O n the evening of June 5, 1944, Louis Leroux, his wife, and their six children scrambled atop an embankment near their farm to investigate the sounds of distant explosions. Three miles south, Allied fighter-bombers were attacking bridges over the Douve River on France’s Cotentin Peninsula. In the fading twilight the family watched silhouetted warplanes peel away from the glowing tracers of German anti-aircraft fire that stabbed skyward. When the excitement ended, the Lerouxs returned home to bed, unaware that their farm would play a vital role in the Allied liberation of France. 

Their slumber was disturbed a few hours later by the droning of low-flying aircraft. Gazing out their windows, they were startled to see descending parachutes. “They looked like big falling mushrooms,” recalled Madame Leroux. “We didn’t know what they were but could see that they were landing in the marshes.” When shrapnel from German flak shells pelted the roof, Madame Leroux and her husband gathered their children to take shelter in the stone stairwell. 

The farmstead sat on the east bank of the Merderet River, which bisected the Cotentin Peninsula north to south. The farm overlooked one of just two crossing points: the La Fière Bridge on the road to the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. While on the high ground, the family home was closer to the riverbank than originally intended thanks to the German occupiers who, recognizing the defensive potential of the landscape, had manipulated locks to flood the area with seawater. Rivers and streams had overflowed their banks to turn wide swaths of bucolic fields into swampland and a shallow lake.

At dawn on June 6, a platoon of Germans arrived at the Leroux’s farm. They searched the stables and occupied the house while the family retreated upstairs to the main bedroom. When gunfire erupted outside, the Lerouxs again scrambled for cover. Bullets cracked through windows, splintering shutters and ricocheting off interior stone walls. The staccato of German Mausers, MP40s, and MG42s echoed through the house as the occupiers fired back at the attackers.

During a pause in the shooting, the family rushed downstairs, past wounded Germans sprawled in the kitchen, and into the wine cellar. Wanting to flee, they nudged open the external cellar door. Spotting a soldier—who they thought was British—they yelled, “Français! Français!”

He replied in French: “Stay where you are and close the door!” 

Several hours later the door opened, and the same soldier commanded them, again in French, “Get out!” 

The Lerouxs now realized the soldiers were American paratroopers. They questioned the French family to learn how many Germans were inside, and then the shooting resumed as the French family sought cover. “The noise took our breath away,” admitted Madame Leroux. The Americans were peppering the house with rifles and machine guns. The skirmish ended after a bazooka round exploded into the house and paratroopers sprinted in to herd the surrendering Germans out. In the lull that followed, the Lerouxs celebrated their violent liberation by gifting a bottle of Calvados brandy to the Americans. “They asked us to drink some first,” recalled Madame Leroux, “which we did. Then they all drank some.”

The paratroopers, there to seize the bridge and expecting a German counterattack, told the Lerouxs it was too dangerous for them to stay. The family packed food and blankets before walking to a neighbor’s home. During their exodus, they passed more American troopers heading to the bridge.

The La Fière bridge was the D-Day objective of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Capturing the bridge intact was critical to the Allies’ plans: first, they needed to prevent the Germans from using it to move reinforcements against the landings at Utah Beach and second, they wanted the bridge to serve later as an artery for armor and infantry to break out from the beachhead toward the ultimate objective: the port of Cherbourg.

A member of the 505th later described the nighttime parachute drop they had made into Normandy as “a model of precision flying and perfect execution.” Pilots of the 315th Troop Carrier Group—veterans of missions in Sicily and Italy—had dropped their passengers right on target. Under the command of Lieutenant John “Red Dog” Dolan, Able Company assembled 98 percent of its troopers within an hour. The 505th’s sister regiment, the 507th, was supposed to land on the opposite side of the Merderet, but it was not as fortunate. Weather, anti-aircraft fire, and hopelessly lost pilots scattered them across 60 square miles. 

With their drop zone just a half-mile from their objective, Dolan’s lead platoon pushed through the graying light of dawn and reached the Leroux’s farm in 30 minutes. The troopers immediately searched the bridge for demolition charges and put the German occupiers under siege. By mid-morning, with the help of paratroopers from the 508th PIR, the east side of the bridge was secure, but the scattered state of the 507th left the defense of the west side in a weakened state.

Major Frederick C.A. Kellam, the 1st Battalion commander, organized his men as well as troopers from other scattered units into a perimeter. The troopers of the 505th, most of whom had seen combat in Sicily and Italy, provided the backbone of his defense. As one of the veterans recalled, “We knew exactly what to expect on the upcoming mission: incoming mortar rounds, the terrifying German 88s, machine pistols, and one-on-one attacks against machinegun nests.” 

The road past the bridge cut across the swampy marshland via an elevated, tree-lined causeway almost 700 yards long. Kellam’s men dug in on a gentle slope facing the river. The position was less than ideal as it left them in the open and in view of any Germans on the far side, but defending from the protected reverse slope wasn’t an option. One positive, though, was that any attack from the opposite side could only come across the narrow causeway. 

“Red Dog” Dolan positioned Able Company closest to the bridge: a platoon on each side, plus another in reserve 400 yards to the rear. Dolan’s heavy firepower consisted of three .30-caliber belt-fed machine gun crews and two bazooka teams dug in to the left and right of the bridge. He also positioned a 57mm anti-tank gun 500 feet back, at a bend in the road where it had a direct line of fire down the causeway. A platoon of combat engineers stood by to blow the bridge in the event of an enemy breakthrough. To prevent that, troopers blocked the far side of the bridge with Hawkins mines. “We placed our anti-tank mines right on the top of the road where the Germans could see them,” recounted Sergeant William D. Owens, “but could not miss them with their tanks.” 

The troopers created an additional roadblock by pushing a German flatbed truck—disabled during the earlier firefight for the farmhouse—into the middle of the bridge. 

A reconnaissance of the far bank revealed it was occupied by only a handful of 507th troopers rather than the expected battalion. Without radio contact and the planned-for support, the men led by Kellam and Dolan were on their own.

The first sign of trouble came at 4:00 p.m. when scout Francis C. Buck came hightailing it back across the long causeway. He’d heard spurts of gunfire followed by the unmistakable clanking of tanks. Close behind him were a few men from the west bank who were fleeing the German advance. Buck paused briefly at the two bazooka positions to give them a heads-up before sprinting to Kellam’s command post. 

The enemy heralded their attack with an artillery barrage, which lifted as four tanks rolled across the causeway. Following them were an estimated 200 infantrymen. The Americans held their fire—the fleeting glimpses of field gray uniforms darting between the trees wasn’t yet worth wasting ammunition.

The first tank—a Panzer Mk III—paused 40 yards short of the bridge. The commander, apparently spotting the mines, opened his hatch and stood up for a better look. One of Dolan’s machine gun crews squeezed off a burst at the tempting target and killed him instantly. With that, the American line erupted with rifle and machine gun fire.

The two bazooka teams went to work. Gunners Lenold Peterson and Marcus Heim abandoned their foxhole so they could aim around a concrete telephone pole. To their right, Privates John D. Bolderson and Gordon C. Pryne did the same. Just a few hours earlier, Pryne had been a rifleman, “But on the jump, one of the guys on the bazooka team broke his ankle,” he said. “They gave that job to me. I didn’t want it, really, but they said, ‘You got it.’” 

The two teams pummeled the lead tank, which in turn fired a round at Peterson and Heim. It flew high, shattering the telephone pole. Dolan later admitted, “To this day, I’ll never be able to explain why all four of them were not killed. They fired and reloaded with the precision of well-oiled machinery.” 

The lead tank was hit by several 2.36-inch high-explosive rockets, one of which disabled a track while another briefly set it alight. Peterson and Heim advanced to get a better shot at the second tank—a captured French Renault R-35 painted Wehrmacht gray—which was some 20 yards behind the first. Heim later recalled, “We moved forward toward the second tank and fired at it as fast as I could load the rockets into the bazooka. We kept firing at the second tank, and we hit it in the turret where the body joins it, also in the tracks, and with another hit it also went up in flames.”

The 57mm gun fired as well and was subjected to heavy enemy retaliation. In the melee, two tank rounds punched through the glacis shield, and seven men were killed keeping it in operation.

A third tank now lumbered toward the bridge as German mortar shells pounded the American line. Although the first tank was disabled, the main gun and machine gun were still barking out shells. Rushing out from his foxhole, Private Joseph C. Fitt scrambled atop the first tank to toss a hand grenade into the open hatch and finish off the crew.

While the tank battle raged, the German infantry struggled to advance against the weight of American firepower. One paratrooper observed that the bunched-up enemy, seeking cover along the treelined causeway, “made a real nice target.”

With the German attack stalling, the two bazooka teams yelled for more ammo. Three men, including Major Kellam, scrambled forward with satchels of rockets. The trio was 15 yards from the bridge when another mortar and artillery barrage crashed in. Kellam was killed, and the other two men badly wounded, one mortally. Kellam’s death made Dolan the senior officer. His first action after taking command was to dispatch a runner to the regiment’s command post to advise them what happened.

Artillery continued to rain in. “They really clobbered us,” admitted Owens. “I don’t know how it was possible to live through it.”

Owens’ platoon was out front. When his radioman with the walkie-talkie took a direct shell hit, they lost contact with Dolan. “So, from then on, as far as we were concerned, we were a lost platoon,” said Owens. Anticipating another attack, Owens slithered from foxhole to foxhole collecting grenades and ammunition from the dead to redistribute to his men. “I knew we would need every round we could get our hands on.”

The enemy infantry rushed forward again, passing the knocked-out tanks and getting closer to Owens’ platoon, which poured fire into their ranks. “The machine gun I had was so hot it quit firing,” said Owens. He shouldered a dead man’s BAR, firing it until he ran out of ammo, then he switched to a second machine gun of a knocked-out crew. 

Owens could hear another machine gun stitching the German flank and the plonking belch of a 60mm mortar lobbing shells along the causeway. Riflemen squeezed off shot after shot. It was getting desperate. “We stopped them,” Owens recounted, “but they had gotten within twenty-five yards of us.” 

Just as the German attack failed, Colonel Mark J. Alexander, the regimental executive officer, arrived with 40-odd paratroopers he had managed to collect along the way. His inspection of the defenses confirmed they were set as well as could be expected. Shortly thereafter, the division’s second-in-command, Brigadier General James M. Gavin, arrived with men from the 507th. Gavin concurred with Alexander’s assessment, later recounting that Dolan’s troopers holding the bridge were “well organized and had the situation in hand.”

Alexander asked Gavin, “Do you want me on this side, the other side, or both sides of the river?” 

After glancing at the far bank, Gavin replied, “You better stay on this side because it looks like the Germans are getting pretty strong over there.” The two officers agreed that attacking across the bridge would divide their manpower and might cost them the bridge in the face of a strong counterattack.

German shells continued to pummel the American positions. One shell exploded on the edge of a foxhole, burying the two occupants. Alexander helped dig them out and then sent them back to the medics.

First Sergeant Robert M. Matterson, who was directing the wounded to the aid station, said they were coming back in such numbers that he “felt like a policeman directing traffic.” Indeed, as the day ended, dozens of men flowed past while dozens more of their comrades lay dead, strewn across the battlefield. 

Sunset gave way to darkness, with a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by scudding clouds. Throughout the night, the Germans periodically lobbed artillery shells at the Americans, while Alexander dispatched supply parties to scour the division’s drop zone for more ammunition.

At dawn, the rising sun released mist from the surrounding swamps and heralded the arrival of a squad of airborne engineers along with two more machine gun crews. Colonel Alexander warmly welcomed the men and directed them to dig in. 

The additional firepower was much needed, but Alexander was still concerned about his available arsenal: “We had no long-range firepower other than machine guns. Well, we had one 57mm gun with six rounds of ammunition and a limited supply of mortar rounds, but this all had to be held in reserve for any serious effort the Germans might make to cross the bridge.” 

Alexander’s mental inventory was interrupted when a group of paratroopers on the far side of the Merderet River attempted to wade across. He watched helplessly as German fire cut into the men sloshing through the water. A handful made it to safety, but most were killed and several of the wounded drowned.

The Germans preceded their next attack with intensified shelling, including tree bursts. Two more captured French Renault tanks were in the vanguard. Dolan’s 57mm crew held their fire—with only six rounds left they wanted a clear shot. But when the lead tank boldly geared onto the bridge, the 57mm crew cracked off a round. The shell struck the tank, sending it and its partner into retreat. Nestled in front of the anti-tank gun was Corporal Felix Ferrazzi, a radioman serving as a machine gunner. With a clear view down the causeway, he added to the mayhem with repeated bursts of fire into the advancing Germans. The gunners implored him to move due to the 57mm’s muzzle blast, but despite being wounded, Ferrazzi stayed put—until a mortar shell mangled his .30-caliber. The other Americans added to the wall of lead, especially Sergeant Oscar Queen, who estimated he fired 5,000 rounds from his belt-fed machine gun. 

Thirty minutes into their attack, the Germans floundered. They began their withdrawal as the paratroopers neared their breaking point. Dolan’s 1st Platoon was down to 15 men; one squad had just three troopers still standing. Owens sent a runner to report to Dolan: they were almost out of ammo and unable to repel the next attack; could they pull back? Dolan replied, “No, stay where you are.” He then scribbled a short message for the runner to relay to Owens: “We stay. There is no better place to die.” With his orders in hand, Owens organized what was left of his platoon.

But the Germans had had enough. They waved a Red Cross flag and requested a 30-minute truce to recover their wounded. Owens and his comrades used the time to bring up more ammo and determine who was still alive. Able Company had suffered 17 killed and 49 wounded; the battalion was down to 176 men. The exhausted Owens then sought a better view of the causeway. “I estimated I could see at least 200 dead or wounded Germans scattered about. I don’t know how many were in the river,” he said, “Then I sat down and cried.”

But the battle for La Fière Bridge wasn’t over. For the Allies to break out of the beachhead, the stalemate had to be broken. Later that evening, General Gavin relieved the battered 505th paratroopers with elements of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. In a charge rivaling the Light Brigade, the glider men made a daylight assault across the causeway on June 9. Pushing through the pall of friendly artillery and withering enemy fire, they successfully occupied the far bank, while another group of 100 paratroopers swarmed in behind them to help secure the foothold. The road to Cherbourg was now open for Major General J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps, but it came at a heavy cost. The 82nd Airborne had suffered 254 men killed and more than 500 wounded to seize, hold, and secure the vital bridge at La Fière. 

The Leroux family returned to find their home in ruins and most of their livestock victims of the crossfire. They lived in the stable—as it had suffered the least damage—rebuilding their farm over the next five years. They moved back into their home in time for Christmas 1949. 

“Our family celebrated,” recalled Madame Leroux, “happy, in spite of our misery, to all be back together without having suffered any dead or wounded, thanks to the American soldiers who fought to liberate and save us.”

As dawn lightened the skies on January 31, 1945,a naval flotilla of more than a hundred vessels held station in the dark waters off Nasugbu Beach on the Philippine island of Luzon. The convoy was poised 40 miles south of Manila, ready to land 6,462 troopers of the 11th Airborne Division. But first came the air strikes: 18 twin-engine Douglas A-20 Havoc medium bombers zoomed over Red Beach, chewing up suspected Japanese positions with their forward-mounted .50-caliber machine guns. Nine Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters followed them in, repeating the performance.

At 7:15 a.m., two American destroyers rotated their 5-inch guns into position and began hurling 55-pound shells at the shore, tearing apart the tree line in a series of shattering explosions. Simultaneously, rocket-equipped landing craft angled to align their rudimentary launchers with the landing beach. The rockets lifted off with deafening whooshes as paired salvos arched across the pink sky. 

An hour into the bombardment, boatswains gunned their landing craft toward the beach to land the first wave of infantry. Intelligence suggested there were 7,000 Japanese soldiers south of Manila, with 500 guarding the beach itself. By this point the battle for Luzon had been raging for three weeks, so keeping track of enemy units was difficult at best. Ten days into the campaign General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had complained about the slow pace of his field commander, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, whose Sixth Army was plodding south toward Manila despite light enemy resistance. To spur Krueger forward, MacArthur authorized a second landing south of the capital city. The operation, code-named MIKE VI, fell to Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army. Eichelberger proposed to amphibiously land the 11th Airborne’s two glider infantry regiments and then airdrop the division’s parachute regiment farther inland a few days later.

The second landing was likely spurred by MacArthur’s desire to use the rivalry between his two army commanders to hasten Manila’s capture. There was a simmering antagonism between the two men, and Eichelberger, who believed MacArthur was “disgusted” by Krueger’s slow progress, referred to the Sixth Army commander as “old Molasses in January.” Eichelberger’s own Eighth Army was a skeleton organization, slimmed down from its normal complement of several divisions to just the undersized 11th. With a total manpower of just over 8,300, the 11th was roughly sixty percent the size of a standard infantry division. Additionally, the navy provided barely enough ships to support the landing, and the Air Corps had scraped together just 50-odd transport planes, a third of what was needed to drop the entirety of a regimental combat team in a single lift. Eichelberger privately referred to his command as “Task Force Shoestring.” 

Major General Joseph M. Swing, the 11th’s 50-year-old commander, begrudgingly supported the plan, “Well, half a loaf is better than none, I suppose…. We’re going in half airborne and half amphibious,” he wrote to his father-in-law. “As you can imagine, it’s an end run with a forward pass.” 

This was Swing’s second campaign of the war. He and his division had already fought their way through the jungles of Leyte as part of MacArthur’s triumphant return to the Philippines in October 1944. While Swing was a relative newcomer to the Pacific theater, he had served almost 30 years in uniform, having received his West Point commission in 1915 and serving in General John “Black Jack” Pershing’s 1916 expedition into Mexico as his first assignment. There he witnessed Pershing’s propensity for leading from the front—a trait he took to heart. In 1917, Swing served as a captain with the 1st Infantry Division in World War I, where his experiences in the mire of the trenches taught him that static positions and frontal assaults were no way to win a war. By 1941, Swing had earned the star of a brigadier general and was Major General Matthew B. Ridgway’s artillery officer when the 82nd Infantry Division transitioned into the army’s first airborne division. In February 1943, with a second star on his collar, he was assigned to command his own airborne division.

The 11th’s landing at Nasugbu was technically a “reconnaissance in force” to determine the “Japanese strength, deployment, and intentions.” The exact goals remained vague—Eichelberger labeled them “indefinite plans,” and he and Swing agreed to exploit the ambiguity and get into the main action. Their field orders advised commanders to be “prepared to advance north” after seizing their initial objectives. “North” was a veiled reference to Manila.

Swing landed on Red Beach with the third wave. As he and his staff hustled out of their landing craft, several Japanese machine gun bursts erupted from the left flank. Swing’s assistant division commander, Brigadier General Al Pierson, was hit in the stomach by what felt like a baseball bat. Miraculously, the bullet struck his army-issue compass. The instrument would never point north again, but it had saved Pierson’s life. As the staff lay pinned down in the dunes, bullets stitched the beach, and random artillery shells exploded in geysers of sand and shrapnel. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Crawford, Swing’s logistics officer—the “G-4”—announced he was going to crew the belt-fed machine gun on their landing craft to return fire. Waiting for a lull, he readied for a sprint. When Crawford got to his feet, Swing grabbed his ankle and tripped him. “You keep down,” Swing yelled. “I need a G-4!”

The heaviest fire came from several machine guns nested in a red-roofed building on the left flank. Not far from Swing, a naval gunfire team radioed sailors offshore and within minutes rockets tore into the building, setting it and several surrounding structures ablaze. The guns fell silent.

By 9:45 a.m., glider troops were fanning out to secure the beachhead while Swing and his staff set up their command post in a one-story school building in Nasugbu’s town plaza. 

The primary objective, Tagaytay Ridge, where the paratroopers would drop, lay 24 miles inland. Eichelberger urged speed, but he needn’t have worried. Swing already had the commander of the 188th Glider Infantry Regiment, 44-year-old Colonel Robert “Shorty” Soule, on the move. The glidermen headed out of town, weaving through crowds of jubilant Filipinos celebrating the end to three years of Japanese occupation. Once past the gleeful mobs, they moved briskly in single-file columns on each side of the one-lane gravel road.

The primary artery to Tagaytay led past open farmland punctuated by pockets of thick, lush vegetation. The sun beat down on the men’s steel helmets. With full packs and rifles slung or at the ready, they put one dusty boot in front of the other. Sweat dripped into their eyes and gravel crunched under their feet. It all combined into a monotony that made the weight of their equipment impossible to ignore. Glancing up from their march, they would have seen the distant ridgeline that was their destination—and where the enemy lay waiting. 

Five miles inland the lead platoon shuffled downhill toward the Palico River, intent on securing the 200-foot steel-trussed bridge that spanned the river’s 80-foot-deep gorge. On the far side, the men spotted a Japanese squad preparing to demolish the bridge. The Americans’ first volley of rifle fire felled six saboteurs and scattered the rest. 

Soule’s men marched on, huffing out of the coastal plains and ascending into the mountains toward Tagaytay. They kept hiking after dark, taking advantage of the moonlight. At midnight, after slogging inland for more than 12 hours, the lead battalion paused to allow fresh troops to take point. They pushed through sporadic rifle fire until they finally stopped to rest at 4:00 a.m. They were back on their feet two hours later.

At daybreak on February 1, the rattle of machine guns sent the point squad diving for cover. Now 11 miles inland, the road threaded uphill through a draw formed by three mountains. The left was dominated by 2,100-foot Mount Cariliao, with the sharp rise of Mount Aiming at its base. One of the troopers described Aiming as “a thimble at the base of an overturned teacup.” On the right, Mount Batulao rose to 2,700 feet. The heights were covered in thick scrub and provided a commanding view of the road. Bullets cracked in from machine gun positions on all three mountains. Japanese observers, eyeing the Americans through binoculars, called down artillery and mortars. As the glidermen crawled for protection, shells whistled into pre-sighted points up and down the gravel road. 

While Soule’s mortar teams thumped out high-explosive rounds to suppress the incoming fire, cannoneers wheeled up heavier guns: four 75mm pack howitzers of the 457th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion. The crews, ignoring ricocheting bullets, muscled their gun tubes into position and aimed them by looking over the barrels as though they were shotguns. Each successive WHOOOOM! of a howitzer shattered a distant machine gun nest. But rifle fire still snapped overhead and the artillery shells raining down forced Soule’s lead battalion to withdraw.

With the sun well up, circling Havocs streaked out of the sky, seeking enemy howitzers and pummeling the hilltops with bombs and strafing fire. While the Japanese hunkered down, Soule’s men attacked. Captain Raymond F. Lee led a company through a steep gorge on the north side of the highway and then on the ascent of Aiming. Their close-quarters assault with rifles, grenades, and bayonets cleared the summit and captured a 105mm howitzer in the process. Lee and his men rolled Japanese corpses out of foxholes so they could use the dugouts for their own defense. Lee’s men spent the afternoon fending off several banzai attacks, and in between the Japanese pounded them with artillery. 

Simultaneously, on the right flank, troopers cleared enemy positions up to the base of Mount Batulao. The day’s work resulted in 91 enemy dead and several captured howitzers, but it came at a heavy cost: 16 dead Americans and 44 wounded.

Friday, February 2, dawned with clear skies and good visibility, perfect weather for airstrikes and artillery barrages. The Havocs and howitzers paved a path and by midday the troopers had swarmed past three Japanese anti-tank ditches to sack a command post littered with bloody medical supplies and nearly 100 tons of ammunition. The advance had been a modest two miles, but it was close enough to Tagaytay for Eichelberger and Swing to agree: the airdrop was on. Even so, the Japanese weren’t done. Artillery, mortars, and machine guns harassed Soule’s forward lines all night. Infiltrators crept through the inky jungle to assault artillery positions and forced the cannoneers to desert their guns before mustering to retake them.

The next morning, February 3, was the big push. Swing and his entourage were up front with the infantry who, after scarfing down a few bites of cold rations, pulled themselves out of their foxholes. It was time to go to work. They trudged forward to close on the last hill between them and Tagaytay.

An hour into their trek, a low, steady droning noise caught their attention. It came from an armada of 51 lumbering C-47s escorted by darting P-38s. As the first serial approached, the pilots found the ridgeline obscured by a low cloud bank. Fortunately, a break in the haze revealed the final checkpoint. The lead pilot, now assured of his position, led the following aircraft to the drop zone.

Paratroopers surged out the doors once the jump light glowed green. Weighed down with equipment, they tumbled more than jumped. One of them, Charlie Sass, recalled, “I carried double my weight out the door—two bandoliers, rockets, grenades, BAR clips, assorted firing devices, three days of K-rations, first aid packet, shovel, two canteens, plus chute, reserve, and me. The whole rig may have toted up to four hundred pounds.”

The trailing serials were still six miles short of the drop zone when either an equipment bundle was intentionally dropped or jarred loose or someone jumped early. In any event, troopers mistook the parachute canopy as the signal to jump. The resulting chain reaction was inevitable. First Lieutenant Randolph Kirkland remembered, “Our lead officer in the door had to make a quick decision. The planes were going much too fast, and we were certainly some miles from the true drop zone. He did what I would have done—he jumped.” Kirkland followed, holding a tight body position until he felt the reassuring jerk of his deploying chute. But exiting before the pilot slowed down meant a rough opening shock. Kirkland’s experience was typical of many. “My musette bag, with my poncho, C-rations and bourbon, disappeared into the clouds,” he said. “The grenades in my pockets joined them. The opening shock well-nigh knocked me out.”

The sky filled with parachutes as troopers descended into the cloud bank. Kirkland recalled, “[I] was rudely brought to reality when a palm tree whistled by me. It was a ground fog and not a cloud.”

Within minutes 886 troopers were on the ground but only 345 of these had landed on the planned drop zone—the rest were strung out four to six miles away. The men shrugged off their chutes, loaded their rifles, and scurried off to their assembly areas. Overhead the rumbling C-47s banked into their return route to pick up the second lift.

Soule’s glidermen made steady uphill progress toward the drop zone until 10:15, when 300 Japanese troops opened fire with rifles and machine guns. Explosions from the incoming artillery walked up the length of the American column. 

In the vanguard, Eichelberger, Swing, and their contingent of high-ranking staff officers scrambled for cover. They were there to prod momentum, intent on making a smooth linkup with the paratroopers. A colonel sheltering near Swing was killed in the barrage along with seven other men. Twenty-one more were wounded, among them ‘Shorty’ Soule. Undaunted, he crawled half a football field back to his jeep while more shells whistled in. Soule’s driver, Pius Corbett, was under the jeep, shielding himself from flying shrapnel.

“Corbett, do you want to hand me that radio?” asked Soule.

“No, sir,” replied Corbett, “I don’t even want to move.” 

Despite Corbett’s reluctance, Soule got the radio and ordered his reserve battalion into the fray. Soule, refusing medical treatment, instead crawled to a better spot to direct his artillery against the ridge. At the same time, the air support party radioed the Havocs to wing in for strafing and bombing attacks. Soule’s fresh battalion rushed forward under a thunderous umbrella of howitzers, mortars, and aircraft, while on the right flank, a company swept around the hill to press a second attack. The Japanese who survived the devastating barrage were routed with hand grenades and flamethrowers. 

Just after noon, the returning C-47s roared overhead and dropped the second sortie of 906 paratroopers. Only 80 of them dropped in the correct location. Seeing the collapsed parachutes on the ground from the first group’s early jump, most of the second sortie also jumped too soon. As a result, only 425 of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s paratroopers landed on the drop zone; the remainder were spread over four to six miles away. Fortunately, potential disaster was averted because the Japanese were not defending the ridge. As the men descended, one noted, “There was the loud sound of artillery firing a few ridges away and because the land is rolling (with the hills terraced for farming) it was impossible to determine just where the shells were bursting.” The glidermen were still flushing out Japanese holdouts on the western slopes.

With the division’s linkup completed, Eichelberger, Swing, and their combined staffs moved farther up the ridge. From there they could see Manila shimmering in the distance, some 30 miles due north. Eichelberger, champing at the bit, later wrote, “Our real written orders…were to establish ourselves on Tagaytay Ridge and stabilize conditions in that part of Luzon.” But there was Manila, tantalizingly within reach, its southern door apparently wide open.

But the enemy disposition in Manila was uncertain. The Americans assumed that the Japanese would declare it an open city, as MacArthur had in 1942 to avoid widespread destruction and civilian casualties. And indeed, the Japanese commander-in-chief in the Philippines, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, reasoned it was too populated, its structures too flammable, and its terrain too flat for a prolonged defense. But the Imperial Navy posited they could best delay the Americans by fortifying Manila’s urban labyrinth. So, as the army withdrew, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi moved in with nearly 14,000 marines, soldiers, and sailors. Although Yamashita was in overall command, the 49-year-old Iwabuchi believed himself subject to the army only after completing his mission and he made it clear to his men they would all go down fighting. “If we run out of bullets, we will use grenades; if we run out of grenades, we will cut down the enemy with swords; if we break our swords, we will kill them by sinking our teeth deep in their throats,” he decreed.

This was all unknown to the Americans, whose early intelligence suggested the Japanese were evacuating the city. More recent reports from local guerrillas, however, reported the construction of urban strongpoints: fortified buildings, emplaced landmines, and barricaded road intersections. Eichelberger dismissed the updates. “The guerrilla reports make me laugh,” he wrote. “The report tonight is that Manila is being burned by the Japanese, and yet I can look right down into the town and see lights and one little fire.”

Eichelberger ordered the 11th Airborne into the city.

At Tagaytay Ridge, Swing tapped his paratroopers to lead the charge since the glidermen had been fighting for four days without rest. With the bulk of his supplies still at Red Beach, Swing pressed every available man into service. The band’s musicians hauled cargo ashore and operated bulldozers to assist engineers in grading beach access roads. The division’s clerks, cooks, and parachute riggers served as stevedores, unloading rations and tons of crated artillery, mortar, and rifle ammunition as well as grenades, medical supplies, and radio batteries. The headquarters’ finance staff, along with members of the adjutant general’s office, humped the artillery and mortar shells forward. Five hundred local laborers were paid to help organize the growing stockpiles.

More improvisation was required to get the troops the 30-odd miles to Manila. Five hundred troopers of the 2nd Battalion would depart first in a few jeeps and 17 cargo trucks. Two jeeps towing 75mm pack howitzers and two tank-like, pug-nosed M8 self-propelled 75mm howitzers brought up the rear. They’d drive until they made enemy contact, at which point the trucks would go back for the next group, which was heading north on foot. 

The convoy made it 22 miles to the village of Imus, where the Japanese had blown the main bridge over the 80-foot-wide Imus River. A fierce skirmish erupted over a secondary crossing, with an M8 clanking forward to hurl 75mm shells into the enemy. Following an infantry assault, the paratroopers continued forward. Eichelberger and Swing were both up front, urging speed. Eichelberger later wrote, “Things were bogged down a bit, so we jazzed it up.”

The troopers kept moving, pinning down any resistance while other units flanked the skirmishes to keep moving toward the capital. Six miles south of the city center, in the suburb of Parañaque, the point squad was stopped cold. The Japanese had fortified the last bridge into the capital with several pillboxes. Up the coast, troopers could see a glowing conflagration as Manila’s port became engulfed in flames. Iwabuchi had ordered the demolition of the docks and fuel storage depots and the fires had set bordering houses aflame.

The Japanese holding the city were now caught in a vice, with Swing’s division poised to the south, and two of Krueger’s closing from the north. The stage for a tragedy of unimaginable horror was set.

The next morning, February 5, 1945, a dawn assault got the paratroopers across the bridge. But by sunset they had only gained a few blocks and were digging in to avoid flying shrapnel from incessant artillery. They had run into Iwabuchi’s Genko Line, a fortified belt approximately two and a half miles deep, starting at Manila Bay’s shoreline and running east five miles or so to high ground at Laguna De Bay. An estimated 4,000 Japanese manned more than 150 light, medium, and heavy-caliber anti-aircraft guns bolstered by dozens of dug-in howitzers. Hundreds of pillboxes covered open fields and road intersections with machine guns and rifles.

Krueger’s 1st Cavalry Division dismissed the report by Eichelberger and Swing that their forces had made a toehold in the capital. Instead, Krueger’s command claimed that they had beat their rivals by six hours. Swing later argued in his own favor, but U.S.-issued maps showed that his men, while certainly in the suburbs, were still four miles south of the pre-war city limits.

The approach to Manila was over, but far worse was yet to come. The ensuing battle for the city would last for several weeks of bitter street fighting, ending on March 3. As one trooper lamented, “From now on our advance was not measured in miles, it was measured in yards.” By the time the city fell, more than 100,000 citizens were dead and Manila, once hailed as the Pearl of the Orient, was reduced to rubble. H

James M. Fenelon is a former paratrooper and author of Four Hours of Fury, the story of the 17th Airborne Division’s jump across the Rhine River. His next book, Angels Against the Sun, chronicles the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific and was published in April 2023.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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ATHENS, ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST and most fabled cities, has earned its reputation as the cradle of Western civilization over its 3,400-year history. Today a modern metropolis of 3.5 million residents, Athens’s rich heritage is visible at a glance: dotted within the urban sprawl are ancient pillared relics, a marble stadium, Byzantine churches, mosques, and arguably the capital city’s most famous landmark, the Acropolis—translated as “high point.” It is here that I start my self-guided tour—ascending the summit not only for the view but also in search of a storied past that sheds light on Greece’s often-overlooked role in World War II.

The rocky promontory, rising almost 500 feet above the city’s sea of concrete, is home to several ancient temples and is the site of one of the most recognizable ruins in the world, the Parthenon. The Doric-columned temple, dedicated to the goddess Athena, was completed in 432 BC and stood largely untouched until pirates sacked it in 276 AD. It was converted to a Christian church in the sixth century, and the Ottomans later used it as a mosque. The Venetians shelled it in 1687, archeologists raided it in 1799—and, on its grounds in 1941, German invaders raised a massive red-and-white flag adorned with a black swastika. 

Metaxas vs. mussolini

Greece was a reluctant World War II belligerent, its attempt to remain neutral ending at 3 a.m. on Monday, October 28, 1940. When Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini demanded the Greeks submit to occupation, Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas is said to have replied with one word—“No!”—which became a rallying cry throughout the country. Two and a half hours later, the Italians invaded from Albania with six divisions.

The dogged Greek defense, with British air support, held the Italians at bay. In January 1941, the Hellenic Army’s counterattack pushed the invaders back over the border, giving the Allies one of their few early victories, but at the cost of several thousand casualties. With the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force and Greece now firmly committed to the Allied cause, the Germans invaded in April. Three weeks later, they reached Athens.

the Acropolis

Atop the Acropolis, I wander the grounds, winding my way around visitors mingling in front of the 45-foot-tall marble Parthenon, some marveling at its magnificence, others posing for selfies. There is no shade at the summit, so arriving before the heat of the day was prudent—but even so, I feel the sun beating down on me as I pass the Erechtheion, an asymmetrical temple, also dedicated to Athena, to the north of the Parthenon. Period photographs reveal that its decorative wall of six sculpted female figures was a popular tourist destination for occupying Wehrmacht soldiers. Finally, I make my way to the observation deck on the east side of the rocky outcrop. Here an enormous blue-and-white Greek flag flutters in the breeze. It was near this site on April 27, 1941, the day the Germans rolled into the capital, where Konstantinos Koukidis, a soldier of the elite Evzones light infantry, was on guard duty.

As the story goes, the Germans ascended the Acropolis, intent on raising their flag over the city. An officer hailed Koukidis, commanding he lower the national colors to hoist the swastika in its place. Koukidis did as he was told, but rather than surrendering the Greek flag, he wrapped it around his body and leapt off the cliff to his death.

A small plaque commemorates the event, which has generated its share of skepticism. In 2000, the mayor of Athens declared that no documentary evidence had been found to confirm the act, despite multiple claims by eyewitnesses. My informal survey of tour guides, docents, and locals are unanimous in their support of the story’s validity.

Koukidis’s unit of Evzones was disbanded during the occupation, with many of the troops forming the ranks of resistance groups. Today the Evzone traditions and battle honors are carried on by the Presidential Guard, a distinctively garbed infantry unit that performs ceremonial duties.

National Parliament building

To get more insight into their history, I hike back down the hill and head to the National Parliament building. My route takes me through the Plaka, the city’s oldest neighborhood, and it feels almost criminal to use my phone’s GPS to help me thread my way through the ancient, twisty streets. Not much has changed here since the late 1800s, and the wrought-iron balconies, neoclassical architecture, and narrow alleys make it easy to imagine the neighborhood in the 1940s. What is harder to imagine is the Third Reich’s shadow dimming these cozy labyrinthine streets, many teeming with hibiscus and olive trees.

The Parliament building, a commanding three-story edifice tucked into the northwest corner of the 38-acre National Garden, was built in 1842 as a palace for Greece’s first king after independence from the Ottomans. In 1926, it was gutted for renovation into a single-chamber parliamentary council. At the base of the building, below its columned facade, is Greece’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Flanking the tomb are two blue-roofed guard shacks, manned by Evzones standing at attention, with bayonet-tipped M1 Garand rifles at their sides. They are unmoving, reminding me of the red-coated British soldiers posted in front of Buckingham Palace. The guards wear their traditional uniform, with its origins in the 1800s: a small red fez with a long black tassel, a knee-length, button-up tunic with a black leather cartridge belt, white leggings with black garters, and hobnailed clogs topped with black pompoms. 

I watch the two guards begin their measured, ceremonial march toward the tomb, which is dominated by a marble relief of a prostrate Spartan. Inscribed on either side of the fallen warrior are the names of battlefields dating back to the early 1900s. Included are more than a dozen from World War II, such as Pindus, Crete, Hill 731, and El Alamein, all serving as reminders of the 35,000 Greek soldiers who met their deaths during the war. The guards, with rifles shouldered, move painstakingly slowly with a regimented high kick on each step. Juxtaposed against the noise of passing buses and cars on the nearby multilane boulevard, the solemn ritual is made more poignant by the Evzones’ silent focus. 

hotel grande bretagne

Across the street from the Parliament building is the Hotel Grande Bretagne, my last stop. The luxury hotel overlooking both the Parliament building and Athens’s central plaza—Syntagma Square—is another example of the city’s layered and hidden past. Built in 1842 as a private mansion, it was renovated in 1874 into a hotel. In 1930, the hotel expanded with the addition of a new wing. During the war, the Greek General Headquarters established itself in the hotel until the German occupation, when it served as Wehrmacht headquarters. The hotel’s well-appointed lobby and ornate tapestry in the atrium’s Alexander’s Lounge would make the staff officers of any army feel comfortable.

It was here in May 1941 that General-leutnant Kurt Student planned Operation Mercury, the airborne invasion of the Greek island of Crete. The glider and parachute assault was a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans, who suffered more than 26 percent casualties, but it completed the Axis occupation of Greece and began a multi-year reign of terror: tens of thousands of civilians died from famine, torture, and executions, while an estimated 60,000 Jews were deported from Greece to German death camps.

Tomb of the unknown soldier

In the same month that Crete fell, two Greek students, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas, crept through the dark to scale the Acropolis and make off with the Germans’ swastika-emblazoned war flag. It was eventually replaced, and the occupiers sentenced Glezos and Santas to death in absentia. But the brazen act further inspired a fledgling Greek resistance movement, which by 1944 had grown to over a million men and women. The underground harassed the Germans until October 1944, when the invaders withdrew after the Soviet Red Army seized the vital Ploesti oil fields in Romania, reducing Greece’s strategic significance as a deterrent to Allied air raids. Fittingly, period newsreel footage shows a German soldier scurrying from the Acropolis with the Nazi flag bunched over his shoulder.

With the occupation in mind, I head up to the hotel’s rooftop patio, from where I can see the Unknown Soldier’s tomb to the left and the Greek flag flying high above the Acropolis to my right. The sweeping view of modern buildings, public parks, ancient ruins, and distant mountains reminds me that Athens is a city of celebrated legends. And at the end of the day, I don’t know if Koukidis really leapt to his death or not, but I do know Athens’s history of sacrifice and resistance makes it easy to believe he did. 

WHEN YOU GO

Athens is easily accessible by air or sea. The international airport is serviced by all major and regional airlines, and nearby Piraeus is Europe’s largest cruise ship port. Getting around the city is easy by Metro, bus, tram, ridesharing, or foot.

Where to Stay and Eat

Athens has a myriad of hotels, B & Bs, and vacation rentals to meet any traveler’s budget. Those seeking a historical luxury experience would be hard-pressed to beat the centrally located Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the bartenders serve some of the city’s best cocktails. For fresh fish and a view of the well-lit Acropolis, try dinner atop The Old Tavern of Psaras.

What Else to See and Do

With Athens’s numerous world-renowned museums, it would be easy to overlook the War Museum, covering Hellenic martial history from antiquity to the present day. On display are rare weapons, uniforms, art, and battlefield relics. 

Six miles south from the city center and accessible via a tram ride from Syntagma Square is the Phaleron War Cemetery. Within its well-curated grounds stands the Athens Memorial, which commemorates the thousands of Commonwealth troops who died during World War II campaigns in mainland Greece, Crete, Yugoslavia, and the Dodecanese islands.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Robert Baldwin gained two Bronze Stars and a lifetime’s worth of inspiration after serving with the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Germany.

ROBERT M. BALDWIN’S life changed forever a few minutes after 10 a.m. on March 24, 1945. The 20-year old’s parachute had just jerked open, and what he witnessed in the few seconds before hitting the ground became seared into his memory: dozens of C-47s droning overhead as his regiment jumped into Germany, flak bursting in black clouds of shrapnel. Surrounding him were the chutes of his comrades; below him was a hornet’s nest of Germans making a last-ditch effort to repel the Allies. Then a blast rocked Baldwin from below. Where his platoon sergeant had been a moment earlier was a drifting, empty parachute. An antiaircraft shell had ignited explosives carried by the sergeant, disintegrating him in an instant.

Baldwin didn’t have long to contemplate the tragedy. Crashing to earth, he crumpled under the weight of his equipment and, finding himself in a melee of bullets and mortar fire, struggled to get out of his chute. He joined his company for the successful seizure of their objective—but the day’s sights and sounds made a lasting impression. Even the smell was notable. Writing to his mother, he confessed, “It’s funny, when death is so near one can actually smell it. It may be my imagination, but the minute I got over the first shock of the jump that nauseating odor hit me.”

With watercolors and a sketchbook he “liberated” from a house near the drop zone, Baldwin recreated what he’d seen that day, as well as sights from the next few weeks as he, with the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, fought toward the town of Münster. Several times Baldwin complied with orders from his company commander, Captain Howard “Big Steve” Stephens, to “throw that damned book away!” only to slyly recover it from the trash each time. For Baldwin, Germany’s beauty was in the past: everything in the Reich was in ruin or covered in ash.

Discharged in 1946 with two Bronze Stars, he settled in New Jersey to raise a family and launch a successful career as a commercial artist. His World War II service stayed with him, and much of his personal art is military-themed. He completed his most enduring tribute at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1985: “The Airborne Walk,” a series of concrete paths in the shape of jump wings leading visitors by 28 monuments dedicated to airborne units of the past.

Recalling the dramatic day he jumped into Germany, Baldwin later admitted, “How I made it I’ll never know.” He lived to the age of 78 and passed away in December 2003. ✯

All artwork from the 82nd Airborne Museum collection; reproduced with permission of Mark Baldwin.

This article was published in the August 2021 issue of World War II. 

The retired lieutenant colonel recalls his days spent at England’s Duxford Air Force Base—and in the sky.

IN LATE 1942, Huie Lamb withdrew from the ROTC program at Texas A&M University to enlist as a flight cadet: the 18-year-old, born in Carey, Texas, wanted to fly. After graduating through a series of flight schools and earning the coveted wings of a U.S. Army Air Forces aviator, he shipped overseas to serve as a pilot with the 82nd Fighter Squadron, 78th Fighter Group. During his time in Europe, Captain Lamb flew P-47s, as well as P-51s, and became one of the first pilots to shoot down a German Me 262 jetfighter. He went on to survive 61 combat missions, along with a crash into the English Channel when his P-51 suffered mechanical failure. From his home in Texas, Lamb—who retired from the Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1984 and who will turn 97 this February—recalled his time flying out of the American base at Duxford, England, and what it was like to be a fighter pilot in a dogfight.

Before we talk about the dogfights, let’s talk about the bar fights. What were you guys doing for entertainment when you weren’t flying?

Usually we would get a weekend pass and go to London. We’d go there and meet girls. We enjoyed getting away. There were a lot of buzz bombs hitting London, and then the V-2s—that wasn’t any fun. There was also a troop carrier truck that would go into Cambridge [about 12 miles from Duxford]. There was a place called Dorothy’s or something, and we’d go there to dance, and then we’d take the troop carrier back.

Some guys had bicycles. When we first got over there, they gave each of us in the 82nd Fighter Squadron a bicycle. Well, those crazy guys started riding those bikes like they were airplanes and tried to outdo each other. We had accidents, and guys would get hurt. So the commander said, “Get rid of those bicycles.” And they wouldn’t let us have them anymore.

Tell us about your first aerial victory.

In that business, they say that you “learn as you go.” We were on an escort mission over Germany—I think Colonel Joseph Myers was leading the group with one of the squadrons at a higher altitude. We in the lower squadron were a bit separated from them. Myers radioed us: “Come on up! ‘Cause there’s a gaggle of German planes heading for the bombers.” It wasn’t a formation like we were in—it looked like there were hundreds of them. “Come on up,” Myers said, “We got ’em cornered.”

I was “tail-end Charlie,” which means I was the very last guy, on the right side of the formation. About that same time, I looked over and there was a Me 109 fighter. I could see his guns flashing—he was shooting at me! I immediately called it over the radio and turned into him, circling to get on his tail at 29,000 feet. He dropped his flaps and his landing gear, hoping I would overshoot him. Well, I didn’t have time to even get a shot at him, so I pulled up and did a wingover to come back around. But my element leader shot him down first.

About two weeks later, on October 12, 1944, something similar happened. I was a wingman, and there was a lone 109 flying fairly low to the ground—about 2,000 feet. My element leader made a pass at him but was going so fast he overshot him and missed. By that time, I learned that you had to kind of slow down, so I reduced speed and was able to hit him. The 109 went straight in—it wasn’t really much of a fair fight. He didn’t have a chance, really. But he would’ve done it to us if he could have.

Just three days later, you became one of the first pilots to shoot down a German Me 262 jet.

We were flying a strafing mission to hit marshaling yards in Germany; I was wingman to Captain John Brown, who’d flown with the Royal Air Force in one of the “Eagle Squadrons” [fighter squadrons consisting of volunteer American pilots] early in the war. He joined the 78th Fighter Group when the squadrons became part of the U.S. Army Air Forces. We’d shot and destroyed maybe four or five locomotives, and after about 30 minutes, John said, “Let’s head back.” He had a saying: “Fight and run away, live to fight another day.”

So we were leaving the area about 15 or 20 minutes earlier than the other guys. We were at about 15,000 feet, and I saw a bogie down at about 1,000 feet. I alerted John, who looked but couldn’t spot it. He replied, “You check it out, and I’ll cover you.” That’s all he had to say. I dove, and my airspeed indicator read 475 [mph], but I wasn’t gaining on him. So I hit the water injection [to briefly boost the engine’s horsepower], and it gave me about another 15 or 20 miles per hour. But I still wasn’t gaining on him. So I lobbed a few rounds in front of him, and that must have alerted him, or maybe he saw me. He turned to the left, and when he did, I was able to turn inside of him to close in and catch him.

I kept shooting and hit him on the turn. He straightened out, but by that time, I was right behind him. He led me up a flak corridor to his air base—I didn’t know that until later. I wound up with only one or two of my guns firing because I had already used up a lot of ammo. I was within 100 feet, probably—I was awful close to him—and I hit his left engine. We were about 100 feet above the ground at that time, and his plane flipped on its back and exploded. After he crashed, I pulled up, and then antiaircraft guns from the air base opened up on me.

John saw this and radioed, “Get down! You’re over an airfield!” So, I went back down and came out real low, as low as I could. I finally got away from the area and was able to pull up. The flak hit my tail, so I didn’t have rudder control—but you don’t really need that for flying straight and level. I had promised my crew chief that if I got anything, I’d do a victory roll over the base back at Duxford [about 400 miles away]. But I thought better of that. Without rudder control, I settled for just getting the thing on the ground.

You had initials painted above the victory markings on your plane. Whose were they?

The first swastika had “FLW” over it, for my flight instructor, Fred Webster. When I graduated from flight school, he told me, “Get one for me!” So, I did. The second had “BL” above it, for [Lieutenant] William “Bill” Lacy. He was shot down in September 1944, probably while strafing.

You must have lost other friends.

Yes, several, including my roommate, Second Lieutenant Troy Eggleston. He’d gone to London and got a little white-haired terrier. Troy named him “Brussels” because he was such a little sprout. He became our squadron mascot.

In November 1944, they were putting steel matting down on our base because it was too muddy, so we were bussed over to Bassingbourn—the 91st Bomb Group field—where the taxiways were paved. I was taxiing out on a mission, and I got off the taxiway and into the mud. I tried to blast my way out, and when I did, my prop hit the ground. A tow truck had to pull me out, but the prop was nicked, so I couldn’t fly. Troy was on that flight, and they got into a heck of a dogfight over Germany. Troy was killed. He was an excellent pilot and an excellent gunner. He’d already shot down some German planes.

You engaged a second German jet. Tell us about that.

We were given a mission to hit a German airfield, hopefully before they could take off to go after our bombers. It was March 19, 1945. I was an element leader, and our flight leader got one Me 109, then he hit an Arado 234 [a jet-powered bomber used for reconnaissance]. We were at low altitude—about 1,000 feet. I came in and finished it off—getting several strikes on his left side. I overshot him and looked back to see him crash into the ground.

That day we got quite a few destroyed in the air, but we did lose some guys. I’ve forgotten how many.

What became of Brussels?

I’d made arrangements to bring him home. I was going to take him to Walters, Oklahoma, as a gift to Troy’s parents. Just a few days before I was supposed to depart, Brussels disappeared. I don’t know what happened to him. If somebody got him, or if he run off, I don’t know. ✯

This article was published in the February 2021 issue of World War II.

American paratroopers attached to Operation Varsity may have missed their drop zone but not their opportunity in March 1945, weeks before war’s end in Europe

The morning sky was gray on Saturday, March 24, 1945, when paratroopers of the U.S. 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion started gearing up. The Allied airfield in France, designated A-40, was packed with rows of twin-engine C-47 cargo planes.

At each aircraft the men had divided into pairs for the practiced ritual of donning their parachutes. The ordinarily straightforward process was complicated by having to route the harnesses around canteens, shovels, medical aid bags, map cases, demolition packs and firearms of all sorts, mostly rifles, submachine guns and carbines.

As they shrugged on their equipment, their commander, Col. Edson Raff, drove up the flight line. He stopped at each cluster of troopers to stand in his jeep and deliver a short but direct sermon: “Give the goddamned bastards hell, men! You know what to do. Cut out their goddamned guts!”

Raff had the personality and résumé to back up his bravado. The tough 37-year-old West Point graduate was an ardent believer in strong leadership and had commanded the Americans’ first combat jump into North Africa as well as battled through the bocage in France. As a result of those experiences he embraced the brutality of his profession. “Forget good sportsmanship
on the battlefield,” he wrote in his wartime memoir. “And if for one moment you feel soft toward that Nazi shooting at you, remember he’s trying to kill you, and if he had the chance, he’d drive your dad into slavery, cut your mother’s throat and rape your wife, sister, sweetheart or daughter. You’ll get no quarter from him. Give him none!”

Raff had taken command of the 507th in June 1944 after the Germans captured the original commander a few days into the Normandy campaign. The outsider’s assignment disgruntled the regiment’s rank and file, and his popularity dropped even more when he introduced the men to his combat maxims on their withdrawal back to England. One of his favorites, “The squad and platoon must be perfectly trained—they win battles,” was perhaps his men’s least favorite.

His focus on the smallest unit in the Army’s inventory was often mistaken for micromanagement. And despite needing a training regimen to incorporate newly arrived replacements, many of the Normandy veterans took offense to Raff’s back-to-basics emphasis on fundamental field tactics. His physical training regime was disliked as well. Raff liked to exercise—a lot.

In August 1944 the 507th was transferred out of the 82nd Airborne Division and attached to the untested 17th Airborne Division, a move that further reduced Raff’s limited popularity. His aggressive attitude and diminutive height of 5 feet 6 inches earned him the nickname “Little Caesar.”

Captain Chester McCoid, an intelligence officer in the 17th Airborne’s HQ, considered Raff a “miserable monster” but conceded, “Despite his queer quirks of character, Raff was a terrific combat leader.”

Indeed, in December 1944 when the 17th Airborne was rushed to Belgium to help stem the tide of the Germans’ Ardennes offensive, Raff earned a reputation for his unruffled professionalism. McCoid later admitted the combat effectiveness of “Raff’s Ruffians” stood above “the less imaginative performances” of the division’s other infantry regiments. But it came at a cost.

When withdrawn from the front in mid-February 1945, the Ruffians had suffered more than one-third of the division’s 2,000 casualties. But after the cauldron of the Ardennes many of Raff’s critics begrudgingly admitted his methods had merit.

As Raff’s jeep continued down the flight line, his men grumbled while struggling to attach the heavy equipment Raff insisted they carry. He wanted them ready to fight when they landed, and that meant jumping with radios, mortars and 31-pound machine guns on their person.

Private Rexford Bass, who’d be jumping in the first serial with Raff, was one such unhappy soul. With a chest-mounted satchel for his belt-fed .30-caliber machine gun clipped into each shoulder of his parachute harness, he had to waddle toward the plane, as the contraption was so long that it dragged the ground. Private Glenn Lawson strapped on a leg bag containing his 60 mm mortar. He would lower it on a 20-foot suspension line after his chute opened to dangle below him during descent.

The complaints were tempered by the realization Raff was right. In a few hours the Ruffians would jump into Germany in the vanguard of Operation Varsity, the airdrop to support the Allied crossing of the Rhine River. And they were expecting heavy resistance.

That same morning British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21 Army Group was assaulting the Rhine with five divisions abreast. As part of that effort two airborne divisions—the British 6th and the American 17th—were to be dropped inland and form a bridgehead.

The 507th’s objective was to seize the high ground of Diersfordt Forest, from where it was feared German artillery would wreak havoc on the river crossing. Raff and the 694 troopers of 1st Battalion would be departing in 46 aircraft, while the regiment’s two other battalions were flying in serials out of airfield A-79. The fourth serial would drop the 464th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion to provide heavier firepower.

Their collective destination would be Drop Zone W (DZ W) an egg-shaped area of open farmland hugging the eastern edge of the forest. At just over a mile inland from the Rhine’s east bank, they would be landing closest to the river while the rest of the division established the bridgehead’s right-flank perimeter farther inland.

Colonel Joel Couch, a veteran pilot who’d flown multiple combat airdrops, would be piloting the lead aircraft. He wagered Raff a case of champagne that he’d drop the Ruffians right on target. Raff, who suspected everyone of incompetence, took the bet.

At 0725 hours Couch’s aircraft roared down the runway, and within minutes the other 45 planes of the first serial had climbed into the clear blue sky.

They rendezvoused over Wavre, Belgium, with the largest Allied airborne armada of the war: more than 1,500 powered aircraft and 1,300 gliders escorted by close to 500 British and American fighters. The phalanxes of aircraft carrying the two airborne divisions took more than three hours to pass a single point on the ground.

As the aircraft neared Germany, the terrain below shifted from colorful villages and idyllic farms to an ominous gray landscape of shell craters and burnt fields. Olive-drab convoys congested the roads, bringing forward tanks, engineering equipment, sections of pontoon bridges and countless other supplies.

The pilots, pushing closer to the Rhine, passed back the 10-minute warning. The jumpmasters in turn stood to face the men, bellowing, “Get readddyyyyy!”

“Get ready!” the men shouted back. After hooking up their chutes’ static lines and conducting a final equipment check, the jumpers crowded toward the open cargo door, waiting to surge forward.

Over the steady pitch of the engines the troopers heard the muffled crumps of exploding flak getting closer. From the far side of the river German anti-aircraft gunners targeted the incoming transports. Several near misses burst between the planes, showering their thin skin with what sounded like gravel. The concussions jarred the aircraft and buffeted the men inside.

“Rhine!” yelled the jumpmasters. Pilots toggled the jump light to red—the two-minute warning.

In the lead aircraft Couch was having difficulty spotting his checkpoints as he crossed over the Rhine. Smoke from the river assault had drifted inland, reducing visibility. As Couch descended to 600 feet, Raff braced himself in the open cargo door, scanning the farm fields flashing past. Behind him the troopers felt the plane reduce speed to 110 mph. They were anxious and wanted out—anything was better than being tossed around in the back of a flak magnet. Couch flipped the jump light to green at 0948.

“Let’s go!” shouted Raff, launching himself out the door. Keying off Couch’s plane, the other pilots flipped on their jump signals as well.

The sky filled with chutes, and within a few minutes Raff’s 1st Battalion had crashed to earth in Germany. A murky haze obscured landmarks, but the irrigation ditches and hedgerows appeared to match the maps they had studied. Officers and sergeants gathered troopers and formed them into squads and platoons as they moved toward the tree line. Raff herded 200 of his men off the DZ. He knew the next serial should be dropping in four minutes, and it was smart to clear out as fast as possible.

Entrenched enemy machine guns opened up on the Americans as they advanced. Squads of troopers went to ground while others bounded forward. The well-rehearsed choreography was simple: Someone was always shooting, and someone was always moving. If everyone did his job, the tactic overwhelmed the enemy by keeping their heads down or making them traverse too quickly to be accurate. It was effective, deadly and exhausting work. The Ruffians swept into the German positions, suffering some casualties, but eliminating the machine guns and capturing their first prisoners.

Raff noticed something was wrong when the planes of the second serial came over. They were flying farther south and dropping troops on the far side of the forest. Map study and information from a POW confirmed pilot Couch had lost the champagne bet: He’d dropped Raff’s 1st Battalion almost a mile and a half off the DZ.

Other troopers realized they’d missed the DZ when they noticed the hazy silhouette of Diersfordt Castle a half-mile to their west. Noted during the planning phase of the operation, the compound was suspected to be a German HQ and was an objective of Raff’s 3rd Battalion.

Having assembled roughly 400 men of the first serial, Raff turned his attention to two immediate targets: the castle and a nearby enemy artillery battery. He understood that seizing these objectives, even with a portion of his troops, would pay off. He wanted to exploit the initial pandemonium; delays would only favor the enemy, giving them time to muster stronger defenses. It was important to keep the Germans reacting to events rather than dictating them.

Since no radio contact had yet been made with the still-organizing 3rd Battalion, Raff gave the job of capturing the castle to 1st Battalion’s Company A. The situation called for improvisation, and they’d be going into the attack. The artillery battery would be tackled by a group of troopers led by Lt. Murray Harvey. It didn’t matter to Raff the enemy guns were in a section of forest assigned to another regiment; the howitzers were firing at troops crossing the Rhine and had to be dealt with.

While Raff reorganized 1st Battalion, C-47s continued to roar over DZ W at 600 feet. Four aircraft in the second serial were hit by anti-aircraft fire, one fatally. A single paratrooper escaped, but the other 17 and all of the aircrew died when the plane plunged into a large stone barn.

The third serial jumped five seconds late, putting dozens of jumpers 500 yards farther east than intended. Among them was Capt. Paschal Fowlkes, an unarmed chaplain, who was shot to death while caught in a tree.

The fourth serial, dropping the Ruffians’ artillery support, arrived overhead at 1003. Three of their 12 howitzers’ chutes malfunctioned, and the massive bundles tumbled through the sky in a tangled mess, thudding into the ground. Useless.

Once on the ground, troopers hugged the furrowed fields. The woods to the north and west sparked with muzzle flashes from dug-in machine guns. Fire poured in from several houses turned into fortified bunkers. Heavy mortars and artillery peppered the DZ.

Small groups of artillerymen fought their way out to their supply bundles and soon had three of their heavy .50-caliber machine guns in action. The methodical chug-chug-chug of the belt-fed machine guns could be heard raking the tree line. Their overwhelming firepower provided essential cover for the crews crawling out to assemble the howitzers. Soon the welcoming boom of friendly artillery could be heard above the fracas as crews leveled their 75 mm howitzers in direct fire on the German positions.

With the Ruffians on DZ W mopping up resistance, Company A prepared to seize the castle complex. After a series of brief skirmishes, including a bloody battle with a German Mark IV tank, the company made a wide flanking move through the woods that drew fire from the castle’s defenders.

Simultaneously, 3rd Battalion had departed the DZ and was advancing toward the castle from the east. With radio contact established, Raff ordered Company A to hold its position and provide covering fire as 3rd Battalion organized for its assault. Raff himself kept moving with the rest of 1st Battalion to establish the regimental command post on the DZ.

Two companies of 3rd Battalion formed a wide arc on the castle’s east side. They used an embankment along the tree line for cover, but as they moved into position, the volume of fire from the castle swelled. A distinct clanking sound could be heard above the cacophony of rifle and machine gun fire. Tanks.

Two panzers rumbled down a narrow, tree-lined road, headed directly for the troopers’ embankment. Rounds from the lead tank sailed in, injuring several troopers. The two tanks were soon put out of action—the first by a well-heaved British Gammon grenade, and the second by a 57 mm round from an M18 recoilless rifle.

With Company A providing mortar and small arms cover, the Ruffians along the embankment launched their attack on the compound’s northeast corner through a section of collapsed wall. Disaster struck as soon as the advancing troopers crossed into the open field. Enemy fire cut down several men, and the assault commander was wounded. The attack stalled, forcing the men to withdraw to the shelter of the berm—they would have to try again.

The battalion commander reorganized his men for a textbook plan: In a coordinated effort one element would unleash fire at the castle, aiming at windows to keep the enemy’s head down; the other element would use the covering fire to maneuver against the northeast corner.

When the second hand of their watches ticked up to 1300, the troopers cut loose. Bullets from rifles and belt-fed machine guns chipped away at the castle’s brick facade. The assaulting troopers surged forward, splashing across the shallow moat and clearing the outer buildings room by room. They ran past the bodies of their buddies who’d died in the first attack. Grenades echoed in the large blockhouse as the attack became a series of individual battles, with troopers scurrying across the complex for cover and shooting at anything not in olive drab. Faced with the paratroopers’ full fury, pockets of defenders started to surrender.

Just before 1530 Raff reported his situation to higher headquarters: He had radio contact with his three battalions, and the initial confusion of the missed drop had been quickly replaced with orderly execution. His men had established a perimeter and set up roadblocks along the southern sector. At least 80 percent of his troops were accounted for, with losses estimated at 99 casualties.

Though the mopping up at Diersfordt Castle was under way, the Americans had taken 300 POWs, while the remaining defenders were buttoned up and no longer posed a threat.

But the Germans were still counterattacking. At least two enemy self-propelled guns clanked their way into the Ruffians’ northern perimeter. As the enemy armor hurled 75 mm shells into the DZ, a forward observer called for fire. Several rounds rattled in, bracketing the tracked vehicles before pulverizing them with direct hits.

Raff, recognizing the potential of an enemy breakthrough, dispatched two companies from 1st Battalion to clear several enemy positions and reinforce the northern perimeter.

After flanking through the woods of Diersfordt Forest, the paratroopers were driven to ground by the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of two German machine guns dug into the front gardens of two farmhouses. Trenches and foxholes surrounded the emplacement. The farmyard had already been the scene of heavy fighting. Several dead paratroopers—many still in their chutes—were scattered around the farmhouses. From the way some of the bodies were positioned, it appeared at least six of them had been executed.

A Ruffian later recalled the chaos of the swarming attack: “Everywhere was a gray uniform, shoot, run, shoot, throw a grenade.” As the Ruffians overwhelmed the trenches, the Germans retreated, leaving behind their dead and wounded.

With their objectives secured and resistance reduced to minor skirmishes, the Ruffians sent out patrols to sweep the area. One of the patrols found a forward squad from the British 6th Airborne and passed back the good news by radio. In the regimental diary a staff officer confessed the news “[relieved] the feeling that we were all alone on this mission.”

The patrols searched houses and rousted out any occupants. Herding the civilians into holding points was the safest option for all concerned, as it would get them out of the crossfire and ease the minds of punchy troopers wanting their perimeter cleared before sunset. The troopers segregated the civilians from the POWs, whose numbers had swelled to an estimated 700.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, the Ruffians dug in for the night to await morning, when reinforcing Allied tanks—crossing the Rhine on barges and pontoon bridges—were to arrive. In the meantime, Raff’s aggressive leadership had paid off. His regiment had quickly recovered from its missed drop to literally advance through the fog of war and successfully secure their sector.

For the Ruffians, March 24, 1945, was almost over. An American flag flew over Diersfordt Castle, but more objectives and villages remained to be seized before the war was over. They would continue to advance with the 17th Airborne Division, sweeping deeper into Germany to help close the Ruhr Pocket’s northern flank. They ended their campaign as occupation troops in Duisburg, a mere 15 miles upstream from DZ W, where their journey into the Reich had begun. MH

Texas-based writer and former U.S. Army paratrooper James Fenelon is the author of Four Hours of Fury: The Untold Story of World War II’s Largest Airborne Invasion and the Final Push Into Nazi Germany. For further reading he recommends We Jumped to Fight, by Col. Edson D. Raff.

Infantrymen ferried into Nazi Germany via glider fought to seize 10 key bridges during Operation Varsity. 

ON THE MORNING OF March 24, 1945, an Allied armada of more than 1,500 powered aircraft and 1,300 gliders converged over the central Belgian town of Wavre. The aircraft had departed from 23 airfields in England and France; for their pilots, Wavre served as the command assembly point over which all aircraft formations changed course for their approach to drop zones on the east side of the Rhine River. 

Drawn outside by the reverberating sound of droning engines, its residents gazed skyward as the air columns came together in a cloudless blue sky to form the war’s largest single-day airborne armada. It was about 9 a.m.; close to 500 British and American fighter escorts, darting about like angry hornets on all flanks, added to the mighty display. Anyone wanting to watch the entire spectacle would have to wait more than three hours for the fleet to pass. 

Onlookers were witnessing the voyage of two Allied airborne divisions—the American 17th and the British 6th—on their way into Germany to participate in an operation codenamed “Varsity.” Following a nine-month campaign that had begun on the beaches of Normandy, the Allies were now on the threshold of kicking in the door to the Third Reich. 

But first, they had to cross the Rhine.

Preparation for the crossing—given the overall code name “Plunder”—had been so monumental that it was impossible for the enemy not to notice. The stockpiling of bridging equipment, the increasing bombing campaigns, the movement of troops, the Allied airfields in France overcrowded with C-47 transports and olive-drab gliders—all had served to put the Germans on high alert. Nazi propaganda broadcasts made it clear that any element of surprise was long gone. 

The two airborne divisions were to drop into enemy territory on the east bank of the Rhine, outside the town of Wesel in western Germany. There they were to secure a perimeter some five miles wide to shield the British, Canadian, and American ground troops of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery’s assault river crossing, underway since 10 p.m. the previous evening. The paratroopers were expected to hold their positions for 24 hours until the ground troops swarming across the 400-yard-wide river could arrive and reinforce them.

Meanwhile, the enemy was waiting.

THE BRITISH AIRBORNE TROOPS were responsible for the western flank of the perimeter, while the 17th Airborne would land farther east. Leading the American column, in 298 aircraft, were paratroopers of the 507th and 513th Regimental Combat Teams. Their mission was to secure the high ground overlooking the Rhine and establish the perimeter’s northern boundary. 

The paratroopers were followed by 906 gliders being towed to their landing zones. Nearly two-thirds of the boxy, canvas-covered aircraft carried the U.S. 194th Combat Team, which consisted of the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment plus supporting medics, engineers, artillery, and antitank guns. Their destination was Landing Zone S on the eastern edge of the perimeter. The glider-borne infantry, or “glider riders,” arguably had the most vital task: blocking German counterattacks from the eastern flank by seizing bridges over the Issel River and Issel Canal, north of the Rhine. Several of those bridges could support the weight of armored vehicles; the Allies needed to take them intact so they could use them to break out of the perimeter and continue the offensive into Germany.

Planners had numbered the bridges for easy reference. Starting in Wesel and moving counterclockwise, the bridges over the canal were numbered 1 through 4 and were to be seized by the 194th’s 2nd Battalion. Bridges 5 through 10—over the river—were the 1st Battalion’s goal. The 3rd Battalion, plus supporting artillery and antitank guns, would land after the two assault battalions.

The gliders—Waco CG-4As—gave the 194th the advantage of bringing in heavier weapons, and of landing squads intact as fighting elements. In their cargo holds the gliders could carry 13 men, or a jeep and three men, or a 75mm howitzer (or, if positioned just right, an M3 105mm howitzer) along with up to three men. The troopers had packed the gliders to capacity to squeeze as many men and as much materiel into the perimeter as possible. Many of the C-47s were also lugging in two gliders instead of the customary one.

For three hours the gliders had pitched and yawed behind the tow planes as their pilots strained to keep them steady against the turbulence. Despite the pilots’ efforts, the fully loaded—and in some cases, overloaded—aircraft were buffeted about in the armada’s agitated prop wash. It was exhausting work, with pilots and copilots swapping turns at the controls to reduce fatigue. Many veteran pilots complained it was the worst turbulence they’d ever experienced. 

In the back, passengers braced themselves against unpredictable updrafts and downdrafts. Private Jim Lauria had secured a rope along the length of the cargo area to give himself a handhold as he periodically maneuvered around his 75mm howitzer to inspect its tie-downs during the bumpy flight.

Another gun crew hadn’t been so diligent, and their M3 105mm howitzer worked itself loose. Staff Sergeant Jimmie Taylor screamed over the racket of the wind slapping at the canvas fuselage to get his crew into action. As the 2,400-pound gun threatened to upset their center of gravity, Taylor and another trooper muscled it back into place. Vomit all over the plywood floor made their work more precarious, as they kept slipping in it. 

Just before 10:30 a.m. the first American glider, still under tow, crossed the Rhine. As they passed over, Lieutenant Colonel John Paddock, a passenger and commander of the 17th Airborne’s antitank battalion, made a ceremony of tossing an empty champagne bottle into the river as they officially crossed into Nazi Germany. He’d popped the cork earlier, passing the bottle around during their flight. “I figured the dice were cast, might as well enjoy ourselves,” he later recalled. 

Down below, Montgomery’s Allied troops darted across the river in their amphibious assault craft. German artillery shattered the water’s surface with exploding geysers. Enemy antiaircraft fire, or flak, targeted the Allied aircraft as they approached the river. The Germans’ heavier guns—the big 88s and 105s—got the range first. The coal-black clouds of bursting flak drifted past as the gliders were towed relentlessly onward. In their cockpits, the glider pilots could smell the rotten-egg stench of exploding ack-ack shells.

They were six miles from the landing zone; red lights flashed from the C-47 navigators’ glass domes, signaling to the glider pilots that they were almost there. Stand by. 

SOME DIDN’T MAKE IT. The two lead aircraft were shot down a mile short of Landing Zone S; pilots of the towed gliders cut loose to avoid being pulled into the ground. Out of the first 40 tow aircraft, 36 were hit. In the next hour, German gunners would down 10 more C-47s and damage another 140. 

As the formation reached the edge of the landing zone, green lights replaced the red standby signal. Release when ready. The first glider pilot did so at 10:36 a.m., sending the tow rope snapping forward and his glider into  descent. For the next hour, more gliders did the same roughly once every six seconds.

In one glider, Associated Press reporter Howard S. Cowan had his eyes glued on his pilot. Cowan wanted to cast off as soon as possible; the flak was loud and close. The fabric-covered gliders offered virtually no protection. 

After what seemed like hours, the pilot shouted over his shoulder, “Going down!” With a flick of the release toggle, the glider pitched forward into a steep dive. No longer being towed, the passengers heard the howl of the wind decrease, only to be replaced by the distinct sounds of bursting flak and the rattle of German machine guns. Seconds later, Cowan was startled by the POP-POP of shrapnel puncturing the taut canvas skin of the glider on one side and slicing its way out the other.

Advised the sergeant sitting across from him: “Now is when you pray.” 

Glider pilot George Buckley, who at age 19 was already a veteran of multiple combat operations, said the flak was the heaviest he’d seen yet. But the aircraft formations bore straight through it without taking evasive action. He recalled: “A C-47 in front of us with one engine out and with flames streaming back over its wing held to a steady course, determined to get its two gliders to the [landing zone].” 

DOWN BELOW, Peter Emmerich, a private—or Kanonier—in a three-gun battery of the Luftwaffe’s 883rd Antiaircraft Battalion, had been finishing his breakfast when the unmistakable rumbling of Allied aircraft filled the sky. There appeared to be no end to the staggered formations; they stretched as far back to the horizon as Emmerich could see. As he stared at the spectacle for a few dread-filled moments, the gunners swiveled their 20mm Flakvierling-38s into action. 

The rapid booming of the guns snapped Emmerich back to reality. He followed the trajectory of tracer fire as the rounds chewed through the wing of a C-47, vaporizing its left engine. 

The crews hustled. At the gunner’s command of “Laden!” they swapped out the empty magazines for four fresh 20-rounders. Emmerich’s battery commander liked to stagger types of ammunition for maximum damage: armor-piercing, incendiary, high-explosive. Repeat.

When the gliders released overhead, Emmerich’s section chief ordered the gunners to ignore the C-47s: “Aim for the gliders!”

As the first glider neared Emmerich’s position, the gunner gave it a full burst, emptying all four barrels into it. The right side of the glider shattered, losing the wing and rear stabilizer. It crumpled into the ground. So many aircraft were overhead, “We did not have to aim anymore,” Emmerich recalled, “just point our guns in the air and fire. We would have always hit something.”  

All three guns in the battery were firing at their full rate of 1,000 rounds a minute; soon the surrounding field was littered with heaps of twisted metal-framed gliders on fire. Two dead bodies lay nearby, and the air was heavy with a sick burning smell. 

ABOARD THE DESCENDING GLIDERS, squad and platoon leaders leaned between their two pilots to peer out the cockpit windows, scanning the terrain below for landmarks. Smoke from the river assault had drifted over nearby farmland, blanketing everything. As they got lower, ground details emerged. Some leaders, like Lieutenant Frank Dillon, were able to spot his platoon’s assembly point: a triangular patch of woods bordered by a dirt road. Dillon called out the distance and direction to his men as they braced themselves for a rough landing. 

Out of the fog, a power line loomed. The pilot pulled up, but the glider’s tail struck the wire, pitching them forward until he could level the craft. The maneuver kept them from crashing but increased their speed, prompting the glider to slam into the ground and skid across the field. Trees ripped off both wings, but the fuselage continued forward, mowing down a row of fence posts before a large tree brought them to a bone-jarring halt. Its trunk creased the cockpit between the two pilots, but neither was injured. 

Gliders plunged in from every direction, plowing into the open fields, knocking down telephone poles, bowling through fences, and toppling trees. Germans firing at a glider were often surprised by another landing directly behind them. Several gliders ran over foxholes; in at least one case, a copilot fired his Tommy gun through the nose of his glider, scattering an enemy machine-gun crew as the CG-4A crashed into them. 

Small battles erupted across the landing zone as troopers ran from their gliders and the chaos shifted from sky to ground. It was a 360-degree battlefield of barking sergeants, cracking guns, snapping bullets, coughing mortars, and screaming wounded.

Additional waves of gliders brought in more men and heavier firepower: 57mm antitank guns and the howitzers of the 680th and 681st Glider Field Artillery Battalions. 

A 680th artillery crew unloaded their M3 105mm howitzer and lugged it out into the field to duel with the enemy guns. They fired first but missed. The German crew didn’t. A second group of Americans wheeled their howitzer into position, splattering the enemy battery with flanking fire. This move was enough to take out several of the guns and bag 25 prisoners. The troopers gave better than they got, but their efforts cost them dearly: two battery commanders were killed within 100 yards of each other, as were 17 troopers, with more than 50 wounded in the melee. 

Private Jim Lauria’s 75mm howitzer—one of 12 brought in by the 681st—was trapped inside the glider: the aircraft had hit a wire fence on landing, and the collision had fouled the nose so badly the men couldn’t open it. 

After enlisting the help of some glider riders with wire cutters, Lauria finally extracted the howitzer from the glider’s cargo hold. At the same time, one of the troopers spotted muzzle flashes coming from a hayloft, where a German machine gunner was methodically spraying the landing zone. Lauria and crew manhandled the howitzer into alignment and sighted down its tube like it was a rifle. When satisfied, Lauria jerked the lanyard. The 75mm shell whined across the field and flashed into the barn. The explosion lifted the roof off, destroying the hayloft. 

In little more than an hour, the gliders had delivered 3,492 troops and 637 tons of cargo—including 202 jeeps and 78 mortars and artillery pieces—into Landing Zone S. The glider riders struck out toward the 10 bridges over the Issel Canal and River.

Members of 2nd Battalion’s George Company fought their way across the landing zone, dodging gliders and bullets to attack bridges 1 and 2. Their destination was the far side of the canal, where they were to set up a perimeter and block any German counterattacks.

The troopers went to ground in an open field 600 yards short of Bridge 1. Squads of well-armed Germans had barricaded themselves inside a cluster of industrial buildings, and they quickly pinned down the Americans. Repeated Allied bombings had left the buildings in Wesel little more than shells of heaped bricks, but the defenders made the most of the crumpled urban redoubt. Squads of glider riders scratched forward block by block to reach the bridge. 

Two German Mk V Panther tanks clanked toward the Americans, trying to sweep them off their objective. The city’s rubble and splintered beams were a tank hunter’s playground. Private Robert Geist let the first panzer approach within 50 feet before firing a high-explosive rocket from his bazooka into the metal monster. The round impacted with an orange flash and a tremendous shock wave, and Private William Paliwoda took out the second tank from close range as well. The enemy’s first counterattack ground to a halt.

It didn’t take long for German infantry—led by two more Panthers—to make another attack, this time against the troopers digging in at Bridge 2. The situation was precarious. The glider riders’ antitank guns weren’t yet in position, and they were on the verge of being overrun. 

In a desperate “ends justify the means” decision, the troopers prodded several of their POWs up onto the road at gunpoint, using them as human shields. The German attack stalled, allowing one of the antitank crews to wheel their 57mm gun into position.

The German tanks spotted it and cranked their turrets around for a shot. Shells shrieked back and forth in a race for the first hit. The troopers scored first, knocking out one of the 44-ton Panthers. They reloaded and ricocheted a round off the second panzer. The other Panther’s muzzle barked, and the round slammed into the antitank gun with a devastating crash, wounding all four crewmembers. The surviving tank and German infantry fell back.

Farther up the 60-foot-wide canal, troopers of 2nd Battalion’s Fox Company were, by 11:45 a.m., en route to bridges 3 and 4. The company already had two coups to their credit, having separately bagged, within 30 minutes of landing, two regimental command posts and vital intelligence, including maps marked with gun positions surrounding Wesel. 

Now, the vast American troop formations cutting across the open terrain proved a tempting target for another Mk V Panther. It opened fire with its main gun from 500 yards. Private Robert Weber unlimbered his bazooka for a Hail Mary—at that distance the tank would have been difficult to hit, let alone scratch. But with what would later be considered a “miraculous hit,” the round either ignited ammunition carelessly stored on the tank’s exterior or, if some witnesses are to be believed, arched into an open hatch. Beyond dispute was the result: the tank all but disintegrated, bursting into flames and engulfing the trapped crew in an inferno. 

After knocking out several German outposts at bridges 3 and 4, Fox Company captured the overpasses intact. With heaving shovels and flying dirt, they dug defensive positions to fortify their perimeter on the far side. 

Farther northwest, along the river at bridges 5 and 6, elements of the 1st Battalion had seized control within 15 minutes of landing. Still, they were having trouble keeping their perimeter secure—they’d clear a house only to have it later reoccupied by lone snipers. After chasing them out a few times, the troopers simply blasted away with bazookas to burn the houses down. 

The troopers tasked with seizing bridges 7 through 10 found them well-protected by dug-in German infantry armed with prodigious numbers of machine guns and automatic weapons. Particularly stubborn defenders held Bridge 7, firing volley after volley of devastating mortar and artillery barrages. 

BY MIDDAY, as more men trickled in, the glider riders entrenched along the canal were strengthening their positions. By then they had secured all of their objectives except Bridge 1, which was still contested by an undaunted German battle group. 

To break the Americans’ hold, German units outside the airborne perimeter needed at least one bridge capable of bearing the weight of armored vehicles. German battle groups prowled the banks across from bridges 1 through 4, probing the glider riders’ defenses for a weakness. 

At 4 p.m. the Germans launched a concerted counterattack against bridges 1, 2, and 3. Determined to keep a route open, they pounded the American positions with showers of mortar and artillery shells. The glider riders dug their foxholes deeper and waited.

Their attached forward observer, Lieutenant Herman Lemberger, moved toward the attack as panzers lurched toward the bridges. Lemberger needed a better view, so he climbed to the top of the canal bank and radioed instructions to British artillery batteries back across the Rhine. One of the panzer crews must have spotted his radio. The bark of their main gun rocked the tank, and Lemberger disappeared in the explosion of a direct hit. But he had sent the coordinates, and the British gunners had the range. They dropped shell after shell into the enemy formation, chopping the attackers to pieces with salvos of high explosive rounds. It was close. One of the panzers clanked within 10 yards of the main line before glider rider Andrew Adams knocked it out with a shattering shot from his bazooka. 

Simultaneously, German infantry attacking Bridge 3 with two Mk IV panzers in the lead threatened to overrun Fox Company. Again, British artillery from the far bank disrupted the attack. The shells splashed viciously into the German columns; their fragments whizzed through the ranks of infantry and sent the tanks scurrying in retreat. The artillery had come to the rescue—but the troopers’ relief was temporary. It was just a question of time before the Germans would try again. After the dust settled, both George and Fox Companies radioed 2nd Battalion’s command post to report they had lost contact with their forward squads at bridges 1, 2, and 3.

As the sun dipped below the horizon on that long day and a light mist formed over the canal, the glider riders braced for a sleepless night. They had fought ferociously since landing that morning and had successfully seized their objectives, but their grip on bridges 1, 2, and 3 was tenuous. It would be at least another 10 hours before Allied tanks, crossing the Rhine on barges and pontoon bridges, arrived to reinforce their perimeter. For the 17th Airborne Division’s troopers, March 24, 1945, was almost over, but they would still have to hold the line until relieved. ✯

This story was originally published in the August 2019 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here. 

Private Roger Carqueville was half asleep in the headquarters’ orderly room when the duty officer burst in.

“Carque, alert the company. We’re moving out.” 

Carqueville rousted his fellow paratroopers, many of whom had gone to sleep in anticipation of leaving the next morning on a three-day pass to Paris. Instead of donning their dress uniforms, with silver jump wings and spit-polished jump boots, they slipped into their well-worn combat fatigues. 

The men of the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion grabbed their gear and assembled in the cold night to await further orders. It was December 16, 1944. No one seemed to know what was going on, but it was clear that nobody would be going to Paris. The troopers were dismissed to shove personal belongings into their barracks bags, draw their weapons, and stand by. 

It was a drill they were familiar with. As an independent battalion—never permanently assigned to a parent unit—the 551st was routinely dispatched like a fire brigade to bolster the front where needed. Such independence fostered a magnificent esprit de corps in the ranks but, as the 551st’s odyssey would reveal, there were distinct downsides. The battalion was often overlooked in terms of supplies. And it usually drew the missions no one else wanted.

FORMED IN LATE 1942, the 800-man battalion was initially deployed to Panama in case the Axis made a move against the Panama Canal. From the moment he took command, Wood G. Joerg—then a 27-year-old major hailing from Eufaula, Alabama—wanted his battalion to be unique. Their colors were purple and yellow, and a large silver eagle with the Spanish motto—“Aterrice y Ataque” (Land and Attack), a nod to their Panamanian mission—dominated their insignia. 

The unit’s call to action was “Get Off Your Ass!” and it was in Panama that Joerg started referring to his men as “GOYA birds,” “GOYAs,” or just “birds.” Joerg didn’t expect angels within his ranks; he valued initiative and individuality over rules and discipline. The battalion cultivated a rowdy reputation, bolstered by legendary drinking and fighting and exacerbated by a lack of enemy action. One GOYA, a former professional boxer, was feted for single-handedly KO’ing six MPs.

The GOYAs thought they were sure to see action in June 1943, when they were tagged to spearhead an airborne attack on the West Indies’ island of Martinique. American intelligence believed the island, under the control of Vichy France, was a safe harbor for German U-boats wreaking havoc on American shipping. But the local French naval commander surrendered the island before the invasion took place. 

The unit returned to the States in September 1943, where its men spent their time training and getting into more trouble at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. After returning there from a 21-day furlough, the GOYAs reportedly held one of the U.S. Army’s highest VD rates. The discipline issues got nothing but worse, and soon nearly 200 of the troopers were in the stockade for being absent without leave.

Embarking for Europe in April 1944 seemed to quell their restless nature. After a few months of training in Italy, the GOYAs jumped into occupied southern France in mid-August as part of the cobbled-together 1st Airborne Task Force. Their daylight drop near the village of La Motte marked the beginning of a 95-day campaign that ended with the battalion holding an isolated 40-mile front in the Maritime Alps. The GOYAs conducted ski patrols to cover their sector and harass the Germans. They turned in most of their heavy cold-weather gear when they arrived in northern France in early December for rest and refitting.

NOW WAITING FOR THE WORD to move out, the GOYAs spent Sunday, December 17, milling around their barracks in Laon. The former French military billets were a tantalizing 75 miles from Paris, liberated that August. But, unknown to the troopers, about 100 miles in the opposite direction, the Germans had launched a massive surprise offensive through the Ardennes Forest, igniting what has be-come known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler’s attack, intended to slice through the Allies and seize Antwerp and its valuable port, was a desperate gamble that relied on almost everything going right at a time when German fuel supplies and unit strengths were in decline. But there was no denying that the offensive’s violent opening salvo of artillery and tanks, followed by swarms of German panzergrenadiers and paratroopers, had succeeded in punching through the Allied lines in Belgium. 

The pandemonium of the breakthrough rattled General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff at Supreme Headquarters. They moved quickly to organize the disarray—but accurate information from the front was in short supply. To ease the logistical burden, Eisenhower placed some of his forces under the temporary control of British field marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. 

Multiple delays gave rise to rumors among the GOYAs of sitting this one out. But those hopes were dashed when Wood Joerg, now a lieutenant colonel, returned at midnight from a briefing at 82nd Airborne Division headquarters. Joerg confirmed they were to move out as soon as possible. Their destination: Bastogne, Belgium. 

Halfway to Bastogne, though, panzers cut off the convoy’s route and the 551st’s orders were rescinded. The battalion was now to report to the 30th Infantry Division near Stavelot, about 40 miles to Bastogne’s northeast. Forced to skirt the southern flank of the German advance, the GOYAs’ journey became a multiday, circuitous marathon; their trucks slid off slick roads, backtracked under artillery fire, were rerouted by MPs, and were occasionally strafed by marauding enemy aircraft.

Separated by their travails, the vehicles trickled into Stavelot on December 20 and 21. Winters are severe in the region—especially so that year, with wind, bitter cold, and frequent snow. On the 20th, snow had begun falling again. By the time all the GOYAs had arrived, the enemy advance on the northern shoulder had been largely halted. Through a combination of determined Allied defenses, air power, and German logistical nightmares, the tanks and half-tracks of the German 1st SS Panzer Division had ground to a halt in the snow. The division was now fighting a desperate rear-guard action, and needed time for their remaining units to escape before they were completely annihilated. 

THE GOYAS WERE SOON transferred back to the 82nd Airborne and placed into reserve positions a few miles to the west, near Rahier. There, their primary adversary was the freezing temperatures. The troopers spent Christmas and the next two days trying to stay warm, dodging enemy artillery shells, and—in the case of the 82nd’s commander, Major General James M. Gavin—growing impatient. Field Marshal Montgomery, in an effort to tidy up his lines, had ordered several units to withdraw from seized terrain and fall back several miles to the main frontline.

Gavin disagreed with Montgomery’s strategy; he didn’t like paying for the same real estate twice. But if he couldn’t attack, Gavin wanted his division aggressively needling the enemy. He tasked the GOYAs with a raid on the night of December 27. It would be against elements of the 62nd Volksgrenadier Division and the 9th SS Panzer Division, dug in around a cluster of stone farmhouses called Noirfontaine, three or four miles beyond the frontline. Joerg’s birds were to get in, wreak havoc, grab a prisoner or two, and be back before sunrise.

Given just a few hours’ notice, Joerg and his company commanders studied maps and reconnaissance photographs while the men scarfed down C-rations, cleaned their weapons, and steeled themselves for a night attack.

As the troopers crunched through the snow, covering U.S. artillery rounds warbled overhead to crash into the cluster of houses and barns. Joerg deployed the battalion’s three rifle companies: B Company moved in to set up a base of fire, while the two assault companies, A and C, swept through the tiny village. The 551st’s 81mm mortars set up 800 yards short of Noirefontaine. Lieutenant Robert Buscher had scrounged four additional mortars, doubling the battalion’s allotment. His men had perfected a rapid-fire technique to serve as the GOYAs’ mobile artillery; dur-ing the raid they hurled more than 400 shells onto enemy positions.

C Company’s Lieutenant Dick Goins positioned three Browning machine guns on the attack’s left flank and poured fire into the buildings. Meanwhile, his commander, Captain Tims Quinn, spotted a German Panzer IV tank. He dispatched two bazooka teams, yelling, “Don’t come back unless you are dragging them goddamn Tigers by the tail!” The men returned a few minutes later having knocked out one of the panzers with the rest in retreat. 

A burning barn added an eerie glow to the nighttime scene and, in the pandemonium, there were several confused “friendly” shootouts. Fortunately for the 551st, the only casualties from the latter were a couple of creased helmets and some bruised egos. The GOYAs had caught the enemy by surprise. “Krauts were running all over,” recalled Sergeant Jack Carr. “Some of our guys walked right up and shot the Germans in their foxholes.”

At 2:30 a.m. the GOYAs withdrew, herding more than 20 POWs back through the woods and leaving some 50 enemy dead, at a cost of four killed and 15 wounded. 

THE INEVITABLE ORDER for a full-scale Allied counterattack came six days later, on January 2. The 551st was now attached to the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and would be on the left flank of the 82nd Airborne’s assault to push the Germans back. 

At 8:30 the morning of January 3, after a hot meal of pancakes and beef stew, the GOYAs marched south toward Saint-Jacques. Orders had come down for those who still had them to leave their cumbersome wool overcoats and rubber overshoes behind. The bulky cold-weather gear hampered rapid movement; they would attack in their standard-issue jump boots and olive fatigues. There was a lot of grumbling but, to their later regret, the men complied. 

The troopers of the 551st—by then a 643-man force—loped forward, their breaths fogging the air. They high-stepped through two feet of snow as they advanced: A Company on the left, C Company on the right, with B Company bringing up the rear. The shortage of manpower required the cooks to serve as ammunition bearers. German Nebelwerfer rockets screamed overhead and the occasional short round of friendly artillery kept the troopers diving into the snow. Their first obstacle was crossing the icy Baleur River. There was no way around it and everyone got their feet wet. 

Panzergrenadiers of the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions were waiting for them, having used Montgomery’s withdrawal to their benefit. They were well dug into hilltop positions and the half-mile span of open ground to their front gave them all the advantages. Attacking uphill, the GOYAs would stand out like targets on a rifle range.

The panzergrenadiers’ mortar and artillery fire hit the 551st while they were still surveying the enemy positions from the tree line. An 88mm round vaporized one of A Company’s three-man mortar squads. Soon another shell wiped out the forward observer team: there would be no calling for artillery support.

Joerg, standing in the open, directed his men forward. A Company surged into the attack. The Germans let them get 200 yards into the field before opening up with at least six machine guns. The rounds ripped into the paratroopers’ formation, wounding the company’s captain; Lieutenant Keith Harsh assumed command. He had been hit, too, but refused to be evacuated.

“You had two choices,” Sergeant Bill Dean said. “You could get up and try to get away and they’d shoot you with the machine guns, or you could lie there and get shot with artillery.”

The man next to Dean went down. “He was a nice-looking kid, about 18,” Dean recalled. “He got shot in the throat and he looked at me with a desperate plea in his eyes. I looked away—I never did look back at him. He was blowing red bubbles in the snow.”

German tanks joined the melee, their main guns flashing as they launched deadly 75mm rounds. An intrepid GOYA bazooka gunner circled wide and took out one of them with a hit just above the tracks. The remaining panzers clanked away to safer ground.

From the right flank, Tims Quinn saw A Company pinned down. With a rebel yell, he led the men of C Company in a charge up the slope. They made good progress until the Germans pivoted their guns. The savage barrage cut down 45 troopers in less than 15 minutes. 

Joerg committed B Company and, together with remnants of the other two badly hit companies, they pushed the grenadiers off the hill. As the sun set and the temperature dropped, tempers flared over the day’s slaughter: 189 GOYA casualties. In retaliation, Joerg’s troopers executed at least eight German prisoners without debate; some witnesses claimed the number was more than 20. One trooper, overflowing with grief and fury, even snapped off a few shots at a distant group of GIs wearing overcoats. Thankfully, he missed.

The troopers searched frantically for their wounded. If a man was left in the snow, subject to the sub-zero temperatures, he would freeze to death. The officers ordered their men, all of whom were without sleeping bags, to stay on their feet. They stomped their boots and, in some cases, marched circles around trees to stay awake, but at least a dozen GOYAs who lay down never got back up, dying of hypothermia. 

Their misery continued. A steady stream of frostbite cases—many with blackened noses, fingers, and toes—were evacuated to aid stations. Officers began slapping their men to keep them awake. Those who lay down for even a few minutes found themselves frozen to the ground and in need of help to get up. The exhaustion took its toll. After their next attack—on January 4, at the town of Dairomont—some of the GOYAs went berserk, beating the corpses of stubborn German defenders so violently they broke the stocks of their rifles. By the evening of January 5, battle casualties and cold-weather injuries had reduced the battalion to half strength: 325 troopers, including 30-odd fresh replacements. 

On the afternoon of January 6, the GOYAs were reassigned yet again, this time to the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. But, due to the fog of war or to distraction, the handoff was bungled. The 82nd staff documented the transfer, but there is no record of the 504th formally recognizing the attachment. The confusion would seal the GOYAs’ fate. 

THE GOYAS’ NEXT ATTACK was to take place first thing the morning of January 7. Joerg was exhausted; most of his men were in a state of near shock. That night the men in the command post heard an exasperated Joerg arguing over the radio—exactly with whom has never been established. He wanted the attack called off. The GOYAs had had enough. Whoever was on the line denied the request.

Holding back tears, Joerg huddled with his company commanders to plan their next assault—this time against the rocky crag of Rochelinval, occupied by approximately 500 German grenadiers who were holding the last bridge across the nearby Salm River for their retreating comrades. Lieutenant Donald “Big Dog” Booth’s A Company—down to 80 men divided into two platoons—would be in the lead. There wasn’t a lot of optimism about their chances of surviving the near-frontal attack. “I knew we were all going to die,” Lieutenant Dick Durkee, one of the platoon leaders, later admitted.

At 6:45 a.m. they skirted the tree line to get into position, crunching through the snow as quietly as possible. Durkee fired a yellow flare—the signal they were in position—while a forward observer whispered into the radio, calling for artillery. Bathed in the eerie pulsing glow of the arcing flare, the GOYAs waited.

Four American shells sailed overhead and exploded, harmlessly off target. Through a broken and garbled radio connection, the forward observer made frantic pleas for more, but the supporting artillery unit claimed that the GOYAs’ target was outside their fire zone. The four rounds were all they would get.

The sun was now up, and the troopers still had to cross an open field before reaching the base of the steep ravine leading up to Rochelinval. When Booth realized the situation wasn’t going to get any better, he ordered the attack forward.

The German machine guns, including at least two captured water-cooled Brownings, were well positioned. The first 551st man fell almost as soon as he stepped out of the woods, killed by a headshot. A sustained burst cut Booth, who was waving the men forward, nearly in half. The devastating fire mowed the company down; the dead sprawled along the base of the hill.

“They were laying this way and that, some face-up staring at the sky with sightless eyes, and others face-down in the snow,” Durkee recalled.

Corporal Robert H. Hill witnessed the bloodbath. Almost all of his best friends were lying in front of him, dead. Before rage or anguish could even register, he dropped his M1 Garand and sprinted forward. Scooping up a Browning Automatic Rifle from a downed comrade he charged up the ravine, spraying the German positions. He was hit twice and fell to his knees, still firing. A third shot ended his life.

Dick Durkee was not far behind him, with a bazooka gunner who fired almost point blank into a machine-gun nest. Durkee tossed a few hand grenades and crawled to the crest of the ravine. Seeing Private Pat Casanova several yards down the hill, he yelled for him to bring the rest of the men up.

“Sir, they’re all dead,” Casanova shouted back. A Company’s seven survivors withdrew.

Meanwhile Wood Joerg, who had established his forward command post not far from A Company’s point of departure, was desperate for information. The three tanks expected to support the assault were nowhere to be found and, making matters worse, the Germans began lobbing in artillery. Shells peppered the cluster of trees where the GOYAs’ C Company waited in reserve. Joerg, pacing, returned to his radio team, sitting down to study the map and sort out the mess. 

An artillery round exploded a few yards to the group’s front, followed by a second overhead burst. A shard of shrapnel pierced Joerg’s steel helmet—an image forever burned into the memory of Lieutenant Richard Hallock, who watched his mortally wounded commander slump onto his side. Roger Carque-ville helped carry their commander to the aid station, but Joerg died a few hours later. “There was nothing we could do for him,” the private later lamented. 

At the same time, B Company had been circling around to the east in a pincer attack to assault Rochelinval from the south. One of the overdue supporting tanks finally arrived and, with C Company rushing alongside it, the GOYAs pushed into the village. It was obvious the grenadiers had had enough as well: at the sight of the tank, more than 300 surrendered.

THE GOYAS’ THREE-MILE, five-day trek to the Salm River had come at a loss of more than 500 troopers. When they consolidated their positions at Rochelinval, there were just over 100 men left, many of them wounded or frostbit. Forty-eight hours later, the battalion was withdrawn from the front.

The final, bitter blow fell only three weeks later, on January 27, 1945, and it hit Joerg’s birds hard: the 551st was being disbanded. The GOYAs would be split up and transferred to other parachute units.

It would be decades before enough survivors and their relatives found each other to hold annual reunions. There they asked many questions: why did they only get four artillery rounds on January 7, when their parent unit—the 504th—was able to call in 1,052 shells? Who denied Joerg’s request to call off the attack? Why hadn’t they been withdrawn after suffering 50 percent losses?

Most of the answers were lost in the bloodstained snow of Belgium. The GOYAs’ fate exposed an uncomfortable truth: the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion had been lost in the shuffle of the U.S. Army’s largest battle. Regardless, the troopers had waded into the maelstrom of the Battle of the Bulge with stubborn independence and an aggressive spirit. In 2001 the battalion’s successes and sacrifices were at last recognized with an overdue award of the Presidential Unit Citation. The GOYAs had given everything they had, until they had nothing left. ✯

This story was originally published in the April 2019 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ieutenant Colonel Doyle R. Yardley knew the answer to the question he had just been asked, but he damn well wasn’t going to answer.

The German panzer captain repeated the question. Yardley shifted slightly and stared back at his interrogator.

Again, the man asked, in perfect English, “What is your mission? Are more parachutists to be dropped?”

Eyeing the skull and crossbones insignia on the man’s black wool collar, Yardley said nothing. The 30-year-old commander of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, a 1937 graduate of Texas A&M’s ROTC program, had no intention of cooperating.

Realizing the futility of repetition, the German changed tactics and gave Yardley a shot of whiskey followed by a cup of ersatz coffee. The two adversaries sipped their beverages and guardedly debated the war. While disagreeing over who would ultimately win, they both knew the latest Anglo-American assault in Italy was on the brink of disaster. 

Yardley’s own operation was certainly off to a disastrous start. He had been in enemy territory for less than three hours before being wounded and taken prisoner. He had no information about the fate of his men. Nor did he realize that the mission had unraveled almost immediately after take-off and that the men of the 509th, falling back on their training, were being forced to improvise.

ALLIED FORCES HAD LANDED on the beaches of Salerno, in southwestern Italy, before dawn on September 9, 1943, but within three days their advance ground to a halt in the face of heavy German counterattacks. Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the American commander of the expedition, had underestimated the Germans’ pugnacity and deft reaction. Tanks and half-tracks filled with panzergrenadiers swarmed in, terminating what little inland progress the Allies had made. By Monday, September 13, the counterattacks were dangerously close to splitting the British and American sectors. On the verge of being thrown back into the sea, Clark realized his situation was precarious enough to consider evacuating his forces.

To avoid that outcome, the 82nd Airborne Division rushed reinforcements to the besieged beachhead. Two parachute infantry regiments dropped into the Allied perimeter over a period of two nights, with two more regiments arriving later by sea. Yet Clark needed more help.

Even before the landings at Salerno, Allied planners had envisioned a bold mission: dropping paratroopers 15 miles behind enemy lines to seize and hold an intersection of converging highways near Avellino, a bottleneck through which southbound German traffic passed en route to the beachhead. But the developing chaos of the landings provoked a series of confused orders and cancellations.

As a result, it was not until the afternoon of September 14 that Yardley’s 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, temporarily attached to the 82nd, received orders to drop behind enemy lines that same night. The men had only six hours to get ready. 

Veterans of combat jumps in North Africa—a campaign defined by improvisation—the men of the 509th were up to the challenge; after months of inactivity they were eager to get back into the war.

“One minute we were sitting, fat, dumb, and happy, on the beach,” Private Charlie H. Doyle, a teenager from Massachusetts, recalled. “The next, orders came down to prepare for action.”

The troopers were briefed to expect a fluid situation as soon as they hit the ground. There was little information about the enemy’s disposition; the Americans expected to encounter rear echelon troops, but reports indicated a panzer division was inbound from Rome and expected to pass through the crossroads. If General Clark’s forces did not break through to relieve the 509th in three to five days, the paratroopers were to split into small groups and make their way back to friendly lines.

As the paratroopers finalized their preparations, the reality of their potential exodus weighed heavily on them. The battalion surgeon, Captain Carlos C. “Doc” Alden, recalled thinking that “if we don’t come back, there will be thousands to take our place and win this war. I hope I make it, but I hope even more to do my duty as an American man.” The bespectacled Alden was well suited for service in the paratroops: before the war, he had been an athlete and an amateur daredevil, playing football at Princeton and roaring down Lake Placid’s bobsled run on his motorcycle. 

At 9:35 p.m., the first of 39 C-47 aircraft, each carrying a “stick” of 16 paratroopers, lumbered down the dirt airstrip at Comiso, Sicily, and lifted into the night sky. In the pale light of a full moon, the transports flew in pairs along the Italian coast up to Agropoli, across the Allied bridgehead to Montecorvino, and into the steep valleys of the Apennine Mountains. Except for a few moments of moderate antiaircraft fire when the C-47s flew over the frontlines, the flight was relatively quiet. With the flak behind them, the planes droned on toward the drop zone—a valley near Avellino surrounded by 4,000-foot peaks. 

JUMPING FROM THE LEAD AIRCRAFT, Doyle Yardley landed near Lieutenant Fred E. Perry’s 11-man pathfinder team. The pathfinders had jumped a mere 10 minutes before the main element and, with no time to relocate, set up their navigation aids—two Aldis lights and a 5G transmitter—where they landed, hoping the following aircraft would drop on their signal. Perry informed Yardley that they had come down at an intersection near the village of Santa Lucia di Serino—a mile short of the actual drop zone.

Still, as several C-47s buzzed overhead, Yardley believed the mission was unfolding per plan. His optimism soured over the next hour, though, as fewer than 100 of his 638 men reached the assembly point.

Scattered paratroopers continued to filter in, along with an Italian civilian, who warmly greeted the Americans. The man told Yardley several German trucks were parked nearby and offered to act as a guide. It was a tempting target; Yardley organized his men to attack on their way to the crossroads.

During the trek the Italian slipped away into the night. Not long after, Yardley’s lead troops engaged in a skirmish with a German sentry, whom they killed in a volley of rifle fire. As the column cautiously continued forward, German machine-gun bursts sent the paratroopers to ground. Tracer fire ripped through their ranks, killing several men where they lay. Yardley ordered the men to push through, using hand grenades to clear a path.

Suddenly, a German flare popped, casting an eerie glow over the battle and illuminating several tanks and armored vehicles—not the soft target the Americans were expecting. The enemy fire continued to increase and soon became overwhelming. Yardley’s attack collapsed. The paratroopers scrambled to withdraw, with German fire chasing them the entire way. One trooper, sprinting for a tree line, saw Doc Alden calmly firing his rifle toward the German positions. Alden managed to escape the pandemonium, but many did not.

Once the American attack stalled, German troops pressed forward across the killing ground, taking prisoners and searching the dead. One of them found Yardley, shot in his left hip, seeking cover in a roadside ditch. The German prodded Yardley with a bayonet before grabbing him by the collar and dragging him into their camp, where he received rudimentary first aid.

As the panzer captain questioned him, Yardley, unable to sit comfortably due to his wound, stared at his imitation coffee wondering where the mission had gone awry. 

THE MOONLIGHT HAD DONE LITTLE to help orient the C-47 pilots. The pale light and deep shadows cast the terrain into a monochromatic maze; it was nearly impossible to differentiate one valley from another. After 45 minutes, many of the two-plane formations drifted apart.

Several pilots, realizing they were in the wrong valley, circled back to the coast to try another approach. Eleven misjudged the turn at Montecorvino and dropped their troopers 10 miles east of their intended location. Fifteen other C-47s managed to fly within five miles of the drop zone, but only four of them delivered their jumpers on target. The remaining transports were completely lost and scattered their paratroopers as far as 25 miles away. The pathfinder team’s navigation aids had been useless: the steep mountains thwarted transmitter reception and the Aldis lights required a pilot be virtually on top of them to be seen. 

Compounding the navigation errors was the drop altitude. Surrounding peaks forced the paratroopers to jump from nearly 2,000 feet—more than twice the ideal altitude. Despite calm winds, the unavoidable drift from that height ensured that the troopers, whose chutes allowed only rudimentary steering, would float apart as they descended. Furthermore, almost all their equipment bundles—containing mortars, bazookas, ammunition, food, and radios—were lost or hopelessly snagged in trees. 

Upon landing, the paratroopers groped through the darkness to gather whatever comrades and supplies they could. Their priority was to determine their location and how to get to the crossroads at Avellino. Little time had been available to study the terrain and few maps had been issued—and those were hard to read. Crawling under a poncho to scan a map with a flashlight or lighter revealed terrain contour lines webbed so close together that without knowing the name of a nearby village, it was impossible to determine one’s position.   

ACROSS THE DARK VALLEY, the scattered paratroopers took stock of their situation. Knowing that they had to hold out for at least three days—awaiting General Clark’s infantry to push inland from the beaches—the clusters of men waged their own guerilla war, laying road mines, cutting telephone lines, sniping sentries, and ambushing small convoys. 

Captain Casper E. “Pappy” Curtis and 17 other troopers slipped into the blacked-out town of Avellino and crept down its narrow streets. In the village square, they surprised and captured 10 Germans and commandeered their truck. They decided to drive the rest of the way to the crossroads with their haul of POWs, but an armored car interrupted them and the square erupted with gunfire. In the commotion, several POWs made a break for it. Hearing more incoming enemy vehicles, Curtis yelled for his paratroopers to disengage and scatter. 

Southeast of Avellino, in the Santo Stefano del Sole valley, Lieutenant Dan A. DeLeo and his stick of jumpers were engaged in a fighting retreat. They had landed virtually on top of a German headquarters; two of the troopers drifted inside the compound, their parachutes entangled in the trees. Before they could free themselves, German soldiers riddled them with bullets. Behind volleys of fire and hand grenades, DeLeo and the survivors withdrew into the dark, carrying their wounded.

Elsewhere, Lieutenant Lloyd G. Wilson and Staff Sergeant George C. Fontanesi, uncertain of their location, led 10 men toward what they hoped was Avellino. Using a paved road as a guide, they navigated cross-country in the dark woods along the roadside. Suddenly, the lead scout tripped and fell onto a camouflage shelter tent, collapsing it as he crashed on top of its sleeping occupants.

“Schwinehund!” 

The lost paratroopers had stumbled into the middle of a Wehrmacht bivouac site. Amid the confusion, the Americans ran forward—blundering into more tents. Before the startled enemy realized Americans were among them, the troopers scattered back into the woods, leaving the Germans bellowing at each other’s clumsiness. 

Wilson’s group made it to the deserted crossroads just before dawn. With the sun rising, the troopers concealed themselves in a dry streambed. A few hours later, the Americans were alarmed when two elderly Italian women, picking greens, appeared to be heading directly for them. When it became clear the women would discover them, Wilson stepped out of the underbrush, pointed to the American flag on his shoulder, and whispered, “Americano… Americano.” 

The women ran screaming back toward the road; the Americans scurried out of the streambed and climbed to a new vantage point. Soon after, the troopers watched a company of panzergrenadiers form a skirmish line and approach their former positions. When they were 40 yards away, the Germans opened fire with rifles and submachine guns before charging into the empty streambed. 

The Americans waited until nightfall before heading for higher ground, where they found a cave. The men decided to hide there by day and go on the warpath at night, attacking targets of opportunity until their ammunition ran out. Staff Sergeant Fontanesi, who had been born in Italy, befriended a local farmer who provided the troopers with whatever food he could scrounge: bread and moldy bacon.

The scattered troopers sowed mayhem whenever they could. Still carrying their wounded, Lieutenant Dan DeLeo’s group ambushed a German motorcycle courier, stringing a telephone line across the road to “clothesline” the driver before pouncing on him with knives. Sergeant Solomon B. Weber, a radioman from New York, shot up a scout car, leaving two Germans dead in the middle of the road. Charlie Doyle and several of his comrades, who had been lounging on the beach less than 24 hours ago, raked the last troop truck in a convoy with their submachine guns as it snaked through the narrow streets of a village. 

A few hours after the melee in the town square, 21-year-old Private Edward M. Pawloski and four of his comrades opted to cut through Avellino in broad daylight to reach the crossroads. As they entered the village, a burst of machine-gun fire tore into the group, killing Private J. J. O’Brien and Private Walter A. Cherry. Pawloski was struck in the hip and knocked off his feet. As he examined the wound, he was horrified to see smoke wafting out of his uniform—a bullet had hit the grenade in his pocket. He grabbed the explosive and hurled it at the enemy before running back toward the woods.

The group’s appearance from the north side of the village created panic among the Germans in Avellino, who thought the Americans had landed to the south. To them, it now seemed the paratroopers were everywhere; initial reports wildly exaggerated their numbers. General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, commander of the Wehrmacht’s Tenth Army, diverted troops and armored vehicles from the 16th Panzer Division to hunt the Americans.

Most German patrols swept the valleys in vain, but some did stumble upon small bands of paratroopers who either fired a few rounds and ran or surrendered to the larger German forces. Doc Alden fell into both camps. After two days on the run, his luck ran out when a squad of Germans cornered the surgeon in a farmer’s field and captured him.

After his scout car ambush, Sergeant Weber bumped into a group of troopers led by the 509th’s executive officer, Major William R. Dudley. As far as Dudley could tell, they had landed off the map; although he had gathered nearly 60 men, he limited their actions to foraging patrols, opting to avoid the enemy until the Allied forces arrived from the beaches. 

His decision did not sit well with most of the eager troopers, who believed it their duty to attack the enemy. The staccato of distant gunfire and the crump of grenades reverberating in the valleys were constant reminders that their comrades were out there taking the fight to the enemy. Some troopers decided to disobey the major and sneak away from the group to pursue their own war. 

ONE OF DUDLEY’S FORAGING PATROLS met an Italian who told them of the nearby Montella Bridge, which German convoys regularly crossed. The troopers made another appeal to Major Dudley; he finally agreed to attack. In the six days since the drop, the men had recovered only 25 lbs. of demolitions from supply containers—not enough to topple the bridge, but enough to damage it. 

That night, September 19, the men divided into several groups. First Lieutenant Justin T. McCarthy, leading the demolition team, recalled that they “waited for the moon to come up” but it was still so dark that several men held hands to keep together and avoid getting lost.

After positioning troopers on each end of the bridge for security, McCarthy and his team went to work, placing their explosives in the middle of the span and tamping them with bags filled with dirt. Without warning, several bursts of .30-caliber machine-gun fire startled those on the bridge; some of the paratroopers had fired on a German Kübelwagen motoring toward them. German soldiers spilled out of the vehicle and returned fire.

With the fuse set, the demolition team scrambled over the side. A minute later the charges exploded. Unaware of what was happening on the bridge, a convoy of four blacked-out German trucks came around the corner and drove straight into the melee. The lead vehicle’s front wheels slid into the crater, stalling the whole group. The paratroopers tore into them with machine guns and rifle grenades and withdrew up the steep slope of the mountain, leaving two of the vehicles in flames. “The worst part of that night’s job was the long hike uphill,” McCarthy remembered. “We were so dog-tired we just stopped and lay down where we were.”

Meanwhile, as the piecemeal units from the 509th created chaos in the mountains, the situation at the Salerno beachhead was improving. Supported by air raids and naval gunfire, General Clark’s forces repelled the final German counterattacks and pushed northwest toward Naples. By that time, ragtag groups of paratroopers were filtering back to friendly lines. Some opted to stay with advancing Allied units and continue the fight. 

American infantry finally took Avellino on September 30, a full 16 days after the 509th dropped in. By early October, 520 of the 638 paratroopers had made it back to friendly lines. The remaining men were assumed to be killed, captured, or missing.

Nine days after German soldiers captured him, Doc Alden managed to escape and found his way to an American patrol. His battalion commander, Doyle Yardley, was not so lucky: he spent the rest of the war in Oflag 64, a POW camp in Poland.

TODAY THE 509TH’S CONTRIBUTION to the Salerno campaign remains largely overlooked. In his memoirs, General Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the 82nd Airborne, wrote that the 509ers “caused the Germans vast annoyance, but whether they had any real effect on the Salerno operation is a matter for military historians to debate.” U.S. Air Force historian John C. Warren called the mission a failure, citing insufficient aircrew training, a difficult flight route, an obscure drop zone, inadequate pathfinder facilities, and loss of equipment.

For their part, the men of the 509th believed they had fulfilled the intent of their mission by sowing pandemonium behind enemy lines. By disrupting German communications and troop movements, the 509th undoubtedly kept units of the 16th Panzer Division on antiparachute patrols, preventing them from participating in counterattacks against the Allied beachhead. Measuring the effectiveness of that pandemonium is difficult, but the tenacity of the troopers and their willingness to close with the enemy at every opportunity reflected their aggressive spirit and fostered the growing reputation of the American parachute troops.

The battalion had more action ahead. In January 1944 it landed with U.S. Army Rangers further north at Anzio, acting as assault troops for the next Allied leap up the boot of Italy. A few months later, in August, the 509th conducted a combat jump into Southern France and fought through Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. The battalion emerged from that campaign with only 7 officers and 48 enlisted troops—a total of 55—out of an original roster of 745 men.✯

This story was originally published in the October 2017 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.                          

KNOWN FOR ITS UNIVERSITY AND SOARING GOTHIC MASTERPIECES, Cambridge, England, has much to offer visitors seeking antiquity and spectacle. Established in 1209, the campus occupies the center of town, where a maze of narrow streets winds its way through centuries of history. Humble in comparison to King’s College Chapel—a Gothic tour de force built in phases from 1446 to 1515—is Saint Bene’t’s Church, whose simple rectangular Anglo-Saxon tower dates back to the eleventh century. In its shadow is The Eagle, a pub originally opened in 1667. Its mismatched chairs, burnished wood, aged brass, and worn ale pull-handles radiate an appealing warmth. I navigate to a small back room to begin my exploration of more recent history: American servicemen and women who passed through Cambridgeshire during World War II.

At the height of the war, the local countryside contained, on average, an airfield every eight miles. The Eagle’s back room, known as the RAF Bar, is a tribute to the World War II British and American airmen who, looking for fun, mischief, alcohol—or a combination of all three—migrated in from surrounding airfields.

Memorabilia crowd the pub’s walls: service caps, flying goggles, photographs, and dozens of squadron insignia. The most unique artifact, however, is the mottled amber ceiling, completely covered with graffiti. It is believed a British airman, Flight Sergeant P. E. Turner, was the first to ascend a table and burn his squadron’s number into the plaster. He soon was followed by scores more airmen who, using lighters, candles, and, in one case, a girlfriend’s lipstick, immortalized their squadron, plane, or initials onto the ceiling.

Grabbing a pint, I crane my neck and box the room. At capacity, the dimly lit pub is noisy and, though you are likely to be surrounded by debating academics, it is easy to imagine the room filled with clouds of cigarette smoke and boisterous airmen. With the help of research displayed on a nearby wall—gathered by local World War II Royal Air Force veteran James Chainey, who, in the early nineties, identified references to more than 60 RAF squadrons and 37 units of the U.S. Army Air Forces—I discover a few of the stories encoded in soot.

A prominent mark near the bar reading “THE WILD HARE” was most likely burned into the ceiling by the Zippo of an American airman stationed at Bassingbourn. A B-17G, The Wild Hare, went down over Altenbeken, Germany, in November 1944, killing six of the crew. The surviving crewmen spent the rest of the war as POWs.

In the corner is “PRESSURE BOYS,” no doubt emblazed by a member of the 448th Bombardment Group, which had gained a reputation for accurate high-altitude bombing while fighting both the Luftwaffe and sub-zero temperatures in arduous flying conditions.

Leaving the pub, I make the eight-minute walk to Drummer Street where, during the war, canvas-covered “Liberty” cargo trucks from nearby Duxford airfield picked up American airmen before curfew. I follow their route south.

Constructed in 1917, Duxford became an RAF fighter base in 1925. During the Battle of Britain, several Duxford-based Hawker Hurricane fighter squadrons were often routed to support the combat taking place further south. In March 1943, with the arrival of the U.S. 78th Fighter Group, RAF colors gave way to an American flag.

The sight of P-47 Thunderbolts, painted with the unit’s distinct black-and-white checkerboard nose design, became common as the 78th’s three squadrons soared out of Duxford to conduct bomber escorts, fighter sweeps, and ground-attack missions. In late 1944, P-51s replaced the P-47s; the pilots protested the unwanted change by posing for photos while being dragged away from their beloved “Jugs.” In December 1945, the airfield was returned to the RAF. And on August 1, 1961, the last military aircraft took off from Duxford.

Now a branch of the Imperial War Museum, Duxford is Britain’s largest aviation museum. I walk down the flight line to the original control tower. Little has changed since the 1940s when crash vehicles were parked at its base, ready with medics and firefighting equipment.  In July 1944, a B-17 buzzed the squat tower; the pilot failed to pull up in time and most of its port wing was sheared off, sending the Fortress into the ground, killing all 14 onboard, including extra crew and one man on the ground.

Three of the airfield’s original four immense hangars are still present. The 78th assigned three hangars to its squadrons and turned the fourth into a grand theater where Bob Hope, Frances Langford, and Bing Crosby performed during USO tours. Despite a Luftwaffe attack in 1940, all four hangars survived—until 1968, when United Artists blew one up while filming a bombing sequence for The Battle of Britain. The remaining hangars now house the museum’s extensive aircraft collection.

In so sprawling a complex it is easy to feel you are overlooking something. I ask a docent, “Is there anything I missed?” He escorts me to a small building. “The course of the war changed in there,” he says.

It was here British test pilot Ronald Harker convinced the Air Ministry to install a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine into a P-51 Mustang. In 1941, the RAF had received several Mustangs, but its Allison engine underperformed above 15,000 feet, limiting the plane’s utility to ground attacks and tactical reconnaissance. The Merlin’s superior horsepower and two-speed supercharger raised the Mustang’s service ceiling to 42,000 feet. The U.S. Assistant Air Attaché in London, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hitchcock Jr., championed Harker’s conversions. Soon, American production lines were placing Merlins into the Mustang, giving the USAAF the fighter escort it desperately needed to mitigate the unsustainable losses of daylight bomber crews.

Just past the hangars, a conspicuously modern building houses the museum’s collection of 19 American-flown aircraft, ranging from a World War I SPAD XIII biplane to the more modern A-10 Thunderbolt II. Aviation enthusiasts will enjoy the breadth of U.S. military aviation history on display, including a B-17, B-24, B-25, and a C-47 that dropped troops in all three of the ETO’s airborne operations: Overlord, Market Garden, and Varsity.

Ten miles north of the museum is a tribute of a different type: the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial. Dating back to 1943, the burial grounds would become the final resting place for many Americans who died in the Battle of the Atlantic, the air campaigns over northwest Europe, in accidents, or in the invasion of France.

I stand by the large flagpole, where the ground slopes down toward the English countryside, making all 3,812 headstones visible. The grounds are immaculate, and each white marble cross or Star of David headstone gleams in the afternoon sun.

Fifty feet away, near the cemetery’s southern edge, is a reflecting pool. It runs parallel to a 400-foot wall engraved with 5,127 names of missing servicemen and women. Among the names are most of the sailors of the USS Reuben James, the first American warship sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic; John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., who died in August 1944 when his bomber exploded; and musician Alton Miller—better known as Glenn Miller—whose plane disappeared over the Channel that December.

I step down to explore the headstones. At ground level they surround me and the sadness of the place presses in. Here is 25-year-old Captain Wilbur P. Wofford, a Texan who, along with most of his platoon, was killed in a glider crash during training. Not far from him lies Sergeant George B. Tullidge, an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper who was wounded yet refused to leave his machine-gun position on a road outside Sainte-Mère-Église. He
died at age 20. There’s Emily Harper Rae, a 32-year-old Red Cross volunteer killed in
a B-17 crash just 19 days before the end of the war. And here lies Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock, the man instrumental to the P-51’s success. The decorated World War I pilot died in 1944 during a test flight gone wrong.

There are thousands of other stories to be discovered—a humbling reminder that there are no clichés when it comes to the cost of freedom. In this small corner of the English countryside, I’m thankful for the opportunity to pay my respects to those who gave up their lives to stop the Third Reich. ✯

This column was originally published in the March/April 2017 issue of World War II magazine. Subscribe here.