First to Jump (24 page)

In fact, the supplies enabled them to hang on just long enough.

5.

Yellow, red, white, blue.

At the brick pile, McNiece and the men were watching the supply bundles fall through the suddenly, startlingly, gloriously blue sky like manna on parachutes. The arrival of the planes had also turned the Germans' attention skyward, and led to a welcome pause in the machine-gun fire they'd been directing at the hill.

Yellow, red, white, blue
.

Down below the hill and across the road toward the edge of the cemetery, the trucks and jeeps had sped to the DZ as soon as the radars were triggered, arriving to wait for the planes, their crews pouring from the vehicles at first sight of the bundles. Now they were recovering the packages as they touched down on the ground, in some instances gathering supplies from bundles that had come apart in midair or broken to pieces upon landing, the men picking their spilled contents out of the snow and hauling them into the vehicles by the armful. With each new planeload there would be a fresh outburst of cheers from all around the area, the troopers whooping it up like they were at a ballpark in New York, Cleveland, or St. Louis when their team won the World Series.

Yellow, red, white, blue
.

Up atop the bricks, Private Jack Agnew kept working the radar, pressing its button once every thirty seconds as he'd learned to do in England. He would rarely climb down off that pile in the next five days, at least not while the sun was out and the planes were coming in. That first day, in the first four hours of the airlift, the Pathfinders guided in 244 planes. The following day—the day before Christmas—they brought in almost 200 more, switching between their three radar locations to keep the Germans from getting a bead on them. On Christmas Day, the weather conditions over England prevented the fleet of C-47s from taking off, but McNiece and his men would bring in a volunteer eleven-glider lift of medical personnel launched from France. There would be 269 transports the day after that, and another hundred plus on the fifth and final day of the drop.

They were long, hard days for Agnew. He was hungry, and thirsty, and most of all he was cold. On one of those days, a foxhole at the bottom of the hill took a direct hit from an artillery shell, and the eight soldiers in it, who'd been talking to him on and off to while away the hours, were blown to death. On Christmas, he and the other Pathfinders got a treat, the troops sharing some hot C rations from the resupply drops—cow beets and onions that were like a taste of heaven after the cold Ks they'd been eating, and that might have warmed the Pathfinders up all the more because of the gratitude they represented. But with the way he was burning calories in the cold, Agnew's hunger and thirst would soon return.

There would be another day when Agnew, briefly relieved from his post, found a pig that had been run over by a tank in the snow. But when he stood the carcass up against a tree, hoping to slice some meat from it, it was stiff as a board, and he dejectedly returned to the brick pile with his growling stomach and wilted dreams of a roasted ham dinner for himself and the boys.

Throughout those days, Agnew would continue to see the burial details hacking bodies out of the snow with the edges of their shovels, the breath steaming from their mouths as they struggled to maneuver their rigid bodies onto the stretchers.

Those days. Long, hard, and always the maddening, bone-deep cold.

Like the rest of the men in Bastogne, Agnew had heard that General George Patton's Third Army was making a breakthrough, and that the German siege was already starting to crumble at its outer edges, and he guessed that was one of the things that got him through.

But the thing that really did it for him, McNiece, and the rest of the men who had jumped to bring in the planes, was just seeing the cargo parachutes descend from the sky with the incoming waves of planes. Up on the bricks as the transports came in, half-frozen, his finger an icicle jabbing at the radar button every thirty seconds, Agnew would watch the chutes spring open above the bundles, yellow, red, white, and blue, and feel his heart lift in his chest.

“It's a great Christmas present,” he said to McNiece on the first day. “One these men won't forget for a long time.”

He'd been up on the pile with the CRN-4, Jake and the others standing beneath him, all of them using the bricks for cover and watching the parachutes float above them, bright as balloons at a summer fair, or possibly a grand and special birthday celebration.

McNiece watched the bundles thump onto the snow, their chutes flapping in the wind as the soldiers hurried over to bring them back to their trucks.

Delivered by air
, he thought.

6.

Lieutenant Everett G. Andrews of the 101st Airborne's 377th Field Artillery Battalion was a Normandy replacement who couldn't have suspected what he'd be in for when he got shipped into Bastogne.

On December 18 his unit had been ordered to set up gun positions on the outskirts of Savy, a farming hamlet near a major road and rail juncture north of the city. Their command post was a small house occupied by the LeRoy family—a farmer, his wife, and their four daughters—and Andrews had known it would be a stress on them when he and three other officers moved in. But they'd done their best to assist the LeRoys with their chores, and had hooked up a small generator to restore the electricity that had been knocked out by German shellings. That gave them lights, and a radio, so they could listen to the BBC. These were good accommodations compared to the cold foxholes the infantrymen had to endure, and Andrews had considered himself most fortunate to be inside.

A day or so after reaching the little village, the officers had sent some trucks out for supplies and ammunition, but they'd never seen them again. Ironically, it was through the BBC news broadcasts that they found out they were surrounded by enemy forces.

Early on the 23rd, Andrews received word from Headquarters about the airborne resupply and was told to be ready for when the flights came through. On a signal from a group of Pathfinders who'd marked out the drop zone, he and his men were to speed out in every available vehicle to assist with collecting the bundles.

Andrews would remain there for all the airdrops, watching the C-47s fly in over a German flak belt situated just beyond the DZ, making them easy targets. He saw transports arrive damaged, some trailing smoke, their engines on fire. But the pilots had kept them in formation long enough to drop their supply loads before the crews bailed . . . though some were unable to escape their aircrafts before they crashed or exploded. It was the bravest act his eyes ever witnessed.

On the ground, there was a danger of getting hit by some of the hundred-fifty and two-hundred-pound bundles that broke free of their chutes in the air, and Andrews took to ducking under the trucks until after a plane dropped its load, only then crawling out to gather the supplies.

Over the course of those days, the troopers assigned to pick up the bundles started hanging on to the parachutes. They'd found all kind of uses for them—they made great outer linings for their boots and bedrolls, and even spare blankets. Andrews took four of them, one of each color, yellow, red, white, and blue.

When Patton thrust through the German defenses the day after Christmas, far ahead of most predictions, Andrews was redeployed to Longchamps, northwest of Bastogne, where elements of the II SS Panzer Corps were staging one of the final enemy attempts to retake the hub. He would remain there until January, when he sustained wounds that sent him back to the States for hospitalization.

But before that he returned to the farmhouse in Savy and gave the light blue parachute to the LeRoy family, explaining that it was a token of appreciation for the courtesy they had shown him and his fellow officers. On his second visit there a year later, Mrs. LeRoy would proudly display the blue dresses she'd sewn out of the fabric for their four daughters.

Andrews left Europe with the yellow, red, and white parachutes in his possession. The white one became his wife Margaret's wedding dress. After the war, in the 1950s, he decided to donate the yellow one to the 101st Airborne Division museum, but still kept the red one as a cherished reminder of the day those planes came in and saved the men in Bastogne.

In 2014, the ninety-three-year-old Andrews learned about a World War Two reenactment group that was planning to stage a para-bundle drop over Bastogne on the seventieth anniversary of the wartime events that occurred there. It was then that he decided the fourth parachute should be used in the commemoration, and got in touch with the group, who accepted it with deep appreciation. The rigging was all fouled up, and Andrews couldn't remember how to fix it, so he gave it to some riggers at Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, and they repaired it for him.

“This may be the last one that's fit to use,” he would say. “The last of all that fell that day.”

Donating it to the group, Everett Andrews decided that he would travel to Belgium with the parachute, return there so he could look up one last time to see it blossom open beneath the wings of a soaring plane in the high, cold winter air of the Ardennes Mountains.

And maybe, he thought, that was why he'd held on to it for so long. So they could go back to Bastogne, both of them, back to where heroes fought and died for something immeasurably greater than themselves, back to where thousands of besieged, weary, desperate American soldiers received the most precious thing of all as a Christmas gift.

Everett Andrews was going back to Bastogne, one last time, to look up and see that dash of red against the blue sky and white clouds, coming gently down to earth, as bright and enduring as hope itself.

7.

The breakthrough of General Patton's 4th Armored Division on December 26, 1944, did not immediately end the fighting in the Ardennes. Although Hitler ordered a retreat in early January, scattered armored elements held out in the Bois Jacques pine woods around the villages of Foy, Noville, and Recogne, north of Bastogne—some because they did not have enough fuel left to return to their side of the line. Ragged but able, the 101st Airborne Division would clear those areas, but only after some of the bloodiest combat of the war.

Snuffy Smith, the original Pathfinder/medic who had dropped on Normandy and Holland, had taken retraining at Chalgrove with the IX TCC in December, but wasn't among the men Jake McNiece chose for his team or Rothwell's backup stick. Reassigned to the 502nd PIR, he was sent to Bastogne to join Lieutenant John F. Stopka's 3rd Battalion with other reinforcements after Patton's tanks and infantry reopened the roads in late December. As the fighting raged on, the Pathfinders were often used as recons and given the dangerous job of scouting the snowy mountain terrain ahead of the main troops.

In mid-January, Stopka's unit was advancing through the Bois Jacques between Foy and Bizory, moving along one side of a railroad track that had been built up almost twenty feet above the clearing, when they spotted German tanks sheltering on the other side of the berm. The Germans had set up gun emplacements that would have made a ground attack on the tanks all but impossible, and one of Stopka's men radioed for airpower to knock them out.

The fighter planes arrived quickly, strafing and bombing the enemy armor. But their attack came too close to Stopka and his men, leaving thirty dead and forty wounded.

Smith, who would treat the wounded and tag the dead, recalled the attack as the most horrifying experience he had “from D-Day all through the 101st battles,” thinking it even worse than watching the glider tows go down over the fields of Holland as he guarded the T with the rest of the Pathfinders. Separating the loose ends of war from its main threads was an exercise for the generals and historians. For the men fighting and dying on the ground, the pattern and perspective remained those of daily survival.

But the fighting in the Ardennes soon would be over. By the end of the month, the last of the German units in Belgium either had been destroyed or were limping back across the lines. Hitler's thrust to divide the U.S.-British alliance and win a compromise peace with them had failed, leaving his country still engaged on two fronts, with nearly all its military resources exhausted, and the armies of the East and West racing toward Berlin.

The Third Reich's days of ascendance were long gone, its everlasting night coming on fast.

8.

In early January, Jake McNiece and his two sticks of Pathfinders were transferred out into France, where they stayed for several days before taking off in a flight for Chalgrove. On their return, Captain Frank Brown of the IX TCC would recommend all of them for Silver Stars for their daring jump into Bastogne, citing valor and gallantry in action. But Colonel Robert Sink, executive officer of the 506th—and the commander of McNiece's Regimental HQ demolition-saboteurs—would quash the request, asserting they had done nothing that wasn't within the range of normal action for paratroopers. McNiece, who cared about as much for medals as for promotions in rank, would react with indifference. “It had not been different from anything else I had ever done,” he would say about the mission later on.

Ultimately the men were given Bronze Stars for action and inserted entry. Jake didn't turn his down.

Later that same month, Captain Brown asked Sink's permission to keep McNiece and the five troopers he'd brought from headquarters at Chalgrove. He was again overruled by the colonel.

Send them back to me
, Sink cabled.
Evidently,
I can kill them quicker than you can!

Brown would reply that he could have all of the men but McNiece, who was “essential to this operation”
and needed for the training of new recruits. In the end, Lieutenant Schrable Williams stayed on too.

Meanwhile, the war was entering its final stages. With the victory at Bastogne behind them, the Allies would make their push across the Rhine throughout the early part of 1945 and encounter mostly weak and disorganized resistance. In February, the 4th and 90th Infantry Divisions were tasked with plowing through the Siegfried Line near the town of Prüm. What was left of the
Wehrmacht
mustered a counterattack that boxed in the American troops at the Prüm bridgehead, depleted their supplies and ammunition, and threatened to inflict heavy casualties.