First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  McNiece drew a breath. The CRN-4 had a single button you needed to press for a signal, and that was it. But while Max had come through the course all right, he was still kind of unpredictable.

  “It will send signals so the pilots can pick you up with their sets,” he explained, and then crouched over the controls. “This button here, you just press it on and off, on and off, on and off.”

  The officer looked at him. “You mean intermittently?” he asked.

  Majewski screwed up his face. “Let me see,” he said. “On and off, on and off. Yeah, Colonel, that would be intermittently, I think.”

  The officer ignored the gibe—or possibly it went right over his head. Either way, he didn’t say anything about it.

  McNiece exhaled. The truth was that pushing those two buttons was all he and Max knew about the Eureka. Blain was the expert and that was fine with them. Besides, as far as Jake was concerned, their use of the radar and lights would never go further than demonstrations. He was as confident as ever that the Pathfinders and the rest of the Army would be returning to the States before long.

  December was now entering its third week. With Western Europe encased in snow and ice, and Hitler’s lines pulled so far back that the Allies had established footholds in Germany’s western territories, the war front was quiet. Confident the lull would last until the spring thaw, and that the bad weather areas were unlikely to see German counteroffensives, the American and British high commands had left them thinly patrolled.

  Earlier in the month, General Taylor had taken advantage of the hard-earned break in the action and left the 101’s billet at Mourmelon for a working visit to the States. His trip began with a half-hour meeting at the Pentagon on December 10, where he and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had an exchange of ideas about the future nature of airborne deployments. A day later, he was extensively debriefed about Market Garden by Secretary of War Henry Stimpson, touching on the Dutch allegations of trooper misbehavior, among many other subjects. Taylor’s main order of business, however, was a conference with senior operations officers about a plan he’d developed to overhaul the staffing of airborne divisions.

  On December 15, Marshall approved most of his recommendations and sent him off on a tour of training installations along the East Coast.

  That same evening across the Atlantic, the 26th Volksgrenadier, a division of the XLVII Panzer Corps, had begun gathering on the German side of the Our River, which drew a crooked line through the Ardennes mountain range along the Fatherland’s southwestern border with Belgium. Behind them in the rolling forests of Germany’s Eifel region, 500 medium tanks, 900 armored assault guns, 19,000 pieces of artillery, and the bulk of a 200,000-man infantry force had gathered amid the blowing snow.

  The troop buildup had gone mostly unnoticed by the Allies. Aerial reconnaissance flights were impossible in the stormy weather, and the U.S. Army’s 28th Infantry—its command post located outside a hub town named Bastogne—had seen the Germans assemble on the river’s opposite banks before. With its high plateaus, rugged peaks, steep valley walls, and waist-deep snowpack, the terrain had seemed impassable in the winter to SCAEF Eisenhower. Only a single German division was believed to be in the area, and he had felt that the 28th, though depleted from long weeks of bloody battle in the Hürtgen Forest, and filling slowly with green replacements, could adequately patrol the American sector of the border, a twenty-five-mile stretch that was more than three times the area a unit its size should have covered.

  It would prove to be a costly misjudgment.

  During the final weeks of 1944, Hitler had ensconced himself in the Wolf’s Lair, his Prussian headquarters, and devised a plot to strike at the heart of his Western enemies while they slept the sleep of the overconfident, idle in their winter blankets, believing victory in their grasp. His scheme was to drive a massive armored force across the river into Belgium, where he would split the Allied front between American and British lines and retake the strategic port city of Antwerp. And that was only his partial goal.

  Divided from one another by the German spearhead, America’s First and Ninth Armies, Canada’s First Army, and the British Second Army would be encircled and annihilated during the attack, a move intended to rock the Allies’ confidence and shatter their unity. Hitler saw the Americans as weak-willed, and felt the stunning defeat would break their resolve and force them to the negotiating table, where he could arrive at a compromise peace agreement and be freed to concentrate on his war in the East with Stalin.

  It was an audacious gamble that hearkened back to the Third Reich’s early years of blitzkrieg and conquest, when its Wehrmacht had rolled through Eastern Europe, taking one country after another with swift lightning strikes. Sparing none of his resources, the Führer had drawn vital manpower and tanks away from the Eastern Front with Russia toward the armored advance.

  Standing at the hub of seven roads essential to the movement of his Panzer groups, Bastogne was centered in Hitler’s crosshairs. Commanded by General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz, the XLVII Panzers meant to capture it in the first twenty-four hours of their push.

  By nightfall on December 15, Lüttwitz’s engineers had built floating bridges that spanned the Our, and his infantrymen were marching across into Allied territory behind a hard rain of artillery shells. Among them were infiltrators in American army uniforms, who cut telephone lines to knock out communications and throw the enemy into disarray. As shocked 28th Division patrols made isolated sightings of German troops over the next twenty-four hours, wild skirmishes began to break out in the forests west of Bastogne. On December 17, a U.S. Army field observation battalion was ordered toward the border to establish a defensive position, but was pounced on by a German tank column from Kamfgruppe Peiper near the town of Malmédy. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the 112 American soldiers who survived the initial attack surrendered to the larger force—after which they were led to a field and massacred in cold blood.

  Still, despite their confusion and inexperience, the American troops managed to slow the Germans’ progress, with the area’s snow-choked roads further impeding it. Lüttwitz’s goal had been to take Bastogne on the first day of the operation. But two days later, his tanks remained some miles short of the city’s outskirts.

  The delay had given Eisenhower and his top officers a chance to regain their bearings and mobilize reinforcements. On the morning of the 17th, he decided that the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, on reserve status after Market Garden, would be sent to the border territory to repel the German push. He would leave it to two members of his general staff—his chief of staff Lieutenant General Walter “Beetle” Smith and the Royal British Army’s Major General Sir John Whiteley—to decide precisely where to position them.

  Looking at a map of the area, Whiteley poked a finger at Bastogne.

  “I think I should put them there,” he said. “This place has the best road net in the area.”

  Smith nodded. He agreed that the village’s radial highway network would be advantageous, allowing them to rapidly go where they were needed.

  That night both divisions were alerted that they were to move out of their billeting areas with all due haste. Quartered closest to the Netherlands in Suippes and Sissone, France, the 82nd left at dawn on the 18th in a convoy of trailer trucks, the inclement weather ruling out an airborne drop. En route, their destination was changed to the town of Werbomont, where Kamfgruppe Peiper had penetrated the American lines.

  The 101st departed from Camp Mourmelon later that evening. With Major General Taylor away in the United States, and his assistant division commander Brigadier General Gerald Higgins in England giving a lecture, the operational leadership of the division fell to artillery commander Brigadier General Anthony B. McAuliffe. When SHAEF ordered him to Belgium, McAuliffe gathered his officer staff and told them, simply, “All I know of the situation is that there has been a breakthrough and we ha
ve got to get up there.”

  The men scrambled to pack their bags and ammunition. Although many were on furlough in Paris, McAuliffe didn’t wait for them to return. The situation was too urgent.

  The 101st left France on the afternoon of the 18th and rode straight through the night, its trucks rumbling through curtains of fog, drizzle, and sleet, their headlights cutting through the gloom despite blackout orders. McAuliffe had instructed his division to head to Werbomont, but after the 82nd was diverted to that village, their destinations were switched. The Screaming Eagles would now roll through the high country into Bastogne and establish it as their base camp.

  At 6 A.M. on the morning of December 19, the division’s 501st PIR, riding at the head of the convoy, entered the village and went on to the division’s assembly point at an outer crossroads. Later on that morning, they were joined there by the rest of the 101st.

  With McAuliffe present and in charge, the division would now dig in, establish its perimeter defenses, and try and find out what the Germans planned to do next.

  3.

  The IX TCC had inherited Chalgrove Airfield from several squadrons of the United States Army Air Force’s 10th Reconnaissance Group, a few elements of which still occupied sections of the base. At one-thirty in the afternoon on Friday, December 22, Jake McNiece was walking along the Pathfinder company street when Lieutenant Williams came his way.

  “Jake, you need to report to the airfield in half an hour,” he said without preamble. “Have your stick ready to jump.”

  McNiece stood there in the middle of the path, hands deep in his pockets, vapor puffing from his nose, his cheeks numb from the bitter cold.

  He spread his hands to indicate the tall heaps of plowed and windblown snow on either side of them.

  “Willy, the snow’s ass deep to a tall Indian,” he said. “What are you thinking to jump in these conditions when every one of the men has forty, fifty jumps? They don’t need this. You’ll get backs broken, legs broken.” He paused, figuring Williams had gotten his orders from Captain Brown. “Tell the captain we’re not doing it on account of the weather—”

  Williams interrupted him. “Yeah, you are. But not here. It’s a combat mission.”

  McNiece gave him a questioning look. “What are you talking about?”

  “I told you. We’re going on a combat mission. Two o’clock this afternoon.”

  Disbelief overspread McNiece’s features. A moment ago he’d been thinking about a Christmas furlough in London. What kind of horseshit was this? Did Williams not remember that they’d come from Mourmelon so that they would never have to make another combat jump as long as they lived?

  “This mission.” he said. “When are we going to be briefed about it?”

  “They’ll brief you in the plane.”

  Jake stared at him. He wanted no part of any mission. “Do you know that not a man in the outfit has any combat equipment?” he asked. And he wasn’t exaggerating about the equipment. The guys had come to Chalgrove for training purposes and hadn’t been issued helmets or field uniforms. Furthermore, with limited facilities for the secure storage of weapons and ammunition, Brown had arranged for the Pathfinder trainees to leave their firearms with their units in France. “We don’t even have a CRN-4 that isn’t a dummy . . .”

  “They’re working on it right now,” Williams said, quashing his argument. “They’ll be at the plane.”

  They. McNiece suddenly knew this was coming from higher up the ladder than Brown. In fact, he wondered where the captain was. Under the circumstances, he would have expected him to be around.

  “You’re really serious about this,” he said, finally surrendering to the idea.

  Williams nodded in the affirmative. “And you haven’t heard the worst of it,” he said. “Be at the orderly room with your stick in thirty minutes. We’ll have jeeps to run you all out to the plane.”

  It turned out to be a single truck, but Williams was otherwise right on. As the group pulled to a halt at the tarmac where a C-47 was on the runway with its engines warming up, McNiece saw the navigation equipment and other gear waiting to be loaded aboard. Also there to meet the bewildered Pathfinders were a couple of USAAF colonels with the collars of their field overcoats pulled up and grave, no-nonsense looks on their faces.

  They.

  The officers thrust their arms out and shook hands with McNiece as the troopers and aircrew lifted the gear onto the idling transport.

  “Good luck,” one of them said.

  “What do you mean ‘good luck’?” McNiece asked point-blank. He’d about run out of patience. “Where are we going and what’s the deal? When do we get briefed?”

  The colonel reached into his coat pocket and brought out a folded map. Jake thought it looked like an Automobile Club of America road map. There was nothing detailed about it at all.

  “Right now,” he said, unfolding it. “You see that circle?”

  “Yeah.” McNiece said. Using a typical mile-per-inch measure, he estimated the area inside the circle was two miles in diameter, and enclosed a part of Luxembourg, Belgium, situated right at the German border. He could see what might have been roads or highways spreading out from its center like bicycle spokes.

  “That’s a town called Bastogne,” the colonel explained. “Your division is cut off in there and completely encircled . . . or they were the last time we heard from them. That was two days ago. Whether or not they’re still there, I don’t know. But all indications are they still are.”

  McNiece stood quietly under a leaden sky, northeasterly winter gusts beating against his face as they swept across the runway area. There had been no jump for the division. If there had been, he would have known about it. For one thing, the Pathfinders would have been sent in advance to mark their DZs. But that hadn’t happened. A mass drop in those mountains out there, with all that snow around, was impossible.

  That meant they’d been activated out of reserve status and trucked in from Mourmelon, and something like that only would have happened if the outfits that were already in Bastogne were in a desperate predicament.

  “They’re out of ammunition, medicine, and food, and have nothing but a handful of men,” the colonel went on. “We have to maintain control of Bastogne.”

  McNiece listened carefully, the reality of the situation sinking in. Being surrounded was nothing new for guys from the 101st. They’d been surrounded all through Normandy. But his gut feeling was that they wouldn’t have had much of a chance to prepare themselves for action or load up on provisions and ammo before they moved out. They had been short on stores in the first place—Jake knew because he’d left Mourmelon with torn long johns and holes in his boots just two weeks before. For the boys who’d been ringed in, this wasn’t about their holding the village. It was about the Germans having them in a chokehold, and them having no way to fight their way out of it without bullets for their guns and morphine and sulfa for their wounds.

  For those men—his friends and brothers—it was about survival. But if the colonel wanted his Pathfinders marking the field for an aerial resupply, it would have to be one hell of a good-sized drop to be of any use to them.

  Though he didn’t know it, there was a large store of supplies on hand. Weeks earlier, Joel Crouch had made a pair of special recommendations. One was that two sticks of Pathfinders from each airborne division be retained at Chalgrove when their training period concluded in the event a situation occurred demanding their use on the Western Front. The other was that a hundred aircraft loads of vital troop provisions be sent to the air base, pre-bundled for rapid parachute delivery to any unit of the Airborne Corps on request.

  Captain Brown had endorsed both ideas. The first had needed approval from the separate divisional commanders—if he was going to keep their men at his base as standbys, they had to sign off on it. But he’d needed no one’s permission to implement Crouch�
��s bid for supplies and had procured them from the 490th Quartermaster Company for storage at the airfield.

  What Crouch had done with these proposals was create the basis for an unprecedented utilization of the Pathfinders—and in doing so he had taken a large step toward reconceptualizing airborne operations as a whole. Sending them to prepare the drop zones for massive deliveries of airborne troops and gliders had been an innovation, and a successful one, but their previous jumps over Normandy and Holland had been executed in advance of a main wave of thousands of troopers. The Pathfinders had been a forward component of a larger force. The thought that one or two sticks of paratroopers might be dropped behind enemy lines with a precise, limited tactical objective, delivered for a commando-style mission without follow-on airborne troops, was something altogether new in warfare.

  Crouch had understood this. He’d ambitiously pushed the development of airborne operations his entire military career and wanted to keep exploring their tactical possibilities.

  Jake McNiece’s concerns were different, and perhaps more centered on the moment. Standing on the airfield, the transport waiting behind him, he knew his men were being asked to do something that hadn’t been asked of anyone before, and without the benefit of a proper briefing, or a decent recon map of the DZ, or anything close to up-to-the-minute intelligence. He didn’t care for it all, but also knew it had to done—though he would not have admitted it to the colonel, who’d tucked away the map and put his hand back out.

  “Well,” he said again, “good luck.”

  McNiece had a feeling of déjà vu. “I don’t need luck, I need a miracle,” he said. “You are trying to hit a two-mile-diameter circle, flying four hundred miles to it in a C-47 that has no navigational aids or instruments.”