Piccadilly Willy was right behind me in the plane. My stick pressed together like a coiled spring, toe to heel. There was not any space between us. As we shuffled to the door, a big chunk of flak came up through the belly of the ship right between Willy and me. I had just stepped past it when he stepped into it. It did not hit my backpack but instead hit his belly reserve. It blew the cover and everything all to pieces but did not draw a drop of blood. The plane was so full of air from the holes and the open door that his chute blossomed out. He could not go out the door with it, so he gathered it up in his arms.
The C-47 had a cable that went clear through from front to back. A paratrooper hooked his snap fastener to the cable. When at the door, he would throw it past then jump right on out. I managed to clear the door. Well, Piccadilly Willy was trying to gather up his chute and keep moving. He ran on past, still gathering up his chute to clear the door for everybody else to exit. This delayed the last squad about a minute before they could exit. Those planes fly about a hundred and sixty miles an hour. So with the hesitation of one minute, the second half of my stick was dropped down the road about two miles.7
In other words I was the last man out in the first half of the stick. I had one squad of nine men. Chuck Plauda was the last man out. He later told me, “Jake, I wasn’t out of that plane three seconds till it blew up.” I never heard of Piccadilly Willy again.8
I had nine behind me and ten to the front. I always jumped in the middle of the stick instead of pusher or lead man. A section was made up of two squads. I always placed a corporal in the front of the stick and a corporal in the back. I jumped in the middle of it and had the men assemble toward me along the flight of the plane. When they hit the ground, they would look up. If the plane was going toward me they would follow it, if it was going away they would double back. Not any one of the eighteen assembled on me.9
I landed in an open area about two miles from Ste. Mere Eglise. This place was just about eight miles from our bridges. It turned out to be a Kraut bivouac area. The Krauts were dug in just like a checkerboard and I landed right in the middle of them. Boy those Germans were just boiling out of there like ants. Everywhere I went there were a jillion of them. Joe Oleskiewicz fought out one side of it and I fought out the other but we could not get together. All the others were gone. No way could we assemble.
On all the combat jumps that I made, the parachute harness had these old straps with big hooks and snap fasteners. When I got on the ground, the first thing that I did was reach up and grab those risers and cut them off.10 I fought until I got a break, then I took the rest of the harness off.
General Bill Lee was the father of airborne units in America. He had been the organizer and inventor of it but somehow he got disabled. So the command of the airborne passed on down to other officers. In preparation for this invasion, they told us that when we jumped out the door, instead of screaming “Geronimo” or something like that, everybody would scream “Baseball and Bill Lee.”11
Loulip jumped out of the plane ahead of me and landed on a blacktop road. It was very tough to distinguish between a clean, hard, coated surface and a stream of water. Lou landed on a roadbed there and I guess it broke his back. He never even got out of his harness. Lou lay there when I passed by, but I could not get to him. He was beyond help anyway. He was just moaning, “Baseball and Bill Lee, baseball and Bill Lee.”
BREAKOUT
D-Day: June 6, 1944
It was a hell of a feeling to be by myself in the middle of a foreign land surrounded by enemy soldiers. I had been by myself for two hours and had not seen another paratrooper other than Loulip; nor had I heard the sound of an American rifle. I was beginning to think they had canceled the entire invasion and I was the only American down there. It gave me a hell of a feeling. It was a pretty lonesome feeling. One thing about it, combat kept me so busy that the anxiety soon left me and it became a matter of either kill or get killed.
In France, they have these hedgerows along every road divided into little posts. There were a bunch of Krauts in every hedgerow and they had me pinned down in the junction of three hedgerows that formed a “T.” Every time I felt like they were moving in, I would shoot at them. They would cuss and threaten me, then cuss each other. They would back off, then another side would try to close in. I would shoot at them and then another side would try.
There was a dugout across the road, a gap in the hedgerow. The Germans cut these gaps in those hedgerows where their vehicles could go through. They would also have a dugout manned right there at the opening. Back at the opposite corners of these little ole farms, the Germans would also have machine-gun nests set up. If someone started to approach it, a Kraut machine gun would shoot his ass off.
There was one of those right across the road from me. I kept thinking, “There’s a man in there.” I could see him. His shadow was a different color. All the time the other Krauts were making a little more progress toward me and I thought, “I’ve got to get out of here or they’ll kill my ass.” I had jumped with a M1 Garand and bayonet. I finally decided that I was going to have to get across there and eat him up or I would be killed right there.
We jumped with little ole toy crickets.12 So I gave him a cricket and received no reply. I cricked him again and still did not get any reply. With all the roads over there, I decided that the only way I was going to get that boy was root him out with a bayonet. So I got set.
When we jumped into Normandy we had a challenge, a password and a reply. We used “Flash” for halt because the German word for “Halt” is “Halt.” Then we used “Thunder” for our password because even if they knew it they could not say it. They cannot pronounce the “th.” They would have said, “Dunder” or “Tunder.” And they cannot pronounce “W”s. They are all “V”s to them. So we used the reply of “Welcome” because they could not say it. So if a paratrooper had handed them a note and told them what it was all about, the Krauts could not have been able to use it.
When I made a run at that dugout, this ole boy came up out of there screaming, “Flash! Flash! Flash!” Of course I knew it was a paratrooper. I had that bayonet right on him—boy I was going hell bent for leather. I jerked it up over him and slid right down into that bunker with him. I just missed him by an inch. I asked, “What in the world are you doing?”
He said, “Boy, you better be careful about running at these dugouts. They’re full of Krauts. Right across the lot they’ve got two machine guns.”
I said, “Well, I found that out already tonight. This isn’t the first one I’ve been in. I wasn’t the one who was about to get killed, you idiot! If you had waited one more second, I would have had your ass on the end of this bayonet rooting you across this field. Why in the world didn’t you answer my challenge?”
He said, “Well, I had been watching that mess going on across the street there with you and these three hedgerows of Germans. I really thought you were a Kraut putting on a show to get me to open up.13 If I had answered your challenge and you had turned out to be a Kraut, do you know what I’d of had to have done?”
I said, “No, I don’t. What would you have had to have done?”
He just picked up a belt of machine gun ammunition and said, “I would have had to jump up and run across the road and beat you to death with this belt of machine gun ammunition.” He was a machine gunner out of some heavy weapons platoon. He said, “When I got my opening shock, me and my machine gun parted company. This is all in the world I’ve got left to fight with.”
I said, “You’re pretty poorly equipped. I’ll tell you what. They’ve kicked me in and out of every hedgerow over here. I had begun to think that the invasion had been called off and that I was the only man in Europe. You look like Coxy’s Army to me and I’m going to give you a couple of grenades. You follow me. We’re on the attack now. We’ll have no more of this damn running.”
So he took a couple of my grenades and threw away that belt of machine-gun ammunition and then we took off out of there. H
e was the first guy that I met after I landed in there. All I had was thirty-six pounds of Composition C-2, a thousand feet of wire, blasting caps, and a ten-cap detonator and not a man in my demolition section, but I headed toward my objective.
I heard a noise, motioned him down and then we squatted there. We were right on the edge of this landing that the Germans had flooded. This noise kept getting closer. It was three soldiers out there in this water walking along, laughing and talking and bullshitting. They got up a little closer and I thought, “They can’t be Krauts. That’s got to be paratroopers,” although I could not hear their voices distinctly enough to make that determination. I told him, “There’s three paratroopers. I want to holler them in.”
He said, “Oh no, no! Don’t do that. They might be Germans!”
I said, “No German would fight a war like that. That’s got to be three stupid paratroopers.” So I hollered at them and they came on over immediately.
One of them was this kid named Manual Cockeral. He was the kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had enlisted with down there at Fort Sill back in 1942. I had not seen him since that time in Toccoa, Georgia. He was the second American that I met. Out of twenty thousand people to jump into an area of combat and confusion, I bumped into someone that I personally knew.
It was a pretty tough go in there. Those hedgerows usually had small brush and trees that were fifteen to twenty feet tall all along them. They were so close and so dense that a lot of the boys became hung up in those trees and were killed. A bunch of them even drowned in the fields flooded by the Douve Canal, but in spite of that the drop really turned out to be a successful operation.
I picked up three more guys from our demolition platoon. They were Jack Agnew, Mike Marquez, and Keith Carpenter.14 I just gathered up all the demolitions men I could find. Of course, any troops we passed we asked to come along. If they did not we would at least ask them for their demolitions. I even got three men from a mortar company to go along with me. I did not tell them where we were going or anything else about the mission. I just told them to stick with us and we were going to make it out okay. The mortar men carried six rounds of mortar ammunition. I grabbed all the explosives I could get.
I had rounded up about ten paratroopers along the march, just piecemeal here and there. Demolitions men jumped with two eighteen-pound satchels of Composition C-2. We had electrical blasting caps, wire, and primer cord. So my little demolition squad was re-forming.
GERMAN CP15
Along the way we accidentally ran into a big German military headquarters. It was possibly a regiment or might even have been a division. We knew that because a lot of big brass were there. It had never been mentioned as a target in our training. We did not even know where we were. We were just as surprised as the Germans were. All we did was blast them from every side then scattered.
This was a beautiful part about paratrooping. It was a commando-type operation. If we bumped into a company of Krauts marching along through there, why two of us would just lay in and kill fifteen to thirty of them and then we were gone. They could not interrupt an operation just to hunt down two paratroopers. That is what we did to this headquarters. We just went right on through them, just like a bunch of bobcats.
COLONEL JOHNSON16
When we passed Ste. Mere Eglise, we ran into Colonel Howard R. Johnson. He was the commander of the 501st. He had established his headquarters between me and my bridges. Well, when I reached his command post, I think I probably had up to ten men. I went to tell an officer who I was. I had three bridges to blow up out there beyond him about six miles. Of course, he was glad to see anybody who could squeeze a trigger. He was desperately short of men and needed firepower. So this officer told me that he was assigning us to his unit.
Then Johnson came up and said, “You take up a defensive perimeter out there in that area.”
I said, “It’s not right. Johnson, I’ve got another assignment on these bridges. I have a job assigned to me and a lot of lives depend on me accomplishing it. You can’t use me out here as just a line man. No, I won’t do it.”
He said, “That’s been rescinded. You’re part of this position now.”
I said, “Evidently, they thought it was important that those bridges be destroyed or held.”
He said, “That’s the way it is. You go out there and establish a perimeter defense right in that section.”
I said, “Okay.”
So I took my little group and headed out to the sector where he wanted a perimeter defense. It was night and we could not see but ten feet. Of course when we got there, I just kept on going. One of the guys, I think it was Keith Carpenter, said, “McNiece, isn’t this where he told us to get? Where are you going?”
I answered, “Yeah, but don’t you remember I told him that this is not where we were going to be, that we’ve got bridges down there to take care of.”
He said, “Well, the colonel gave you orders to stay here in this area.”
I said, “I’ll let the colonel figure that out later. We’re going to the bridges.”
He said, “Okay.”
We took off and I do not think we had gone a hundred yards until ole Keith Carpenter was shot through the calf of the leg. He looked like Hercules, a big man, not enormous, but he was built like a brick shithouse. That bullet went clear through his leg and exited out the other side and did not touch a bone—not a bone! We just poured a bunch of sulfur powder in it and he was okay. So we took off.
WARE GETS HIT
The jump in there was pretty tough because the Germans had undone the locks along the Douve Canal and flooded some fields as wide as four hundred to five hundred yards. In some places out there the water was as much as ten feet deep. A lot of the guys landed in that with their chutes and military equipment and drowned.
By then, somewhere we had picked up of Clarence Ware. I was picking up stragglers here and there. They had no idea what had happened to their outfits. They had all been killed off except maybe one or two. I had about thirteen men by the time I finally reached the bridges.
Of course, I was older than most of the kids in there. Jack Agnew was really just a young kid himself. He was amazed at all the things that I had done and gotten away with in garrison. I had kind of become his hero. It was his ambition to be like me.
I always led point on every patrol. I would have a guy follow close enough so that he could determine anything I said with hand signals, then he would pass it on back. When we were going across that flooded area, Clarence Ware was walking right along beside me. Agnew was the first man behind him about ten or fifteen yards, straggling through this water with the rest of the pack. The rest of the squad was marching in a wedge formation. About halfway across, one shot rang out. Ole Ware went down like a lark. I stopped to check him out. They had hit him right between the shoulder blades and it went clear through his chest.
We were only two hundred yards from the front edge of the flooded area. So I figured there was only one place from where they could possibly have shot him. It had to have come out of that little old farmhouse, right there in the middle of that bog off about seventy-five yards behind us to one side. It was just a little frame country shed or building.
So I put everybody down, then went over and checked that house out. I went all through it and checked every room. I could not find anything. I did not even find any sign of recent occupancy. So I went back, picked up the guys, and took them on down to the bridges.
After the war was over, Jack Agnew told me, “Jake, when that shot rang out, I saw Ware go down. I thought, ‘Oh, hell. The war is over! They’ve killed McNiece!’ It just scared me to death. I thought, ‘What in the hell will we do now?’ Then I got on up there and saw it was Ware.”17
DOUVE CANAL18
We came to this flooded area and started out across it to reach the bridges. I went out there about seventy-five to a hundred yards. I was walking in water ankle deep and then suddenly I took a step and was over my head. I knew there were ditch
es in there. So I went right on across about six or eight feet to the other side.
The mortar men each carried six rounds of mortars in a vest, three in the front and three in the back, that slipped over their heads like an apron. It was so heavy that it took two people to lift it up and put it on them. One mortar man stepped right behind me into that ditch before he saw what had happened. Those mortar rounds pushed him right down. The water was just bubbling as he tried to fight his way back up to the surface. I grabbed him and dragged him on out, then we went back to work.
The farmers had cut ditches through their farms about every seventy-five to a hundred yards. With the fields flooded we could not see them until we stepped in one. When I got ready to step up to the next one, I would tell him to step up behind me about two or three steps. Then I would help the mortar man across each ditch.
My primary assignment was to blow the two wooden bridges up stream. One was just a foot bridge that did not show up on the map. Then we would move on up and place charges underneath the girders of the big bridge at Carentan.19 I was to hold it if possible and not to blow it unless the Germans started across it with armor. The Allies wanted to hold that bridge so they could make an exit out of the Cherbourg Peninsula en masse. But if the Germans started to cross it with tanks, we were supposed to wait until they got two or three tanks out on it then blow the whole thing. We were to keep the Germans from reinforcing their men down on the beachhead.
When we reached the bridges about 3:00 that morning, I think I had about thirteen people. Most of them were demolitions men that I had picked up along the way. I also had three mortar men. I used those mortar shells for explosives. We wired those bridges for demolition. We blew the supports out from under the two wooden bridges, then moved on up to the bridge on the main thoroughfare. We got in and wired it up under the cover of darkness where and how I liked it. The bridge was unguarded since the Germans were not anticipating anyone being in that deep behind the lines. We had it wired up and ready to blow before daybreak. After daylight, we began fighting in there.20
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