Clay took two steps, then squared himself again. “And go with your instincts. When the German war machine arrives, the time for study and reflection will have passed. Act, don’t delay. Doing nothing is standard for an army. Acting is the exception. Move into a breach. Exploit a weakness. Move now, not later. A good plan ferociously executed right now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
Hammond nodded fiercely.
“We are a newly assembled team,” the general said. “Most of you have not waged war with me before. You will find that I can excuse mistakes and I can live with quirks of command style.” Clay’s voice rose. “But I will not tolerate a hesitation to engage the enemy, to inflict mortal damage on him. I demand savagery. You are to be as fired up as the foot soldier reduced to using his bayonet.”
For a moment I thought I’d hear a chorus of “amens.” But the room was silent. Even so, the commanders’ faces reflected a renewed confidence.
The general concluded, “Your strength and stamina and aggressiveness will rub off on your men, and will make up for whatever they lack in experience and material. Remember, there are no poor soldiers, only poor commanders.” The general’s gaze swept the room like a scythe. “I don’t think there’s a poor commander in this room.”
Clay adjourned the meeting with, “That’s all, gentlemen. God willing, we’ll all meet again in two days.”
The men rose quickly. Some lingered for a few more words with General Clay, but most were anxious to return to their units. The speech worked. Although the officers had been shaken by news of the Three Blows, they left the meeting reinvigorated.
But God was not willing, and this group would never meet again.
Years may pass before the full story of Green Thumb can be told, before all the documents and the eye-witness accounts are collected and assayed, and before the darkness and confusion can be pared away from that night. Some things have been buried, and may remain there forever.
The U.S. Army General Staff School taught that surprise was the deadliest of all weapons. Clausewitz wrote that surprise was the most important element of victory, and noted that Napoleon, Gustavus Adolphus, Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander owed the brightest rays of their fame to swift surprise. General Clay wanted to follow their shining lights.
For months the Allies had cowered behind the North Sea and English Channel, waiting at the Germans’ leisure, reacting rather than acting, putting out fires rather than starting them. General Clay’s turn had come. His operation, Green Thumb, was to be a stab at the Wehrmacht heart.
Ranger Sergeant Aaron Hirschorn’s bravura got him into the C-53 Skytrooper, but it did not help him during the crossing. “I swear,” he told me later, “I had to pee the entire trip.”
Big talkers and big laughers, the Rangers in Hirschorn’s plane were silent. The sergeant was loaded with weapons and equipment. Normally a parachute landing is the equivalent of a ten-foot fall. Carrying the extra weight, the drop would seem like twenty feet. Colonel Yates had confided to Clay that ten or twenty percent of the Rangers would suffer ankle or leg injuries from the fall.
“My mouth was dry the whole trip,” Hirschorn remembered. “I couldn’t have spit if I had wanted to.”
Green Thumb’s target was OKW’s forward command headquarters near Zottegem, in Flanders, Belgium, one hundred miles east-by-southeast of the Isle of Thanet airfield. Excited with his plans of the operation, General Clay had asked me, “Jack, do you know who said, ‘Always attempt the unexpected’?”
I thought carefully, then replied, “Charlie Chaplin?”
“Jack, goddamn it, it was Frederick the Great. Sometimes I think you are headed for the loony bin.”
The Rangers’ mission was to destroy the German invasion command post and to bring back plans detailing the time and place of the invasion. With success, the Rangers would force the Germans to postpone their operation, giving the Allies more time to prepare.
Lieutenant Ronald Betts remembers being thankful the engines filled the Skytrooper’s cabin with a loud roar. Otherwise his platoon would have heard his knees knocking together. Betts was the tallest man in his unit, and on training jumps the jumpmaster always put his hand on the lieutenant’s helmet to make sure he didn’t coldcock himself on the way through the hatch.
Private George Lukowski sat next to Betts on the two-by-eight plank. In long shadows cast by pale red overhead lights in the cabin, the soldiers, with their camouflage paint and gear, were hardly recognizable. He felt a quick jolt of fear. Maybe these men weren’t his mates. They were as alien as Martians. Then Private Howard Lance leaned onto one cheek, crowding the entire line of Rangers, and loosed one of his patented farts, louder than the Pratt and Whitneys. Lance was rewarded with raucous, tension-cracking laughter. Yeah, this was Lukowski’s crew.
To reduce the mission’s radar profile, the three Skytroopers were unescorted. They flew fifty feet above the water, one of the Green Thumb’s riskiest maneuvers. Moonlight strained through high clouds to illuminate the waves. To avoid spotters on land, the route was direct, with no diversionary zigzags south over Artois or north over the Schelde estuaries. Undetected, the Skytroopers breasted land at Ostend, forty-five miles from Zottegem. Fifteen minutes later, the light on the forward bulkhead came on. The jumpmaster barked orders to stand and attach static lines.
Just as the jumpmaster pushed open the hatch, an AA shell burst near the starboard wing, then another, higher but closer. The plane lurched. Rangers toppled against the cabin wall, but quickly regained their feet. A number of them made a point of grinning broadly. Most grabbed a hand rail above their heads. Lukowski was reminded of a crammed subway car in Manhattan, his hometown. There was no further antiaircraft fire.
The Skytroopers had been guided to Zottegem by a navigational beam system similar to the Luftwaffe’s dog leg. The beams were accurate to within miles, not yards, so the pilots depended on the Belgian resistance to set four bonfires, a rectangle marking the landing zone. The pilots had been accurate. Ahead was a rectangle. Because the Germans enforced blackout regulations, no other lights were visible.
“Check lines,” the jumpmaster called over the engine nose.
Lieutenant Betts yanked his static line. He also glanced for the final time over his shoulder at his parachute pack. His constant fear was that his pack would open as he fell, and, instead of the chute, out would come a couple of sandwiches, a canteen, tent staves, and a sleeping bag. No, this was his chute pack.
The line of paratroopers crowded together. Betts was first, Lukowski behind him. The jumpmaster wore a headset. He palmed Betts’ helmet, then yelled, “Go!”
The stick sailed out the hatch. Night jumps are instantly disorienting. Lukowski told me after the war that he couldn’t tell if he was cartwheeling head over heels or dropping in a perfect spread eagle. He felt his harness’s tug as the silk opened above him. The sky was filled with chutes.
Sergeant Aaron Hirschorn dropped from the second Skytrooper. He swung lazily under his chute, feeling motionlessness, unable to find the horizon. Then he saw the first plane’s Rangers below him. He was immeasurably reassured. He finally saw the bonfires. He swore he’d someday shake that pilot’s hand. The sergeant lifted his submachine gun into his hands, prepared to fire back at muzzle flashes on the ground.
Betts landed in a pasture thirty yards from Lukowski. The lieutenant dragged his chute to the row of trees at the edge of the field. There was no time to bury them. The platoon formed up around him. Lukowski’s knee had rapped his chin on landing, and he had bitten deeply into his tongue, filling his mouth with blood. Even so, he was better off than two of the platoon. Emil Johanson’s leg had snapped, and Dennis Smythe had severely twisted an ankle on the field’s furrows. They were helped to the trees. Johanson refused morphine. He and Smythe would join other Rangers assigned to the pasture’s perimeter. The Skytroopers would be returning in forty-five minutes.