First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Now the troopers rose and went through their preparations, their discarded reserves pushed back under their seats. At Lillyman’s command to “Snap up!” they clipped their static lines—the cords that would connect their chutes to the aircraft—to an anchor cable running the length of the cabin. Their hurried equipment checks followed at once, each man inspecting the chute of the man in front of him and yelling out his okay.

  Lillyman’s final order of business before the jump was to go down the line and make sure the men’s static lines were securely attached to the cable. Then he returned to the door to wait.

  In the cockpit, Crouch and Pedone felt encouraged by the continued absence of antiaircraft fire, taking it as an indication that they’d surprised the enemy. But they’d missed some landmarks because of the thick ground fog, and it was already midnight before Pedone realized that they were over the village of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville—a mile and a half from their scheduled DZ.

  Crouch could not risk getting any farther away from it.

  At 12:12 A.M. by his stopwatch, he flipped the switch for the green ready light.

  In the troop cabin, Lillyman and his men shuffled toward the exit.

  5.

  The second team of Pathfinders had been headed for Drop Zone C outside Hiesville, several miles southeast of Team A’s goal. Their pilot, Captain Clyde Taylor, had trailed closely behind Crouch’s C-47, his eyes on its pale blue wing lights and the faint glow of the flame suppressors on its engine exhausts. But Taylor and his copilot, Lieutenant Hal Sperber, would not enjoy the element of surprise that gave the lead aircraft a reprieve from ground fire.

  Shortly after they overflew the Guernsey and Alderney Islands—near the spot where Buck Dickson had noticed enemy searchlights—they lost sight of Crouch’s flight group and headed directly into the cloud bank. Peering out the windscreen, they searched for the planes ahead of them, but visibility was so poor they couldn’t even see their blue formation lights. It was as if Crouch’s V had disappeared, swallowed up by clouds and darkness.

  Taylor knew his crew was on its own. Without any other recourse, he trimmed altitude, banked toward his team’s DZ, and flashed the ready light.

  The paratroopers had no sooner stood up than the sky around the transport lit with red, blue, and green tracers, the pyrotechnics streaking across the night like ribbons of multicolored fire. Almost spellbound, the men stared out at this brilliant display with a mixture of fear and awe. It was as if all the Fourth of Julys in their collective memories had been rolled into one—but these weren’t harmless fireworks meant to thrill parents and kids at the town celebration. Their sole purpose was to help the enemy pinpoint the American aircraft’s location.

  Sergeant Charles Malley was standing in the door when the warning bell clanged through the troop compartment. His wide-eyed attention abruptly shifted from the tracers to the wing of the plane. A loud explosion had shaken the airship; its left engine had been hit and was burning fiercely, trailing flames and smoke.

  Taylor and Sperber knew they wouldn’t be able to stay in the air long, and that their only hope was to make it back to the Channel for a water landing. Acting at once, Taylor feathered the propeller, moving it parallel to the airflow to increase the plane’s gliding distance. Then he banked hard to the right to start his turn. Beside him, Sperber peered out his window and abruptly realized that turn was about to take them straight into another flight in their serial—Plane 5, piloted by Lieutenant Dwight Kroesch. His fingers tightly gripping the yoke, Sperber pushed it forward to bring down the aircraft’s nose. It dipped below the other plane in the nick of time, barely avoiding a collision that would have turned both of them into aerial fireballs.

  Taylor, meanwhile, had gotten on the intercom and issued hurried instructions to his crew chief, Marvin Blackburn, who was back in the troop section with the paratroopers. At the door, Sergeant Malley heard him shout above the loud ringing of the bell, repeatedly giving an emergency jump order: “Clear the ship! Clear the ship! Clear the ship!”

  Malley didn’t budge from where he stood. After staring downward for an endless moment, he turned to Lieutenant Gordon Rothwell, his jumpmaster and the leader of Pathfinder Team C.

  “Hold!” he shouted, motioning at the bushy treetops. The trees were so close to the belly of the aircraft, Malley almost felt that he could reach down to touch them with his hands. “Hold the men!”

  Rothwell understood at once. The plane had dropped too low on its remaining engine. It would be suicidal for the troopers to bail. Their chutes would have no time to deploy before they hit the trees.

  He ordered them to wait. Antiaircraft rounds riddled the floor of the fuselage, whizzing through the troop section. Pressed together in its dim, tight confines, their apprehensive faces starkly limned by the tracers, the men mouthed silent prayers—hard, serious prayers—and awaited further orders.

  At the controls, Taylor pulled the transport’s nose sharply upward amid the volleys of tracer and AA fire coming from below. Then Sperber appeared from the cockpit. “Everything overboard!” he called out. “We’re going down!”

  His heart pounding in his chest, Lieutenant Taylor had swung hard back toward the Channel. The plane was as good as lost, and if he crashed into the trees, so were the men onboard. Their only chance at survival would be a water landing.

  In the troop section, the Pathfinders felt their stomachs flip-flop as the plane reversed course. They were hurriedly shedding ballast, jettisoning everything that wasn’t essential or bolted in place. Bringing out their knives, they began cutting themselves free of parachute harnesses, backpacks, leg bags, and gun straps—there wasn’t a moment to waste undoing buckles or clips. Weapons went out the door, as did ammunition. Fitted with explosive mechanisms to prevent them from falling into enemy hands, the cutting-edge Eureka radar units also suddenly became expendable. Malley would recall pulling the detonator cord on one before he hoisted it through the exit—and moments later accidentally cutting one of his mates through to his rib section while slashing off his harness.

  The man winced in pain, blood soaking through his uniform. Although Malley would joke about having earned him a Purple Heart, he’d known it was anything but a laughing matter when it happened. If the wound had hampered his ability swim, he might well have been a goner.

  But there had been no time for either of them to think. Blackburn was back in the tumult of the cabin, shouting for everyone to jump, telling them they were going to hit the water.

  Jump hell, Malley thought. Most of the troopers had already cut themselves out of their chutes and stripped down to their boots and combat uniforms. What was he talking about? How were they supposed to jump?

  The plane rattled around them as it accelerated, a shuddering vibration the men could feel deep in their bones. All they could do now was get ready to ditch.

  Struggling to control their fear, the soldiers fell back on their training and hastily shrugged into yellow Mae West life vests, pulling the cords to inflate them. Then they got down on the floor of the cabin, facing the rear of the transport, each trooper with his legs bracketing the man in front of him. Rothwell was the only exception; as jumpmaster, he was responsible for trying to inflate the dinghies. If the men survived the landing, they would need them to stay alive.

  Their descent gathered speed, a red flare searing the darkness outside the plane. Low above the Channel now, Taylor had released it to illuminate the water’s roiling surface.

  Suddenly he brought up the aircraft’s nose, making every effort to belly into the sea and distribute the force of collision. As the plane’s tail angled downward, the men braced for impact, sweating nervously, their pulses quickening, some with their heads bowed in silent prayer.

  Finally the transport smacked into the Channel with a loud, wrenching crump, tossing the men about the cabin.

  After that there was nothing around them but water
.

  6.

  In Crouch’s lead plane, Bluford Williams had abruptly noticed some confusion up front near the door. He didn’t know how long it had been since Lillyman ordered the men to jump with a hollered “Let’s go!” It could have been a minute, or several minutes. He couldn’t tell. His sense of time had been washed away in a heady rush of adrenaline.

  Standing at the end of the stick, he’d risen from his aluminum seat prepared to nudge along anybody who lagged or froze up with sudden hesitation. But that didn’t seem to be the problem. From where he stood, it appeared that one of the guys—Mangoni, he thought—had gotten his rifle hung on the edge of the door.

  The M-1s were supposed to be broken down and carried in a heavy padded leg case called a Griswold bag, but none of the troopers had been able to figure out who was responsible for that idea. Surely, they’d complained, it was some genius who’d never jumped from a height of five feet, let alone five hundred. Like their other leg bags, which had been invented by the Brits for their own airborne forces, the Griswolds were ungainly impediments to movement.

  Most of the men had chosen to jump without one of them, just as they’d decided against using their reserve chutes. Instead, they had kept their fully assembled rifles tucked under their harness straps, where they could reach for them quickly after making landfall.

  Lillyman had given his tacit approval by turning a blind eye, even knowing there was a risk involved: the wind would tear at them when they dropped, sweeping off whatever gear wasn’t properly secured. But he was a combat officer, not a pencil pusher, and he understood the situations his troopers would face on the ground. When a soldier came down in hostile territory with enemy soldiers shooting at him, the last thing he wanted was to squander precious seconds reassembling his M-1. Taking fire without a functional weapon in hand was a far deadlier prospect than getting momentarily caught in the jump door.

  Still, Mangoni had gotten his rifle snagged, or so Williams would recall. Dickson, the S-2 commander from regimental HQ, thought one of the paratroopers, saddled with a heavy load of equipment, had tripped over one of his leg bags and lost his balance. Neither of them had the clearest view from where they stood, but it was undebatable that somebody was having problems. In the commotion, Lillyman stepped out of position to help him.

  Then McFarlen felt a hand on his back, urging him toward the door. The plane was already making its pass of the DZ and in moments would turn back toward home. There wasn’t time to think or hesitate. He would no longer be the third man to exit the transport, but the first.

  The troopers had wanted to use the jump cry “Geronimo” after cooking it up to match their Indian warrior haircuts. But it would have to wait for another time. The ailing General William C. Lee was commander of the 101st, and the father of the U.S. Army airborne. In the days before the invasion, it had gotten around that the troopers would honor him by calling out his name instead.

  McFarlen remembered that as he moved into the doorway and gazed down at the fog-shrouded Normandy countryside, his ears filling with the merged thunder of the wind, the aircraft’s engines, and his own savagely beating heart.

  “Bill Lee!” he shouted into the void.

  And leaped.

  7.

  Coming down with their landing lights on, Captain Taylor and his copilot, Harold Sperber, had at first seen only water in front of them, bright green in the moonlight. Then, suddenly, the huge form of a ship. Steeling himself against the worst, Taylor wrenched at his control column and managed to turn away from yet another deadly collision.

  The plane hit the Channel hard. Cold seawater came surging up around it in a great wave, gushing through the door of its troop section. Taylor’s expert landing had kept the plane intact, but it was flooding fast.

  “Get the troops out, this baby’s going down!”

  It was Sperber shouting into the troop section this time, poking his head down from the aircraft’s astrodome, the glass observation bubble above and behind its cockpit. Meant for celestial navigation, it had now become a crow’s nest from which he could scan for nearby vessels. But in those first moments after the crash, he saw neither friendly nor hostile ships around him. There was only the darkness on all sides.

  Below him in the cabin, the men were now knee-deep in freezing water. They stood up off the riveted metal floor, their soaked uniform trousers clinging to their legs, their skin prickled with gooseflesh. Lieutenant Rothwell and several others were furiously pushing the dinghies out the door, trying to get the men who couldn’t swim onto them ahead of the rest. But the lieutenant had not been able to inflate more than a few of the rafts, and the current was sweeping them away faster than anyone could haul himself inside.

  Sloshing toward the exit, Malley noticed that Private First Class Steve Pustola’s pockets were bulging with service pistols. He’d stuffed them full of the Colt .45s as they’d been passed up the line of paratroopers to be tossed overboard. A Brooklyn boy, Pustola had a thing for those guns. He never seemed to have enough of them, and, sink or swim, he’d been intent on hanging on to as many as he could. But Malley had heard that people from Brooklyn were all a little bit crazy.

  One of the men crowding at the door, Private First Class Richard M. Wright—his flame-colored hair had earned him the nickname “Red” with his teammates—was simultaneously grateful and disappointed. Grateful he was still alive, disappointed that he’d been shot down before the jump. Wright hated the brutality and carnage of war. Hated the death and the killing. But he’d paid close attention to what was happening in Europe since Hitler’s ascent to power and had come to hate the evil of Nazi tyranny more than anything on earth.

  Though warned it was tantamount to committing suicide, Red had volunteered for Pathfinder duty with his close friends Terrence “Salty” Harris and Dutch Fenstermaker, figuring it was the quickest way to join the fight. That wasn’t to be, not now, not for him and Dutch, who was a member of his stick. But Harris was on Plane Number 5, the transport right behind theirs, and Wright hoped he’d make it to Normandy.

  As he prepared to swim out the door, Red swore he’d still get into the war somehow. . . if he survived the night. In his mind, it was by no means a certainty. The plane was sinking in a hurry, and the sea around it might be teeming with enemy patrol boats. Wright knew it was possible he’d drown before anyone, the Germans or the Allies, fished him out of the water.

  Taking a deep gulp of air, he splashed out into the Channel, swimming away from the plane to avoid being dragged down with it. He could discern the bobbing forms of his comrades in the brilliant glow of the moon, hear them calling to each other as they struggled to keep their heads above the swells. Beyond a few feet away, he saw nothing around him. No lights, no ships, nothing.

  Then he heard some of the men shouting that they’d located one of the dinghies. He swam in its direction, guided by their voices.

  “This way . . . this way . . . over here!”

  Wright’s arms and legs were almost numb from the cold when he got to the raft. He grabbed its edge and saw hands reach down from onboard to clutch at his uniform and Mae West, hoisting him up and in. At last he rolled over the side, catching his breath. There were two or three others on the dinghy with him, all shivering and drenched in briny water. A lifeline ran from inside the raft, the men in the water gripping every inch of its corded length, its slack fully paid out so it was taut as a bowstring. He felt a surge of relief when he saw Dutch Fenstermaker among them.

  Soaking wet from head to toe, his teeth chattering uncontrollably, Wright sat up and peered into the night. The little rubber dinghy couldn’t hold any more men than the few already aboard. The evacuees would have to take turns climbing onto it, or those hanging onto the rope would rapidly succumb to exposure.

  Time passed, no one knew how much for sure. The men were quiet, trying to conserve energy. Water whipping around it, their transport had reared in
the waves like a great gray bird that had plunged seaward in its terminal spasms, then begun to spiral down toward the Channel’s shallow bottom.

  In the distance, the men heard the drone of planes, the rattle of antiaircraft fire . . . and closer, too close, the sound of the wavelets lapping at the edges of the dinghy. They saw no sign of approaching ships and weren’t certain if that was good or bad.

  Helpless and battered, drifting alone in enemy waters, they could do nothing but wait to find out.

  8.

  In the sky behind Taylor’s downed transport, the remaining two planes in Team C bore on toward the Hiesville drop zone. Their pilots could only hope and pray the lead flight had ditched without breaking up, and that its crew and passengers had managed to escape serious harm. With German flak guns thumping on the ground and tracers streaking the darkness around them, it was all their aircrews could do to safely deliver the Pathfinders to their target area.

  Commanded by Lieutenant Roy Kessler, the troopers on Plane 5 had now become the serial’s primary stick. Among that group was Red Wright’s buddy Private First Class Salty Harris, who’d gotten his nickname because he’d once attended the Naval Academy, leaving after a series of disciplinary infractions that he would mainly attribute to boredom. Strapping, good-humored, and exuberantly foul-mouthed, Harris had found the atmosphere at Annapolis far too passive for his disposition, and in the end had guessed he just wasn’t cut out to be a Navy man. Possessed of a raucous fighting spirit that he attributed to his Irish lineage, he’d wanted action and found it in the Army, where he’d started out with a mortar company and been one of the early volunteers for the paratrooper school in Toccoa, Georgia.

  While there with the 506th PIR’s Easy Company, Harris met Wright and many of his other closest friends—in fact, he’d sat next to Wright on the bus to Toccoa and they’d hit it off right away. At paratrooper school, he’d trained under Captain Herbert Sobel, known to the men as the “Black Swan,” a notorious disciplinarian whose methods were considered unnecessarily harsh by the majority of his recruits. Making staff sergeant in a hurry, Harris would become as respected among the troopers of Easy Company as Sobel was despised and resented—a kind of accessible, everyman yin to the Black Swan’s stiffly detached yang.