First to Jump (17 page)

His tactic worked. The enemy guns had rattled up in his direction and been drawn away from the Pathfinders, who'd constructed their T in minutes. Looking down from his cockpit, Gaudio had seen the completed pattern of lights on the ground, veered away from the farm, and set a course for home.

At the DZ, the men had been grateful for the diversion. The Air Force had assured them nothing would move against them on the field, and with no sign of German infantry in their immediate area, they'd felt they could collectively inhale while awaiting the main body of paratroopers.

About twenty minutes after landing, Zamanakos, Wilhelm, and Snuffy Smith were standing watch by the T and talking when the shelling picked up again. There was a loud crash as a mortar round hit nearby and exploded into shrapnel.

Zamanakos felt a blast of warm air, then a hard clap on the side of his chest. The next thing he knew, he was down on the ground, his jump jacket and undershirt torn to shreds, the skin flapping off his exposed ribs where he'd been struck by a shell fragment.

He lay there in pain, his uniform filling with blood. Around him were Wilhelm, Smith, and Bluford Williams, who'd spotted a row of German tanks on a nearby road when they descended. They were about a quarter of a mile away, ten or twelve of them sitting under the roadside trees, and Williams would swear he'd seen their commanders drop down into their hatches during the jump. Although he was convinced they were hiding from Allied fighter planes, he thought they might have fired the rounds.

The men didn't know for sure. They were unaware of the enemy guns at the farmhouse, and hadn't seen movement from the tanks, so they could only venture guesses—and there really wasn't time for that. They had to get Zamanakos some cover while they guarded their lights.

It might have been Williams who suggested the drainage ditch running through the field near the T. Whoever's idea it was, they agreed it seemed like the safest place for the wounded trooper. Together a couple of them helped him to his feet and then got him down into the ditch.

Although the world kept swimming in and out of focus, Zamanakos never lost consciousness. Sitting with his back against the side of the ditch, his ribs on fire, he was aware of Smith crouching over him with his first aid kit, pulling out sulfa powder, gauze, bandages . . . whatever was available to patch up the wound.

The first of the 326th Airborne Medical Company's two glider loads arrived minutes later aboard six Wacos bearing vehicles, trailers, equipment, and more than fifty personnel who unloaded and set up an aid station at the southern end of the landing field. Zamanakos was brought to a ward tent, given further treatment, and eventually evacuated by ambulance to Son—liberated in the early hours of Market Garden—about twenty miles from the field. On that first day of Market Garden, the village's civilian hospital, the CBC Sanatorium, would be taken over by American forces and become the 101st's medical triage center.

Like many of those treated by the 326th AMC, Zamanakos was later moved to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Belgium, and ultimately flown to England to recover.

Bombed, rocketed, suffering dozens of casualties, the 326th would remain operative for the next seventy-one days of combat in Holland, its doctors and nurses and medical technicians working tirelessly around the clock to treat thousands of wounded soldiers.

And to identify the dead.

1.

In the late summer of 1944, with Hitler's Western Front pulling inward, the twelve-thousand-man Hermann Goering Training and Replacement Regiment in the Netherlands had braced for an Allied invasion. Established years earlier to train personnel for its parent unit, the Hermann Goering Parachute-Panzer Division, the regiment would, by September, be tasked with securing the southern part of the territory against a coastal and ground attack.

Its 3rd Battalion's five flak batteries were responsible for replenishing the HG P-P Division's ranks with antiaircraft and artillery gunners. One of these batteries—the
16 Flakbatterie—
was located at the Pont Fort heights outside the village of Retie, Belgium. With fears of an air attack mounting among German commanders, the position's inexperienced troops had been bolstered by veteran flak personnel from other units. This was the battery that had harassed the Pathfinders on their approach to the Market drop zones and that scored a lethal hit on Lieutenant Gene Shauvin's flight, IX TCC 981, over the dairy farm of Jan Adriaensen in the tiny rural hamlet of Kirtijnen.

Twenty seconds after going into its uncontrollable nosedive, the plane had come down in Adriaensen's garden and exploded in a sheet of flame, its burning debris hailing over the farmhouse. Half straw thatch and half tile, its roof instantly ignited. Within minutes the fire had consumed the house and barn, then leaped over to an adjacent barn belonging to a neighbor named Peer Franken.

Besides his wife Coleta and their three unmarried children, Adriaensen had been harboring his daughter Julia, her husband Jef, and their newborn baby Marie at the farm since the Allied air strikes began weeks before, his deep stone basement serving as a shelter during the repeated strafings and bombings. With the frequency of the raids escalating in recent days, the entire family had taken up full-time residence in the basement.

Shortly before the crash Jef, who'd been assisting with the chores, had gone out to the long wooden barn where his father-in-law kept his milk cows, pulled a fresh bale of straw off the pile with his muscular arms, then grabbed hold of a pitchfork and gotten to work. The bales were heavy and compacted, and separating the straw took effort. But he was glad to do it for the man who'd so generously opened his home to him in this time of extreme scarcity, when every morsel of food and bar of soap was precious.

He'd been spreading the straw across the floor when a tremendous
thump
stopped him cold with his hands around the pitchfork. Something had fallen to earth outside the barn, but at first he could only wonder what it might be. A bomb? It was possible. All he knew was that the object had been large enough for him to feel the impact underfoot.

Puzzled and alarmed, he dropped the pitchfork, rushed out the barn doors, and saw the wide pool of fire beside the farmhouse. Then he realized it had already spread to its rooftop and went running toward the house to get everyone out of the basement.

By the time Jan emerged into the daylight, his house and barn were ablaze. Sending his daughter Stan off to seek help from her brother Louis, whose farm was next door, he hurried across the yard with the other men to save his valuable livestock. They would try to set the cows loose before they burned to death.

Jan, Jef, and Louis couldn't get them out the barn doors, however. They were visibly panicked, tossing their heads and swishing their tails, their grunts and bellows awful to hear. But they had never been outside their stalls, and were refusing to budge, and the men didn't have any prods or sticks they could use to urge them on.

Still, they kept trying to get the animals out of the barn, doing everything they could to counter their nervous stubbornness. They slapped their sides and tried shoving them from their stalls, shouting, clapping their hands so they could be heard above the snapping roar of the fire, but it was of no use. With the fire climbing up to the rafters, and the heat and smoke inside the barn becoming unbearable, they wouldn't move. Finally the men had no choice except to abandon them to the fire. They ran out into the barnyard, coughing and gasping for air.

By now the farmhouse and Peer Franken's barn were seething with flames. Jan's family stood huddled together in the yard, watching the fire gnaw through the roof of his home, Coleta and the older children shocked and tearful, Julia's face a tight mask of anguish as she clutched her crying infant daughter to her breast.

They could hear the cows in the barn as they were incinerated. It made them want to cover their ears.

Jan Adriaensen felt as if he'd been struck by evil lightning. But he knew the tragedy could quickly expand beyond his personal catastrophe. Kirtijnen's six small farms stood within a half mile of each other, and almost everyone in the community had poured out into its country lanes after hearing the plane crash. Across the road, Adriaensen's neighbors had run from their home when the fire's baking heat had jumped through their windows, afraid of getting trapped inside if the conflagration spread—and their fear was far from unreasonable. Somehow, the villagers had to prevent the rest of their farms from going up in flames.

Hastening to fetch buckets and hoses, they banded together to wet down the other homes, drenching their rooftops and outer walls with water, praying that would be enough to impede the progress of the blaze.

Their cooperative action may have been why the fire didn't spread beyond the farmhouse and two adjacent barns. Watching it roar above the field, Adriaensen realized he'd been fortunate that his loved ones had escaped with their lives. But his home had been wholly consumed. He had lost his livelihood. Everything he'd owned was gone.

The farmhouse's skeletal embers were still smoldering when the Germans showed up to investigate the crash. A group of local Red Cross volunteers had also arrived to provide emergency medical treatment and aid in any rescue efforts, but their work would have to be conducted under the close scrutiny of the soldiers.

As they hunted through the scattered wreckage of the aircraft, they knew the odds of finding survivors were slim. If anyone aboard had lived through its impact with the ground, the flames that consumed it would have incinerated them.

The workers' grim expectations were confirmed when they discovered eight burned, mangled bodies outside a large section of the plane's fuselage. They would find the charred remains of a ninth man hanging from a seat on the left side of its cockpit.

Under directions from the Germans, the bodies were buried on the spot in eight graves along the side of the road. Fearing they would be accused of violating the Geneva protocols, the Germans would later order them dug up and moved to the cemetery in Retie. After the war, they were again exhumed, this time by the United States Army for permanent interment in the Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial at Neuville-en-Condroz, in western Belgium.

All the Pathfinders and every member of the aircrew except for Gene Shauvin were positively identified. Shauvin was initially given MIA status, and then listed as killed in action, but aside from a mention in a Red Cross journal, there would be no official record mentioning the disposition of the remains seen in the cockpit, where he would have been situated before the crash. With eight graves for nine bodies, his family would come to believe that his remains were confused with someone else's and buried in the wrong coffin.

Of the contingent of Pathfinders aboard 981, the bodies recovered at the crash site and identified by their dog tags belonged to Privates George L. Sarlas and Michael Rofar, and to Corporals Roy L. Stephens and Delbert S. Brazzle. Not found were Privates Earnest A. Robinson, Alvin Haux, Spencer E. Everly, and Lester R. Hunt; T/5 Richard H. Beaver; and their group leader, Lieutenant Charles M. Faith.

Faith, of course, knew Hunt had survived and been taken prisoner. Since he'd never seen their chutes in the air, he might have been surprised to learn that the four other troopers whose bodies weren't found had also survived and been captured by the Germans.

But at that point the lieutenant was just trying to stay alive and a free man. After roving more than a mile through woods, fields, and streams, he was tired and hungry and wondering how he would manage to stay out of sight until he made contact with friendly forces.

Concealed in his patch of shrubbery, he would wrestle with these questions through the long afternoon and night of his first day of hiding from the enemy.

2.

At Drop Zones B/C, the Pathfinder teams led by DeRamus and Rothwell were to stay out in the field for several days marking and guarding the DZs for glider lifts and resupply drops. But with no further landings scheduled in the smaller fields to the north, Headquarters had given Team A the assignment of helping the paratroops of the 501st PIR's 1st Battalion seize the town of Veghel and its four bridges—two spanning the River Aa in the village proper, and two south of it across the Willemsvaart Canal. Specifically, the Pathfinders were told to take and hold the bridge that ran into town across the River Aa, and to do it with all necessary haste. So great was the concern that the Germans would blow the crossings as they retreated, and eliminate them as rear supply lines for Montgomery's troops, that the goal was to have the bridges under the regiment's control by 1300 hours, or one o'clock in the afternoon, just half an hour after the Pathfinders touched down behind the lines.

The battalion's march from its drop zone had proceeded at a grueling clip. With their navigational beacon lost when Lieutenant Faith's flight was shot down, its forty-two sticks had been dropped at the wrong location, finding themselves around a spired medieval castle—Kasteel Heeswikj—in the village of Kameren, about six miles northwest of their intended DZ. The misdrops were remarkably concentrated, with all the paratroopers finding themselves within a short distance of the castle, and many coming down in its moat or surrounding trees.

There were relatively few casualties among the battalion's six hundred men, and those that occurred were accidental. From Kameren the paratroopers double-timed it to their objective without opposition, jogging sweatily in the warm sunlight under the arduous weight of their equipment. A few were given bicycles by the castle's caretaker and his companions, and would remember it as the first time they'd actually pedaled into battle. It was a peculiar feeling for them.

The Pathfinders and the battalion's forward element converged at the outskirts of Veghel to find themselves greeted by cheerful townspeople. They waved orange paper from doors and windows and poured from their tile-roofed homes onto the road, men, women, the old, and the young, all gathering around the Americans in their Sunday finest. There were boys in double-breasted red vests and baggy dress trousers, and pigtailed girls wearing white-winged caps, church dresses, and wooden clogs. They sang and danced with joy; they tossed flowers at the soldiers' feet and exchanged Dutch pounds for their invasion currency; they handed them bread, cheese, cake, apples, jugs of fresh milk, even ice cream.

As they neared the Aa River Bridge into the village proper, the troopers continued to be mobbed by civilians. A parade of children following behind him, one soldier felt a tug on his leg and saw a little boy with a red wagon pointing to his radio, trying to tell him he'd wheel it into town. Since the radio had been damaged in the jump, the trooper agreed and took it off his back. He would recall thinking the boy seemed “about the happiest little Dutch boy in the entire country. You could see the pride in his face.”

The exuberant reception gave the soldiers a much-needed boost. For a short time it seemed to suspend the war and simultaneously remind them why they were fighting it. It was a recollection many would later reference, something that would sustain and replenish their morale in the dark days to come.

The small group of Pathfinders split up at the bridge. Per his orders, Lieutenant Robert Smith stayed behind to hold the span with four of the men, while Sergeant John O'Shaughnessy, T/5 Glenn Braddock, and the rest of the team joined the 501's forward element moving on along the Willemsvaart Canal into Veghel. Their task was to clear the village streets and establish a blockade at the market square's main intersection.

Before their departure at Chalgrove, the troopers had received mimeographed translation sheets from S-2 with basic Dutch phrases on them, and they'd folded the slips of paper into their pockets or under their helmets as they boarded their planes. They proved more than handy. Walking off the bridge, O'Shaughnessy, Braddock, and the others used the phrases to ask the locals to guide them to the square and point out possible German hiding places.

The canal dead-ended at the intersection, where the soldiers found a camouflaged gun nest. After a quick inspection revealed it to be unoccupied and strewn with rubbish, they hastened to set up their roadblock.

Braddock would remember that they'd barely gotten started when someone shouted, “There's Krauts running into that building on the left!”

He and Sergeant O'Shaughnessy looked around, saw a group of Germans running toward a long brick building across the square, and took off in heated pursuit, several other troopers following them from the gun emplacement. But the enemy soldiers had gotten a head start and already reached the house. They bolted in different directions, most racing through the front door, the rest fleeing around behind the building.

Close on their heels, Braddock and O'Shaughnessy ran straight up to the door, the other troopers staying with the Germans who'd gone around back. As the door practically slammed shut in O'Shaughnessy's face, he kicked it open and threw in a hand grenade.

There was a loud explosion inside the place. Braddock, also fisting a grenade, was about to pull the pin, but the sergeant had charged inside with his Thompson ablaze. Braddock hurried after him through the door, his own sub raised in his hands.

They were on the ground floor of an industrial warehouse, the room around them cavernous in its dimensions, an open door on its opposite side. Both men knew at once the Germans must have fled through it.