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The bridges were unguarded when the men finally reached them at three o'clock in the morning. McNiece thought that was probably because the Germans hadn't expected Allied forces to be roaming that deep behind their lines. He always claimed the biggest advantage to being a paratrooper was that the enemy could only reserve so many troops for the rear, and that meant they were never fully prepared for you. Meanwhile, you could move about at will right in the middle of their forces with surprise in your favor.

Under cover of darkness, the troopers would now prepare the bridges for demolition, planting their charges on the supports, using the mortarmen's shells as improvised casings for the soft, dough-like plastique. There were three bridges in all, two wooden footbridges and the third a large steel bridge with concrete supports. McNiece's orders were to wire all three, then blow the two smaller bridges and try to hold the main one for the troops and vehicles coming up from Utah Beach. However, if the Germans started to cross it from either direction, McNiece was to blow the span with them on it.

Short on demo-sabos, the sergeant set all his tagalongs to the job out of necessity. He wanted it done before daybreak, when the enemy had a better chance of spotting them. But the men without training and experience in the use of explosives faced unexpected risks.

Beamy Beamesderfer, who worked all night wiring the bridges, tremendously underestimated the potency of the C2. In fact, he'd barely heard of the compound until that night. When the demo-sabos blew the footbridges with a shout of “
Fire in the hole!
” he hadn't moved far enough away to escape the explosive shock wave and went flying through the air.

After he was helped to his feet, Beamesderfer took a quick inventory of himself. Though he'd never lost consciousness, he was dizzy and had a bloody nose. There were scratches and cuts all over his body . . . nothing too deep, but they stung. Still, he figured he'd just been shaken up.

It wasn't long before he started to wonder if something more serious might be wrong with him. His nose wouldn't stop bleeding, and he kept spitting blood from his mouth. When the guys asked how he felt, his replies drew some odd glances. At the time, he had no idea he wasn't making sense to them.

Beamesderfer spent the night at the wired bridge as more paratroopers from different units wandered over. He felt pressure in his head and his ears were ringing. Every so often he'd get confused and babble nonsense. Back then he knew close to nothing about head trauma and could not have suspected he was suffering from a severe concussion.

The first Germans came in the morning and would be followed by more as they fled the Allied advance from the beach. Meanwhile, a lieutenant had arrived from the command post and reiterated McNiece's original orders. No enemy soldiers were to cross the bridge.

The band of sixty or so troopers that had assembled there dug in for a fight. It would rage for the next five days.

8.

As the thin light of daybreak filtered down into the ditch, T/5 Richard Lisk stirred for what seemed the first time in hours. He'd stayed perfectly still as enemy patrols tramped past him throughout the night. It had meant ignoring the pain radiating from his broken foot. It had meant ignoring the earthworms, ants, beetles, and other tiny creatures that had slipped from the damp soil to crawl over his face, hair, and hands and inch exploratively under his uniform. He had wanted to stay alive and protect the Eureka unit, and it had required that he lie there for hours without moving a muscle.

It had been a while since he'd discerned any German voices or footsteps. All night he'd heard machine guns cackling in the near distance, and farther toward the coast the rumble of artillery fire. The eruptions were even louder now, and constant, as if the whole world around him was shuddering from a convulsion that would not let go of it. But there was no sound now in the field outside the drainage ditch. Nothing . . . no twittering of birds, no flapping of their wings as they took flight, or rustling of their notched, jerky movements in the hedgerows. The birds had either fled or been stilled as they nervously awakened to the strange thunder of a storm that had blown in without rain.

In this peculiar silence, this complete and utter
absence
of sound, Lisk knew he was alone. He would use the opening, and the light, to take care of things.

Slowly, he raised his head, pushed himself up from the bottom of the ditch, and peered over its lip. There was no one in sight.

He climbed out of the ditch, trying to keep his weight off his injured foot. After he'd emptied his bladder, he knelt down and lifted the homing beacon and its antenna up into the grass. Back at North Witham he'd drilled with the Eureka units blindfolded. He literally knew how to use one and how to demolish it with his eyes closed.

Methodically now he extended the antenna, broke its lightweight segments into small pieces, and tossed them around the field. Then he pulled the det cord—it was made of fishing line—from inside the device, backing away from it as he ran the cord out to its full twenty-five-foot length. He did not want to be standing too close when it blew.

He looked around the field again. An early June field in the lush Norman countryside, bees gathering pollen from wildflowers, butterflies dabbing the air with color.

But there was no birdsong.

His face smeared with dirt, his hair clotted with it, dirt under his fingernails and embedded in the creases of his knuckles, Lisk clenched his fist around the det cord and gave it a hard tug. Heat smacked his cheeks as the Eureka was blasted to pieces amid chuffs of dark gray smoke, its tube-and-wire guts disintegrating from the pressurized explosion, its case fragmenting into an unrecognizable wreck around them. Scraps of twisted metal shot upward and then dropped to the grass. Dials, knobs, and bits of broken glass went zipping everywhere like tiny rockets.

Lisk stood there a moment looking at the demolished unit, the sharp burnt odor in the air stinging his nostrils, reaching all the way to the back of his throat. Then he limped back over to the ditch and slid back down into it. If the Germans found him now, they could go ahead and put him down like a sick dog, but at least they wouldn't get their hands on the homing box.

Time passed. He lay motionless as the blast smoke dissipated and the sky brightened with full morning. Then he heard footsteps approaching and inhaled through his front teeth.

After a moment he heard an American voice call out his name. His comrades had kept their promise to send a medic back for him.

A shot of morphine in his foot anesthetized the pain to the extent that Lisk was able to walk. As the medic moved off with his kit, tending to other soldiers, he went off in search of his unit command post. Although he didn't locate it at once, he found some glider pilots who were also looking for it and joined them.

They would eventually reach the command post at Mézières, where, that same morning, several of Colonel Pat Cassidy's men were engaging the enemy in the bloodiest of firefights.

9.

As Lisk had huddled at the bottom of the ditch in the hours before dawn, the rest of his Pathfinder stick—along with a handful of survivors from Beamy Beamesderfer's plane—had marked off the landing zone for fifty-two Waco gliders that had flown over the coastline in groups of four, each glider towed by a Dakota.

The Chicago mission, as it was dubbed, had a broad-ranging purpose. Forty-four of the lightweight canvas-and-wood aircraft were transporting two batteries of an antiaircraft battalion, sixteen 57mm field guns, twenty-five Willys jeeps and small trucks, a bulldozer, and almost fifteen tons of combined ammunition and equipment. Eight gliders carried engineers, signalmen, an antitank platoon, and an entire surgical unit from the 326th Airborne Medical Company to staff a field outpost. All told there were 148 troopers aboard the Wacos.

The lead glider had been named after the
Fighting Falcon
,
the first aircraft of its type to be constructed by the industrious Gibson Refrigerator Company in Greenville, Michigan. Painted on the pilot's side of the nose was a giant representation of the 101st Airborne's Screaming Eagle insignia. A similarly large-scale American flag was emblazoned on the opposite side.

At the controls of
Fighting Falcon
was Colonel Mike Murphy, the Army's most seasoned glider pilot, a former barnstormer who'd once drawn breathless wows by landing customized planes upside down at air shows. Lieutenant John Butler, his copilot, sat beside him in the cockpit. The assistant division commander of the 101st Airborne, Brigadier General Don F. Pratt, was behind them in the front passenger seat of a lashed-down jeep, wearing his combat helmet and Mae West vest, using a flashlight to pore over the classified dispatches stuffing a big leather briefcase on his knees. Beside the jeep, Pratt's aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John May, was crammed in with some five-gallon jerry cans of gasoline that would fuel the jeep along the Cotentin's roads, having been squeezed out of the vehicle by the equipment stowed aboard it. The items included several powerful radio sets the general had brought for his divisional command post—but they would never be used.

Don Pratt was about to become the first and highest-ranking officer on either side of the war to die in the D-Day invasion.

Ironically, he was a late addition to Chicago. Early in the invasion planning, Pratt had received the assignment of leading the seaborne invasion fleet, but he'd coaxed Major General Maxwell Taylor, chief of the 101st, into letting him hit Normandy with the advance airborne element so he could have a head start organizing the ground forces. Although he'd wanted to come in with the paratroopers, Pratt had never earned jump quals, leaving a glider arrival as his only option.

Mike Murphy was likewise a last-minute pick for the operation. In England to train glider pilots for the D-Day invasion, he'd been disappointed to find out he wasn't slated to fly across the Channel with them. But his opening came when he got wind of General Pratt's change of plans. Like the general, he'd lobbied his superior officer, explaining that it was important for him to get a close-up look at how the Wacos performed in combat. His best argument would be unstated, though: The Army would want to be certain that someone of Pratt's rank had the best glider pilot available for his flight, and Murphy knew his expertise was unsurpassed.

While General Pratt was said to have been eager to fly aboard a Waco, his staff worried about the risk to his life. Without consulting him, they ordered a layer of steel-plate armor installed at the bottom of the fuselage to shield him from enemy ground fire—and arranged for him sit atop a parachute pack in the jeep. The armor not only added hundreds of pounds of weight to an aircraft already carrying a 2,300-pound vehicle and other heavy cargo, but threw the distribution of that weight dangerously off balance.

Murphy only heard about the
Fighting Falcon
's ad hoc belly armor before takeoff, and it made him concerned about the glider's airworthiness. He had previously ordered an experimental crash-resistant nose placed on a glider and felt that was all the added protection it could safely handle. But with everything set to go at the airfield, no one was inclined to request a last-minute change of plans.

At 1:19 on the morning of June 6, a C-47 with the
Fighting Falcon
in tow had left England on schedule, with the other Chicago planes and gliders following at thirty-second intervals. Murphy's extra weight load created problems from the start, forcing his tow ship to use a huge amount of runway to get him airborne—and when the pilot finally did take wing, he'd had more difficulties staying level. It was, he would recall, like trying to fly a freight train.

The lift met little resistance overflying the Channel Islands at two thousand feet, but things got hot over the French coastline as enemy guns opened up on them. In the
Falcon
's pilot seat, Murphy heard bullets ricochet off the jeep and penetrate his wings and fuselage with a sound that reminded him of popcorn popping. But with no engines or fuel tanks that could ignite, the rounds passed through the canvas without doing critical harm.

The situation worsened when the heavier antiaircraft guns awakened below. Wishing they could crawl into their helmets, the glider pilots flew through fluid streams of flak that were “beautiful yet frightening, orange fireballs coming up through the air and arching off in a curve. Always the fire was directed at the tow ship ahead, with its exhausts belching bright blue flames.” As the lift settled into its final approach route, the German AA gunners lit bonfires on the ground to warm themselves against the chill, damp weather, and the orange glare had the secondary effect of blinding the pilots. With their eyes taxed by all these visual distractions, many of them would never know how they managed to stay on course.

It was about 4
A.M.
when Murphy saw a green light in the astrodome of his towplane, signaling that they'd reached their destination outside the village of Hiesville.

“
So long
,” he said to the transport. He could hear German machine-gun fire through the roar of the wind outside the cockpit and was thinking he'd had his fill of it.

Hitting his towline release knob, he exchanged a relieved glance with his copilot. It wasn't just the gunfire that had worn on their nerves. The glider's added, misplaced weight had made it buck and shimmy in the air practically from takeoff, and they'd spent more than two and a half hours wrestling with their controls to keep it steady. Coupled with the strain of having to fly through walls of flak, the effort had left them mentally and physically tired out, their shoulders sore with fatigue, their arms and legs stiffly cramped.

Despite his weariness, Murphy decided to give himself some extra hang time so he could get a feel for how to land the unstable aircraft. The very rules he'd helped institute for glider landings required a pilot to stay level as he slowed to his descent speed, but he would now make an exception, turn sharply to the left, and bring the
Fighting Falcon
up into a steep climb.