First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  Overlapping Chicago’s landing zones, the area had gotten increasingly dangerous as small groups of German snipers and machine-gunners stole into its hedgerows and farm buildings, pressing in on the airborne command post. Troops from a battalion of Georgian enlistees—former POWs who’d chosen to fight for Hitler’s war machine rather than starve to death in its prison camps—were also rolling down the main road from the village of Turqueville to the northeast, where the enemy had built up a sizeable combat force of soldiers, armored vehicles, and artillery guns, housing them in massive concrete blockhouses. The reinforcements were massing for a single purpose; it was here outside Hiesville that the Germans planned to build a defensive line against the Allied troops moving in from the beach.

  After arriving from the CP, Lillyman filmed the wreckage of General Pratt’s glider for the U.S. Army archives, then went to work on the LZ with his crew and a few other paratroopers he’d assembled from different units. Their first order of business was to find a field that was large enough for the Horsas and had been cleared of Rommel’s asparagus and other lethal obstacles. The Pathfinders would again utilize their luminous Holophane panels and a Eureka beacon in laying out the site, but this time they added green smoke pots to their array of signaling equipment. The colored smoke, which wouldn’t have been visible to the aircrews during the night landings, would give Keokuk’s pilots another visual aid to home in on.

  Their landing zone chosen, the Pathfinders arranged their Holophanes in the familiar T pattern, setting the radar beacon at the north end of the T and the smoke pots in the middle, where Lillyman was positioned. Standing guard as the trailblazers built their runway, their security detail took almost no enemy fire from the hedges—but the silence would prove deceptive. Hidden in the trees and bushes, the Germans had planned a deadly welcome for the gliders, lying in wait until they were within range of their small arms and rockets.

  Shortly before nine o’clock, the Keokuk gliders crossed Utah Beach, cut loose from their C-47 tugs, and descended on the peninsula. As they neared the ground, the enemy guns came alive beneath them, throwing a sleet of ammunition up at their wings and fuselages. The pilots dropped fast, their Horsas smacking into the trees and hedges, some breaking apart as they hit at a high speed. Incredibly, less than a fourth of those aboard were killed or seriously hurt in the crashes.

  But the Germans were quick to close in. The crewmen and passengers exiting the shattered aircraft with their injured flight mates—either on foot or in the jeeps that had been part of the air train’s cargo—were at once met by ripples of machine-gun and Mk-40 burp-gun fire and chased across the fields by mortar rounds. Their objective was to reach the command post less than a mile off, a simple plan in concept that would have to be executed with a concealed enemy firing at them from all sides.

  Frank Lillyman was still at the T when he saw one of the gliders slam to earth a short distance away and raced off in the direction of the crash, his squad following behind. As the Pathfinders emerged from an opening in the foliage and saw the demolished glider on the ground, they instantly realized it was under fire from the hedgerow. Hidden in the bushes, the Germans were shooting at the glider’s occupants as they tried to evacuate, barraging them with machine-gun fire and rocket launchers.

  Lillyman and his men spread out in the hedges along their side of the field, aimed their weapons at the enemy gun nest, and opened up on it, drawing its volleys away from the beleaguered glider crew. With fire coming at them from different angles, the Germans may have thought themselves outnumbered, and they broke off the engagement, fleeing through the vegetation.

  But even as they made their retreat, Lillyman heard the characteristic brrrrp of an Mk-40 firing a short burst and felt a sudden, biting heat across his arm.

  Hearing one of the men shout his name as if from a distance, he looked down himself, at his chewed up uniform sleeve, saw the blood welling out of it in pulses, and knew he’d been shot.

  Then his legs gave out underneath him and he went down hard, a chunk of shrapnel from a detonated mortar shell slicing into his face as he hit the ground.

  3.

  It was not until late in the morning of June 7 that Buck Dickson and his S-2s found their way to Colonel Cassidy’s 1st Battalion command post at Mézières. They were tired, bedraggled, and famished after more than thirty-six hours of hedgerow fighting beside groups of paratroopers from the 101st and 86th, all while trying to locate the coastal battery position that had been their objective.

  At the CP, Dickson reported in to Cassidy, telling him exactly what had happened to him after getting separated from the Pathfinders, only to learn from the colonel that the German gun emplacements at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville had been abandoned. Possibly the Germans had fled after the 394th Bombardment Group’s first run in mid-May, taking three of the four long-range cannons with them. The two hundred enemy troops billeted at W-X-Y-Z had, of course, remained entrenched until the day before—but Cassidy’s men had thoroughly cleaned them out.

  Dickson digested that without saying much. It was an odd feeling. His team had spent every minute since their jump resolutely fighting toward a goal that already had been accomplished.

  After his debriefing, he left the command post and went a few hundred yards east along the road to where the artillery guns had stood, walking past the wounded paratroopers in their bloodied uniforms and bandages, the German prisoners of war, the soldiers coming in for orders, supplies, and first aid. When he reached the bombed out field, he strode across the rubble to one of the empty concrete artillery bunkers and stared quietly west toward Utah Beach, where Headquarters had feared the big guns would be trained. From his vantage point he could not see the ocean or the dunes where the men had come ashore. But they were out there.

  Dickson wasn’t sure quite how long he’d been standing alone in the sun when someone touched his shoulder. Startled, he turned his head and saw that his old friend from Western Maryland University, Ed “Frosty” Peters, had come up beside him unnoticed. Peters and Dickson had been roommates at school and then some. Both had been in the ROTC program, and Frosty was captain of the football team on which Dickson earned varsity honors.

  Now, two and a half years after graduation, Peters was a captain with the United States Army. As chief of the 506th PIR’s regimental headquarters, he’d been tabbed for the jump at Drop Zone C, near Vierville, to the southwest.

  Recovering from his surprise, Dickson met Frosty’s grin with one of his own and grabbed his elbows. Then they flung out their arms and embraced—big, fond, wholehearted, crushing bear hugs. Dickson didn’t know what his old college pal was doing there in the field and was so pleased to see him he didn’t bother to ask. A lot of soldiers from different units were passing through the command post, and he just figured Frosty was one of them.

  They spoke happily in the quiet, sun-washed field. Neither man talked about his flight across the Channel, or his jump, or the combat he’d experienced afterward; Dickson didn’t think he ought to mention any of it right then. Their encounter here felt like a gift of sorts, a brief, welcome respite from the bloodshed everywhere around them. He wanted it to remain that way while it lasted, and sensed Frosty did too.

  So instead they made some cheerful small talk, reminisced about old times at Western MD, and exchanged bits of news about their former classmates from the officers’ program, discussing which branches of the military different guys had wound up serving in and where this one or the other was stationed.

  After about ten minutes, though, Frosty’s face turned serious.

  “Well,” he said, “I’d better be getting back to my men.”

  Dickson nodded. “Okay, take care of yourself,” he said. Then it occurred to him that Peters would have established his own regimental command post by now—and that it must be relatively close by for him to have walked over from it. “Where’s your CP?” he asked.

  Peters st
arted walking away. “Over there,” he said, motioning across the field. “Behind those trees.”

  Dickson watched him depart, his gaze following his slow walk toward the hedgerows until he disappeared in their long afternoon shadows. Talking to his friend had given him a real lift after the pure hell of the previous night . . . and it really was quite a coincidence to have met him there in the gun field. The whole thing seemed kind of dreamlike, although he knew it was no dream.

  It was only after he’d rotated back to England in July that Dickson learned his friend had been shot to death on June 6, the day before their encounter, while storming an enemy gun position up near his DZ. But he would go to his grave bristling at any suggestion he’d imagined seeing Frosty Peters that day.

  “I knew that man well! We hugged each other,” he would say when summoning up his recollections of the Normandy invasion.

  No one who knew the sensible, levelheaded Dickson would have questioned him.

  4.

  It had been a grueling, bloody five days for Jake McNiece, Beamy Beamesderfer, and all the other troopers at the Douve River Bridge.

  German infantrymen retreating from the invasion forces on Utah Beach had tried crossing it twice in the first forty-eight hours, but both times the Americans on the embankments of the elevated causeways cut them down. Then, on the third day, U.S. Mustangs flew in, started carpet bombing the area, and took out a chunk of the bridge.

  As McNiece later recalled, the pilots had an order to release their extra bombs after their missions. “They were not supposed to return to the runway with live bombs because an accident might destroy ten other planes.” Probably, he surmised, they’d thought the soldiers they saw below were the enemy. He remembered feeling great fear during the runs, then a sense of calm. The men on the ground were powerless to do anything but “wait for the bombs to fall.”

  Even after the bridge was destroyed, the Germans kept coming from the beaches. With nowhere else to go as the Allies pushed inland, they would charge the flooded marshes trying to escape, calf- and knee-deep in water. Although vastly outnumbered, the American soldiers held the high ground and kept chopping them down.

  McNiece had figured out that one way to avoid getting killed was to stay on the move. The Germans would home in on your fire after a while if you stayed in one place, so he would raise his head up above the embankment, trigger a burst into a group of them, duck, and move on to another spot. He spent most of the next few days doing that and killing Germans. Meanwhile more lost paratroopers and survivors from decimated sticks kept wandering in.

  On the fifth day, the enemy soldiers finally stopped coming. The American units that had driven them from the beach arrived, and they’d been pressed in on two sides. Hundreds of them lay dead or wounded in the marsh.

  When the shooting ended, McNiece and Jack Agnew took to the field with their weapons—Agnew used a Colt .45 service pistol—and “walked out through there killing the ones that were just wounded or hiding.”

  At one point they saw an injured German in a flooded ditch, only his head and shoulders above the water. His chest had been ripped open by machine-gun bullets.

  “Give him a shot,” said a chaplain who had caught up to them.

  McNiece turned to Agnew. “You’ve got that forty-five,” he said. “Blow his head off.”

  Agnew’s first shot missed. Then he knelt, put the gunbarrel to the German’s temple, and squeezed the trigger again, disintegrating his skull.

  The chaplain was screaming at them. “You know I didn’t mean to shoot his head off! I meant to give him a shot of morphine!”

  “I’ll tell you what, Chaplain,” McNiece said, and looked at him. “You do anything you want to with your morphine. There will be a thousand paratroopers around here that will need a shot of morphine. We are not wasting it on these Krauts.”

  McNiece’s response wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew him. He believed that if you were going to fight an enemy, you could never show or ask any mercy.

  On the fifth night after the invasion, McNiece and the other men who’d fought at the Douve River Bridge reported to the 506th regimental headquarters, located eight miles west of Carentan, a German stronghold between Utah and Omaha Beaches. Beamesderfer would stay with the unit, joining the 3rd Battalion troops pushing to take the city. The Five-Oh-Deuce had tried, and then the Five-Oh-Ought, but the enemy had hung on. After that the Air Force bombers had hit the place hard, and now the 506th was going to make another attempt at seizing it.

  The commander leading the group of four hundred or so men was Robert G. Cole, and he’d found the final causeway into the city obstructed by a heavy steel fence that the Germans were using as a barricade. As his men tried to get around it, one and two at a time, the well-hidden enemy soldiers in the hedgerows alongside the causeway would rake them with machine-gun and mortar fire, inflicting heavy casualties. Finally he ordered a frontal bayonet charge on the Germans through the hedges. McNiece had heard the Germans feared and hated bayonets after the close-in fighting of the First World War, and guessed that was why Cole decided to take them that way.

  The charge got the Germans out of the hedges. But it cost more than half the battalion, and none of the survivors would ever forget how it felt to kill a man by thrusting a bayonet into his stomach—and know you would have been the one to die if you’d hesitated. Beamy would be very grateful for his Bible after that charge.

  When they reached the city’s outskirts where the bombers had struck, he and McNiece saw hundreds of dairy cows lying dead in the fields—cows and German soldiers, but almost no French civilians. Beamy wondered where all the people in those farms had gone. That was something that would always puzzle him, and when they got into the city, it was also like that. The streets were full of dead German soldiers, but the population had completely vanished.

  Although the enemy had been mostly driven out by the fighter planes, it would take two days of door-to-door street fighting before they were completely routed. The troopers who’d marched into the city would hold it for another ten days before they were relieved, but the truth was the bombings hadn’t left much of Carentan to hold. Its buildings had been pounded flat.

  After the replacements arrived, McNiece, Beamesderfer, and the rest of the men who had taken Carentan were sent back to England for rest and resupply. Both men would see further combat throughout the remaining six months of the war—a great deal of it, in fact. But Beamesderfer’s Pathfinder duty was at its end, while McNiece’s was yet to come. And in a way that would make history.

  5.

  Captain Frank Lillyman’s participation in the Allied invasion of France, and his role as lead combat officer of the 101st Pathfinders, ended on D-Day, when he was shot by a fleeing German soldier after coming to the aid of a threatened glider crew in a field behind Utah Beach.

  The marking of the Keokuk landing zone would also be the final pathfinding mission of the Normandy campaign. There was to be no further need for parachute drops and airlifts as American and British forces continued to land on the beaches and establish themselves on the peninsula, and the volunteers of IX TCC Pathfinder Group would now fall in with their umbrella units—or, in the chaos of Normandy, other units—to help accomplish their regimental objectives.

  The fighting at Normandy was bloody, and costly; an estimated five thousand Allied soldiers died on the Normandy beaches on D-Day alone. In the days before and after the invasion, about nineteen thousand French civilians were killed in bombings of enemy targets centered within population centers. The Germans, whose military records were left in disarray after the war—deliberately in many if not most cases—lost between four thousand and nine thousand men. But the fighting was so chaotic, and the loss of life so overwhelming in its proportions, that the actual casualty tallies on both sides were still being sorted out seven decades later.

  For the Allies, Normandy was a decisive vic
tory despite the heavy losses. Smashing through the Atlantic Wall, it dealt Hitler a blow from which he would never fully recover. By late June, more than three hundred thousand U.S. troops and an equal number of British infantrymen had come ashore on the Normandy beaches to begin their relentless push toward the French capital. On August 25, Paris was freed from Nazi occupation. The Third Reich was in retreat across Western Europe.

  Shipped off to recover in a British hospital, Lillyman would skip out of the hospital, talk his way aboard a military supply ship sailing for France, and report for duty eight days after the invasion.

  He would not, however, be cleared to return to combat until September, when he was reassigned to the 502’s 3rd Battalion for the massive jump in the Netherlands that became known as Operation Market Garden. Later that year, he would lead a paratroop unit holding the snowbound town of Bastogne, Belgium, against a German siege meant to retake a portion of their formerly occupied ground and shatter Allied resolve. All told, Lillyman spent ten months in Europe fighting the war’s most vicious battles, got wounded three times, and earned eight combat decorations.

  Throughout his tour of duty, Lillyman would entertain himself by scribbling down notes about a dream vacation on which he’d take Jane and their three-year-old daughter, Susan, when he got home. After a while the idea took on reality in his mind and he began to save up for it. By the time he returned to his hometown of Skaneateles after the war, he’d socked away five hundred dollars for his imagined spree.

  One night after a cognac or two, Lillyman, always a prodigious letter writer, sat down and dashed off a lighthearted wish list to the Statler chain’s Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan, taking them up on their magazine ads claiming to provide extra special service for the families of war veterans interested in reservations.