First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  He reached in, lifted the helmet out, and held it in his hands a moment, thinking he might hang on to it as a war memento. But then he reconsidered. The idea just didn’t sit right inside him. It belonged where it belonged.

  Carefully, Warriner bent back into the glider, set the helmet back down where he’d found it, and walked off.

  Somehow, that made him feel better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1.

  Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers, B/502, 101st Airborne, had been in an ugly state of mind when he’d joined Colonel Pat Cassidy’s march toward Objective W-X-Y-Z. Before hooking up with Cassidy, his misdropped stick had landed near the town of Sainte-Mère-Église in one of the areas the 82nd Airborne had been sent to take. When he and another of the staff sergeants, Roy Nickrent, walked past the village church, they’d seen dead American paratroopers hanging from the trees where they came down, their chutes still on. Some of them had been shot, others bayoneted. In some cases they had suffered a variety of different wounds. One of the jumpers had been burned up by a flamethrower, and Summers’s fellow sergeant had recognized him as one of his closest friends. The horrible appearance of his remains, and the smell of his charred flesh, would leave permanent scars on their memories.

  Reaching the W-X-Y-Z compound shortly before 6:30 A.M., Summers and the men rushed the first of the stone houses with Cassidy after taking a wild gunshot from inside it. A room-to-room sweep turned up no enemy soldiers, and the house was quickly declared clear and turned into a command post—though two Germans would be flushed out of hiding later that day after being secreted away by the property’s French landlady, who said they’d been “kind” to her.

  Cassidy then led a detail to the Saint-Martin coastal battery position and found it a deserted ruin, exactly as Captain Lillyman had described. After several unsuccessful tries, his radioman made contact with the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach and gave them word that the guns were no longer a threat to the landing craft. It was the first communication between the airborne and seaborne invasion forces in the area.

  With the guns no longer a concern, Cassidy planned to establish a tight security perimeter around the CP and “build a small defensive base” at the crossroads of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville and Mézières to “keep the Germans from breaking through to the beach.”

  His other immediate priority was to clear out the W-X-Y-Z barracks compound a few hundred yards west of his command post. He had no idea if it was still occupied, but the absence of German defenders at the CP and gun battery made him hopeful it would be similarly emptied. Before leaving to inspect the battery, he sent Sergeant Summers out toward the buildings with a patrol of about fifteen soldiers. It was a smaller group than he’d have ideally chosen, but he was short on manpower and they were all the troopers he could spare.

  Summers’s leadership of the patrol would be hamstrung from the start. The narrow road to the compound was hemmed in by shrubs and trees, preventing the men from spreading out at its flank—and forcing the members of the squad to walk in a single file, which made them nervous about an ambush. The motley assortment was also made up of soldiers from different units who were strangers to one another and the twenty-five-year-old sergeant, who “didn’t know a single man in the detail.” They hadn’t trained together and developed the bonds of trust and friendship that helped forge a cohesive fighting unit.

  At about nine o’clock in the morning, Summers saw the first farmhouse just up ahead, turned to give the men instructions, and saw them hesitate. At that moment he made the snap decision to storm the buildings himself, figuring that if he went ahead and set an example the others would follow.

  His Thompson at the ready, he went stalking toward the two-story building—and that was when the Germans opened up on the troopers and sent them scrambling for cover in the ditches on either side of the road. Raising his head, Summers could see their semiautomatic fire coming from the first floor, where they had fabricated loopholes in the structure’s thick stone wall.

  A soft-spoken coal miner from rural West Virginia, he would never be able to articulate what came over him right at that moment. He simply decided the job had to be done, pushed to his feet, walked to the farmhouse’s back door with the tommy gun at his waist, and kicked it in, spraying the room on the other side with fire.

  As four of the Germans dropped from the sustained volley, a number of others and some civilians went running through another door into the hedges, heading toward the second house in the cluster. Summers followed them there, smashed in the door, and stared inside.

  The room was empty except for a sick-looking child. The sergeant would never recollect whether the face staring back at him from the bed belonged to a boy or girl. He was in an adrenaline-washed haze, a state of near abstraction, and mostly took in the kid’s frailty and defenselessness. A small, sick, innocent child looking at a man in a strange uniform. A soldier with a gun in his hand, a face that was smeared black, and killing in his eyes.

  It briefly stopped Summers cold. Then enemy rounds began pouring from the third farmhouse, about fifty yards away. Snapped back into the reality of what he’d come to do, Summers tore his eyes from the bed and charged out the door, dashing up the road toward the next house, zigzagging to avoid the fire.

  Behind him in the ditch, a young private named William Burt found himself stirred by the sergeant’s courage and realized he couldn’t just watch him go it alone. Crawling out of the ditch with his BAR light machine gun, Burt hastily set up the weapon, stretched out on the ground behind it, and began triggering a hail of suppressive fire, aiming for the gun ports in the farmhouse wall.

  That blinded the German soldiers crouched behind them. Their heads ducked, unable see their moving target, they fired scattershot at Summers through the ports, raking the bushes and trimming the leaves off the trees above his head.

  The sergeant took full advantage of their misplaced volleys. With a final charge toward the house, he kicked in the door with a booted foot, the tommy gun chattering in his hand even as it flung wide open.

  The Germans in the room never saw him coming. He would have time to notice six men in coal scuttle helmets still shooting through the loopholes before he took them out with one broad sweep of his gun.

  Summers stood in the entrance for a long moment afterward, his eyes moving about the room. He saw blood dripping down from the walls to the floorboards and spreading in pools under the bodies of the soldiers. He heard their delayed muscle spasms, the involuntary twitching of their arms and legs. He smelled death in the confined air. Before that morning he had never fired a rifle except in practice. Now he’d killed almost a dozen men in the span of minutes. It had already exhausted him . . . and there were still seven buildings to clear.

  Sometime before he reemerged, Summers’s squad climbed up out of the ditches and joined Private Burt in firing their weapons at the compound’s fourth building—a small, single-story structure. Under cover of the guns, Summers resumed his charge, sprinting over to the door and shouldering all his weight against it.

  He realized too late that it was partly open. Stumbling forward on his own unchecked momentum, the sergeant crashed hard to the floor, the wind knocked out of him.

  To his good fortune the interior of the outbuilding’s single room was empty. He rose to his feet, catching his breath. Then he turned back outside and sank to the doorstep in exhaustion.

  Summers sat there, smoked a Lucky Strike, and took pulls of warm water from his canteen. At one point some of the men came over and replenished his ammunition. There was no sign of the enemy. If there were more of them in the compound, they would have to be flushed out of hiding.

  About half an hour later, Summers saw someone he didn’t know approaching the house, raised his tommy gun from his side . . . and then lowered it. The man was wearing an American paratrooper’s uniform. A tall, lank captain with an 82nd Airborne patch on his sleeve, h
e explained that he’d misdropped into a nearby apple orchard, wandered toward the buildings, and seen the sergeant storming in and out of them with his tommy gun ablaze. He hadn’t noticed the rest of his squad in the ditch.

  By now Summers felt rested. He got to his feet and told the captain he was ready to move on toward the next building, a large, two-floor manor house standing about a quarter mile across the road.

  The captain fell in next to him. “I’ll go with you,” he said, and had barely started toward the house when a rifle shot cracked the air and he crumpled dead to the ground, the front of his uniform splashed with red.

  Summers glanced numbly down at the man’s body. A bullet had penetrated his heart. It had happened so fast, he’d never even gotten his name—but there was no time to think about it. The shot had come from the manor, and he had no available cover. Not unless he backtracked toward the house he’d just left, or scrambled into a ditch.

  He didn’t like either option. It would do no good to be pinned down. Instead, he sprinted toward the manor, stitching evasively to the left and right. Following his lead, Private Burt moved up with a couple of other men, shooting at the outside of the house from the roadside brush, trying to draw off the sniper’s fire.

  One of the men, Private John Camien, had seen enough. He burst from the hedge and came up alongside Summers as he ran. With Private Burt covering them, they quickly reached the manor, coming to a halt outside its door.

  “Why are you doing it?” Camien asked in a New York accent.

  “I can’t tell you,” Summers said.

  “What about the others?”

  “They don’t seem to want to fight, and I can’t make them,” Summers said. “So I’ve got to finish it.”

  Camien nodded and hefted his carbine. “Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  Summers burst in the door, Camien standing guard outside as he conducted a furious room-to-room search, cutting down six German soldiers as others fled the building and surrendered to the men in the ditches. They would take turns entering the next three buildings, switching weapons, killing more than two dozen enemy soldiers. Burt continued to move up the road along the side of the ditch, harassing the defenders at the gun ports with his light machine gun, making it impossible for them to take accurate aim at the two paratroopers.

  There were now two buildings left in the compound, the closest a stately old château with white-shuttered windows and neat low hedges in front. Summers and Camien ran the hundred fifty yards to it, the sergeant going in, his companion watching the entrance.

  Summers crashed through the door, found two empty rooms, and then stared into a third large room with astonishment. The Germans had converted it into a mess hall, and about fifteen of them were at a long wooden table eating their breakfasts, seemingly oblivious to the gunfire that had been tearing through the compound. He looked at their faces for a suspended moment and saw them staring back at him over their eggs, sausage, and steaming cups of coffee. Anyone with a working pair of ears would have heard the noise outside. He couldn’t comprehend it. How much could they have liked their chow?

  Summers opened fire with his tommy gun even as the silverware clattered from their hands and they went groping for their weapons. His brain in a kind of haze, he held his finger on the trigger and relentlessly chopped away until every last one of them was dead, the room transformed into a slaughterhouse, blood everywhere, bodies sprawling on the floor and draped over the tables and benches.

  It was all over in a minute. Summers felt the heat coming off his gun barrel as he lowered it, got his cigarettes back out of his pocket with a trembling hand, and shook one out.

  When Camien entered the house, he found the sergeant crouched on his knees and puffing on a Lucky Strike, smoke streaming from his nostrils. Although he looked tired to the bone, his features were set and coldly dispassionate. There was one last building to clear.

  Summers finished his smoke and led Camien outside to reconnoiter it. They found a tall hedgerow with a thick dirt embankment and crawled up to peer through the foliage.

  The structure, another two-story farmhouse with a large wooden shed connected to it, was on a knoll surrounded by many yards of flat, open ground. The Germans at the gun ports had an elevated vantage and clear lines of sight on all sides. It would make it easy for them to target any attacker coming on across the field. Studying it from behind the hedgerow, Summers was convinced they couldn’t rush it as they had the other buildings.

  They were about to get some unexpected support. Down the road, Colonel Cassidy had heard the gunfire coming from W-X-Y-Z and sent additional forces into the compound as men from different units trickled into his command post. He had been tempted to lead them himself, but with the fighting having heated up at his roadblocks and a stream of wounded infantrymen and German prisoners flowing into the CP, he felt he needed to stay back there to coordinate things.

  His first group of reinforcements entered the compound to the left of Summers’s platoon. Met with a combination of sniper and small arms fire from the farmhouse, seven of them were killed and the rest sent scrambling for cover. As Summers had feared, the Germans’ position on the high ground gave them a deadly advantage over the troopers.

  It was Private Burt whose brainstorm tilted those circumstances in another direction. Firing away at the farmhouse with his machine gun, he’d spotted a large pile of hay beside its attached shed. Almost at once, it occurred to him that he might be able to flush the enemy soldiers out of the main building—or at least make it harder for them to stay at their gun ports.

  Replacing the BAR’s standard .50-caliber ammunition with tracers, he took aim at the haystack and inundated it with pyrotechnic rounds. The burning chemicals inside them ignited the dry stack at once, the flames completely swallowing it up and then spreading across to the shed. In minutes it was ablaze, the smoke and fire leaping up the side of the farmhouse to chase the enemy soldiers away from their ports.

  Burt’s plan had done the trick, but he was about to get even better dividends than he could have foreseen. What he hadn’t known was that the Germans had been using the shed as a heavy ammo dump—and it was stocked with live artillery shells. As the fire tore through its planks, the ammunition inside began to detonate, a chain of explosions that flushed about thirty enemy soldiers out of the structure and onto the hillside. Caught between the group that had come with Summers and Cassidy’s reinforcements, they were shot down as they bolted from the door.

  The soldiers inside the farmhouse remained holed up, though, hoping its ancient two-and-a-half-foot-thick stone walls could keep out the flames as well as it had thus far repelled the Americans’ gunfire. And they might have if not for one of Cassidy’s late reinforcements.

  Sergeant Roy Nickrent was the trooper who had hiked with Summers from their drop zone, and seen his good friend’s disfigured remains in a tree while passing through the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Trained at using the bazooka he’d brought with him—he called it his type of work—his mood was no more forgiving toward the Germans than it had been when he arrived at the command post.

  Finding a good spot behind the mess hall, he knelt, balanced the launcher on his shoulder, and fired two shots at the farmhouse to get his range. The first fell short. The second hit the stone wall of the building near its base. Systematically making adjustments, he fired four more charges.

  The sixth finned rocket leaped from the tube to the roof of the farmhouse and spun down into it with a blast that reverberated across the fields. Seconds later, Nickrent saw black smoke spewing out of the hole.

  Fifty Germans were killed as they fled the building, and thirty others were taken prisoners of war. The total number of dead and captured enemy soldiers after five hours of combat at W-X-Y-Z would come to more than a hundred and fifty.

  Harrison Summers would later call the whole thing kind of crazy, and never really felt too go
od about it—in fact, the events of that morning would sometimes make him feel cold and dirty when he thought about them on the far side of midnight. It was as if he’d lost his mind, lost his reasoning. He hadn’t cared if he got killed or not, but he figured if he went, he was going to take some Germans with him.

  Watching the last of the compound’s buildings get eaten by flames, his weapon perched on his shoulder, Roy Nickrent, perhaps better than anyone, had understood.

  2.

  At six-thirty in the evening on D-Day, about twelve hours after the Allied seaborne assault commenced, the thirty-two gliders and towplanes of a second glider serial—codenamed Keokuk—left Aldermaston Airfield southwest of London for the Cotentin Peninsula. Flown by the 434th Troop Carrier Group, the lift was on a mission to reinforce the 101st Airborne with antiaircraft guns, medical and signal personnel, jeeps, and other vital supplies.

  Despite having fewer gliders, Keokuk’s total payload was roughly equivalent to the Chicago mission’s cargo. This was because the British Airspeed Horsa used for the operation was much larger than the CG-4A Waco, carrying double the number of troops—thirty as compared to twelve—and a heavier freight—8,586 pounds versus 3,750 pounds. Its wooden construction made it sturdier, if less maneuverable, than the flimsy canvas-and-tubular-steel American version, and its hemp-rope tow harness was attached to both wings (rather than just the nose) to give it greater stability in flight. But the most significant difference between the airlifts was that Keokuk was scheduled for early evening, when it was hoped the glider pilots would benefit from the available daylight as they guided their big Horsas toward a suitable landing field.

  It would be Frank Lillyman’s Pathfinders who prepared the LZ. After helping to set up roadblocks at Cassidy’s northern perimeter, they had gradually made their way to the divisional command post established at Hiesville by personnel from the Chicago lift. There they got some rest, took on ammo and provisions, and hiked out to mark the nearby fields where the Keokuk gliders were to come down.