Seventy-seven years ago last night one of my old units, the 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment went out the C-47 doors into the dark over northwestern France.
When you look at the record the 505th has been a pretty hard-luck unit.
In Sicily the green pilots of Air Transport Command and the inexperienced Allied commanders didn't think what the high wind over the south shore of the island might do to a night drop of a cherry outfit and scattered the 505th all over hell.
After getting hammered in Sicily the 505th jumped into the Salerno beachhead; the 505th missed the nightmare that had been the German attack two days earlier but spent the rest of 1943 grinding up the Italian peninsula and getting ground up in the process.
The plan for the Normandy drop was for the '05 to take and hold the town of St. Mere Eglise.
As you can see from the map, this village was a chokepoint for roads both leading to Utah Beach as well as the high-speed lateral route along the shore. So nailing it down was pretty critical.
Well, as it seemed typical with those WW2 jumps, the real thing looked nothing like the plan.
See the little black dots? Each one is a "stick", a C-47-load of GIs. The biggest cluster is actually pretty damn close to the DZ, mind, which isn't bad given the darkness and the flak, but look at the other big cluster just to the left of the oval. See the gray hatch pattern where those guys landed?
That's the valley of a tributary of the Douve River that the Germans had flooded knowing that the Allies were damn likely to throw some paratroops at them. My guess is that the WW2 guys had a "water landing" gimmick just like we had in the Eighties, but just like ours it was a whole lot more likely to work in calm daylight training than in a night full of chaos and antiaircraft fire.
A lot of guys from my old outfit never made it out of the swamp.
Enough did, though, to take the town and win the war.
The '05 got stuck into the mess that was The Bridge Too Far, as well, and then had a rough winter on the northern side of the "Bulge".
After the Big War the '05 did the usual sorts of imperial grunt work, including - alone of the 82nd, Vietnam - and has deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, where continuing in the hard-luck tradition the 1st Battalion drew the Fallujah short straw.
I can't find a listing of how many of the guys who went out the doors that night are still around. Probably not too many, and those have to be in their nineties, so they're going to be gone, too, before too long.
So I'm not sure there's a larger lesson to this one, other than "fucked up things happen in wartime", and that's been true since Thucydides' day.
But I guess the point is; here's to the boys of the 505th.
Who's like us?
Damn few, and they're all dead.
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