The Last Full Measure (41 page)

The chute that was designed to safeguard the paratrooper could also be the instrument of his death. Its very ability to keep him in suspension increased his exposure to enemy ground fire. It was for all an agony of anticipation and for some a bloodily premature extinction. General Sir John Hackett, dropping with
the First Airborne at Arnhem, saw “an inert mass … swinging down in a parachute harness beside me, a man from whose body the entrails hung, swaying in a reciprocal rhythm.”
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The chute could snag the jumper up on a tree or pole as a helplessly dangling target for enemy infantry, and on the ground it might drag him into God knows what peril.

Private Ken Russell of the US 505th recalls about D-Day: “I don’t remember all the stick [the unit] in our plane but I know Private H.T. Bryant, Private Ladislaw ‘Laddie’ Tlapa and Lieutenant Cadish were most unfortunate. They were the fellows who were shot on the power poles. My close friend Private 1st Class Charles Blankenship was shot still in his chute hanging in a tree.” In addition, he remembers that when

The fate of the airborne warrior was also greatly dependent on the mode of delivery—aircraft or glider—and the crews who flew them. Both had their own unique risks, but both shared the difficulties of navigation, weather, and hostile fire, often in
an unholy confluence. The Allied airborne assault on Sicily in 1943—a mixture of glider and airplane delivery—was probably one of the best examples of that deadly nexus.

The British First Air-Landing Brigade went in first on July 10, 1943. The idea was to fly in gliders with the stealth the Germans had used against the Belgian fort of Eben-Emael in May 1940. The operation fell apart. Gale-force winds blew up great sandstorms that obliterated landing sites; there was insufficient fighter cover and inadequate training. Sixty percent of the tugs (the aircraft towing the gliders) detached their gliders prematurely, and once a military glider (unlike lightweight recreational versions) was let loose, it dropped fast. Many gliders crashed into the sea, and 252 troopers were drowned. Of the 52 gliders that had left the North African coast, only 12 landed anywhere near their targets. Of the 2,000 men of the First Air-Landing, 490 were lost, and of the 145 glider pilots, 88 were lost.
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Shortly after the British attack, the aircraft-borne US 505th Parachute Infantry Brigade, led by the legendary Colonel James Gavin, a pioneer of airborne warfare, battered by high winds and disoriented by the lack of adequate navigational aids, was dropped up to 60 miles off target with men landing “on stone ridges, olive groves, barbed wire, beaches—and a few in the sea.”
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Their sister regiment, the 504th, was sent in as reinforcement, and before it could even get at the enemy it was hammered by friendly fire that spread like a “contagion” from the beachhead and the anchored Allied fleet. It was, to use a descriptive phrase from the Vietnam War, a “cluster fuck.” Due to the congestion of communication, the fleet had not been properly forewarned of the 504th’s flyover:

Putting the parachutist on target was, for the pilot of the aircraft or glider, a hugely complex business. Speed and altitude were obviously critical, and navigation was, to put it mildly, a challenge (especially at night and in fog and low cloud as prevailed on D-Day). Because the planes were forced to come in on relatively low trajectories they were highly vulnerable to flak. An observer on the USS
Quincy
on D-Day records the horror when “a yellow ball would start glowing out in the middle of a field of red tracers. This yellow ball would slowly start to fall, forming a tail. Eventually, it would smash into the black loom of land, causing a great sheet of light to flare against the low clouds. Sometimes the yellow ball would explode in mid-air, sending out streamers of burning gasoline. This tableau always brought the same reactions from us sky control observers: a sharp sucking-in of the breath and a muttered ‘Poor goddamn bastards.’ ”
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There was much accusation that pilots had cravenly sacrificed paratroopers in order to save their own skins. Donald Burgett of the 101st fumed:

Many historians echoed this notion, accusing Troop Carrier Command pilots of not only releasing men too low but also increasing airspeed in order to avoid flak, and thereby pitching the troopers out to suffer terrific prop blast and ferocious shock when their canopies opened. The truth, however, was that the planes themselves were grossly overloaded, which forced the drop speed to be increased in order to prevent stalling. Low cloud cover and wind gusts of up to 30 knots (a safe limit over a drop zone is about 13 knots) also contributed to increased casualties.
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Glider-borne delivery was equally, if differently, hazardous. The very notion of taking a fragile plane (British gliders were hardly more than flying wardrobes; in fact they were made of wood and fabricated in furniture-making factories) and intentionally crashing it is so counterintuitive as to appear positively deranged—a point not missed on the would-be glider-borne troops, who failed to volunteer in droves. In fact, so unattractive was the prospect of intentional self-destruction that they had to be conscripted, the inducement of a monthly bonus notwithstanding.
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Even before landing, there was a very real danger that if
the glider failed to fly either higher than or lower than the tug (“High-Tow” or “Low-Tow”), it could be shaken to destruction by the turbulence of the tug’s slipstream.
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Landing was a nerve-wracking crapshoot conducted in such congestion, and with such little means to maneuver, that a main cause of death to crew and soldiers was collision with other gliders. Clinton Riddle of the Eighty-Second Airborne saw the remains of a crashed glider in Normandy and remembered: “You could almost step on the bodies from one to the other.”
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THERE WERE SO
many ways a soldier could get killed. GI Raymond Gantter pondered the possible fate of his foxhole buddy, Chesty, who disappeared without a trace: “I wonder what did become of him. It’s possible that he wandered up to the front that night and was killed, perhaps so mangled that he was unrecognizable and his dog tags lost. Or a German sniper or straggler may have killed him and concealed his body in Hurtgen Forest … or he may have stumbled on a mine or booby trap … or perhaps he’s spent the night in a dugout that collapsed on him burying him alive.”
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Despite the emphasis on mechanized warfare with the thrilling promise of blitzkriegian speed and finality, much of the fighting followed the much more prosaic tradition of “infantry performing its role with rifles, hand grenades, machine guns, and mortars and using tactics unchanged since the First World War and even the Civil War.”
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Combat in Europe was often drawn out and dogged. The Normandy front was static for two months following D-Day, Monte Cassino lasted six months, the siege of Leningrad lasted two and a half years, and El Alamein has been described as a classic First World War battle, with huge preliminary bombardment, creeping barrages, and infantry
break-ins designed to crumble the enemy’s fortified line.
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And in the Pacific much of the fighting was a classic infantry slugfest against entrenched defenders: “Contrary to the common impression that Second World War battles were easy, fast-moving and decisive affairs we find that they were in reality protracted, gruelling, nerve-racking and costly. There were more dangers to counter than there had been in the battles of a quarter century before; and it took a higher level of training and morale to overcome them. The tight-rope on which front-line soldiers walked had become thinner and less stable, reflected in higher levels of accidents, ‘psychiatric casualties’ and the general destruction of lives and property. War had become inexorably nastier.”
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For the infantryman, the war was fought amid an unremitting exposure to danger. General Omar Bradley described its extraordinary brutality: “The rifleman fights without promise of either reward or relief. Behind every river there’s another hill—and behind that hill, another river. After weeks or months in the line only a wound can offer him the comfort of safety, shelter and a bed. Those who are left to fight, fight on, evading death but knowing that with each day of evasion they have exhausted one more chance for survival. Sooner or later, unless victory comes this chase must end on the litter or in the grave.”
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As a veteran American infantryman put it: “Nobody gets out of a rifle company. It’s a door that only opens one way, in. You leave when they carry you out, if you’re unlucky, dead, or if you’re lucky, wounded. But nobody just walks away. That was the unwritten law.”
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Without the prospect of rotation out of the combat zone, the grave became a likely destination. For Americans, the last fourteen months of the war saw the heaviest casualties. In October 1942, only 1 in 1,000 US Army members became a casualty. In November, it rose to 4 per 1,000, reflecting the fighting in North Africa, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea. By June 1944, it
had soared to 50 per 1,000, hitting its peak in January 1945 with about 56 per 1,000.
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As a snapshot the statistics are interesting but hide a much grimmer picture. The rate per thousand is a percentage of the whole army. Unlike World War I, where a much larger proportion of the total armed services was exposed to combat, in World War II the logistical tail was fat and long and comparatively safe. The combat soldiers formed the small arrowhead that carried combat to the enemy, and their chances of being killed or wounded were, of course, considerably greater. Of the roughly 10 million men in the US Army by the war’s end, only about 2 million, or 1 in 5, were in the 90 combat divisions (of which 68 were infantry divisions), and of these, about 700,000 were in the infantry: 1 in 14 for the whole Army but absorbing 70 percent of the casualties.
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Frank Nisi, an infantryman with the Third Infantry Division, described that exclusive club in a letter to his father: