But the real war was waiting. 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. German antiaircraft fire caused the airplanes full of troopers to be separated, deviating from the flight plan. Dad’s plane was bouncing about – and then, flak hitting the plane caused a sudden dive. The troopers hastily jumped at 250 to 300 feet instead of the ideal of 600. Dutch hit the ground hard with a bang, wrenching his back, an injury that would plague him his entire live. Eventually, he struggled to his feet, slowly realizing he was alone and lost. He wandered towards the sound of machine gun fire. My father, wanting nothing more than to be a hero, pointed his M-1 rifle towards the Rat–a-tat sound and pulled the trigger – and nothing happened. To his horror, with the haste and anxiety of packing the 100 plus pounds of gear, guns and ammunition for his initial combat, he had forgotten to load his gun. This forgetfulness was so typical of dad, who also suffered from a poor sense of direction. I can only imagine the sense of panic he felt wandering the French countryside; lost, with an unloaded gun.
Dutch needed to find his way towards his drop zone, wherever that was. The goal of his 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) on D-Day had been to drop behind enemy lines to capture Sainte Mere Eglise. Seizing the town would hopefully cause disruption of the German military movement towards Utah Beach, which was being stormed by thousands of men as part of the Allied amphibious assault. Hundreds of troopers in the 505 PIR, in addition to dad, were lost after their chaotic drop. Dutch finally finds other wanderers – in The Longest Day, he meets up with a group from the Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne; however, this scene was another departure from historic reality
My father was actually found by the 505th Commander, General James Gavin, who had gathered over 100 troopers from various units and brought them to the bloody Ste. Mere Eglise battle at the La Fiere Bridge across the Merderet River. The fight for the bridge was fierce and my father was right in the middle of it. The troopers prevailed after 4 days of unrelenting combat with little sleep and even less food. Because of the success of this action, German troops were delayed and unable to inflict the type of horror and casualties on Utah Beach that had occurred on Omaha. I had no idea until I interviewed my elderly dad that he was actually involved in the bloody and historic fight for the bridge, since Ryan’s depiction basically showed him as missing all the action.
On June 14, my father was removed from combat for a short period of time. The back injury suffered on D-Day made him unable to walk; he was hospitalized in England for a week and then rejoined the 82nd until the division was taken out of combat sometime in the middle of July 1944. The elite status of the paratroopers grew to legendary proportions after Normandy. Without their valiant stand at La Fiere bridge, the Germans might have inflicted catastrophic losses on Utah Beach.
The paratroopers were lauded as heroic and their legend as invincible fighters began.
My father’s next combat experience, Market Garden, has a historical presence in the recounting of World War II, but in the past, I never quite understood its goals or significance. The name of the operation conjured, in my mind, pleasant images of a bustling farmer’s market somewhere in Holland. However, Market Garden was far from a pleasant affair. It was a disaster. Twenty thousand paratroopers, American and British, were dropped in the Netherlands on September 17, 1944 with the objective of “taking and holding the bridges in or near Eindhoven and Nijmegen along the sixty-mile road that led from the Belgian border to Arnheim”. The American paratroopers from the 82nd and the 101st seized the bridges at Eindhoven and Nijmegen, albeit with heavy casualties. However, the British troops at Arnheim, on the Rhine River border with Germany, were pinned down by the Germans and had to surrender on September 25, 1944. “Market Garden had failed. There would be no rush into the Ruhr Valley, no quick end to the war in Europe. Sixteen thousand Britons and Americans and Poles had been lost, more casualties than the Allies had suffered on all the landing beaches on D-Day.”
Dad did not share too much with me about his experiences at Market Garden; he always talked more about D-Day and the Bulge. I knew that he had a soft landing on a sunny September afternoon and the Dutch people were friendly and welcoming. After I read Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldier, I realized the emotional toll of the operation on my father. Captain Anthony Stefanich, leader of my father’s “C” company of the 505th Regiment, had gathered my father and other troopers to help soldiers on a glider that had crashed in the drop zone and had drawn enemy fire. “Stefanich got hit in the upper torso by rifle fire, which set afire a smoke grenade he was carrying.” He died within minutes, with my father standing over him saying Hail Maries. When Captain Stef died, dad told Ambrose that he broke down and cried – the only time in combat my father ever wept.
The description of chaotic fighting at Nijmegen and being surrounded by Germans was never a part of our discussions. I discovered from a book, A Bridge Too Far, that my father was a” Browning automatic gunner for his platoon”. When I did further research and read that the life expectancy of a BAR team member in World War II was about eleven seconds, I asked dad how he got to be a BAR man. He told me he volunteered because at that time no one else did.
The 82nd Airborne ended up being in continuous combat around Nijmegen for fifty six days, until they were relieved by Canadian soldiers on November 11. By the end of the Market Garden campaign, my father was a battle hardened veteran, learning to suppress his emotional response to the death and destruction around him.
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