Читать книгу Remembering D-day: Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes - Martin Bowman - Страница 75

F Company, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

‘I jumped with the 2nd Platoon, it was commanded by 2nd Lieutenant Harold Cadish. I don’t remember all the stick in our plane but I know Private H. T. Bryant, Private Ladislaw ‘Laddie’ Tlapa and Lieutenant Cadish were most unfortunate. They were the fellows who were shot on the power poles. My close friend Private 1st class Charles Blankenship was shot still in his chute, hanging in a tree, a little distance down the street. When we jumped, there was a huge fire in a building in town. I didn’t know that the heat would suck a parachute towards the fire. I fought the chute all the way down to avoid the fire. One trooper [Private 1st Class A. J. Van Holsbeck of F Company] Who had joined our Company shortly before D-Day landed in the fire. Facing the church from the front, I landed on the right side of the roof, luckily in the shadow side from the fire. Some of my suspension lines went over the steeple and I slid down over to the edge of the roof. This other trooper came down and really got entangled on the steeple, I didn’t know it was Steele. Almost immediately a Nazi soldier came running from the back side of the church shooting at everything. Sergeant John Ray had landed in the churchyard almost directly below Steele. This Nazi shot him in the stomach while he was still in his chute. While Ray was dying he somehow got his .45 out (sergeants jumped with a .45-calibre pistol) and shot the Nazi in the back of the head, killing him. He saved my life as well as Steele’s. It was one of the bravest things I have ever witnessed.

‘I finally got to my trench knife and cut my suspension lines and fell to the ground. I looked up at the steeple but there was not a movement or a sound and I thought the trooper was dead. I got my M-1 assembled and ducked around several places in that part of town hoping to find some troopers, but all of them were dead. I got off several rounds at different Germans before they drove me to a different position with intense gunfire.’

Van Holsbeck died falling into the house, which was on fire on the south side of the town square. The Germans allowed the villagers, under guard, to break the curfew to fight it.

Tense and anxious, a Platoon from the Third Battalion, 82nd Airborne barely manage a smile just before they boarded their C-47 for D-Day.

U.S Army

Major Frederick C. A. Kellam, First Battalion Commander (left) and Colonel William E. Ekman, CO, 505th Regiment, 82nd Airborne, at Cottesmore waiting for D-Day. Kellam, whose nickname was the “Jack of Diamonds” (note the Diamond insignia on their helmets) was KIA by an exploding mortar shell.

U.S Army

General Eisenhower talking with paratroops of the 502nd Parachute Regiment, 101st Airborne Division at RAF Greenham Common on 5 June. At centre is Lt Wallace C. Strobel, the jumpmaster (for plane number 23) of Company E whose 22nd birthday it was on 5 June. Ike asked Strobel what was his name and where did he come from (Michigan)? Eisenhower, his round of visits to the paratroopers completed, shook hands with General Maxwell Taylor and wished him good luck before walking to his waiting staff limousine to return to invasion headquarters at Portsmouth. An aide noticed that there was a tear in Eisenhower’s eye.

National Archives