First to Jump (14 page)

On the fifth day, the enemy soldiers finally stopped coming. The American units that had driven them from the beach arrived, and they'd been pressed in on two sides. Hundreds of them lay dead or wounded in the marsh.

When the shooting ended, McNiece and Jack Agnew took to the field with their weapons—Agnew used a Colt .45 service pistol—and “walked out through there killing the ones that were just wounded or hiding.”

At one point they saw an injured German in a flooded ditch, only his head and shoulders above the water. His chest had been ripped open by machine-gun bullets.

“Give him a shot,” said a chaplain who had caught up to them.

McNiece turned to Agnew. “You've got that forty-five,” he said. “Blow his head off.”

Agnew's first shot missed. Then he knelt, put the gunbarrel to the German's temple, and squeezed the trigger again, disintegrating his skull.

The chaplain was screaming at them.
“You know I didn't mean to shoot his head off! I meant to give him a shot of morphine!”

“I'll tell you what, Chaplain,” McNiece said, and looked at him. “You do anything you want to with your morphine. There will be a thousand paratroopers around here that will need a shot of morphine. We are not wasting it on these Krauts.”

McNiece's response wouldn't have surprised anyone who knew him. He believed that if you were going to fight an enemy, you could never show or ask any mercy.

On the fifth night after the invasion, McNiece and the other men who'd fought at the Douve River Bridge reported to the 506th regimental headquarters, located eight miles west of Carentan, a German stronghold between Utah and Omaha Beaches. Beamesderfer would stay with the unit, joining the 3rd Battalion troops pushing to take the city. The Five-Oh-Deuce had tried, and then the Five-Oh-Ought, but the enemy had hung on. After that the Air Force bombers had hit the place hard, and now the 506th was going to make another attempt at seizing it.

The commander leading the group of four hundred or so men was Robert G. Cole, and he'd found the final causeway into the city obstructed by a heavy steel fence that the Germans were using as a barricade. As his men tried to get around it, one and two at a time, the well-hidden enemy soldiers in the hedgerows alongside the causeway would rake them with machine-gun and mortar fire, inflicting heavy casualties. Finally he ordered a frontal bayonet charge on the Germans through the hedges. McNiece had heard the Germans feared and hated bayonets after the close-in fighting of the First World War, and guessed that was why Cole decided to take them that way.

The charge got the Germans out of the hedges. But it cost more than half the battalion, and none of the survivors would ever forget how it felt to kill a man by thrusting a bayonet into his stomach—and know you would have been the one to die if you'd hesitated. Beamy would be very grateful for his Bible after that charge.

When they reached the city's outskirts where the bombers had struck, he and McNiece saw hundreds of dairy cows lying dead in the fields—cows and German soldiers, but almost no French civilians. Beamy wondered where all the people in those farms had gone. That was something that would always puzzle him, and when they got into the city, it was also like that. The streets were full of dead German soldiers, but the population had completely vanished.

Although the enemy had been mostly driven out by the fighter planes, it would take two days of door-to-door street fighting before they were completely routed. The troopers who'd marched into the city would hold it for another ten days before they were relieved, but the truth was the bombings hadn't left much of Carentan to hold. Its buildings had been pounded flat.

After the replacements arrived, McNiece, Beamesderfer, and the rest of the men who had taken Carentan were sent back to England for rest and resupply. Both men would see further combat throughout the remaining six months of the war—a great deal of it, in fact. But Beamesderfer's Pathfinder duty was at its end, while McNiece's was yet to come. And in a way that would make history.

5.

Captain Frank Lillyman's participation in the Allied invasion of France, and his role as lead combat officer of the 101st Pathfinders, ended on D-Day, when he was shot by a fleeing German soldier after coming to the aid of a threatened glider crew in a field behind Utah Beach.

The marking of the Keokuk landing zone would also be the final pathfinding mission of the Normandy campaign. There was to be no further need for parachute drops and airlifts as American and British forces continued to land on the beaches and establish themselves on the peninsula, and the volunteers of IX TCC Pathfinder Group would now fall in with their umbrella units—or, in the chaos of Normandy, other units—to help accomplish their regimental objectives.

The fighting at Normandy was bloody, and costly; an estimated five thousand Allied soldiers died on the Normandy beaches on D-Day alone. In the days before and after the invasion, about nineteen thousand French civilians were killed in bombings of enemy targets centered within population centers. The Germans, whose military records were left in disarray after the war—deliberately in many if not most cases—lost between four thousand and nine thousand men. But the fighting was so chaotic, and the loss of life so overwhelming in its proportions, that the actual casualty tallies on both sides were still being sorted out seven decades later.

For the Allies, Normandy was a decisive victory despite the heavy losses. Smashing through the Atlantic Wall, it dealt Hitler a blow from which he would never fully recover. By late June, more than three hundred thousand U.S. troops and an equal number of British infantrymen had come ashore on the Normandy beaches to begin their relentless push toward the French capital. On August 25, Paris was freed from Nazi occupation. The Third Reich was in retreat across Western Europe.

Shipped off to recover in a British hospital, Lillyman would skip out of the hospital, talk his way aboard a military supply ship sailing for France, and report for duty eight days after the invasion.

He would not, however, be cleared to return to combat until September, when he was reassigned to the 502's 3rd Battalion for the massive jump in the Netherlands that became known as Operation Market Garden. Later that year, he would lead a paratroop unit holding the snowbound town of Bastogne, Belgium, against a German siege meant to retake a portion of their formerly occupied ground and shatter Allied resolve. All told, Lillyman spent ten months in Europe fighting the war's most vicious battles, got wounded three times, and earned eight combat decorations.

Throughout his tour of duty, Lillyman would entertain himself by scribbling down notes about a dream vacation on which he'd take Jane and their three-year-old daughter, Susan, when he got home. After a while the idea took on reality in his mind and he began to save up for it. By the time he returned to his hometown of Skaneateles after the war, he'd socked away five hundred dollars for his imagined spree.

One night after a cognac or two, Lillyman, always a prodigious letter writer, sat down and dashed off a lighthearted wish list to the Statler chain's Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan, taking them up on their magazine ads claiming to provide extra special service for the families of war veterans interested in reservations.

I'd like a suite that will face east, and English-made tea that will be served to me in bed every morning,
he wrote
. A phonograph with any and all Strauss selections. For breakfast, a fried egg with the yolk pink and the white firm, coffee brewed in the room so I can smell it cooking. The family breakfast should be served in the suite so we don't have to get dressed.
No military title . . . “Mister” will be music to my ears. And there should be
a
large, grey-haired motherly maid for my daughter
 . . .
a prodigious menu of such delicacies as filet mignon and lobster a la Newburg . . . a daily program of sightseeing, theatergoing and nightclubbing . . .

Lillyman added several more items before ending his note with a provocative
Can you do it?
and then stuffing it into an envelope.

When the Lillymans arrived in New York City a few weeks later, a smiling hotel concierge told them that “everything was set” and their stay would be on the house. They were installed in a lavish five-room suite—“The George Rex!” the hotel boasted—with “an ashes-of-roses carpet, a sunken bathtub, a telephone rigged only for outgoing calls, and a buffet full of liquor.”

In addition,
LIFE
magazine would report, the family was greeted with a bouquet of fresh flowers every day of the week . . . and everyone from the concierge and desk clerks to the bellhops and waiters called Frank “Mister
.
” The periodical also mentioned that young Susan was so excited by the trip—and by suddenly having a personal maid at her service—that she forgot herself and ate her spinach.

Worlds away from the hell of battle, Frank Lillyman was getting plenty of attention for his valor and, unsurprisingly, not minding it a bit.

SEPTEMBER 17–25, 1944

Both fliers and airborne had been working as teams for almost six months, and nearly all were veterans of the Normandy drops. They knew their business and they knew each other.

—From the official U.S. military history of the operation

1.

Word of the mission came down late for the Pathfinders. In fact, many were on weekend leave on Friday, September 15, only to have their escapades in the village watering hole cut short.

Technician Fifth Grade Glenn E. Braddock of the 101st Airborne was among them. Just recently off his recuperation furlough after Normandy, where he had jumped from the number two plane of Frank Lillyman's serial, the Kansas native had been having a “high old time” when he got the news.

Braddock was a tough, resilient sort of guy, a Golden Gloves boxer who rolled with the punches wherever and whenever they struck their blows—and it was no wonder. When he was four years old, he and his older brother Harry had been dropped off at an orphanage in Topeka by parents they would never know. The brothers were eventually adopted by the Daharsh family, but when Mrs. Daharsh passed away at a young age, they'd found themselves back at the orphanage. Luckily, George Braddock, of Jewell County, needed hands to work on his farm and, mixing pragmatism and compassion toward a happy result, took them in and gave them his name.

A hard worker and quick study, Glenn had picked up a varied grab bag of hobbies in his twenty-five years on earth. He played guitar, banjo, and harmonica in whatever spare time he could find, and liked to sing a bit too—country music, mostly, learning the songs he'd heard the Carter Family perform on Border Radio, the five-hundred-megawatt broadcast dynamo out of Texas. The boxing was something he'd taken up in high school; back in the orphanage, he'd had to defend himself against some of the bigger, tougher kids who'd given him trouble, and that meant learning how to fight. The sport gave him a way to channel his aggressions and apply the skills he acquired with focus, endurance, and precision. At Camp Pike in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he'd gotten his basic training, Glenn won the lightweight boxing championship and wore the belt till his transfer to Fort Benning. As a T/5 in Pathfinder school later on, he'd been trained in how to use the Eureka box.

Operating the radar beacon was of course a serious responsibility. But Glenn Braddock held another job besides, a special role that set him apart from all others in the unit and showed the level of respect he'd earned from his peers and commanders alike.

An outfit's rigger was the soldier who packed and repaired the chutes. In the U.S. Army, his official motto was “I will be sure—always.” It made total sense. Every trooper who jumped from a plane was entrusting him with his life. And a rigger had to value each life as if it were his own.

The job could be repetitive and mundane; perhaps for that reason, it required someone who was reliable, conscientious, and exactingly consistent, who above all else understood the words in his pledge that there could be “no compromise with perfection.”

Braddock was honored to be that man for the 101's Pathfinders. Before Normandy, he'd packed, inspected, and personally signed off on all their parachutes in the marshaling area at North Witham. On the September night he learned of their second mission, it was Tom Walton, another veteran of the D Minus One drop, who broke the news to him at a Nottingham pub, letting him know there would be more packing ahead.

“We have to report back to base,” he said, raising his voice over the music and laughter around them. “We've been designated for another possible jump.”

Braddock had looked at him over his beer, trying to gauge his seriousness. But Tom's sober, earnest expression dispelled any thoughts that he might be pulling his leg.

A short while later, Braddock was in a jeep returning to North Witham. The troopers that Walton had rounded up would stop there briefly before they headed off to their new marshaling area at RAF Chalgrove, in Oxfordshire, about sixty miles closer to London.

The ride was a quiet one. They'd all experienced enough horror and destruction in Normandy for several lifetimes, and none would be gung-ho about heading into combat again. They had seen men killed and maimed, and some had barely escaped death or critical injury themselves. It had left irreversible marks on their souls.

As they bumped along over the foggy English roads, Braddock found himself wondering if this would prove the latest in a string of false starts they'd had since returning from Normandy. He wasn't alone among the men to hope for it, and with good reason. Just a month ago, a drop on Chartres, in northern France, to cut off German reinforcements had been scratched at the last minute, after Patton and his troops took control of the city. Two weeks later the Pathfinders had gotten their English currency exchanged for Belgian francs at the marshaling area, then been briefed about a jump near Tournai, a city hardly anyone had ever heard of. But a British armored division captured it in September, and the 101's planes had again stayed on the ground.

Ultimately, though, Braddock knew he had to push all that out of his mind. Whether his company returned to action wasn't for him to decide. His job was to get their parachutes packed.

At the marshaling area, he found things very different than they'd been before the D-Day jump, when the men had pretty well known what to expect. Yes, the invasion's exact location had been kept secret till a couple of weeks before it happened. And, yes, most of the Pathfinders had only learned its scheduled date around when they were ready to deploy. But they'd understood for months that they would be at the vanguard of the assault, and had a good idea they would be landing behind the lines in Occupied France. It had given them a chance to mentally, emotionally, and physically prepare.

Now they weren't told anything about the mission, or given any hint where they would drop. While the paratroopers were again under quarters and area arrest, there would be no long wait under heavy lockdown, no barbed wire fences, no armed MPs except at the supply room and Glenn Braddock's parachute shed. The little wooden structure would have some of the tightest security on base, with canine patrols constantly around except when he was inside working on the chutes.

On arrival at Chalgrove, Braddock learned he'd have fewer than half as many to pack than in early June. Just four sticks of 101st Pathfinders—each team consisting of an officer and nine enlisted men—had been moved to the marshaling area, compared to the eleven that had dropped into Normandy. It didn't mean the assignment was going to be any harder or easier than the last, but it did lead some of the troopers to conjecture it would be a day jump, since that would probably require fewer personnel and lights.

The men spent all day Saturday tossing guesses about the barracks. Most were friends from way back in paratroop school, and they did a lot of gabbing to relieve their anxiousness. Among them were the two scouts from Captain Frank Lillyman's Normandy stick, Fred Wilhelm and Bluford Williams; John Zamanakos, the demolition man; and the medic Snuffy Smith, his ankle having mended well enough for him to return to active combat status. Private Ernest “Dutch” Stene, who'd been in Braddock's stick in June, would be jumping again, as would his buddies Privates John Kleinfelder, Bill Mensch, and Corporal Roy Stephens.

They were a close-knit group, though some members of the Normandy teams were no longer with them. Gus Mangoni was now with Regimental S-2, and Zamanakos missed him. Lillyman himself had been transferred to a regular company command. A number of others also had been shuffled to other units. But with the exception of a single private, the officers and men awaiting orders at Chalgrove were old hands who'd done it before, and that was no coincidence. Because of the short window of time available for their preparation and briefing, the brass had sought experienced troopers for the operation.

That strongly declared preference had left the fresh replacements from the States out of the action despite being ready and able to contribute. The unit's commanders had spent weeks finding out which ones could cut it as Pathfinders and weeding out those who couldn't, forcing the entire company to repeat its specialized training course. The repetitive drills had irritated the old hands to no end. But their endless grousing about the “kids”—anyone who hadn't seen combat was called a kid, although they were about the same average age as the seasoned veterans—were really surface ripples on a deeper well of loss over the men who'd been killed or seriously injured in France.

No one felt this more than Braddock. He bundled their parachutes with his own two hands, inspecting the skin and ribs of the canopies, testing the links and lines, checking and rechecking the entire assemblies. Working late into Saturday night in his shed, carrying out his solitary responsibilities, he thought about the men whose chutes he wouldn't be packing and grew quietly sad.

Sunday morning came around fast for the Pathfinders. With few having gotten any sleep, they ate an early breakfast together in the mess. Steak and eggs, whole milk, fresh-baked bread . . . the hearty servings made them feel like they were being stuffed for the lion's den. At eight-thirty, they were called into a briefing, which in a sense bore out that suspicion. Told to prepare for their drop, they were issued their chutes, weapons, and supplies, and then informed they would be given their flight plan and orders at the airstrip.

Two hours later they were geared up and soaring over the English Channel. Their wait was over and so were the long hours of guessing. Like it or not, there had been no last-minute cancellation this time.

Their destination was Holland, where they would again be the first behind enemy lines.

2.

Three hundred and thirty-five miles away as the crow flies, Dutch resistance cells in and around the coastal villages of Veghel and Sint-Oedenrode had also gotten their instructions handed out on a strictly need-to-know basis.

Their superiors in the
Landelijke Knok Ploeg
,
or Central Government Fighting Group, were perhaps even cagier than the big wheels of the 101st, and with good reason. The LKP's six or seven hundred members had been engaged in gathering intelligence on their occupiers, demolishing rail, telephone, and telegraph lines, and assassinating German soldiers and collaborators since their homeland's surrender to the Nazis in 1940. If they were caught as the result of any leaks or slipups, they would be killed as saboteurs, with the Germans exacting harsh retaliation against their family members, fellow townspeople, and anyone else believed to have lent them assistance. Their methods of reprisal ranged from sending suspects to prison, to deportation to concentration camps and merciless summary executions.

In Nijmegen, two members of the LKP, Johannes J. van Gorkum and Piet J. Jeuke, were at their headquarters in a shop near the city's main traffic circle when their commander, Sjef de Groot, contacted them over their backroom radio.

They were told to bicycle out to the heath at the edge of the Zonsche Forest by the Wilhelmina Canal and then “be alert and ready to help and provide information if necessary.” Johannes was to identify himself as “Joe” and Piet as “Pete.”

But to
whom
?

There had been no mention of that. The two young men weren't told who they were to meet or assist. They weren't told why they were being sent to the field. In fact, they weren't told anything about what was going on, except that de Groot and several others would be heading to a separate field north of their destination, outside the town of Eerde and southwest of Veghel. But they had their suspicions.

On Saturday afternoon, droves of American and British war planes had flown in over the fields to bomb and strafe railroad tracks, roads, overpasses, and German barracks and fortified artillery positions throughout the area. People in the city and nearby villages had taken cover at the roar of the Lancasters, Stirlings, Halifaxes, and B-26 Marauders. There had been reports over the underground radio that some of those planes had been downed by antiaircraft fire, but the Germans had suffered the worst of it.

Or perhaps that grievous distinction went to the Dutch people. The tiny village of Zeelst, outside Eindhoven, had been carpeted by Allied bombs probably meant for a nearby airfield. Dozens had been killed there and in other raids—men, women, and children. The carnage was beyond belief, and almost everyone held the German invaders responsible. They had grabbed civilian buildings for their military use. They had built bunkers and gun emplacements close to homes and business. They had put the people in harm's way.

The Dutch wanted their freedom. But they had already lost much to the war and knew it was still possible to lose more. As they had secretly listened to news over the BBC of the Allied victories in France and Belgium, it had made them wonder if their country was next to be liberated. Many swung between fear and hope that it would be.

Johannes and Piet, barely into their twenties, knew those emotions could quite easily coexist in one's heart. As members of the LKP, they had placed their lives and the life of everyone they loved in jeopardy. But they had chosen not to accept their occupiers and in fact to take an active role against them. Pedaling out to the field that beautiful Sunday morning, the warm sunlight on their necks, they could sense something major was about to happen and brimmed with excitement over the possibility.

The nearby Wilhelmina Canal was above Highway 69, a narrow, two-lane asphalt-and-brick road running from Eindhoven to Arnhem. An important strategic corridor from a military perspective, it stretched from north to south above the surrounding fields, with four bridges branching off its shoulders to span canals and rivers on either side. If the Allies took the road and those bridges, they would be able to cross the Rhine into Germany and establish open lines of supply behind them.

Perhaps that was their plan, perhaps it wasn't. But the Germans had been observed digging foxholes near the bridges, which said a great deal about what they believed. Cycling out to Zonsche heath, the young freedom fighters could not help but feel they were on their way to welcome their American or British liberators. Why else would they have been told to become Joe and Pete?