Day One: D-Day
Captain William Harris of the 131st Airborne sat in the darkness of the C-14. The cabin shook violently as rockets, flak, and other planes exploded all around. Yells from the engine room and cockpit echoed around the tightly packed room, twenty soldiers lining the walls. Suddenly, the dim red light bulb overhead buzzed, flashed a bright white light, and then stayed green. They were over the jump zone.
The door latch loudly retracted into the wall, and several soldiers stood up and slid it open. A huge gust of wind blew into the chamber, and guns, packs, and papers flew about. Harris rose quickly and slapped his parachute and machine gun to make sure all was order. The other soldiers did the same, checking that each pulley was primed and ready to work when needed.
“Alright boys!” Harris shouted over the airplane engines. “This is it! Jump on my signal!” Each man signaled a rapid thumbs up and readied themselves.
“One!” Tension rushed over each soldier, and they grasped their guns tighter, and placed a hand upon their parachute strings.
“Two!” The sky began to clear and the men could now see that the city lay in heaps of rubble, bodies and artillery strewn everywhere, hundreds of planes and chutes dotting the sky.
“Three!”
Just as the men pushed forward, a mass of flak slammed into the engine and blew them all backward. Part of the wall exploded, sucking five men out into the air. Packs of equipment and supplies rocketed out of the gaping hole in the plane. Harris’ own gun was torn from around his neck. Steadying himself against what remained of the wall, Harris forced his way to the ventral exhaust, a gash in the floor used to drop bombs. He motioned for the remaining men to line up then helped one after the other squeeze through with their chutes, until finally, each soldier was out.
Before Harris could lower his feet into the hole, the plane suddenly lurched forward, launching Harris back towards the cockpit. Smashing his head into the cabin, Harris felt the g-force yank his parachute off his shoulder and into the night. Harris clawed at the wall to keep himself from falling out of the plane but he felt only air.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed Harris’s shoulder. He looked up and saw Thomas, the pilot. His forehead oozed dark red blood. Thomas opened a small compartment in the plane’s ceiling and strapped the emergency parachute across Harris’s shoulders, then shoved him toward the gaping hole. Harris tried to grab at Thomas but felt only a rush of freezing air.
Squirming around in his parachute, Harris looked down onto the battlefield below him. Planes roared under his feet and above his head. He could see men falling all around but couldn’t decipher which side they were on. He looked back over his shoulder as he heard a loud screeching noise. It was the C-14 diving blindly toward the ground.
The plane exploded in a gigantic fireball, sending rubble and shards of metal in all directions. Fearing that his chute would be destroyed, Harris tried to steer his body towards a small lake below but the thrust of the explosion slammed him into a grove of trees, the lines of chute becoming entangled in the branches and his head smacking into the side of a trunk. A fog of pain and darkness swallowed him.
He woke some time later, dangling above the ground, one leg twisted grotesquely. Far below him, a German soldier sprayed the beach with machine gun fire. Harris wormed one hand into a pocket, pulled out his army knife, and quietly sawed at the ropes of the chute to free himself from the prison of branches. As he cut the last shred of rope, he let himself fall onto the stunned soldier’s back, wrestled the soldier to the ground, and then stabbed his knife deep into the soldier’s neck.
The German soldier was young, no more than eighteen, the same age as the boys in the 131st. Harris waited for the soldier to die. Then he limped over to a burning church and quickly hid inside.