First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Beamy lay there, wet, cold, and terrified. He felt no shame admitting later on that he lost control of his bowels. Remembering the Bible his mother had given him, he put his hand where he could feel its outline pressing against the outer fabric of his pocket, and prayed for a higher power to see him through. That helped him reach an inner place of calm, one to which he would return time and again when everything around him seemed almost too fearsome to bear.

  When the first men of 3rd Battalion finally started coming in—some landing around him, others splashing over from adjacent fields—their guns and bazookas created sufficient cover for troopers from the two planeloads of Team E Pathfinders to reach a dry spot for their glider runway. Though Beamesderfer’s stick had been decimated on landing—of the group who’d flown aboard Plane 20, eight were killed during or shortly after the jump—the assignment would be completed by the Five-Oh-Deuce team that jumped from Plane 19, the same transport that had carried Richard Lisk, the injured Eureka operator.

  Plagued by mortars and enemy fire, Beamesderfer’s team was nevertheless able to establish their lights and turn on their Eurekas by ten minutes to four in the morning. At four o’clock sharp, the transmitters made contact with their companion Rebecca units aboard the glider tows, and Colonel Mike Murphy, the pilot of the lead CG-4A Waco in the airlift dubbed the Chicago mission, began his descent upon the illuminated runway.

  Beamesderfer, meanwhile, had gone off in search of his missing teammates. Unaware that most had been killed, he hoped they might have gone on toward the main regimental objective, the Douve River’s La Barquette lock. He himself knew little about why the lock had been targeted. But the thought at Headquarters was to turn the Germans’ own strategy of flooding the marshes against them. It was believed that if the airborne could seize the lock intact and hold it against all counterattack by the enemy, the marshes could be turned into a lake, imposing an extra barrier between the Germans and the Allies. Or they could “sit on” the lock and keep the marsh draining until they were ready to go forward.

  As it turned out, Beamy would never reach La Barquette. In trying to find his regiment, he would tag up with a band of paratroopers headed southwest toward the Douve River, where their objective was to wire three bridges near the towns of Brevants and Carentan for demolition. Two were wooden footbridges they’d been instructed to blow with all due haste, and the third was a larger vehicular bridge the Allies hoped might be used by their own armor—if it could be captured and held. Otherwise it was also to be reduced to smoking rubble.

  Like many of the groups wandering the peninsula that night, this one had been cobbled together from men belonging to different units. The 506th PIR demolition platoon assigned the mission had been widely scattered in the jump, and its leader was “picking up stragglers” to help him carry it out.

  His name was Sergeant James Elbert “Jake” McNiece, and he was rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the toughest of the tougher-than-nails fighting men in the 101st Screaming Eagles.

  6.

  Some miles to the northeast of Drop Zones C and D, Lieutenant Buck Dickson was finding out the limitations of the M3 grease gun he’d almost left behind in the tall grass. It was a learning experience he hoped would not prove fatal.

  He, Ott, and Clark had been wandering throughout the night, trying to figure out where they were and make their way to the Saint-Martin battery. In the course of roaming the fields, they’d found men from the 101st and the 82nd in similar predicaments and joined up with them as they sought their unit commands. Periodic brushes with German troops had eventually left the S-2s and a few others separated from the loosely bound group, and as dawn approached they’d come under attack from machine guns concealed in a hedgerow about three hundred yards away. Several of the troopers were shot dead at once.

  Hunkered low in the field, Dickson had returned fire with his M3 and swiftly realized the German gunners were well outside its effective range. Worse, they seemed to be locked in on the greaser’s muzzle flash.

  Dickson knew he was in trouble. All he’d managed to accomplish with the weapon was to become a perfect bull’s-eye. He would have to cease firing—but as he’d chided himself on landing, you couldn’t fight a war without a gun.

  Staying low, he scrambled over to one of the troopers who’d been cut down in the grass. He couldn’t afford to think about who he’d been or what the bullets had done to him. He couldn’t let himself react to the metallic smell of blood coming off his sprawled, limp body to mingle with the smell of the wet grass and soil. The young soldier was dead. The M1 Thompson he’d carried would be of no use to him anymore. And Dickson badly needed it if he wanted to stay alive.

  He took the weapon from the trooper’s lifeless hands, wiped off the blood, and joined the other paratroopers in returning fire.

  The tommy gun worked better than his original weapon. Though it was larger and harder to handle than the greaser, the sheer torrent of ammunition that could pour from its barrel more than compensated for any drawbacks.

  The incoming fire finally stopped. Dickson, his two guards, and the paratroopers with whom they’d tagged along moved on through the grass in the diffuse predawn light.

  The S-2s still hadn’t quite gotten their bearings and remained an unknown distance from the guns at Saint-Martin. But with daylight near, they were hopeful they would spot some useful landmarks and orient themselves.

  They dashed from hedgerow to hedgerow, doggedly seeking their objective. As the sun rose over the Cotentin Peninsula on the morning of June 6, it was really all they could do.

  7.

  Acting Sergeant Jake McNiece didn’t just look like an Indian on the warpath, he took a fair amount of pride in being one—or at least in being part Oklahoma Choctaw, on his mother’s side. His Irish half was how he’d gotten his name and, by extension, his nickname, “McNasty.” But he admitted that he found his Native American birthright had some practical benefits.

  Back in England, he’d once used it as a reason to skip reveille, although that hadn’t washed with his higher-ups. Nor had the drinking binge he’d gone on afterward in downtown London. That had gotten him a few days in the stockade. But he’d managed to give the MPs who arrested him a beating with their own nightsticks, and that had been pretty satisfying to him . . . especially since they’d been beating up on some poor recruit outside a bar when he decided enough was enough and stepped in.

  He hadn’t been made to stand retreat again, not after taking care of those MPs. In his mind that alone had been worth a stint in the brig.

  McNiece didn’t give a damn about rules and regulations. He didn’t care about discipline or pleasing his officers. He extended his leaves whenever he felt like it and would sometimes disappear from camp for days on end. But guys would follow him anywhere. They trusted him to lead them, and knew he’d never ask them to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. That was why he always wound up getting bumped back from sergeant to private, or acting sergeant, after they kicked him down in rank. The Army tolerated him because he was a damn good soldier, and because he knew what it took to energize and mentally prepare men for fighting a war.

  The attitude McNiece instilled in the men was pretty basic: You had to be aggressive and ready to kill. The biggest reason he’d enlisted in the paratroopers was because he wanted the chance to go “eyeball-to-eyeball” with a person who wanted to kill him, wanted it to be his personal ability matched against that of the enemy. He hated the thought of being ten miles behind the lines with regular infantry when a German shell dropped down from the clear blue sky and knocked him out of his undershorts.

  Paratroopers had a reputation for being crazy, and the scalp locks and face paint McNiece had gotten his men to wear made them look even crazier. Besides being a nod to his Indian background, he figured it would scare the hell out of the Germans. But he also thought the paint worked better as camouflage than trying to find twigs and lea
ves to stick in their helmets when they were under fire, and would let them blend in with any kind of foliage. That was the practical side of him again.

  It was the same kind of thing with the haircut. McNiece would tell people it was an Indian warrior custom back home in Oklahoma, but that was just a line he’d cooked up so he could have some fun with them. The truth was he’d heard about guys getting head and body lice when they went off to fight in Europe, and then read something about a new kind of head mite called scabies that was almost impossible to get rid of because it burrowed under the scalp. Even the name made him want to scratch . . . scabies. He figured if he could wash the sides of his head regularly he stood a chance of avoiding an infection.

  McNiece’s demolitions skills were also checkmarks in his favor. Before he enlisted, he’d been a firefighter for the War Department, and after Pearl Harbor he nailed a job as gang pusher for a construction project at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, where grenades and bombs were being manufactured for the conflict overseas. Drinking after work with the guys who formulated and tested the explosives, he’d picked their brains about the weapons’ chemical composition and properties, how they were triggered, and the basic physics and effects of detonations. He had a thorough insider’s knowledge of how to use the materials.

  His unit’s lengthy official name was the 1st Demolitions Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, but they would come to be known by the handle the Filthy Thirteen. Some said they’d gotten the name because of their personal hygiene—or lack of it. McNiece happily admitted that they “never took care of their barracks or any other thing.” One night while carousing with a buddy who was an Air Force bomber pilot, he’d told him the men had made a blood oath “not to bathe and to remain filthy and dirty until D-Day, when they . . . would be jumping behind enemy lines.”

  That explanation for the moniker was given in an article about his team in the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Published two days after the invasion, it had appeared with a photo of two members of the demo section painting each other’s face. But as their reputation grew, McNiece and his blood brothers would claim they’d mostly earned the name because they knew how to fight dirtier than the enemy, and because their superiors knew they were a “damned good bunch of soldiers who did a lot more than they were asked to do . . . and sometimes got in trouble for it.”

  The truth was they got in trouble a lot. Jack Agnew, McNiece’s closest buddy on the team, always said that he knew he’d wind up getting arrested whenever he went on weekend leave with “McNasty.” But Jake and his platoon of demolitions saboteurs—or demo-sabos—had usually managed to avoid serious punishment for their repeated offenses. As he later put it, “We went AWOL every weekend we wanted to, and we stayed as long as we wanted till we returned back, because we knew they needed us badly for combat. We stole jeeps. We stole trains. We blew up barracks. We blew down trees. We stole the colonel’s whiskey and things like that.”

  On D-Day Minus One, the demo-sabos had been supposed to drop on Drop Zone D, about three miles north of the Douve bridges, but instead they’d been spread out across the flooded marshes without rhyme or reason. McNiece wound up about five miles off target. Other members of his team were still farther away, while a few had dropped closer to the bridges than planned. There hadn’t been a single member of his team nearby where he came down.

  Alone for the first two hours after he made landfall, McNiece had oriented himself and marched toward his destination carrying—in addition to his standard paratrooper load—thirty-six pounds of Composition C2 plastic explosive, a thousand feet of primer cord, and a collection of blasting caps. Along the way he’d pulled together about ten troopers from assorted units of the 101st and 82nd Divisions. Though some of them were fellow demo-sabos, and three were mortarmen, he didn’t ask their specialties or even share the details of his mission, but assured them that if they stuck with him “everything would be okay.”

  Beamy Beamesderfer was among this group of troopers. Having strayed to the southwest while seeking his regimental objective at La Barquette, he’d gotten mixed up and thought himself heading toward the locks. His confusion was typical of the men in the hodgepodge squad, most of whom were lost and trying to find their units. Still, McNiece had been able to collect three of his blood brothers from the 1st Demo Section—Jack Agnew, Keith Carpenter, and Mike Marquez—during his long march.

  Their progress across the inundated fields was slow, their footing treacherous. Each of the mortarmen carried a half dozen rounds of mortars in an apron-style canvas vest that was so heavy it took two soldiers to slip it over his shoulders. McNiece would recall one of the ammunition bearers stepping from the ankle-deep muck into a flooded ditch and sinking like a lead weight into water that was well over his head, the air bubbling from his lungs. As he struggled to claw his way the surface, before he drowned, McNiece “grabbed him and dragged him on out” and then continued toward his destination.

  The bridges were unguarded when the men finally reached them at three o’clock in the morning. McNiece thought that was probably because the Germans hadn’t expected Allied forces to be roaming that deep behind their lines. He always claimed the biggest advantage to being a paratrooper was that the enemy could only reserve so many troops for the rear, and that meant they were never fully prepared for you. Meanwhile, you could move about at will right in the middle of their forces with surprise in your favor.

  Under cover of darkness, the troopers would now prepare the bridges for demolition, planting their charges on the supports, using the mortarmen’s shells as improvised casings for the soft, dough-like plastique. There were three bridges in all, two wooden footbridges and the third a large steel bridge with concrete supports. McNiece’s orders were to wire all three, then blow the two smaller bridges and try to hold the main one for the troops and vehicles coming up from Utah Beach. However, if the Germans started to cross it from either direction, McNiece was to blow the span with them on it.

  Short on demo-sabos, the sergeant set all his tagalongs to the job out of necessity. He wanted it done before daybreak, when the enemy had a better chance of spotting them. But the men without training and experience in the use of explosives faced unexpected risks.

  Beamy Beamesderfer, who worked all night wiring the bridges, tremendously underestimated the potency of the C2. In fact, he’d barely heard of the compound until that night. When the demo-sabos blew the footbridges with a shout of “Fire in the hole!” he hadn’t moved far enough away to escape the explosive shock wave and went flying through the air.

  After he was helped to his feet, Beamesderfer took a quick inventory of himself. Though he’d never lost consciousness, he was dizzy and had a bloody nose. There were scratches and cuts all over his body . . . nothing too deep, but they stung. Still, he figured he’d just been shaken up.

  It wasn’t long before he started to wonder if something more serious might be wrong with him. His nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he kept spitting blood from his mouth. When the guys asked how he felt, his replies drew some odd glances. At the time, he had no idea he wasn’t making sense to them.

  Beamesderfer spent the night at the wired bridge as more paratroopers from different units wandered over. He felt pressure in his head and his ears were ringing. Every so often he’d get confused and babble nonsense. Back then he knew close to nothing about head trauma and could not have suspected he was suffering from a severe concussion.

  The first Germans came in the morning and would be followed by more as they fled the Allied advance from the beach. Meanwhile, a lieutenant had arrived from the command post and reiterated McNiece’s original orders. No enemy soldiers were to cross the bridge.

  The band of sixty or so troopers that had assembled there dug in for a fight. It would rage for the next five days.

  8.

  As the thin light
of daybreak filtered down into the ditch, T/5 Richard Lisk stirred for what seemed the first time in hours. He’d stayed perfectly still as enemy patrols tramped past him throughout the night. It had meant ignoring the pain radiating from his broken foot. It had meant ignoring the earthworms, ants, beetles, and other tiny creatures that had slipped from the damp soil to crawl over his face, hair, and hands and inch exploratively under his uniform. He had wanted to stay alive and protect the Eureka unit, and it had required that he lie there for hours without moving a muscle.

  It had been a while since he’d discerned any German voices or footsteps. All night he’d heard machine guns cackling in the near distance, and farther toward the coast the rumble of artillery fire. The eruptions were even louder now, and constant, as if the whole world around him was shuddering from a convulsion that would not let go of it. But there was no sound now in the field outside the drainage ditch. Nothing . . . no twittering of birds, no flapping of their wings as they took flight, or rustling of their notched, jerky movements in the hedgerows. The birds had either fled or been stilled as they nervously awakened to the strange thunder of a storm that had blown in without rain.

  In this peculiar silence, this complete and utter absence of sound, Lisk knew he was alone. He would use the opening, and the light, to take care of things.

  Slowly, he raised his head, pushed himself up from the bottom of the ditch, and peered over its lip. There was no one in sight.

  He climbed out of the ditch, trying to keep his weight off his injured foot. After he’d emptied his bladder, he knelt down and lifted the homing beacon and its antenna up into the grass. Back at North Witham he’d drilled with the Eureka units blindfolded. He literally knew how to use one and how to demolish it with his eyes closed.