CHAPTER FIVE
AT THE DEPARTURE AIRFIELD A RADIO WAS PLAYING THE MOONLIGHT Sonata. Oh, brother, Duber muttered, is that telling 'em we're coming by moonlight? There had been other music, live music by bands playing favorite marches, as Third Battalion assembled. This seemed a breach of security, a tip-off that something special was in the air or soon would be, but instead it reinforced Duber's hunch that such obvious activity must be to provoke German reactions for study. So he began taking bets that this run-up would be another dry run rather than the end of a weather delay as had been announced (the rain hadn't been too bad around Exeter where they'd marshaled).
Wagers like that revealed some amazing sangfroid among the paratroopers. Even when they blackened their faces with charcoal some did Al Jolson imitations. Banter between sticks continued up to the C-47s' ladders. English villagers had also been deceived into nonchalance. They'd just waved and given thumbs-up to each truck convoy as they had during the many, so many rehearsals.
Consequently a good number of Blues were feeling deja vu when they reached the airfield but had second thoughts when they saw all the VIPs there. That's when Joe became convinced this was it; others were still smokin' and jokin', which seemed to cheer up the VIPs but also puzzle them. Don't these troopers know what they're going into? Didn't we make the training serious enough? The Currahees took then-cue from Sink, who didn't seem at all worried.
Before wrestling into his chute Joe ran over to the next ship for an encouraging handshake with Bray and Vanderpool. However, they had already loaded, so he just waved at portholes, hoping they'd see him. Their jumpmaster, Lieutenant Johnston, was the last to climb aboard. “Good luck, sir!” Joe yelled. Johnston nodded and confidently returned his salute.
Like all the others, Captain McKnight's stick was so heavily loaded that they had to be boosted up one by one into the narrow fuselage. Now even jokers were quiet. Several men popped airsickness pills as soon as the propellers turned over, were snoring by the time they reached altitude, and remembered nothing of the ninety-minute flight to their rendezvous with destiny.* Every trooper was in some degree of sleep deprivation because of the twenty-four-hour weather delay. They jumped at around 1:00 A.M. on June 6 but, except for catnaps, hadn't slept since the night of the fourth.
The moon was a fluorescent lamp, illuminating a sky jammed with planes, many of them pulling gliders. Joe had seen pictures from the Pacific war showing ships spread from horizon to horizon. The heavens over the Channel were filled the same way but in three dimensions and more tightly. Awesome didn't nearly describe it, even though Joe's porthole was no more than a peephole. Inside, the only light was from pulsing cigarettes. Joe's mind was in four places—the past, present, future, and a little of the beyond. He tried to take the best from them all.
Not much from the present; that was all watching and waiting as the armada turned south. The past was about his parents and people who he wished could be watching him now. The future was not far away, a product of his training that required a leg-locked exit, tight body position, and counting to four. If the main chute didn't open then, pull the rip cord of the reserve. It wasn't much to remember but it was everything that mattered during those first four seconds, then would come a bent-leg landing, sorting his gear, finding McKnight, and moving out to the company objective.
With everything at stake, such unique concentration was unforced but set off a riptide of thoughts in all directions. More than anything else, the mind, even the most highly disciplined mind, needed distraction from an overload of concentration. As chewing gum for their thoughts, men hummed or silently whistled vacuous tunes of the times like “I Want a Zoot Suit with a Drape Shape.”
Joe indulged in such mind occupation but kept his thoughts close to what he knew he could do, not what luck could do to him; at the same time he realized that the future was no promise, only potential to continue. The priorities of the immediate future had to be taken in sequence, or the sequence would end.
Beyond was what would happen if the sequence did end. How he'd be killed didn't matter much. He imagined two doors. If he couldn't get through either one, it didn't seem he would suffer—he would instead be whisked away to a new reality.
CROUCHED AT THE HEAD of the stick was McKnight, the jump-master, who checked off landmarks and bellowed them back so that if the plane got hit, his stick would know where they'd be bailing out.
“The English coast's behind us, men … here come the Channel Islands … whoops, they're shooting at us.”
There was a German division stationed on Guernsey and Jersey. The aerial armada skirted them with enough distance so that antiaircraft guns were ineffectual, though it seemed sure that their fire would alert batteries on the Norman coast. That didn't happen—there was only a dribble of tracers from Cotentin—perhaps because the coastal batteries were fooled into thinking that the initial wave of the armada was just another of the big bombing raids that had become so common they flew over unopposed.
Duber cursed that he'd lost his bet—they hadn't come this far to turn around and go back. Joe knew he'd won the larger wager because that sure as hell was Normandy coming up. At one thousand feet it looked as dark and still as it had for his paymaster jumps. Once again he would arrive in France a rich young man.
So as not to pass above Allied navies (nervous naval antiaircraft gunners had riddled the 82nd's jump into Sicily), the aerial armada approached the coast from the west, the opposite side of the peninsula from Utah and Omaha beaches. Upon landfall the pilots started a gradual descent to the planned jump altitude of seven hundred feet. Joe's stick sensed they were lower, much lower, around four hundred feet. The ever-calculating Duber did some calculations. He determined that at that height a reserve chute would be useless. McKnight agreed, so one by one his stick chucked the reserve packs to the back of the plane.* Same thing with gas masks and life vests. The troopers were over land now, and poison gas was at the bottom of their fear list.
“Get ready!” McKnight shouted, a standard prejump command, quite unnecessary except for a few troopers coming out of a sleeping-pill stupor. Joe's thoughts flashed for a moment to the FFI. Here we come, Camille—you won't be disappointed! God had been away from Europe for five years, replaced by the Gestapo. Now He was back. Yet the Germans prayed to Him with a motto embossed on their belt buckles: GOTT MiT UNS. God is with us. It seemed impossible for God to receive so many short messages, from both sides, as D Night unfurled.
“Check your equipment” was McKnight's next command.
Even while descending to four hundred feet the C-47s applied full power, though they were supposed to throttle back to the maximum safe jump speed of 120 miles per hour. Evidently many pilots found that was too slow for safety as each wave of transports felt more shocks from guns below. The German “88” artillery piece was originally designed for antiaircraft use and against the vertical invasion did much damage. Moreover, the armada was flying in formation. To slow down to one hundred miles per hour was to risk being rammed from behind. Thus the waves reached drop points at the speed of the fastest rather than the slowest planes among them.
Concussions from 88s multiplied, bouncing C-47s around like speedboats in a typhoon, as eight hundred of them— wingtips scant yards apart—struggled to hold formation and continue inland. Hunched on metal benches, troopers lurched against one another, helmets striking the fuselage as it whip-sawed from explosions that flashed and thundered like a lightning storm, first remote, then rolling by, then rumbling elsewhere, then returning as antiaircraft batteries ahead searched for new targets. Between thunderclaps a face would appear momentarily in the flare of a cigarette lighter. Otherwise the fuselage was a dark cave of prayerful impatience united in a single plea—Let us out!
But first the Germans broke in. Joe heard a scud of shrapnel pepper the left wing. Suddenly a long stitch of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire shrieked up through the belly of his plane, punching jagged mouths across the deck. As one, the stick shouted and pulled up their feet. Spent slugs rolled around on the pitching deck. A trooper bent over and picked one up, perhaps the first war souvenir on the Western Front. No one seemed to have been hit. A good omen, and a taunt from the Germans that had to be answered because several men exclaimed that their precious jump boots had been gouged. No one's going to get away with that! Let's jump!
Ground fire and concussions abated when the armada, its formations broken beyond reassembly, entered a belt of fog. Germans could shoot only at sound, which five hundred feet overhead was like elevated trains. In the fog McKnight and the pilot saw no landmarks, relying entirely on a luminous compass, a wristwatch, and dead reckoning. The fog opened. Once again tracers reached up. Most missed, some hit, one with a huge flash and jolting explosion dead ahead. Lieutenant Johnston's ship—Jack, Orv—all aboard were consumed in a falling flame.
TWENTY FAMILIES LOST their men in a moment. It would be days before Joe knew, weeks for them. The fireball superheated a fury to get at the antiaircraft gunners. Till then jaws were locked, but someone yelled at the pilot, “Lemme at 'em!” But it was not quite yet time.
Emerging from the fog bank the armada was scattered storm-tossed, its pilots confounded and confused at every altitude. Red lights went on, the alert to watch for green. McKnight yelled the long-awaited commands:
“Stand up!” Troopers struggled to rise amid flashes in darkness.
“Hook up!” Attach to the anchor line.
It was hardly an anchor, rolling, slanting down as if the plane had crested the ultimate dip of a roller coaster, the pilot as eager to disgorge the jumpers as they were to escape.
A trooper blurted that his boot was full of blood. The crew chief pulled him from the stick where he slumped against the pile of reserve chutes, fumbling for his first-aid pack. He'd been hit by the earlier stitch of machine-gun fire but didn't notice the wound till he tried to stand. No one said anything when he apologized for not going with them. His was just an early rendezvous, they'd think later, but not be able to remember his name.
Tracers streaked outside while in the black tube of the cabin Joe's stick swayed, groping for balance, every man bent by his load, which seemed welded to the deck. As the C-47 fishtailed, its crew chief manhandled cargo bundles to the door. Out they went.
“Shuffle to the door!” was McKnight's last command. Belly to butt, the stick jammed up behind him moments before a green light suddenly glowed in the fuselage: the signal to go from their pilot, from Wolverton, Sink and Taylor, Bradley and Ike. From America, to go do what had to be done.
Joe's stick was hell-bent to set a new record for sixteen men evacuating a C-47. They probably did so in under ten seconds. Photos were to show that many Screaming Eagles flung themselves out “ass over appetite,” as if they'd never received jump training. McKnight led, followed by Duber, then Joe, who took a firm grip on the door and exited professionally like a Toccoa trooper. He yelled, “Currahee Three!,” unheard by anyone else as the prop blast ripped his words away.
“Hup thousand, two thousand.” The overstressed harness wrenched his shoulders up to ear level, the opening shock estimated after analysis as the equivalent of several tons. Though Joe's didn't, leg bags burst like fountains of confetti because most planes were going so much faster than jump speed.
The correct and inculcated body position was to be tense above the waist, chin down on the reserve chute. By choice Joe had no reserve, but in other sticks jumpers were knocked unconscious when metal rip-cord handles hit chins with unprecedented force. These jumpers did not revive, if at all, till they crumpled in trees or on fields. It was as if astronauts, seconds after pulling incomparable Gs, had to strip off then-space suits and immediately fight with ferocious aliens. All this happened for D Night paratroopers within less than a minute between exit in the sky and combat on the ground.
The uproar of war was all around, yet the night was cool and clear, the air rising from farmland fragrant of long grasses that descending jumpers were surprised they could smell. There were muzzle flashes but no Germans to be seen below, the only movement from disturbed shadows of horses and cows. With neurons still vibrating from the ultimate opening shock, Joe gaped and gawked from sensory contrasts. The night glowed as if God had lit the lamps of heaven to watch.
Thus commenced by far the largest and most sudden scattering of a major force in military history. Twenty thousand (counting British paratroopers) rendezvous with destiny began with a green light. For some men the rendezvous would end before they reached the ground, for many as soon as they did. The rest would start savage battles to control the ground and remember that nothing was nearly the same thereafter. Not for them, not for the Germans, not for the world.
THERE WERE ONLY SECONDS for Joe to realize that he was drifting toward a steeple coruscating with rifle flashes. From briefings he felt pretty sure it was the steeple of the church, the only church, in St. Come-du-Mont—unless his C-47 had been way off course, and conscientious McKnight never indicated that it was. If Joe was right, he was also lucky because the village of St. Come-du-Mont was only about a half mile from Third Battalion's drop zone and less than three miles from their objective, two wooden bridges across the smallish Douve River. Seizing the bridges and defending them would foil a German drive against Utah Beach. The intense briefings, the pictures and sand tables, had embedded that big picture in his mind.
Tracers perforated his canopy, leaving circular glows in the silk. Joe climbed the risers to side slip, at the same time releasing his tethered leg bag. In free fall it hit the church roof like a wrecking ball. Two seconds later so did Joe, with a force that buckled his knees. The roof sloped sharply. He tumbled and slid down it till boot soles and fingernails stopped him spread-eagled at the eaves.
For his second jump of the night, Joe rolled off the roof, grabbed the eaves to slow his fall, and dropped about fifteen feet to the ground, landing on his side and carbine. Even with the wind knocked out of him, earth never felt so good. The shadow of the church provided some concealment as he unharnessed, retrieved his leg bag, and for a few moments took stock. All the while tracers crisscrossed in the night, with no counterfire from the hundreds of Blues who must already be on the ground. That amazed and perplexed him. Here at last, after the desperate flight to reach them, were Germans as targets, the enemy to kill. Why aren't we doing it?!
The Germans had torched a house nearby. It was burning like a bonfire at a football rally. Snipers in the steeple were using the illumination to shoot at planes and jumpers. Joe, as the Most Obvious Temper in his class, began planning how to climb up to the belfry and tommy-gun those snipers. It was an infuriating and nearly irresistible impulse; then it dawned on him why Blues had not attacked the church and snuffed its antiaircraft fire. Where were they? Well, they must have already set off for the objective—the Douve bridges—and the objective came first, as had been repeated in every briefing. It was for him to join them, all the more important because he was carrying I Company's most vital radio.
Where were they, his single-minded buddies? Another briefing point came to him. Wolverton had said over and over, “Remember, men, our objectives are east of the DZ. That's the direction the C-47s will all be flying. If you get disoriented, just look up and follow the planes.” They were still roaring overhead, still fired upon from the steeple. Grinding his teeth, Joe concluded that eliminating that fire must be left to others. But he'd leave something for them. Gathering up his gear, Joe bequeathed the heaviest stuff like the land mine and machine-gun belt. When troopers from later sticks attacked the church, probably soon, they could use it.
Unburdened, he took off in a crawl through the cemetery, dragging the radio. It reminded him of Toccoa times when Currahees had to belly-crawl a quarter mile in under ten minutes. The tombstones were good protection, but when Joe reached the wall it had to be vaulted.
With a heave and walrus jump he did it. No fire was directed at him from the steeple, for the Germans were focused on planes and jumpers, exchanging yells when they scored a hit. That was more than Joe could bear. From a ditch he let loose tommy-gun bursts at the steeple some fifty yards away. Divots of plaster spouted where the few bullets hit, very satisfying for Joe, though the snipers paused just momentarily. Firing on the enemy was a rite of passage, whetting an edge to see them fall next time. That could wait till he had some Blues beside him.
His stick had dropped a half mile west of almost all the others in Third Battalion. Though he didn't know it while slinking toward the Douve bridges, Joe was bringing up the rear. He'd seen aerial photos of the hedgerows for which Normandy is famous. Now he was encountering them in the dark. Thick mats of vegetation, they rose from solid earthen berms, marking off and walling in rectangular fields for crops or cattle. Hedgerows could not be crawled through or climbed over; neither could they be skirted except on cart lanes. Through hedgerows there were no more than two openings between fields, usually at a corner. At these corners were most of the clashes on D Night. Joe could see muzzle flashes flickering behind distant hedgerow shadows, hear burp guns versus tommy guns like dogs fighting.
Until he joined a pack, Joe could only come up to a hedgerow and listen for anything on the other side. Once or twice there seemed to be some kind of scuffling sound and he'd cricket, but never got a response. He was tempted to toss a grenade over but incapable of handling what might come back at him. Probably most of what he heard was cows.
So if the sound went one way, Joe went the other. Even with a compass, this back-and-forth disoriented him. He was playing a version of hide-and-seek that little resembled his childhood game. Am I the only guy by myself? Where's the rest of the company? he kept wondering. It seemed they had vanished, transplanted to another battlefield.
“Stand alone” was the Currahee motto, but to survive in the vast grid of hedgerows required at least two men, one listening for what might be in the next field and the other to watch his back because some Germans could be coming into their field from the other corner. A squad leader lucky enough to assemble his men could move right along like a king in checkers. Enter a square, and if unoccupied, it was his. If not, he had men to seize the corners, then, holding a hedgerow square, his squad could repel almost anything. The same was true for German squads, fewer in number but more intact because they had not been dispersed like the paratroopers. In general, on D Night, the Germans knew where they were but not what was happening, whereas the Allied paratroopers were positive about what was happening but uncertain where they were.
Like a demolition derby, firefights for squares progressed east. Following them, Joe came upon bodies, German and American. The first sight of dead men did not much affect him because his mind was filled with determination not to join them. More than anything else he wanted to find some living buddies.
More hedgerows thwarted, kept turning him back. Now heavier-caliber fire was moving farther east and he was farther behind. He turned on the SCR 300. If Third Battalion was in hot action, he'd surely hear about it. But there was only static on the company frequencies, and he had memorized them all. He tuned all through the band every half hour for a couple of hours.
By then the hedgerows had curved him around, back toward St. Come-du-Mont. In the distance he could see flames still leaping from the house that was the Germans' torch. Antiaircraft fire had ceased because the aerial armada was gone. For the last time Joe turned on the radio. Hearing nothing, he switched the frequency, smashed the set, and buried it in the corner of a hedgerow.
That represented failure, the first of any significance since Joe had joined the army nearly two years before. How significant he didn't know, but he felt that was the right thing to do. Despite all his efforts, he was alone, quite killable, his radio a prize for the Germans to take from his body. That's how Joe was coming to view himself, somewhat as he had as living cargo with the FFI: a potential find for the enemy who outgunned him. He also reasoned that there were plenty of other radios in I Company—if I Company still existed. What if every one of its C-47s, except Joe's, had been fireballs? There was little reason to feel otherwise, at that age, at that time, at that place in the darkness of D Night.
Joe's primary job was radioman; his secondary, demolitions. The blocks of nitro starch were for blowing the Douve bridges in case of German counterattack. It didn't look like he'd get to those bridges soon, not the way D Night was going for him. He needed a change of luck and, crouching in the corner of a hedgerow, decided to make it happen.
St. Come-du-Mont, now a lurking silhouette in front of him, was just a minor village, but according to briefings, the Germans had installed a small power-relay station there. Joe crawled up to the outskirts and cased the village. The relay station, he remembered, was a fenced enclosure between buildings on Highway 13. Joe crawled closer. Sure enough, there was a square of high fence. It had a gate and something that looked like a small bunker inside with cables and wires running out.
The briefers' description of the relay station was exactly right, information that must have come from the FFI. Joe's memories are like glimpses of a mountain range through turbulent clouds. What he remembers about the relay station was, “I'd paid the FFI, and now they were paying me back.”
While Joe watched, he listened to a lull. As if in some spectral intermezzo, smoke from the burning house drifted toward him over the roofs of St. Come-du-Mont. The moon had set; the village was nearly silent, seeming abandoned, as if the war had departed. The French were hunkered in root cellars, keeping their heads down till one side or the other exerted firm control. What control Joe could detect was German.
For what seemed an hour he staked out the relay station. Not a light, no movement around it, though out on the edge of his vision he detected a soldier or two moving between cottages. He was determined to get ahead of them before they reached the objective he had set for himself.
But Joe became distracted. Studying silhouettes, he could see some Wehrmacht vehicles parked helter-skelter as if they had been abandoned in a snowstorm. They were unguarded. Whether or not there were Germans inside that relay station, he wasn't sure, but he was the Class Shark, an opportunist who saw an opportunity, with no sergeant or officer there to gainsay him. With the knife he'd used to extricate himself from his harness, Joe crawled around slashing tires with glee and a rationale: “General Taylor said that our hell-raising was his biggest problem in England. Just before we took off for Normandy he told us, ‘Okay, now go out and raise all the hell you can!’”
So Joe just followed orders, slashing and crawling while there was still enough darkness to shadow him. If this was combat, he thought as he heard tires deflate, the more the merrier. Then there was no more rubber to slash. It was time to face up to the relay station he had avoided, indeed past time to just move out, be a Currahee, straight to the gate.
As Joe came closer he could see that the gate was open about an inch. “Okay,” he said to himself, “you can do it, now do it.” The last twenty yards remain engraved in his memory. He wanted to kick open the gate and throw in the nitro starch like grenades. He'd already fused the blocks and primed the caps. Then he lectured himself as if Sergeant Lincewitz, his demo instructor at Fort Benning, were lecturing him: go up and open the gate, soldier. If no one's home, place the nitro on the target. Throwing close is only good for hand grenades and horseshoes.
Okay, Lincewitz, he thought. Approaching closer, Joe could see a generator or dynamo larger than an office desk. Whatever it was, it was silent, apparently not operating. Too bad, but he put one nitro starch block on each side of what looked like the most important machinery, then popped the fuses and walked away (Lincewitz had said a good demo man never runs).
The fuses were set for forty-five seconds. Joe was looking for cover when they went off together, a muffled explosion that puffed some white smoke from the bunker; but much to his disappointment, nothing changed in the darkly silent village. He broke into a run, rationalizing that even if lights didn't go out—there weren't any on before—some German radios went off the air.
THE WEHRMACHT HIGH COMMAND was slow to Size Up the scale and objectives of the vertical invasion, how it was designed to seal off Utah Beach, where seaborne forces started to come ashore with the dawn of D Day. In a disorganized night fight, with communications often cut, Rommel's forces were largely immobilized, hard-pressed to defend where they stood while awaiting orders for the next day. It was this quies-cence Joe had noticed, but hiding by a brush fence he sensed that his opportunity to raise hell was ebbing with the night.
Toward the relay station Germans began moving around. Had they really heard Joe's charge go off there, or was it another random explosion in the night? He heard them coming down Highway 13 as if there were no danger. He was one happy hell-raiser when a group of them stopped twenty yards away and started talking. He could have sprayed them with his tommy gun but adhered to his D Night orders not to shoot unless fired upon, which made sense in his situation.
Joe carefully pulled the pins from two grenades, one to roll down the road, the other to lob over the group for an airburst.
Like parachutes, grenades are timed for four seconds. For the air burst Joe released the handle (muffling its ping), counted “Hup thousand, two…,” and threw a grenade high. In the next second he bowled the other grenade down the road; he heard it bounce before his air grenade went off, followed by the second small boom.
He expected to hear screaming and yelling, but there was hardly any. Shit! This war wasn't like any war movie he'd seen. Knocking out a power station didn't bother the Germans; now he'd peppered them with grenade fragments and they'd hardly reacted. He'd have to get another shot at them, if only to reestablish his self-respect. There seemed to be plenty of opportunities ahead. Joe took off in a crouching run, putting hedgerows between himself and the road. Hide-and-seek had been no fun, but this was almost like playing kick-the-can on a summer evening in Muskegon.
The Douve bridges were east, but hedgerows deflected Joe south, while overhead the main lift of gliders arrived at dawn. He could see them angling down, often under fire. Many were to land or crash nearby but always inaccessibly behind hedgerows. Thousands of Screaming Eagles were all around him, but still Joe could not link up with any. Better to wait for the glider men chancing upon him rather than search for them. That's what he decided, his cricket in hand.
Before the jump Joe had been a one-man arsenal. Now, with his land mine, machine-gun ammo, nitro starch, and grenades all gone, he felt lightly armed with only a carbine, tommy gun, and pistol—maybe enough for self-defense but no more. Joe was less frightened by his predicament than frustrated at not doing everything possible for his buddies. Unified with them but in a way AWOL, he felt he had contributed little. While he was within earshot, so much was being done by others.
He hid out on D Day, the day Rommel called the longest. It was long for Joe but also the shortest in his memory because it contained no events, no change in his predicament. He'd move a little this way, that way, look at the compass a lot, more a fugitive than a soldier while historic fighting raged within a few miles' radius. On D Day he was just one tiny eye watching inside a hurricane, hearing more than seeing it.
Fatigue was taking over. All of Colonel Sink's training had been about functioning while more tired than ever before. That made Currahees “body-conscious” decades before the rest of the country. Joe began to look at himself as if he were his own doctor, an ability he would cultivate.
He'd notice himself staring at a barn a hundred yards away but unable to put it in perspective. A place to hide? A good machine-gun nest for the Germans? He was a decisive youngster, in tactical drills quick to see what was key terrain. Now he was failing, and it enraged him. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; he felt his judgment was poor. That's what alerted him. “Hey, Joe, what's going on?” he asked himself. The answer was exhaustion after being awake for dozens of hours, most of them in an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline is a supercharger for emergencies, it allows you to floorboard the gas pedal to avoid a crash but empties the gas tank very fast. As the driver of his body, he was nearly out of control.
INCREASINGLY INTENSE COMBAT focused on St. Come-du-Mont, now behind him, and he heard the heavier calibers, mortars, and howitzers joining the battle. To the village was where Rommel, at the end of D Day, moved the first of his reserves, the 6th Parachute Regiment, to throw back what he was now convinced was the main invasion. Hitler, however, still vacillated.
Once more darkness set in. Joe took off his helmet so that it wouldn't affect the magnetism of his compass, but then he couldn't find the helmet. His nose was the last of senses to lose keenness, for he noticed his caustic miasma as he slumped on the ground for longer and longer periods.
The freight-train rumble of glider-towing C-47s had ended replaced by a stupendous naval bombardment of the beachheads. In that direction Joe persevered—east—a solitary soldier, scared by exhaustion but still daring. He kept putting it to the touch, through another hedgerow maze, instinct his only guide. He poked his head into a field, sniffed around, felt he was still alone.
Crawling along the hedgerow he heard a rustle. Joe cricketed. There was a shout, “Hande hoch!” before many hands grabbed him as if he were a girl.
* The pills were so strong that a medical investigation revealed some troopers were half asleep when shot by the Germans.
* Without a reserve parachute there was life or death in a hundred feet of altitude. Some sticks didn't have enough. They went out without enough altitude for even the main chutes to open, and troopers who had already landed heard a sound like pumpkins smashing on the ground.