First to Jump (12 page)

His maneuver worked like a charm.

Although daylight was still a couple of hours off, the high, full moon clearly limned the geography below in its shining silver light. Murphy could see the outlines of the Norman fields and hedgerows he'd studied on his maps, and even spotted a railroad track he'd known would be a mile and a half from the LZ. He and the other glider pilots would now find out what the 101's paratroopers had already discovered: The trees in the hedgerows around the landing zone were much taller than their briefings had led them to believe. Although they'd been told the highest trees were forty feet tall, many of the poplars bordering the field in the thick bocage towered sixty feet above the ground.

This might have presented a hazard for the pilots under some circumstances. But the Pathfinders who'd landed ahead of the glider lift had perfectly defined the runways. Marked on a downhill slope with a lighted T, Murphy's was between a thousand and twelve hundred feet long. He normally required much less than that—two or three hundred feet, tops—to brake to a halt. The large built-in margin for error convinced him he'd have an easy landing.

His achy muscles forgotten in his concentration, he made his descent without a hitch, though he'd picked up a tailwind that nudged his velocity up to about seventy miles an hour, ten miles over the optimum final approach speed. Just before touchdown, he would see the lift's number two glider bank in for its landing to his right. Then he felt his wheels bump to the ground.

As he'd practiced countless times, Murphy hauled back on the brake lever and lowered the glider's nose to trim its speed—but to his stunned surprise it continued to slide over the rain-slicked grass without slowing down. Two hundred feet, three hundred . . . four, five . . .
eight
hundred
 . . .

Murphy's face pulled tight with dismay. His machine wasn't stopping; its poorly distributed extra weight sustained its downhill momentum. He could see the hedgerow coming up on him like a dark, solid wall. Bracing for a collision, he looked down the slope, saw a column of treaded vehicles with blackout lights through a break in the foliage, and knew they were Germans—they had to be, since he'd been told no American vehicles would roll before dawn. He snapped his head around to warn whoever could hear him, but his voice failed to reach his lips, and the best he could muster was as a hoarse, ragged whisper.

Then the
Fighting Falcon
plowed into the hedgerow's five-and-a-half-foot-high earthen embankment and struck a tree with a loud, rending crash that shook the ground. Belted into his seat, Murphy was tossed helplessly back and forth as the glider's windscreen shattered in front of him. He felt pain jolt through every bone in his body, and then was hanging partway from the aircraft's window into the shrubbery, its nose section's steel-reinforced frame crunched around him in a twisted mass.

The next few seconds were a sickening blur. Dazed and in agony, Murphy glanced over to his right and saw Butler's mangled, bloodied body wedged into the floor of the cockpit. He'd taken the brunt of the impact with the tree and been crushed between the jeep and its trunk, a branch driven through his skull like a javelin. Still strapped into the vehicle's passenger seat, General Pratt showed no visible injuries. But his head was bent forward to his chest and he wasn't moving—not encouraging signs. Barely able to move himself, Murphy was unable to check on the condition of Lieutenant May, the general's aide who'd been outside the jeep in the cargo section.

A wave of dizziness came and went. He was dimly aware that Glider Number 2 had slammed into the hedges about a hundred and fifty feet to his left. Meanwhile, the armored vehicles he'd spotted before the crash were still visible through the hedge. There were five of them, or five that he could count, German soldiers sitting with their legs over the vehicles' sides and rifles across their laps, peering into the field where the gliders had landed.

His legs pinned by the twisted steel tubing, his upper body dangling into the hedges, Murphy watched two of the enemy soldiers jump down off the vehicles and then walk along the line of shrubs toward the glider, outthrust flashlights in their hands.

He remained perfectly still, trying not to breathe as they reached it, briefly held their flashes over him, then slipped them inside the aircraft and swept their pale yellow beams around its broken interior.

After a hurried inspection, they straightened and tramped back to their vehicles. Murphy waited some more, listening. Minutes later, he heard the armored wagons rumble off into the night. Whether the Germans believed everyone inside the glider had been killed, or were concerned about the arriving Allied planes, they had wanted no part of sticking around the field.

Murphy didn't budge for another several minutes, to be certain they'd moved on. Then he began trying to wriggle free of the glider's cockpit.

The pain in his lower half almost unbearable, he screwed himself out of the aircraft a little at a time, gripping its tangled frame with both hands for support. But he'd no sooner stood up than his legs gave way underneath him and he went tumbling down into a shallow ditch.

Murphy lay there briefly, the air knocked from his lungs. Then he dug his fingers into the side of the ditch and began struggling to claw his way out.

He'd almost done so when Lieutenant May arrived holding a submachine gun. The aide had shuffled behind the jeep seconds before the crash, hoping it would absorb some of the shock. His desperate attempt at survival had worked; he was bruised and badly shaken up, but otherwise unharmed. When the Germans had come with their flashlights, he'd done the same as Murphy and faked being dead.

The news he brought about General Pratt wasn't good. Before leaving the glider, he'd checked him for a pulse and hadn't detected one. But he'd thought it possible he could have missed it in his shock and distress.

If Murphy and the general's aide knew one thing for certain, it was that the wreck would need to be guarded until medical assistance arrived. As May rushed back off to find help, Murphy drew his Colt service pistol from his holster—his M1 had gotten bent into a U-shape in the crash—and kept his own lookout from the side of the ditch. He did not trust the Germans in the armored vehicles to stay away.

Captain Charles Van Gorder, a surgeon with the 326th Medical Company who'd been aboard the number two lift, would find him crawling along outside the ditch with his .45 at the ready, dragging his legs behind him. Van Gorder had run over to him after having examined the occupants of his aircraft and determined none were seriously injured.

After seeing the
Falcon
's condition, he hadn't expected its passengers to have fared as well. Wrapped around the tree it had hit, the stricken glider had been reduced to an unrecognizable pile of debris.

Crouching over Murphy, Van Gorder knew instantly that his legs were broken—one of them with a compound fracture, its splintered femur poking out of the torn flesh. His left knee had also been horribly torn up. The surgeon's first thought was that he would die from shock and blood loss before he could reach triage. With that in mind, he'd offered to relieve his suffering with a palliative shot of morphine.

Murphy refused. “I want to stay alert,” he said, “so I can shoot Germans.”

Van Gorder left the syringe inside his medical kit.

By now Lieutenant May had returned to the
Falcon
with a detail of paratroopers. Leaving them to stand watch, he trotted over to Van Gorder and asked him to take a look at the general. The doctor quickly walked the short distance to the wreckage and tried to examine him, but he couldn't work his arms through the mashed tubing. Stripping off his gear, he finally managed to squeeze in and check Pratt and Butler's vital signs.

Neither man had a pulse or a heartbeat. They were dead.

May's spirits sank. While there had been little doubt that Butler was gone, he'd been clinging to the slender hope that the general was merely unconscious. But Van Gorder's inspection revealed he'd died of severe whiplash. Though Pratt was a short man, the parachute pack had raised him up high enough so that when the jeep rammed forward into the cockpit, his head struck a crossbar of the glider's framework, snapping his neck back. The supposed precautions his staff had taken against threats to his life in the air had been the direct cause of his death on landing.

Van Gorder now returned to Murphy and splinted his broken legs using whatever materials he could gather. The pilot was eventually removed to a field hospital the 326th Airborne Medical established at a nearby château. Sometime later on D-Day, a group of paratroopers arrived for General Pratt's body, wrapped him in an American flag, and buried him near the wreckage of the
Fighting Falcon
. There was no traditional gun salute out of concern it would draw attention from the enemy.

The pilot of the number two glider, Lieutenant Victor Warriner, remained in the field for hours afterward. Curiously peering into the ruined glider, he noticed a helmet on the floor. When he saw the single white star in front, he knew it had been the general's.

He reached in, lifted the helmet out, and held it in his hands a moment, thinking he might hang on to it as a war memento. But then he reconsidered. The idea just didn't sit right inside him. It belonged where it belonged.

Carefully, Warriner bent back into the glider, set the helmet back down where he'd found it, and walked off.

Somehow, that made him feel better.

1.

Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers, B/502, 101st Airborne, had been in an ugly state of mind when he'd joined Colonel Pat Cassidy's march toward Objective W-X-Y-Z. Before hooking up with Cassidy, his misdropped stick had landed near the town of Sainte-Mère-Église in one of the areas the 82nd Airborne had been sent to take. When he and another of the staff sergeants, Roy Nickrent, walked past the village church, they'd seen dead American paratroopers hanging from the trees where they came down, their chutes still on. Some of them had been shot, others bayoneted. In some cases they had suffered a variety of different wounds. One of the jumpers had been burned up by a flamethrower, and Summers's fellow sergeant had recognized him as one of his closest friends. The horrible appearance of his remains, and the smell of his charred flesh, would leave permanent scars on their memories.

Reaching the W-X-Y-Z compound shortly before 6:30
A.M.
, Summers and the men rushed the first of the stone houses with Cassidy after taking a wild gunshot from inside it. A room-to-room sweep turned up no enemy soldiers, and the house was quickly declared clear and turned into a command post—though two Germans would be flushed out of hiding later that day after being secreted away by the property's French landlady, who said they'd been “kind” to her.

Cassidy then led a detail to the Saint-Martin coastal battery position and found it a deserted ruin, exactly as Captain Lillyman had described. After several unsuccessful tries, his radioman made contact with the 4th Infantry Division at Utah Beach and gave them word that the guns were no longer a threat to the landing craft. It was the first communication between the airborne and seaborne invasion forces in the area.

With the guns no longer a concern, Cassidy planned to establish a tight security perimeter around the CP and “build a small defensive base” at the crossroads of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville and Mézières to “keep the Germans from breaking through to the beach.”

His other immediate priority was to clear out the W-X-Y-Z barracks compound a few hundred yards west of his command post. He had no idea if it was still occupied, but the absence of German defenders at the CP and gun battery made him hopeful it would be similarly emptied. Before leaving to inspect the battery, he sent Sergeant Summers out toward the buildings with a patrol of about fifteen soldiers. It was a smaller group than he'd have ideally chosen, but he was short on manpower and they were all the troopers he could spare.

Summers's leadership of the patrol would be hamstrung from the start. The narrow road to the compound was hemmed in by shrubs and trees, preventing the men from spreading out at its flank—and forcing the members of the squad to walk in a single file, which made them nervous about an ambush. The motley assortment was also made up of soldiers from different units who were strangers to one another and the twenty-five-year-old sergeant, who “didn't know a single man in the detail.” They hadn't trained together and developed the bonds of trust and friendship that helped forge a cohesive fighting unit.

At about nine o'clock in the morning, Summers saw the first farmhouse just up ahead, turned to give the men instructions, and saw them hesitate. At that moment he made the snap decision to storm the buildings himself, figuring that if he went ahead and set an example the others would follow.

His Thompson at the ready, he went stalking toward the two-story building—and that was when the Germans opened up on the troopers and sent them scrambling for cover in the ditches on either side of the road. Raising his head, Summers could see their semiautomatic fire coming from the first floor, where they had fabricated loopholes in the structure's thick stone wall.

A soft-spoken coal miner from rural West Virginia, he would never be able to articulate what came over him right at that moment. He simply decided the job had to be done, pushed to his feet, walked to the farmhouse's back door with the tommy gun at his waist, and kicked it in, spraying the room on the other side with fire.

As four of the Germans dropped from the sustained volley, a number of others and some civilians went running through another door into the hedges, heading toward the second house in the cluster. Summers followed them there, smashed in the door, and stared inside.

The room was empty except for a sick-looking child. The sergeant would never recollect whether the face staring back at him from the bed belonged to a boy or girl. He was in an adrenaline-washed haze, a state of near abstraction, and mostly took in the kid's frailty and defenselessness. A small, sick, innocent child looking at a man in a strange uniform. A soldier with a gun in his hand, a face that was smeared black, and killing in his eyes.

It briefly stopped Summers cold. Then enemy rounds began pouring from the third farmhouse, about fifty yards away. Snapped back into the reality of what he'd come to do, Summers tore his eyes from the bed and charged out the door, dashing up the road toward the next house, zigzagging to avoid the fire.

Behind him in the ditch, a young private named William Burt found himself stirred by the sergeant's courage and realized he couldn't just watch him go it alone. Crawling out of the ditch with his BAR light machine gun, Burt hastily set up the weapon, stretched out on the ground behind it, and began triggering a hail of suppressive fire, aiming for the gun ports in the farmhouse wall.

That blinded the German soldiers crouched behind them. Their heads ducked, unable see their moving target, they fired scattershot at Summers through the ports, raking the bushes and trimming the leaves off the trees above his head.

The sergeant took full advantage of their misplaced volleys. With a final charge toward the house, he kicked in the door with a booted foot, the tommy gun chattering in his hand even as it flung wide open.

The Germans in the room never saw him coming. He would have time to notice six men in coal scuttle helmets still shooting through the loopholes before he took them out with one broad sweep of his gun.

Summers stood in the entrance for a long moment afterward, his eyes moving about the room. He saw blood dripping down from the walls to the floorboards and spreading in pools under the bodies of the soldiers. He heard their delayed muscle spasms, the involuntary twitching of their arms and legs. He smelled death in the confined air. Before that morning he had never fired a rifle except in practice. Now he'd killed almost a dozen men in the span of minutes. It had already exhausted him . . . and there were still seven buildings to clear.

Sometime before he reemerged, Summers's squad climbed up out of the ditches and joined Private Burt in firing their weapons at the compound's fourth building—a small, single-story structure. Under cover of the guns, Summers resumed his charge, sprinting over to the door and shouldering all his weight against it.

He realized too late that it was partly open. Stumbling forward on his own unchecked momentum, the sergeant crashed hard to the floor, the wind knocked out of him.

To his good fortune the interior of the outbuilding's single room was empty. He rose to his feet, catching his breath. Then he turned back outside and sank to the doorstep in exhaustion.

Summers sat there, smoked a Lucky Strike, and took pulls of warm water from his canteen. At one point some of the men came over and replenished his ammunition. There was no sign of the enemy. If there were more of them in the compound, they would have to be flushed out of hiding.

About half an hour later, Summers saw someone he didn't know approaching the house, raised his tommy gun from his side . . . and then lowered it. The man was wearing an American paratrooper's uniform. A tall, lank captain with an 82nd Airborne patch on his sleeve, he explained that he'd misdropped into a nearby apple orchard, wandered toward the buildings, and seen the sergeant storming in and out of them with his tommy gun ablaze. He hadn't noticed the rest of his squad in the ditch.

By now Summers felt rested. He got to his feet and told the captain he was ready to move on toward the next building, a large, two-floor manor house standing about a quarter mile across the road.

The captain fell in next to him. “I'll go with you,” he said, and had barely started toward the house when a rifle shot cracked the air and he crumpled dead to the ground, the front of his uniform splashed with red.

Summers glanced numbly down at the man's body. A bullet had penetrated his heart. It had happened so fast, he'd never even gotten his name—but there was no time to think about it. The shot had come from the manor, and he had no available cover. Not unless he backtracked toward the house he'd just left, or scrambled into a ditch.

He didn't like either option. It would do no good to be pinned down. Instead, he sprinted toward the manor, stitching evasively to the left and right. Following his lead, Private Burt moved up with a couple of other men, shooting at the outside of the house from the roadside brush, trying to draw off the sniper's fire.

One of the men, Private John Camien, had seen enough. He burst from the hedge and came up alongside Summers as he ran. With Private Burt covering them, they quickly reached the manor, coming to a halt outside its door.

“Why are you doing it?” Camien asked in a New York accent.

“I can't tell you,” Summers said.

“What about the others?”

“They don't seem to want to fight, and I can't make them,” Summers said. “So I've got to finish it.”

Camien nodded and hefted his carbine. “Okay,” he said. “I'm with you.”

Summers burst in the door, Camien standing guard outside as he conducted a furious room-to-room search, cutting down six German soldiers as others fled the building and surrendered to the men in the ditches. They would take turns entering the next three buildings, switching weapons, killing more than two dozen enemy soldiers. Burt continued to move up the road along the side of the ditch, harassing the defenders at the gun ports with his light machine gun, making it impossible for them to take accurate aim at the two paratroopers.

There were now two buildings left in the compound, the closest a stately old château with white-shuttered windows and neat low hedges in front. Summers and Camien ran the hundred fifty yards to it, the sergeant going in, his companion watching the entrance.

Summers crashed through the door, found two empty rooms, and then stared into a third large room with astonishment. The Germans had converted it into a mess hall, and about fifteen of them were at a long wooden table eating their breakfasts, seemingly oblivious to the gunfire that had been tearing through the compound. He looked at their faces for a suspended moment and saw them staring back at him over their eggs, sausage, and steaming cups of coffee. Anyone with a working pair of ears would have heard the noise outside. He couldn't comprehend it. How much could they have liked their chow?

Summers opened fire with his tommy gun even as the silverware clattered from their hands and they went groping for their weapons. His brain in a kind of haze, he held his finger on the trigger and relentlessly chopped away until every last one of them was dead, the room transformed into a slaughterhouse, blood everywhere, bodies sprawling on the floor and draped over the tables and benches.

It was all over in a minute. Summers felt the heat coming off his gun barrel as he lowered it, got his cigarettes back out of his pocket with a trembling hand, and shook one out.

When Camien entered the house, he found the sergeant crouched on his knees and puffing on a Lucky Strike, smoke streaming from his nostrils. Although he looked tired to the bone, his features were set and coldly dispassionate. There was one last building to clear.

Summers finished his smoke and led Camien outside to reconnoiter it. They found a tall hedgerow with a thick dirt embankment and crawled up to peer through the foliage.

The structure, another two-story farmhouse with a large wooden shed connected to it, was on a knoll surrounded by many yards of flat, open ground. The Germans at the gun ports had an elevated vantage and clear lines of sight on all sides. It would make it easy for them to target any attacker coming on across the field. Studying it from behind the hedgerow, Summers was convinced they couldn't rush it as they had the other buildings.

They were about to get some unexpected support. Down the road, Colonel Cassidy had heard the gunfire coming from W-X-Y-Z and sent additional forces into the compound as men from different units trickled into his command post. He had been tempted to lead them himself, but with the fighting having heated up at his roadblocks and a stream of wounded infantrymen and German prisoners flowing into the CP, he felt he needed to stay back there to coordinate things.

His first group of reinforcements entered the compound to the left of Summers's platoon. Met with a combination of sniper and small arms fire from the farmhouse, seven of them were killed and the rest sent scrambling for cover. As Summers had feared, the Germans' position on the high ground gave them a deadly advantage over the troopers.

It was Private Burt whose brainstorm tilted those circumstances in another direction. Firing away at the farmhouse with his machine gun, he'd spotted a large pile of hay beside its attached shed. Almost at once, it occurred to him that he might be able to flush the enemy soldiers out of the main building—or at least make it harder for them to stay at their gun ports.

Replacing the BAR's standard .50-caliber ammunition with tracers, he took aim at the haystack and inundated it with pyrotechnic rounds. The burning chemicals inside them ignited the dry stack at once, the flames completely swallowing it up and then spreading across to the shed. In minutes it was ablaze, the smoke and fire leaping up the side of the farmhouse to chase the enemy soldiers away from their ports.

Burt's plan had done the trick, but he was about to get even better dividends than he could have foreseen. What he hadn't known was that the Germans had been using the shed as a heavy ammo dump—and it was stocked with live artillery shells. As the fire tore through its planks, the ammunition inside began to detonate, a chain of explosions that flushed about thirty enemy soldiers out of the structure and onto the hillside. Caught between the group that had come with Summers and Cassidy's reinforcements, they were shot down as they bolted from the door.