First to Jump Read online

  The Pathfinders attached to the 502nd PIR of the 101st Airborne—the Screaming Eagles—would be transported across the English Channel in twenty Dakota Skytrains. Adapted from the civilian DC-3 airliners Lieutenant Crouch had flown in what seemed another lifetime, the large, sturdy twin props had black and white invasion stripes painted near their tails to make them identifiable to Allied antiaircraft batteries. Friendly fire had been one of the major problems with the paratrooper drop on Sicily, causing terrible loss and confusion as offshore guns opened up on arriving flights, and the goal was to avoid a repeat of that debacle this time. But Crouch and the rest of the airmen who would fly the Pathfinders to their destination knew they’d have to make it past the formidable German shore defenses, itself a daunting proposition.

  This coordinated airborne assault was to begin right around midnight.

  Going in first without backup, the Pathfinders would jump into enemy territory a half hour earlier.

  3.

  The first to leave the runway, Lieutenant Crouch’s plane—tail number 23098—soared into the night sky at 9:54 P.M., with the rest taking wing at five-minute intervals. Once they reached cruising altitude, they assembled into tight V formations: three planes to a V serial, three V serials to an echelon.

  The pilots were taking their cue from nature. Like geese during long migrations, flying in these groups allowed them to maintain closer contact and communication in the air.

  Whipcord thin at 140 pounds—although he weighed twice that in full uniform and gear—Captain Lillyman sat behind the cockpit chewing his customary cigar. The men always kept an eye out for it, reasoning that the luck it brought him could only be an asset for them too. In fact, during a practice jump over England with his Pathfinder trainees, he’d neglected to put the stogie in his mouth and their whole mood had changed. Glancing at their faces as they neared the target, he’d decided something was wrong.

  “Hey,” he asked one of them, “what’s the trouble with you fellas?”

  “The captain hasn’t got his cigar,” the trooper replied.

  With that, Lillyman had taken one out of his pocket and chomped down on it so all the men could see. As he recalled, the plane had made an additional circle of the field, and the stick had jumped with their usual swagger . . . and a full measure of good luck, they would have agreed.

  Of course Lillyman’s confidence stemmed from much more than just the lucky cigar. He knew his men inside out. Most weren’t big on rules and would have admitted to having had a close brush or two—or possibly three—with insubordination. But, then again, he’d heard whispers that his own regimental commander, Colonel George van Horn Moseley, had called him an “arrogant smart-ass” behind his back before he’d gotten assigned to head up the Pathfinder training school.

  If this was true, he was okay with it. He was proud of his unit. In his opinion, a maverick disposition was almost an essential quality for its fighters. It went along with a strong sense of independence and was partly what would allow them to seize the initiative and make quick decisions under pressure. In short, it gave them the wherewithal to do their job knowing they would sink or swim on their own.

  Looking down the aisle at his troopers, Lillyman could have given a detailed recitation of their temperaments, backgrounds, and specialized skills. For instance, Private Gus Mangoni, the demolition man, was the best he’d ever seen at working with a stick of dynamite. Along with John “The Greek” Zamanakos, Mangoni could do just about anything he wanted setting an explosion. They were quite a team.

  Private John McFarlen was in position to be the third to jump behind Lillyman. An ornery, rough-and-tumble Texan, he enjoyed fighting for the simple fun of it and had prompted many an aggravated Saturday night phone call to the Nottingham police after a fracas at the local pub. McFarlen was one of the guys for whom a three-day pass usually spelled trouble, and Lillyman had had his hands full keeping him out of the English guardhouse. But now McFarlen was hot to go up against the German Army, and that was their great misfortune.

  Private Frank Rocca—the boys called him “The Rock”—was cut from the same toughened mold, a born scrapper. Knee-high to a keg of cider and hard as a barrel of nails, he knew how to handle an M-1 carbine as well as anyone. On the firing range, he’d show off his skill by weaving like a hula dancer with the Tommy gun at his hip as he turned silhouette targets to splinters.

  The unit’s scouts, Privates Frederik Wilhelm and Bluford Williams, sat toward the rear of the troop section, and Lillyman would have followed them anywhere without hesitation. Williams was also his cleanup man, the last Pathfinder in line aboard the plane. His orders were to keep pushing the stick forward in case anybody got cold feet . . . though Williams had mused to himself that the door was so tight, it would have been hard to budge a man in full jump gear out of it.

  Seated between Williams and the security detachment, saying little and keeping to themselves, were a Section 2 intelligence liaison, Staff Lieutenant Robert “Buck” Dickson, and his two-man guard, a couple of privates named Clark and Ott. A small, whippet-thin guy who looked like he could have run track, Ott seemed almost diminutive beside the thickset Dickson.

  Although Dickson and Lillyman had stood over sand tables together at briefings, and Dickson’s team wore the Pathfinder wing patch, they hadn’t gone through the special training and were somewhat grudgingly accepted by the men who’d done so. Upon making landfall, Dickson and his team were to break off from Lillyman’s group on classified orders from regimental headquarters. The S-2s weren’t under Lillyman’s direct command, and their objective was separate from that of the Pathfinders. He wouldn’t be responsible for them once they hit the ground.

  As he settled in after embarkation, Lillyman had ample time to ponder his own mission. The transport looped around the airfield for almost two hours—some of the paratroopers were told this was done to throw off possible German observers—before it left the English coast behind. Then, at about 11:30 P.M., it finally stopped circling and soared off over the Channel.

  Lieutenant Crouch had a reputation for possessing a cool demeanor behind the controls, and tonight it was in complete evidence. His face taut with concentration, eyes sharply alert, he flew in radio silence, dropping beneath one hundred feet to thwart enemy radar—so close to the water that the troopers nearest their open cabin door could feel the sea spray whipped up by the aircraft’s propellers. Had the plane been any lower, it might have clipped the masts of the Allied invasion ships.

  Behind him in the troop section, Captain Lillyman glanced out at the naval armada massed below. Destroyers, cruisers, troop carriers, battleships, gunships . . . they seemed to form a floating bridge that stretched on without end. He could practically imagine walking clear across to France on their decks.

  One thing was obvious—the water was anything but calm. A strong wind was blowing over the wave tops, tossing ships about in the chop. Depending on variables like gusts and direction, Lillyman knew the wind could cause a slew of problems for the jump. If the men were dispersed over a wider area than expected, it could prevent them from assembling as planned and put them in very dangerous situations.

  They didn’t speak much throughout the forty-five-minute flight. Their exchanges were short, clipped, and perfunctory. Smoking was barred once they were over the Channel, and most of them abided by the prohibition; they’d been told something about the exhaust from the engines possibly blowing back into the cabin and combusting because of the smokes. Though the risk seemed tiny compared to the dangers they would soon be facing, they’d by and large kept the cigarettes in their pockets.

  Some of the men were surprised to find themselves growing drowsy in spite of their nervousness. They felt oddly dull, as if their emotions had been slowed down, and more than a few quietly wondered if it was due to the airsickness tablets they’d been issued before takeoff. The pills came in little cardboard boxes that Sergeant Ray “Snu
ffy” Smith, the medic, dispensed to them on orders from his regimental superior. While a fair number of the troopers just tossed the pills away, others swallowed them. The contents of the pills, and their distribution to the troopers by the Army, would later draw a number of questions.

  Overall the mood aboard the flight was tense. With their bulky gear making it hard to move, the men sat very still in their seats, squeezed together on either side of the troop compartment, butterflies fluttering in their stomachs. The 101st Pathfinders liked to think of themselves as supermen, the toughest of the tough. But as they faced one another across the aisle, their gazes would occasionally meet, and their hardened facades crack a little, each man recognizing his own nervous fear in his comrade’s eyes.

  The staff sergeant from Headquarters who’d delivered their mission briefing back in England, Hugh Nibley, had asked repeatedly whether they had any questions, and they had raised their hands one after another, slowly, almost tentatively, everyone wanting to know the same thing from him: did they have any chance of survival?

  The soft-spoken, articulate Nibley, a former missionary, historical scholar, and intelligence specialist, had given his replies in careful, measured tones. He felt a profound compassion for the men and refused to mislead them with double-talk and false optimism. He praised their courage and unique training, emphasized their preparedness for the mission, and mentioned the support they would have once the invasion force arrived. But the words that left his mouth hadn’t contained any more reassurance than the sorrowful look in his eyes as they moved from one young face to another. When the men had asked him their questions, he had seen the bravado drop away from their faces like the paper Mardi Gras masks people held up on sticks.

  If nothing else, the Pathfinders had appreciated the sergeant’s honesty. They had confidence in their ability to accomplish their mission, but accepted that they didn’t have a prayer of coming home alive. Although official post-combat reports would describe them joining in battle songs on the transports, their few halfhearted attempts at singing had quickly petered off into silence, and the noise of the engines had been far too loud for them to hear one another’s voice anyway.

  In his seat near the rear of the compartment, Dickson felt anxious and out of place. Only three weeks before he’d been coaching the regimental football team, a far cry from his current assignment. But with D-Day’s approach he’d been given his high-priority objective and rushed through jump training. Now the tall, broad-shouldered former varsity athlete noticed flashing green lights in the English Channel and wondered aloud about their purpose.

  “It’s a rescue ship,” said one of the Pathfinders in a tone that was almost too flat. “Just in case.”

  Years afterward, Dickson would find out they weren’t rescue ships at all, but a pair of Royal Navy patrol guide boats leading Crouch’s planes across the Channel with their navigational lights. It would leave him to wonder if the trooper had been pulling his leg or just mistaken. But his deadpan response and the water spraying in the door would always stand out in Dickson’s memory of the crossing.

  Later, as the C-47 passed over the Channel Islands and made its hard left turn for France, he noted a big German searchlight sweeping the sky, probing for the arrival of the Allied planes.

  It was not a comforting sight.

  4.

  The Cotentin Peninsula on the French seaside jutted into the Channel at the western end of the Allies’ amphibious landing area, codenamed Utah Beach. The 101st Airborne had been tasked with capturing four roads between Saint-Martin-de-Varreville and Pouppeville, blowing their smaller bridges and seizing two of the major ones. The 82nd Airborne was to secure the Douve River and crossings at La Fière and Chef du Pont on opposite sides of the Merderet River, establishing a defensive line west of the Merderet. A glider infantry unit of the British 6th Airborne was to take Pegasus Bridge, a drawbridge spanning the Caen Canal.

  Together these groups were to block off German reinforcements heading down to the beachhead from the north, simultaneously opening passages for Allied armor and infantry to roll into the French mainland. If they failed to secure these junctures, the American 4th Infantry Division coming ashore at Utah would likely get trapped there on the dunes or bogged down in the flooded Cotentin wetlands—a disaster in either case.

  Frank Lillyman’s 101st Pathfinder team had departed England shortly before the 82nd Airborne’s teams, which were led by Captain Neal McRoberts of the 505th PIR. Along with the American units, two sticks from the British 6th Airborne—it was at their Pathfinder school at RAF North Witham in Lincolnshire that the Americans had trained under Lieutenant Crouch’s command—were being sent to mark off the glider landing zones near Pegasus Bridge.

  It was up to Lillyman and his men to mark Drop Zone A at the northern edge of the main attack—within six miles of Pouppeville. Meanwhile, two other teams would land nearby at DZs C, D, and E. In his approach to the Cotentin, Lieutenant Crouch had taken an aerial corridor that would run between the German-occupied Guernsey and Alderney Islands, then cross the peninsula’s west coast before delivering the Pathfinders to their destinations. But as he neared the shoreline, the veteran pilot saw a thick bank of clouds and fog ahead of him. Blotting out the moonlight, it appeared to reach to an altitude of about three thousand feet.

  That immediately threatened to derail Crouch’s plan. The transports had been instructed to maintain visual contact until they were over the peninsula, where they would veer off toward their separate drop and landing zones. But once they entered the clouds, it would be impossible to stay in formation or see all the landmarks needed for accurate orientation. Moreover, he could not expect the troopers to jump blindly into the overcast. Their safety was paramount to him.

  He thought hard about what action to take, drawing on long years of experience. Like other United Airlines pilots of his era, he’d learned to fly—and navigate—from the great old transcontinental airmail pilots who’d blazed the trail for commercial aviation. The stringent standards he’d set for himself and his IX Troop Carrier Command Pathfinder pilots far exceeded Air Corps requirements—as did his training techniques. Back in England, he’d deliberately confused navigators by recalibrating their instruments so they would have to rely on their eyes and intuition, and had once offered a cash reward and furlough to the crew that could drop a dummy parachutist closest to its target area.

  With the cloud stack looming in front of him now, Crouch made a decision to fly in under its bottom layer. Although going in low would make him an easier target for antiaircraft guns, he saw no other acceptable course. Not if he was to give the paratroopers their best shot.

  His hands steady on the controls, Crouch shed altitude, dropping well below five hundred feet. The strict radio silence edict had not allowed him to notify the rest of the troop carriers of his intentions, and he only hoped they would see his formation lights clearly enough to follow his lead. Once beneath the mass of clouds, Crouch made a sharp ninety-degree turn inland, throttled back to his 120mph jump speed, and flashed the red standby light beside the cabin door.

  Four minutes from the DZ, he held the plane slow and steady.

  Beside him, his copilot, Captain Vito Pedone, gazed down at the moonlit terrain below in silence. How did I get here? he thought, thankful they hadn’t yet come under fire from German antiaircraft batteries.

  Pedone, a twenty-one-year-old native New Yorker, had flown twenty-five previous missions with the Air Corps. But this felt almost surreal. When you’d just gone over the English Channel and made the left turn that would take you into Nazi-occupied France, and you were, moreover, helping to fly the lead plane of the invasion, you knew you were part of something different, and understood how much hinged on your success. But you didn’t know—couldn’t possibly know—what was going to happen.

  Still, he told himself, there was no time to be scared. If you were afraid, you might as well get right out of the
stinking airplane and go back to base. You had to take control of your senses, think about the people in your plane, and do what was expected of you.

  Back in the cabin, meanwhile, Frank Lillyman had been hunkered down on one knee, peering out the jump door and comparing what he saw to aerial photos of the drop zone that he’d memorized before the mission. Like the pilots, he’d been familiarized with important landmarks.

  Then he saw the red light blink on and rose to his feet, ordering his men do the same. Although heavily encumbered with gear, they weren’t wearing their bulky reserve chutes. It was standard procedure for them to climb aboard the plane with the packed reserves across their midsections, but Williams had asked for permission to remove his, and Lillyman had remained flexible and given it to him. He would place his trust in the private’s ability and experience, and his own common sense, over blind adherence to the rule book. If a trooper’s main chute failed to deploy at their low jump altitude, he’d be smacking into the ground before the backup could inflate.

  After Williams got the go-ahead to shuck his reserve, most of his comrades followed suit—none more happily than Sergeant Smith. Besides his first-aid supplies and plasma bag, the twenty-year-old Kentuckian, who’d enlisted at sixteen without graduating high school, was carrying a fifty-five-pound Eureka radio transmitter. Ridding himself of the spare parachute meant one less heavy item of gear.