D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (32 page)

Because of the way his plane rolled, Private Griffing's stick was badly separated. The man who went before him was a half mile back; the man who jumped after Griffing was a half mile forward. "My chute popped open and I was the only parachute in the sky. It took me one hundred years to get down." Below him, a German flak wagon with four 20mm guns was pumping out shells "and I was the only thing they had to shoot at. Tracers went under me and I couldn't help but pull my legs up." The flak wagon kept shooting at him even after he hit the ground. "I would have been hit through sheer Teutonic perseverance if the next flight of planes hadn't arrived and they gave up shooting at me to shoot at them."
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Pvt. Fitzgerald "looked up to check my canopy and watched in detached amazement as bullets ripped through my chute. I was mesmerized by the scene around me. Every color of the rainbow was flashing through the sky. Equipment bundles attached to chutes that did not fully open came hurtling past me, helmets that had been ripped off by the opening shock, troopers floated past. Below me, figures were running in all directions. I thought, Christ, I'm going to land right in the middle of a bunch of Germans! My chute floated into the branches of an apple tree and dumped me to the ground with a thud. The trees were in full bloom and added a strange sweet scent to this improbable scene." To Fitzgerald's relief, the "Germans" turned out to be cows running for cover. "I felt a strange surge of elation: I was alive!"
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The 506th was supposed to land ten kilometers or so southwest of Ste.-Mere-Eglise, but a couple of sticks from the regiment

came down in the town. It was 0115. A small hay barn on the south side of the church square was on fire, evidently caused by a tracer. Mayor Alexandre Renaud had called out the residents to form a bucket brigade to get water from the town pump to the fire. The German garrison sent out a squad to oversee the infraction of the curfew.

Sgt. Ray Aebischer was the first to hit. He landed in the church square, behind the fire-brigade line and unnoticed by the German guards (the great brass bell in the church tower was ringing to rouse the citizens, drowning out the noise of his landing). He cut himself loose, then began moving slowly toward the church door, hoping to find sanctuary. The door was locked. He crawled around the church to the rear, then along a high cement wall. The Germans began firing, not at him but at his buddies coming down. He saw one man whose chute had caught in a tree get riddled by a machine pistol. Altogether, four men were killed by German fire.
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Pvt. Don Davis landed in the church square; he played dead, got rolled over by a suspicious German, and got away with it.* Aebischer meanwhile took advantage of the confusion to make his escape. Within a few minutes, it was quiet again over Ste.-Mere-£glise; on the ground the fire-fighting effort resumed. But the German guards were now alert for any further paratroop drops.

Sgt. Carwood Lipton and Lt. Dick Winters of Company E, 506th, landed on the outskirts of the town. Lipton figured out where they were by reading the signpost in the moonlight, one letter at a time. Winters gathered together a group of squad size or less and began hiking for his company's objective, Ste.-Marie-du-Mont.

Winters did not know it, but his CO was dead. Lt. Thomas Meehan and Headquarters Company had been flying in the lead plane in stick 66. It was hit with bullets going through it and out the top, throwing sparks. The plane maintained course and speed for a moment or two, then did a slow wingover to the right. Pilot Frank DeFlita, just behind, remembered that "the plane's landing lights came on, and it appeared they were going to make it, when the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded." There were no survivors.
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Sgt. McCallum, one of the pathfinders for the 506th, was on the ground, about ten kilometers from Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. The

* Davis was killed a few days later outside Carentan. William True had been in a quonset hut with Davis in England. There were sixteen men in the hut; onlv three returned unscathed to England in mid-Julv (William True oral history, EC).

Germans had anticipated that the field he was in might be used as a drop zone, so they had machine guns and mortars around three sides of it. On the fourth side, they had soaked a barn with kerosene. When the planes carrying Capt. Charles Shettle and his company came overhead and the men started jumping out, the Germans set a torch to the barn. It lit up the whole area. As the troopers came down, the Germans commenced firing. Sgt. McCallum said, "I'll never forget the sadness in my heart as I saw my fellow troopers descend into this death trap."

Captain Shettle got down safely, despite mortar shells exploding and tracer bullets crisscrossing the field. Shettle was battalion S-3; the company he had jumped with was supposed to assemble at the barn, but that was obviously impossible; Shettle moved quickly to the alternate assembly point and began blowing his whistle. In a half hour he had fifty men around him—but only fifteen were from the 506th. The others were members of the 501st.

That kind of confusion and mixing of units was going on all over the Cotentin. A single company, E of the 506th, had men scattered from Carentan to Ravenoville, a distance of twenty kilometers. Men of the 82nd were in the 101st drop zone and vice versa. Standard drill for the paratroopers, practiced countless times, was to assemble by "rolling up the stick." The first men out would follow the line of flight of the airplane; the men in the middle would stay put; the last men out would move in the opposite direction from the airplane's route. In practice maneuvers it worked well. In combat that night it worked only for a fortunate few.

Capt. Sam Gibbons of the 501st (later long-term congressman from Florida) was alone for his first hour in France. Finally he saw a figure, clicked his cricket, got a two-click answer, and "suddenly I felt a thousand years younger. Both of us moved forward so we could touch each other. I whispered my name and he whispered his. To my surprise, he was not from my plane. In fact, he was not even from my division."
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Lt. Guy Remington fell into the flooded area near the Douve River. He was pulling up the bank when he heard a noise. He froze, pulled his tommy gun, then clicked his cricket. No response. He prepared to fire when he heard a voice saying "friend." He parted some bushes and there was an embarrassed Colonel Johnson, his CO, who explained, "I lost my damn cricket."
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Some men were alone all night. "Dutch" Schultz was one of them. When Schultz used his cricket in desperation, hoping to find

someone, "I got a machine-gun burst. I brought my M-l up and pointed it toward the Germans only to discover that I had failed to load my rifle." He crept off, thinking, I'm totally unprepared for this.
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Private Griffing recalled, "There were so many clicks and counterclicks that night that nobody could tell who was clicking at whom."
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Private Storeby landed in a ditch. After cutting himself loose, he crawled to the top and heard a click. Not from a cricket; it was the distinctive sound of someone taking the safety off an M-l. Storeby pulled out his cricket "and I just clicked the living hell out of that cricket, and finally this guy told me to come on out with my hands up. I recognized his voice; it was Harold Conway from Ann Arbor, Michigan. I said, 'I don't have any idea where we are or what we're doing here or nothing.' " They set out to find friends.
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In contrast to almost every other battalion, the 2nd of the 505th had an excellent drop. Its pathfinders had landed in the right spot and set up their Eurekas and lights. The lead pilot, in a Dakota carrying the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, saw the lighted T exactly where he expected it. At 0145 hours, twenty-seven of the thirty-six sticks of the battalion either hit the drop zone or landed within a mile of it. Vandervoort broke his ankle when he landed; he laced his boot tighter, used his rifle as a crutch, verified his location, and began sending up green flares as a signal for his battalion to assemble on him. Within half an hour he had 600 men around him; no other unit of similar size had so complete an assembly so quickly.

The 2nd Battalion's mission was to secure Neuville-au-Plain, just north of Ste.-Mere-Eglise. It was a long hike; Vandervoort was much too big a man to be carried; he spotted two sergeants pulling a collapsible ammunition cart. Vandervoort asked if they would mind giving him a lift. One of the sergeants replied that "they hadn't come all the way to Normandy to pull any damn colonel around." Vandervoort noted later, "I persuaded them otherwise."
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General Taylor was not as fortunate as Vandervoort. The commander of the 101st landed alone, outside Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. For twenty minutes he wandered around, trying to find his assembly point. He finally encountered his first trooper, a private from the 501st, established identity with his clicker, and hugged the man. A few minutes later Taylor's aide, Lieutenant Brierre, came

up. The three-man group wandered around until Taylor, in the dark, physically collided with his artillery commander, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe. He didn't know where they were either.

Brierre pulled out a flashlight, the generals pulled out a map, the three men ducked into a hedgerow, studied the map, and came to three different conclusions as to where they were.

Lt. Parker Alford and his radio operator (without his radio, lost on the drop, a typical experience) joined Taylor's group. By this time it consisted of two generals, a full colonel, three lieutenant colonels, four lieutenants, several NCO radio operators, and a dozen or so privates. Taylor looked around, grinned, and said, "Never in the annals of warfare have so few been commanded by so many." He decided to set off in a direction that he hoped would take him to his primary objective, the village of Pouppeville, the foot of causeway l.
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Lt. Col. Louis Mendez, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 508th, was even worse off than Taylor. He jumped at 2,100 feet, "which was too much of a ride. I landed about 0230 and didn't see anybody for five days." In that time he may have killed more of the enemy than any other lieutenant colonel in the war: "I got three Heinies with three shots from my pistol, two Heinies with a carbine, and one Heinie with a hand grenade." He estimated that he walked ninety miles across the western Cotentin looking for another American, without success.
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At La Madeleine, in his blockhouse, Lt. Arthur Jahnke was confused. The airplanes overhead did not particularly worry him even though the numbers of planes flying through the night were greater than usual. But what was the meaning of the bursts of automatic and machine-gun fire he was hearing to his rear? Jahnke alerted his men, doubled the guards, and ordered a patrol to go out and reconnoiter.

Simultaneously, Pvt. Louis Merlano of the 101st, second man in his stick, landed on the dunes a few meters away from Jahnke's position. Horrified, he heard the cries of eleven of his comrades as they fell into the Channel and drowned. Half an hour later, the German patrol returned to La Madeleine with nineteen American paratroopers, including Merlano, picked up on the beach. Delighted with his catch, Jahnke tried to telephone his bat-

talion commander, but just as he began to report the line went dead. A paratrooper somewhere inland had cut the line.

Jahnke locked his prisoners into a pillbox and placed a guard in front of it. At 0400 the guard came to inform him that the prisoners were nervous and kept insisting that they be transferred to the rear. Jahnke could not understand; there would be a low tide at dawn and Rommel had told him the Allies would only come on a high tide. What were the captured men afraid of?
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In Ste.-Mere-Eglise, the fire was raging out of control. The men of the 506th who had landed in and near the town had scattered. At 0145, the second platoon of F Company, 505th, had the bad luck to jump right over the town, where the German garrison was fully alerted.

Ken Russell was in that stick. "Coming down," he recalled, "I looked to my right and I saw this guy, and instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down." Evidently a shell had hit his Gammon grenades.

Horrified, Russell looked to his left. He saw another member of his stick, Pvt. Charles Blankenship, being drawn into the fire (the fire was sucking in oxygen and drawing the parachutists toward it). "I heard him scream once, then again before he hit the fire, and he didn't scream anymore."

The Germans filled the sky with tracers. Russell was trying "to hide behind my reserve chute because we were all sitting ducks." He got hit in the hand. He saw Lt. Harold Cadish and Pvts. H. T. Bryant and Ladislaw Tlapa land on telephone poles around the church square. The Germans shot them before they could cut themselves loose. "It was like they were crucified there."
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Pvt. Penrose Shearer landed in a tree opposite the church and was killed while hanging there. Pvt. John Blanchard, also hung up in a tree, managed to get his trench knife out and cut his risers. In the process he cut one of his fingers off "and didn't even know it until later."
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Russell jerked on his risers to avoid the fire and came down on the slate roof of the church. "I hit and a couple of my suspension lines went around the church steeple and I slid off the roof." He was hanging off the edge. "And Steele, [Pvt.] John Steele, whom you've heard a lot about [in the book and movie
The Longest Day],
he came down and his chute covered the steeple." Steele was hit in the foot.

Sgt. John Ray landed in the church square, just past Russell and Steele. A German soldier came around the corner. "I'll never forget him," Russell related. "He was red-haired, and as he came around he shot Sergeant Ray in the stomach." Then he turned toward Russell and Steele and brought his machine pistol up to shoot them. "And Sergeant Ray, while he was dying in agony, he got his .45 out and he shot the German soldier in the back of the head and killed him."