War Stories III (16 page)

505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
3 Kilometers Northeast of Gela, Sicily
10 July 1943

I was assigned to the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment on 19 April '42, and was initially a company executive officer. Less than a year later I was promoted to captain and made a company commander. We all knew we were going someplace overseas in Europe, but didn't know where. We went by train to New York, and then boarded the
Monterrey
—a converted luxury liner for four hundred passengers. But it wasn't quite so luxurious for
six thousand
soldiers. We crossed the Atlantic and landed in North Africa as part of a large convoy with plenty of destroyer escorts.

A week before D-Day, we got maps of Sicily and aerial photos of our proposed objectives. We built sand tables, and duplicated exactly what the drop zone was supposed to look like, and knew where all our checkpoints were on the approach. We all memorized the map features and rehearsed at those sand tables with our troops, again and again.

We took off from Tunisia in a large flight of C-47s, just at dark on the night of July 9. The wind was blowing hard—in training we don't jump in wind over fifteen miles per hour because high winds will blow paratroopers off their drop zone or drag them across the ground. As we got
closer to Sicily the overcast and turbulence increased, but we were all in high spirits—it was our first combat jump and we were ready.

We were supposed to jump shortly after midnight but we were late because of the winds. The whole timing of H-Hour had been based on the moon and the tides. The airborne needed a little bit of moonlight and the amphibious force needed an incoming high tide.

Theoretically, we were to have moonlight as we jumped and then the moon would be setting and we'd be in complete darkness. But instead of moonlight we got pitch-black darkness; instead of low winds we got strong ones. But at this point we had to take what we could get.

I looked out the door of my plane, with my map in hand, and I saw that we were in the wrong place. So, I went up to the cockpit and showed the pilot on the map where we were compared to where we needed to be. Fortunately I was in the lead aircraft with the most experienced pilot in the formation. Not every pilot would have let a young paratroop captain tell him he needs to turn a nine-plane formation around, and go to some other place. But this pilot listened to me—even though anti-aircraft gunners on the ground were firing at us. He asked, “Do you want to circle around and try another shot at it?” I said “yes,” and we circled around, found the checkpoints, and he let us out about a mile from our intended drop zone.

The wind had to be blowing 40 to 45 miles per hour. I was blown over my DZ and landed right in the middle of a grape vineyard, and couldn't see my hand in front of my face. By dawn—as the amphibious forces were landing on the beach—right on time below us, I had collected up a handful of men from my company.

We knew very little about the enemy situation and had never been told that there was a German armored division parked on the spot that had been picked for our drop zone. If the higher command knew German Panzers were where we were going to jump, that word never got to us.

Shortly after daylight, we moved into an enemy trench line that one of my squads had captured. Then, German tanks started heading our way. Thankfully, the 1st Infantry Division had given me an artillery forward
observer. So I told him, “Let's get some fire out there. They're going to overrun us here in this trench. It's better for us to be hit with our own stuff, than for them to crush us with those tanks.”

He got on the radio and very quickly a 155 mm artillery battery down on the beach opened up. A “one-five-five” round hit the lead tank and it caught fire. You could hear the screams of that German crew from inside that tank a half-mile away. And then the tank exploded in front of us. That kind of dismayed the rest of the Panzers.

Gavin had ordered us, “If you land somewhere and don't know where you are, just find the nearest enemy and attack.” Well, inasmuch as they were shooting at us when we exited the plane, and after we got on the ground, we didn't have any trouble finding them.

We moved a few hundred yards and were taken under fire by a machine gun. After crawling forward a bit, I could see that it wasn't just a machine gun, but a whole series of concrete pillboxes. We needed more firepower.

I got on the radio and told my platoon leaders, “I'll fire three shots close together, and everybody assemble on me.” We got together and checked what we had: carbines, M1s, two light machine guns, and plenty of ammunition. But we needed a bazooka—an anti-armor rocket launcher. I called a bazooka man over and I told him, “I want you to take your bazooka and crawl underneath that culvert, and put a round into that pillbox. And if any German tanks come up, you get out and shoot it in the rear.”

And he said, “That's a real good plan, Captain. Only one problem—I haven't seen my ammunition man since we jumped.” So of course he didn't have any ammunition for his bazooka.

I set up my mortars and machine guns to deliver supporting and suppression fires and the rest of us crawled up until we were right below the row of pillboxes. Then, we all lobbed grenades and assaulted the emplacements. It worked and we took out a whole row of fortifications.

We had killed a number of the enemy and captured ten Germans and about forty Italians. We told the Germans to pick up our stretchers and carry our wounded, but they clicked their heels together like good Germans
and said, “Nein.” But my paratroopers convinced them that they really should pick up those stretchers. They did, and we started moving down the plateau to link up with the 1st Division.

505th Parachute Infantry Regiment
8 Kilometers Northwest of Gela, Sicily
13 July 1943

We left America in June of '43—about a month before the invasion of Sicily. When we arrived in North Africa we immediately started practicing parachute jumps. On the night of July 9, we climbed aboard C-47s and just after midnight on the morning of the tenth, we jumped into Sicily, just like we had been trained.

I was carrying my Tommy gun, some grenades, and a knife, along with my reserve chute, helmet, equipment-pack with supplies, lot of ammo, and canteens. I probably weighed close to 200 pounds with all the equipment.

We landed inland of Gela, where our invasion forces were to come ashore after dawn. My stick must have jumped at an altitude of about 300 feet, because my chute barely opened before I hit. If we had jumped at 1,000 feet, the wind would have blown us even further off our DZ and the Germans would have picked us off as we came down. But because of the wind and the low altitude of the jump, a lot of our guys broke arms, legs, or their backs when they landed too hard.

I hit very hard and was unconscious for some time. When I came to it was very dark and there was all kind of firing going on and a lot of our transports overhead. One of our planes was hit right after dropping its stick of paratroopers and slammed into the side of a hill and burst into flames.

After I came to, I gathered about a dozen men around and tried to figure out where we were. There was no doubt that the inexperienced
pilots—probably because of the high winds—had missed our drop zone by several miles.

We were supposed to set up a roadblock to keep enemy reinforcements from getting to the guys who would be coming across the beach at dawn, so we headed toward higher ground. But as we got to the top of this hill at just about dawn, a group of German tanks was coming up the other side. We didn't anticipate having to take on tanks—we didn't even know they were on the island—particularly German Panzers. It was a real shock.

We scrambled to get off to the side of the column of tanks and I got my bazooka team—Pat Sheridan and John Rubluski—and they took out the lead tank. Now it was the Germans' turn to be shocked—they didn't know we were there.

A German officer commanding the Panzer group opened up the hatch on the turret of his tank to see if he could spot us, and we fired again. The bazooka round hit right beneath him on the turret and killed him. And then another tank came along and my bazooka team destroyed the treads on that tank and brought it to a stop. I think the impact of killing the commander of the unit made a difference when the German tanks showed up. Without their leader they didn't know what to do.

In the American Army every private was a general—meaning they could adapt. This wasn't the case with the German army. When their chain of command was broken they were helpless and didn't know what to do. It took them a good two or three hours to get a junior officer to organize them. They had a much larger force than our dozen men—and they were trying to move infantry up to where we were but every time they stood up to move, we would shoot them down.

They backed off a ways—out of bazooka range—and stated to hammer us with fire from their tanks. We had to pull back over the crest of the hill and pretty soon we were pinned down in a ditch with potato masher grenades raining down on us. They would throw grenades down into the ditch and we would throw them right back up at them. This continued for a long period of time until one of the tanks came around the side of the hill and turned its big gun on us.

We were trapped, outnumbered, and had a bunch of wounded. I was the senior man so I had to make the decision to surrender to save the lives of my men. That hurt—and it still does—because we were trained to be the best and never surrender. It was a terrible feeling but our consolation was in knowing that we knocked out their tanks and killed their commanding officer. That had bought a few hours for the guys on the beach. If nothing else, our little group had created confusion and delay among the Panzers. The tanks never did make it to the beach.