But the pathfinders ran into difficulties from the very beginning. They plunged into chaos. The Dakotas had swept in over the targets so fast that the Germans at first thought they were fighter planes. Surprised by the suddenness of the attack, flak units opened up blindly, filling the sky with weaving patterns of glowing tracer bullets and deadly bursts of shrapnel. As Sergeant Charles Asay of the 101st floated down, he watched with a curious detachment as “long graceful arcs of multicolored bullets waved up from the ground,” reminding him of the Fourth of July. He thought “they were very pretty.”
Just before Private Delbert Jones jumped, the plane he was in got a direct hit. The shell slammed through without doing much damage, but it missed Jones by only an inch. And as Private Adrian Doss, burdened with upwards of one hundred pounds of equipment, fell through the air, he was horrified to find tracer bullets weaving all about him. They converged above his head and he felt the tugging of his chute as the bullets ripped through the silk. Then a stream of bullets passed through the equipment hanging in front of him. Miraculously he wasn’t hit, but a hole was ripped in his musette bag “large enough for everything to fall out.”
So intense was the flak fire that many planes were forced off course. Only thirty-eight of the 120 pathfinders landed directly on their targets. The remainder came down miles away. They dropped into fields, gardens, streams and swamps. They crashed into trees and hedgerows and onto rooftops. Most of these men were veteran paratroopers, but even so they were utterly confused when they tried to get their initial bearings. The fields were smaller, the hedgerows higher and the roads narrower than those they had studied for so many months on terrain maps. In those first awful moments of disorientation, some men did foolhardy and even dangerous things. Private First Class Frederick Wilhelm was so dazed when he landed that he forgot he was behind enemy lines and switched on one of the large marker lights he was carrying. He wanted to see if it still worked. It did. Suddenly the field was flooded with light, scaring Wilhelm more than if the Germans had actually opened fire on him. And Captain Frank Lillyman, leader of the 101st teams, almost gave his position away. Dropping into a pasture, he was suddenly confronted by a huge bulk that bore down on him out of the darkness. He almost shot it before it identified itself with a low moo.
Besides frightening themselves and startling the Normans, the pathfinders surprised and confused the few Germans who saw them. Two troopers actually landed outside the headquarters of Captain Ernst During of the German 352nd Division, more than five miles from the nearest drop zone. During, who commanded a heavy machine gun company stationed at Brevands, had been awakened by the lowflying formations and the flak barrage. Leaping out of bed, he dressed so quickly that he put his boots on the wrong feet (something he didn’t notice until the end of D Day). In the street Düring saw the shadowy figures of the two men some distance away. He challenged them but got no answer. Immediately he sprayed the area with his Schmeisser submachine gun. There was no answering fire from the two well-trained pathfinders. They simply vanished. Rushing back to his headquarters, Düring called his battalion commander. Breathlessly he said into the phone, “Fallschirmjäger [Paratroopers]! Fallschirmjäger!”
Other pathfinders weren’t as lucky. As Private Robert Murphy of the 82nd, lugging his bag (which contained a portable radar set), headed out of Madame Levrault’s garden and started toward his drop zone north of Ste.-Mère-Église, he heard a short burst of firing off to his right. He was to learn later that his buddy, Private Leonard Devorchak, had been shot at that moment. Devorchak, who had sworn to “win a medal a day just to prove to myself that I can make it,” may have been the first American to be killed on D Day.
All over the area pathfinders like Murphy tried to get their bearings. Silently moving from hedgerow to hedgerow, these fierce-looking paratroopers, bulky in their jump smocks and overloaded with guns, mines, lights, radar sets and fluorescent panels, set out for rendezvous points. They had barely one hour to mark the drop zones for the full-scale American airborne assault that would begin at 1:15 A.M.
Fifty miles away, at the eastern end of the Normandy battlefield, six planeloads of British pathfinders and six R.A.F. bombers towing gliders swept in over the coast. Ahead of them the sky stormed with vicious flak fire, and ghostly chandeliers of flares hung everywhere. In the little village of Ranville, a few miles from Caen, eleven-year-old Alain Doix had seen the flares, too. The firing had awakened him and now he stared transfixed, as had Madame Levrault, utterly fascinated by the kaleidoscopic reflections which he could see in the great brass knobs on the posts at the end of the bed. Shaking his grandmother, Madame Mathilde Doix, who was sleeping with him, Alain said excitedly, “Wake up! Wake up, Grandmama, I think something is happening.”
Just then Alain’s father, René Doix, rushed into the room. “Get dressed quickly,” he urged them. “I think it’s a heavy raid.” From the window, father and son could see the planes coming in over the fields, but as he watched René realized that these planes made no sound. Suddenly it dawned on him what they were. “My God,” he exclaimed, “these aren’t planes! They’re gliders!”
Like huge bats, the six gliders, each carrying approximately thirty men, swooped silently down. Immediately on crossing the coast, at a point some five miles from Ranville, they had been cast off by their tow planes from five to six thousand feet up. Now they headed for two parallel waterways shimmering in the moonlight, the Caen Canal and the Orne River. Two heavily guarded bridges, one leading to the other, crossed the twin channels just above and between Ranville and the village of Bénouville. These bridges were the objectives for this small band of British 6th Airborne glider infantry—volunteers from such proud units as the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Royal Engineers. Their hazardous mission was to seize the bridges and overwhelm the garrison. If their task could be achieved a major artery between Caen and the sea would be severed, preventing the east-west movement of German reinforcements, particularly panzer units, from driving into the flank of the British and Canadian invasion area. Because the bridges were needed to expand the invasion bridgehead, they had to be captured intact before the guards could set off demolitions. A swift surprise assault was called for. The British had come up with a bold and dangerous solution. The men who now linked arms and held their breath as their gliders rustled softly down through the moonlit night were about to crash-land on the very approaches to the bridges.
Private Bill Gray, a Bren gunner, in one of three gliders heading for the Caen Canal bridge, closed his eyes and braced himself for the crash. It was eerily silent. There was no firing from the ground. The only sound came from the big machine, sighing gently through the air. Near the door, ready to push it open the moment they touched down, was Major John Howard, in charge of the assault. Gray remembers his platoon leader, Lieutenant H. D. “Danny” Brotheridge, saying “Here we go, chaps.” Then there was a splintering, rending crash. The undercarriage ripped off, splinters showered back from the smashed cockpit canopy, and, swaying from side to side like a truck out of control, the glider screeched across the ground, throwing up a hail of sparks. With a sickening half swing, the wrecked machine smashed to a halt, as Gray recalls, “with the nose buried in barbed wire and almost on the bridge.”
Someone yelled, “Come on, lads!” and men came scrambling out, some piling through the door, others tumbling down from the stove-in nose. Almost at the same time and only yards away, the other two gliders skidded to a crashing halt and out of them poured the remainder of the assault force. Now everybody stormed the bridge. There was bedlam. The Germans were shocked and disorganized. Grenades came hurtling into their dugouts and communications trenches. Some Germans who were actually asleep in gun pits woke to the blinding crash of explosions and found themselves gazing into the business ends of Sten guns. Others, still dazed, grabbed rifles and machine guns and began firing haphazardly at the shadowy figures who seemed to have materialized from nowhere.
While teams mopped
up resistance on the near side of the bridge, Gray and some forty men led by Lieutenant Brotheridge charged across to seize the all-important far bank. Halfway over, Gray saw a German sentry with a Very pistol in his right hand, ready to fire a warning flare. It was the last act of a courageous man. Gray fired from the hip with his Bren gun and, he thinks, so did everyone else. The sentry fell dead even as the flare burst over the bridge and arched into the night sky.
His warning, presumably intended for the Germans on the Orne bridge a few hundred yards ahead, was fired much too late. The garrison there had already been over-run, even though in that attack only two of the assaulting gliders found the target (the third came down seven miles away on the wrong bridge—a crossing over the Dives River). Both target bridges fell almost simultaneously. Stunned by the swiftness of the assault, the Germans were overwhelmed. Ironically, the Wehrmacht garrisons couldn’t have destroyed the crossings even if they had had the time. Swarming over the bridges, the British sappers found that although demolition preparations had been completed, explosive charges had never been placed in position. They were found in a nearby hut.
Now there was that strange silence that seems always to follow a battle, when men partly dazed by the speed of events try to figure out how they lived through it and everybody wonders who else survived. The nineteen-year-old Gray, elated by his part in the assault, eagerly sought out his platoon leader, “Danny” Brotheridge, whom he had last seen leading the attack across the bridge. But there had been casualities, and one of them was the twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant. Gray found Brotheridge’s body lying in front of a small café near the canal bridge. “He had been shot in the throat,” Gray recalls, “and apparently hit by a phosphorous smoke grenade. His airborne smock was still burning.”
Close by, in a captured pillbox, Lance Corporal Edward Tappenden sent out the success signal. Over and over he called into his walkie-talkie-like radio the code message. “Ham and jam … Ham and jam …” D Day’s first battle was over. It had lasted barely fifteen minutes. Now Major Howard and his 150-odd men, deep in enemy territory and cut off for the moment from reinforcements, prepared to hold the vital bridges.
At least they knew where they were. The same couldn’t be said for the majority of the sixty British paratroop pathfinders who jumped from six light bombers at 12:20 A.M.—the same time that Howard’s gliders touched down.
These men took on one of the toughest of all D-Day jobs. The vanguard of the British 6th Airborne assault, they had volunteered to jump into the unknown and to mark three drop zones west of the Orne River with flashing lights, radar beacons and other guidance apparatus. These areas, all lying in a rectangle of roughly twenty square miles, were close to three small villages—Varaville, less than three miles from the coast; Ranville, near the bridges which Howard’s men now held; and Touffréville, barely five miles from the eastern outskirts of Caen. At twelve-fifty British paratroopers would begin dropping on these zones. The pathfinders had just thirty minutes to set them up.
Even in England in daylight, it would have been tricky to find and mark drop zones in thirty minutes. But at night, in enemy territory and in a country where few of them had ever been, their task was awesome. Like their comrades fifty miles away, the British pathfinders dropped headlong into trouble. They, too, were scattered widely and their drop was even more chaotic.
Their difficulties began with the weather. An unaccountable wind had sprung up (which the American pathfinders did not experience) and some areas were obscured by light patches of fog. The planes carrying the British pathfinder teams ran into curtains of flak fire. Their pilots instinctively took evasive action, with the result that targets were over-shot or couldn’t be found at all. Some pilots made two and three runs over the designated areas before all the pathfinders were dropped. One plane, flying very low, swept doggedly back and forth through intense antiaircraft fire for fourteen hair-raising minutes before unloading its pathfinders. The result of all this was that many pathfinders or their equipment plummeted down in the wrong places.
The troopers bound for Varaville landed accurately enough, but they soon discovered that most of their equipment had been smashed in the fall or had been dropped elsewhere. None of the Ranville pathfinders landed even close to their area in the initial drop; they were scattered miles away. But most unfortunate of all were the Touffréville teams. Two ten-man groups were to mark that area with lights, each one flashing up into the night sky the code letter K. One of these teams dropped on the Ranville zone. They assembled easily enough, found what they thought was their right area and a few minutes later flashed out the wrong signal.
The second Touffréville team did not reach the right area either. Of the ten men in this “stick,” only four reached the ground safely. One of them, Private James Morrissey, watched with horror as the other six, suddenly caught by a heavy wind, sailed far off to the east. Helplessly Morrissey watched the men being swept away toward the flooded Dives valley, gleaming in the moonlight off in the distance—the area the Germans had inundated as part of their defenses. Morrissey never saw any of the men again.
Morrissey and the remaining three men landed quite close to Touffréville. They assembled and Lance Corporal Patrick O’Sullivan set out to reconnoiter the drop zone. Within minutes he was hit by fire which came from the very edge of the area they were supposed to mark. So Morrissey and the other two men positioned the Touffréville lights in the cornfield where they had landed.
Actually in these first confusing minutes few of the pathfinders encountered the enemy. Here and there men startled sentries and drew fire, and inevitably some became casualities. But it was the ominous silence of their surroundings which created the greatest terror. Men had expected to meet heavy German opposition the moment they landed. Instead, for the majority all was quiet—so quiet that men passed through nightmarish experiences of their own making. In several instances pathfinders stalked one another in fields and hedgerows, each man thinking the other was a German.
Groping through the Normandy night, near darkened farmhouses and on the outskirts of sleeping villages, the pathfinders and 210 men of the battalions’ advance parties tried to get their bearings. As always, their immediate task was to find out exactly where they were. Those dropped accurately recognized the landmarks they had been shown on terrain maps back in England. Others, completely lost, tried to locate themselves with maps and compasses. Captain Anthony Windrum of an advance signal unit solved the problem in a more direct way. Like a motorist who has taken the wrong road on a dark night, Windrum shinnied up a signpost, calmly struck a match and discovered that Ranville, his rendezvous point, was only a few miles off.
But some pathfinders were irretrievably lost. Two of them plunged out of the night sky and dropped squarely on the lawn before the headquarters of Major General Josef Reichert, commanding officer of the German 711th Division. Reichert was playing cards when the planes roared over, and he and the other officers rushed out onto the veranda—just in time to see the two Britishers land on the lawn.
It would have been hard to tell who was the more astonished, Reichert or the two pathfinders. The General’s intelligence officer captured and disarmed the two men and brought them up to the veranda. The astounded Riechert could only blurt out, “Where have you come from?” to which one of the pathfinders, with all the aplomb of a man who had just crashed a cocktail party, replied, “Awfully sorry, old man, but we simply landed here by accident.”
Even as they were led away to be interrogated, 570 American and British paratroopers, the first of the Allied forces of liberation, were setting the stage for the battle of D Day. On the landing zones lights were already beginning to flash up into the night sky.
*As a war correspondent I interviewed Madame Levrault in June 1944,. She had no idea of the man’s name or unit, but she showed me three hundred rounds of ammunition, still in their pouches, which the paratrooper had dropped. In 1958, when I began writing and interviewing D-Day participants for this
book, I was able to locate only a dozen of the original American pathfinders. One of them, Mr. Murphy, now a prominent Boston lawyer, told me that “after hitting the ground … I took my trench knife from my boot and cut myself out of the harness. Without knowing it I also cut away pouches carrying three hundred rounds of ammunition.” His story tallied in all respects with Madame Levrault’s, told to me fourteen years before.
2
WHAT’S HAPPENING?” yelled Major Werner Pluskat into the phone. Dazed and only half awake, he was still in his underwear. The racket of planes and gunfire had awakened him, and every instinct told him that this was more than a raid. Two years of bitter experience on the Russian front had taught the major to rely heavily on his instincts.
Lieutenant Colonel Ocker, his regimental commander, seemed annoyed at Pluskat’s phone call. “My dear Pluskat,” he said icily, “we don’t know yet what’s going on. We’ll let you know when we find out.” There was a sharp click as Ocker hung up.
The reply didn’t satisfy Pluskat. For the past twenty minutes planes had been droning through the flare-studded sky, bombing the coast to the east and the west. Pluskat’s coastal area in the middle was uncomfortably quiet. From his headquarters at Etreham, four miles from the coast, he commanded four batteries of the German 352nd Division—twenty guns in all. They covered one half of Omaha Beach.
Nervously, Pluskat decided to go over his regimental commander’s head; he phoned division headquarters and spoke with the 352nd’s intelligence officer, Major Block. “Probably just another bombing raid, Pluskat,” Block told him. “It’s not clear yet.”
Feeling a little foolish, Pluskat hung up. He wondered if he had been too impetuous. After all, there had been no alarm. In fact, Pluskat recalls, after weeks of on-again, off-again alerts this was one of the few nights when his men had been ordered to stand down.