Leo Boyle was the last man in the stick on his plane. There was this “tremendous turbulence” as the green light went on and the men began leaping out into the night. The plane lurched. Boyle was thrown violently down to the floor.
The plane was flying at a tilt. Boyle had to reach up for the bottom of the door, pull himself to it, and roll out of the C-47
into the night.
Tracers were everywhere. The lead plane in stick 66, flown by Lt. Harold Cappelluto, was hit with bullets going through it and out the top, throwing sparks. The plane maintained course and speed for a moment or two, then did a slow wingover to the right. Pilot Frank DeFlita, just behind, remembered that “Cappelluto’s landing lights came on, and it appeared they were going to make it, when the plane hit a hedgerow and exploded.” It was the plane carrying Lieutenant
Meehan, 1st Sergeant Evans, and the rest of the company headquarters section, including Sergeant Murray, who had held that long talk with Lipton about how to handle different combat situations. He never got to experience any of the possibilities he and Lipton had tried to visualize.
Easy Company had not put one man into combat yet, and it had already lost platoon leader Schmitz, company commander Meehan, and its first sergeant.
Pvt. Rod Strohl was one of those so overloaded that he could not put on his reserve chute. “I remember thinking, well, hell, if you need it, and it doesn’t open, it’s going to be over in a hurry, and if you don’t need it, you don’t need it.”
His plane got hit and started going down. As his stick went out, “the pilot and co-pilot came out with us.”
George Luz was on Welsh’s plane. He had barely made it, as in addition to all the regular gear he was carrying a radio and batteries, and had been unable to get into the plane until a bunch of Air Corps guys pushed him in. Once inside, he had turned to Welsh to say, “Lieutenant, you got me fifth man in the stick, and I’ll never make it to the door.” So Welsh had told him to change places with Pvt. Roy Cobb. When the flak started (“you could walk on it,” Luz remembered; Carson said “we wanted to get out of there so damn bad it was unbelievable”) Cobb called out, “I’m hit!”
“Can you stand up?” Welsh shouted.
“I can’t.”
“Unhook him,” Welsh ordered. Mike Ranney unhooked Cobb from the static line. (Private Rader recalled, “Cobb was some pissed. To have trained so hard for two years and not get to make the big jump was hell.”) Just then the red light went on, flashed a second, and was hit by flak. “I had no way of telling anything ” Welsh recalled, “so I said ‘Go’ and jumped.” Luz kicked his leg bag containing the radio and other equipment out the door and leaped into the night.
Thus did 13,400 of America’s finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler’s Fortress Europe.
5 “FOLLOW ME”
*
NORMANDY
June 6,1944
They jumped much too low from planes that were flying much too fast. They were carrying far too much equipment and using an untested technique that turned out to be a major mistake. As they left the plane, the leg bags tore loose and hurtled to the ground, in nearly every case never to be seen again. Simultaneously, the prop blast tossed them this way and that. With all the extra weight and all the extra speed, when the chutes opened, the shock was more than they had ever experienced. Jumping at 500 feet, and even less, they hit the ground within seconds of the opening of the chute, so they hit hard. The men were black and blue for a week or more afterward as a result.
In a diary entry written a few days later, Lieutenant Winters tried to re-create his thoughts in those few seconds he was in the air: “We’re doing 150 MPH. O.K., let’s go. G-D, there goes my leg pack and every bit of equipment I have.