First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Methodically now he extended the antenna, broke its lightweight segments into small pieces, and tossed them around the field. Then he pulled the det cord—it was made of fishing line—from inside the device, backing away from it as he ran the cord out to its full twenty-five-foot length. He did not want to be standing too close when it blew.

  He looked around the field again. An early June field in the lush Norman countryside, bees gathering pollen from wildflowers, butterflies dabbing the air with color.

  But there was no birdsong.

  His face smeared with dirt, his hair clotted with it, dirt under his fingernails and embedded in the creases of his knuckles, Lisk clenched his fist around the det cord and gave it a hard tug. Heat smacked his cheeks as the Eureka was blasted to pieces amid chuffs of dark gray smoke, its tube-and-wire guts disintegrating from the pressurized explosion, its case fragmenting into an unrecognizable wreck around them. Scraps of twisted metal shot upward and then dropped to the grass. Dials, knobs, and bits of broken glass went zipping everywhere like tiny rockets.

  Lisk stood there a moment looking at the demolished unit, the sharp burnt odor in the air stinging his nostrils, reaching all the way to the back of his throat. Then he limped back over to the ditch and slid back down into it. If the Germans found him now, they could go ahead and put him down like a sick dog, but at least they wouldn’t get their hands on the homing box.

  Time passed. He lay motionless as the blast smoke dissipated and the sky brightened with full morning. Then he heard footsteps approaching and inhaled through his front teeth.

  After a moment he heard an American voice call out his name. His comrades had kept their promise to send a medic back for him.

  A shot of morphine in his foot anesthetized the pain to the extent that Lisk was able to walk. As the medic moved off with his kit, tending to other soldiers, he went off in search of his unit command post. Although he didn’t locate it at once, he found some glider pilots who were also looking for it and joined them.

  They would eventually reach the command post at Mézières, where, that same morning, several of Colonel Pat Cassidy’s men were engaging the enemy in the bloodiest of firefights.

  9.

  As Lisk had huddled at the bottom of the ditch in the hours before dawn, the rest of his Pathfinder stick—along with a handful of survivors from Beamy Beamesderfer’s plane—had marked off the landing zone for fifty-two Waco gliders that had flown over the coastline in groups of four, each glider towed by a Dakota.

  The Chicago mission, as it was dubbed, had a broad-ranging purpose. Forty-four of the lightweight canvas-and-wood aircraft were transporting two batteries of an antiaircraft battalion, sixteen 57mm field guns, twenty-five Willys jeeps and small trucks, a bulldozer, and almost fifteen tons of combined ammunition and equipment. Eight gliders carried engineers, signalmen, an antitank platoon, and an entire surgical unit from the 326th Airborne Medical Company to staff a field outpost. All told there were 148 troopers aboard the Wacos.

  The lead glider had been named after the Fighting Falcon, the first aircraft of its type to be constructed by the industrious Gibson Refrigerator Company in Greenville, Michigan. Painted on the pilot’s side of the nose was a giant representation of the 101st Airborne’s Screaming Eagle insignia. A similarly large-scale American flag was emblazoned on the opposite side.

  At the controls of Fighting Falcon was Colonel Mike Murphy, the Army’s most seasoned glider pilot, a former barnstormer who’d once drawn breathless wows by landing customized planes upside down at air shows. Lieutenant John Butler, his copilot, sat beside him in the cockpit. The assistant division commander of the 101st Airborne, Brigadier General Don F. Pratt, was behind them in the front passenger seat of a lashed-down jeep, wearing his combat helmet and Mae West vest, using a flashlight to pore over the classified dispatches stuffing a big leather briefcase on his knees. Beside the jeep, Pratt’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John May, was crammed in with some five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline that would fuel the jeep along the Cotentin’s roads, having been squeezed out of the vehicle by the equipment stowed aboard it. The items included several powerful radio sets the general had brought for his divisional command post—but they would never be used.

  Don Pratt was about to become the first and highest-ranking officer on either side of the war to die in the D-Day invasion.

  Ironically, he was a late addition to Chicago. Early in the invasion planning, Pratt had received the assignment of leading the seaborne invasion fleet, but he’d coaxed Major General Maxwell Taylor, chief of the 101st, into letting him hit Normandy with the advance airborne element so he could have a head start organizing the ground forces. Although he’d wanted to come in with the paratroopers, Pratt had never earned jump quals, leaving a glider arrival as his only option.

  Mike Murphy was likewise a last-minute pick for the operation. In England to train glider pilots for the D-Day invasion, he’d been disappointed to find out he wasn’t slated to fly across the Channel with them. But his opening came when he got wind of General Pratt’s change of plans. Like the general, he’d lobbied his superior officer, explaining that it was important for him to get a close-up look at how the Wacos performed in combat. His best argument would be unstated, though: The Army would want to be certain that someone of Pratt’s rank had the best glider pilot available for his flight, and Murphy knew his expertise was unsurpassed.

  While General Pratt was said to have been eager to fly aboard a Waco, his staff worried about the risk to his life. Without consulting him, they ordered a layer of steel-plate armor installed at the bottom of the fuselage to shield him from enemy ground fire—and arranged for him sit atop a parachute pack in the jeep. The armor not only added hundreds of pounds of weight to an aircraft already carrying a 2,300-pound vehicle and other heavy cargo, but threw the distribution of that weight dangerously off balance.

  Murphy only heard about the Fighting Falcon’s ad hoc belly armor before takeoff, and it made him concerned about the glider’s airworthiness. He had previously ordered an experimental crash-resistant nose placed on a glider and felt that was all the added protection it could safely handle. But with everything set to go at the airfield, no one was inclined to request a last-minute change of plans.

  At 1:19 on the morning of June 6, a C-47 with the Fighting Falcon in tow had left England on schedule, with the other Chicago planes and gliders following at thirty-second intervals. Murphy’s extra weight load created problems from the start, forcing his tow ship to use a huge amount of runway to get him airborne—and when the pilot finally did take wing, he’d had more difficulties staying level. It was, he would recall, like trying to fly a freight train.

  The lift met little resistance overflying the Channel Islands at two thousand feet, but things got hot over the French coastline as enemy guns opened up on them. In the Falcon’s pilot seat, Murphy heard bullets ricochet off the jeep and penetrate his wings and fuselage with a sound that reminded him of popcorn popping. But with no engines or fuel tanks that could ignite, the rounds passed through the canvas without doing critical harm.

  The situation worsened when the heavier antiaircraft guns awakened below. Wishing they could crawl into their helmets, the glider pilots flew through fluid streams of flak that were “beautiful yet frightening, orange fireballs coming up through the air and arching off in a curve. Always the fire was directed at the tow ship ahead, with its exhausts belching bright blue flames.” As the lift settled into its final approach route, the German AA gunners lit bonfires on the ground to warm themselves against the chill, damp weather, and the orange glare had the secondary effect of blinding the pilots. With their eyes taxed by all these visual distractions, many of them would never know how they managed to stay on course.

  It was about 4 A.M. when Murphy saw a green light in the astrodome of his towplane, signaling that they’d reached their destination outside the village of Hiesville.

/>   “So long,” he said to the transport. He could hear German machine-gun fire through the roar of the wind outside the cockpit and was thinking he’d had his fill of it.

  Hitting his towline release knob, he exchanged a relieved glance with his copilot. It wasn’t just the gunfire that had worn on their nerves. The glider’s added, misplaced weight had made it buck and shimmy in the air practically from takeoff, and they’d spent more than two and a half hours wrestling with their controls to keep it steady. Coupled with the strain of having to fly through walls of flak, the effort had left them mentally and physically tired out, their shoulders sore with fatigue, their arms and legs stiffly cramped.

  Despite his weariness, Murphy decided to give himself some extra hang time so he could get a feel for how to land the unstable aircraft. The very rules he’d helped institute for glider landings required a pilot to stay level as he slowed to his descent speed, but he would now make an exception, turn sharply to the left, and bring the Fighting Falcon up into a steep climb.

  His maneuver worked like a charm.

  Although daylight was still a couple of hours off, the high, full moon clearly limned the geography below in its shining silver light. Murphy could see the outlines of the Norman fields and hedgerows he’d studied on his maps, and even spotted a railroad track he’d known would be a mile and a half from the LZ. He and the other glider pilots would now find out what the 101’s paratroopers had already discovered: The trees in the hedgerows around the landing zone were much taller than their briefings had led them to believe. Although they’d been told the highest trees were forty feet tall, many of the poplars bordering the field in the thick bocage towered sixty feet above the ground.

  This might have presented a hazard for the pilots under some circumstances. But the Pathfinders who’d landed ahead of the glider lift had perfectly defined the runways. Marked on a downhill slope with a lighted T, Murphy’s was between a thousand and twelve hundred feet long. He normally required much less than that—two or three hundred feet, tops—to brake to a halt. The large built-in margin for error convinced him he’d have an easy landing.

  His achy muscles forgotten in his concentration, he made his descent without a hitch, though he’d picked up a tailwind that nudged his velocity up to about seventy miles an hour, ten miles over the optimum final approach speed. Just before touchdown, he would see the lift’s number two glider bank in for its landing to his right. Then he felt his wheels bump to the ground.

  As he’d practiced countless times, Murphy hauled back on the brake lever and lowered the glider’s nose to trim its speed—but to his stunned surprise it continued to slide over the rain-slicked grass without slowing down. Two hundred feet, three hundred . . . four, five . . . eight hundred . . .

  Murphy’s face pulled tight with dismay. His machine wasn’t stopping; its poorly distributed extra weight sustained its downhill momentum. He could see the hedgerow coming up on him like a dark, solid wall. Bracing for a collision, he looked down the slope, saw a column of treaded vehicles with blackout lights through a break in the foliage, and knew they were Germans—they had to be, since he’d been told no American vehicles would roll before dawn. He snapped his head around to warn whoever could hear him, but his voice failed to reach his lips, and the best he could muster was as a hoarse, ragged whisper.

  Then the Fighting Falcon plowed into the hedgerow’s five-and-a-half-foot-high earthen embankment and struck a tree with a loud, rending crash that shook the ground. Belted into his seat, Murphy was tossed helplessly back and forth as the glider’s windscreen shattered in front of him. He felt pain jolt through every bone in his body, and then was hanging partway from the aircraft’s window into the shrubbery, its nose section’s steel-reinforced frame crunched around him in a twisted mass.

  The next few seconds were a sickening blur. Dazed and in agony, Murphy glanced over to his right and saw Butler’s mangled, bloodied body wedged into the floor of the cockpit. He’d taken the brunt of the impact with the tree and been crushed between the jeep and its trunk, a branch driven through his skull like a javelin. Still strapped into the vehicle’s passenger seat, General Pratt showed no visible injuries. But his head was bent forward to his chest and he wasn’t moving—not encouraging signs. Barely able to move himself, Murphy was unable to check on the condition of Lieutenant May, the general’s aide who’d been outside the jeep in the cargo section.

  A wave of dizziness came and went. He was dimly aware that Glider Number 2 had slammed into the hedges about a hundred and fifty feet to his left. Meanwhile, the armored vehicles he’d spotted before the crash were still visible through the hedge. There were five of them, or five that he could count, German soldiers sitting with their legs over the vehicles’ sides and rifles across their laps, peering into the field where the gliders had landed.

  His legs pinned by the twisted steel tubing, his upper body dangling into the hedges, Murphy watched two of the enemy soldiers jump down off the vehicles and then walk along the line of shrubs toward the glider, outthrust flashlights in their hands.

  He remained perfectly still, trying not to breathe as they reached it, briefly held their flashes over him, then slipped them inside the aircraft and swept their pale yellow beams around its broken interior.

  After a hurried inspection, they straightened and tramped back to their vehicles. Murphy waited some more, listening. Minutes later, he heard the armored wagons rumble off into the night. Whether the Germans believed everyone inside the glider had been killed, or were concerned about the arriving Allied planes, they had wanted no part of sticking around the field.

  Murphy didn’t budge for another several minutes, to be certain they’d moved on. Then he began trying to wriggle free of the glider’s cockpit.

  The pain in his lower half almost unbearable, he screwed himself out of the aircraft a little at a time, gripping its tangled frame with both hands for support. But he’d no sooner stood up than his legs gave way underneath him and he went tumbling down into a shallow ditch.

  Murphy lay there briefly, the air knocked from his lungs. Then he dug his fingers into the side of the ditch and began struggling to claw his way out.

  He’d almost done so when Lieutenant May arrived holding a submachine gun. The aide had shuffled behind the jeep seconds before the crash, hoping it would absorb some of the shock. His desperate attempt at survival had worked; he was bruised and badly shaken up, but otherwise unharmed. When the Germans had come with their flashlights, he’d done the same as Murphy and faked being dead.

  The news he brought about General Pratt wasn’t good. Before leaving the glider, he’d checked him for a pulse and hadn’t detected one. But he’d thought it possible he could have missed it in his shock and distress.

  If Murphy and the general’s aide knew one thing for certain, it was that the wreck would need to be guarded until medical assistance arrived. As May rushed back off to find help, Murphy drew his Colt service pistol from his holster—his M1 had gotten bent into a U-shape in the crash—and kept his own lookout from the side of the ditch. He did not trust the Germans in the armored vehicles to stay away.

  Captain Charles Van Gorder, a surgeon with the 326th Medical Company who’d been aboard the number two lift, would find him crawling along outside the ditch with his .45 at the ready, dragging his legs behind him. Van Gorder had run over to him after having examined the occupants of his aircraft and determined none were seriously injured.

  After seeing the Falcon’s condition, he hadn’t expected its passengers to have fared as well. Wrapped around the tree it had hit, the stricken glider had been reduced to an unrecognizable pile of debris.

  Crouching over Murphy, Van Gorder knew instantly that his legs were broken—one of them with a compound fracture, its splintered femur poking out of the torn flesh. His left knee had also been horribly torn up. The surgeon’s first thought was that he would die from shock and blood loss before
he could reach triage. With that in mind, he’d offered to relieve his suffering with a palliative shot of morphine.

  Murphy refused. “I want to stay alert,” he said, “so I can shoot Germans.”

  Van Gorder left the syringe inside his medical kit.

  By now Lieutenant May had returned to the Falcon with a detail of paratroopers. Leaving them to stand watch, he trotted over to Van Gorder and asked him to take a look at the general. The doctor quickly walked the short distance to the wreckage and tried to examine him, but he couldn’t work his arms through the mashed tubing. Stripping off his gear, he finally managed to squeeze in and check Pratt and Butler’s vital signs.

  Neither man had a pulse or a heartbeat. They were dead.

  May’s spirits sank. While there had been little doubt that Butler was gone, he’d been clinging to the slender hope that the general was merely unconscious. But Van Gorder’s inspection revealed he’d died of severe whiplash. Though Pratt was a short man, the parachute pack had raised him up high enough so that when the jeep rammed forward into the cockpit, his head struck a crossbar of the glider’s framework, snapping his neck back. The supposed precautions his staff had taken against threats to his life in the air had been the direct cause of his death on landing.

  Van Gorder now returned to Murphy and splinted his broken legs using whatever materials he could gather. The pilot was eventually removed to a field hospital the 326th Airborne Medical established at a nearby château. Sometime later on D-Day, a group of paratroopers arrived for General Pratt’s body, wrapped him in an American flag, and buried him near the wreckage of the Fighting Falcon. There was no traditional gun salute out of concern it would draw attention from the enemy.

  The pilot of the number two glider, Lieutenant Victor Warriner, remained in the field for hours afterward. Curiously peering into the ruined glider, he noticed a helmet on the floor. When he saw the single white star in front, he knew it had been the general’s.