First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  He blinked a few times, took some deep breaths to unscramble his senses, and fumbled with the hooks some more. Aside from Dutch Stene, the rest of the stick at Drop Zone A had alighted on the other side of some trees, and he wanted to pull himself together and get over to them right away. Since he’d been the last man out of the plane, he figured he’d mentally line his position up with the drop pattern and retrace it . . . not a difficult thing with a clear head. But his brain still felt like mush after the rough landing.

  “They’re over here!” Stene yelled from several yards off.

  Finally out of the harness, Braddock turned in his direction. He’d assumed Stene was talking about the men. But then he started shouting again—and this time he sounded alarmed.

  “Hold it . . . there’s someone spotted us,” he warned. “Coming down the road toward us!”

  His words raised Braddock’s alertness with a jolt. He lifted his Thompson, thumbed off the safety for full auto fire, and waited.

  A lone man in a pale blue military uniform was approaching him, walking along the edge of a ditch across the road. Braddock watched him closely, noticing he had a holstered pistol against his side. He steadied the tommy gun on him and waited.

  The man did not slow down at all, but kept walking until he was directly opposite Braddock. He hadn’t put his hand anywhere near his pistol.

  “Take me to your commandant,” he said.

  Braddock looked at him over his gun barrel. “Ah,” he said. “You speak English.”

  The man gave a nod. “Yes,” he said. And then abruptly snapped up his hand.

  It was a signal and Braddock knew it. But before he could react, two men in civilian clothes appeared out of the ditches on either side of the road. Both had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “I am with the Dutch Underground,” the man said, offering his name as Sjef de Groot. “An officer.”

  In fact, de Groot was more than just an officer. His formal title was commander of the Brabant Regiment, and his authority covered the entire southern Netherlands. But he didn’t give that information to Braddock, who wasn’t about to relax his guard in any event.

  He steadied the tommy gun. “Tell your men not to move or I’ll kill you,” he said.

  Showing no desire to confront him, de Groot was calmly relaying the message in Dutch when another voice came through the tree line: “Where the hell’s Braddock with the rest of the equipment?”

  The T/5 didn’t try to figure out which of the men that was. He had more pressing concerns—and getting his beacon over to the others was chief among them. The voice had reminded him that they had only minutes to set up the DZ before the main wave came roaring in.

  “Stene . . . Stene, come over here quick,” he hollered.

  The private came trotting up on the double, his weapon at the ready.

  Braddock motioned at the uniformed man. “This soldier claims to be a Dutch underground officer. But as far as I’m concerned he’s still enemy,” he said. “Take my equipment with him in front of you. If he makes a bad move, kill him. If I hear a shot, I’ll start shooting likewise. If you hear a shot from this direction . . . let the rest of the stick know someone is with you. Or they might start shooting at you.”

  Stene nodded to show he understood.

  “I’ll stay here and act as security for the rest of the team, so they can take whatever precautions are necessary,” Braddock said, thinking. Then he turned to de Groot. “Have you heard and understood what we have been talking about?”

  “I understood.”

  “Okay, then,” Braddock said. “Instruct your men to stay as they are until I walk out to the middle of the road.”

  The officer did as Braddock had ordered, speaking to his companions in Dutch. Then Stene moved behind him with his rifle and walked him and the transmitter equipment over to Smith.

  The arrival of the underground men cut the timing closer than Braddock had realized. As he kept tense watch over them, wondering if they were who they claimed to be, the rest of the Pathfinders hurried to build the T behind the trees. It seemed to him that they’d no sooner gotten it done than he heard the thrum of the planes, saw smoke rise over the treetops from the DZ . . . and then saw the parachutes of the descending troopers fill the turquoise sky above.

  As the troops floated down to earth, Braddock kept a suspicious eye—and ready Thompson—on the Dutchmen in spite of their cheers and applause at the men’s arrival. Cautious man that he was, he would only lose his skepticism when Lieutenant Smith and de Groot came around a bend in the road, shaking hands with one of the paratroopers who’d made landfall.

  More than two thousand men would jump into Drop Zone A as the 101st’s forward parachute echelon was delivered to the fields north of Eindhoven, its transports homing in on the navigational aids set out by the Pathfinders. Down near Son at DZ B/C, Lieutenants DeRamus and Rothwell and their sticks would bring in more than four thousand additional 101st paratroopers, hundreds of equipment and supply bundles, and a lift of more than a hundred Wacos—the landings and drops carpeting four hundred acres of low-lying fields that spread out around the arriving sky soldiers as far as the eye could see.

  In the words of a classified assessment written toward the end of 1944, the Screaming Eagle Pathfinders had accomplished their initial mission in Holland “efficiently due to excellent drops at slow speeds directly over previously selected pinpointed positions.”

  But the success of marking the September 17 drop zones had come at the cost of Lieutenant Gene Shauvin’s flight—a price that would be dwarfed by the U.S. Airborne’s overall losses as Market Garden skidded toward failure over the next seven days.

  7.

  Lieutenant Charles Gaudio and his copilot, Lester Vohs, had flown Plane 096 of the IX TCC on D-Day Minus One, dropping their squad of 82nd Airborne Pathfinders while under heavy fire from the ground. Now they’d brought in a stick from the 101st for the Holland jump—Lieutenant Rothwell’s group—and had again pushed 096 through bands of heavy flak.

  But Gaudio had learned a lesson from his first mission. As he’d made his pass over Normandy, the enemy gunners had shifted their aim toward the troopers, inflicting heavy casualties as they came down and preventing them from setting up their lights. Because he’d sped back across the Channel at once, Gaudio hadn’t known the severity of the fire they were receiving on the ground and was quickly too far away to provide assistance.

  He meant to avoid a repeat of that occurrence.

  Approaching Drop Zone B/C, he and Vohs had been hit with small arms fire from some farmhouses in the middle of the immense clearing, and then spotted German gun and mortar teams outside the buildings. Determined to protect the Pathfinder teams as they installed their navigational aids, they’d looped back toward the farm and buzzed it, powering their aircraft low over its fields and rooftops.

  It was a chancy maneuver for a plane without armaments, but Gaudio had bet on the Germans being caught off guard by the huge, noisy Dakota—and on the fact that they could have no sure knowledge it wasn’t carrying a lethal surprise for them.

  His tactic worked. The enemy guns had rattled up in his direction and been drawn away from the Pathfinders, who’d constructed their T in minutes. Looking down from his cockpit, Gaudio had seen the completed pattern of lights on the ground, veered away from the farm, and set a course for home.

  At the DZ, the men had been grateful for the diversion. The Air Force had assured them nothing would move against them on the field, and with no sign of German infantry in their immediate area, they’d felt they could collectively inhale while awaiting the main body of paratroopers.

  About twenty minutes after landing, Zamanakos, Wilhelm, and Snuffy Smith were standing watch by the T and talking when the shelling picked up again. There was a loud crash as a mortar round hit nearby and exploded into shrapnel.

  Zamanakos felt
a blast of warm air, then a hard clap on the side of his chest. The next thing he knew, he was down on the ground, his jump jacket and undershirt torn to shreds, the skin flapping off his exposed ribs where he’d been struck by a shell fragment.

  He lay there in pain, his uniform filling with blood. Around him were Wilhelm, Smith, and Bluford Williams, who’d spotted a row of German tanks on a nearby road when they descended. They were about a quarter of a mile away, ten or twelve of them sitting under the roadside trees, and Williams would swear he’d seen their commanders drop down into their hatches during the jump. Although he was convinced they were hiding from Allied fighter planes, he thought they might have fired the rounds.

  The men didn’t know for sure. They were unaware of the enemy guns at the farmhouse, and hadn’t seen movement from the tanks, so they could only venture guesses—and there really wasn’t time for that. They had to get Zamanakos some cover while they guarded their lights.

  It might have been Williams who suggested the drainage ditch running through the field near the T. Whoever’s idea it was, they agreed it seemed like the safest place for the wounded trooper. Together a couple of them helped him to his feet and then got him down into the ditch.

  Although the world kept swimming in and out of focus, Zamanakos never lost consciousness. Sitting with his back against the side of the ditch, his ribs on fire, he was aware of Smith crouching over him with his first aid kit, pulling out sulfa powder, gauze, bandages . . . whatever was available to patch up the wound.

  The first of the 326th Airborne Medical Company’s two glider loads arrived minutes later aboard six Wacos bearing vehicles, trailers, equipment, and more than fifty personnel who unloaded and set up an aid station at the southern end of the landing field. Zamanakos was brought to a ward tent, given further treatment, and eventually evacuated by ambulance to Son—liberated in the early hours of Market Garden—about twenty miles from the field. On that first day of Market Garden, the village’s civilian hospital, the CBC Sanatorium, would be taken over by American forces and become the 101st’s medical triage center.

  Like many of those treated by the 326th AMC, Zamanakos was later moved to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Belgium, and ultimately flown to England to recover.

  Bombed, rocketed, suffering dozens of casualties, the 326th would remain operative for the next seventy-one days of combat in Holland, its doctors and nurses and medical technicians working tirelessly around the clock to treat thousands of wounded soldiers.

  And to identify the dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1.

  In the late summer of 1944, with Hitler’s Western Front pulling inward, the twelve-thousand-man Hermann Goering Training and Replacement Regiment in the Netherlands had braced for an Allied invasion. Established years earlier to train personnel for its parent unit, the Hermann Goering Parachute-Panzer Division, the regiment would, by September, be tasked with securing the southern part of the territory against a coastal and ground attack.

  Its 3rd Battalion’s five flak batteries were responsible for replenishing the HG P-P Division’s ranks with antiaircraft and artillery gunners. One of these batteries—the 16 Flakbatterie—was located at the Pont Fort heights outside the village of Retie, Belgium. With fears of an air attack mounting among German commanders, the position’s inexperienced troops had been bolstered by veteran flak personnel from other units. This was the battery that had harassed the Pathfinders on their approach to the Market drop zones and that scored a lethal hit on Lieutenant Gene Shauvin’s flight, IX TCC 981, over the dairy farm of Jan Adriaensen in the tiny rural hamlet of Kirtijnen.

  Twenty seconds after going into its uncontrollable nosedive, the plane had come down in Adriaensen’s garden and exploded in a sheet of flame, its burning debris hailing over the farmhouse. Half straw thatch and half tile, its roof instantly ignited. Within minutes the fire had consumed the house and barn, then leaped over to an adjacent barn belonging to a neighbor named Peer Franken.

  Besides his wife Coleta and their three unmarried children, Adriaensen had been harboring his daughter Julia, her husband Jef, and their newborn baby Marie at the farm since the Allied air strikes began weeks before, his deep stone basement serving as a shelter during the repeated strafings and bombings. With the frequency of the raids escalating in recent days, the entire family had taken up full-time residence in the basement.

  Shortly before the crash Jef, who’d been assisting with the chores, had gone out to the long wooden barn where his father-in-law kept his milk cows, pulled a fresh bale of straw off the pile with his muscular arms, then grabbed hold of a pitchfork and gotten to work. The bales were heavy and compacted, and separating the straw took effort. But he was glad to do it for the man who’d so generously opened his home to him in this time of extreme scarcity, when every morsel of food and bar of soap was precious.

  He’d been spreading the straw across the floor when a tremendous thump stopped him cold with his hands around the pitchfork. Something had fallen to earth outside the barn, but at first he could only wonder what it might be. A bomb? It was possible. All he knew was that the object had been large enough for him to feel the impact underfoot.

  Puzzled and alarmed, he dropped the pitchfork, rushed out the barn doors, and saw the wide pool of fire beside the farmhouse. Then he realized it had already spread to its rooftop and went running toward the house to get everyone out of the basement.

  By the time Jan emerged into the daylight, his house and barn were ablaze. Sending his daughter Stan off to seek help from her brother Louis, whose farm was next door, he hurried across the yard with the other men to save his valuable livestock. They would try to set the cows loose before they burned to death.

  Jan, Jef, and Louis couldn’t get them out the barn doors, however. They were visibly panicked, tossing their heads and swishing their tails, their grunts and bellows awful to hear. But they had never been outside their stalls, and were refusing to budge, and the men didn’t have any prods or sticks they could use to urge them on.

  Still, they kept trying to get the animals out of the barn, doing everything they could to counter their nervous stubbornness. They slapped their sides and tried shoving them from their stalls, shouting, clapping their hands so they could be heard above the snapping roar of the fire, but it was of no use. With the fire climbing up to the rafters, and the heat and smoke inside the barn becoming unbearable, they wouldn’t move. Finally the men had no choice except to abandon them to the fire. They ran out into the barnyard, coughing and gasping for air.

  By now the farmhouse and Peer Franken’s barn were seething with flames. Jan’s family stood huddled together in the yard, watching the fire gnaw through the roof of his home, Coleta and the older children shocked and tearful, Julia’s face a tight mask of anguish as she clutched her crying infant daughter to her breast.

  They could hear the cows in the barn as they were incinerated. It made them want to cover their ears.

  Jan Adriaensen felt as if he’d been struck by evil lightning. But he knew the tragedy could quickly expand beyond his personal catastrophe. Kirtijnen’s six small farms stood within a half mile of each other, and almost everyone in the community had poured out into its country lanes after hearing the plane crash. Across the road, Adriaensen’s neighbors had run from their home when the fire’s baking heat had jumped through their windows, afraid of getting trapped inside if the conflagration spread—and their fear was far from unreasonable. Somehow, the villagers had to prevent the rest of their farms from going up in flames.

  Hastening to fetch buckets and hoses, they banded together to wet down the other homes, drenching their rooftops and outer walls with water, praying that would be enough to impede the progress of the blaze.

  Their cooperative action may have been why the fire didn’t spread beyond the farmhouse and two adjacent barns. Watching it roar above the field, Adriaensen realized he’d been fortunate that
his loved ones had escaped with their lives. But his home had been wholly consumed. He had lost his livelihood. Everything he’d owned was gone.

  The farmhouse’s skeletal embers were still smoldering when the Germans showed up to investigate the crash. A group of local Red Cross volunteers had also arrived to provide emergency medical treatment and aid in any rescue efforts, but their work would have to be conducted under the close scrutiny of the soldiers.

  As they hunted through the scattered wreckage of the aircraft, they knew the odds of finding survivors were slim. If anyone aboard had lived through its impact with the ground, the flames that consumed it would have incinerated them.

  The workers’ grim expectations were confirmed when they discovered eight burned, mangled bodies outside a large section of the plane’s fuselage. They would find the charred remains of a ninth man hanging from a seat on the left side of its cockpit.

  Under directions from the Germans, the bodies were buried on the spot in eight graves along the side of the road. Fearing they would be accused of violating the Geneva protocols, the Germans would later order them dug up and moved to the cemetery in Retie. After the war, they were again exhumed, this time by the United States Army for permanent interment in the Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial at Neuville-en-Condroz, in western Belgium.

  All the Pathfinders and every member of the aircrew except for Gene Shauvin were positively identified. Shauvin was initially given MIA status, and then listed as killed in action, but aside from a mention in a Red Cross journal, there would be no official record mentioning the disposition of the remains seen in the cockpit, where he would have been situated before the crash. With eight graves for nine bodies, his family would come to believe that his remains were confused with someone else’s and buried in the wrong coffin.