H-Plus-40,471,200

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.

Over the shore

Seventy years ago today - as I'm sure you and everybody else within sight or hearing of some sort of broadcast implement knows - about 150,000 Allied troops landed on the north coast of the Normandy peninsula and reopened the Western Front of World War 2.

By dawn that morning my old unit, the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had already had a hell of a shitty day. The unit was badly scattered - note the little black dots on the map to the left each representing a C-47-load of paratroops - and many of the troopers had landed in the swampy fringes of the River Merderet invisible in the dark fields below and had been drowned by their equipment without firing a shot.

Worse, the Third Battalion of the regiment had been dropped directly on the small town of St. Mere Eglise whose garrison were out of their fartsacks already, what with all those C-47s flying around overhead and all, and tore apart the guys as the descended. For the young men of the 505th, and a hell of a lot of other guys 6 JUN 1944 really was a long day full of suck.

But...they hung on, and by nightfall the Western Allies had a toehold on the European continent they never relinquished. Before another June would arrive those armies would be along the Elbe and the war in Europe would be over.

That said...it is a peculiarly American myopia to see D-Day as - in the words of LTC Bateman - "...on this day, this morning, 70 years ago...the world began to change."

That's not to say that D-Day wasn't a major event in World War 2, or a major historical event. That's not to say that the men - and women - who came ashore didn't play an important role in defeating the Axis.

But it was less than three weeks later that the Soviet Army opened up Oперация Багратион (Operatsiya Bagration). Operation Bagration destroyed an entire German Army Group and unhinged the Eastern Front. In that operation, lasting from June to July 1944 Armeegruppe Mitte...

"lost about a quarter of its Eastern Front manpower, similar to the percentage of loss at Stalingrad (about 17 full divisions)...included many experienced soldiers, NCOs and other officers, which at this stage of the war the Wehrmacht could not replace. An indication of the completeness of the Soviet victory is that 31 of the 47 German divisional or corps commanders involved were killed or captured. Exact German losses are unknown, but newer research indicates around 400,000 overall casualties. Soviet losses were also substantial, with 180,040 killed and missing, 590,848 wounded and sick, together with 2,957 tanks, 2,447 artillery pieces, and 822 aircraft also lost." (Wiki 2014)

I don't think we, that is, the people of the United States, have ever come to terms with the fact that the "Greatest Generation" of World War 2 was, very likely, the Soviet subjects born in the Teens and Twenties who fought, and died in millions to roll back the Nazi invasions. What destroyed the fighting strength of Germany was, largely, the Soviet Union. So when you read all the veneration of this day in the Western popular press, it's well to pause and consider that.

Still.

My father's generation, and the Western world they helped create, was shaped by days like this day seventy years ago. The importance of D-Day to them, and thus to us, is hard to elide...although we, at this remove, might do well to listen carefully past the speeches and paeans to the invasion beaches for the distant thunder of the guns in Ukraine and Belorussia. Those caught in the firestorm can't afford to spend time looking at the horizon; it is for those of us with space and time to be thoughtful and mindful that for all that what happens to us is the Most Important Thing in the World it is often our own viewpoint that distorts the size and shape of events, and that viewpoint is often skewed by hate, or fear, or lust, or simple ignorance.

As for my father and his cohort...this year is probably their last big anniversary; ten years from now I doubt more than a handful will remain. In twenty, the Longest Day and their war will be just a history story, different only in proximity from Verdun, or Shiloh, or Hohenlinden, or Cannae.

6/6/44

Early this morning sixty-three years ago thousands of airborne soldiers jumped into the dark skies over northern France. They were the first wave of what would be the liberation of Europe: D-Day.

In a time of "phony war", when our "leaders" have to keep reminding us of how we're fighting for "freedom" - note all the quotation marks in the preceding sentence - it might be well to recall a time when were really were fighting against a deadly enemy, one which, had they won, would have initiated a new Dark Age.

Soldiers have always been a double-edged weapon: we do things that no decent, civilized person would or should do. And yet, sometimes, because we do those things those we fight for will never have to. This was certainly true for the citizen-soldiers of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, who landed in the hedgerows around St. Mere Eglise early this morning those many years ago. Their example, and the memory and honor of their service, lives on in the motto of the "Panthers" of the 82nd Airborne - "H-Minus"! I was and always will be proud to have worn that crest, and the red beret that has come to symbolize all those who ride to battle on others' wings.

Those men, those who lived through that terrible night of fighting in the streets of the little town, who lived through the fight across France, the Low Countries and into Germany, are old now, and falling away faster than June wheat under a Norman's scythe.

And it is because of this that I wanted to stop and remember them. Not the "heroism" of their war, because - in our debased time when merely being in the same grid square that a hostile round lands in is "heroic" - for most soldiers being a "hero" is about as voluntary as being caught the wrong way on a moving escalator. Not to celebrate the "Greatest Generation", which, like all people in all times, were not so much born to greatness as had it thrust upon them.

Rather, it is just to try and put into words my love for those men I have never met, who, like me and my friends and brothers and comrades, had to face their fears and doubts and step out that door into space. But unlike us, knowing that whatever waited for them it would be bad and worse before it got better.

So now you shuffle toward's death's darkened jump door, guys. It's black, and you're being shoved and shuddered by forces you can't see or control. The fear is as much of the unknown as of the pain and fright you know await you after you pass through that opening. The shadowed face of the jumpmaster at the door holds no enlightenment, no warnings or cautions to help you out into the night.

No matter who and how, we all have to pass our static line to that jumpmaster and jump out that door. It is never easy and it is never simple, just as in war the simplest things are hard. Thing is, you did it once. And because you did, all of our lives are better and brighter.

So here's to you, guys. May you exit clean. May your 'chute deploy perfectly. May you drift down through the clear night sky, free, this time, of tracer fire and the merciless flares. To find your home, the heart of rest, whatever and wherever that may be to each one of you.

Thank you.