First to Jump (15 page)

It would not be long before they found out. They were speeding along on their cycles, Johannes a few yards behind Piet, when the sky began to throb with the sound of approaching aircraft. Within seconds, the noise grew deafening around them. Glancing up into the sunlight, they saw a German Messerschmitt tear through the air overhead, a British fighter in close pursuit. The planes were flying so low their markings were perfectly clear.

Then another plane appeared over the wide, flat horizon. This one wasn't a fighter, but a large transport. Awestruck, they saw a small handful men drop from its side as it passed over the Zonsche field, their parachutes blossoming open against the pale blue sky.

Scouts, Johannes thought. They were
scouts
.

Piet shot forward on his bicycle, leaning over the handlebars, streaking toward the heath where the paratroopers were coming down. Behind him, Johannes pumped his legs breathlessly but couldn't keep pace. With a quick glance over his shoulder, he realized he was riding past a field that belonged to a local farmer named Sanders, then saw him there watching and jumped off his seat.

Leaving the cycle with Farmer Sanders, he raced madly along the road to catch up with his comrade.

3.

Flying in serials of two, the four C-47 Dakotas of the IX Troop Carrier Command had taken wing with their sticks of Pathfinders at about ten-forty in the morning. The rest of the transports were scheduled to begin leaving England an hour later and continue their departures over the next four days. These flights would convey thirty thousand Allied paratroopers and glider-borne soldiers to the Netherlands, launching the largest airborne operation ever attempted.

Conceived by British field marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, the plan was to bring a swift end to the war by having his infantry divisions cross the Rhine River at Arnhem and make a concentrated thrust into the heart of the Third Reich. It had originally met with resistance from SCAEF Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley, the commander of America's ground forces in Europe. After Normandy, they had arrived at a strategy of creating a broad front along the entire length of the Rhine, an overwhelming military force that would close in on the enemy's flanks like pincers as it advanced through German territory. Montgomery had vehemently differed with them. In his opinion, the invasion of France had left Hitler “weak on his pins,” and it was time for a knockout punch. His stated objective was the industrial Ruhr Valley, but he was hoping to create a momentum that pushed straight on to Berlin.

A combination of political and military demands eventually led Eisenhower to warm to a limited version of Montgomery's plan, with the stipulation that it would have to fit within his overall broad-front strategy. Although he would rankle the British general by guaranteeing fewer supplies than requested, he agreed to commit all three U.S. airborne divisions to the attack.

The mission's airborne phase was codenamed Market; its ground assault, Garden. The combined operation, then, was called Market Garden.

Market's principal goal was to secure eight canal and river crossings along Highway 69 for Montgomery's Second Army. The 1st British Airborne Division and the Polish Parachute Brigade would make landfall at the northern end of the road to capture the bridges at Arnhem. The 101st Division's drop zones were slightly to the south, between Eindhoven and Veghel. The 82nd would jump still farther to the southeast and southwest of the corridor between the Rivers Maas and Waal.

As they'd flown across the Channel at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the 101's Pathfinder serials had been joined by a brawny Canadian P-47 Thunderbolt fighter escort. Its pilot would accompany the transports until they reached the coast of France, circling them repeatedly as he patrolled the air for hostile aircraft.

The escort had done nothing to allay the misgivings of Sergeant Marshall Copas. The twenty-two-year-old Kentuckian was pretty edgy, but a similar case of the willies had admittedly overtaken him when he'd dropped into Normandy. In fact, he'd been scared stiff. It hadn't helped that he'd thought he heard someone behind him after he landed. But when he'd whipped around, carbine in hand, he'd discovered it was only his chute—one of its lines had gotten caught on his canteen.

After about fifteen minutes Copas had settled down. He was trying to remember that, about as much as he would have liked to
forget
having gotten wounded later on by a German bullet fired from the hedgerows. But that night, at least, the Pathfinders had forty-five minutes to lay out their navigational aids. Now they would have twelve, about a quarter of that time. He and his buddy John Brandt also weren't encouraged by the knowledge that the “Tommies” were the ones coming to support them on the ground. Given their druthers, they later recalled, both would have wanted to see American soldiers. Taking it all together, was it any wonder Copas was nervous?

Up ahead in the Pathfinders' lead plane, Glenn Braddock had been a good deal calmer while gazing out a window at the Canadian fighter and his serial's number two transport. He was the cleanup man for his stick, one spot behind Sergeant John O'Shaughnessy and two behind the jumpmaster, Lieutenant Robert G. Smith, who'd been his parachute supply officer at Chalgrove. Smith and O'Shaughnessy had both dropped into the nightmarish inferno of Drop Zone D in Normandy, and they'd obviously managed to survive, so maybe they were lucky charms. On the other hand, Braddock didn't really like the cleanup position and had drawn straws with his buddy Roy Stephens, who'd just recently gotten a promotion from private to corporal, to see if they could swap flights. But he'd pulled the short straw and wound up in the lead plane. You won some, and you lost some.

Shortly after the Pathfinder serials turned overland toward Belgium, Braddock realized the Canadians had disappeared from sight. Stephens's flight, piloted by a lieutenant named Gene Shauvin, was close by, flying slightly behind and below his own transport.

“Don't you love me anymore?”

Braddock heard the voice over the intercom but wasn't positive which of the flyboys it belonged to . . . and a moment later he became too startled to worry about it. Shauvin had come up alongside his flight and gotten close, so close that Braddock would later insist the plane's wingtip poked through the open door of the troop compartment.

Christ!
he thought. If the stunt had tickled his aircrew, it had just about made him jump out of his skin. For a second he'd been sure the planes would crash in midair.

Then Shauvin's plane dropped off a little. Apparently Shauvin was done hotdogging.

Braddock was watching him fall back into position when he heard the explosions, followed by “a rattle like heavy hail” on the roof of his transport. His eyes wide with horror, he saw smoke begin to pour from Shauvin's left engine and fuel tank. Then the plane nosed steeply down in that direction and hurtled toward the ground spewing flames.

Braddock stared out into the empty sky feeling walloped. He was a man who placed his confidence in diligent, careful attention to detail. In eliminating the element of chance wherever possible. But it was
pure
chance—the luck of the draw—that had spared him from flying aboard that transport instead of Stephens.

He wasn't certain how long it took for that to sink in. All he would remember later on was that he was still looking out the window when he saw the leading edge of his transport's wing turn into a gaping hole. A huge chunk had been blown out of it.

And it wasn't just the wing. Slugs were riddling the bottom of the plane, punching through the fuselage between the troop and the navigator's compartments. Braddock saw tracers with little tailing streamers of flame shoot up from the floor to the roof.

He looked around at the cabin, wishing he could take cover, hoping those rounds wouldn't drill straight through his seat into his backside. The navigator's door was closed. It had been open since they left England, but now he'd shut it. Sure he had, Braddock thought. Their plane was getting barraged with fire. Why would anyone leave it open?

“
Flak tower to the left and firing at us!
” someone shouted.

Braddock could no more tell who it was than he'd known who had been horsing around over the ship-to-ship before all hell broke loose. But the words turned his attention back to the window.

The tall, reinforced-concrete tower was visible rising from the field below,
to the left
,
its 20mm guns chattering away from their turrets.

“Stand up, hook up, and check equipment!”

This time it was Lieutenant Smith, calling back over his shoulder. He wanted the troopers ready to jump as soon as the plane cleared the flak belt.

They hefted off their seats on his orders, laden with their packs and equipment. Standing, Braddock was a bundle of nerves—and he wasn't alone. The AA fire had continued pecking holes in the bottom of the transport, and the men wanted nothing more than to get past it.

He'd craned his head for another look at the enemy tower when everyone in the troop compartment heard the whine of a diving plane. It shrieked past them seemingly from out of nowhere, a British fighter, firing a stream of tracers at the flak tower—and then launching a pair of rockets from under its wing.

An instant later the tower went up in dust and smoke. Braddock joined an outpouring of cheers from the men around him as the ack-ack quieted, but that giddiness was short-lived. Their initial surge of relief quickly gave way to the awareness that they had lost a planeload of men. Their friends and brothers. It was a sobering moment.

But there was no time to dwell on what had just happened. Their transport had trimmed altitude. With the tower knocked out, its pilot, Lieutenant Centers, was descending for their jump.

They flew low for about five minutes. Then the transport climbed slightly, banking to the left.

“Red light, recheck hookup and equipment,” Lieutenant Smith shouted.

Braddock carefully went through the checks before letting his eyes return to the window. In the field below were crisscrossing roads at the end of a long canal . . . and an old man and a little girl standing in the middle of everything. The girl was holding the man's hand with one of hers and waving up at the plane with the other.

Waving.

Braddock would never forget that.

Then the plane straightened out and the green light came on and he moved up the aisle to the jump door.

4.

Lieutenant Charles M. Faith, the squad leader and jumpmaster aboard Shauvin's plane, knew it had been struck by flak almost as it occurred. The Allied forces pushing in from Belgium had marked the front line with orange smoke for the transport pilots—orange was the banned national color of the occupied Netherlands—and it was soon after his flight crossed the line that the Germans had opened fire.

By that point Faith had noticed the ready light flashing above the door. Although the aircraft was about fourteen hundred feet in the air, twice as high as the optimal jump altitude, he'd ordered his men to stand up and hook up.

He was waiting at the front of the stick when the battery began raking the transport from below. Looking out a window, he'd seen the damage at a glance. Smoke was gushing from the juncture of the left wing and main fuel tank.

Faith could tell it was a bad hit, but he would have no time to absorb
how
bad before a massive explosion rocked the entire plane. As it took a hard tilt to the left and then seesawed downward, he went staggering to the open door.

The lieutenant would later come to believe that if he hadn't found himself right there in position to jump immediately, he'd have gone down with the aircraft. Standing at the door, hanging onto the frame, he had turned toward the front of the transport and seen a solid wall of fire between him and the pilot's cabin. It was like peering into a furnace.

He looked over his shoulder into the troop section. Weapons and supply bundles were skidding in the aisle as the transport swayed lopsidedly in the air. The soldiers packed together on either side had grabbed on to anything within reach, struggling not to fall under the weight of their gear. Lester Hunt, one of the enlisted men, was beside Faith in the number two position. Hunt, Mike Rofar, Ernie Robinson . . . he'd led them all into Normandy and handpicked them for his stick in today's mission.

But their goal now was just to survive. The plane was going down and they had to evacuate.

Faith didn't dare wait. He gave the go command, slapped Hunt's arm, then turned and bailed out the door.

The lieutenant plunged through space, his static line snapping taut as his canopy spread open above him. He heard the plane screaming through the sky and turned his head in time to watch its final moments. It hurtled earthward like a comet, trailing flames and smoke, then crashed into a field below with a terrific explosion, the fuel in its tanks igniting to envelop it in a gigantic fireball.

Faith knew he would never forget the image of the transport burning on the ground. He would see it vividly in his mind's eye until the day he died.

The seconds blurred by. As he made his descent, the lieutenant saw Hunt floating down to earth slightly below him—but no one else. Looking left and right, he still didn't see any of the others and concluded they mustn't have gotten to the jump door in time. More than a dozen men had been trapped inside the plane.

Faith held his risers tightly in his fists, trying to keep a firm grip on his emotions. As he neared the ground, he brought up his knees and prepared for his roll.

The soft, grassy field allowed for an easy landing. Standing up, Faith got out of his harness and Mae West vest and looked around. He saw no sign of Les Hunt. But there was a wooded area to one side of him, and he thought he'd heard some movement through the trees.

He slipped into the edge of the thicket and went toward the sounds, hoping they would lead him to the private.