First to Jump (5 page)

“They're Jerries!”

“Shoot the bastards!”

Raising his binoculars to his eyes, Jones heard shouts coming back at them across the heaving water: “Ship ahoy! We're American paratroopers!
American paratroopers!
”

Jones knew he had a decision to make. Obviously, the men clinging to that raft could not be friend and foe at the same time.

He peered through the goggles, shifting his focus between the survivors and their sinking plane. The aircraft's nose and wings were almost submerged, but he was able to see its rear section projecting out of the water like the tail of a breaching whale. Steadying the binoculars on that part of the fuselage, the skipper identified horizontal white bands near its tail wings—the distinct markings of an Allied invasion plane.

Jones thought hard now. He was a veteran forty-three-year-old officer and nobody's fool. In the weeks leading up to D-Day, SHAEF had issued repeated warnings about German efforts at deception and infiltration. While all those men surviving a plunge from the sky could have been viewed as a happy miracle, the captain couldn't have been faulted if he'd been suspicious of what he saw, or even felt it an impossible strain on his credibility. As a flotilla commander, he bore a grave responsibility for the safety of four warships and their crews. He needed to be cautious.

But caution was only part of the matter for Jones. The rest was the simple nature of his mission. HMS
Tartar
was not a search-and-rescue ship. He'd received strict instructions to keep the ship on patrol, to stop for nothing unless it was to engage an enemy vessel. Under the circumstances, he would be justified in simply radioing a message to the fleet about the men in the water, thereby making them someone else's problem. In fact, it would be a full-out violation of orders if he stopped to pick them up.

But the drink was rough tonight, and freezing cold, and it looked as if more than a score of the men were desperately trying to hang on to a single lifeboat. What if no one came to pull them out? The Germans had threatened to shoot Allied paratroopers as spies, without regard for the Geneva accords. If they were indeed who they claimed to be—and this was, after all, the American invasion sector—the enemy might discover them in the water and pick them off like ducks in a pond.

Captain Jones stirred all these factors together and then weighed them, searching his heart and conscience. Mindful that orders were orders, he could really do just one thing.

Soberly, he gave his command. The decision hadn't taken him long. Right or wrong, he would have to live with it.

11.

If the irony of Private Ray “Snuffy” Smith's predicament even occurred to him, it would have been a fleeting awareness. Once down on enemy soil, the Pathfinders were to a man living in the moment, propelled from one to the next by the dual imperatives of their mission and basic survival. He would have had other things on his mind.

But whatever he may or may not have thought about his mishap, it was a wicked turn of fate. He was the team's medic. His job was to tend to their wounded. Yet he was the first in his unit to be injured, breaking his foot on landfall.

Nicknamed after the popular cartoon character Snuffy Smith—a moonshining hillbilly who shared Ray's deep Southern-Appalachian accent and boisterous personality—the twenty-year-old Kentuckian had joined the army four years earlier after quitting high school, then trained as a medical corpsman with the 4th Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia, and been promoted to sergeant by the time he was seventeen. A natural as a medic, he'd been handpicked for the Medical Corps officer training program, only to be disqualified when his paperwork revealed he hadn't gotten past the eighth grade. Stung and disappointed by the rejection, Smith had volunteered for paratrooper school, knowing full well it would mean getting bumped down to private. But the parachute pay was fifty dollars a month better than the average enlisted man's wage, and, besides, he'd wanted in on the action.

After he earned his wings, the Pathfinder units put out a call for medics, and Smith decided to respond. Why not put his training to use where it counted? It had seemed like the way to go.

Carrying the Eureka unit and first-aid supplies tonight, Smith had been among the most overloaded troopers aboard the lead flight. It is no mystery, then, why he was one of the men to jump without the reserve parachute. But he didn't blame his tree landing on the bulky combat load. To him, it was just a nasty fluke.

There had been no problems during the jump. Before clearing the door of the plane, he had looked out and seen nothing but the horizon. There was no incoming flak, no tracer fire. Then he'd felt a push from behind and leaped into the night.

The grove of apple trees had appeared below in a hurry. He'd hurtled down into one of them, unable to get clear of it, twigs and branches tearing at his skin, his chute and static lines getting entangled, leaves flying everywhere, pale green June apples dropping all around him.

Smith's descent finally came to a halt when he found himself dangling from a limb of the tree, suspended by his twisted lines. He'd landed in a churchyard enclosed by a low stone wall and could see the church close by in the moonlight.

Then he noticed the vague silhouettes of helmets about fifty feet away across the grove. Alarmed and helpless, he peered in their direction, knowing he'd be able to recognize German coal scuttles if he got a halfway decent look at them. But despite the brightness of the moon it was too dark to make out the helmet shapes.

With a deep breath, Smith struggled to escape his harness. Whether the soldiers were friend or enemy, he had to get out of the tree . . . but all he accomplished trying to unfasten his straps was to shake more apples from the branches. They rained down amid a flutter of leaves and twigs and then went bouncing off his body to the ground.

Pulling his trench knife out of its boot sheath, Smith cut his shroud lines and dropped among the apples. It was a hard spill, but he quickly discovered that wasn't the worst of it. Something was seriously wrong with his foot. He couldn't rest his weight on it without pain, and it was swelling up fast.

He instantly realized he'd broken a bone, or even suffered a compound fracture. As a medic he knew all the indications, and his weren't good.

Smith knew he couldn't just wait there to be discovered, though. His first order of business was to locate his teammates, and the first step would be to identify the shadowy forms across the churchyard.

He reached into a pocket, fishing for his cricket. Given to every Screaming Eagle before D-Day, the little metal clicking devices were military-issue versions of the novelty toys found in Cracker Jack boxes. Since the cricket would click once when its tab was depressed and a second time when it was released, it had been determined that one set of clicks would be the challenge and a double set the response.

His clicker in hand, using the trees and bushes for cover, Smith crept toward the indistinct forms he'd seen moving about him. His injured foot felt like a huge swollen lump in his boot. He would need to give himself a shot of morphine if he was going to keep walking on it, and he had no way of telling how well he'd get around even with a hypo. But first things first.

Squatted behind a patch of shrubbery with bated breath, aiming his rifle in the direction of the men, he raised the cricket and snapped it in front of him.

Click-clack
.

Thankfully the answering signal came almost at once:

Click-clack, click-clack
.

He relaxed and lowered his weapon. It had been a double snap—the correct identifier.

He emerged from the shrubs that had lent him cover. Stepping forward, he could see more than just their American helmets now, and recognized Mangoni and another paratrooper. His foot throbbing badly, he limped over to join them.

Lost, disoriented, and frazzled, the men exchanged very few words as they came together, sharply aware that they needed to get on with their mission. But Smith could barely put pressure on his foot and knew he wouldn't be able to keep up with the others without a painkiller. Nor could they afford to have him slow them down.

He got the morphine syrette out of his kit. It would be too agonizing to take off his boot, so he rolled up his pants and injected the lower part of his leg. That helped a little.

Half-carrying him along between them, aware time was running out, the Pathfinders moved off across the field to search for the rest of their team.

12.

Private Delbert Jones, another of the men to jump from Plane Number 1, had landed hard in a small courtyard, his helmet scraping down along its surrounding rock wall. The helmet's metal shell may have saved his life, and it certainly spared him from a traumatic blow to his skull, but the collision had been noisy, and that wasn't a good thing.

Tumbling to the ground with a grunt, the wind knocked out of him, he'd lain flat on his back in the darkness for several seconds. A signal-light man, Jones was so weighted down with equipment he could hardly move, no less get his Holophanes and other gear out from under his harness.

Confused, he looked around and saw a rustic stone building just yards away. A light was on inside it, leaching across the court from the narrow space under the door.

Jones's brow filmed with sweat. He remembered the sandbox models showing German barracks at the northern end of the drop zone—old country farmhouses they'd confiscated for the use of their troops. It seemed likely he'd fallen outside one of them.

He quickly pulled himself together. If the structure was in fact a barracks, it would be patrolled by sentries, and the loud clanking of his helmet against the stone wall could have easily alerted them to his presence. But he couldn't yield to panic. He would need all his wits about him to avoid enemy soldiers and had only a short while to set up his lights for the paratroopers of the 502nd.

Pushing up to a sitting position, Jones fumbled around under his chest packs until he was able to work open the harness. Then he extricated his carbine and signal lights and rose to his feet. He could only guess at his location, and had no idea where his teammates might be. Somehow, he'd have to gain his bearings and then go find them.

Jones scurried off, hugging the wall, relying on his wrist compass to help him move back along his jump stick's line of dispersal. He searched for an opening, a gate, some way out of the yard. When he couldn't find one, he planted his hands on the wall and boosted himself over the top.

The weight of his packs made him take another stumbling misstep as he came down on the opposite side. Then the night upended and he was once again sprawled on the ground.

When Jones got up, he was surrounded by tombstones. Like the farmhouse from which he'd fled, the cemetery was ages old. Partly surrounded by hedgerows, its burial plots were covered with moss, their cracked, leaning markers bleached chalk-white from exposure to the elements.

Peering across the uneven rows of graves, he saw the outlines of three men near a bordering hedge and froze.

Tensely alert, he stood near the wall in silence as they came closer.

13.

Landing in the same enclosed courtyard as Jones, Frank Rocca had also seen the light under the stone building's front door and guessed that its occupants might be wide awake. But for him there was no mistaking the structure for a farmhouse or German military barracks. As he'd done on the firing range, quickly knocking out human-shaped targets from every angle like he had two sets of eyes, the blocky little private made a snap assessment of his surroundings. In the midst of his descent, he'd seen a high church steeple beyond the wall of the courtyard, a cemetery outside another part of the wall, and determined that the house with the light shining from it was the parsonage.

After he touched down, Rocca had gotten out of his chute rig without a hitch, gathered up his equipment, and leapfrogged over the wall into the adjoining cemetery. There were a lot of places that would have been outwardly more dangerous than a church caretaker's front yard, but he knew the Germans had occupied many local homes, and wasn't eager to alert anyone to his presence.

Although he and Rocca did not encounter each other in the courtyard—Jones may well have left it before Rocca crashed to the ground—the Pathfinders both headed off in the same general direction, seeking to retrace Lieutenant Crouch's flight path and find their brothers.

14.

Mangoni and John Zamanakos had sat elbow-to-elbow aboard the transport and jumped one after the other. But the demolition men had been separated when they landed on different sides of a large hedgerow.

Alone in a tree-studded field, Zamanakos—like Jones—had trouble unbuckling his parachute harness. He'd hooked his Eureka unit under his chest packs and over the harness's straps, and the big piece of equipment had gotten in the way of things. Finally, he had to use his trench knife to cut his risers.

Free of the chute now, he looked this way and that, saw a long, deep ditch running parallel to the hedgerow, and crawled down into it, hoisting his radar unit over the dirt embankment. Then he waited and listened.

For a few moments, he heard nothing but winged insects flittering and buzzing past his ears. Then at last the sounds he'd been hoping for reached him from the near distance:
Click-clack . . . click-clack . . . click-clack . . .

A cricket
.

He took out his own device without leaving the drainage ditch. It offered him more than vital cover; when he'd checked his compass, he seen that it roughly traced his transport's line of flight. Since the other members of his stick also would be heading that way, his path was sure to converge with theirs if he stayed down in it.

Grimed and sweaty, Zamanakos tramped through the ditch with his transmitter box, repeatedly clicking the little signal device in front of him as he moved along. He didn't have much time before the planes appeared from the west seeking the drop zone. However far off it might be, he and his teammates had to get there first to bring them in.