Band of Brothers (8 page)

Each officer had to learn the company mission by heart, know his own and every other platoon’s mission to the most minute detail, and be able to draw a map of the whole area by memory. One point was made very clear, that the Germans relied less on their fixed coastal defenses than on their ability to counterattack. Mobile reserve units would start hitting the 4th Infantry wherever its units threatened to make it across the causeways. The briefers therefore impressed strongly on the officers that, regardless of where their platoons were or how many of their men they had managed to collect, if they spotted German units moving toward the causeways, they should fire upon them with everything they had. Even a five-minute delay thus imposed on the Germans could mean the difference between success and failure at Utah Beach. The importance of each mission was likewise emphasized, most effectively. Winters said, “I had the feeling that we were going in there and win the whole damn thing ourselves. It was our baby.”

On June 3, Winters and the other platoon leaders walked their men through the briefing tent, showing them the sand tables and maps, telling them what they had learned.

·    ·    ·

Sergeant Guarnere needed to use the latrine. He grabbed a jacket and strolled over to the facility. Sitting down, he put his hand in a pocket and pulled out a letter. It was addressed to Sergeant Martin — Guarnere hadtaken Martin’s jacket by mistake — but Guarnere read it anyway. Martin’s wife was the author; they had been married in Georgia in 1942, and Mrs. Martin knew most of the members of the company. She wrote, “Don’t tell Bill [Guarnere], but his brother was killed in Cas[s]ino, Italy.”

“You can’t imagine the
anger
I felt,” Guarnere said later. “I swore that when I got to Normandy, there ain’t no German going to be alive. I was like a maniac. When they sent me into France, they turned a killer loose, a wild man.”

·    ·    ·

On June 4, Easy was issued its ammunition, $10 worth of new French francs just printed in Washington, an escape kit containing a silk map of France, a tiny brass compass, and a hacksaw. The men were given an American flag to sew on the right sleeves of their jump jackets. Officers removed their insignia from their uniforms and painted vertical stripes on the back of their helmets; N.C.O.s had horizontal stripes. Everyone was given the verbal challenge, “Flash,” the password, “Thunder,” and the response, “Welcome.” They were also given small metal dime-store crickets, for alternative identification: one squeeze
(click-clack)
to be answered by two (
click-clack … click-clack).

The men spent the day cleaning weapons, sharpening knives, adjusting the parachutes, checking equipment over and over, chain-smoking cigarettes. Many of the men shaved their heads, or got Mohawk haircuts (bald on each side, with a one- or two-inch strip of short hair running from the forehead to the back of the neck). Pvts. Forrest Guth and Joseph Liebgott did the cutting, at 15¢ per man.

Colonel Sink came round, saw the haircutting going on, smiled, and said, “I forgot to tell you, some weeks ago we were officially notified that the Germans are telling French civilians that the Allied invasion forces would be led by American paratroopers, all of them convicted felons and psychopaths, easily recognized by the fact that they shave their heads or nearly so.”

·    ·    ·

First Lt. Raymond Schmitz decided to ease the tension with some physical activity. He challenged Winters to a boxing match. “Come on, Winters, let’s go out there behind the tents and box.”

“No, go away.”

Schmitz kept after him. Finally he said, “O.K., let’s wrestle.”

“Dammit, enough, you’ve been egging me long enough, let’s go.”

Winters had been a wrestler in college. He took Schmitz down immediately, but he threw him too hard. Schmitz suffered two cracked vertebrae, went to the hospital, and did not get to go to Normandy. His assistant leader of the 3d platoon, 2d Lt. Robert Mathews, took his place, with Sergeant Lipton as his second in command. The rest of that day and night on up to the time the men strapped on their parachutes, Winters had a constant line of troopers asking him, with smiles on their faces, to break their arms or crack their vertebrae.

General Taylor circulated among the men. He told them, “Give me three days and nights of hard fighting, then you will be relieved.” That sounded good. Three days and three nights, Winters thought to himself. I can take that. Taylor also said that when the C-47s crossed the coastline of France, he wanted every man to stand up; if a trooper got hit by flak, he wanted him to be standing and take it like a man. There was a point to the order that went beyond bravado; if a plane got hit the men hooked up and ready to jump would stand some chance of getting out. Taylor told Malarkey’s platoon to fight with knives until daylight, “and don’t take any prisoners.”

That night, June 4, the company got an outstanding meal. Steak, green peas, mashed potatoes, white bread, ice cream, coffee, in unlimited quantities. It was their first ice cream since arriving in England nine months earlier. Sergeant Martin remembered being told, “When you get ice cream for supper, you know that’s the night.” But a terrific wind was blowing, and just as the men were preparing to march to their C-47s, they were told to stand down. Eisenhower had postponed the invasion because of the adverse weather.

Easy went to a wall tent to see a movie. Gordon remembered that it was
Mr. Lucky,
starring Cary Grant and Laraine Day. Sergeants Lipton and Elmer Murray (the company operations sergeant) skipped the movie. They spent the evening discussing different combat situations that might occur and how they would handle them.

·    ·    ·

By the afternoon of June 5, the wind had died down, the sky cleared a bit. Someone found cans of black and green paint. Men began to daub their faces in imitation of the Sioux at the Little Bighorn, drawing streaks of paint down their noses and foreheads. Others took charcoal and blackened their faces.

At 2030 hours the men lined up by the planeload, eighteen to a group, and marched off to the hangars. “Nobody sang, nobody cheered,” Webster wrote. “It was like a death march.” Winters remembered going past some British antiaircraft units stationed at the field, “and that was the first time I’d ever seen any real emotion from a Limey, they actually had tears in their eyes.”

At the hangars, each jumpmaster was given two packs of papers, containing an order of the day from Eisenhower and a message from Colonel Sink, to pass around to the men. “Tonight is the night of nights,” said Sink’s. “May God be with each of you fine soldiers.” Eisenhower’s began, “Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.… Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

In addition to the exhortations, the jumpmasters passed around airsickness pills. Who thought of the pills is a mystery; why they were passed around an even greater mystery, as airsickness had seldom been a problem.

Something else was new. The British airborne had come up with the idea of “leg bags.” These bags contained extra ammunition, radios, machine-gun tripods, medical gear, high explosives, and other equipment. They were to be attached to individual paratroopers by a quick release mechanism and fastened to his parachute harness by a coiled 20-foot rope. When the chute opened, the trooper was supposed to hold the weight of the leg pack, pull its release to separate it from his leg, and let it down to the end of the rope. It would hit the ground before he did. In theory, the trooper would land on top of the bundle and not have to waste any time looking for his equipment. It seemed sensible, but no one in the American airborne had ever jumped with a leg bag. The Yanks liked the idea of the thing, and stuffed everything they could into those leg bags — mines, ammunition, broken-down Tommy guns, and more.

The men threw their kits, parachutes, and leg bags into the waiting trucks, climbed in themselves, and were driven out to the waiting planes.

“With that done,” Winters wrote in his diary, “we went to work harnessing up. It’s here that a good jumpmaster can do the most for his men. Getting all that equipment on, tied down, make it comfortable and safe, then a parachute over the top, calls for a lot of ingenuity and sales talk to satisfy the men that all’s well.”

Dressed for battle, they sat under the wings of the planes, waiting. The nervousness increased. “This is the jump where your problems begin
after
you land,” they told one another. It was the “$10,000 jump” (the men had $10,000 G.I. life insurance). Men struggled to their feet to go to the edge of the runway to relieve themselves, got back, sat down, and two minutes later repeated the process. Joe Toye recalled Lieutenant Meehan coming over to his plane to tell the men, “No prisoners. We are not taking any prisoners.”

At 2200, mount up. The jumpmasters pushed their men up the steps, each of them carrying at least 100 pounds, many 150 pounds. One 101st trooper spoke for all 13,400 men in the two airborne divisions when he got to the door of his C-47, turned to the east, and called, “Look out, Hitler! Here we come!”

At 2310 the C-47s began roaring down the runway. When they reached 1,000 feet, they began to circle, getting into a V of Vs formation, three planes to each V. As they straightened out for France, most of the men found it difficult to stay awake. This was the effect of those pills. Through that night, and into the next day, paratroopers had trouble staying awake. Joe Toye did fall asleep on his flight: “I was never so calm in all my life,” he recalled. “Jesus, I was more excited on practice jumps.”

On Winters’s plane, Pvt. Joe Hogan tried to get a song going, but it was soon lost in the roar of the motors. On Gordon’s plane, as on most, men were lost in their own thoughts or prayers. Pvt. Wayne Sisk of West Virginia broke the mood by calling out, “Does anybody here want to buy a good watch?” That brought a roar of laughter and a lessening of the tension.

Winters prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through it, prayed that he wouldn’t fail. “Every man, I think, had in his mind, ‘How will I react under fire?’
 
”

·    ·    ·

With Lieutenant Schmitz in hospital, Sergeant Lipton was jumpmaster on his plane. The pilot gave the paratroopers a choice; they could ride with the door off, giving them fresh air and a chance to get out if the plane was hit, or ride with the door in place, which would allow them to smoke. They chose to take it off, which allowed Lipton to lie on the floor with his head partly out the door. Most of the men were asleep, or nearly so, a consequence of the airsickness pills.

As the C-47 crossed the Channel, Lipton saw a sight no one had ever seen before, nor would anyone ever see again, a sight that every man who was in the air that night never forgot: the invasion fleet, 6,000 vessels strong, heading toward Normandy.

Gordon Carson was with Lieutenant Welsh. As the plane crossed the Channel, Welsh told the men near the front, “Look down.” They did, “and all you could see was wakes. No one ever saw so many ships and boats before.” Carson commented, “You had to be a little bit awed that you were part of a thing that was so much greater than you.”

·    ·    ·

At 0100, June 6, the planes passed between the islands of Guernsey and Jersey. In his plane, the pilot called back to Winters, “Twenty minutes out.” The crew chief removed the door of the plane, giving Winters, standing No. 1, a rush of fresh air and a view of the coast. “Stand up and hook up,” he called out. The red light went on.

At 0110, the planes passed over the coast and into a cloud bank. This caused the formation to break up. The lead V plowed straight ahead, but the Vs to each side veered off, the one to the right breaking away in that direction, the one on the left over the opposite way. This was the natural, inevitable reaction of the pilots, who feared midair collisions. When they broke out of the cloud bank, which was only a mile or two across, every pilot was on his own. Only the lead pilots had the device that would lead them to the Pathfinders’ Eureka signals;
⁴
with the formation gone, none of the others knew when or where to turn on the green light. They could only guess.

Lost, bewildered, frightened, the pilots immediately had another worry. Antiaircraft fire began coming up at them, blue, green, and red tracers indicating its path. It was light stuff, 20 and 40 mm. When it hit the planes, it made a sound like rocks being shaken in a tin can. On Harry Welsh’s plane, some ack-ack came through exactly where he had been sitting a minute before.

The pilots were supposed to slow down before turning on the green light, but as Gordon put it, “here they were thrust into the very jaws of this violence and they had never had one minute of combat experience, so they were absolutely terrified. And rather than throttle down, they were kind of like a fellow thinking with his feet, they thought with that throttle. And they said, ‘My God, common sense will tell me the quicker I get out of here, the better chance I have of surviving, and that’s unfortunate for the boys back there, but be that as it may, I’m getting out of here.’
 
”