First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Just weeks before Normandy, the men’s gaining frustration with the captain came to a boil with his revocation of their three-day passes over a minor incident. At the center of a protest against Sobel that got him busted in rank, Harris was transferred out of Easy without being allowed to pick up his bags. He hadn’t been inclined to complain; it was better than the court-martial for mutiny he’d barely dodged—and, on the flip side, also better than he would have felt if he’d stood by and done nothing about Sobel. No one would have denied that E Company was a crackerjack outfit, a model for the paratroop infantry—and that Sobel deserved credit for helping to whip it into shape. But the captain had demoralized Easy’s enlisted men even as they’d needed to muster their confidence for the coming invasion. Harris and several of his fellow noncoms had felt him to be almost sadistic in the punishments he doled out for the most minor breaches of discipline—and in their eyes, his behavior had become more and more irrational as the prospect of jumping into battle had ground on his nerves. In the end, they grew convinced he’d been unfit to lead men into combat and was bound to get them unnecessarily killed.

  If Harris still dwelled on the episode on the eve of D-Day, he kept it to himself. When one of his old Easy platoon commanders had recruited him for the Pathfinder school, he’d eagerly seized the chance. He didn’t care that it was pegged a landing spot for screwups and agitators, or that that was probably the main reason he’d been asked to volunteer. Nor did he care that they were supposedly training for a mission of no return. Figuring he’d deal with whatever the mission might be when he had to, Harris had simply decided Pathfinder duty would give him a fresh start, get him into the thick of the action he craved, and keep him together with some of his closest friends in Easy Company. Dick Wright and Carl “Dutch” Fenstermaker had been steered toward the Pathfinders mainly because they were his friends, and both were now aboard Plane 4. Mike Ranny, who had gotten into trouble with Harris during the Sobel incident, also took the special signal training at North Witham, but he’d rejoined Easy when the opening came up.

  Whatever Harris was thinking as his flight approached the DZ, he kept it to himself. He likely had no inkling that Wright and Fenstermaker’s plane had gotten shot out of the air—the flight crew wouldn’t have rushed to share that information—and was focused on his particular responsibilities. Kessler had entrusted him with carrying and rigging one of the stick’s two radar homing beacons, which said everything about how highly he was regarded by the CO. While the light panels were important visual aids for the squadrons flying to Drop Zone C, eighty-one planeloads of airborne infantry were relying heavily on the Eureka sets to bring them in from a distance of twenty miles. Aboard the cockpits of the C-47s, transponder units called Rebecca interrogators would send out timed radar pulses that, upon finding the Eureka beacons on the ground, would be rebroadcast to the Rebeccas on a different frequency and picked up by directional antennas mounted on the planes. It was no coincidence, then, that the word eureka was Greek for “I have found it.”

  Now the red signal light blinked, and Lieutenant Kessler gave the orders to stand up and hook up. Harris pushed to his feet and began his equipment checks. Back in England, he’d been called a disgrace to the company he’d helped found, and had the stripes he’d proudly earned at Toccoa peeled from his shoulders. But now he’d be able to show his worth where it counted, on the battlefield. It would be, if not redemption, then a kind of validation for him.

  The green light came on. Salty Harris moved into the aisle, and then was standing in the open doorway. His team’s pilot, Lieutenant Dwight Kroesch, had opted to fly in above rather than under the clouds and had given the go signal at a higher altitude than many of the other flights. Seen in the moonlight, the French countryside below Harris would have resembled a relief map, or one of the sand table dioramas he’d seen at the pre-mission briefings. But there had been neither tracers nor belching antiaircraft guns coming from those scale models.

  He had wanted action and gotten his wish. The enemy defenses were awake and spitting fire up into the sky.

  Ready as any man could be, he jumped into their vicious teeth.

  9.

  Minutes earlier, Captain Frank Lillyman’s team had learned a practical benefit of jumping from a very low altitude: It didn’t leave them with time to think about their vulnerability, feel the bottoms drop out of their stomachs as gravity hauled them downward, or for that matter think or feel much of anything at all. The experience passed so quickly it was a blur. There was the prop blast whipping them toward the C-47’s tail, the shock of their chutes blossoming open and jerking their harnesses up into their crotches, and then, about twenty-five seconds after they left the aircraft, the ground racing up to meet them.

  The men had been taught to control the drops with their canvas risers—the straps that connected to the shroud lines running up to the canopy. If a trooper pulled his left front riser, he would turn left. If he pulled the right riser, he’d float over in that direction. If he pulled both of them at the same time he would accelerate his descent, spilling air from the front of his chute. The harder he pulled, the more air he released in the appropriate section of the canopy, and when he pulled hard enough the canopy would deflate to allow for his landing.

  Simple in theory, but a paratrooper’s abilities were honed through innumerable tower drills, dozens of jumps out of flying aircraft, and many months of arduous physical fitness training for strength, stamina, and coordination. The Pathfinders, moreover, had gone through an additional level of intensive preparation at North Witham, where they were trained to set up and operate the special equipment they would bring behind enemy lines.

  Descending quickly, Lillyman sailed over the treetops and tugged on his forward risers, convinced the open field below would be a good place to land. His chin tucked low, knees slightly bent, he went into a practiced sideways roll as the chute collapsed with a fluttery whisper and then poured to the ground in a loose heap.

  His landing accomplished, he scrambled to his feet and shucked his harness. The stogie was still jutting from his teeth, a good indication his luck would be holding up.

  But not all the signs were that reassuring. Even as the full realization that he was on enemy ground sank in, Lillyman realized he was alone in the field. He heard bursts of machine-gun fire an uncertain distance away, saw 40mm tracers flaring like otherworldly lightning above the treetops. But there was neither sight nor sound of his men or their security detail. For some reason—he conjectured it was the delayed jumps when Mangoni got fouled up in the plane—the troopers seemed to have been widely scattered across the area. With Crouch flying about 110 miles an hour, a half minute’s holdup for Mangoni would have resulted in the men behind him jumping hundreds of yards from those who’d preceded him out the door.

  Lillyman continued to evaluate his situation, his hands automatically dropping to his carbine. The field looked different from the ones he’d seen in the sand table diagrams and reconnaissance photos. Much smaller, for one thing. He’d known about the hedgerows bordering the peninsula’s roads and farmlands. But the growth around the pasture was closer to fifty feet high than the fifteen his briefings had led him to expect. The foliage looked old, even ancient, each hedge a wildly overgrown jumble of shrubs, trees, and roots. They seemed almost impassable to him at first glance.

  He was trying to orient himself, figure out where he was relative to the DZ, when he heard a sound across the field. Something had moved in the darkness at its edge, near a tall, tangled line of bushes. The breath catching in his throat, he turned his gun toward the noise. His orders were to do no shooting, to avoid betraying his position. He was supposed to be a ghost, a phantom stealing through the night, taking evasive action if he encountered enemy forces. Unless he had no other choice.

  A moment or two passed. Biting into his cigar, his eyes narrow and alert in his camo-smeared face, Lillyman peered across the field and turned his M
-1 toward the sound.

  Then whatever he’d heard parted with the shadows and moved toward him—a slow, lumbering shape much too large and bulky to be human.

  Lillyman slid his finger over his rifle’s trigger . . . and then suddenly heard a low, deep moo. His windpipe unlocking, the breath streaming from his mouth, he lowered the weapon and grinned. The cow trudged slowly over to where he stood, stuck out her big, moist, fleshy nose, and snuffled the sleeve of his jump jacket.

  He looked at the beast, flushed with relief. Thanks to her, he felt about five years older than he had a few minutes ago.

  When the newspapers and radios blare out the news, remember that your pappy led the way. He’d written those words to Jane in mid-May, right after he was briefed about his Pathfinders’ role in the coming invasion, but hadn’t supposed his first encounter on enemy-held soil would be with a cow. It would be a story worth telling her sometime.

  Right now, though, Lillyman had to find his men. If he was going to do that, he’d have to retrace Crouch’s flight path. They would have been scattered along that line.

  With a silent good-bye to this bovine welcomer, he checked his wrist compass and went sprinting across the pasture toward an opening in the hedges, as alone as he’d felt in his entire life.

  10.

  At about half past midnight, Captain Basil T. Jones, the skipper of the HMS Tartar, found himself staring straight into the jaws of a major conundrum. Assigned picket duty off the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula, his 377-foot Tribal-class destroyer was the flagship of the British Royal Navy’s 10 Destroyer Flotilla, a group on patrol against enemy vessels that might be attempting to intercept the Allied landing forces or resupply German troops on the beachhead.

  Jones’s orders were to stop for nothing unless it was to engage the enemy. The admiralty had been clear about that. They wanted to ensure that his group was undistracted, and to minimize any chance of Nazi vessels slipping through its line of defense.

  But just minutes ago, every sailor on Tartar’s deck had spotted an aircraft plunging out of the sky within yards of the destroyer, its left wing engulfed in ragged orange flames. Her lookouts had almost immediately witnessed men bailing out of the plane into the Channel. Notified over the ship’s telephone, Captain Jones had instructed his steersmen to investigate and hurried topside for a firsthand look. When he reached the upper deck, the destroyer’s searchlights were beaming through the misty darkness toward the downed, sinking aircraft. Several men were hollering over the gunwales and waving toward a nearby lifeboat in the water. A relatively new crew that had come on board following a major refit in January, the sailors had seen little combat to this point and were excited and anxious.

  “They’re Jerries!”

  “Shoot the bastards!”

  Raising his binoculars to his eyes, Jones heard shouts coming back at them across the heaving water: “Ship ahoy! We’re American paratroopers! American paratroopers!”

  Jones knew he had a decision to make. Obviously, the men clinging to that raft could not be friend and foe at the same time.

  He peered through the goggles, shifting his focus between the survivors and their sinking plane. The aircraft’s nose and wings were almost submerged, but he was able to see its rear section projecting out of the water like the tail of a breaching whale. Steadying the binoculars on that part of the fuselage, the skipper identified horizontal white bands near its tail wings—the distinct markings of an Allied invasion plane.

  Jones thought hard now. He was a veteran forty-three-year-old officer and nobody’s fool. In the weeks leading up to D-Day, SHAEF had issued repeated warnings about German efforts at deception and infiltration. While all those men surviving a plunge from the sky could have been viewed as a happy miracle, the captain couldn’t have been faulted if he’d been suspicious of what he saw, or even felt it an impossible strain on his credibility. As a flotilla commander, he bore a grave responsibility for the safety of four warships and their crews. He needed to be cautious.

  But caution was only part of the matter for Jones. The rest was the simple nature of his mission. HMS Tartar was not a search-and-rescue ship. He’d received strict instructions to keep the ship on patrol, to stop for nothing unless it was to engage an enemy vessel. Under the circumstances, he would be justified in simply radioing a message to the fleet about the men in the water, thereby making them someone else’s problem. In fact, it would be a full-out violation of orders if he stopped to pick them up.

  But the drink was rough tonight, and freezing cold, and it looked as if more than a score of the men were desperately trying to hang on to a single lifeboat. What if no one came to pull them out? The Germans had threatened to shoot Allied paratroopers as spies, without regard for the Geneva accords. If they were indeed who they claimed to be—and this was, after all, the American invasion sector—the enemy might discover them in the water and pick them off like ducks in a pond.

  Captain Jones stirred all these factors together and then weighed them, searching his heart and conscience. Mindful that orders were orders, he could really do just one thing.

  Soberly, he gave his command. The decision hadn’t taken him long. Right or wrong, he would have to live with it.

  11.

  If the irony of Private Ray “Snuffy” Smith’s predicament even occurred to him, it would have been a fleeting awareness. Once down on enemy soil, the Pathfinders were to a man living in the moment, propelled from one to the next by the dual imperatives of their mission and basic survival. He would have had other things on his mind.

  But whatever he may or may not have thought about his mishap, it was a wicked turn of fate. He was the team’s medic. His job was to tend to their wounded. Yet he was the first in his unit to be injured, breaking his foot on landfall.

  Nicknamed after the popular cartoon character Snuffy Smith—a moonshining hillbilly who shared Ray’s deep Southern-Appalachian accent and boisterous personality—the twenty-year-old Kentuckian had joined the army four years earlier after quitting high school, then trained as a medical corpsman with the 4th Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia, and been promoted to sergeant by the time he was seventeen. A natural as a medic, he’d been handpicked for the Medical Corps officer training program, only to be disqualified when his paperwork revealed he hadn’t gotten past the eighth grade. Stung and disappointed by the rejection, Smith had volunteered for paratrooper school, knowing full well it would mean getting bumped down to private. But the parachute pay was fifty dollars a month better than the average enlisted man’s wage, and, besides, he’d wanted in on the action.

  After he earned his wings, the Pathfinder units put out a call for medics, and Smith decided to respond. Why not put his training to use where it counted? It had seemed like the way to go.

  Carrying the Eureka unit and first-aid supplies tonight, Smith had been among the most overloaded troopers aboard the lead flight. It is no mystery, then, why he was one of the men to jump without the reserve parachute. But he didn’t blame his tree landing on the bulky combat load. To him, it was just a nasty fluke.

  There had been no problems during the jump. Before clearing the door of the plane, he had looked out and seen nothing but the horizon. There was no incoming flak, no tracer fire. Then he’d felt a push from behind and leaped into the night.

  The grove of apple trees had appeared below in a hurry. He’d hurtled down into one of them, unable to get clear of it, twigs and branches tearing at his skin, his chute and static lines getting entangled, leaves flying everywhere, pale green June apples dropping all around him.

  Smith’s descent finally came to a halt when he found himself dangling from a limb of the tree, suspended by his twisted lines. He’d landed in a churchyard enclosed by a low stone wall and could see the church close by in the moonlight.

  Then he noticed the vague silhouettes of helmets about fifty feet away across the grove. Alarmed and help
less, he peered in their direction, knowing he’d be able to recognize German coal scuttles if he got a halfway decent look at them. But despite the brightness of the moon it was too dark to make out the helmet shapes.

  With a deep breath, Smith struggled to escape his harness. Whether the soldiers were friend or enemy, he had to get out of the tree . . . but all he accomplished trying to unfasten his straps was to shake more apples from the branches. They rained down amid a flutter of leaves and twigs and then went bouncing off his body to the ground.

  Pulling his trench knife out of its boot sheath, Smith cut his shroud lines and dropped among the apples. It was a hard spill, but he quickly discovered that wasn’t the worst of it. Something was seriously wrong with his foot. He couldn’t rest his weight on it without pain, and it was swelling up fast.

  He instantly realized he’d broken a bone, or even suffered a compound fracture. As a medic he knew all the indications, and his weren’t good.

  Smith knew he couldn’t just wait there to be discovered, though. His first order of business was to locate his teammates, and the first step would be to identify the shadowy forms across the churchyard.

  He reached into a pocket, fishing for his cricket. Given to every Screaming Eagle before D-Day, the little metal clicking devices were military-issue versions of the novelty toys found in Cracker Jack boxes. Since the cricket would click once when its tab was depressed and a second time when it was released, it had been determined that one set of clicks would be the challenge and a double set the response.

  His clicker in hand, using the trees and bushes for cover, Smith crept toward the indistinct forms he’d seen moving about him. His injured foot felt like a huge swollen lump in his boot. He would need to give himself a shot of morphine if he was going to keep walking on it, and he had no way of telling how well he’d get around even with a hypo. But first things first.