D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (31 page)

Lt. Eugene Brierre of Division headquarters was an aide to Maj. Gen. Maxwell Taylor, commanding the 101st Airborne. This would be Taylor's qualifying jump (five jumps were required to qualify for paratrooper wings), but he wasn't in the least excited. He had brought some pillows along and lay them on the floor of the plane. Brierre helped him get out of his chute; Taylor stretched out on the pillows and got in a solid hour's sleep. When Brierre woke him, it took five minutes to get the chute back on.
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Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 508th PIR recalled, "Here we sat, each man alone in the dark. These men around me were the best friends I will ever know. I wondered how many would die before the sun came up. 'Lord, I pray, please let me do everything right. Don't let me get anybody killed and don't let me get killed either. I really think I'm too young for this.' "
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Pvt. Ken Russell of the 505th had just made it onto his C-47. Two weeks earlier he had been running a high fever, a result of his vaccinations, and was sent to a hospital. On June 4 he still had a high fever, but "like everyone else, I had been looking forward to D-Day since 1940—when I was still in grammar school. Now I was so afraid I would miss it." He begged his way out of the hospital and managed to rejoin his company on June 5. Flying over the Channel, he was struck by the thought that his high-school class back in Tennessee was graduating that night.
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Like many of the Catholic troopers, "Dutch" Schultz was "totally engrossed in my rosaries." Clayton Storeby was sitting next to George Dickson, who "was going around that rosary, giving a lot of Hail Marys. After about ten minutes, it seemed like it was helping him, so I said, 'George, when you're through with that, would you loan it to a buddy?' "
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"It was a time of prayer," Pvt. Harry Reisenleiter of the 508th PIR recalled, "and I guess we all made some rash promises to God." He said that so far as he could tell everyone was afraid— "fear of being injured yourself, fear of having to inflict injury on other people to survive, and the most powerful feeling of all, fear of being afraid."
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The pilots were afraid. For most of the pilots of Troop Carrier Command this was their first combat mission. They had not been trained for night flying, or for flak or bad weather. Their C-47s were designed to carry cargo or passengers. They were neither armed nor armored. Their gas tanks were neither protected nor self-sealing.

The possibility of a midair collision was on every pilot's mind. The pilots were part of a gigantic air armada: it took 432 C-47s to carry the 101st Airborne to Normandy, about the same number for the 82nd. They were flying in a V-of-Vs formation, stretched out across the sky, 300 miles long, nine planes wide, without radio communication. Only the lead pilot in each serial of forty-five had a Eureka set, with a show of lights from the Plexiglas astrodome for guidance for the following planes. The planes were

100 feet from wingtip to wingtip in their groups of nine, 1,000 feet from one group to another, with no lights except little blue dots on the tail of the plane ahead. That was a tight formation for night flying in planes that were sixty-five feet long and ninety-five feet from wingtip to wingtip.

They crossed the Channel at 500 feet or less to escape German radar detection, then climbed to 1,500 feet to escape antiaircraft batteries on the Channel Islands (which did fire on them, without effect, except to wake sleeping troopers—the airsickness pills the medics had handed out at the airfields had caused many men, including Ken Russell, to doze off). As they approached the Cotentin coast, they descended to 600 feet or so, the designated jump altitude (designed to reduce the time the trooper was helplessly descending).

When they crossed the coastline they hit the cloud bank and lost their visibility altogether. The pilots instinctively separated, some descending, some rising, all peeling off to the right or left to avoid a midair collision. When they emerged from the clouds, within seconds or at the most minutes, they were hopelessly separated. Lt. Harold Young of the 326th Parachute Engineers recalled that as his plane came out of the clouds, "We were all alone. I remember my amazement. Where had all those C-47s gone?"
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Simultaneously, to use the words of many of the pilots, "all hell broke loose." Searchlights, tracers, and explosions filled the sky. Pilot Sidney Ulan of the 99th Troop Carrier Squadron was chewing gum, "and the saliva in my mouth completely dried up from the fright. It seemed almost impossible to fly through that wall of fire without getting shot down, but I had no choice. There was no turning back."
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They could speed up, which most of them did. They were supposed to throttle back to ninety miles per hour or less, to reduce the opening shock for the paratroopers, but ninety miles per hour at 600 feet made them easy targets for the Germans on the ground, so they pushed the throttle forward and sped up to 150 miles per hour, meanwhile either descending to 300 feet or climbing to 2,000 feet and more. They twisted and turned, spilling their passengers and cargo. They got hit by machine-gun fire, 20mm shells, and the heavier 88mm shells. They saw planes going down to their right and left, above and below them. They saw planes explode. They had no idea where they were, except that they were over the Cotentin.

The pilots had turned on the red lights over the doors when

they crossed the Channel Islands. That was the signal to the jump-masters to order their men to "Stand up and hook up." The pilots turned on the green light when they guessed that they were somewhere near the drop zone. That was the signal to go.

Many troopers saw planes below them as they jumped. At least one plane was hit by an equipment bundle; it tore off almost three feet of wing tip. Virtually every plane got hit by something. One pilot broke radio silence to call out in desperation, "I've got a paratrooper hung up on my wing." Another pilot came on the air with advice: "Slow down and he'll slide off."
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"In this frightful madness of gunfire and sky mixed with parachuting men and screaming planes," pilot Chuck Ratliff remembered, "we found we had missed the drop zone and were now back out over the water. We were dumbfounded. What to do?"

Ratliff "turned that sucker around and circled back." He dropped to 600 feet. The jumpmaster pressed his way into the cockpit to help locate the drop zone. He saw what he thought was it. "We pulled back throttles to a semistall," Ratliff said, "hit the green light and the troopers jumped out into the black night. We dove that plane to 100 feet off the ground and took off for England, full bore, like a scalded dog."
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Sgt. Charles Bortzfield of the 100th Troop Carrier Squadron was standing near the jump door, wearing a headset for the intercom radio, passing on information to the jumpmaster. As the green light went on he was hit by shrapnel. As he fell from four wounds in his arm and hand he broke his leg. One trooper asked him, just before jumping, "Are you hit?"

"I think so," Bortzfield replied.

"Me too," the trooper called over his shoulder as he leaped into the night.*

In the body of the planes the troopers were terrified, not at what was ahead of them but because of the hopeless feeling of getting shot at and tumbled around and being unable to do any-

* Bortzfield's plane had to make an emergency landing in England, with the left engine gone and no hydraulic pressure left. An ambulance picked him up on the runway and rushed him to a hospital. He recalled, "I was a real celebrity because at this moment I was their only patient. All their patients had been evacuated and they were waiting for D-Day casualties. I was in the ward by 0600 when the boys were hitting the beaches. The doctors really interrogated me" (Charles Bortzfield oral history, EC).

thing about it. As the planes twisted and turned, climbed or dove, many sticks (one planeload of paratroopers) were thrown to the floor in a hopeless mess of arms, legs, and equipment. Meanwhile, bullets were ripping through the wings and fuselage. To Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd PIR, "they made a sound like corn popping as they passed through." Lt. Carl Cartledge likened the sound to "rocks in a tin can."
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Out the open doors, the men could see tracers sweeping by in graceful, slow-motion arcs. They were orange, red, blue, yellow. They were frightening, mesmerizing, beautiful. Most troopers who tried to describe the tracers used some variation of "the greatest Fourth of July fireworks display I ever saw." They add that when they remembered that only one in six of the bullets coming up at them were tracers, they couldn't see how they could possibly survive the jump.

For Pvt. William True of the 506th, it was "unbelievable" that there were people down there "shooting at
me!
Trying to kill Bill True!" Lt. Parker Alford, an artillery officer assigned to the 501st, was watching the tracers. "I looked around the airplane and saw some kid across the aisle who grinned. I tried to grin back but my face was frozen."
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Private Porcella's heart was pounding. "I was so scared that my knees were shaking and just to relieve the tension, I had to say something, so I shouted, 'What time is it.' " Someone called back, "0130."
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The pilots turned on the red light and the jumpmaster shouted the order "Stand up and hook up." The men hooked the lines attached to the backpack covers of their main chutes to the anchor line running down the middle of the top of the fuselage.

"Sound off for equipment check." From the rear of the plane would come the call, "sixteen OK!" then "fifteen OK!" and so on. The men in the rear began pressing forward. They knew the Germans were waiting for them, but never in their lives had they been so eager to jump out of an airplane.

"Let's go! Let's go!" they shouted, but the jumpmasters held them back, waiting for the green light.

"My plane was bouncing like something gone wild," Pvt. Dwayne Burns of the 508th remembered. "I could hear the machine-gun rounds walking across the wings. It was hard to stand up and troopers were falling down and getting up; some were throwing up. Of all the training we had, there was not anything that had prepared us for this."
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In training, the troopers could anticipate the green light; before the pilot turned it on he would throttle back and raise the tail of the plane. Not this night. Most pilots throttled forward and began to dive. "Dutch" Schultz and every man in his stick fell to the floor. They regained their feet and resumed shouting "Let's go!"

Sgt. Dan Furlong's plane got hit by three 88mm shells. The first struck the left wing, taking about three feet off the tip. The second hit alongside the door and knocked out the light panel. The third came up through the floor. It blew a hole about two feet across, hit the ceiling, and exploded, creating a hole four feet around, killing three men and wounding four others. Furlong recalled, "Basically the Krauts just about cut that plane in half.

"I was in the back, assistant jumpmaster. I was screaming 'Let's go!' " The troopers, including three of the four wounded men, dove head first out of the plane. The pilot was able to get control of the plane and head back for the nearest base in England for an emergency landing (those Dakotas could take a terrific punishment and still keep flying). The fourth wounded man had been knocked unconscious; when he came to over the Channel he was delirious. He tried to jump out. The crew chief had to sit on him until they landed.
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On planes still flying more or less on the level, when the green light went on the troopers set a record for exiting. Still, many of them remembered all their lives their thoughts as they got to the door and leaped out. Eager as they were to go, the sky full of tracers gave them pause. Four men in the 505th, two in the 508th, and one each in the 506th and 507th "refused." They preferred, in John Keegan's words, "to face the savage disciplinary consequences and total social ignominy of remaining with the aeroplane to stepping into the darkness of the Normandy night."
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Every other able-bodied man jumped. Pvt. John Fitzgerald of the 502nd had taken a cold shower every morning for two years to prepare himself for this moment. Pvt. Arthur DeFilippo of the 505th could see the tracers coming straight at him "and all I did was pray to God that he would get me down safely and then I would take care of myself."
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Pvt. John Taylor of the 508th was appalled when he got to the door; his plane was so low that his thought was "We don't need a parachute for this; all we need is a step ladder."
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Private Oyler, the Kansas boy who had forgotten his name when General Eisenhower spoke to him, remembered his hometown as he got to the door. His thought was "I wish the gang at Wellington High could see me now—at Wellington High."
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When Pvt. Len Griffing of the 501st got to the door, "I looked out into what looked like a solid wall of tracer bullets. I remember this as clearly as if it happened this morning. It's engraved in the cells of my brain. I said to myself, 'Len, you're in as much trouble now as you're ever going to be. If you get out of this, nobody can ever do anything to you that you ever have to worry about.' "

At that instant an 88mm shell hit the left wing and the plane went into a sharp roll. Griffing was thrown to the floor, then managed to pull himself up and leap into the night.
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Most of the sticks jumped much too low from planes going much too fast. The opening shock was intense. In hundreds if not thousands of cases the troopers swung once, then hit the ground. Others jumped from too high up; for them it seemed an eternity before they hit the ground.