First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Squatted behind a patch of shrubbery with bated breath, aiming his rifle in the direction of the men, he raised the cricket and snapped it in front of him.

  Click-clack.

  Thankfully the answering signal came almost at once:

  Click-clack, click-clack.

  He relaxed and lowered his weapon. It had been a double snap—the correct identifier.

  He emerged from the shrubs that had lent him cover. Stepping forward, he could see more than just their American helmets now, and recognized Mangoni and another paratrooper. His foot throbbing badly, he limped over to join them.

  Lost, disoriented, and frazzled, the men exchanged very few words as they came together, sharply aware that they needed to get on with their mission. But Smith could barely put pressure on his foot and knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the others without a painkiller. Nor could they afford to have him slow them down.

  He got the morphine syrette out of his kit. It would be too agonizing to take off his boot, so he rolled up his pants and injected the lower part of his leg. That helped a little.

  Half-carrying him along between them, aware time was running out, the Pathfinders moved off across the field to search for the rest of their team.

  12.

  Private Delbert Jones, another of the men to jump from Plane Number 1, had landed hard in a small courtyard, his helmet scraping down along its surrounding rock wall. The helmet’s metal shell may have saved his life, and it certainly spared him from a traumatic blow to his skull, but the collision had been noisy, and that wasn’t a good thing.

  Tumbling to the ground with a grunt, the wind knocked out of him, he’d lain flat on his back in the darkness for several seconds. A signal-light man, Jones was so weighted down with equipment he could hardly move, no less get his Holophanes and other gear out from under his harness.

  Confused, he looked around and saw a rustic stone building just yards away. A light was on inside it, leaching across the court from the narrow space under the door.

  Jones’s brow filmed with sweat. He remembered the sandbox models showing German barracks at the northern end of the drop zone—old country farmhouses they’d confiscated for the use of their troops. It seemed likely he’d fallen outside one of them.

  He quickly pulled himself together. If the structure was in fact a barracks, it would be patrolled by sentries, and the loud clanking of his helmet against the stone wall could have easily alerted them to his presence. But he couldn’t yield to panic. He would need all his wits about him to avoid enemy soldiers and had only a short while to set up his lights for the paratroopers of the 502nd.

  Pushing up to a sitting position, Jones fumbled around under his chest packs until he was able to work open the harness. Then he extricated his carbine and signal lights and rose to his feet. He could only guess at his location, and had no idea where his teammates might be. Somehow, he’d have to gain his bearings and then go find them.

  Jones scurried off, hugging the wall, relying on his wrist compass to help him move back along his jump stick’s line of dispersal. He searched for an opening, a gate, some way out of the yard. When he couldn’t find one, he planted his hands on the wall and boosted himself over the top.

  The weight of his packs made him take another stumbling misstep as he came down on the opposite side. Then the night upended and he was once again sprawled on the ground.

  When Jones got up, he was surrounded by tombstones. Like the farmhouse from which he’d fled, the cemetery was ages old. Partly surrounded by hedgerows, its burial plots were covered with moss, their cracked, leaning markers bleached chalk-white from exposure to the elements.

  Peering across the uneven rows of graves, he saw the outlines of three men near a bordering hedge and froze.

  Tensely alert, he stood near the wall in silence as they came closer.

  13.

  Landing in the same enclosed courtyard as Jones, Frank Rocca had also seen the light under the stone building’s front door and guessed that its occupants might be wide awake. But for him there was no mistaking the structure for a farmhouse or German military barracks. As he’d done on the firing range, quickly knocking out human-shaped targets from every angle like he had two sets of eyes, the blocky little private made a snap assessment of his surroundings. In the midst of his descent, he’d seen a high church steeple beyond the wall of the courtyard, a cemetery outside another part of the wall, and determined that the house with the light shining from it was the parsonage.

  After he touched down, Rocca had gotten out of his chute rig without a hitch, gathered up his equipment, and leapfrogged over the wall into the adjoining cemetery. There were a lot of places that would have been outwardly more dangerous than a church caretaker’s front yard, but he knew the Germans had occupied many local homes, and wasn’t eager to alert anyone to his presence.

  Although he and Rocca did not encounter each other in the courtyard—Jones may well have left it before Rocca crashed to the ground—the Pathfinders both headed off in the same general direction, seeking to retrace Lieutenant Crouch’s flight path and find their brothers.

  14.

  Mangoni and John Zamanakos had sat elbow-to-elbow aboard the transport and jumped one after the other. But the demolition men had been separated when they landed on different sides of a large hedgerow.

  Alone in a tree-studded field, Zamanakos—like Jones—had trouble unbuckling his parachute harness. He’d hooked his Eureka unit under his chest packs and over the harness’s straps, and the big piece of equipment had gotten in the way of things. Finally, he had to use his trench knife to cut his risers.

  Free of the chute now, he looked this way and that, saw a long, deep ditch running parallel to the hedgerow, and crawled down into it, hoisting his radar unit over the dirt embankment. Then he waited and listened.

  For a few moments, he heard nothing but winged insects flittering and buzzing past his ears. Then at last the sounds he’d been hoping for reached him from the near distance: Click-clack . . . click-clack . . . click-clack . . .

  A cricket.

  He took out his own device without leaving the drainage ditch. It offered him more than vital cover; when he’d checked his compass, he seen that it roughly traced his transport’s line of flight. Since the other members of his stick also would be heading that way, his path was sure to converge with theirs if he stayed down in it.

  Grimed and sweaty, Zamanakos tramped through the ditch with his transmitter box, repeatedly clicking the little signal device in front of him as he moved along. He didn’t have much time before the planes appeared from the west seeking the drop zone. However far off it might be, he and his teammates had to get there first to bring them in.

  15.

  Click-clack . . . click-clack . . .

  Click-clack, click-clack . . . click-clack, click-clack . . .

  The signals given and received, Jones hurried toward the three shadowy forms across the graveyard. One was Snuffy Smith, the outfit’s medic. He’d clearly been injured and was being half-dragged along by the others.

  The Pathfinders assembled at the edge of the cemetery and then moved into a neighboring orchard, where more troopers from their flight joined them after hearing their clickers: Mangoni, Rocca, Wilhelm, T/5 Owen Council, and then Zamanakos. His helmet and uniform covered with mud and soil from trekking through the ditch, his face smeared with camo paint, he looked to all eyes around him like he’d clawed his way out of a nearby grave.

  Together in the field now, the men hastily compared notes. Though most reported seeing the church and enclosed courtyard, no one had noticed any German soldiers or vehicles around the structure Jones had thought might be a barracks. This led them to agree that it was probably still occupied by the local parson.

  Flustered and discombobulated, Wilhelm now shared his own experience of landing in a wood-ringed pasture; spoo
ked by the heavy darkness, he’d nervously turned on his Holophane.

  “I wanted to see if it would work,” he said, realizing how crazy that must have sounded.

  As it turned out, he explained, the panel had done more than “work”—it had lit up the night around him with its brilliant reflectorized glare, startling him out of his momentary confusion and making him realize that he might as well have turned on a neon sign revealing his position to enemy soldiers. Fueled by that thought, he had left the field in a hurry, fortunate not to have alerted every German in the area.

  With almost half the stick assembled, the troopers now had to decide how to carry out their orders. They knew they were southeast of Pouppeville, where they were supposed to have dropped—but none of the men were sure how far to the southeast, making it all the more urgent that they not waste a minute. Although Captain Lillyman and the rest of their team were still unaccounted for, they would have to move off toward the DZ without them.

  At least with regard to Lillyman, that would prove unnecessary. The entire group breathed a collective sigh of relief when he stepped out of the night with Tom Walton, having met up with him while following all the clicks and clacks. Walton and Council were T/5s, or technician fifth grades, trained at operating the Eureka beacon; with both men present, the group was at last entirely capable of readying a drop zone.

  Their big problem was timing. Or more precisely, the amount of time left to them. Lillyman had already determined that the Pathfinders wouldn’t be able to reach their assigned DZ before the flights came in, leaving him to present them with a simple contingency plan: namely to get as close to the original location as possible in the minutes they had left and find a field large enough for the 502nd to use as an alternate landing spot. The members of the stick—and security detail—who were still missing when they headed out would hopefully follow in that same direction and catch up to them.

  As for Lieutenant Dickson and his men: The S-2s hadn’t been seen by anyone since before the jump, but they’d also been last to exit the transport, meaning they would have landed farthest from the troopers closest the door. More important—if cold-blooded—was the realization that their classified mission had nothing to do with preparing the DZ. Wherever Dickson’s party had come down, the bottom line was that they were on their own.

  Finished with his huddle, Lillyman gave the men a brisk order to move out, Jones slipping an arm under Snuffy Smith’s shoulder to help him along, another member of the group relieving the medic of his Eureka. It was obvious to all of them that he was barely able to stand up on his own, let alone carry the weighty instrument.

  Their course of action set, the Pathfinders hastened northeast across the fields, looking for a suitable place to lay out their beacons.

  16.

  About six weeks before the invasion, in mid-May, the U.S. military’s G2 Intelligence Corps had begun noticing tiny black specks on their aerial surveillance photos of projected drop zones across the Cotentin Peninsula. The number of specks multiplied daily and were soon identified as vertical wooden poles spaced between seventy-five and a hundred yards apart, with cables strung between them in a way that they could shred alighting Allied gliders to pieces and kill or maim descending paratroopers on landfall. Fabricated out of logs and railroad ties, they would become known as “Rommel’s asparagus” after the German field marshal who’d masterminded the Atlantic defenses and ordered them planted in the ground like the vegetables they resembled. Spied among them outside the farming hamlet of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville were two buildups of casemented 105mm howitzers, and parking bays for military vehicles—including heavy armor.

  The poles were so numerous and easily replaceable that little could be done about them. But the heavy guns were another story. They presented a grave threat to the ships bringing men and supplies ashore on Utah Beach, making them prime targets of the 502nd PIR’s airborne troops. In fact, regimental HQ was convinced that “the fate of the northern half of the operation could have turned” on whether the coastal batteries were taken out before the arrival of the amphibious assault waves.

  Destroying the batteries would be a challenge for two main reasons, however: The Allies were unfamiliar with the local roads leading up to them, and many of those roads had been deliberately flooded by the Germans to make them impassable.

  That was where Buck Dickson, his men, and their bags full of maps and top secret orders entered the picture. Contrary to what the Pathfinders might have jokingly asserted, the S-2s hadn’t only piggybacked Lieutenant Crouch’s transport to stoke their curiosity. Their top secret mission was to reconnoiter the gun emplacements in Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, as well as an artillery garrison billeted in the nearby hamlet of Mézières, where the Germans had appropriated a cluster of eleven farmhouses, barns, and stables for their use. Coded W-X-Y-Z by G2 Intelligence, the complex had been bombed twice in a week, the first time by the RAF in late May, then again earlier that night by B-26 Marauders from the U.S. Air Force’s 394th Bombardment Group, stationed at the RAF airfield at Boreham, Essex. But the chiefs in no way trusted the job to airpower alone. Dickson had been ordered to assess the strength of the enemy forces there and determine an overland route that the 502nd Infantry’s 2nd Battalion could use to attack and destroy the gun emplacements.

  But things did not at all go as planned for his team. As the last three men to exit Plane 1, they were seriously affected by the delay caused by Mangoni’s stumble and did not clear the door until Crouch had doubled back over the peninsula and sped up for his trip home. Consequently, they’d landed far from Lillyman and the other paratroopers without having the slightest idea where they were relative to their location . . . and, more critically, to the position of the gun batteries they were supposed to scout out.

  Dickson’s jump itself went smoothly, and for that he was thankful. He’d barely had time to feel himself falling through the air when he came down in tall grass, moonlight pouring over him from the cloudless sky, washing over the grass so it almost looked like a carpet of silver tinsel. The night was silent around him—almost eerily so. He could hear nothing but his own anxious breath.

  Still gathering his wits, he had some trouble escaping his parachute harness and set his M3 submachine gun down on the ground while working free of it. When he finally got that accomplished, he collected and repacked his gear and started to move off to find his men.

  The lieutenant had gone about a dozen yards when he froze in his tracks, as if struck by cold lightning. He’d left the grease gun somewhere behind him in the field.

  With a quick about-face, Dickson scrambled back to the spot where he’d dropped from the sky—or what he thought was the same spot. The grass was everywhere around him, coming up to his knees, one area resembling the next in the darkness. Cursing his stupidity, he squatted down on all fours and desperately felt around for the weapon, patting the ground, groping for it at the bottom of the high, flowing blades of grass.

  The lieutenant expelled a long sigh of relief when his hands finally touched the grease gun’s cool metal barrel. He didn’t know what had guided them to it in the darkness, and didn’t much care. The main thing was he’d found the weapon. Any fool knew you couldn’t fight a war without a gun.

  Standing up out of the grass like a surfacing diver, Dickson shouldered the weapon and got back to looking for his men. The countryside was quiet around him; he heard nothing but the night sounds one might have expected in any meadow anywhere: insects humming and chirruping, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and over and around it all the whisper of the breeze as it shifted through the field. He could have been in Kansas, Nebraska, or even Western Maryland, where he’d attended college . . . except that the hedgerows growing on all sides were undeniable reminders of how far he was from those places.

  Alone and disoriented, Dickson moved off along the troop carrier’s line of flight. For him, the silence had an almost perilous quality, leading his
mind in unwanted and unsettling directions. What if the weather had taken a bad turn after the Pathfinder flights left England, forcing the invasion to be postponed again? If there hadn’t been enough time to recall the troopers before they’d jumped? It didn’t seem a likely scenario, but what if? The men who’d been flown here aboard the transport would be left to fend for themselves. To survive in enemy territory, possibly for several weeks, with only the supplies, ammunition, and meager chocolate D rations they carried on their backs.

  Gnawed by uncertainty, Dickson went off seeking Ott and Clark. Fortunately they’d landed in nearby fields, and he was soon able to locate them, aided by the clicking of their signal bugs and the plentiful moonlight. But in spite of his relief at finding the S-2s, he knew the clock was running down on the arrival of the 2nd Battalion. They would have no time for a breather.

  Kneeling low in the grass, the intelligence men spread their maps across their knees and studied them carefully by the light of their flashlights.

  That was when the loud, rumbling thunder of antiaircraft fire shook the night.

  Dickson looked up into the sky. So much for the invasion being on hold. Tracers had lit up the western horizon, a brilliant, pulsing glare that left all three men momentarily overwhelmed. But within seconds the rapt, fascinated expressions on their faces would be replaced with naked horror. A stricken C-47 transport had appeared above them, gushing flames, streaking down to earth like a meteor. If there were men aboard, they would be doomed.

  Stunned, Dickson realized almost an hour had passed since his jump. The sheer volume of gunfire left him with no doubt that the main wave of airborne troops had arrived and met heavy resistance from German shore defenses. He also acknowledged, with a sinking feeling in his gut, that it was much too late to reconnoiter the battery at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville before the paratroops of the 2nd Battalion hit the ground.