West Point ’41: The Class That Went to War and Shaped America

8 | Dawn and Dusk

79 8 Dawn and Dusk Before the break of dawn on June 6, 1944, Jack Norton, with the 82nd Airborne, was in a C‑47 transport plane headed for Normandy. More than two-dozen men in full paratrooper gear lined the plane’s benches. Their objectives: drop behind the beaches, knock out pillboxes, block German approaches to beaches designated as Allied entry points. As they neared the coastline, Norton glanced out the window at a sky lit with tracers and illuminating devices. It was the work of the Pathfinders, who had infiltrated the ground thirty minutes earlier. After the debacle in Sicily, Norton had spearheaded developing the doctrine, which involved sending in an elite force prior to the main assault to set up signaling devices to guide aircraft to drop zones. This included radar homing devices modeled on British equipment, along with colored panels and smoke grenades for daytime recognition and marking-lamps for night, among other Pathfinder protocols. The straightforward goal: to make it possible for troops to arrive at the right place at the right time and be heavily concentrated so they could take on the enemy at full force. Seeing the Pathfinder handiwork in the night skies over Normandy, Norton ’s anticipation grew. It looks like the Fourth of July times ten, he thought. I can’t wait to get out of this aircraft—can’t wait to get to the ground. Norton was forced to hang fire. The 82nd Airborne pilots were having trouble holding formations, given the heavy cloudbanks. As many as 450 airplanes trying to stay tip to tip in V’s was a feat under the best of circumstances . Add in the clouds and fifty-knot winds, and the planes had to scramble to avoid collision. The pilot of Norton’s plane accelerated in attempt to rise above the gray blanket. But the move brought the plane up to an altitude untenable for the jump, and the pilot was a mere ten minutes from the drop zone. He pushed his luck. Then the red light went on, a four-minute warning. Kazel-Wilcox - West Point.indb 79 3/19/2014 5:40:11 PM 80 ★ west point ’41 With just two minutes to go, the pilot was running out of time. He began rapidly descending, screaming toward the zone at a speed greater than usual for a drop. The green light went off. It was jump time. Norton hurled himself out the plane’s door, but given its speed, the air hit him with such force that he blacked out. His automatic pistol and the World War I revolver that once belonged to his father burst through their holsters and hurtled into the dark beyond. The ammunition in his pockets pierced through his fatigues, raining onto the fields of France as though warning the enemy that the 82nd was on its way. Norton was still unconscious when he tumbled to the ground in a heap, the folds of his chute surrounding him like a blanket of snow. About ten minutes elapsed until slowly he came to. He looked around, shook off his daze and surveyed the damages. No broken bones. He counted himself lucky that he had not been pierced by a “Rommel asparagus,” one of the hundreds of thousands of spikes installed in possible Allied drop zones by German Field Marshal Rommel; if the spikes didn’t nab a jumper, the barbed wire connecting them easily could. Norton knew he was off target, like so many other paratroopers who had scattered over a fifty-mile line from east to west. His first thoughts were that he needed to connect with others in his stick—the group with whom he’d jumped—but they were scattered about in the dark. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a toy metal clicker that made a noise like a cricket. After clicking it, he waited to hear if any paratroopers within earshot heard him and clicked back. Hearing nothing, he moved cautiously about ten yards and clicked again. Silence. He repeated this several times before he heard the magic sound. Click. He had connected. He and another paratrooper sounded their way toward each other and then advanced together. Moving undetected by the Germans in this manner, they soon assembled a group of about twelve troopers. The group slinked among the shadows till they spotted some farmers toiling in the predawn hours. Once Norton was certain they were locals, he put his French lessons from...