The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (10 page)

Around 2000 hours, “Axis Sally,” the “bitch of Berlin,” came on the radio. “Good evening, 82nd Airborne Division,” she said. “Tomorrow morning the blood from your guts will grease the bogey wheels on our tanks.” It bothered some of the men; others reassured them-she had been saying something similar for the previous ten days.

Still, it made men think. Pvt. John Delury of the 508th PIR talked to his friend Pvt. Frank Tremblay about their chances of coming through alive. “He thought he’d get a slight wound and survive. I thought I was going to be killed. That was the last time I saw him.”

Pvt. Tom Porcella, also of the 508th, was torturing himself with thoughts of killing other human beings (this was common; the chaplains worked overtime assuring soldiers that to kill for their country was not a sin). “Kill or be killed,” Porcella said to himself. “Here I am, brought up as a good Christian, obey this and do that. The Ten Commandments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ There is something wrong with the Ten Commandments, or there is something wrong with the rules of the world today. They teach us the Ten Commandments and then they send us out to war. It just doesn’t make sense.”

When every man was ready, the regiments gathered around their commanders for a last word. Most COs stuck to basics-to assemble quickly was the main point-but one or two added a pep talk. The most famous was delivered by Col. Howard “Jumpy” Johnson, in command of the 501st PIR. Every man in the regiment remembered it vividly and could quote word for word his conclusion. As Lt. Carl Cartledge described Johnson’s talk, “He gave a great battle speech, saying victory and liberation and death to the enemy and some of us would die and peace cost a price and so on. Then he said, ‘I want to shake the hand of each one of you tonight, so line up.’ And with that, he reached down, pulled his knife from his boot and raised it high above his head, promising us in a battle cry:

‘Before the dawn of another day, I’ll sink this knife into the heart of the foulest bastard in Nazi land!’ A resounding yell burst forth from all 2,000 of us as we raised our knives in response.”

After the regimental meetings the companies grouped around their COs and platoon leaders for a final word. The officers gave out the challenge, password, and response: “Flash,” “Thunder,” and “Welcome.” “Welcome” was chosen because the Germans would pronounce it “Velcom.” When Capt. Charles Shettle of the 506th PIR gave out the signals, Dr. Samuel Feiler, the regimental dental officer who had volunteered to accompany the assault echelon, approached him. Feiler was a German Jew who had escaped Berlin in 1938. “Captain Shettle,” Feiler asked, “Vat do I do?”

“Doc,” Shettle replied, “when you land, don’t open your mouth. Take along some extra crickets and if challenged, snap twice.” Later, as Shettle was inspecting each planeload prior to takeoff, he found Feiler with crickets strapped to both arms, both legs, and an extra supply in his pockets.  At 6P.M. Eisenhower and a group of aides drove to Newbury, where the 101st Airborne was loading up for the flight to Normandy. The 101st was one of the units Leigh-Mallory feared would suffer 70 percent casualties. Eisenhower wandered around among the men, whose blackened faces gave them a grotesque look, stepping over packs, guns, and other equipment.  A group recognized him and gathered around. He chatted with them easily. He told them not to worry, that they had the best equipment and leaders. A sergeant said, “Hell, we ain’t worried, General. It’s the Krauts that ought to be worrying now.” When he met a trooper from Dodge City, Eisenhower gave him a thumbs up and said, “Go get ‘em, Kansas!” And a private piped up, “Look out, Hitler, here we come.” A Texan promised Eisenhower a job after the war on his cattle ranch. Eisenhower stayed until all the big C-47s were off the runway.  As the last plane roared into the sky Eisenhower turned to Kay Summersby, who was his driver that night, with a visible sagging in his shoulders. She saw tears in his eyes. He began to walk slowly toward his car. “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s on.”

For Major Howard and the Ox and Bucks, June 5 had been a long day. In the morning the officers and men checked and rechecked their weapons. At noon they were told that it was on, that they should rest, eat, and then dress for battle.  The meal was fatless, to cut down on airsickness. Not much of it was eaten. Pvt.  Wally Parr explained why: “I think everybody had gone off of grub for the first time possibly in years.” Then they sat around, according to Parr, “trying to look so keen, but not too keen like.”

Toward evening the men got into their trucks to drive to their gliders. They were a fearsome sight. They each had a rifle or a Sten gun or a Bren gun, six to nine grenades, four Bren-gun magazines. Some had mortars; one in each platoon had a wireless set strapped to his chest. They had all used black cork or burned coke to blacken their faces. (Pvt. Darky Baines, as he was called, one of the two black men in the company, looked at Parr when Parr handed him some cork and said, “I don’t think I’ll bother.”) Lt. David Wood remarked that they all, officers and men, were so fully loaded that “if you fell over it was impossible to get up without help.” (Each infantryman weighed 250 pounds, instead of the allotted 210.) Parr called out that the sight of them alone would be enough to scare the Germans out of their wits.

As the trucks drove toward the gliders, Billy Gray could remember “the girls along the road, crying their eyes out.” On the trucks the men were given their code words. The recognition signal was “V,” to be answered by “for Victory.” The code word for the successful capture of the canal bridge was “Ham,” for the river bridge “Jam.” “Jack” meant the canal bridge had been captured but destroyed; “Lard” meant the same for the river bridge. Ham and Jam. D Company liked the sound of it, and as the men got out of their trucks they began shaking hands and saying, “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam.”

Howard called them together. “It was an amazing sight,” he remembered. “The smaller chaps were visibly sagging at the knees under the amount of kit they had to carry.” He tried to give an inspiring talk, but as he confessed, “I am a sentimental man at heart, for which reason I don’t think I am a good soldier. I found offering my thanks to these chaps a devil of a job. My voice just wasn’t my own.”

Howard gave up the attempt at inspiration and told the men to load up. The officers shepherded them aboard, although not before every man, except Billy Gray, took a last-minute leak. Wally Parr chalked “Lady Irene” on the side of S.  Sgt. Jim Wallwork’s glider. As the officers fussed over the men outside, those inside their gliders began settling in.

A private bolted out of his glider and ran off into the night. Later, at his court-martial, he explained that he had had an unshakable premonition of his own death in a glider crash.

The officers got in last. Before climbing aboard, Lt. Den Brotheridge went back to Lt. R. “Sandy” Smith’s glider, shook Smith’s hand, and said, “See you on the bridge.”

Howard went around to each glider, shook hands with the platoon leader, then called out some words of cheer. He had just spoken to the commander of the Halifax squadron, he said, who had told him, “John, don’t worry about flak; we are going through a flak gap over Cabourg, one that we have been using to fly supplies in to the Resistance and to bring information and agents out.” Finally Howard, wearing a pistol and carrying a Sten gun, climbed into his own glider, closed the door, and nodded to Wallwork. Wallwork told the Halifax pilot that everything was go. At 2256 hours, June 5, they took off, the other gliders following at one-minute intervals.

The flight over the Channel of the American paratroopers in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions was uneventful, but when the C-47s crossed the coast the skies erupted. German anti-aircraft gunners had gone to work and were firing with every gun they had.

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 anything 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.” 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 added that when they remembered that only one in six of the bullets coming up at them was a tracer, 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 atme! 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.” 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.” 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.”

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. Pvt. Arthur “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 headfirst 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-C-47s-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.  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 historian 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.”

Every other able-bodied man jumped. Private Fitzgerald 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.” 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.” Pvt. Sherman Oyler, a Kansas boy, 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.”

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.

Over the Channel, at 0000 hours, two groups of three Halifax bombers flew at seven thousand feet toward Caen. With all the other air activity going on, neither German searchlights nor antiaircraft gunners noticed that each Halifax was tugging a Horsa glider.

Inside the lead glider, Pvt. Wally Parr of D Company, Ox and Bucks, a part of the Air Landing Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division of the British army, was leading the twenty-eight men in singing. With his powerful voice and strong Cockney accent, Parr was booming out “Abby, Abby, My Boy.” Cpl. Billy Gray, sitting down the row from Parr, was barely singing because all that he could think about was the pee he had to take. At the back end of the glider, Cpl. Jack Bailey sang, but he also worried about the parachute he was responsible for securing.

The pilot, twenty-four-year-old S. Sgt. Wallwork, of the Glider Pilot Regiment, anticipated casting off any second now because he could see the surf breaking over the Norman coast. Beside him his copilot, S. Sgt. John Ainsworth, was concentrating intensely on his stopwatch. Sitting behind Ainsworth, the commander of D Company, Maj. John Howard, a thirty-one-year-old former regimental sergeant major and an ex-cop, laughed with everyone else when the song ended and Parr called out, “Has the major laid his kitt yet?” Howard suffered from airsickness and had vomited on every training flight. On this flight, however, he had not been sick. Like his men, he had not been in combat before, but the prospect seemed to calm him more than it shook him.  As Parr started up “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary,” Howard touched the tiny red shoe in his battle-jacket pocket, one of his two-year-old son Terry’s infant shoes that he had brought along for good luck. He thought of Joy, his wife, and Terry and their baby daughter, Penny. They were back in Oxford, living near a factory, and he hoped there were no bombing raids that night. Beside Howard sat Lieutenant Brotheridge, whose wife was pregnant and due to deliver any day (five other men in the company had pregnant wives back in England). Howard had talked Brotheridge into joining the Ox and Bucks, and had selected his platoon for the #1 glider because he thought Brotheridge and his platoon the best in his company.