A Gift in Honor of D-Day

On this, the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings, I wanted to share with you a chapter from my new book, REMEMBER US, that recounts an historic moment between one of the major characters in my book, Lt. Col. Robert G. Cole, 101st Airborne, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Cole trained under earlier in his career. I hope you will buy REMEMBER US and learn more about the heroism of Lt. Col. Cole and the other heroes included in my book.

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CHAPTER 26

from

Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and A Forever Promise Forged in World War II

D-DAY

Robert Cole

June 1944

On the evening of June 5, 1944, four-star General Dwight Eisenhower made a surprise visit to the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, at their base in Greenham Common, England. In December 1943, he had been promoted from commanding Allied units in the Mediterranean to supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe following the success of operations he had overseen in North Africa, Sicily, and mainland Italy.

“You are going to command Overlord,” President Roosevelt told him, when he bestowed the appointment. Operation Overlord, the invasion of continental Europe from across the English Channel, was to be the pivotal moment in the European Theater.

Overlord, designed by a joint Anglo-American military staff, was pre- sented to Ike when he arrived in London on January 15. It was the largest amphibious assault ever contemplated, involving more than 5,000 ships and 40,000 men, but it had to be. The Allies had one shot. If they failed to gain a foothold, it might be years before they could mount another attempt. So Ike increased the invasion force from three assault divisions to five and added three airborne divisions, bringing the totals to more than 6,900 ships (including 4,000 landing craft) and 186,000 assault troops.

With the difficult, stressful months of planning over, and the hinge of history reached . . . the weather turned foul. The operation had a three- day window where a full moon phase created a low tide, but the first day was lost to a storm. The next evening, June 5, the weather was miserable, but the forecast for the morning offered a glimmer of hope. And time was running out.

“Is there any reason we shouldn’t go on Tuesday?” Ike asked General Montgomery, his subordinate commander.

“No,” Montgomery replied immediately. “I say go.”

Ike paced back and forth. “Okay,” he finally declared. “We’ll go.”

With that, he put aside his maps and left his headquarters in Bushy Park, London, for Greenham Common. Tomorrow would be the D-Day, a general term for the day a military operation begins. Ike wanted to look into the faces of the men of the airborne: The first to land. The first to die. The young paratroopers and glider infantry, 17,000 Americans and 8,500 British, many of whom would never return to their wives, children, friends, and families.

He told his driver, Kay Summersby, to cover the stars on his license plate. His f lag was not f lying at the front of his car. It took the men a moment, as he walked silently through the airfield, to realize who he was. But then word went down the ranks, and the paratroopers began to roar.

He shook their hands. He looked them in the eye, as they whistled and cheered, wishing them success. “It’s very hard to look a soldier in the eye,” he later admitted to Summersby, “when you fear you are sending him to his death.”

He was surprised when a familiar face stepped out of the ranks: Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry, the promising young company commander from his days at Fort Lewis with the 15th Infantry. Paratroopers were among the toughest, most highly trained soldiers in the United States Army. They were men who had looked a near-suicidal new combat concept full in the face and said, I volunteer. But even among such men, Cole was a standout. After six months in the airborne, he was promoted to battalion adjutant of the 502nd Parachute Infantry on the day it mustered. In May 1943, he was promoted to commander of the 3rd Battalion, responsible for 700 paratroopers. When he kissed his wife Allie Mae good-bye on September 5, 1943, and shipped out for Europe, he was already a lieutenant colonel, a startling four promotions in less than four years.

Ike, in his crisp service uniform, reached out his hand to his former company commander. Robert Cole, in his baggy jump trousers and jacket, reached out to take it. His face was smeared with vegetable oil and char- coal. His pockets stuffed with survival gear. The paratroopers were mere hours from heaving themselves out of an airplane at 600 feet above 50,000 enemy troops, with no relief or escape if things went absolutely FUBAR, but Robert Cole was smiling.

General Eisenhower and Lieutenant _Colonel Cole, just hours before the 101st dropped into Normandy. (National Archives (342-USAF-19674-R3))

Not a false smile. Not a for-the-camera smile. An easy smile, accompanied by a wink, as if to say, Ah hell, General, don’t worry. We got this.

“They say you never get to the point that butterflies don’t f lit around your stomach,” one paratrooper wrote home from training. “I doubt I’ll ever jump as many times as I have already. I’ll never make an unnecessary one. But when one is necessary, I know I’ll never fail to go out.”

He was talking about the experience of standing at the jump door, waiting for the signal. He could have been talking about the night before a combat jump. There wasn’t a paratrooper that evening in Greenham Common not chewing butterflies. There wasn’t a soldier who didn’t feel fear. But every man in the 3rd Battalion was prepared to do his part.

And Robert Cole was smiling.

“Full victory,” Eisenhower told the paratroopers, “and nothing else.” Cole and the paratroopers went to their staging area and checked their weapons: M1 Garand rifle, M1 carbine, Thompson submachine gun, cartridge belt, hand grenades, trench knife, M1911A1 semiautomatic pistol, two pounds of high explosives. They settled their gear: canteen, compass, medical kit, rope, flares, bouillon cubes, Nescafé, four pieces of gum, four chocolate bars, Tootsie Rolls, Charms candy, cigarettes, halazone tablets to purify water, and enough food to last several days, because there would be no resupply. The only things guaranteed were the things they carried.

As the propellers turned and the engines sputtered to life, they packed the last of their personal equipment, supplies, photos, mementos, and good- luck charms. They donned their gloves and distinctive steel-pot helmets, with their wide chin straps, then trundled past the control tower and the ground crews, who gave them the thumbs-up and V-for-victory signs. Many had to be helped into the planes. The average paratrooper carried seventy pounds in his pack. Radiomen, mortarmen, and machine gunners carried more.

Ike watched from the roof of the control tower as the C-47s embarked on the “Great Crusade,” as he called it. They poured down the runway, then gently lifted into a night sky lit by a bright white moon. The planes circled overhead, waiting for their fellows to lift off so they could form up and fly in formation. Soon, there were hundreds in the air. As they began to tail off and swing toward Normandy, Ike turned and walked away. His head was down. His solitude complete. On the way to his car, he stopped and turned to his driver, and she saw that he had tears in his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “it’s on. No one can stop it now.”

He went back to his cottage and jotted a quick note, known as the “In Case of Failure” speech: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

By then, the planes were beyond the English coast. Like the others, Cole’s C-47, The Snooty, held 28 paratroopers. If everything went right, the men, known as a stick, would jump less than a second apart and land in a line. And the other 700 paratroopers in his battalion, spread out in 25 planes, would be nearby.

Many of the men were resting, their heads back against the aluminum skin of the plane. It was a couple hours to the drop zone. There would be no rest below. Some talked quietly. Some contemplated their mission objectives, thinking through their actions on the ground, or said their prayers. Cole stood at the open door of the cargo bay, the wind whipping around him, watching the gray humps of the squadron flying beside him. Beyond those planes were more planes, and then more planes, and then more. Dark humps and pinpoint navigation lights were everywhere, spreading to the horizon: other squadrons, other transports, other sticks.

Cole chuckled as the plane hit its first turn and an NBC radio reporter lurched away from the astrolabe observation dome at the top of the fuselage, his comically oversized helmet rattling on his head. “It’s cold back here with the wind whipping in,” Cole said, as the reporter staggered toward him.

The night was calm and clear. The moonlight glinted off the channel. The dark hulls of the C-47s seemed to swim like enormous whales, undulating in the prop wash of their fellow planes, their engine drone so steady it put the world to sleep. And then, one by one, the transports switched off their navigation lights.

Thirty minutes later, The Snooty plunged into a bank of fog off the French coast. For two minutes, there was nothing but gray, and then the hedgerows were beneath them, so close it felt as if they could step out into the moonlit fields.

The antiaircraft fire began to crack and flash, ripping open the night sky.

Cole felt the intensity. The fear. He was scared, there was no other way to say it. All the men were scared. You’d be a fool not to be, and the paratroopers were no fools. But Cole didn’t flinch. It was his duty as the

commanding officer to remain confident and calm.

“Stand up! Hook up!” he yelled, as the sky became frantic with flak. The stick jostled quickly into position, each man attaching his static line to the anchor line that would pull his rip cord when he jumped. They hated being up here, now that planes were exploding and going down. They wanted to jump. They wanted a fighting chance.

“All set?” Cole asked Major John Stopka, his executive officer. Stopka nodded. “Then get this thing hooked for me.” Cole was the first in line. It was the job of the man behind to check the anchor line of the man in front of him, since the man in front couldn’t see to check his own.

“All set,” Stopka said.

“Close up!” Cole shouted against the whipping wind. “And move to the door!”

And then, as the radio reporter watched, the signal light blinked and Robert Cole was gone into the flak-filled night, with Stopka and the rest of the stick tight on his heels.

The 3rd Battalion was supposed to parachute into Drop Zone A, west of the town of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, but Cole’s first sensation upon hitting the ground was tearing and pain. He had landed in a massive rose- bush. It took him fifteen minutes to hack himself free. When he finally found his bearings, he didn’t recognize any landmarks, and his stick wasn’t with him. The night was full of searchlights and bright white tracers, so many that the clouds looked red. He scuttled across a field to a tree line, bursts of machine-gun fire echoing around him, the night incredibly loud for thirty seconds, a minute, before the firing slowed and the din of the antiaircraft guns fell to a rattling instead of a roar.

The planes were gone. The paratroopers scattered. But he had an objective, and if he didn’t reach it, the men on the landing craft would be outgunned, so he chose a direction and started running. As he crossed the open fields of the Cotentin Peninsula, the young wheat barely six inches high, several misdropped paratroopers joined him. The night echoed with small arms fire, but Cole’s group was fortunate. They met no resistance. After twenty minutes, they still had no idea where they were.

Cole knocked on a farmhouse door. “Where are we?” he asked. Sainte-Mère-Église.

They were too far west. They had been moving in the wrong direction. It was some time after 2:00 a.m. when they ran into their first enemy, a group of German soldiers with horses and carts. Instead of the 700 men under his command, Cole had just seventy-five paratroopers from the 502nd’s regimental headquarters; Company G, 506th (not his reg- iment); and the 82nd Airborne (not even his division). Some were fully armed; some with Cole, like Lieutenant Dick Winters of the 506th’s Easy Company, had lost everything in the jump except their knives. Still, they were airborne. They ambushed the convoy, killed several Germans, took ten prisoners, and moved quickly toward the beach.

Around 4:00 a.m., Cole sent a reconnaissance group to check the German battery emplacement near Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, his original objective. The German position had been hit by aerial bombardment and abandoned, so Cole moved forward with what was left of his force, now close to fifty. The Germans had flooded two miles of low-lying fields behind Utah Beach by opening a series of defensive locks originally devised by Napoleon, leaving only four paths out of the kill zone for the men coming ashore, which Army planners had designated Exits 1 through 4. Cole’s battalion was responsible for securing Exits 3 and 4.

At 5:30 a.m., Allied warships began pounding German coastal batter- ies, blanketing the shoreline in smoke. Some support landing craft were fitted with heavy weapons. They opened fire at 6:00 a.m. The landing craft carrying the first wave of 4th Infantry Division troops hit Utah Beach at 6:30 a.m. By then, Cole and his paratroopers had cleared Exit 3. They set up in the low defiles along the narrow causeway, the only route of retreat for the German soldiers manning the beach defenses.

Around 9:30 a.m., the Germans appeared. Cole’s men waited, then raked them with fire, killing fifty to seventy-five enemy soldiers and destroying their ability to reposition on that stretch of the beach. Then they waited again. Currents had pushed the landing craft 1,500 yards south, toward Exits 1 and 2, so the morning was strangely calm. It was several hours later, around 1:00 p.m., before the first American soldiers—the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division, with Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr. shouting encouragement—appeared out of the smoke at Exit 3. Those who had come ashore from the water, and those who had come ashore from the sky, had linked at last. The Germans were far from beaten, but the lodgment at Utah was secure.

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