First to Jump (16 page)

They did, but not in the way Faith had expected. Parting the brush with his hands, he looked into another field and saw Hunt standing there with his arms raised in the air, a German infantryman steadying a bayoneted rifle on him.

Faith was still peering out between the branches when more sounds filtered through the greenery . . . but now they were coming from the field where he'd touched down.

He turned back in that direction to investigate, and what he saw made his whole body tense up. Another enemy soldier was standing over his discarded chute and harness, his weapon raised, looking edgily around for the man who'd been wearing it.

Faith watched for several minutes. He doubted two soldiers would go patrolling through these fields without backup. There likely would be more of them nearby. A squad, maybe an entire company. If he gave away his position, he would be captured like Hunt—or worse.

He backed deeper into the woods, trying not to make a sound. When he'd put some distance between himself and the field, he took off running at full speed.

Lieutenant Faith wasn't sure how far he ran before pausing to catch his breath. Then he heard German-speaking voices and ran some more, heading deep into the old growth forest.

After a while he stopped again, seeking out his bearings amid the tall Belgian elms and draping willows. Before their mission, the Pathfinders had received an intelligence briefing on escape and evasion, along with special double-sided maps printed on rayon fabric so they could be easily tucked away in their uniforms and wouldn't crinkle from wear, fall apart in bad weather, or rattle to alert the enemy when they were opened. Faith had kept the instructions from S-2 firmly in mind throughout his flight, using the E&E map and his wrist compass to move in a southerly direction.

He eventually found another way of orienting himself. The map showed an ancient stream, the Looiendse Nete, running north to south toward the French border—and he would pick up what he believed to be that waterway running its course through the woods and fields. Besides leading where he wanted to go, it provided freshwater for washing and refilling his canteen, and he resolutely kept its banks in sight as he journeyed on.

Finally he emerged from the woods, saw a hedgerow separating it from a roadway and field, and sprinted over to it, leaving the stream behind. The hedge wasn't nearly as tall or thick as those he'd seen in Normandy but was still bushy with summer growth. It would have to be good enough.

Exhausted, Faith plunged into the leaves and branches and hunkered down to rest.

He would spend the next five days there hiding from the enemy.

5.

“Hands up!”

Stopped cold in his tracks, Johannes van Gorkum raised his arms above his head almost before he'd realized it, holding them up straight as two flagpoles. He didn't need to see the Americans' weapons pointed at him to obey. But staring at their outthrust carbines and submachine guns, even at a distance of a hundred feet, did more than intimidate him. He suddenly found himself wishing he could return to the Sanders farm, hop onto his cycle, and pedal back to Nijmegen as fast as its two wheels could carry him. The soldiers had scared him to the core.

They approached without lowering their weapons, then patted him down.

“Let's go,” said one of the men, finding him unarmed.

Johannes was ushered off the road and onto the heath, where he saw Piet talking to the Americans' commandant, his bicycle left on its side. Evidently his friend had already gained the officer's confidence. Realizing the two young Dutchmen were together, he had his troopers lower their guns.

Johannes—“
I am Joe!
”
he'd repeatedly told the soldier who had walked him there—dropped his hands and listened. Piet spoke rapidly to the commandant, telling him about German troop locations in the area. The American paid close attention to the information, asked him a handful of questions, and then gave his men a brief set of orders. They immediately began to remove strange-looking equipment from their packs and duffels and lay it out on the field.

Unbeknownst to the Dutch resistance fighters, they had arrived at Drop Zone B/C, where the two planes composing the second Pathfinder serial had deployed their troopers between Sint-Oedenrode and the village of Son. Lieutenant Gordon DeRamus was the leader of the squad that had jumped from Plane Number 3, and the man Piet was speaking to when Johannes caught up to him. Team Four's commander, Lieutenant Gordon Rothwell, stood within earshot near a drainage ditch, securing the area with his troopers.

This was the same Rothwell who'd headed the Pathfinder team that ditched into the English Channel on D-Day Minus One. Today he'd had better luck. His stick had landed on a dime almost side by side with DeRamus's men, the teams coming down so close to each other they hadn't needed to assemble. Together the two squads would prepare and guard a landing zone on a large field—actually several contiguous fields—that would be used by the 502nd Regiment's impending glider lift. Neither crew had any idea that Shauvin's number two plane had been shot down, and for Rothwell, fresh with memories of his own crash, it was probably for the best. He would need his full concentration for the job.

The ol' scarf was mostly the same as it had been for the Normandy landings: seven Holophane panels, colored smoke grenades, and a Eureka box. In addition, the Pathfinders would use an AN/CRN-4 glide path radio transmitter that could interface with a glider's onboard compass and had been rigorously tested at North Witham. The new portable beacon would allow for more accurate navigation by the glidermen—or so it was hoped.

Rothwell's men had primary responsibility for the electronic equipment, while DeRamus's group was to lay out the T with yellow marker panels—the letter “B” stenciled on them—and send up the smoke signals. It would be Fred Wilhelm who supervised the placement of the T, and John Zamanakos who set up and operated the radar equipment.

Their task completed without a hitch in four minutes, the Pathfinders at B/C were off to a quick start, an improvement over the delays and confusion that had characterized their Normandy misdrops.

But less confused did not necessarily mean less dangerous, as they would soon find out.

6.

Braddock felt muzzy and confused. His fingers were trembling as he tried to get out of his harness, a task made all the more difficult because the weight of his Eureka and other equipment had pushed him deeper into the straps. Still, it was giving him more trouble than it should have—if he knew his way around anything, it was a parachute rig. But he'd hit the top of a barbed wire fence when he fell to earth, and it had left him bruised and nicked up . . . besides sending him for a tumble that had knocked the stuffing out of him.

He blinked a few times, took some deep breaths to unscramble his senses, and fumbled with the hooks some more. Aside from Dutch Stene, the rest of the stick at Drop Zone A had alighted on the other side of some trees, and he wanted to pull himself together and get over to them right away. Since he'd been the last man out of the plane, he figured he'd mentally line his position up with the drop pattern and retrace it . . . not a difficult thing with a clear head. But his brain still felt like mush after the rough landing.

“They're over here!” Stene yelled from several yards off.

Finally out of the harness, Braddock turned in his direction. He'd assumed Stene was talking about the men. But then he started shouting again—and this time he sounded alarmed.

“Hold it . . . there's someone spotted us,” he warned. “Coming down the road toward us!”

His words raised Braddock's alertness with a jolt. He lifted his Thompson, thumbed off the safety for full auto fire, and waited.

A lone man in a pale blue military uniform was approaching him, walking along the edge of a ditch across the road. Braddock watched him closely, noticing he had a holstered pistol against his side. He steadied the tommy gun on him and waited.

The man did not slow down at all, but kept walking until he was directly opposite Braddock. He hadn't put his hand anywhere near his pistol.

“Take me to your commandant,” he said.

Braddock looked at him over his gun barrel. “Ah,” he said. “You speak English.”

The man gave a nod. “Yes,” he said. And then abruptly snapped up his hand.

It was a signal and Braddock knew it. But before he could react, two men in civilian clothes appeared out of the ditches on either side of the road. Both had rifles slung over their shoulders.

“I am with the Dutch Underground,” the man said, offering his name as Sjef de Groot. “An officer.”

In fact, de Groot was more than just an officer. His formal title was commander of the Brabant Regiment, and his authority covered the entire southern Netherlands. But he didn't give that information to Braddock, who wasn't about to relax his guard in any event.

He steadied the tommy gun. “Tell your men not to move or I'll kill you,” he said.

Showing no desire to confront him, de Groot was calmly relaying the message in Dutch when another voice came through the tree line: “Where the hell's Braddock with the rest of the equipment?”

The T/5 didn't try to figure out which of the men that was. He had more pressing concerns—and getting his beacon over to the others was chief among them. The voice had reminded him that they had only minutes to set up the DZ before the main wave came roaring in.

“Stene . . . Stene, come over here quick,” he hollered.

The private came trotting up on the double, his weapon at the ready.

Braddock motioned at the uniformed man. “This soldier claims to be a Dutch underground officer. But as far as I'm concerned he's still enemy,” he said. “Take my equipment with him in front of you. If he makes a bad move, kill him. If I hear a shot, I'll start shooting likewise. If you hear a shot from this direction . . . let the rest of the stick know someone is with you. Or they might start shooting at you.”

Stene nodded to show he understood.

“I'll stay here and act as security for the rest of the team, so they can take whatever precautions are necessary,” Braddock said, thinking. Then he turned to de Groot. “Have you heard and understood what we have been talking about?”

“I understood.”

“Okay, then,” Braddock said. “Instruct your men to stay as they are until I walk out to the middle of the road.”

The officer did as Braddock had ordered, speaking to his companions in Dutch. Then Stene moved behind him with his rifle and walked him and the transmitter equipment over to Smith.

The arrival of the underground men cut the timing closer than Braddock had realized. As he kept tense watch over them, wondering if they were who they claimed to be, the rest of the Pathfinders hurried to build the T behind the trees. It seemed to him that they'd no sooner gotten it done than he heard the thrum of the planes, saw smoke rise over the treetops from the DZ . . . and then saw the parachutes of the descending troopers fill the turquoise sky above.

As the troops floated down to earth, Braddock kept a suspicious eye—and ready Thompson—on the Dutchmen in spite of their cheers and applause at the men's arrival. Cautious man that he was, he would only lose his skepticism when Lieutenant Smith and de Groot came around a bend in the road, shaking hands with one of the paratroopers who'd made landfall.

More than two thousand men would jump into Drop Zone A as the 101st's forward parachute echelon was delivered to the fields north of Eindhoven, its transports homing in on the navigational aids set out by the Pathfinders. Down near Son at DZ B/C, Lieutenants DeRamus and Rothwell and their sticks would bring in more than four thousand additional 101st paratroopers, hundreds of equipment and supply bundles, and a lift of more than a hundred Wacos—the landings and drops carpeting four hundred acres of low-lying fields that spread out around the arriving sky soldiers as far as the eye could see.

In the words of a classified assessment written toward the end of 1944, the Screaming Eagle Pathfinders had accomplished their initial mission in Holland “efficiently due to excellent drops at slow speeds directly over previously selected pinpointed positions.”

But the success of marking the September 17 drop zones had come at the cost of Lieutenant Gene Shauvin's flight—a price that would be dwarfed by the U.S. Airborne's overall losses as Market Garden skidded toward failure over the next seven days.

7.

Lieutenant Charles Gaudio and his copilot, Lester Vohs, had flown Plane 096 of the IX TCC on D-Day Minus One, dropping their squad of 82nd Airborne Pathfinders while under heavy fire from the ground. Now they'd brought in a stick from the 101st for the Holland jump—Lieutenant Rothwell's group—and had again pushed 096 through bands of heavy flak.

But Gaudio had learned a lesson from his first mission. As he'd made his pass over Normandy, the enemy gunners had shifted their aim toward the troopers, inflicting heavy casualties as they came down and preventing them from setting up their lights. Because he'd sped back across the Channel at once, Gaudio hadn't known the severity of the fire they were receiving on the ground and was quickly too far away to provide assistance.

He meant to avoid a repeat of that occurrence.

Approaching Drop Zone B/C, he and Vohs had been hit with small arms fire from some farmhouses in the middle of the immense clearing, and then spotted German gun and mortar teams outside the buildings. Determined to protect the Pathfinder teams as they installed their navigational aids, they'd looped back toward the farm and buzzed it, powering their aircraft low over its fields and rooftops.

It was a chancy maneuver for a plane without armaments, but Gaudio had bet on the Germans being caught off guard by the huge, noisy Dakota—and on the fact that they could have no sure knowledge it wasn't carrying a lethal surprise for them.