First to Jump (2 page)

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 “Snuffy” 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.

Now the troopers rose and went through their preparations, their discarded reserves pushed back under their seats. At Lillyman's command to “Snap up!” they clipped their static lines—the cords that would connect their chutes to the aircraft—to an anchor cable running the length of the cabin. Their hurried equipment checks followed at once, each man inspecting the chute of the man in front of him and yelling out his okay.

Lillyman's final order of business before the jump was to go down the line and make sure the men's static lines were securely attached to the cable. Then he returned to the door to wait.

In the cockpit, Crouch and Pedone felt encouraged by the continued absence of antiaircraft fire, taking it as an indication that they'd surprised the enemy. But they'd missed some landmarks because of the thick ground fog, and it was already midnight before Pedone realized that they were over the village of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville—a mile and a half from their scheduled DZ.

Crouch could not risk getting any farther away from it.

At 12:12
A.M.
by his stopwatch, he flipped the switch for the green ready light.