He fainted. My boxing champ, team captain, never run away from a fight father had no memory of his first training jump. The moment he descended from the massive C-47, he blacked out, from fear and shock at the jumpmaster’s barked command to exit. Consciousness didn’t return until he landed with a thud on the red clay drop zone at Fort Benning, Georgia. Dutch had never in his young life been in an airplane and would have preferred to enjoy is maiden flight. He was afraid, but – he jumped.
After successfully completing the arduous physical training and required number of practice jumps, 20 year old Dutch Schultz became a member of the elite 82nd Airborne, an achievement which influenced his view of life and his subsequent fathering methods. According to dad, wearing shiny airborne wings meant you were special – intelligent, excellent physical condition, motivated and individualistic. Those paratrooper wings also symbolized a young man who was a risk taker, arrogant and not too fond of following the rules. My dad had the above traits in abundance. This unique mix played a significant role in his postwar successes and unfortunately too often in his failures. It wasn’t until later in my adulthood that I realized that my father’s identity as a paratrooper and his war experiences created a template for both his life and mine.
Most of what I knew concerning my father’s war came from books with titles like The Longest Day, Citizen Soldiers and Beyond Valor. Dad was a charming man and an engaging storyteller, so there was never a shortage of authors, film producers and documentarians eager to listen and record his war stories. For most of my adolescence and adult life, my mind was filled with a jumble of visual images and lofty, sometimes humorous, written descriptions of Dutch Schultz’s involvement in the European Theatre of World War II. It wasn’t until 2003, two years prior to my father’s death, when it struck me that dad, similar to the majority of World War II combat veterans, had not divulged to me the full reality of his war. So, I questioned him. For the most part, if I asked a direct question, he would be truthful, but he certainly didn’t volunteer any of the horrific details. When I was young, Dad had played war games with his two daughters, with us marching, saluting, standing at attention and finally relaxing on his command “at ease”. A spirit of fun permeated the atmosphere; my father had a goofy, childish side that shone through when he was playing with his kids. During those early years, I knew dad had been a paratrooper — his right hand always sported a large gold ring with an engraved parachute and the words 82nd Airborne. However, I never saw any other war memorabilia, even though he had been awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. It would be decades before I laid eyes on the medals and awards; not until the 1990s, in the California home he shared with his third wife. His Silver Lakes bedroom was a shrine to his war with Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, decoratively colored aiguillettes and lanyards from the United States, France, Belgium and the Netherlands adorning the wall. Multiple decoupaged newspaper articles about dad’s exploits were prominently displayed. To complete the effect, a miniature white parachute hung from the ceiling.
This display was in sharp contrast to my childhood. Back then, World War II was subtly buzzing in the background, part of the story of how my parents met and maybe why daddy taught me how to fight the boys who picked on me. It was certainly not a topic of discussion at our dinner table. During the 1950s, my father wanted to forget.
In the early 1960s, thanks to Cornelius Ryan’s book and movie, The Longest Day, dad’s history became known to me. My father was one of the thousands of American paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines into Normandy during the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. The film in which he was portrayed became a World War II classic, a precursor of other docu-cameo-epic war genre movies which created and perpetuated the cultural myth of the “Good War”. Over the years, The Longest Day generated nostalgia, serving for many as a documentary history. Shot in black and white, it had an eerie, but bloodless quality, similarity to the footage of the actual battle.
My youthful perception of D-Day was skewed because of Ryan’s description of dad’s activities during those historic days. Supposedly, on the evening prior to D-Day, Dutch Schultz was the lucky winner of $2500, the spoils of an ongoing dice game. According to Ryan, the arrival of a letter from my grandmother included a wooden rosary. My father began to feel uneasy and guilty about his gambling bounty. When the black rosary dropped to the floor, my father had an overwhelming premonition of disaster. Ryan recounted that Dutch “knew” if he kept all the gambling money, he most certainly would be killed, so my dad rejoined the crap game and promptly lost all his money. Ryan had presented my father as a high-minded sort of fellow who had gone to Mass that morning and felt that keeping his wages of sin would doom him. Ryan got it partly right – dad had a strong spiritual and sometimes fatalistic bent, but he often said that he was no “altar boy”.
From conversations with my elderly father, I got the straight story. He did go to Mass that morning, did lose all the money on the night prior to D-Day, but his motives were mixed. Dutch Schultz had won $2500 and had succeeded in overpowering every soldier in the game except for a sergeant he strongly disliked. The other soldier was close to losing all his money and dad rejoined the game just to break him. But, his lucky streak ended – he lost everything.
This gambling escapade was memorialized to my father’s advantage in the movie and dad’s image as the World War II good soldier with the rosary was cemented. But the real war was waiting.
Next week in Part 2
After a long delay due to bad weather, Dutch was finally loaded into a massive C-47, one of over 13,000 Americans ready to jump behind enemy lines into Normandy.
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Visit their website at Daughters of D Day
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