Ed Ruggero - Combat Jump: The Young Men Who Led the Assult into Fortress Europe, July 1943

COMBAT JUMP

ALSO BY ED RUGGERO

NONFICTION

Duty First

Army Leadership

(with the Center for Army Leadership)

FICTION

The Academy

Breaking Ranks

Firefall

The Common Defense

38 North Yankee

Combat Jump

THE YOUNG MEN WHO LED THE ASSAULT INTO FORTRESS EUROPE, JULY 1943

Ed Ruggero

Copyright 2003 by Ed Ruggero

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form. For information, address Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, 55 Fifth Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, New York 10003.

Print ISBN: 978-0-7867-5539-4

ebook ISBN: 978-0-7867-5529-5

Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

To Jack Norton,
who inspired me to tell this story

COMBAT JUMP

Jim Gavin struggles against the hundred-plus pounds of gear strapped to his body, scrambling to gain footing on the deck of the bucking aircraft. A few of the seventeen other men sitting hunched in the darkness look up. Others are sleeping or lost in their own thoughts. Gavin checks his watch yet again and looks out the starboard windows of the C-47 Skytrain, hoping to see the dark mass of Sicily rising out of the Mediterranean, but there is nothing except the occasional flash of moonlight on water. No amount of wishing can make the enemy-held island appear, so Gavin is on his own to fight the rising feelings of panic.

At thirty-six, Colonel James M. Gavin has been a soldier for his entire adult life; his whole career has been in preparation for this night. In his first combat action, Gavin is leading a force of just over thirty-four hundred men, who will be the first American soldiers to set foot on what Adolf Hitler has called Festung Europa, or Fortress Europe. In the skies behind Gavin are another 225 aircraft, all heading for the same action, all filled with men who are counting on him to lead them to victory, and Jim Gavin cannot entirely dismiss the notion that he is lost.

He climbs past the outstretched legs of his troopers to the cramped cockpit of the aircraft, where he and the pilots search for the landmarks that would tell them they are on the right course. But there is nothing below the plane except a dark sea.

As midnight approaches, the men in the aircraft spot the dark hulls of the invasion fleet, steaming for the beaches. Most of the troopers find this sight comforting, but it is one they arent meant to see. The frustrated Gavin knows the pilots are supposed to fly a course over the open water between the American and British convoys, which are on widely separated, parallel tracks for the southern coast of Sicily. Looking down on the blacked-out armada, Gavin cant tell if he is looking at the British or the American force. Either way, it seems plain that the Navy is probably not in the wrong place, which means he must be. And now he wonders if the ships nervous antiaircraft gunners will fire on them.

Besides all the predictable worries of a commander going into battle for the first timewho will perform well? who poorly? have I prepared my men for every contingency?Gavin carries an additional burden. He is doing what no American commander has ever done before: taking a large body of men into combat by parachute drop, to spearhead a massive seaborne invasion. It is a gamble at best, and an invitation to disaster at worst. If the paratroopers fail in their mission to block the German counterattacks that are certain to hit the beaches come daylight, the enemy might push the invading force back into the sea. This would leave the airborne units cut off behind enemy lines with a choice between capture or destruction. Besides the slaughter sure to ensue, such a debacle would throw off, for a year or more, the entire Allied effort against Hitler. Gavin would go down in history as the man whose failure doomed the newly formed U.S. airborne.

Another worry: Gavins men have made only two night jumps since arriving in North Africa in April. The first resulted in so many broken legs, arms, and backs that the second had to be stage-managed: only a token number of troopers made the jump; the rest began their training already on the ground. But here they were, about to make a difficult night jump, and this time mistakes would be measured not in lost training, but in lost lives.

Gavin knew, all during the planning phase, that their first big challenge was simply getting from the departure airfields in North Africa to the right drop zones in Sicily. There wasnt time for all the pilots to get in enough night training. The flight path, which began at twelve different departure airfields in Tunis, took the planes over 185 miles of featureless, open sea between Africa and Malta. Without sophisticated navigational aids, the inexperienced pilots had to rely on dead reckoning, calculating airspeed and compass direction to get a rough idea of when and where they should make landfall. But the strong cross winds played havoc with their plans. Just before takeoff, a young airman from the weather station had come running up to Gavins plane.

Colonel Gavin? Is Colonel Gavin here?

Here I am, Gavin answered.

I was told to tell you the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east. Then, perhaps realizing what this news meant for the paratroopers, the man added, They thought youd want to know.

Gavin had canceled training jumps when the wind exceeded fifteen miles an hour: there was too much risk of the paratroopers being blown far from their drop zones, or of being dragged to their deaths across rugged ground by their chutes. This wasnt a training jump, of course, and there was no calling it off. Gavin was left to imagine the cost, in broken limbs and broken bodies, for these men he had trained.

Now, in the air above the Mediterranean, Gavin can see that the wind is pushing the air armada off course. The bumpy ride is also making some of the troopers violently airsick. Weighted down with up to 120 pounds of equipment, the men are all but trapped in their seats. The ones who get sick throw up in their own laps, and in the cramped interior of the planes, the tangy smell of vomit is mixed with the engine exhaust fumes.

The pilots of Gavins plane completely missed both landmarks on the flight from North Africa: the small island of Linosa and, incredibly, the 300-square-mile island of Malta. This Allied-held island was supposed to be lit up as a navigational beacon to help guide the air armada, but neither Gavin nor his pilots see it. Instead, the young colonel sees the tiny wingtip lights marking the aircraft, but even these are not reassuring. The inexperienced pilots, fearful of midair collisions, allow their planes to drift apart; the farther apart the planes, the more widely scattered the troopers will be on the ground.