First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  The scouts returned with word that they’d seen a farmhouse at the edge of the pasture with a Nazi infantry vehicle outside it. That confirmed Lillyman’s suspicions. The single car told him they likely wouldn’t find too many Germans there, but it only took one to sound an alert about American soldiers nearby.

  Wanting a closer look, he decided to head over to the house with the scouts.

  When he and his men reached the farmhouse, they saw a civilian in the doorway, calmly smoking a pipe as if he’d been expecting them. “Bosche,” he said, and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at the stairs.

  Lillyman recognized the derogatory French slang word for their occupiers; loosely translated it meant something like “pig head.”

  Racing up to the second story, the paratroopers found the enemy soldier asleep in bed wearing crisp white pajamas, his officer’s uniform folded away, a bottle of champagne at the bedside. He’d obviously had no problem getting comfortable in a home where he was an unwanted guest.

  A single crack of a rifle echoed down from the little room. When the three Americans emerged and hurried back downstairs, they were carrying the champagne bottle with them. They had dispatched the German officer and, as Lillyman would later put it, “expropriated” the bubbly.

  Whatever term he favored, the satisfied Frenchman puffing tobacco in the front door didn’t seem to mind them taking it one bit.

  3.

  Back in the field, Captain Lillyman looked up and saw the sky filled with the billowing chutes of American paratroopers, hundreds of them afloat in the darkness like jellyfish descending through the sea. As Zamanakos would recall, the planes had seemed to “come in from all points of the compass.” The cloud bank that had created so much confusion for Crouch’s pilots was now causing the main body of airborne infantrymen to jump wide of their marks.

  But the transports had arrived, and their pilots used the beacons to stay reasonably close to the overall Allied objectives. Lillyman took that as a qualified success.

  These lights never looked so bright in training, he thought. That night they seemed like searchlights, leading him to half expect they would draw the enemy to his position. But the only German soldiers he’d seen since leaving the farmhouse had been in a bicycle patrol, and they’d quickly pedaled off as if wanting no part of the troopers.

  It was now past midnight. Alone and in small groups, jumpers from various units straggled toward the DZ after making landfall. As they began to arrive, Lillyman sent out word for all the Pathfinders in his serial to gather at the little church, where they were to drop off their lights and radar beacons and await further orders from their company commanders.

  Meanwhile, two hundred yards to the east, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cassidy of the 502nd PIR’s 1st Battalion had leaped from the forward plane of his V serial into streams of machine-gun fire that seemed to be aimed right at him. The guns tracked the men of this stick three-quarters of their way down to the ground and then angled up toward the aircraft overhead. As he plunged earthward, Cassidy was sure he would have been picked out of the air if their fire hadn’t been redirected at the planes.

  Suddenly he saw a paved road below—actually the juncture of two roads. His boots hit the macadam at the intersection, the impact sending a jolt up his spine. At the same time, his entire body was wrenched upward from the shoulders, as if by an impossibly huge rubber band. He fell to the pavement, realizing his parachute had gotten snagged on a low-hanging branch.

  He was struggling to free himself from the chute when a machine gun began pouring rounds at him from the hedgerow across the road. Flat against the pavement, he reached for a grenade and prepared to hurl it toward the source of the fire.

  Just then he heard planes flying overhead. Another group of transports had come in. The aircraft once again drew off the guns, buying him the seconds he desperately needed to wriggle out of his harness, orient himself east to west, and start crawling back along the line of flight. But he’d only gone a short distance when the fusillade resumed, bullets chewing up road around him.

  He flattened again. A new group of C-47s passed overhead, dropping its paratroopers a short distance to the west. As the machine gun rattled up at the aircraft, Cassidy continued to move toward the alighting troopers, staying off the middle of the road, stitching out an evasive path between the hedges and ditches at its margins.

  Then he heard a sound in the crossroads behind him—one that seemed jarringly out of context in his present surroundings. But there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was:

  Hoofbeats. Galloping hooves.

  Cassidy shot a quick glance backward and saw the spectral form of a man on horseback plunging across the intersection, the horse’s mane whipping over the sides of its long, muscular neck. He stared with nervous surprise as rider and mount vanished through a gap in the hedgerows, the drumming of hooves rapidly fading into the night. He didn’t pause to wonder if the horseman was German or French, would not let his mind deviate from the goal of uniting with the other paratroopers. He had to keep moving.

  He’d scurried a little farther along when he heard an artillery shell launch from behind the hedges. Diving to his belly, he felt the ground shudder beneath him as the mortar round detonated nearby with a crash, chunks of pavement flying in all directions. It was almost as if he were traversing an endless obstacle course, with every danger imaginable coming at him.

  He waited. A second mortar round whumped down to the ground several feet away. There was a third, a fourth. Then the next serial of planes flew overhead, leading to another break in the fire. He pushed up off the road and sprinted forward.

  About a hundred yards from where he’d started out, Colonel Cassidy heard a rustling noise on the other side of the hedges. It grew softer and more distant as he listened.

  Scrambling up the dirt embankment, he found an opening where he could see through into the adjacent field.

  Two men were moving away from him, walking briskly along the hedge toward the crossroads. With their backs turned, they were nothing more than shadows in the gloom.

  Cassidy got his clicker from where it hung around his neck and snapped it. They kept walking without response. Had they failed to recognize the signal and mistaken it for the sound of an insect, indicating they were likely enemy soldiers? Or could they be Americans who’d just failed to hear it?

  He’d no sooner asked himself these questions than somebody did respond—but it wasn’t one of the pair he’d spotted.

  Click-clack, click-clack!

  Squinting into the darkness, Cassidy saw a third man trailing behind the others, much closer to where he was hunkered on the embankment. Although the colonel didn’t recognize him at all, he immediately identified his American paratrooper’s uniform.

  “Where are you going?” Cassidy asked from his side of the hedgerow.

  “We’re looking for the colonel,” the trooper replied.

  Cassidy smiled thinly and told him they’d found their man. Pushing through the hedges, he realized he knew the soldiers who’d been walking with their backs to him. Both were staffers—his radioman, T/3 Leo Bogus, and his runner, Private Talmage New. The trooper who’d heard his click was a stranger who’d stumbled on the others while trying to locate his own platoon.

  Colonel Cassidy would now lead the group toward the paratroopers he’d seen drop out of the sky, rallying men from his 1st Battalion along with misdropped soldiers belonging to other units. Crossing into another field, they found Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strayer, commander of the 506’s 2nd Battalion, and his own mixed band of troopers. After a panel split in his chute, Strayer had landed hard, hurting his ankles and right knee. Although hardly able to walk, he joined Cassidy in moving through the hedgerows, assembling men from different sticks and looking for road signs that could help orient them. They soon came upon three of his officers, who’d pulled together still more
strays and were gathering up supply bundles dropped from the transports. One of the officers, Captain Fred Hancock, had noticed a sign for the village of Foucarville about a mile and a half to their north. Checking his aerial map, Cassidy realized it would be a straight shot in the opposite direction to Objective W-X-Y-Z at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville—the same encampment Buck Dickson had been sent to reconnoiter for Strayer’s 2nd Battalion.

  But Captain Dickson and his men hadn’t yet reported in. Nor had anyone from headquarters been able to raise them in the field. With their status and whereabouts unknown, Strayer and Cassidy had been left without close-up intelligence about the complex.

  The lack of scouting information troubled Strayer. It was his job to destroy the big artillery guns at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, while Cassidy’s battalion cleaned out the German garrison three hundred yards to the west. Cassidy was then supposed to establish roadblocks at two key road crossings from Utah beach that ran past W-X-Y-Z—Exits 3 and 4—allowing the troops that were coming ashore to advance without opposition from German reinforcements.

  For Strayer, his lack of a full complement of troopers for the mission was a major complication. The fact that the bulk of his men still hadn’t assembled convinced him a large number had come down far outside their designated area and would need more time to reach it. He’d also found it increasingly laborious to get around on his bad leg and felt that would make him a sure drag on any force he might try to lead against the Germans at W-X-Y-Z.

  That left the two colonels to decide how to proceed—and they immediately found themselves at odds. Strayer insisted on waiting for more of his troopers before heading toward the complex and refused to budge until they showed up. Sharply differing with him, Cassidy made it clear he intended to take his men and shove off with all due haste. He hadn’t survived barrages of machine-gun fire and mortar shells only to risk leaving the gun battery in enemy hands and the road exits vulnerable to attack.

  “I’ll get going,” he said. “We’re ready.”

  Strayer wasn’t swayed. He would stay back to gather his battalion and hopefully get hold of a vehicle to convey him to their objective. Since the gliders were coming in with jeeps aboard them, he was optimistic that wouldn’t take long.

  Their discussion was over. Cassidy’s 1st Battalion and the stragglers who’d joined them would now spearhead the attack on the gun battery. As dawn crept up the eastern sky, they formed into a column and set out northward to Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, marching over the road instead of using the cover of the fields and bocage where the going would be safer but slower.

  Cassidy was about halfway to his destination when he fortuitously crossed paths with Frank Lillyman and some of his Pathfinders. Though their meeting was unplanned, he’d find out they had important information to share with him.

  4.

  The hours after midnight had been busy ones for Lillyman. By two or three o’clock in the morning, the main body of paratroopers had been delivered by their transports, freeing him to venture from the drop zone in support of the 502’s primary objective—the taking of the gun battery west of Utah Beach. Leaving a small detail with the Holophanes and injured troopers at the Saint-Germain church, he’d led a scouting party comprised of Wilhelm, Jones, and several others up and down the road toward Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, probing for enemy soldiers at its edges and wanting to learn what he could about the disposition of the German artillery that Lieutenant Dickson’s still-missing team had been sent to recon.

  A short while before running into Cassidy, Lillyman’s party had gone as far south as the two exits near the W-X-Y-Z complex, traipsed off the road, and abruptly realized they were in the very spot where the gun emplacements were shown on their maps.

  Surprise had flickered in their eyes. The site was a silent ruin, its soil pitted and blackened, torn up by the five-hundred-pound demolition bombs dropped in the two preparatory Allied airstrikes. Wherever they turned, the Pathfinders saw crates of German arms and supplies scattered about like scale-model pieces thrown from a violently upended tabletop—some with their lids still on, others blown to splintery bits, their disgorged contents randomly strewn around them.

  There was no sign of the German troops that had occupied the site—only the weapons and equipment they’d left behind. A Renault R35 light tank seized from the French Army lay flipped over on its dome. Three of the four guns were gone, removed from their concrete bunkers. The remaining cannon, a 122mm Soviet howitzer captured on the Eastern Front, had been partly rolled out of the bunker that housed it when the structure collapsed into heaps of rubble, burying the portion of the weapon that was still inside. On inspection, Lillyman had concluded that the German artillerymen tasked with rescuing the cannon must have fled as the bombers made their run . . . and that the bunker had taken a direct hit.

  And that was it. There was nothing else. The field was spooky and deserted.

  Lillyman hadn’t wanted to linger amid the debris. The emplacement had been a source of much nervous hand-wringing for U.S. Army brass, who would be landing more than twenty thousand troops at Utah beach in a scant few hours. He was eager to pass on word of his discovery.

  After ordering a few of the men to stay behind at the abandoned gun position, he and Wilhelm had headed back up toward Saint-Germain, where he’d planned to radio word of his find to his commanders from the church.

  As it turned out that wouldn’t be needed. Now several hundred men strong and made up of paratroopers from both the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, Pat Cassidy’s patchwork fighting force had appeared on the road ahead of Lillyman. Marching toward him in the predawn grayness, the dark-haired, smartly mustached colonel headed up the column.

  Lillyman hastily told Cassidy what he’d seen up the road.

  “I’ve got news for you,” he said. “I scouted that coastal battery. It’s thoroughly bombed out. No need to worry about that one.”

  The perceptible sigh of relief that escaped the colonel’s lips would be shared by the entire U.S. 4th Infantry divisional command. A major obstacle to the landing had been neutralized.

  Neither man was about to bask in his good fortune, though. Cassidy had yet to secure the beach exits for the infantry, and there was no telling what sort of resistance he’d encounter at the W-X-Y-Z barracks.

  In a hurry to move on, the colonel ordered Lillyman to gather the rest of his men and head up to Foucarville, where he wanted to establish roadblocks to seal off the northern margin of his operational area, preventing German reinforcements from pushing down the road into it.

  Lillyman snapped him a salute, wished him luck, and started toward his assigned destination. But within hours his group of Pathfinders would be given a new set of orders.

  5.

  Beamy Beamesderfer had landed in darkness and water up to his ankles.

  During their four-year occupation of France, the Germans had regularly opened the Douve and Merderet River locks along a twelve-square-mile floodplain spreading out behind the Normandy coast and spanned by a small number of roads and bridges running inland from the beaches. The periodic floodings were likely trial runs for a possible Allied assault. If Rommel’s forces could hold the bridges, and control the flow of the river and its offshoot canals, they would be able to bog down American and British tanks, gliders, and infantry in the marshes while ensuring their own troops had unimpeded access to the area. In that way, they could form a choking noose around the invaders.

  The marsh into which Beamesderfer parachuted was less than six inches deep, but could precipitously drop to depths of six or eight feet in any of the countless irrigation ditches crisscrossing the field. The Cotentin’s farmers had dug the ditches between seventy-five and a hundred yards apart, inadvertently laying the groundwork for these watery obstacle courses. A paratrooper might be wading ankle-deep across the marshland, step into one of the flooded pits, and suddenly find himself trying to swim in
water over his head, weighted down by hundreds of pounds of equipment. Or he might plunge down into it and drown when making landfall. Situations of this type would bedevil the paratroopers who came down in Drop Zones C and D, killing scores of them before they ever saw a German soldier.

  After he’d splashed into the marsh, Beamy had disentangled himself from his parachute and harness, let them drift off in the muck, and then gotten down flat on his stomach . . . or as flat as his chest and belly packs would allow. He’d been cold, uncomfortable, and scared. Dropping into the swamped fields was a nightmarish experience for the Pathfinders—especially so at the fringes of DZ D, near the village of Saint-Come-Du-Mont, where the enemy had taken hidden positions around the farmhouse.

  Now Beamesderfer lay there in the muddy water as the flares and tracers scratched the darkness over his head. His combat uniform, woolen long johns, and boots were sopping wet, adding several pounds of weight to his equipment load. Water sloshing around his chin, he looked from side to side, discerned several figures moving about the field, and then heard them snap their clickers. They were almost certainly fellow Pathfinders, but with the darkness and blinding glare of the incendiaries playing havoc with his vision, it was hard to be sure they were members of his stick—and he was reluctant to raise his head for a better look. With machine guns chattering from the hedges, and tracer rounds zipping through the half-submerged grass like glowy snakes, he knew the LZ was hemmed in by Germans and that they could easily pick off him and the rest of the Pathfinders.

  He also knew his group could not set out the light panels and radar transmitters in water and would have to seek out higher ground after they managed to assemble. In the meantime, they could only wait until the main wave flights arrived. If they couldn’t depend on the troops that were coming in to rout the enemy from the hedges, their chances of success—and survival—would be close to zero.

  The German fire got worse as the minutes wore on. Beamesderfer saw men around him drop into the marsh after being struck by bullets, heard the moans of the wounded in the darkness, and wondered if he would be next. He’d thought the sound of the transports flying in over the coast would be a relief, but the nightmare only worsened when the Germans put their torches to the farmhouse and it roared into flame like a colossal pyre.