First to Jump (13 page)

The soldiers inside the farmhouse remained holed up, though, hoping its ancient two-and-a-half-foot-thick stone walls could keep out the flames as well as it had thus far repelled the Americans' gunfire. And they might have if not for one of Cassidy's late reinforcements.

Sergeant Roy Nickrent was the trooper who had hiked with Summers from their drop zone, and seen his good friend's disfigured remains in a tree while passing through the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Trained at using the bazooka he'd brought with him—he called it his type of work—his mood was no more forgiving toward the Germans than it had been when he arrived at the command post.

Finding a good spot behind the mess hall, he knelt, balanced the launcher on his shoulder, and fired two shots at the farmhouse to get his range. The first fell short. The second hit the stone wall of the building near its base. Systematically making adjustments, he fired four more charges.

The sixth finned rocket leaped from the tube to the roof of the farmhouse and spun down into it with a blast that reverberated across the fields. Seconds later, Nickrent saw black smoke spewing out of the hole.

Fifty Germans were killed as they fled the building, and thirty others were taken prisoners of war. The total number of dead and captured enemy soldiers after five hours of combat at W-X-Y-Z would come to more than a hundred and fifty.

Harrison Summers would later call the whole thing kind of crazy, and never really felt too good about it—in fact, the events of that morning would sometimes make him feel cold and dirty when he thought about them on the far side of midnight. It was as if he'd lost his mind, lost his reasoning. He hadn't cared if he got killed or not, but he figured if he went, he was going to take some Germans with him.

Watching the last of the compound's buildings get eaten by flames, his weapon perched on his shoulder, Roy Nickrent, perhaps better than anyone, had understood.

2.

At six-thirty in the evening on D-Day, about twelve hours after the Allied seaborne assault commenced, the thirty-two gliders and towplanes of a second glider serial—codenamed Keokuk—left Aldermaston Airfield southwest of London for the Cotentin Peninsula. Flown by the 434th Troop Carrier Group, the lift was on a mission to reinforce the 101st Airborne with antiaircraft guns, medical and signal personnel, jeeps, and other vital supplies.

Despite having fewer gliders, Keokuk's total payload was roughly equivalent to the Chicago mission's cargo. This was because the British Airspeed Horsa used for the operation was much larger than the CG-4A Waco, carrying double the number of troops—thirty as compared to twelve—and a heavier freight—8,586 pounds versus 3,750 pounds. Its wooden construction made it sturdier, if less maneuverable, than the flimsy canvas-and-tubular-steel American version, and its hemp-rope tow harness was attached to both wings (rather than just the nose) to give it greater stability in flight. But the most significant difference between the airlifts was that Keokuk was scheduled for early evening, when it was hoped the glider pilots would benefit from the available daylight as they guided their big Horsas toward a suitable landing field.

It would be Frank Lillyman's Pathfinders who prepared the LZ. After helping to set up roadblocks at Cassidy's northern perimeter, they had gradually made their way to the divisional command post established at Hiesville by personnel from the Chicago lift. There they got some rest, took on ammo and provisions, and hiked out to mark the nearby fields where the Keokuk gliders were to come down.

Overlapping Chicago's landing zones, the area had gotten increasingly dangerous as small groups of German snipers and machine-gunners stole into its hedgerows and farm buildings, pressing in on the airborne command post. Troops from a battalion of Georgian enlistees—former POWs who'd chosen to fight for Hitler's war machine rather than starve to death in its prison camps—were also rolling down the main road from the village of Turqueville to the northeast, where the enemy had built up a sizeable combat force of soldiers, armored vehicles, and artillery guns, housing them in massive concrete blockhouses. The reinforcements were massing for a single purpose; it was here outside Hiesville that the Germans planned to build a defensive line against the Allied troops moving in from the beach.

After arriving from the CP, Lillyman filmed the wreckage of General Pratt's glider for the U.S. Army archives, then went to work on the LZ with his crew and a few other paratroopers he'd assembled from different units. Their first order of business was to find a field that was large enough for the Horsas and had been cleared of Rommel's asparagus and other lethal obstacles. The Pathfinders would again utilize their luminous Holophane panels and a Eureka beacon in laying out the site, but this time they added green smoke pots to their array of signaling equipment. The colored smoke, which wouldn't have been visible to the aircrews during the night landings, would give Keokuk's pilots another visual aid to home in on.

Their landing zone chosen, the Pathfinders arranged their Holophanes in the familiar T pattern, setting the radar beacon at the north end of the T and the smoke pots in the middle, where Lillyman was positioned. Standing guard as the trailblazers built their runway, their security detail took almost no enemy fire from the hedges—but the silence would prove deceptive. Hidden in the trees and bushes, the Germans had planned a deadly welcome for the gliders, lying in wait until they were within range of their small arms and rockets.

Shortly before nine o'clock, the Keokuk gliders crossed Utah Beach, cut loose from their C-47 tugs, and descended on the peninsula. As they neared the ground, the enemy guns came alive beneath them, throwing a sleet of ammunition up at their wings and fuselages. The pilots dropped fast, their Horsas smacking into the trees and hedges, some breaking apart as they hit at a high speed. Incredibly, less than a fourth of those aboard were killed or seriously hurt in the crashes.

But the Germans were quick to close in. The crewmen and passengers exiting the shattered aircraft with their injured flight mates—either on foot or in the jeeps that had been part of the air train's cargo—were at once met by ripples of machine-gun and Mk-40 burp-gun fire and chased across the fields by mortar rounds. Their objective was to reach the command post less than a mile off, a simple plan in concept that would have to be executed with a concealed enemy firing at them from all sides.

Frank Lillyman was still at the T when he saw one of the gliders slam to earth a short distance away and raced off in the direction of the crash, his squad following behind. As the Pathfinders emerged from an opening in the foliage and saw the demolished glider on the ground, they instantly realized it was under fire from the hedgerow. Hidden in the bushes, the Germans were shooting at the glider's occupants as they tried to evacuate, barraging them with machine-gun fire and rocket launchers.

Lillyman and his men spread out in the hedges along their side of the field, aimed their weapons at the enemy gun nest, and opened up on it, drawing its volleys away from the beleaguered glider crew. With fire coming at them from different angles, the Germans may have thought themselves outnumbered, and they broke off the engagement, fleeing through the vegetation.

But even as they made their retreat, Lillyman heard the characteristic
brrrrp
of an Mk-40 firing a short burst and felt a sudden, biting heat across his arm.

Hearing one of the men shout his name as if from a distance, he looked down himself, at his chewed up uniform sleeve, saw the blood welling out of it in pulses, and knew he'd been shot.

Then his legs gave out underneath him and he went down hard, a chunk of shrapnel from a detonated mortar shell slicing into his face as he hit the ground.

3.

It was not until late in the morning of June 7 that Buck Dickson and his S-2s found their way to Colonel Cassidy's 1st Battalion command post at Mézières. They were tired, bedraggled, and famished after more than thirty-six hours of hedgerow fighting beside groups of paratroopers from the 101st and 86th, all while trying to locate the coastal battery position that had been their objective.

At the CP, Dickson reported in to Cassidy, telling him exactly what had happened to him after getting separated from the Pathfinders, only to learn from the colonel that the German gun emplacements at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville had been abandoned. Possibly the Germans had fled after the 394th Bombardment Group's first run in mid-May, taking three of the four long-range cannons with them. The two hundred enemy troops billeted at W-X-Y-Z had, of course, remained entrenched until the day before—but Cassidy's men had thoroughly cleaned them out.

Dickson digested that without saying much. It was an odd feeling. His team had spent every minute since their jump resolutely fighting toward a goal that already had been accomplished.

After his debriefing, he left the command post and went a few hundred yards east along the road to where the artillery guns had stood, walking past the wounded paratroopers in their bloodied uniforms and bandages, the German prisoners of war, the soldiers coming in for orders, supplies, and first aid. When he reached the bombed out field, he strode across the rubble to one of the empty concrete artillery bunkers and stared quietly west toward Utah Beach, where Headquarters had feared the big guns would be trained. From his vantage point he could not see the ocean or the dunes where the men had come ashore. But they were out there.

Dickson wasn't sure quite how long he'd been standing alone in the sun when someone touched his shoulder. Startled, he turned his head and saw that his old friend from Western Maryland University, Ed “Frosty” Peters, had come up beside him unnoticed. Peters and Dickson had been roommates at school and then some. Both had been in the ROTC program, and Frosty was captain of the football team on which Dickson earned varsity honors.

Now, two and a half years after graduation, Peters was a captain with the United States Army. As chief of the 506th PIR's regimental headquarters, he'd been tabbed for the jump at Drop Zone C, near Vierville, to the southwest.

Recovering from his surprise, Dickson met Frosty's grin with one of his own and grabbed his elbows. Then they flung out their arms and embraced—big, fond, wholehearted,
crushing
bear hugs. Dickson didn't know what his old college pal was doing there in the field and was so pleased to see him he didn't bother to ask. A lot of soldiers from different units were passing through the command post, and he just figured Frosty was one of them.

They spoke happily in the quiet, sun-washed field. Neither man talked about his flight across the Channel, or his jump, or the combat he'd experienced afterward; Dickson didn't think he ought to mention any of it right then. Their encounter here felt like a gift of sorts, a brief, welcome respite from the bloodshed everywhere around them. He wanted it to remain that way while it lasted, and sensed Frosty did too.

So instead they made some cheerful small talk, reminisced about old times at Western MD, and exchanged bits of news about their former classmates from the officers' program, discussing which branches of the military different guys had wound up serving in and where this one or the other was stationed.

After about ten minutes, though, Frosty's face turned serious.

“Well,” he said, “I'd better be getting back to my men.”

Dickson nodded. “Okay, take care of yourself,” he said. Then it occurred to him that Peters would have established his own regimental command post by now—and that it must be relatively close by for him to have walked over from it. “Where's your CP?” he asked.

Peters started walking away. “Over there,” he said, motioning across the field. “Behind those trees.”

Dickson watched him depart, his gaze following his slow walk toward the hedgerows until he disappeared in their long afternoon shadows. Talking to his friend had given him a real lift after the pure hell of the previous night . . . and it really was quite a coincidence to have met him there in the gun field. The whole thing seemed kind of dreamlike, although he knew it was no dream.

It was only after he'd rotated back to England in July that Dickson learned his friend had been shot to death on June 6, the day before their encounter, while storming an enemy gun position up near his DZ. But he would go to his grave bristling at any suggestion he'd imagined seeing Frosty Peters that day.

“I knew that man well! We
hugged
each other,” he would say when summoning up his recollections of the Normandy invasion.

No one who knew the sensible, levelheaded Dickson would have questioned him.

4.

It had been a grueling, bloody five days for Jake McNiece, Beamy Beamesderfer, and all the other troopers at the Douve River Bridge.

German infantrymen retreating from the invasion forces on Utah Beach had tried crossing it twice in the first forty-eight hours, but both times the Americans on the embankments of the elevated causeways cut them down. Then, on the third day, U.S. Mustangs flew in, started carpet bombing the area, and took out a chunk of the bridge.

As McNiece later recalled, the pilots had an order to release their extra bombs after their missions. “They were not supposed to return to the runway with live bombs because an accident might destroy ten other planes.” Probably, he surmised, they'd thought the soldiers they saw below were the enemy. He remembered feeling great fear during the runs, then a sense of calm. The men on the ground were powerless to do anything but “wait for the bombs to fall.”

Even after the bridge was destroyed, the Germans kept coming from the beaches. With nowhere else to go as the Allies pushed inland, they would charge the flooded marshes trying to escape, calf- and knee-deep in water. Although vastly outnumbered, the American soldiers held the high ground and kept chopping them down.

McNiece had figured out that one way to avoid getting killed was to stay on the move. The Germans would home in on your fire after a while if you stayed in one place, so he would raise his head up above the embankment, trigger a burst into a group of them, duck, and move on to another spot. He spent most of the next few days doing that and killing Germans. Meanwhile more lost paratroopers and survivors from decimated sticks kept wandering in.