Dog tags were taped together to prevent them making a noise. Cigarettes and lighters, together with other essentials, such as a washing and shaving kit, water-purifying tablets, twenty-four sheets of toilet paper and a French phrase book, went into the musette bag slung around the neck, along with an escape kit consisting of a map printed on silk, hacksaw blade, compass and money. The largesse of the issued equipment amazed poor country boys more used to make-do and mend at home.
On top of all these smaller items came an entrenching tool and the soldier’s personal weapon, usually a carbine with a folding stock partially disassembled in a bag known as a ‘violin case’ which was strapped across their chest. Others were armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun. Bazookas were broken down into their two halves. Together with several rounds of anti-tank grenades, they were packed in leg bags which would dangle during the descent. The leg bags alone often weighed up to eighty pounds.
Paratroopers had their own superstitions. A number of them also foresaw their own death. One soldier remembered a ‘tow-headed kid’ named Johnny. ‘He was standing there, staring into space. I went over to him and I said, “What’s the matter, Johnny?” He said, “I don’t think I’ll make it.” I said, “Nah, you’ll be alright.” I sort of shook him because he was like in a daze. As it turned out, he was one of the first men killed in Normandy.’
When Eisenhower arrived at Greenham Common in his Cadillac staff car, followed by a small convoy of pressmen and photographers, he began to chat with paratroopers of General Maxwell Taylor’s 101st Airborne shortly before they emplaned. It must have been hard not to think of Leigh-Mallory’s dire prediction that they were almost all going to their deaths. Yet Eisenhower’s ‘informality and friendliness with troopers’ amazed even his aide. A Texan offered the supreme commander a job after the war roping cows. Eisenhower then asked airborne officers if they had any men from Kansas. He hoped to find someone from his home town of Abilene. A soldier called Oyler was sent over to meet him.
‘What’s your name, soldier?’ Eisenhower asked him.
Oyler froze in front of the general and his friends had to shout his name to jog his memory.
Eisenhower then asked him where he was from.
‘Wellington, Kansas,’ Oyler replied.
‘Oh, that’s south of Wichita.’
The supreme commander proceeded to ask him about his education and service and whether he had a girlfriend in England. Oyler relaxed and answered all his questions about their training and whether he thought the other men in his platoon were ready to go.
‘You know, Oyler, the Germans have been kicking the hell out of us for five years and it is payback time.’
Eisenhower went on to ask him if he was afraid and Oyler admitted that he was.
‘Well, you’d be a damn fool not to be. But the trick is to keep moving. If you stop, if you start thinking, you lose your focus. You lose your concentration. You’ll be a casualty. The idea, the perfect idea, is to keep moving.’
Movement at that moment was the paratroopers’ biggest problem. They were so loaded down with kit that they could only waddle to the waiting planes lined up beside the runway.
The ground crews of their C-47 Skytrains (the British called them Dakotas) had been working hard. All invasion aircraft were painted at the last moment with black and white stripes on the wings and fuselages to identify them more clearly to all the Allied ships below. Some paratroopers were taken aback at the sight. ‘We were surprised as dickens to see the big wide stripes painted on the wings and also on the fuselage. You thought they would be up there like sitting ducks for every ground gunner to try his luck on.’
The danger of ‘friendly fire’ was a major preoccupation, especially for airborne forces. During the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, US Navy anti-aircraft gunners had shot at both American transport aircraft and those towing gliders. In their desperation to escape the fire, pilots of tow aircraft had let loose their gliders, leaving them to crash into the sea. More than a dozen had been lost in the disaster. This time, to avoid flying over the invasion fleets, the routes planned for the drop on to the Cotentin peninsula would take the two airborne divisions on a wide sweep to the west, making their final approach from over the Channel Islands.
Many of the C-47s, which paratroopers referred to as ‘goony birds’, had names and symbols painted on the side of the nose. One, for example, had a picture of a devil holding up a tray on which sat a girl in a bathing suit. The inscription underneath was ‘Heaven can Wait’. A less encouraging aircraft name was ‘Miss Carriage’.
It took forty minutes to load the planes, for heavily burdened paratroopers needed help to get up the steps, almost like knights in armour trying to mount their horses. And once they were in, a large number needed to struggle out again soon afterwards for another ‘nervous pee’. The pilots of the troop carrier squadrons became increasingly worried about the weight. Each aircraft was to carry a ‘stick’ of sixteen to eighteen fully laden men and they insisted on weighing them. The total made them even more concerned.
A sergeant mounted first to go to the front of the plane and the platoon commander last, as he would lead the way. The sergeant would bring up the rear so that he could act as ‘pusher’ to make sure that everyone had left and nobody had frozen. ‘One trooper asked the sergeant if it was true that he had orders to shoot any man that refused to jump. “That’s the orders I’ve been given.” He said it so softly that everybody became quiet.’
The 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division received a nasty shock during loading. A Gammon grenade exploded inside one fuselage, killing a number of soldiers and setting the plane on fire. The survivors were simply switched to a follow-up detail. Nothing was allowed to delay the schedule for take-off that night.
Their engines ‘growling’, the heavily laden C-47s began to trundle in a seemingly endless sequence down the runway at Greenham Common. General Eisenhower stood there, apparently with tears in his eyes, saluting the paratroopers of the 101st as they took off.
Churchill, on that night of problems with de Gaulle, was also thinking of their powerful ally in the east. He had been trying to persuade Stalin to coincide his summer offensive with the invasion of Normandy. On 14 April he had signalled, ‘We ask you to let us know, in order to make our own calculations, what scale your effort will take.’
The year before Stalin had begun to despair of the western Allies ever launching the invasion of northern Europe, a development which they had been promising since 1942. Churchill had always preferred an indirect, or peripheral, strategy in the Mediterranean, to avoid another bloodbath in France like the one which had slaughtered the youth of his generation. He was right in the end to have delayed the invasion, albeit for the wrong reasons. The Anglo-American armies had simply not been ready, either materially or in trained manpower, to attempt such an operation before. A failure would have been catastrophic. Yet none of the excuses or genuine reasons had placated Stalin, who never ceased to remind his allies of their commitment. ‘One should not forget,’ he had written to Churchill on 24 June 1943, ‘that on all this depends the possibility to save millions of lives in the occupied regions of western Europe and Russia and reduce the colossal sacrifices of the Soviet armies, in comparison with which the losses of the Anglo-American troops could be considered as modest.’ More than 7 million members of the Soviet armed forces had already died in the war.