. Thus has been made the vital & crucial decision to stage the great enterprise which [shall?], I hope, be the immediate means of bringing about the downfall of Germany’s fighting power & Nazi oppression & an early cessation of hostilities.

  “I am not under [any] delusions as to the risks involved in this most difficult of all operations. . . . Success will be in the balance. We must trust in
our invisible assets to tip the balance in our favor.

  “We shall require all the help that God can give us & I cannot believe that this will not be forthcoming.”61

  Tired as he must have been, Ramsay caught the spirit and soul of the great undertaking perfectly, especially in his hope for what the results would be for occupied Europe and the world, his recognition that the enterprise was fraught with peril, and his confidence that God was blessing this cause.

  11

  CRACKING THE ATLANTIC WALL

  The Airborne into Normandy

  THE PATHFINDERS went in first. They preceded the main body of troops by an hour or so. Their mission was to mark the drop zones with automatic direction-finder radios, Eureka sets, and Holophane lights formed into Ts on the ground. But a cloud bank forced pilots to either climb above it or get below it, so the pathfinders jumped from too high or too low an altitude. Further, antiaircraft fire coming from the ground caused pilots to take evasive action, throwing them off course. As a consequence, of the eighteen American pathfinder teams, only one landed where it was supposed to. One team landed in the Channel.

  Sgt. Elmo Jones of the 505th PIR jumped at 300 feet or so. Just before exiting the C-47 he said a brief prayer: “Lord, Thy will be done. But if I’m to die please help me die like a man.” His chute popped open, he looked up to check the canopy, and just that quick his feet hit the ground. It was a “soft” landing. (One advantage of a night jump: the men could not see the ground so they did not tense up just before hitting it.) His chute settled over his head “and the first thing that I thought without even trying to get out of my parachute was, ‘Damn, I just cracked the Atlantic Wall.’ ”

  Jones assembled his team, got the seven men with the lights in place for their T, told them not to turn on until they could hear the planes coming in, set up his radio, and began sending out his ADF signal. He was one of the few pathfinders in the right place.1

  • •

  Maj. John Howard’s D Company of the Ox and Bucks was the first to go into action as a unit. Glider pilot Sgt. Jim Wallwork put his Horsa glider down exactly where Howard wanted it to land, beside the Orne Canal bridge. Lt. Brotheridge led 1st Platoon over the bridge. The Horsas carrying 2nd and 3rd platoons landed right behind Wallwork. Within minutes the men secured the area around the bridge, routing about fifty German defenders in the process. Two other platoons landed near the Orne River bridge and secured it. By 0021, June 6, five minutes after landing, D Company had taken its objectives. It was a brilliant feat of arms.2

  • •

  As the pathfinders were setting up and Howard’s men were carrying out their coup de main operation, the 13,400 American and nearly 7,000 British paratroopers were coming on. The Americans were following a precise route, marked at ten-mile intervals with Eureka sets and at thirty-mile intervals with aerial beacons over England. Thirty miles over the Channel a British patrol boat, “Gallup,” marked the path. It was thirty additional miles to checkpoint “Hoboken,” marked by a light from a British submarine. At that point the aircraft made a sharp turn to the southeast, crossed between the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey (occupied by the Germans, who were sending up some flak), and headed toward their drop zones in the Cotentin. All planes were maintaining radio silence, so none of the pilots were forewarned by the pathfinder groups about the cloud bank over the Cotentin.

  In the Dakotas, the men prepared themselves for “the jump in which your troubles begin after you hit the ground.” This was the $10,000 jump (the GIs were required to buy a $10,000 life insurance policy). The flight over England and out over the Channel was a period—two hours and more—that came between the end of training, preparation, and briefing and the beginning of combat. Maj. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, commanding the 82nd Airborne, noted that “the men sat quietly, deep in their own thoughts.”3

  Lt. Eugene Brierre of Division headquarters was an aide to Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, commanding the 101st Airborne. This would be Taylor’s qualifying jump (five jumps were required to qualify for paratrooper wings), but he wasn’t in the least excited. He had brought some pillows along and lay them on the floor of the plane. Brierre helped him get out of his chute; Taylor stretched out on the pillows and got in a solid hour’s sleep. When Brierre woke him, it took five minutes to get the chute back on.4

  Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 508th PIR recalled, “Here we sat, each man alone in the dark. These men around me were the best friends I will ever know. I wondered how many would die before the sun came up. ‘Lord, I pray, please let me do everything right. Don’t let me get anybody killed and don’t let me get killed either. I really think I’m too young for this.’ ”5

  Pvt. Ken Russell of the 505th had just made it onto his C-47. Two weeks earlier he had been running a high fever, a result of his vaccinations, and was sent to a hospital. On June 4 he still had a high fever, but “like everyone else, I had been looking forward to D-Day since 1940—when I was still in grammar school. Now I was so afraid I would miss it.” He begged his way out of the hospital and managed to rejoin his company on June 5. Flying over the Channel, he was struck by the thought that his high-school class back in Tennessee was graduating that night.6

  Like many of the Catholic troopers, “Dutch” Schultz was “totally engrossed in my rosaries.” Clayton Storeby was sitting next to George Dickson, who “was going around that rosary, giving a lot of Hail Marys. After about ten minutes, it seemed like it was helping him, so I said, ‘George, when you’re through with that, would you loan it to a buddy?’ ”7

  “It was a time of prayer,” Pvt. Harry Reisenleiter of the 508th PIR recalled, “and I guess we all made some rash promises to God.” He said that so far as he could tell everyone was afraid—“fear of being injured yourself, fear of having to inflict injury on other people to survive, and the most powerful feeling of all, fear of being afraid.”8

  • •

  The pilots were afraid. For most of the pilots of Troop Carrier Command this was their first combat mission. They had not been trained for night flying, or for flak or bad weather. Their C-47s were designed to carry cargo or passengers. They were neither armed nor armored. Their gas tanks were neither protected nor self-sealing.

  The possibility of a midair collision was on every pilot’s mind. The pilots were part of a gigantic air armada: it took 432 C-47s to carry the 101st Airborne to Normandy, about the same number for the 82nd. They were flying in a V-of-Vs formation, stretched out across the sky, 300 miles long, nine planes wide, without radio communication. Only the lead pilot in each serial of forty-five had a Eureka set, with a show of lights from the Plexiglas astrodome for guidance for the following planes. The planes were 100 feet from wingtip to wingtip in their groups of nine, 1,000 feet from one group to another, with no lights except little blue dots on the tail of the plane ahead. That was a tight formation for night flying in planes that were sixty-five feet long and ninety-five feet from wingtip to wingtip.

  They crossed the Channel at 500 feet or less to escape German radar detection, then climbed to 1,500 feet to escape antiaircraft batteries on the Channel Islands (which did fire on them, without effect, except to wake sleeping troopers—the airsickness pills the medics had handed out at the airfields had caused many men, including Ken Russell, to doze off). As they approached the Cotentin coast, they descended to 600 feet or so, the designated jump altitude (designed to reduce the time the trooper was helplessly descending).

  When they crossed the coastline they hit the cloud bank and lost their visibility altogether. The pilots instinctively separated, some descending, some rising, all peeling off to the right or left to avoid a midair collision. When they emerged from the clouds, within seconds or at the most minutes, they were hopelessly separated. Lt. Harold Young of the 326th Parachute Engineers recalled that as his plane came out of the clouds, “We were all alone. I remember my amazement. Where had all those C-47s gone?”9

  Simultaneously, to use the words of many of the pilots, “all hell broke loose
.” Searchlights, tracers, and explosions filled the sky. Pilot Sidney Ulan of the 99th Troop Carrier Squadron was chewing gum, “and the saliva in my mouth completely dried up from the fright. It seemed almost impossible to fly through that wall of fire without getting shot down, but I had no choice. There was no turning back.”10

  They could speed up, which most of them did. They were supposed to throttle back to ninety miles per hour or less, to reduce the opening shock for the paratroopers, but ninety miles per hour at 600 feet made them easy targets for the Germans on the ground, so they pushed the throttle forward and sped up to 150 miles per hour, meanwhile either descending to 300 feet or climbing to 2,000 feet and more. They twisted and turned, spilling their passengers and cargo. They got hit by machine-gun fire, 20mm shells, and the heavier 88mm shells. They saw planes going down to their right and left, above and below them. They saw planes explode. They had no idea where they were, except that they were over the Cotentin.

  The pilots had turned on the red lights over the doors when they crossed the Channel Islands. That was the signal to the jump-masters to order their men to “Stand up and hook up.” The pilots turned on the green light when they guessed that they were somewhere near the drop zone. That was the signal to go.

  Many troopers saw planes below them as they jumped. At least one plane was hit by an equipment bundle; it tore off almost three feet of wing tip. Virtually every plane got hit by something. One pilot broke radio silence to call out in desperation, “I’ve got a paratrooper hung up on my wing.” Another pilot came on the air with advice: “Slow down and he’ll slide off.”11