First to Jump

by Jerome Preisler

  3.

  As he fluttered to earth, McNiece saw a sprawling cemetery below him, its frozen knolls and lawns studded with elaborate headstones, footstones, and mausoleums. Its size reassured him they were over Bastogne. No other village in the area would have a burial ground that large, and he was thinking that all those monuments would provide good cover if he landed on top of the Germans.

  And then he was down, his boots breaking through the snow crust. He rolled into all that whiteness, wrestled free of the harness and chute, got back on his feet, and shoved his hands into his waist pouches for the smoke grenades. An instant later, he was hurling them everywhere, never mind if there might be enemy guns trained on him, whump-whump-whump, churning up a huge orange cloud as he kept lobbing the grenades, one after another after another, Germans be damned, whump-whump-whump, everywhere, so it must have looked to the pilots up there overhead like hell was popping its lid around him.

  Still hanging from his risers in midair, George Blain, the radar man, saw the thick orange plumes rising up from below and decided not to wait till he was on the ground to give the transports his okay. Hitting the switch on the portable AN/CRN-4 set strapped to his body, he sent the signal and looked up at the orbiting planes with a kind of manic, adrenaline-infused giddiness. What a party! he thought.

  In his cockpit, Joel Crouch radioed Headquarters to open the aerial supply line. Because he was a precise, thorough man, he’d waited for his Rebecca to interrogate the radar unit, keeping one eye on its cathode ray screen, only sending out the message after he saw the blips. But in a sense that was a technical and procedural formality. It would have been enough for him to see McNiece whip up a billowing orange funnel, flinging his grenades like a man having wild conniptions, his bright, rising smoke signal a clear declaration that he was right where he needed to be.

  As he pulled away now, Crouch noticed three or four burning German light tanks not far from where he’d made his pass, a large, undamaged Panzer within four hundred yards of them, and an enemy armored column resting alongside a nearby road. Still on the radio, he relayed the information in the hopes that HQ could get some fighters out—but had no regrets about dropping the troopers. If the bombers came, the armor would be duck soup, and the truth was that he and McNiece weren’t that different. Failure hadn’t been an option for either man when they left Chalgrove that morning to go sneaking over the German heads. They had come here to get the job done.

  Flying behind Crouch, Lieutenant Lionel Wood got the signal and gave the thumbs-up to his copilot, who immediately flashed the green light for their troopers. Both felt as if their nerves had been replaced with high-voltage wires. They had flown Normandy and Market together, and those missions had been hairy, but the one they were on today was somehow different. This time there were thousands of American troops freezing to death down there in the snow, waiting for them, desperate for food, water, medicine, and warm clothing, their lives depending on a handful of men coming down right on a dime.

  Behind the cabin bulkhead, Red Wright was having comparable thoughts, praying to God that the planes bringing in his group had the best navigators to ever chart a course through the air. Looking down at the ring of Germans as they’d flown in, it had occurred to him that he would be trying to drop into a doughnut hole maybe a mile and a half across. It had seemed one hell of a long shot.

  But then the green light flashed above the door, and just like that, he put all those thoughts aside. The fear that been wriggling in his stomach was gone. Red had promised himself several times that he would make a difference in the battle against Hitler’s evil. He had made that promise when he enlisted, and done it again when he ditched into the Channel, and had repeated his promise after he heard that Salty Harris, one of the best friends he’d had in his entire life, was killed by a sniper in Normandy. There was a reason they’d gotten into the war. A reason they were fighting and dying.

  Now he heard Lieutenant Rothwell shout, “Go,” and turned to Dutch Fenstermaker in line beside him, looked into his eyes, and could see that Dutch knew the same thing he knew: This was it, their turn, their chance.

  Red jumped without hesitation as his stick poured out of the transport into a rising cloud of orange smoke.

  On the ground, meanwhile, Jack Agnew stood up to get out of his harness with blood sheeting from his nose, mouth, and chin. Right after his chute opened, he’d seen an enemy tank below him—it was the same Panzer Crouch had spotted—and tried to free up his tommy gun, ready for a fight. Though the tank hadn’t come close, he’d hit the ground hard and the sub had smashed into his face. A “mess,” he went staggering toward the others as they hastily assembled outside the cemetery. With German machine-gun fire and mortar shells raining upon them from about a hundred fifty yards away, they hurried through its gate to take cover, scrambling behind some enormous monuments.

  Almost at once, McNiece realized that they were getting screened by fire from deeper inside the graveyard. Then he saw a squad of American troopers come racing over to them. Members of the division’s 327th Glider Infantry, they’d held a defensive line there for days and had been on alert for the transports since sunrise. Notified that a second Pathfinder mission had been arranged, Colonel Kohls, the supply officer, had ordered the soldiers to contact him at first sight of the planes.

  Kneeling for cover behind a monument, Rothwell suddenly had a field telephone thrust into his hand. It was the colonel.

  “How long before the resupply flights arrive?” Kohls asked.

  Rothwell told him the first group of planes—forty C-47s from the IX TCC—was circling over France waiting for a signal and would appear within ninety minutes. These would be followed by a second wave of aircraft from the 441st Troop Carrier Group. And there would be more after that. All told there were more than two hundred planes waiting to deliver their loads.

  “We need to know where you want us to set up the drop zones,” he said over the noise of the volleys.

  Kohls had him and Williams brought over to the division’s command post on the opposite side of the graveyard so they could figure it out. As the officers sped off through the snow in a waiting jeep, a medic went to work on Agnew. With guns rattling on both sides of the line, McNiece also stayed behind in the cemetery to await instructions.

  They came quickly. Phoning from the CP, Williams told him the beacons were to be laid in approximately the same area where the sticks had made landfall. At Chalgrove the Pathfinders had practiced arranging the light panels in circles, and they would build four of them inside the 327’s defensive perimeter, one for each ARN/CR-4 unit. It was vital that one beacon be set up to guide in the initial wave of planes, with the others prepared for successive flights. Finally, because it was believed the Germans could home in on their signals, the portable radar sets were only to be turned on when the men heard the incoming resupply aircraft—and no sooner. The instant the primary set was activated, a fleet of jeeps and quarter-ton trucks would zero in on the signal, speed out to the DZ from the command post, and start picking up the urgently needed ammunition, clothing, rations, and medical supplies for distribution to the troops.

  With the 327th infantrymen providing cover, McNiece led the men out of the graveyard to look for a place to set up the radar. He spotted a large pile of bricks at the top of a hill and ran over to scout it out more closely. The pile stood across the road from a dilapidated old farmhouse and was about a dozen feet tall and more than twice as long, its bricks carefully stacked for construction. Though it was only about a hundred yards from the German line—the men could see the enemy emplacements with their naked eyes—Jake figured that placing the CR-4 on the brick pile would ensure that it was high enough that nothing would obstruct its signal.

  “Climb up on there and get the radar ready,” he told Agnew, who was carrying one of his stick’s two boxes. He motioned to the snow-crusted ground alongside the pile. “The rest of you lay out the panel
s.”

  Agnew searched for a handhold, handed the box to one of the men, stretched his arms above his head, and, groping at the bricks, hoisted himself to the top. A moment later he reached down for the radar.

  That was right about when McNiece saw a boy of about fourteen race out the front door of the old farmhouse, cross the road, and come hustling up to the group of Pathfinders and troopers from the 327th.

  “What’s your name?” he asked the kid.

  “Loui,” he said, and then gestured that he wanted to help carry the panels.

  McNiece watched as the men put him to work, then turned to look around the hill. He needed to decide where to set up the remaining units.

  Leaving Wright, Fenstermaker, and most of the other men to lay out the DZ, he hurried off with Blain and the rest to scout out the area. His boots slipping and sliding over the ice and snow, the air so frigid it felt like he was inhaling razor blades, he found three decent locations on two different nearby hills. They set the first box up on a hill outside the farmhouse across the road, then ran up another hill with a big metal storage shed on its crest. The next radar unit was set up on one side of the rise, and the last one on the hilltop directly in front of the shed. The high ground was ideal for the signal, and McNiece figured the building would provide emergency cover for the operator.

  The troopers had barely finished setting up that fourth unit when the German guns unleashed a fusillade from their positions behind the line, the ammunition drilling into the snow and clanging against the side of the shed. Taking hurried shelter inside, the men heard the whine of incoming artillery shells and then felt explosions shake the ground as they slammed into the hillside. With each volley the blasts got closer.

  McNiece was not about to stay there until the Germans zeroed in. He got his men out of the shed fast, shouting at the top of his lungs as he hustled them along, grabbing the radar unit off the ground. They barely escaped before the artillery hit the structure hard, hammering it into a mound of crumpled scrap metal.

  It was now a few minutes past eleven in the morning, and McNiece knew the supply transports would be well under way, the IX TCC’s planes flying east over the Channel to clip the northern tip of France en route to Belgium, the rest of the armada launching from an airfield outside Paris and swinging in from the west.

  Leaving a few men at each of the radar sites, he led the rest of his group back to the brick pile. Unable to do anything but wait there on top of it, Agnew, his teeth chattering from the bitter cold, had been watching American burial details pull the dead from both sides out of the snow and ice, toiling to get the stiff, frozen bodies onto their litters, then carrying them shoulder-high where the drifts were piled deep. He would never forget those things, never forget enduring the dreadful cold out there on those bricks, exposed to the wind and snow, shivering in a field jacket borrowed from the IX TCC air corps.

  The men at the pile first heard the C-47s right about when McNiece got back. The unmistakable noise of their engines pulsed in the air, low and then louder. Glancing down at Jake, Agnew knew to wait a little longer to send out the homing signal. Kohls had wanted half an hour’s notice to give the trucks time to roll in, and that meant estimating the planes’ arrival time. But they would hold off with the radar as long as possible so the Germans couldn’t get a fix on them.

  They waited, taking sporadic gunfire, the Pathfinders and 327th troopers returning it with their own weapons. Finally, at about eleven-twenty, McNiece gave the nod, and Agnew’s hand went to the switch.

  The sound of the cargo aircraft a droning wave overhead, all eyes turned toward the west.

  4.

  The forty C-47s of the IX TCC had taken off from Chalgrove in three-ship Vs, traveling through clouds and fog so thick the aircrews had to rely on their instruments to maintain course and altitude.

  Today even the birds are walking, thought Lieutenant Art Feigion, who was piloting a transport in the third serial. He’d flown Normandy with the Pathfinders, and a mission conducted in instrument weather was therefore nothing new to him, but the near-whiteout conditions were only part of the squally mix. Even as they’d banked over the Channel, climbing to fifteen hundred feet, a major winter storm front out of Eastern Europe had forced the planes to fly into a powerful, battering headwind that would rock them throughout the crossing.

  Opportunely, the cloud cover broke over France to reveal a striking azure sky. Peering outside, Feigion realized he could see for a hundred miles in any direction—and see the other Skytrains emerge from the front in perfect serial formation. Though it was quite a feat, it didn’t surprise him. That day the pilots had taken to the air with a special, steely determination, as if all their training and discipline were being driven by a force beyond their comprehension.

  The armada flew straight as a ram over Belgium, its planes steadily trimming altitude until they were at their drop height above the treetops. The crews would remember a featureless plain of snow spreading out around the shadows of their wings, its whiteness blinding them with glare in the unexpected sunlight. As their eyes adjusted, they saw tall pines thrusting upward through the cover, and roads packed with a solid, bumper-to-bumper line of German tanks and other vehicles. Then a chain of low hills running north to south, and finally Bastogne itself in the distance. Surrounded by circular belts of enemy artillery and antiaircraft guns, it resembled the center of a gigantic target.

  The Pathfinder signals would guide the planes to their bull’s-eye from about twenty miles in. Flying without armaments, the C-47s relied on speed and surprise to accomplish their mission. As one airman recalled, there had been “no fancy tactical planning, no elaborate flight paths” for the armada. The crews were told to head “straight on in, jettison your loads on the position markers west of Bastogne, and get the hell out.”

  The row of hills across the flight path proved an asset, hiding the planes from the German flak batteries until they were almost at the drop zone. But the guns awoke with a roar as they overflew them on their final approach.

  In the cargo holds, the men quickly shoved their freight out the doors under heavy fire. The bundles fell in a growing swarm, a dozen, fifty, a hundred, and then countless hundreds, their color-coded parachutes snapping open above them—yellow chutes for equipment bundles, red for ammunition, white for medical supplies, blue for rations.

  Sergeant Ben Obermark, a crew chief aboard one of the flights, found himself staring down in disbelief at the thought of thousands of American soldiers trapped in all that snow, the whiteness spreading out beneath him to the very limits of his vision. Standing in the door, the glare in his eyes, he couldn’t see the men or much of anything else down there. On impulse, he knelt on the floor, and then got down lower, lower, until he was lying flat in the aisle, belly to belly with the plane despite the hail of deadly fire pouring up from the enemy emplacements. And then, squinting, shielding his eyes with one hand, flattened and vulnerable inside the door, he was finally able to make out American soldiers. They were on the move, scrambling for the para-bundles dotting the snow-covered ground, and hurriedly dragging them off out of sight.

  As his plane veered away from the DZ, its load emptied, the chattering guns behind him, Bastogne behind him, Sergeant Obermark finally stood up and moved from the door. He thought of the guys down there all during the three-hour return trip to England—those cold, desperate men running out for the bundles—and kept hoping the supplies they’d received would give them a chance to hang on awhile longer.

  In fact, the supplies enabled them to hang on just long enough.

  5.

  Yellow, red, white, blue.

  At the brick pile, McNiece and the men were watching the supply bundles fall through the suddenly, startlingly, gloriously blue sky like manna on parachutes. The arrival of the planes had also turned the Germans’ attention skyward, and led to a welcome pause in the machine-gun fire they’d been directing a
t the hill.

  Yellow, red, white, blue.

  Down below the hill and across the road toward the edge of the cemetery, the trucks and jeeps had sped to the DZ as soon as the radars were triggered, arriving to wait for the planes, their crews pouring from the vehicles at first sight of the bundles. Now they were recovering the packages as they touched down on the ground, in some instances gathering supplies from bundles that had come apart in midair or broken to pieces upon landing, the men picking their spilled contents out of the snow and hauling them into the vehicles by the armful. With each new planeload there would be a fresh outburst of cheers from all around the area, the troopers whooping it up like they were at a ballpark in New York, Cleveland, or St. Louis when their team won the World Series.

  Yellow, red, white, blue.

  Up atop the bricks, Private Jack Agnew kept working the radar, pressing its button once every thirty seconds as he’d learned to do in England. He would rarely climb down off that pile in the next five days, at least not while the sun was out and the planes were coming in. That first day, in the first four hours of the airlift, the Pathfinders guided in 244 planes. The following day—the day before Christmas—they brought in almost 200 more, switching between their three radar locations to keep the Germans from getting a bead on them. On Christmas Day, the weather conditions over England prevented the fleet of C-47s from taking off, but McNiece and his men would bring in a volunteer eleven-glider lift of medical personnel launched from France. There would be 269 transports the day after that, and another hundred plus on the fifth and final day of the drop.

  They were long, hard days for Agnew. He was hungry, and thirsty, and most of all he was cold. On one of those days, a foxhole at the bottom of the hill took a direct hit from an artillery shell, and the eight soldiers in it, who’d been talking to him on and off to while away the hours, were blown to death. On Christmas, he and the other Pathfinders got a treat, the troops sharing some hot C rations from the resupply drops—cow beets and onions that were like a taste of heaven after the cold Ks they’d been eating, and that might have warmed the Pathfinders up all the more because of the gratitude they represented. But with the way he was burning calories in the cold, Agnew’s hunger and thirst would soon return.