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17 Sept. 44 |
First Call: We are up and ready to go. We knew this would he
the last meal for some, but we didn't know which ones. Company formation was
held and at this the Pit. Ldr. gave the last briefing before take-off. Lt.
Foley put it to us bluntly; it went something like this, quote: "I have just
attended a briefing and this is the word. A reconnaissance plane flew over
our drop zones early this morning and photographed the area. There is said
to be some 64 anti-aircraft weapons on and around our drop zones. In the
wooded area near Groesbeek tanks have been spotted. The Division has no
alternate drop zones so we go ahead as planned. I figure the fight will not
last over three minutes after we hit the ground, so lets be a winner. Be
ready to fight and good luck." From here we went to the planes and began
getting into the parachutes and securing our equipment. Oh! Lt. Foley also
told us the planes over the drop zone would not be flying over five hundred
feet. So at the plane we decided we would not use the reserve parachutes.
About this time Lt, Foley came over to make his SOP (standard operation
procedure) inspection and says, "What gives on the reserves?" We tell him we
decided not to use them. Lt. Foley, quote: "Regulation is you will board the
plane with a reserve on." He smiled and returns to his aircraft. We load our
plane and immediately off comes over two-thirds of the reserves on that
plane load. All the combat veterans take theirs off and half of the
replacements. Individual weapons were taken out from under the parachute
safety belt as they were normally jumped. We used quite a bit of aircorps
masking tape securing these weapons to our arms as where we could maintain
them during the jump. I remember Walter Dikoon who was armed with a Browning
Automatic Rifle (BAR) preparing for the jump. He [was] adjusting the sling
on his arm and having me tape it firmly to his arm. Dikoon assured me he
could jump this weapon at post arms and he would be ready to contest the
enemy as soon as his chute opened.
We had jumped into the darkness in Normandy, had one hell
of a time assembling. The most of us were at the wrong place, mixed-up units
and small groups. We liked this idea of a daylight operation and knew that
if we landed together as a team we would be hard to handle. Only thing I
could not understand was why this operation was taking place on Sunday. This
has never been answered.
We were given a take-off time which was around 1000 hours;
our drop time was 1328 hours. This would be approximately a three and a half
hour ride. We synchronized our watches at Lt. Foley's last briefing and knew
that if we couldn't pick out land marks during the flight that the aircorp
would have us over the drop zone at the said time. We took off as scheduled,
began to rendezvous with other small groups of aircraft. This continued for
quite some time and then we were on the way to Holland. This flight took us
above the thick white formation of clouds, this I had never seen before.
Our training flights back at Fort Benning and Camp Mackall
had always been low and we the jumpers had good visability of the ground. As
we approached the coast of Holland we knew the planes were descending and
soon we saw the North Sea. As we passed some small islands we received
anti-aircraft fire; we knew our jump time was drawing near.
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