Airborne (1997) (41 page)

This is where Bill Lee, who I described in the third chapter, came into play. Lee had been gently but persistently been nudging the War Department to initiate its own airborne program. He had seen combat in France during World War I, and while serving as a military attaché in Germany, had observed the early demonstrations of its Fallshirmjaeger units firsthand. After he returned to the States, Lee served as an instructor at Fort Benning, and then was transferred to the Chief of Infantry’s office in Washington. There he finally convinced his superiors to establish an all-volunteer test platoon of paratroopers. Equipped by the Air Corps and earning flying pay of thirty dollars per month (the average enlisted man made half that), they would be stationed at Lee’s old home base, Fort Benning.

The small cadre of jumpers was so tremendously successful that—again with some arm-twisting from Lee—it was expanded to battalion size by the fall of 1940 and christened the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion. As the conflict in Europe escalated and America began to mobilize for possible involvement, Lee was given authorization to create three more paratroop battalions, the 502nd, 503rd and 504th, which rapidly grew into six regiments after Pearl Harbor. In June of 1942, now-Brigadier General Lee returned from a trip to England with word that the British Army was manning and readying an airborne division for action, and strongly recommended that the United States do the same. Shortly afterward, not one, but two existing regular infantry divisions would be reshaped into airborne divisions—the 101 st and the 82nd. In keeping with the concept that paratroop units were best employed as a quick-strike assault force, these would be stripped-down divisions of 8,300 men each, not quite half the size of a normal “leg” infantry division. They would be made up of three infantry regiments (initially two glider and one parachute, a mix that would soon be reversed) in addition to antiaircraft, antitank, artillery, and other support units.

Command of the 101st went to Bill Lee, the irrepressible prime mover behind the airborne program. Though the 101 st had seen little action in the Great War, and was not yet fully reactivated, it had, in Lee’s own words, “no history, but a rendezvous with destiny.” The 82nd, by contrast, was already something of a military legend, having been involved in some of the roughest combat in the First World War. The 82nd Infantry Division had spent more time on the front lines than any other American division during the Great War. Known as the “All-American” Division because its fighting men were drawn from all states of the Union, the 82nd had given our country one of its most renowned war heroes, Sergeant Alvin C. York. This pacifist Tennessee gunslinger had received the Medal of Honor for single-handedly defeating an entire German battalion, and was portrayed by Gary Cooper in the famous film
Sergeant York.
Deactivated after the Treaty of Versailles, the 82nd was reactivated after Pearl Harbor. By the summer of 1942, the 82nd was stationed in murky, mosquito-ridden Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. It was there that the division, still nicknamed the All-American (though it was now almost entirely manned by volunteers from Southern National Guard units), completed basic training under the eye of its newly appointed commanding officer, General Matthew Ridgway, a straight-at-you, chin-out patriot and former West Pointer who was himself to become a towering figure in the history of America’s armed services.

By the first chill of autumn, the 82nd had been shifted over from Camp Claiborne to Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, where it remains based to the present day. Fort Bragg was marginally more hospitable than the unit’s previous home, and located near Pope Field, where its assigned air transport unit, the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, was based. After a rough adjustment period during which the exacting Ridgway fixed a number of organizational problems and shuffled a number of key personnel, advanced jump training got underway for the fully assembled division. Over the next several months two parachute infantry regiments, the 504th and, shortly afterward, the younger 505th, were moved from Fort Benning in Georgia to Fort Bragg. Command of the 504th went to Lieutenant Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, while Colonel (later General) James M. Gavin, Bill Lee’s former plans and training officer, was made CO of the 505th.

Like Ridgway, these men would become famous for their dynamic personalities and heroic exploits during the war. In fact, the independent, steel-backboned, Brooklyn-born “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin would instill such a powerful esprit de corps in his troops that they would have a tough time integrating with the rest of the 82nd. The 505th had a reputation for being as rowdily arrogant as they were courageous and superbly trained. Though an intense rivalry would develop between their units, Tucker and Gavin shared the conviction that a good commanding officer had to place himself at the center of the action with his men. Both did exactly that time and again as the war ground on, beginning with the 82nd’s chaotic trial by fire during the invasion of Sicily in June 1943, code-named Operation Husky.

After a great deal of wrangling among high-level planners, many of whom were enormously skeptical of the untested airborne and its strategic value in combat, the 82nd had been relegated to a supporting role in the overall scheme of the invasion: blocking any counterattack upon the flanks of amphibious U.S. forces as they made their beach landings in the Gulf of Gela, and then linking up with elements of Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”) to await further orders.

The paratroopers found themselves plagued with difficulties from the get-go. The division’s training exercises in North Africa were rushed and disorganized. Its pre-staging base in Oujda, French Morocco, was a hellish oven, where the tent camps were besieged with aggressive black flies the size of cherries and scouring windblown dust that caked in the eyes, nose, and throat of every man. During one of the training jumps, the desert siroccos had whipped up to over 30 mph/48 kph and scattered the troopers across the desert. Dozens of the troopers suffered multiple injuries and fractures. Their situation did not improve when the division was shipped to a makeshift airbase in Kairoun, Tunisia, in preparation for the assault. In that Muslim city, where thousands of the devoted were interred in tombs barely two feet underground, the air stank of centuries-old human rot, and morale began to falter. Also, the dysentery many of the troopers contracted from drinking tainted water hardly improved their situation. Only the start of the Sicilian invasion improved things.

The assault commenced on the night of June 10th, 1943. Bolstered by a single battalion of the 504th, Gavin’s 505th led off for the 82nd on D-Day, while the remaining two battalions of the 504th cooled their heels in Kairun. There they awaited word that they could jump into so-called “friendly territory” already seized by the 505th. However, things quickly began to go wrong for Gavin and his men. Entire squadrons of the troop transports missed their landmarks and took incorrect headings to their targets. This was in large part because their transport crews lacked night-flying experience. In addition, high winds caused other planes to break formation and overshoot their DZs, scattering the troopers all over Sicily. Some of them—including Gavin himself—wound up well behind enemy lines. Lost, out of contact with their officers, little groups of paratroopers (the LGOPs that we talked about earlier) wandered around the island for days, conducting improvised commando-style raids as they searched for the Allied front lines. Amazingly, they probably did more damage to the Axis effort in Sicily by these raids than taking their original planned objectives would have done.

Bad as the initial drop had been, even greater catastrophe befell Tucker’s 504 on the night of D-Day+1. While Ridgway had argued for the regiment’s C-47 transport planes to fly a course that would take them
around
the ground and naval forces massed at the beachhead, he was overruled, and the long aerial column was instead routed
over
the two thousand vessels of the invasion fleet. To ensure a safe corridor for the paratroop drop, Allied units were ordered to refrain from firing at aircraft under any circumstances. But Luftwaffe airstrikes had been harassing American and British troops since early that morning, pounding the beaches and scoring hits on the transport and supply vessels. Nerves were on edge, and as the 504th approached the beach slightly ahead of schedule, somebody down below opened fire. Within seconds, antiaircraft batteries everywhere were letting loose with everything they had. Reuben Tucker’s own C-47 transport took over one thousand direct hits, and the paratroopers aboard were forced to bail out into hellish, swirling constellations of AAA fire. Tucker miraculously survived—along with most of his troopers. Others did not fare as well. Nearly half the planes that launched from North Africa were hit, twenty-three of them never making it back to base. Thirty-seven others sustained serious damage. The combined casualties among the paratroopers and airmen numbered in excess of 300. Three days after the two disastrous drops, only 3,024 of the 5,307 troops the 82nd took into Sicily were accounted for. The tragic failure of these operations not only devastated the division’s already sagging morale, but cast a shadow over its future viability in combat. Things were soon to change, though.

Once the division had returned to its base in North Africa, Ridgway rapidly began to apply the hard-won lessons of Operation Husky. Transport and coordination procedures were changed so that drop accuracy would be improved and the disastrous “friendly fire” incident on D+1 would not be repeated. Pathfinder units were created and equipped to help guide the transport aircraft to their drop zones (DZs). Equipment was also improved, particularly antitank weapons. British 6-pounder/57mm antitank guns were added to the division’s equipment, though the anemic American “bazooka” would be a continued failure for another year. One thing that had gone right for the paratroops was their performance once they had hit the ground. No less an authority than General George Patton was full of praise for their fighting abilities and spirit. They would need it for the coming invasion of the Italian mainland, Operation Avalanche.

A number of different staff proposals were made for the employment of the division, but in the end the 82nd would be used to close a dangerous 10-mile/16-kilometer gap between British and American ground forces at Salerno. Three regiments (the 504th, 505th, and 509th) with all their gear were dropped on the night of September 14th, 1943, with excellent results. The lessons from Sicily had been rapidly applied, and the 82nd took all of its assigned objectives. Unfortunately, various units of the 82nd wound up paying for their excellent performance by being held on the line in Italy long after their airborne missions had been completed. As a result, many superbly trained paratroops wound up being killed in worthless firefights.

Even more disturbing was the use of the 504th as an assault infantry unit during the disastrous Anzio invasion near Rome in early 1944. Once again, the paratroops of the 82nd were used in a role that regular infantry units would have been perfectly adequate for. Other than a number of needless casualties, the only effect of the Anzio campaign on the 82nd was to deny the division the use of the 504th for the upcoming invasion of France.

The invasion of Normandy in June of 1944 was to be the formal validation of airborne warfare for the Allies. Three full divisions of airborne troops (the American 82nd and 101st, as well as the British 6th) would be dropped behind the Normandy beachhead in the hours just before and after the landings. The idea was that the airborne units would block the advance of counterattacking German forces into the vulnerable Allied units on the five landing beaches while they gathered their strength. Some Allied leaders, especially the testy British Air Marshal Leigh-Mallory, tried to have the drop canceled for fear of the heavy casualties that might occur. Fortunately, General Eisenhower realized the need to get maximum combat power on the ground as quickly as possible, and the drops were on.

For the Normandy invasion, the 82nd was assigned the tough job of taking and holding a series of roads and crossroads behind the Utah beachhead. It was going to be a tough target. The famous German “Desert Fox,” Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, had personally supervised the anti-invasion measures, and numerous obstacles had been laid to specifically defeat airborne operations. Large numbers of low-lying fields had been flooded to drown heavily laden paratroops when they landed, and “Rommel’s Asparagus” (thick poles topped with barbed wire and/or mines) had been planted in fields to destroy gliders. Despite all these enemy preparations, the drop plans went forward, and were ready by early June.

The night of the June 5th/6th, 1944, was a nightmarish one for both the troopers of the 82nd and their German opponents. Bad weather had delayed the start of D-Day twenty-four hours until just after midnight of the 5th. Even with the delay, the weather conditions were barely adequate for the invasion to begin. The worst effects were reserved for the troopers of the airborne assault, whose aircraft became hopelessly mixed and lost over Normandy. It was the nightmare of Sicily all over again as all three regiments of the 82nd (the 505th, 507th, and 508th) were scattered in the darkness. Some of the transport crews flew all the way across Normandy, dumping their loads of paratroops into the sea to drown. The worst disaster was to befall a company of the 505th, which overshot its drop zone and landed in the middle of the town square in Sainte-Mère-Eglise. German troops, coincidentally fighting a fire there, massacred the American troopers in their chutes. The next day, the 505th fought not only to take the town, but to recover the bodies of their dead comrades.

All around Normandy, mixed LGOPs, sometimes containing troopers from both the 82nd and 101st, fought to take objectives, and hold the line while the invasion troops fought their way off the Utah and Omaha beach-heads. By afternoon, though, help was on the way in the form of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, which swooped in to reinforce the division. Despite some heavy losses of gliders to obstacles, most of the regiment made it down safely, and began to help in the gathering fight. The 82nd would be in continuous deployment for the next thirty-three days, sustaining casualties equal to 46 percent of the troopers who had been dispatched to France. Once again, the division had found that success was rewarded with more combat. Their unrivaled tactical skill on the battlefield kept them committed to battle long after they should have been returned to England for training and refitting. However, they had done their job well, and the fears of those like Leigh-Mallory had been proven groundless, in spite of the problems during the drop.