First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  True to form, Haller had managed to irritate his stick mates while crossing the Channel. He’d been drinking coffee nonstop at base to calm his nerves, and once in flight had needed to answer to his bladder for all the cups he’d consumed. Glancing toward the bathroom stall at the rear of the troop compartment, he decided he would never fit inside it with his equipment load, and instead went to the open jump door and relieved himself—not taking the backdraft into account.

  If Haller had been the only one to wind up dripping with urine, the other troopers might have gotten a good laugh at his expense. But when the men closest to the door got it blown in their faces, they bombarded him with curses and insults.

  Their aggravation notwithstanding, it wasn’t long before everyone aboard the plane quieted down. Bound for Drop Zone D between the villages of Vierville and Angoville-Au-Plain, their serial started taking heavy flak as soon as it turned overland—and the machine-gun and antiaircraft fire would intensify as they neared the DZ. Here the German troops were even more prepared than those to the south at Drop Zone C, where the Pathfinders were already meeting with stiff resistance.

  Its central area a flat, open pasture with a big farmhouse at one side, the DZ offered the paratroopers little cover as they descended, while providing the defenders with numerous convenient hiding places at the field’s periphery. With flare guns to light the darkness and confuse the troopers, they had machine guns and mortars concealed in the hedgerows on three sides, aiming them into the pasture to cover the areas where the invaders would touch down.

  The Germans would also benefit from an unhappy pair of delays that had beset the American transports en route.

  The first hitch for their formation had been running into the belt of clouds along the coast. All three C-47s had gotten lost in the vaporous gray mist, missed their last turning point, and flown clear across the peninsula before their aircrews sighted the east coast below them.

  Sweeping around in a wide circle, they had turned back toward the DZ from the southeast, only to meet with outbreaks of heavy flak as they sped overland to make their passes. The pilots had repeatedly jinked left and right to avoid incoming fire, contributing to the delay in their arrival at the drop zone. When they finally gave the Pathfinders the green light, it was 12:47 A.M., seventeen minutes later than planned, and thirty-five minutes after Lillyman and his men had made their landings to the north.

  It was a critical lag. By this time German troops across the Cotentin had been roused from their barracks and frantically sent out to man their posts. At first none of the defenders, including Rommel himself—who had left the coast for Berlin to attend his wife Lucie’s birthday party and was there when he received news of the airborne attack—suspected that the Allies had begun their invasion. Most believed they were fending off a limited commando strike. But despite their surprise and confusion, they were strongly entrenched throughout the peninsula and well primed to be “sitting at their arms” once the alarm got out.

  The German defenders at Drop Zone D were among the best positioned in the early going. They opened fire on the Pathfinders from the hedgerows even as they made landfall, using flare pistols to light up the field around them, hitting them with a fusillade of machine-gun fire and mortar shells—and that wasn’t the only punishing surprise in store for the invaders. After sloshing gasoline all over the farmhouse at the edge of the pasture, the Germans had stood ready to start it on fire as the C-47s arrived, meaning to blind their aircrews with the glare and immolate the troopers who might be unable to avoid plunging down on top of it.

  With the Pathfinders’ jump having occurred so late, there was only minutes between their arrival and the rumbling sound of the 506th PIR’s main wave transports approaching in the western sky—the Germans’ cue to put their torches to the farmhouse. It went up instantly, gripped by a giant orange claw of flame.

  Although their planes had come in low, the troopers felt as if their descent took a hundred years. With the German guns turned skyward, bullets riddled some of the men’s silk as they dropped into the swirling inferno of the field. Others were killed before their feet touched the earth, and still more were mowed down as they landed. Those who crashed into the trees at the fringes of the pasture had to cut themselves out of their harnesses under heavy fire. At least one jumper, Stanley Suwarsky, who’d leaped from Plane 6, was shot to death as he dangled helplessly from a bough. He would be the first American soldier to perish in the Normandy invasion.

  In the middle of the field, the Pathfinders at first lay still to avoid the bullets and tracers sizzling through the tall grass around them. But they knew they could not stay out in the open, where they were easy targets. Within a few minutes they began inching toward the hedgerows amid the flames and machine-gun salvos, their chins down in the dirt, crawling on their stomachs to avoid crossfire over their heads. They had to find cover and set up their lights and beacons.

  Amid the chaos of the landing, a group of them managed to collect themselves and sneak up on a couple of German machine-gun emplacements. Getting their grenades loose, they tossed them into the nests and hit the dirt. The explosions took out the enemy soldiers at their posts.

  With those guns silenced, Lieutenant Watson got a needed opening to rally several of his men. Among them was Joe Haller, the self-anointed King One, who also held the distinction of being one of Watson’s Eureka operators. The Germans spraying him with fire from several directions, Haller dragged his unit into the shrubbery, fully aware it could have slowed him down enough to get him killed.

  Watson knew it would be impossible for his signalmen to lay out their T with machine-gun rounds and mortars coming at them from all sides. Moreover, the light from the blazing farmhouse across the field would be far brighter than the panels, rendering them almost useless to the pilots. The radar beacon was now Team D’s best bet for guiding in the formation.

  Haller rushed to set it up, getting the antenna out of the oilskin’s outside pocket, connecting it to the unit, and then telescoping it to its full eleven-foot height. The sound of the planes was so loud he could almost feel the vibration in his bones. They were close, almost on top of the field. But he could only hope there was still time for the lead plane’s Rebecca to zone in on the radar beam.

  Slipping on his headset, Haller powered up the Eureka, calibrated its dials to the designated signal frequency, and began transmitting. Without lights to mark the drop zone, he used the device’s added radio Morse code function to send out a dash and two dots for the letter D.

  The planes appeared seemingly at once and began to release their sticks, the shadowy forms of the paratroopers dotting the night sky as they came down into the field.

  Looking up from below, surrounded by the enemy, Watson, Haller, and the rest of the Pathfinders watched them descend in the glare of the fiercely burning farmhouse. Although hardly out of danger, they knew they were no longer on their own.

  The Allied invasion of Normandy had begun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1.

  T/5 Maynard Beamesderfer remembered exactly when he’d started thinking it might be fun to jump out of an airplane with a parachute. He was sixteen or seventeen years old and on a family trip up to New York to see the ’39 World’s Fair.

  The visit was something special for the Beamesderfers. Maynard’s father was a farmhand in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and there was never much spending money at home, and the teenager lived in a world with relatively narrow borders.

  Life revolved around work for the males of the family, and he always did his part to add to the household income. In his final year of high school, Maynard—his friends just called him “Beamy”—had gotten a job at the Hershey chocolate plant about five miles from where he lived and had worked there four hours a day at thirty-five cents an hour, taking the nickel trolley over with some of his friends. During the harvest seasons, he’d earned extra wages picking tomatoes and tobacco and
other crops at the local produce farms. It had helped that he spoke the broken German called Pennsylvania Dutch—his dad had been raised a Dunker, though he wasn’t very religious—because that was all the old farmers knew, and they wouldn’t hire anyone who couldn’t communicate in the dialect.

  It had taken the Beamesderfers a while to save up enough money for the World’s Fair, and Beamy went with only a dollar to spend on the attractions. But the moment he set eyes on the Parachute Jump, he was hooked. The tower was a lofty two hundred fifty feet high, and for a quarter a ride, he was strapped into a seat and pulled up on cables to its summit, then dropped to the ground under one of the brightly colored parachutes.

  Beamy had gotten on the Jump several times, waiting in the long lines and spending most of his dollar on it. The ride had electrified him and he wouldn’t forget it. He’d thought it was just plain great.

  It was about a year later that he’d seen a U.S. Army recruitment film for airborne troopers. This was right after Pearl Harbor, at a movie matinee back home in Lebanon. He had never heard of soldiers that jumped into battle with parachutes, and had figured it must be something new for the service. In the reel, the troopers wore soft leather frap hats, and the narrator explained that the drop towers they used for their drills had come from the World’s Fair. That made Beamy remember his thrilling experience on the rides.

  The jump training sounded like a “real good deal.” Being a country boy, working on the farms, he’d had dreams of seeing the bigger world around him. Whenever he and his classmates had traveled to Philly for the state basketball tournaments, the boys there had harassed them with calls of “Here come the shitkickers!” and Beamy had hardly blamed them. His school didn’t even have a hardwood court, and he played basketball outdoors on the dirt. Beamy and his teammates were very proud they could compete at all with the boys at the city armory.

  With the draft having begun in 1940, Beamy’s parents and relatives had braced for the inevitability that he’d be pulled into the service at some point—of the dozen boys in his high school class, only the three strict Mennonites had legal exemptions. But his family still reacted with surprise when he told them he planned to leave school and enlist at eighteen, with a year left before graduation. The family members on his father’s side were especially taken aback. As Dunkers, they were religious pacifists. He would be the first of their clan ever to join the armed forces.

  But Beamy had never taken to schoolwork. Though his teachers all agreed he was a bright kid, he had a lot of energy he couldn’t seem to channel in positive directions and had gotten into hot water so often that his sister’s friends called him the devil of the neighborhood. In their hearts, the Beamesderfers may have felt the army was the best thing for his future.

  Beamy would practically go straight from the recruitment office in Pennsylvania to Fort Benning, Georgia, where the rookies trained for a couple of months before they did some jumping at the drop zones across the Chattahoochee River in Alabama. The drills had been strenuous, and the NCOs hard as nails, but he’d made it through, and found the night jumps easy and fun. The Alabama DZs had been fairly well cleared of trees, fences, and other jump hazards, so you didn’t have to worry about hitting much except watermelon fields, and hardly any of the men thought landing in one of them was too awful.

  After another two months or so, Beamy had been assigned to the 101st Airborne’s 501st Parachute Infantry at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There at the 62,000-acre Camp Mackall training facility, things had gotten harder. Mackall was a rough-up place. When you were there, you got the sense you were getting ready for something that wouldn’t be too pleasant.

  That feeling would grow among the paratroopers in the spring of 1943, once they were sent to participate in combined, large-scale tank and infantry maneuvers with Patton’s Third Army in Tennessee. There they would drop into swampy areas and be given realistic mission objectives, and everybody agreed the jumps weren’t fun anymore. For Beamy and the other trainees they were becoming scary and pressurized. With each successive exercise you’d carry a heavier load of equipment, and if you didn’t successfully complete your mock operations, or handle your chute and gear with precision, you’d be reprimanded. Beamy caught hell plenty of times for things like not folding his chute to specifications or failing to leave it at a prearranged pickup spot . . . but it wasn’t just that. The geography in Tennessee was similar to Western Europe, and the lifelike maneuvers told him the war was getting closer.

  The Screaming Eagles had impressed the brass with their performance in the Tennessee war games, and in January of 1944 the entire division was transferred overseas to Berkshire, England. The exercises that took place there over the next several months, BEAVER, TIGER, and EAGLE, were the most rigorous the 101st had yet undergone. Assigned to capture roads and bridges from simulated beaches, the men all realized these maneuvers were dress rehearsals for the invasion of Europe and conducted them with a heightened sense of gravity. Now the war wasn’t just close. It was breathing down their necks.

  Beamy’s introduction to the Pathfinders began one day early in ’44. He’d gone off base for lunch with an uncle who lived in the United Kingdom, and they were at a table speaking Pennsylvania Dutch when an officer seated behind them overheard some of their conversation.

  The brass hat waited until they’d finished their meal and then came around to talk. “Are you Mr. Beamesderfer?” he asked.

  Beamy told him he was.

  “I want you to report to HQ,” he said flatly.

  Beamy had sat looking at the officer with apprehension. He didn’t recognize him and was wondering if he’d done something wrong. It wouldn’t have been his first go-round with military discipline—he’d had an episode or three in the village while on weekend pass and gone AWOL a few times, that sort of thing. But he couldn’t think of any recent infractions that could have gotten him in hot water.

  At headquarters, Beamesderfer was informed about the new volunteer Pathfinder unit and told their job would be to land behind the lines ahead of other paratroopers and set up special homing devices. Like Joe Haller, he learned that his name had already been submitted for consideration and was given the rigmarole about it being because of his familiarity with the German language and how that would be an asset behind the lines.

  Beamesderfer had accepted the explanation as truthful, or at least kept it to himself if he ever suspected he’d simply gotten on his commanding officer’s bad side. Whatever he may have thought privately about why he was called in, he’d agreed to the assignment. Soon he was at North Witham taking the special training under the auspices of the IX TCC, sequestered behind its fencing and gates, doing the night jumps, and learning how to operate the navigational equipment in preparation for the invasion.

  Tonight it had all become real. After months of training and preparation, the war was finally upon him. His team of Pathfinders had left the airdrome on Plane 20, bound for Drop Zone C to ready the overlapping landing zone for the Waco glider lifts—designated Drop Zone E. The first of the lifts was scheduled to arrive at four in the morning, the second in the early evening on D-Day.

  Their flight across the Channel hadn’t been too bad given the full range of nerve-wracking possibilities. The shaking and swaying of the transport had made some of the troopers lower their heads between their knees, and the puddles they left on the floor weren’t exactly pleasing to the nose. But the transport hadn’t taken any antiaircraft fire for most of the trip, and that was something they appreciated to a man. Beamy supposed the worst part of it for them was the lingering element of uncertainty over what they were getting into. They knew they were supposed to set up the beacons for the gliders, help the 3rd Battalion troops dropping nearby clear obstacles to the landings, and then join the rest of the 501st PIR in capturing the Douve River lock at La Barquette.

  But many couldn’t shake the same uninvited doubts that had beset Lieutenant Buck Dickson in Plane
Number 1. They wondered what would happen if they couldn’t make contact with the arriving troops—or if the invasion was delayed again for some reason and no one showed up. The closer they got to France, the more these thoughts gnawed at their minds.

  As the transport had made its left turn over the Cotentin Peninsula, the tension in the troop compartment became palpable. German flak guns opened up in force, almost as if making up for lost time. Beamesderfer found himself glad he’d remembered one particular item of equipment that hadn’t been issued by the quartermaster—a pocket copy of the New Testament that his mother had told him to carry. There had been no small amount of friction between his parents throughout their marriage, mostly due to her strict religious beliefs clashing with his father’s indifference. Though Beamy guessed his own religiosity fell somewhere in the middle, he felt keeping that little book close, and seeking guidance from above, would help him get through the dangerous times ahead.

  He was very aware of having it with him when Lieutenant Henley, his stick leader, gave the go command. Moving to the door, his stomach full of butterflies, he looked down at a field that was dotted with orange flames. Though the men couldn’t have known it, they had slightly missed their mark at DZ C and were about to be dropped closer to Drop Zone D, where the Germans had laid their fiery trap for the paratroops and gliders.

  At twenty-seven minutes past midnight, the Pathfinders aboard Plane 20 jumped into the mouth of hell.

  2.

  In Saint-Germain-de-Varreville to the south, Captain Lillyman had sent Wilhelm and Williams to recon the area around the field. He was convinced the machine gunners who’d been harrying them would not have set up their post in isolation. There had to be some place nearby they were using as a de facto command center.