First to Jump (6 page)

15.

Click-clack . . . click-clack . . .

Click-clack, click-clack . . . click-clack, click-clack . . .

The signals given and received, Jones hurried toward the three shadowy forms across the graveyard. One was Snuffy Smith, the outfit's medic. He'd clearly been injured and was being half-dragged along by the others.

The Pathfinders assembled at the edge of the cemetery and then moved into a neighboring orchard, where more troopers from their flight joined them after hearing their clickers: Mangoni, Rocca, Wilhelm, T/5 Owen Council, and then Zamanakos. His helmet and uniform covered with mud and soil from trekking through the ditch, his face smeared with camo paint, he looked to all eyes around him like he'd clawed his way out of a nearby grave.

Together in the field now, the men hastily compared notes. Though most reported seeing the church and enclosed courtyard, no one had noticed any German soldiers or vehicles around the structure Jones had thought might be a barracks. This led them to agree that it was probably still occupied by the local parson.

Flustered and discombobulated, Wilhelm now shared his own experience of landing in a wood-ringed pasture; spooked by the heavy darkness, he'd nervously turned on his Holophane.

“I wanted to see if it would work,” he said, realizing how crazy that must have sounded.

As it turned out, he explained, the panel had done more than “work”—it had lit up the night around him with its brilliant reflectorized glare, startling him out of his momentary confusion and making him realize that he might as well have turned on a neon sign revealing his position to enemy soldiers. Fueled by that thought, he had left the field in a hurry, fortunate not to have alerted every German in the area.

With almost half the stick assembled, the troopers now had to decide how to carry out their orders. They knew they were southeast of Pouppeville, where they were supposed to have dropped—but none of the men were sure how far to the southeast, making it all the more urgent that they not waste a minute. Although Captain Lillyman and the rest of their team were still unaccounted for, they would have to move off toward the DZ without them.

At least with regard to Lillyman, that would prove unnecessary. The entire group breathed a collective sigh of relief when he stepped out of the night with Tom Walton, having met up with him while following all the clicks and clacks. Walton and Council were T/5s, or technician fifth grades, trained at operating the Eureka beacon; with both men present, the group was at last entirely capable of readying a drop zone.

Their big problem was timing. Or more precisely, the amount of time left to them. Lillyman had already determined that the Pathfinders wouldn't be able to reach their assigned DZ before the flights came in, leaving him to present them with a simple contingency plan: namely to get as close to the original location as possible in the minutes they had left and find a field large enough for the 502nd to use as an alternate landing spot. The members of the stick—and security detail—who were still missing when they headed out would hopefully follow in that same direction and catch up to them.

As for Lieutenant Dickson and his men: The S-2s hadn't been seen by anyone since before the jump, but they'd also been last to exit the transport, meaning they would have landed farthest from the troopers closest the door. More important—if cold-blooded—was the realization that their classified mission had nothing to do with preparing the DZ. Wherever Dickson's party had come down, the bottom line was that they were on their own.

Finished with his huddle, Lillyman gave the men a brisk order to move out, Jones slipping an arm under Snuffy Smith's shoulder to help him along, another member of the group relieving the medic of his Eureka. It was obvious to all of them that he was barely able to stand up on his own, let alone carry the weighty instrument.

Their course of action set, the Pathfinders hastened northeast across the fields, looking for a suitable place to lay out their beacons.

16.

About six weeks before the invasion, in mid-May, the U.S. military's G2 Intelligence Corps had begun noticing tiny black specks on their aerial surveillance photos of projected drop zones across the Cotentin Peninsula. The number of specks multiplied daily and were soon identified as vertical wooden poles spaced between seventy-five and a hundred yards apart, with cables strung between them in a way that they could shred alighting Allied gliders to pieces and kill or maim descending paratroopers on landfall. Fabricated out of logs and railroad ties, they would become known as “Rommel's asparagus” after the German field marshal who'd masterminded the Atlantic defenses and ordered them planted in the ground like the vegetables they resembled. Spied among them outside the farming hamlet of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville were two buildups of casemented 105mm howitzers, and parking bays for military vehicles—including heavy armor.

The poles were so numerous and easily replaceable that little could be done about them. But the heavy guns were another story. They presented a grave threat to the ships bringing men and supplies ashore on Utah Beach, making them prime targets of the 502nd PIR's airborne troops. In fact, regimental HQ was convinced that “the fate of the northern half of the operation could have turned” on whether the coastal batteries were taken out before the arrival of the amphibious assault waves.

Destroying the batteries would be a challenge for two main reasons, however: The Allies were unfamiliar with the local roads leading up to them, and many of those roads had been deliberately flooded by the Germans to make them impassable.

That was where Buck Dickson, his men, and their bags full of maps and top secret orders entered the picture. Contrary to what the Pathfinders might have jokingly asserted, the S-2s hadn't only piggybacked Lieutenant Crouch's transport to stoke their curiosity. Their top secret mission was to reconnoiter the gun emplacements in Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, as well as an artillery garrison billeted in the nearby hamlet of Mézières, where the Germans had appropriated a cluster of eleven farmhouses, barns, and stables for their use. Coded W-X-Y-Z by G2 Intelligence, the complex had been bombed twice in a week, the first time by the RAF in late May, then again earlier that night by B-26 Marauders from the U.S. Air Force's 394th Bombardment Group, stationed at the RAF airfield at Boreham, Essex. But the chiefs in no way trusted the job to airpower alone. Dickson had been ordered to assess the strength of the enemy forces there and determine an overland route that the 502nd Infantry's 2nd Battalion could use to attack and destroy the gun emplacements.

But things did not at all go as planned for his team. As the last three men to exit Plane 1, they were seriously affected by the delay caused by Mangoni's stumble and did not clear the door until Crouch had doubled back over the peninsula and sped up for his trip home. Consequently, they'd landed far from Lillyman and the other paratroopers without having the slightest idea where they were relative to their location . . . and, more critically, to the position of the gun batteries they were supposed to scout out.

Dickson's jump itself went smoothly, and for that he was thankful. He'd barely had time to feel himself falling through the air when he came down in tall grass, moonlight pouring over him from the cloudless sky, washing over the grass so it almost looked like a carpet of silver tinsel. The night was silent around him—almost eerily so. He could hear nothing but his own anxious breath.

Still gathering his wits, he had some trouble escaping his parachute harness and set his M3 submachine gun down on the ground while working free of it. When he finally got that accomplished, he collected and repacked his gear and started to move off to find his men.

The lieutenant had gone about a dozen yards when he froze in his tracks, as if struck by cold lightning. He'd left the grease gun somewhere behind him in the field.

With a quick about-face, Dickson scrambled back to the spot where he'd dropped from the sky—or what he thought was the same spot. The grass was everywhere around him, coming up to his knees, one area resembling the next in the darkness. Cursing his stupidity, he squatted down on all fours and desperately felt around for the weapon, patting the ground, groping for it at the bottom of the high, flowing blades of grass.

The lieutenant expelled a long sigh of relief when his hands finally touched the grease gun's cool metal barrel. He didn't know what had guided them to it in the darkness, and didn't much care. The main thing was he'd found the weapon. Any fool knew you couldn't fight a war without a gun.

Standing up out of the grass like a surfacing diver, Dickson shouldered the weapon and got back to looking for his men. The countryside was quiet around him; he heard nothing but the night sounds one might have expected in any meadow anywhere: insects humming and chirruping, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and over and around it all the whisper of the breeze as it shifted through the field. He could have been in Kansas, Nebraska, or even Western Maryland, where he'd attended college . . . except that the hedgerows growing on all sides were undeniable reminders of how far he was from those places.

Alone and disoriented, Dickson moved off along the troop carrier's line of flight. For him, the silence had an almost perilous quality, leading his mind in unwanted and unsettling directions. What if the weather had taken a bad turn after the Pathfinder flights left England, forcing the invasion to be postponed again? If there hadn't been enough time to recall the troopers before they'd jumped? It didn't seem a likely scenario, but
what if
? The men who'd been flown here aboard the transport would be left to fend for themselves. To survive in enemy territory, possibly for several weeks, with only the supplies, ammunition, and meager chocolate D rations they carried on their backs.

Gnawed by uncertainty, Dickson went off seeking Ott and Clark. Fortunately they'd landed in nearby fields, and he was soon able to locate them, aided by the clicking of their signal bugs and the plentiful moonlight. But in spite of his relief at finding the S-2s, he knew the clock was running down on the arrival of the 2nd Battalion. They would have no time for a breather.

Kneeling low in the grass, the intelligence men spread their maps across their knees and studied them carefully by the light of their flashlights.

That was when the loud, rumbling thunder of antiaircraft fire shook the night.

Dickson looked up into the sky.
So much for the invasion being on hold
. Tracers had lit up the western horizon, a brilliant, pulsing glare that left all three men momentarily overwhelmed. But within seconds the rapt, fascinated expressions on their faces would be replaced with naked horror. A stricken C-47 transport had appeared above them, gushing flames, streaking down to earth like a meteor. If there were men aboard, they would be doomed.

Stunned, Dickson realized almost an hour had passed since his jump. The sheer volume of gunfire left him with no doubt that the main wave of airborne troops had arrived and met heavy resistance from German shore defenses. He also acknowledged, with a sinking feeling in his gut, that it was much too late to reconnoiter the battery at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville before the paratroops of the 2nd Battalion hit the ground.

Still, he'd learned to stick with the drill back in Western MD's ROTC program, and it all started with following orders. Unless those orders changed, they would bear toward their objective. There might yet be useful intelligence that his team could relay to headquarters about the gun emplacements.

Their purpose set, they folded away their maps and moved northward in the quaking, battle-torn night.

17.

Minutes earlier to the northwest, Frank Lillyman and his Pathfinders had started deploying their markers. Having stealthily crossed one field after another, slipping between hedgerows with Wilhelm and Williams leading the way, they'd found a suitable pasture behind the Saint-Germain church. Jones had virtually carried Smith, who could hardly walk at all and was doing his best not to slow the team up.

Lillyman knew they were still about a mile south of their original target area. But he'd taken into account that one man was hobbled, and that carrying their heavy radar and signaling equipment over enemy-controlled terrain would be difficult in the little time they had left.

All things considered, this field was their best bet. It was slightly larger than the others they'd passed through and had only a sparse, scattered growth of trees—and the wider and clearer, the better for descending paratroopers. With the Five-Oh-Deuce transports due to come roaring in, he'd decided his team had gone far enough.

Quick to carry out his orders, Jones, Wilhelm, and a couple of the others removed the battery-powered Holophane lights from their cardboard boxes and laid them out in a precise T formation—three panels for the horizontal top bar and four for the vertical leg, with the leg pointed in the direction of the jump and the crossbar marking the arrival point. The transports were to fly straight up the leg to the crossbar, where the jumpmasters would give the go commands to the paratroopers.

Set twenty-five yards apart and mounted on extendible tripods, the Holophanes had bright frosted-glass panels on their upper surfaces and emitted a low-level radiance in the direction from which the C-47s would approach. By placing them on tripods, the Pathfinders meant for them to be easily seen from overhead while, in theory at least, remaining nearly invisible to German infantry patrols at ground level.

Lillyman's T was amber, the identifying color for Drop Zone A. The T panels meant for Drop Zone C, at Hiesville, were red; Drop Zone D, outside Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, was to have lit up green. As a redundant signal to the incoming pilots and navigators, the bottom panel, or tail, of the T was its Morse code light. Using a telegraph key connected to the tail with a cable about eight yards long, one of the men would repeatedly blink the sequence for the letter A—a dot and a dash—so there would be no chance of a plane mistaking one DZ for another if there was some unforeseen snafu with the color panels, or in the event they were blown out by enemy fire.