Free First to Jump by Jerome Preisler

returning and then exhaled.
    But his mission was far from accomplished, and he could only hope the Germans didn’t send out reinforcements. At this point, there was little or nothing his Pathfinders could do but await the coming of the planes.
    Lillyman would remember that wait as the longest of his entire life.
    18.
    Captain Basil Jones had gotten a flash of inspiration.
    His orders from the admiralty were to stay on patrol against German warships, to stop for nothing that didn’t represent a direct threat to the Allied invasion force. As an officer of the Royal Navy and commander of the 10th Flotilla, he was bound by his fidelity to duty and did not intend to disobey those commands.
    Neither was it Jones’s intention, however, to leave American paratroopers and airmen floundering in the Channel. There was, to be sure, a chance they were German spies. But if they were who and what they claimed to be—and his eyes, brain, and intuition told him they were—the skipper knew that by ignoring the men he would likely sentence them to death.
    Stop or don’t.
    His choices were mutually exclusive, out-and-out contradictions . . . or were they?
    Making his decision, Jones ordered his steersmen to circle the evacuees at slow speed and prepare to drop the lifeboats. He would save as many of them as he could without stopping the ship. As long as it kept moving, he could honestly say it had remained on uninterrupted patrol, and no one could claim he was at all violating his orders.
    HMS
Tartar
wound her way around the struggling men, following their “ahoys” and other calls for help, picking them out of the water one, two, or three at a time. Overseeing the rescue effort, Jones found himself face-to-face with one dripping wet trooper whose features were still blackened with camo grease. Shivering, soggy, water pooling around his jump boots, he stood on deck and took a wary assessment of his surroundings.
    â€œWho the hell’s navy is this anyway?” he grunted truculently.
    The skipper just grinned at him. Whatever slender doubts he’d had about these men being bona fide Americans had been dispelled once the paratrooper asked his question. It was an introduction he would never forget.
    The rescue effort went on for about half an hour. Somehow, every last airman and paratrooper from the downed transport was brought safely aboard the destroyer. Most were nicked up, but none too badly hurt. Wheeler, the man Sergeant Malley had accidentally cut with his pocketknife, was the most seriously injured among the group, and Jones had him rushed to the infirmary for medical treatment. The rest were given an immediate taste of English hospitality: warm showers, fresh dry British uniforms, and shots of hot buttered rum—or grog, as their hosts called it—to take the chill out of their bones.
    The group’s participation in the D-Day invasion had ended. For some of them, especially Richard Wright, it was a profound letdown. He’d wanted to be in the vanguard of the fight against Nazi evil, to go to war alongside his friend Salty Harris, and had never gotten his chance that night. But he’d promised himself he would make up for it, and it was a pledge he took very seriously.
    Within a few days, Wright and the others in his unit were turned over to the Air/Sea Rescue Services, brought back to England, and held behind bars for seventy-two hours while their status as American paratroopers was verified. More or less unscathed, their stick hadn’t suffered a single loss in a calamity that could have easily taken every life aboard their flight.
    Not all the Pathfinder teams would be so blessed.
    19.
    Along with the rest of his stick, Private Salty Harris came down almost on target at the outskirts of Hiesville.
    The C-47 from which he’d jumped had carried one of five Pathfinder teams assigned to mark off the area designated Drop Zone C. Clyde Taylor’s V serial—Planes 4,