Home
What's New
Search Engine
Archives
Odyssey
Photo Gallery
Unit History
Unit Honors
TAPS
Voices Of Past
F&F Association
How To Submit

 
FLAMES AND FEAR

Flames and Fear
Ex-paratrooper remembers the terrors on D-Day
by Frank Perkins for Fort Worth Star-Telegram

 HALTOM CITY—Dwayne Burns' memories of D-Day are seared into his mind, He sees graceful lines of tracers dancing in the night sky over France and then a C-47 transport caught in those dancing tracers as the plane makes a flaming arc toward the ground. "It might even have been my plane, I don't know," Burns said.
   He was a 19-year-old paratrooper in the 82nd "All American" Airborne Division making his first combat jump near St Mere-Eglise inland from Utah Beach. German troops butchered other 82nd paratroopers in their chutes as they glided down into the town.
   "I remember coming out the door of my plane and seeing those waving lines of tracers from the flak guns in that dark sky and thinking, 'Boy that's really beautiful' " Burns said.
   "Then I saw this C-47 like the one I jumped from making a U-turn out of formation, its left engine on fire and trailing a long streamer of flame past the plane's tail. Its throttles must have been jammed all the way forward because those engines were just screaming and then it arced away and crashed into the ground."
   That sight drove Burns to prayer. "I said 'Lord you'd better be ready to help me because I'm not going to be able to make it out of this without your help. " he recalled "After that I felt that everything I was told to do or decided to do was the Lord speaking to me and so I did everything as cheerfully as I could because I felt it was all part of God's plan for me."
   Burns came to that dark June morning floating down into Occupied France by way of the draft board that plucked him from his Fort Worth home at age 18. On the bus to the depot and basic training he became friends with John McGee. They stayed together through basic training and into the 82nd Airborne. They were separated at D-Day.
   "I landed west of St Mere-Eglise and I don't know where John hit but he was immediately captured and I didn't see him again until after the war," said Burns, a retired design engineer who worked for Bell Helicopter Textron.
   Now 69, erect and robust, Burns showed off his detailed pencil drawings of paratroopers jumping from C-47s In his workshop with airplane models hanging from the ceiling.
 

   Burns recalled that the ride over to France aboard one of hundreds of C-47s carrying the division's troops was a piece of cake "It was as smooth as silk," he said .  He spoke while holding a beautifully detailed C-47 model with a paratrooper dangling beneath it, the parachute just beginning to deploy
   "And then over France the antiaircraft flak from German guns really began to get rough and our plane was bouncing up and down and lurching from side to side, "Some of the fellows were knocked off their feet as they stood up to jump and others were sick and throwing up. It was really scary. I was ready to get out of that plane."
   It was even scarier on the ground. The 82nd Airborne drop did not go as planned. Drop zones were missed and troopers landed far from their targets. Some dropped into flooded rivers and swamps and drowned in their harnesses. Burns, a radioman in F Company of the 508th Parachute Regiment wound up totally alone in a long field west of St Mere-Eglise.
   "I was really scared" he recalled "I was still in my chute harness and couldn't get to my rifle so I pulled out my trench knife and stuck it in the ground beside me.  'At least I've got a knife,' I thought to myself. "Then I began getting out of the parachute suspension lines and the harness got to my feet unslung my rifle and walked off. I guess that trench knife is still stuck in the ground somewhere west of St Mere Eglise."
   The troopers had been issued crickets — toys that made a metallic click when pressed. The signal that had been drummed into them was one click as a challenge answered by two clicks. "I heard movement and gave the click and then I couldn't remember if I was supposed to get one or two clicks back," Burns said. "Finally I just said 'Come on over' and another 82nd Airborne trooper swung over a low wall and joined me."
   Finally Burns and about 10 other soldiers found the rest of F Company and went on with their war which included an assault crossing of the Douve River behind the beaches on the Cotentin Peninsula.
   "We were 18- and 19-year-olds and we hadn't seen much death and our training hadn't really prepared us for that," Burns said. "At first I couldn't look at the bodies of the dead but after a while there were so many that you could look at a dead German's body and make a joke about it."
   The assault crossing of the Douve in collapsible canvas rowboats went off without a hitch although Burns admitted being frightened by the prospect. "I couldn't swim too well and that worried me," he recalled.
   But Burns said the pact he made with the Lord on D-Day seemed to hold throughout the war "We jumped into France with 130 men; 28 came out," he said. "I was with F Company all through the war — the Arnhem jump. Battle of the Bulge and I was the only man in it that didn't earn a Purple Heart .I never got a scratch"

[Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, TX, 02 Jun 1994, Thu, Pages 17 & 30]

Copyright and all other rights reserved by the Family and Friends of The 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment Association or by those who are otherwise cited,
For problems or questions regarding this web site, please contact
Jumpmaster.