They had covered 118 miles in 75 hours. Actual marching time was 33 hours, 30 minutes, or about 4 miles an hour. Of the 586 men and officers in the battalion, only twelve failed to complete the march, although some had to be supported by comrades the last day. Colonel Sink was appropriately proud. “Not a man fell out,” he told the press, “but when they fell, they fell face forward.” Lieutenant Moore’s 3rd platoon of Easy was the only one in the battalion in which every man walked every step of the way on his own. As a reward, it led the parade through Atlanta.
2 ‘STAND UP AND HOOK UP’
*
BENNING, MACK ALL, BRAGG, SHANKS
December 1942-September 1943
Benning was, if possible, even more miserable than Toccoa, especially its infamous Frying Pan area, where the jump training went on. This was the regimental bivouac area, consisting of scrubby little wooden huts set on barren, sandy soil. But Benning was a welcome relief to the men of E Company in the sense that they were getting realistic training for becoming paratroopers rather than spending most of their waking hours doing physical exercises.
Parachute school was supposed to begin with physical training (A stage), followed by B, C, and D stages, each lasting a week, but the 506th skipped A stage. This happened because the 1st Battalion arrived ahead of the others, went into A stage, and embarrassed the jump school sergeants who were assigned to lead the calisthenics and runs. The Toccoa graduates would laugh at the sergeants. On the runs they would begin running backward, challenge the sergeants to a race, ask them—after a couple of hours of exercises that left the sergeants panting—when they were going to get past the warm-up and into the real thing. After two days of such abuse, the sergeants told the CO that the 506th was in much better physical condition than they were, so all the companies of the 506th started in immediately on B stage.
For a week, the company double-timed each morning to the packing sheds, where the men learned how to fold and pack their parachutes. They ran back to the Frying Pan for lunch, then spent the afternoon leaping into sawdust piles from mock doors on dummy fuselages raised 4 feet off the ground, handling parachutes on a suspended harness, or jumping off 30-foot towers in parachute harnesses suspended from a steel cable.
The following week, in C stage, the men made free and controlled jumps from the 250-foot towers. One tower had seats, shock absorbers, and chute guide wires; the others had four chutes that released when they reached the suspension arm. From these, each man made several daylight jumps and one at night.
C stage also featured a wind machine, which blew a gale along the ground, moving both chute and jumper to teach the men how to control and collapse their canopies after landing.
After a week at the towers, the enlisted men were ready for D stage, the real thing, the five jumps from a C-47 that would earn those who completed the process their parachutists’ wings. The men packed their chutes the night before, checked them, then packed them again, checked them again, until past 2300. Reveille was at 0530. They marched to the hangers at Lawson Field, singing and shouting in anticipation. They put on their chutes, then sat on rows of benches waiting to be summoned to the C-47s. There was joshing, joke telling, lots of smoking, nervous laughter, frequent trips to the latrine, and repeated checking of the chute and the reserve chute worn on the chest.
They loaded up, twenty-four to a plane. With only one or two exceptions, it was the first plane ride for the men.
When the C-47 reached 1,500 feet, it circled. The red light went on; the jumpmaster, a sergeant instructor, called out,
“Stand up and hook up.” Each man hooked the line attached to the backpack cover of his main chute to the anchor line running down the middle of the top of the fuselage.
“Sound off for equipment check!” shouted the jumpmaster.
“Number twelve O.K.!” “Number eleven O.K!” and so on down the line.