Jerome Preisler - First to Jump

They were considered mavericks, insubordinates, and undesirables, and theyd done plenty to earn the reputation. Their commanding officers were glad, not to say overjoyed, to see them ship out to train for their special missionsglad just to be rid of them, never mind that those missions were thought to be suicidal.

They were the U.S. Army Pathfinders of the IX Troop Carrier Command. The first paratroopers to jump into combat.

And they were heroes to a man.

I spent two years chronicling their story to fill a significant gap in the history of the U.S. airborne military effort during World War Twoand in the much broader history of special operations commandos in the U.S. armed services.

While there is some excellent literature about the 101st Screaming Eagles and 82nd Airborne Divisions, not much has been said of their Pathfinder units, perhaps because a lot of information about their covert actions, tactics, and equipment remained classified for decades after the war, and also possibly because they were relatively small in numberfewer than three hundred of them jumped into Normandy in June 1944, and only about two dozen into the frigid, snow-blanketed heart of Bastogne later that year, on the third and arguably most daring mission for which their unique expertise was required. If not for the Pathfinders heroic pinpoint drop into a German siege ring consisting of a quarter million infantry troops and more than a thousand tanks, the Christmas airlift of vital supplies and ammunition to the citys encircled U.S. forces might have failed or never gotten underway. Without it Bastogne would have been lost, the cost in American lives would have soared, and the Allied cause would have been severely damagedor worse.

The Pathfinders were by definition special advance teams. Their job, put succinctly, was to jump behind enemy lines and mark the drop zones and landing zones for the main waves of airborne troops to follow. This alone made their existence a military innovation. But as conceived and refined by Acting Lieutenant Colonel Joel L. Crouch and Acting Sergeant Jake McNiece, the Pathfinders jump into Bastogne helped lay the blueprint for the sort of surgical strikes that would gain subsequent elite units widespreadand well-deservedpublic recognition.

My intent here isnt to subtract from the accomplishments of any of those other groups. Rather, its to enrich the story of their conceptual and tactical development and give the Pathfinders their full due as trailblazers in every sense of the word.

The brainchild of Lieutenant Crouch and the 82nd Airbornes General James M. Gavin, the Pathfinders were created as a result ofand antidote tothe confusion that beset Gavins airborne jump into Sicily during the 1943 Allied invasion of the island. As his 505th Parachute Regiment troops had flown there across the Mediterranean, German flak, friendly fire, and windblown combat smoke forced many of his paratroopers to evacuate their beleaguered C-47 transport planes and become scattered behind enemy lines.

Hiking toward the beachhead with only his compass and the sounds of battle to guide him, Gavin had assembled stray groups of wounded and disoriented paratroopers into a ragtag fighting band. Before all was said and done, his parachute infantrymen would become involved in several importantand bloodyclashes with the enemy. But as a result of their chaotic drop, they sustained terrible losses and accomplished few of their intended objectives.

After Sicily, Gavin consulted with several American and British Air Force generals about how to avoid similar disasters in the future. He then turned to Lieutenant Crouch, a pioneer in civilian air transport and ace troop carrier pilot, to develop the tactics and training methods for commando-style teams that would jump ahead of the main waves of paratroopers without support, stealing across enemy terrain to scout and mark out drop zones with an array of top secret homing and guidance equipment.

In early 1944, Crouch established the Pathfinder School at RAF North Witham in Lincolnshire, England. Sheer nerve and soldiering ability were absolute requirements for a trooper to make the final grade. But so dangerous were the planned missionsthere was an anticipated fatality rate of 80 or 90 percentthat most of the men enticed to take the all-volunteer training were considered troublemakers by their COs and had been persuaded it was a way to rehabilitate their tarnished service records or even avoid the brig. It is arguable, however, that the same maverick qualities that made them what Jake McNiece called bad garrison soldiers gave them the adaptivity needed to survive and carry out their goals under conditions their training had only approximated. The book on Pathfinding was in a real sense written on the fly by troopers whose psychological and emotional wiring freed them to toss out the rules and improvise when circumstances demanded it.

But the men who jumped only account for part of this story. The rest is about the brave and innovative aircrews who flew them to their destinations.

Along with the paratroopers, top-notch pilots and crews from each of the armys troop carrier groups were sent to North Witham for rigorous retraining under Crouch, who would teach them stealthy air delivery techniques for the advance paratrooper teamsand rapid getaway methods through enemy flak once theyd dropped their troop loads. Meanwhile, the Pathfinders would undergo endless drills in the British countryside, where they practiced using their Eureka radar transmitters, fluorescent signal panels, and colored smoke for their first mission.