First to Jump (22 page)

That meant they'd been activated out of reserve status and trucked in from Mourmelon, and something like that only would have happened if the outfits that were already in Bastogne were in a desperate predicament.

“They're out of ammunition, medicine, and food, and have nothing but a handful of men,” the colonel went on. “We have to maintain control of Bastogne.”

McNiece listened carefully, the reality of the situation sinking in. Being surrounded was nothing new for guys from the 101st. They'd been surrounded all through Normandy. But his gut feeling was that they wouldn't have had much of a chance to prepare themselves for action or load up on provisions and ammo before they moved out. They had been short on stores in the first place—Jake knew because he'd left Mourmelon with torn long johns and holes in his boots just two weeks before. For the boys who'd been ringed in, this wasn't about their holding the village. It was about the Germans having them in a chokehold, and them having no way to fight their way out of it without bullets for their guns and morphine and sulfa for their wounds.

For those men—his friends and brothers—it was about survival. But if the colonel wanted his Pathfinders marking the field for an aerial resupply, it would have to be one hell of a good-sized drop to be of any use to them.

Though he didn't know it, there was a large store of supplies on hand. Weeks earlier, Joel Crouch had made a pair of special recommendations. One was that two sticks of Pathfinders from each airborne division be retained at Chalgrove when their training period concluded in the event a situation occurred demanding their use on the Western Front. The other was that a hundred aircraft loads of vital troop provisions be sent to the air base, pre-bundled for rapid parachute delivery to any unit of the Airborne Corps on request.

Captain Brown had endorsed both ideas. The first had needed approval from the separate
divisional commanders—if he was going to keep their men at his base as standbys, they had to sign off on it. But he'd needed no one's permission to implement Crouch's bid for supplies and had procured them from the 490th Quartermaster Company for storage at the airfield.

What Crouch had done with these proposals was create the basis for an unprecedented utilization of the Pathfinders—and in doing so he had taken a large step toward reconceptualizing airborne operations as a whole. Sending them to prepare the drop zones for massive deliveries of airborne troops and gliders had been an innovation, and a successful one, but their previous jumps over Normandy and Holland had been executed in advance of a main wave of thousands of troopers. The Pathfinders had been a forward component of a larger force. The thought that one or two sticks of paratroopers might be dropped behind enemy lines with a precise, limited tactical objective, delivered for a commando-style mission without follow-on airborne troops, was something altogether new in warfare.

Crouch had understood this. He'd ambitiously pushed the development of airborne operations his entire military career and wanted to keep exploring their tactical possibilities.

Jake McNiece's concerns were different, and perhaps more centered on the moment. Standing on the airfield, the transport waiting behind him, he knew his men were being asked to do something that hadn't been asked of anyone before, and without the benefit of a proper briefing, or a decent recon map of the DZ, or anything close to up-to-the-minute intelligence. He didn't care for it all, but also knew it had to done—though he would not have admitted it to the colonel, who'd tucked away the map and put his hand back out.

“Well,” he said again, “good luck.”

McNiece had a feeling of déjà vu. “I don't need luck, I need a miracle,” he said. “You are trying to hit a two-mile-diameter circle, flying four hundred miles to it in a C-47 that has no navigational aids or instruments.”

The colonel looked at him expressionlessly. “Pretty tough deal, boy,” he said. “But that's the way it is.”

And with that he ended their conversation. It was now a little before three o'clock in the afternoon, and the aircrew was ready to go wheels up.

The Pathfinders climbed aboard, and a few minutes later were in the sky. Lieutenant Williams outlined the mission for the men soon after takeoff. “They went into Bastogne with maybe two or three clips of ammo for every man and hardly anything to wear or eat,” he said about their fellow Screaming Eagles. “It could be they've been overrun by Krauts. But we're going to parachute into the encirclement, and set up our equipment if we land in friendly territory, and prepare to bring in vital supplies.”

Williams's assessment was off only insofar as the shortage of ammunition, and only by a little. The actual reports from Colonal Kohls, the division supply officer, were that each trooper was down to about ten clips. In practical terms that wasn't much better.

Listening, Jack Agnew became grimly concerned about his buddies in the 506th. When he glanced over at the others, their faces told him they felt the same way.

They flew for about two or three hours, the heavy fog, sleet, and snow wiping out all visibility. Every so often the clouds would break so McNiece was able to make out a patch of ground below, but then the cover would close up on itself and everything would get swept back into the grayness.

He and Agnew would later recall the pilot having contact with someone on the ground before flashing the red light. The tension in the troop compartment had thickened until it felt like jelly in the air around them. Then, as they got ready to stand up, the light blinked off, and the crew chief appeared from the cabin to inform them the plane was returning to base.

Puzzled, McNiece went forward to ask the pilot what was going on. He replied that he'd thought he had nearly reached Bastogne, but then realized he had overshot it by thirty-five miles. He'd still been looking for the town when Captain Brown radioed from Chalgrove and ordered him to cancel the mission.

McNiece was almost surprised by the sinking feeling inside him. But glancing around at the men, studying their faces, he realized every one of them shared his disappointment over the scrub. It was a funny thing too. They'd volunteered to become Pathfinders so they could eat good Air Force food, drink strong English whiskey, and chase pretty Oxford girls. None had ever expected to make another jump. But they were all thinking about the boys down there in Bastogne. And though they hadn't needed to share those thoughts aloud, there wasn't a man in that troop compartment who'd wanted to turn back.

At Chalgrove, meanwhile, Brown was irate. On a rare trip off base when the colonels arrived from Ninth Air Force Headquarters, he hadn't been consulted about the mission, let alone authorized the Pathfinder stick's departure. Nor did he think it was coincidental that the officers had showed up while he was gone. He would subsequently learn that the 101st had radioed an urgent request for supplies to the Eighth Army, which had in turn put its thumb on HQ to fly them in. But given the weather and early sunsets that time of year, he'd felt an afternoon start for the mission was out of the question. The operation would need hours of daylight to have a chance of success.

It was nightfall when the C-47 returned to the station. Waiting on the tarmac, Brown watched McNiece climb down the ladder and then approach him in the swirling mist.

“Let's hit the mess, then all go into the operations room,” he said, slouching under his equipment load. “See what the best plan of attack is.”

The captain agreed. After wolfing down a hot dinner, the men gathered together amid the room's map tables and wall charts. Joining them there were members of the base's G-2 Intelligence section.

“I think we ought to take two planeloads of men next time,” McNiece told the group. With weather conditions being so poor, he saw a strong chance of losing a plane. And that was before taking enemy interference into consideration. “I'll be in the first one.”

Brown would have recommended that himself. Two sticks not only made practical sense, it was in full keeping with Pathfinder operational doctrine.

“We've got a crackerjack pilot,” he offered. “A guy who can hit that place easily.”

McNiece gave him a look. “I hope so,” he said. “Since you missed it by thirty-five miles today, everyone would be a little happier if you
could
get somebody who could put me in or near Bastogne.”

The captain didn't comment. He did, in fact, have the fleet's best transport pilot on board for the drop. And maybe the best flying ace in the USAAF, period.

“You'll need a predetermined signal,” he said. “Something to show the second load of men you're in friendly territory.”

McNiece thought about that. “I'll take black and orange smoke grenades,” he said. Orange was the Netherlands' national color, and the same color smoke the Pathfinders had used in Market. The Germans wouldn't use it, so there would be no mistaking who was sending it up. “If it looks feasible that we could get in and start a resupply mission, I will throw out orange smoke grenades. When the pilots see it, they're to drop Rothwell's stick right on top of me.” He paused. “Black smoke means danger or disaster. If it's a hopeless case and they see black, forget about us. Try to relocate and drop the men somewhere else.”

Brown nodded, and so did Lieutenant Williams. Agnew had always thought the thing that made Little Willy a good officer was that he listened to his men. And he'd listened that night. In fact, everyone in the room had listened to Jake that night. There was a kind of resolve in it that was contagious.

Their takeoff was set for 6:45 in the morning, and the men turned in to their barracks. The next day was going to be a long one for the Pathfinders. Although not many of them figured to get much sleep, they would at least have mattresses under their backs and blankets to cover themselves with, and they knew that it might be a while until they enjoyed those comforts again.

Or might be the last time ever.

1.

McNiece had hit his bunk after the briefing in the operations room knowing he'd lied outright to everybody there—his men, the officers, everyone. And boarding the plane at a little before six o'clock the next morning, he'd continued the lie without a shred of guilt.

For all his talk about black and orange smoke grenades, he hadn't carried any black ones with him. Bringing them along had sounded good at the time, though he'd probably just come up with it to satisfy Captain Brown and the G-2 boys. The brass always needed contingencies to keep them happy, and he'd served them one for dessert.

But he couldn't go into this mission thinking it had a chance to fail, or that there was really a fallback open to him. He couldn't approach it like that and leave room for doubt in his heart. When the first plane carrying him to Bastogne had aborted its run the day before, something had told him he'd have to make the next go at it work no matter what it took. He'd felt it right away, and Jack Agnew had too. It hadn't been long after they'd turned back toward England that Jack said they'd been wrong to quit. That they should have kept looking for the town.

So McNiece hadn't carried those black smoke grenades. Since he wouldn't be using them, he'd figured why bother? Besides, his allocated load of grenades was supposed to be ten and ten, and common sense told him the smoke from twenty orange grenades would be easier to spot from the air. When he set them off, he wanted to look like “an orange juice tank truck exploding” among the thousands upon thousands of German soldiers around him.

Whatever it took.
That morning, McNiece had left the barracks early for a preflight briefing that had given him plenty to think about on that score. There had been a few more trickles of intelligence coming out of Bastogne overnight, and most of it was bad. But the briefing gave him a fuller understanding of what was going on there, and how the 101st had gotten into such an awful jam.

One thing he'd learned was that the 28th Infantry had been holding the town before they were sent in. But there weren't many seasoned men left in that division after the Hürtgen Forest bloodbath in November, and most of those soldiers were replacements from the States, kids who hadn't fought a day in the war. The German Panzer divisions that punched through the lines had come at them like a giant battering ram, and when Eisenhower heard about it, he'd called in the airborne to form a perimeter around the town.

As Jake had already guessed, the weather had ruled out a jump. On December 18, the eleven thousand troopers at Mourmelon had been packed like cattle into almost four hundred trailer trucks and moved out to become part of that defensive ring. But they'd brought next to nothing in the way of supplies, and hadn't been briefed on the situation they were heading into. The 101st would reach Bastogne only to learn that they and rest of the American troops were outnumbered three to one.

By the 19th they'd been surrounded by German tank and infantry outfits. McNiece's own 506th had taken heavy casualties holding off a Panzer group east of town, losing about a third of its six hundred troopers in forty-eight hours. They'd done worse damage to the enemy, taking out about thirty of their tanks and a thousand men, but on December 20 they'd had to pull back. It seemed as if there was no end to the German forces. They were getting closer and closer every day, shrinking the circle around the troops.

It was an understatement to say the weather wasn't making things easier for them. On the 21st it had started snowing, and the snow had kept piling up as the temperature dropped, and now the men were freezing in over a foot of it. They had no winter linings for their boots. They had no long johns. They didn't even have blankets to wrap themselves in.

None of it made sense to McNiece. He couldn't see how the Allied High Command had gotten caught so badly off guard. But he wasn't Eisenhower or Montgomery, and it wasn't his job to figure it out. He already had enough on his plate.

Now several hours into the flight, he sat in the C-47's troop compartment, feeling restless although he'd barely shut his eyes all night and then gotten summoned into the briefing before sunrise. Soon after takeoff, he'd moseyed forward to introduce himself to Brown's crackerjack pilot. His name was Lieutenant Joel Crouch, and he'd supposedly written the book on Pathfinding, not that it meant a lot to Jake under the circumstances. He'd never paid much attention to the books.

“You don't have much confidence in this, do you?” Crouch asked when he entered the cabin.

McNiece considered his question. He'd mostly developed the mission plan, and wouldn't have expected his men to follow a plan he didn't believe in.
Confidence?
Maybe it ought to have been him asking that of the pilot.

“Change that to ‘little or no,' confidence,” he lied. “I got carried on a merry chase yesterday, and I'm expecting the same thing today. I don't think you can hit Bastogne.”

Lieutenant Crouch looked at him over his shoulder, his hands on the controls. This was the same man of whom journalist Lorelle Hearst, on meeting him shortly before the D-Day Pathfinder drop, had written:
Although I had no idea {his mission} was going to be that important, I instinctively knew it would be something very brave . . . You are going to hear a great deal more about him, because he is terrific . . . absolutely tops at his job.

McNiece had not read Hearst's story about Crouch in the stateside newspaper. But he was a sharp judge of character, and the pilot's quiet charisma and poised self-assurance likely impressed him much as it had the reporter. He decided to play along and see what Crouch could do.

In the copilot's seat, meanwhile, Vito Pedone had gotten a look on his face that said he was no stranger to the game.

“At eight-fifteen on the dot I'll pull us down out of this fog,” Crouch said. “We'll be over Lille, France. You can check on the flight map.”

“Good.” McNiece had deliberately sounded skeptical.

They'd flown on for a while. Right at a quarter past eight Crouch banked gently down to a low altitude and Lille was below them.

McNiece thought that was a nice stunt.

“The next place we'll hit is Luxembourg,” the pilot said, and gave another time of arrival.

McNiece looked at him. “Sure,” he said.

At the exact time he'd mentioned, Crouch shaved altitude again. They were over Luxembourg.

Their gazes had briefly met, and McNiece had tried not to look too impressed.

“Well,” McNiece said. “This gives me a little more hope.”

He'd stood there in the cabin as Crouch brought the plane back up.

“In about fifteen minutes, I'm going to give you a green light,” the pilot said. “Now get out of here. If you do your job, I'll do mine.”

McNiece had just given him a nod, turned, and gone back to rejoin his men. That had been a short while ago. It was almost nine o'clock in the morning now, and the two Pathfinder planes were nearing their destination. They'd had smooth flying the entire trip, but McNiece expected the situation to get hot when they got closer to the DZ. With the resupply planes in the air waiting for his signal, there would be no room for error, and no time for it, either.

He guessed he'd see how things turned out, though it was fair to say that Crouch was well off his list of concerns. Whatever happened, he felt confident the ol' boy could handle it.

2.

Completing his long turn over Belgium, Lieutenant Crouch descended from the clouds toward the wide plateau where Bastogne perched amid the snow-mantled Ardennes forests. He would been more comfortable if their promised Ninth Air Force fighter escort had materialized over Reims, where they'd been supposed to rendezvous. The planes hadn't been there as specified, however, and he'd been unable to wake up anyone at the base—or so it seemed, since no one answered his radio calls. It had left him with no choice but to continue without them.

A few minutes after nine o'clock he brought the transport down through the cloud cover to treetop level.

What he and Pedone saw below was in a very real sense the opposite of what they remembered from D-Day Minus One, when they had looked down on the vast Allied armada stretching from one side of the Channel to the other. Now all the two men could make out were German troops, armor, and artillery surrounding Bastogne like a vast sea rising up around a tiny island, threatening to inundate its shores.

Crouch knew the Pathfinders in the troop compartment would be jumping into the middle of that fearsome assembly, and without up-to-date intelligence to tell them whether they'd land in enemy or American-held territory. He respected that sort of courage above all else, and nothing could have stopped him from flying them in himself. Every one of his pilots was capable in his opinion. But the moment Brown had told him about the mission, he'd known he had to do it.

He craned his head to look out his windscreen, peering past the inner edge of the German buildup at the town proper. One of the main landmarks G-2 had told him to seek out was a large cemetery. The area Colonel Kohls had suggested for the DZ was just outside it, between two lines of American resistance—assuming they'd continued to hold out against the pressing German force. No one had heard from Kohls for some time.

Crouch nodded to Pedone. He could see the cemetery straight ahead, so at least he knew they were on course. The copilot nodded back, toggling on the green light above the jump door.

In the troop compartment, Schrable Williams had just ordered the men to stand up and hook up when the ground fire started pouring up around them. They could see tracers whizzing past the windows, burning so hot they were visible in broad daylight. Then the guns seemed to zero in on the transport, their 88mm rounds striking its thin metal skin with rapid
takking
sounds.

McNiece was standing in front of Sergeant Cleo Merz as he prepared to jump. He thought Merz was one of the nicest fellows he'd met in the service, and got a kick of how the little guy always seemed to have a smile tugging at his lips, like he could see the humor in just about anything. As the flak intensified, they heard a deafening bang in the cabin and flinched. Jake looked around to see that the plane was still in one piece around him, then looked over at the diminutive sergeant and realized his smile had stretched out into a full-blown, rubbery grin. Before McNiece had a chance to wonder what had brought it on, Mertz stuck his finger into a hole in the side of the plane between them. A round had punched right through it and barely missed killing one or the other of them.

McNiece gazed silently down at the ground through a window after that. The mass of German troops and tanks looked like a huge black carpet against the whiteness of the snow, and he could see dead ahead the artillery emplacement that was firing at the transport.

At the controls, Crouch could see it even more clearly. The guns were right in his flight path. He was not going to be able to elude them, and he had no fighter support that could take them out. As far as he could tell that left him with only one option.

Bracing himself in his seat, he nosed into a power dive that hearkened back to his old barnstorming days, looking right down the barrels of those guns.

Caught by surprise, most of the troopers behind him sank to the floor, unable to keep their balance under the tremendous gravitational force produced by the dive. Down on his knees, Agnew saw the Germans leap from the platform of the artillery emplacement and then go scattering off in all directions. Whether they assumed they'd shot the transport out of the air or believed the pilot to be a suicidal lunatic, they'd been convinced he was about to come crashing directly into them.

It was precisely what Crouch had wanted them to think. Streaking past the abandoned artillery guns, he pulled the aircraft sharply up to jump altitude and turned to Pedone again. “As soon as I level off, give them the green light!”

A minute later it flashed on. Barely back on their feet, the troopers went out the door.

3.

As he fluttered to earth, McNiece saw a sprawling cemetery below him, its frozen knolls and lawns studded with elaborate headstones, footstones, and mausoleums. Its size reassured him they were over Bastogne. No other village in the area would have a burial ground that large, and he was thinking that all those monuments would provide good cover if he landed on top of the Germans.

And then he was down, his boots breaking through the snow crust. He rolled into all that whiteness, wrestled free of the harness and chute, got back on his feet, and shoved his hands into his waist pouches for the smoke grenades. An instant later, he was hurling them everywhere, never mind if there might be enemy guns trained on him,
whump-whump-whump
, churning up a huge orange cloud as he kept lobbing the grenades, one after another after another, Germans be damned,
whump-whump-whump
, everywhere, so it must have looked to the pilots up there overhead like hell was popping its lid around him.

Still hanging from his risers in midair, George Blain, the radar man, saw the thick orange plumes rising up from below and decided not to wait till he was on the ground to give the transports his okay. Hitting the switch on the portable AN/CRN-4 set strapped to his body, he sent the signal and looked up at the orbiting planes with a kind of manic, adrenaline-infused giddiness.
What a party!
he thought.

In his cockpit, Joel Crouch radioed Headquarters to open the aerial supply line. Because he was a precise, thorough man, he'd waited for his Rebecca to interrogate the radar unit, keeping one eye on its cathode ray screen, only sending out the message after he saw the blips. But in a sense that was a technical and procedural formality. It would have been enough for him to see McNiece whip up a billowing orange funnel, flinging his grenades like a man having wild conniptions, his bright, rising smoke signal a clear declaration that he was right where he needed to be.