If Chaos Reigns: The Near-Disaster and Ultimate Triumph of the Allied Airborne Forces on D-Day, June 6, 1944

PREFACE

YOU ARE AN American paratrooper.

You are riding into your first battle inside the belly of a C-47 transport plane along with seventeen of your fellow troopers—young men with whom you have trained for over a year. Even though it is shortly after midnight and the interior of the plane is as dark as the night outside, and the faces of your buddies have been blackened with burnt cork, you still know who they are. For over a year you sweated with them, cursed with them, drank with them, laughed with them, went whoring with them. They are closer to you than brothers.

Across the narrow aisle of the transport plane you can see their eyes shining in the dark. You can make out the dim outline of all the equipment that is strapped onto their bodies and you silently marvel at the fact that some of them are burdened down with gear that weighs nearly as much—or more—than they do. No one talks, because talk is impossible in this roaring aluminum container of noise that is being assaulted by the constant blast coming from the two Pratt and Whitney engines outside. Any communication that must be done—stand up, hook up, check equipment, move to the door, go!—must be performed with hand signals by the jumpmaster kneeling by the open door on the port side near the rear of the aircraft.

You are suddenly engulfed in a foul odor; one of your buddies has just up-chucked his pre-invasion meal all over the floor in front of him, a trigger that causes a few others to do the same. You fight to keep your own meal down; try to take your mind off it. You think about home—your mom and dad and best girl—and wonder what they are doing at this exact moment. Probably sleeping. When they wake up, news of the invasion will be all over the newspapers and radio. No one will be able to talk about anything else for days. You wonder if your folks and your girl will wonder if you are a part of it, as you haven’t been able to let them know by letter for the past few weeks that you were preparing for the greatest aerial and amphibious invasion in the history of the world. You just found out it is called Operation Neptune, the initial assault portion of the overall invasion plan Operation Overlord, and here you are, on the leading edge of it. You are both scared and exhilarated.

Then another thought hits you as you try to calm the waves of bile cresting in your stomach. You wonder if you will make it out alive. Rumor has it that the airborne casualties are expected to be high, very high. You heard seventy or eighty percent. You shake the thought out of your mind. It’s the Germans who are going to die by the bushel full, not you and your buddies. No army has ever been as well trained or as well equipped as you and your buddies. Even if some of you get killed, it won’t be you. You’re too strong, too smart, too good a marksman, too good-looking, too lucky for that to happen. Plus, you have the element of surprise on your side. That big storm the day before has probably lulled those Nazi bastards into thinking the Allies won’t attack now—not for several days. Or weeks. Yeah, those Jerries don’t stand a chance. You touch the combat knife strapped to your boot. Why, the first one you see is as good as …

Suddenly, the small red light above the open door goes on and everyone’s head swivels toward it. It means that you are just minutes from the drop zone. The jumpmaster, the lieutenant in charge of your platoon, gets to his feet and, facing you, raises both arms—the signal to stand up. All of you struggle to your feet in the rocking plane as the lieutenant makes a hooking gesture, and you click your metal static line hook onto the steel cable above you that runs like a clothesline down the interior of the fuselage. You check your equipment and the equipment of the buddy in front of you to make sure that everything is as it should be. The jumpmaster then cups his hands behind his ears—a signal to slap the man in front of you on the arm and yell OK! in his ear to let him know that his equipment looks all right.

Everyone’s eyes are on the red light, tensed up, waiting for the moment it will change to green and the bodies begin streaming toward the door, almost pushing and shoving to get out and get this damned invasion started and over with. But then it happens. A giant flashbulb of light goes off outside and your plane is rocked as though a giant fist has just punched it, followed by what sounds like rocks being thrown against a metal roof. Flak! Anti-aircraft shells are being thrust up at you from the ground below! Through the windows and the open door you see a massive illuminated cats cradle—tracer bullets—coming up to knock your plane out of the sky. Still, the green light does not come on. You want to scream, C’mon! Let’s go! but you know that no one will hear you.

Then, someone in the line ahead of you goes down; he’s been hit by a bullet or chunk of shrapnel. He slumps to the vomit-covered floor, his mouth open in an unheard cry, drowned out by the sound of the engines and the explosions outside. Somebody unhooks his static line from the cable and pushes him aside to free the aisleway for the rest of you. You can’t worry about him now. He’s the lucky one. Like the flight crew, he’ll be going back to England and maybe he’ll survive.

Now, after an eternity, the green light comes on and you and your buddies charge forward in single file, pushing toward the open door and the brilliant fireworks display blazing across the night sky. You are in the doorway momentarily, the jumpmaster slaps you on the ass and you spring out instinctively as you have done hundreds of times in training. But no amount of training has prepared you for this moment. All around you are other planes, other jumpers, explosions—a glimpse of hell.

You are just above the treetops when your parachute opens with a strong tug against your groin and shoulders, and you see tracers flashing past you like crazed lightning bugs, each one snapping angrily as it zips by. Before you have a chance to blink you are suddenly on the ground, your feet and legs being absorbed into a cold, wet, squishy marsh. Now the rest of you is in the water and you lie prone as the bullets dash over you in all directions and you struggle to release yourself from the imprisonment of your parachute harness.

All around is darkness punctuated by flashes of munitions, black sky scraped by razor-thin streaks of light, the smell of grass and mud and water and torn-up earth. You look around for your buddies, the men who jumped from the plane with you, but there’s no other friendly face around. You are all alone in a strange, hostile land surrounded by people whose one goal is to kill you, just as you have come to kill them. You hear the gutteral sounds of German being spoken somewhere near and the metallic racking of a round being chambered. Your breath comes in fast, tight clumps as the reality of the situation sinks in. You know you are not going to make it out alive.

YOU ARE A British glider pilot.

You are at the controls of a Horsa glider being towed to the northern coast of France under the cover of darkness. For over an hour you have been straining to keep your engineless craft under control as it has been towed along, and your arms, legs, and eyes are weary from the intense concentration and hard physical work. Your glider is more than a Horsa; it’s a horse, a wild stallion that keeps bobbing up and down, trying to wrest control away from you and your co-pilot, but you know you can’t relax your grip on the steering yoke for an instant or else you and the twenty-eight glider troops riding in the fuselage behind you will plunge into the black English Channel 6,000 feet below.

Occasionally, you dare divert your eyes from the rear of the Albemarle bomber that is towing you and the 200-foot tow line that connects your Horsa with the plane that you are struggling to keep taut, to glance out the cockpit window at the scene below: thousands of tiny white streaks that are the wakes of thousands of ships on their way from England to France as part of Operation Overlord/Neptune. You are part of the operation too—the very first part. Your job is to deliver your soldiers safely to Normandy so that they can go about their business of securing the eastern flank of the invasion area from a German counterattack.

So far, so good, you’ve drawn no ground fire; the Germans must be asleep at this early hour. And then it happens. As you cross the coastline the tracers start to come up at you—bright, skinny fingers trying to find you in the dark to puncture you, to bring you down. But there’s nothing you can do about it, no evasive action you can take. You are the proverbial sitting duck.

Then the voice of the Albemarle pilot comes over the intercom into your headphones: Time to cast off. Good luck, chaps. You pull the mechanism that releases the tow rope and gradually silence engulfs you, the sound of the bomber’s engines fading into the night, a silence punctuated now by the sounds of bursting anti-aircraft shells. But their aim is off and you try to push the danger out of your mind, concentrating only on the dimly lit instruments on the panel in front of you while your co-pilot searches the dark landscape for the landmarks that will indicate you have found the correct landing zone.

You glance at the compass and steer onto a heading of 180o magnetic, trim the flaps a bit, lose some speed, now down to ninety miles per hour. More flap, cut the speed. Your co-pilot pipes up: "LZ dead ahead.

Thirty seconds." What’s my altitude? Five hundred, good … four hundred, three hundred. Steady, steady. We’re overloaded, but it’s too late to worry about that now. Just guide her in as you’ve done so many times before in training.

You turn to the lieutenant behind you, sitting with the troops in back. Thirty seconds, sir, you say, and he gives the command for his men to link arms and lift their feet. Your attention is now riveted on your Perspex windscreen, watching the landscape come up at you. There’s the copse of trees at the edge of the pasture you were expecting to see—just like the terrain model you studied for hours. You go right over it. And beyond, there’s the church steeple in the village. You’re in the right spot. Jolly good—you’ve done it. And no one’s firing at you.

Full flaps now. Perfect. A few white cows in the dark pasture are running for their lives at your approach—you smile briefly at the sight. Nose up slightly, and then your wheels hit the wet grass and soft earth. The brakes are useless. You release the arrestor parachute to slow you down. Nothing. There’s a pole directly ahead; it shears off your starboard wing with a terrible noise of wood ripping and crunching. You skew to the right. The black shape of a hedgerow—a great bloody bank of earth topped with trees—looms up in front of you but you are powerless to avoid it. Wham! A tremendous jolt hits as you are shoved violently into the hedgerow, your seat belt nearly tearing you in half, and you feel a sudden, sharp pain in your legs. You hear the sickening sound of plywood and Perspex shattering, the terrified screams of the troops behind you, the sound of automatic weapons opening up, bullets tearing through the plywood shell of your glider.

As the sound of gunfire intensifies, everything goes black.

THIS WAS THE reality for the airborne and glider forces on D-Day, 6 June 1944—a day like none other in the history of warfare, exemplifying the ultimate conjoined glory and horror that is war. And leading the way were the American, British, and Canadian airborne and glider troops whose mission many—even in the highest echelons—thought was doomed to end in catastrophic failure. Yet, without their participation and sacrifice in Operation Neptune, Operation Overlord likely would have turned out very differently.

This is their story.

U.S. airborne and glider routes into the Cotentin Peninsula on D-Day.

INTRODUCTION

"Attack your enemy where he is not prepared;

appear where you are not expected."

—Sun Tsu, The Art of War

I CANNOT APPROVE your plan, the stiff and formal British Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory bluntly told American Lieutenant General Omar Nelson Bradley. It is much too hazardous in the undertaking. Your losses will be excessive—certainly far more than the gains are worth. I’m sorry, General Bradley, but I cannot go along on it with you.

Bradley, commanding the Twelfth U.S. Army Group, which would, in just a few days, land 55,000 soldiers on two Normandy beachheads code named Utah and Omaha, was stunned at Leigh-Mallory’s complete and sudden rejection of the carefully crafted plan to drop by parachute and glider two American airborne divisions shortly after midnight of D-Day.

His shock—and dismay—was understandable. Just weeks before, Leigh-Mallory, whose responsibilities in the upcoming invasion included the Allies’ entire tactical air operations—from reconnaissance to providing air cover for the troops landing ashore in boats to the dropping of paratroops and the landing of glider forces—had endorsed the airborne plan. And now, on the very threshold of the start of the biggest and most important combined sea and air invasion in history, Leigh-Mallory was pulling the rug out from under what everyone had agreed was an essential component of the overall plan.

Bradley stared incredulously at the dapper, humorless Britisher with the immaculate, slicked back hair and tidy moustache, no doubt wanting to reach across the table in General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s paneled Victorian office and strangle him. Summoning all his self-control, Bradley paused for a moment, then said, Very well, sir, if you insist on cutting out the airborne attack, then I must ask that we eliminate the Utah assault. I am not going to land on that beach without making sure we’ve got the exits behind it.

After months of studying aerial photographs of the area, Bradley knew that Allied control of a handful of roads—elevated causeways that traversed fields and pastures the Germans had flooded to forestall any sort of airborne landings behind the beachheads—was absolutely essential in allowing the seaborne troops to advance inland, not to mention preventing German reinforcements from rushing in to halt the invasion at the water’s edge.

Leigh-Mallory glanced over at the implacable Montgomery, who said nothing but must have been blanching inwardly at this unexpected turn of events, then calmly responded in his clipped upper-class accent: Then let me make it clear that if you insist upon this airborne operation, you’ll do it in spite of my opposition. Turning to Monty, Leigh-Mallory stated, If General Bradley insists upon going ahead, he will have to accept full responsibility for the operation. I don’t believe it will work.

Internally fuming, Bradley said in his plain Missouri accent, That’s perfectly agreeable to me. I’m in the habit of accepting responsibility for my operations.

Montgomery, uncomfortable with his feuding subordinates, rapped on the table and spoke quietly in his high-pitched voice. "That is not at all necessary, gentlemen. I shall assume full responsibility for the operation," he proclaimed. With that, the contentious meeting moved on to other D-Day matters. But the rancor hung in the air like a barrage balloon.¹

WITH THE ENORMOUS complexity of the airborne/glider phase of the operation, and with all the variables that had to work perfectly and at precisely timed intervals—not to mention other factors such as counting on the Germans being taken by surprise, no enemy aerial activity to intercept the Allied air lift, and the weather to cooperate—it was no wonder that Air Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory expected the American forces to meet with disaster. As far as he was concerned, too much was being trusted to luck—a commodity that can just as easily be granted to the enemy as to one’s own side.

Still, the pessimistic Leigh-Mallory would not abandon his opposition to the American airborne portion of the plan. On 29 May 1944, he wrote a letter to Ike—General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Commander of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)—outlining his concerns and reiterating his opinion that the airborne operation behind Utah Beach was doomed to fail and must be canceled. He predicted that Operation Neptune, the assault phase of Operation Overlord, was likely to yield results so far short of what [you] expect and require that if the success of the seaborne assault … depends on the airborne, it will be entirely prejudiced.²

In addition to all his other crushing worries and responsibilities, Ike read Leigh-Mallory’s letter with a worried heart. Its premonition of disaster—a terrible prediction that the Americans would lose (killed, wounded, missing) half of their paratrooper strength and seventy percent of their glider strength, not to mention unacceptable losses of C-47 transport aircraft in the first few hours of D-Day if Ike went ahead with the drop—weighed heavily on him.³

The tall, balding Kansan pondered Leigh-Mallory’s words. If he disregarded his air marshal’s recommendations and the airborne/glider troops suffered massive casualties, the seaborne invasion at Utah Beach might be stopped on the sands and thrown back. And if the Utah portion of the invasion failed, what would happen to the rest of the operation?

Ike—a hopeless chain-smoker—lit another cigarette and considered his options, which seemed to be diminishing by the minute.

ONE COULD ARGUE that the Allies’ momentous 6 June 1944 invasion of France, famously known as D-Day, actually began on 9 April 1940. That was the date on which Nazi Germany shocked the world by launching Unternehmen Weserübung (Operation Weser Exercise)—the invasion of neutral Norway—with history’s first combined military assault by air, sea, and ground forces.* With a single stroke, Weserübung introduced a wholly new and revolutionary idea to the conduct of warfare—the concept of vertical envelopment. For the first time, troops could be delivered to a battlefield and inserted either behind enemy lines or on top of an objective. Suddenly the traditional, age-old horizontal movement of infantry units had been rendered, if not obsolete or irrelevant, at least incomplete. It was as though winged chess pieces had been introduced to the staid game to throw all the old strategies out of balance.

This paradigm shift began early on that crisp spring morning when German warships slipped undetected into Norwegian waters and began bombarding coastal defenses. Later that day, after the Norwegian government bravely rejected Germany’s surrender demands, plane after plane began disgorging parachute troops, or Fallschirmjäger, at key locations. The parachutists were members of Luftwaffe General der Flieger Kurt Student’s 7th Flieger Division, dropping onto the Fornebu airfield near Oslo and at the Sola Air Station near Stavanger. Other 7th Flieger elements floated to earth at Narvik to reinforce sea-landed mountain troops and complete the taking of that vital port.

In a single day, the seven months of tension-filled inactivity facetiously called the Sitzkrieg that followed Germany’s 1 September 1939 invasion of Poland,* and the subsequent declarations of war against Germany by France and Great Britain were swept away. The fighting was on in earnest, with Hitler’s thrust against Norway designed to grab ports and naval bases that would allow him to threaten Britain and dominate the North Atlantic; only then could his long-planned invasion of France and the Low Countries proceed. Owning Norwegian coastal waters would also permit Germany to keep receiving the vital shipments of Swedish iron ore on which its war machine depended.

Intelligence reports and warnings about the impending invasion of Norway had fallen on deaf ears; the government of President Johan Nygaarsvold ignored the signs. But despite being caught more or less by surprise, the Norwegians put up a stiff defense. Some sixty Fallschirmjäger were either killed or wounded by machine-gun fire spitting from a solitary bunker at the Sola airfield before a grenade knocked it out. At Narvik, the fighting was also intense, with French and British troops coming to the aid of the Norwegians. But the Luftwaffe controlled the airspace and pounded the French and British warships and troop transports. The fighting went on for weeks, and on 15 May the Germans dropped a battalion of parachutists to help turn the tide at Narvik and hold onto the prize.⁴

Although brave, the Norwegian defenders were no match for the better-trained Germans—nor for the fact that the pro-Nazi Vidkun Quisling, head of Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian Fascist Party, had taken control of the government and betrayed his country to the enemy.⁵

WHILE BRITAIN AND France were still trying to respond to events in Norway and bring some semblance of order to their largely haphazard and ineffective counterattacks, Hitler thrust the second horn of his two-pronged strategy into France and the Low Countries. This million-man invasion—known as Fall Gelb (Case Yellow)—was an unimagined success, shocking in its audacity and terrible in its result. Driving as they did in World War I through the same impenetrable Ardennes Forest—this time with motorized infantry and panzer forces and using paratroops to quickly overwhelm the defenses in Holland, Luxembourg, France, and Belgium—the Germans scored a victory on a staggering scale. As one historian noted, Large-scale operations early in the war indicated that airborne forces could effectively wage full-scale operations.⁶

As if to go its own Operation Weserübung one better, Germany added another strikingly new facet of warfare to Fall Gelb—the military glider (Segelflugzeug). While Fallschirmjäger dropped and surrounded government buildings in the Hague and seized Waalhaven Airport at Rotterdam, along with key parts of the city, glider troops also made their first appearance on the battlefield. To get around the provisions of the Versailles Treaty that forbade Germany from developing an air force, a huge civilian glider program had been instituted in the interwar years that taught thousands of future Luftwaffe pilots to fly, and now they were putting that training to use.

But probably no battle of the opening days of the war was more pivotal in proving the potential worth of glider operations than the assault on the mighty Eben Emael fortress, ten miles north of Liege, Belgium, on the Albert Canal.

CREDIT FOR THIS new concept in tactics probably must go to Adolf Hitler, who, according to British General Sir John Hackett, "inspired the concept of a glider-borne coupde-main himself. Student and his Chief of Operations Staff, Major Heinrich Trettner, took the idea up enthusiastically and went into the planning of the whole highly complicated operation with their customary vigour and in the utmost secrecy."⁷

The 1,000-man Belgian garrison of Eben Emael thought themselves invincible and their home impregnable. After all, what enemy in his right mind would dare to expend troops against this formidable concrete fortress emplaced into a cliff a hundred feet above the waters of the Albert Canal, or waste bombs or artillery shells on its steel-reinforced concrete walls and roofs many meters thick?

Early on 10 May 1940, the Belgians got their answer, and the surprise of their lives, when eleven DFS 230 gliders, carrying a force of two officers and eighty-three men—all of whom were engineers trained in demolitions—swooped down on the fortress and captured fourteen of its eighteen guns in twenty minutes. It took another day of hard fighting to finally capture the entire fort, but the act was audacious and stunning in its concept and execution. The entire garrison was taken prisoner, to the Germans’ loss of six killed and twenty wounded. An additional thirty-one gliders landed at three key bridges over the Albert Canal, which the glider troops quickly won from the defenders. As Student declared, It was a deed of exemplary daring and decisive significance.⁸

The world was as stunned by the operation as it would have been had Orson Welles’ terrifying 1939 radio program involved real rather than fictional Martians. The nervous period of waiting, known as the Phoney War, when virtually no military action had taken place following Germany’s invasion of Poland and the tit-for-tat declarations of war, had been shattered in an instant. The New York Times’ banner headline that stretched across its entire front page the next day screamed, "DUTCH AND BELGIANS RESIST NAZI DRIVE; ALLIED FORCES MARCH IN TO DO BATTLE; CHAMBLERLAIN RESIGNS, CHURCHILL PREMIER." The first eleven pages of the paper were devoted to news about these developments; not until Pearl Harbor would one story so completely dominate the Times.⁹

Initially, no one could figure out how a small group of lightly armed glider-borne soldiers could have single-handedly conquered one of the world’s most technologically advanced military bastions. There had to be something more than gliders. Time magazine reported that, despite stiff Belgian resistance and the aid of the British Royal Air Force and French Air Corps to try and repel the invaders, "the quick fall of Eben Emael fortress, great new strongpoint of the Liege corner, was a heavy blow, whether brought about by a ‘secret weapon’* or sheer power."¹⁰

Although gliders or paratroopers were not needed to subdue France, that country, after initial sputtering efforts to hold off the invaders, waved the white flag on 22 June 1940. The British Expeditionary Force, which had been rushed across the Channel to aid its Gallic neighbor shortly after Fall Gelb was launched, was forced into a massive evacuation back to England from Dunkirk at the end of May.

Within a few short weeks, the combination of aerial and naval bombardment and a fast, violent assault by ground, seaborne, airborne, and glider forces had brought six nations—Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—to their knees and taught the world a new German word: Blitzkrieg.

Nazi Germany’s brilliant use of airborne and glider troops in the early months of World War II shocked the United States, Great Britain, and Canada into action. Before the German invasion of Norway, not much consideration had been given to the concept of vertical envelopment. But the stunning success of the Fallschirmjäger and Segelflugzeug formations would change warfare forever, just as the airplane, tank, and machine gun did.¹¹

AS THE SECOND world war within a generation marched onward, and the U.S., Britain, and their allies gradually gained the initiative, the possibility of invading and regaining the European continent became a real possibility. The question of how to succeed in such a mission loomed large. Small-scale invasions, such as Dieppe in August 1942, had failed badly. Wresting Pacific islands away from entrenched Japanese had become a bloody endeavor, and was possible only with overwhelming fire and manpower. Besides, the Pacific islands were thousands of miles from Japan; enemy resupply and reinforcement was impossible and made American victories inevitable. In Europe, with its heavily fortified coast-lines, the Germans felt they could move troops and supplies around at will to counter any invasion.

To prepare for the day when the invasion was launched, the Allies began doing some preliminary homework. Even before Eisenhower was chosen in December 1943 to take the reins as Supreme Allied Commander, a small team of planners, under British Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan, had been laying the groundwork for what would eventually become Overlord. Morgan, who held the temporary title of COSSAC, (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander), first met with his staff on 17 April 1943. Quite aware of his group’s limited authority to make any hard-and-fast decisions, he had told them that they should not consider themselves planners, but rather, as primarily a co-ordinating body. He did not want to tie the future Supreme Commander—whomever he might be—to some rigid, cast-in-concrete plan.¹²

Once Ike arrived on the job, planning and preparation for the invasion swung into high gear. Meetings, arguments, and decisions on how many troops, tanks, trucks, tires, bombs, bullets, bulldozers, bandages, planes, maps, gallons of fuel, tons of rations, and mountains of other supplies went on non-stop. Early on it was decided that airborne and glider troops, and plenty of them, would be needed to go in before the seaborne troops to secure the flanks of the operational area; this initial assault plan got its own code name: Neptune. For months Allied planners worked on Neptune’s details, trying to figure out how many aircraft were needed to carry how many men, what equipment the paratroopers would need to fight with before the seaborne forces could reach them, where their training facilities and airbases would be located, how long it would take them to reach their drop zones, and how the soldiers and their pilots could possibly find their correct DZs and LZs in the dark. It was enough to drive sane men crazy.

Eventually SHAEF decided to insert the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into France through the back door—i.e., by coming into Normandy from the west across the Cotentin Peninsula. Major General William Lee’s 101st Screaming Eagles would be the first American division to leave England and the first to hit the ground fighting in France; Major General Mathew Ridgway’s 82nd All Americans would arrive minutes later. Both these divisions would be followed by additional troops, equipment, and supplies brought in by the greatest glider missions in the history of warfare.

As Overlord/Neptune was a joint Allied operation, the British would also play a vital role. With the two westernmost beachheads, Utah and Omaha, being assaulted by American forces and augmented by American airborne and glider troops, it was only right that the three eastern landing beaches—Gold, Juno, and Sword—which would be attacked by British and Canadian forces, have flank protection provided by British and Canadian airborne and glider units. For this role, Major General Richard

N. Gale’s British 6th Airborne Division, augmented by a Canadian parachute battalion, was selected.

The 6th’s plan was only slightly less complex and ambitious than the Americans’: land a small force of glider troops to capture the bridges over the Orne River near Caen and drop paratroops at the Merville Battery a bit farther east to neutralize the casemated gun battery that threatened the seaborne landings at Sword Beach, then bring in large numbers of follow-up troops by parachute and glider to hold these key positions and prevent any German forces from attacking the beachheads while troops and equipment were coming ashore.*¹³

But these Allied airborne and glider forces weren’t simply conjured up out of thin air. They were the result of several years of experimentation and training, of trying to fully grasp the potentials and pitfalls of this brand-new concept of vertical envelopment.

CHAPTER 1

THE GERMANS’ BRILLIANT IDEA

The ‘G’ stands for ‘Guts.’

A PRIME MOVER of the idea of airborne forces was Luftwaffe Generaloberst Kurt Student, generally acknowledged as one of Germany’s most innovative generals. Born on 12 May 1890 in Neumarck, Bran denburg, Prussia, he grew to exemplify, in the words of an English biographer, some of the best characteristics of the German professional soldier…. German airborne forces were almost the unique creation of this one man and were largely sustained by his continuing determination and drive.

At eleven years of age, knowing that he would be unable to pursue his dream of a medical career due to limited family resources, he entered the Royal Prussian Military Academy School at Potsdam, and then went on to the Hauptkadettenanstalt (Main Military Academy) at Lichterfelde, near Berlin. In March 1910, he was commissioned an ensign in a Prussian unit, the Regiment Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. Shortly thereafter, he began taking flying lessons and, in 1916, found himself an aviator in command of a fighter squadron. Although badly wounded in the head during aerial combat in October 1917, he recovered and was allowed to remain in the service, despite the downsizing of the German military man-dated by the Treaty of Versailles.

Although the Treaty proscribed a German air force, the Germans nevertheless continued to secretly develop fliers, aircraft (including gliders), and doctrine during the interwar years. And, after Hitler gained the office of Chancellor in January 1933, Student was named Director of Technical Training Schools for the air arm, which had been detached from the War Ministry and was now a part of the Minister of Aviation, headed by a Great War ace, Hermann Göring.

As Nazi Germany moved ever closer to another war, Student was heavily involved in the development of various aircraft and flying equipment, including the parachute. In early 1938, he was given command of Fliegerdivision 7 (7th Air Division) and, after watching a demonstration of several thousand Soviet parachutists, became intrigued with the idea of delivering infantry troops to the battlefield by parachute.

The conservative generals in the German High Command were slow to warm to the idea of airborne warriors, but Student pressed ahead. Finally persuaded, the High Command turned the 7th Flieger Division into a paratroop unit and a new division, the 22nd, into an air-landed (glider) division. Meanwhile, at a Darmstadt experimental station, Student championed the design and development of a nine-passenger military glider (the DFS 230)—the largest glider that could be towed aloft by a Junkers Ju 52/3—and began thinking of new ways to turn the skyborne soldiers into a potent battle force.

But there was little in the way of history to tell Student and his staff how to recruit, train, and employ parachute and glider troops. Everything about the fledgling airborne and glider forces had to be created on the fly—from formation flying (to prevent parachutists from being struck by following aircraft) to how the paratroops should exit a plane (a news-reel of the day showed Soviet paratroops crawling out onto the wing of an aircraft and leaping into space). Although never a rabid follower of Hitler or the Nazi regime, the dedicated and driven Student did his best simply because of his devotion to Germany.¹

Student’s hard work paid off. On 12 March 1938, during the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, the Germans used paratroops to secure the perimeter of the airfield at Wagram, northeast of Vienna. This was quickly followed by a battalion of troops brought in by thirty-seven transport planes, while other planes delivered artillery, ammunition, and equipment. This dramatic action demonstrated to the German High Command that the effective employment of lightly equipped airborne troops to seize an objective until better-equipped follow-on troops could arrive was feasible.²

THE CONCEPT OF using a parachute to allow oneself to land safely after dropping from a great height is not new. A Frenchman, Louis-Sebastien Lenormand, is credited with jumping out of a tree while holding two parasols to slow his fall in 1783 (no word on whether or not they did the trick). Two years later, another Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard, reportedly was the first to make a parachute out of silk and jump successfully from a balloon. The names of those who jumped unsuccessfully have been lost to history, but many intrepid balloonists thereafter also used these last-ditch safety devices when hotair ascents were all the rage–and very dangerous for the basket-borne occupants.³

These initial jumps seemed to be for fun and recreation, but some people were beginning to think of this new device in military terms. In the year between Lenormand’s parasol jump and Blanchard’s silk-assisted leap, the inventive Benjamin Franklin mused after watching the Mongolfier Brothers demonstrate one of their balloons: Where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, so that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?⁴

Nor are gliders a recent invention. Leonardo da Vinci made sketches and scale models of flying devices in the 15th century that resembled later gliders. In 1799, the Englishman Sir George Cayley devised a flying contraption with fixed wings and flappers that provided thrust and a movable tail that allowed for control. Then came a host of experimenters: Otto Lilienthal in Germany, Percy Pilcher in Britain, Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, and John Montgomery and Octave Chanute in America. Before they mastered the intricacies of powered flight, the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, designed and built numerous fullscale gliders. In fact, the craft that briefly lifted off the sands at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903 was little more than a wood-and-fabric glider with an engine bolted to it.⁵

During the First World War, balloons were frequently used to get a high-angle view of enemy lines—a fact which often brought swarms of enemy aircraft shooting at them; the balloonists had no option but to employ parachutes as a way of escaping a fiery death. Winston S. Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, had the idea of air dropping saboteurs behind enemy lines to knock out bridges, factories, and communications. At the same time, the American Colonel Billy Mitchell was working on a plan to drop troops by parachute from a British bomber onto the German-held city of Metz. Had it not been for the signing of the Armistice, Mitchell’s plan likely would have proceeded.

Military minds continued to be intrigued by aerial transport and parachute operations during the interwar years. The United States was one of the earliest nations to experiment with the idea of moving troops by aircraft, although the possibility of dropping them en masse by parachute had not yet occurred to the War Department. In 1931, a group of soldiers from an artillery battery were flown ninety miles across Panama, but there was no parachute jump at the end. The following year, during Army maneuvers in Delaware, a small detachment was again moved by air to a landing field behind enemy lines.⁶

The Russians were particularly keen on the airborne idea and during maneuvers in 1927, eight Soviet soldiers took part in the first mass parachute training jump in military history. Inspired by the success of this demonstration, Stalin had several thousand paratroops trained by the mid-1930s, calling them locust warriors. In 1936, two battalions of troops, along with 150 machine guns and 16 light field guns, were airdropped into a field near Kiev. As Canadian military historian Brian Nolan wrote about the event, For centuries, practitioners of the art of war dreamt, designed, and launched any number of manoeuvres to outflank their enemies. Now, by arranging one swoop from the sky, a general could place an attacking force anywhere he desired, adhering to Napoleon’s maxim: if you can outflank the enemy, you will surely derange and confuse him.⁷

That September, the Soviets did it again, this time dropping 5,200 paratroopers at once. While military observers from various countries may have been impressed, it was Kurt Student and the Germans who most took the demonstration—and the lesson—to heart. Despite the fact that the Soviets used airborne troops extensively in their 1939 invasion of Finland, they suffered high casualties. The French, too, organized a battalion of paratroops in 1939, but it was disbanded before war came.⁸

As late as the fall of 1939, the United States still had not taken any steps toward military parachuting. But with England and France now at war with Germany, thinking began to roll in that direction. A meeting of the Chiefs of Infantry, Engineers, and Air Corps to decide which arm of service would be responsible for a contemplated detachment of air infantry was held; it was decided that the training and control of this new corps would be the responsibility of the Chief of Infantry. On 25 April 1940, just two weeks after Germany’s invasion of Norway, the War Department granted approval for the Army to form a test platoon of parachutists at Fort Benning, Georgia, under the supervision of the commandant of the Infantry School. Major William C. Bill Lee, a World War I combat veteran, appointed twenty-seven-year-old First Lieutenant William T. Ryder, who had been studying and writing about paratroops for some time, platoon commander.

Like the Pony Express in the previous century, which advertised for orphans because the job was so dangerous, Ryder filled his ranks only with unmarried volunteers. Forty-eight bachelors of the 29th Infantry Regiment were selected to form the basis of a parachute test platoon. Once Ryder had his group, he whipped his men into superb physical condition. Soon the daily three-mile runs in the punishing Georgia heat and humidity turned into five-mile runs. To harden them for the shock of landing, Ryder had them jump from the backs of moving trucks. To enforce discipline, he and his NCOs punished every mistake, no matter how minor, with push-ups. To accustom them to heights, Ryder had the volunteers jump from towers—short platforms at first, graduating to increasingly higher ones, to finally dropping from a 250-foot steel tower modeled after one designed for wire-controlled parachute drops at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The men learned to pack their own parachutes, then do it again while blindfolded. Soldiers who couldn’t stand heights or the grueling training regimen dropped out, replaced by others who wanted the glory of being paratroopers, even though the United States was not yet officially at war.⁹

Then it came time for the test platoon to jump from an actual airplane, an obsolete C-39 (an amalgamation of a DC-2, DC-3, and B-18). On 15 August 1940, the men of the test platoon watched as a 150-pound dummy was thrown from a plane to simulate a parachute drop. Its parachute failed to open and the dummy smashed to the ground fifty feet in front of them. With this portentous event fresh in their minds, the next day the test platoon stood