Free First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Page A

5, and 6—had brought Pathfinders from the 101 Airborne’s 501st and 506th PIRs to light the way for hundreds of main wave paratroopers slated to drop on the DZ around one o’clock in the morning. The other two teams, members of the 502nd PIR, flew aboard Planes 19 and 20, the last Pathfinder transports to leave North Windham airfield. Their mission was to guide in several hundred CG-4A Waco gliders from the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment by establishing illuminated runways in their landing zones. Towed across the Channel by C-47s, the wood, metal, and cloth gliders each carried a complement of thirteen troops and their equipment, including a Willys jeep and a howitzer or trailer.
    From an operational standpoint there was little difference between preparing an area for paratroopers and preparing one for glider landings. Although larger and flatter than paratrooper drop zones, the glider LZs were still to be marked with Eureka beacons and lighted Ts. But the Pathfinders descending to mark their runways would run into much heavier resistance than Lillyman’s group.
    This was no coincidence. While Field Marshal Rommel had erroneously thought the main blow of the amphibious and naval assault would come farther east, he’d been correct in expecting gliders and paratroopers to descend on the peninsula. To prepare for an attack by airborne forces, he’d built up his defenses in many of their probable landing spots, flooding other areas to impede their movements.
    Located near the strategically important Caen Canal, DZ C was a concentrated pocket of German ground troops and artillery, its perimeter bristling with rifle pits and machine-gun emplacements. The guns had been sending up steady streams of ammunition as Lieutenant Dwight Kroesch’s Plane 5 made its pass, the flak so intense that Kroesch dropped shredded tinfoil as chaff to confuse enemy radar. Once the troopers jumped, he boomeranged back toward the coast for the return crossing to England at his top speed of 210mph, convinced he had a Luftwaffe night fighter on his tail.
    The Pathfinders he’d dropped also ran into a firestorm—and had a longer than average descent in which to experience it. Kroesch had been among the transport pilots who opted to fly through the cloud bank rather than underneath it, seeking a hole from which he could see the ground. He’d found one at about eight hundred feet, four times the height at which Lieutenant Crouch had deployed his troopers. The extra time the men spent in the air gave the Germans a longer and better opportunity to shoot them out of it.
    Salty Harris had been badgered by volleys throughout his drop and got no respite after making landfall. With ammunition spurting at him from the hedgerows, he tried to separate the oilskin bag containing his Eureka from his parachute harness, but it was all tangled up in the straps.
    The guns kept firing away as he struggled to extricate the boxy unit, their salvos pulsing through the air around him. Desperate to escape the Germans’ crosshairs, Harris finally ran for cover with the transmitter still strapped to his chest.
    But not all the Pathfinders who came under immediate fire could run. Coming in on a separate flight, T/5 Richard Lisk bore one of his team’s two Eurekas and was supposed to set it up for the gliders. An off-balance landing in a pasture left him with a fractured foot—and there was no medic nearby to give him a shot of morphine. As German bullets peppered the field, he stayed down on his belly, crawled to an open ditch alongside a hedgerow, and then tumbled down into it.
    Several of Lisk’s teammates would soon pass the spot where he’d hidden in the darkness, but aside from sharing some water out of their canteens, there was nothing they could do to help him. Unlike Snuffy Smith with Captain Lillyman’s team, Lisk couldn’t walk at all. His group had precious little time to find and mark the LZ and would have