Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Now dumped in Joe's platoon bay were clips, bandoliers, and belts of sharp-pointed, hard-metal bullets. Troopers dipped into them and looked at one another. What weighed on their minds was the weight of the ammo. They'd have to saddle it on like burros, jump with it like anchors, pick it up and carry it till they could unload on the Wehrmacht. Nevertheless they liked the heavy lethality of what was called their “basic load.” The bang-bang, duh-duh of “voice fire” had made the most serious rehearsals a little childish.

  Now they were no longer boys doing a man's job, they were unquestionably the men. Yet they rubbed their peach fuzz when orders for D Night came down: don't shoot until fired upon. Throw grenades instead to keep the DZs secret. Bullshit, Duber snorted; six thousand parachutes would give that away like a circus coming to town.

  In addition to his basic load, each paratrooper was to carry ammo he'd never personally use, like a howitzer round in his leg bag. He would carry it to someplace near the DZ assembly area and leave it for artillerymen who would arrive later. Joe's nonpersonal munitions included an antitank mine and belts of machine-gun ammo he was to drop off by a certain barn after finding Captain McKnight and moving out with him to I Company's objective.

  Yes, real objectives were at last revealed. Finally, at the eleventh hour, the troopers were shown exactly what they were to do in the vertical invasion. Maps and aerial photos were unsealed, sandboxes with models unveiled, and everything put on display for excruciatingly serious study. Memorize, memorize was the watchword and requirement for repeated quizzes. Study that barn from every angle, Beyrle. Imagine how it's going to look at night. What color is it? It appeared tan from the photo of a prewar tourist. Brochures from travel agencies were also helpful for appreciating the landforms, agriculture, and foliage. Details—for example, the cows around Drop Zone D were predominantly white—were provided by the most titanic intelligence effort in the history of warfare.

  What to do if, despite intimate knowledge of the barn, Joe never found it? That was up to him. There were dozens of such dumps planned on the expectation that many would never be established. Not everything had to work for success, just enough things that exploited possibilities till they became probabilities. Combining good odds, the planners reasoned, put the overall odds in the 101st's favor. That too was the way Joe's young mind was thinking as, around midnight, he saddled on a herculean load for his third jump into Normandy. H Hour of D Night was scheduled for 1:40 in the morning, double daylight saving time, so in that part of the world midnight in midsummer is not very dark, especially with a moon.

  For Screaming Eagles, D Night Eve produced tension like a turnbuckle, not so much seen as felt: a trooper scribbling a last letter, another sharpening his knife even though it was already so thin it seemed nearly transparent, someone else practicing pigtail splices on commo wire. And briefings, briefings, briefings. If the vertical invasion failed, no one could be blamed for not repeating enough the plans of what had to be done and how to do it, even if little went according to plan.

  Plans focused on objectives, soon firmly planted in everyone's mind. The 101 st's initial objective was to seize and hold the exits from Utah Beach where the 4th Infantry Division would be coming ashore. Protected by the 101st, the 4th would swing north to capture the vital port of Cherbourg. That was the overall plan, and every trooper knew how his DZ was located to support it. If you land somewhere else, join up with whoever is there and help them take their objective. At some point the generals would sort things out. This was inculcated by briefing after briefing.

  Briefings and brief-backs definitely kept the troopers occupied, but what to do with the extra time after a twenty-four-hour weather delay was announced? Officers feared a nervous idleness—it could lead to greater fear. The chain of command felt their men should concentrate on what was coming up but at the same time not think about it too much, a most difficult balance to strike.

  Troopers took it upon themselves to show what they were thinking and how to deal with it. A buddy of Joe's from Michigan, George Koskimaki, kept a diary of what was going on: crap games clustered everywhere, other little groups who tested their memory by sketching the Norman road net without looking at a map. Each man had been issued a silk map in three pieces. When the pieces were joined it was about a yard square and showed the whole Cotentin Peninsula, the portion of Normandy to be invaded. Most troopers wore the map as a scarf.

  They were told the challenge and password for the first twenty-four hours of the vertical invasion. It was reckoned that the Germans couldn't pronounce the word “thunder” the way Americans did. They'd say “donder,” so for D Night the challenge in the 101st was “flash” and the password was “thunder”—pronounced like an American.

  But the 101st obtained a better identifier than that. Cautioned by his staff about the hazard of friendly fire when Screaming Eagles used enemy weapons, and from experience with the 82nd's jump in Sicily, General Taylor was vehement about the need for an audible and unmistakable recognition signal for paratroopers milling around in the dark among Germans. He asked an old friend on Eisenhower's staff to come up with a solution. It was both lightweight and light-hearted, the simplest of toys, not much bigger than the trinket that amused children when they emptied a Cracker Jack box. Taylor's toy made the sound of a cricket; research by an army entomologist confirmed that there was a similar species native to Normandy. The FFI was requested to send some over. The insects were auditioned and the mechanical cricket tuned so it could be distinguished from a real one.

  Not long before D Night, the Overlord pipeline spewed out enough mechanical crickets for the 101st, the only division to use them. The source was P. H. Harris & Co., a British toy manufacturer who must have been mystified when the Allied high command, at the crucial point of the war, ordered rush production of frivolous baubles—seven thousand of them.

  The cricket went click-clack. That sound asked “Who's there?” Two click-clacks (no more or less) was the answer: “a friend.”

  From his French experience Joe didn't have to be told that the cricket could mean life or death. Duber kept saying that on D Night there would be more to fear from Screaming Eagles than from Germans. So the cricket couldn't be buried in some pocket, taking seconds to retrieve. Each trooper punched out a hole allowing it to be laced onto a cord around the neck; then all he had to do was reach for his throat and make the cricket chirp.

  AT EXETER EVERY MAN checked over a personal arsenal in light of his D Nighttasks. Viewed officially, Joe's task as a radioman called for him to be armed with a folding-stock carbine— regarded as not much more than a peashooter—so he had added a pistol and Thompson submachine gun, both firing .45-caliber slugs. In the 101st that wasn't considered heavily armed at all. Unauthorized weapons proliferated because officers were taking along plenty of extra firepower themselves. Sink's was said to be a sawed-off shotgun.

  Besides two half-pound blocks of nitro starch, Joe stuffed grenades in his cargo pockets and taped blasting caps to his ankles and helmet. Bray looked at him skeptically: “Joe, if a bullet hits your pot, don't worry about a headache; you won't have a head.”

  More important than his head was Joe's back, to transport the most vital radio, an SCR 300, the principal way for McKnight and Wolverton to communicate. All told, Joe's load, no heavier than most, was hundreds of pounds, so it took two men to raise him up the ladder into his C-47.

  Instead of a million-dollar bandolier he'd been given ten dollars' worth of crisp new French money just minted in Washington. Little brass compasses and big English life vests were issued. Troopers were encouraged to shave their heads because it might be a long time till the next haircut. Many did to look more warlike. In the marshaling area everyone was engrossed with skin and helmet camouflage.

  Before loading out from Exeter they cased their weapons, some in leg bags; they checked ammo for dents that could cause misfires, broke down K rations, and lined up kit bags containing their chutes. Then it was waiting time—waiting, t
he synonym for worry—waiting for something, whenever it came. In the next hour, line up chutes and leg bags, then form up by sticks. In the next minutes, assemble at your plane. In the next seconds, gather your thoughts. Waiting time divided quite like the jump commands they knew as well as then-names: Stand up. Hook up. Stand in the door.

  Something was stronger than even tension as the clock ticked down on D Night. Currahees felt beyond ready to do what training had exhaustively prepared them for. For eight months they'd been at it in England, a year before that in the States. They had reached the peak, with no further to go be-fore falling on the Wehrmacht, the most feared and infamous force in the world. The whole world would be watching.

  The 101st had no combat experience, but that didn't preclude a cocky attitude. They'd be rushing in, but that didn't make them fools. Youth and testosterone were big parts of it, but the biggest part of all was the unwavering will to fight to the death for your buddy, the death of either or both of you because you knew he felt the same way. That feeling was the strongest, but unspoken.

  The overarching motivation was that Overlord must not fail. If it did, everything had to start over, with thousands fewer buddies. The Wehrmacht too had its ultimate motivation— that if they couldn't repel the invasion, they didn't have a chance of stopping the Red Army that had pulsed out from Stalingrad like schools of piranha attacking a bleeding crocodile. If the Russians weren't stopped, that meant the end of Germany's version of civilization. That was evident enough even at Joe's level, though in one briefing he learned that some of the static troops the Blues might fight were Russians who had thrown in with the Germans.

  D NIGHT COUNTDOWN RESUMED fretfully after Channel storms caused the false start. Like a temporary reprieve before execution, the weather delay deflated much of the bravado and some of the emotional high. Eisenhower's army had hurried up only to start waiting again. The face painting, the Mohawk haircuts, the whole metaphor of war dance subsided for its inability to sustain energy.

  Two Screaming Eagles, David Webster of the 506th and Tom Buff of division headquarters, noted the waning hours contrastingly. Webster mulled how the June sun didn't go down until 9:00 P.M., how he could sit watching the soft hills of England darken and wonder about the time of day in the States. Gripped by solitude, he gazed south down a valley winding to the sea. That's where the Germans were, over the southern horizon. What are they thinking? he mused. Of their own homes, their chances of ever returning to them?

  “When will it get dark?” Webster wrote. “What chance does a paratrooper have then? Stay light, stay on forever— and we'll never have to go to Normandy.”

  Buff noted an entirely different attitude among his buddies who would not be jumping into Normandy:

  Every one of our friends whom Fate had placed in the rear echelon [to cross by sea] was there to tell us goodbye. Just before we got into our trucks they took photos of us with rolls and rolls of film. How those guys wanted to go! Even though I had a compass, Bill Urquia of our Aerial Photo Team gave me his, saying: “Tom, this is a lucky compass. It's been through North Africa, Sicily and Italy. Take it to France for me. Dammit, I'm not going…”

  Everyone shook hands, then we drove off for the airfield. We later learned that those fellows just roamed around, killing time until far into the night so they could count our planes as we flew over, wave to the sky and pray Godspeed.

  President Roosevelt was also composing a prayer, his for a radio message to America on D Day: “Almighty God— Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor.”

  After those words resounded, the nation came to a halt. The stock exchange, courtrooms, school classes, professional baseball games, traffic in every city and activity elsewhere froze to mark the moment as America collectively prayed as never before—nor since, till September 2001. Church bells began to toll, perhaps in contemplation of the many American lives that had already ended in Normandy before Roosevelt announced the invasion's site.

  As it so rarely has in all of history, on D Day oratory matched the occasion. To his corps and division commanders of three nationalities, Montgomery had restated the mighty endeavor with verse from the marquis of Montrose:

  HE EITHER FEARS HIS FATE TOO MUCH, ELSE HIS DESERTS ARE SMALL,

  THAT DARES NOT PUT IT TO THE TOUCH, TO GAIN OR LOSE IT ALL.

  Colonel Sink's message to the 506th was read inside C-47s:

  Tonight is the night of nights.

  Tomorrow, throughout the whole of our homeland and the Allied world, bells will ring out the tidings that you have arrived, that the invasion for liberation has begun….

  The confidence of your high commanders goes with you. Fears of the Germans are about to become a reality…. Imbued with faith in the Tightness of our cause and the power of our might, let us annihilate the enemy wherever found.

  May God be with each of you fine soldiers. By your actions let us justify His faith in us.

  With such words in their ears, Currahees were pawing to “put it to the touch.” The feeling was that their chutes couldn't get to the ground fast enough so they could start working over the Wehrmacht. That feeling intensified as Joe watched the first wave of transports slowly climb into an aerial armada.

  Here was the big roll of the main game, even though it had been Japan that had shoved the United States into World War II. Joe could see that priority right in front of him, behind and all around. He saw I Company on the tip of an immeasurable, irresistible spear. It was hurled from the heart and arsenal of democracy—Rosie the riveter, war-bond drives, around-the-clock shifts throughout Michigan—the entire wholehearted American effort at its zenith, circling to poise over the dark and choppy English Channel. Minutes before him, thousands like Joe were already flying off to their rendezvous with destiny. Rendezvous with Destiny became the name of the 101st's march and the title of its book recording the Screaming Eagles' wartime history. The rendezvous began with troopers strapped onto bucket seats in a surreal state of mind where more was to be won than could be lost with their lives.*

  That was how Joe, Jack, and Orv felt, representing the bachelors. Family men had more on the line. Their bedrock sentiments were expressed, if at all, during some earlier time of contemplation, like those of Phil Wallace, Joe's buddy in a sister regiment:

  SUNDAY, MARCH ICJTH, 1944, NEW YORK CITY

  My Dearest Jo,

  You are now reading my last letter from NYC. All letters after this will be censored, so—if there is anything to be said I must say it now.

  You already know that my heart and thoughts remain with you there in New England. No matter what happens to me overseas, believe that your Phil has given all because of deep love for his wife and baby. To die for you both would be an honor, far surpassing the Jap's honor to die for his emperor.

  But to live would be an even greater achievement—and to this end I shall strive. Jo, you never need fear for my safety for it is far better to believe that God takes care of these things. What happens will happen, beyond our understanding. That's the way it goes and will.

  If it is written in the Book of Fate that I shall return to you then we will forget our worries, our sorrows, our heartaches, and forever enjoy that God-given day when your Phil comes home to spend the rest of our lives in happiness. This war will make me appreciate that so much.

  So your husband must leave you and Baby Sue for now. He has a job to do, a job that is not to his liking but he must do it to the best of his ability. You will see him again, even if not in this life. No power can keep us apart.

  I am not alone in my travels. Millions of American soldiers are crossing the waters this spring. May most of us return, God willing.

  * One of the smallest and most obscure—but far from the least important— battles in the ETO was for weather stations in Greenland, a Danish territory that fell to the Germans when they overran Denmark in 1940. For the purpose of reporting storms to their U-boats, two German radio teams set up clandestine transmitters on the
frozen coast. By intercepting their signals, the British located those stations, then liquidated and replaced them with their own. Consequently, by 1944 the Allied high command had better foresight of impending weather than did Rundstedt and Rommel, who had to rely on irregular reports from U-boats.

  * When Ike showed up on D Night he nervously took very hot coffee from a Red Cross worker. She noticed his hand trembling so much that he was in danger of scalding himself, so she withdrew the cup till it cooled. “As the 101st took off,” she recalled, “tears rolled down his face and he didn't even accept a handkerchief. Ike just kept waving till the last C-47 disappeared into the night.”

  * Major General William C. Lee was named the 10 lst's commander when it was activated in August 1942. He may have recalled “rendezvous with destiny” as the phrase applied to the United States in a speech by President Franklin Roosevelt some years earlier. In any case Lee first addressed his fledgling Screaming Eagles this way: “The 101st has no history but a rendezvous with destiny.… We shall be called upon to carry out operations of far-reaching military importance, and shall habitually go into action when the need is immediate and extreme.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HIDE-AND-SEEK

  AT THE DEPARTURE AIRFIELD A RADIO WAS PLAYING THE MOONLIGHT Sonata. Oh, brother, Duber muttered, is that telling 'em we're coming by moonlight? There had been other music, live music by bands playing favorite marches, as Third Battalion assembled. This seemed a breach of security, a tip-off that something special was in the air or soon would be, but instead it reinforced Duber's hunch that such obvious activity must be to provoke German reactions for study. So he began taking bets that this run-up would be another dry run rather than the end of a weather delay as had been announced (the rain hadn't been too bad around Exeter where they'd marshaled).