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by William Gritzbaugh
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The large Mercedes coach came to a stop at an intersection in the tiny village of Colleville-sur-Mer. I left my seat next to my somewhat anxious spouse and walked quickly towards the front exit door. A twitter erupted among the other tour members as to why the stop, where’s he going, etc., but the door quickly closed behind me, and there I was, alone on a cold, damp December streetcorner in Normandy. Thankfully, my ride pulled up a few minutes later, “Bayeux Cab” emblazoned on its side. I climbed in and said, “Bonjour, monsieur”, and, nearly exhausting my high school French, “Hiesville, si vous plait.” The Moroccan driver didn’t balk at my seventy-mile round trip, but cranked up his meter and headed back towards the N-13 coastal highway. Thus began my mission of pilgrimage, tribute and tying-of-historical-loose-ends in the story of my dad PFC Ed Gritzbaugh, Signal Company, 101st Airborne Division.
Cruising along the highway, I noticed the countryside looked much as it must have during the war. Soggy hedgerow lined fields, dirt lanes crisscrossing, occasional small wood frame farm buildings, and church steeples in the distance all gave this section of Normandy a timeless aura. That a huge area of the lower Cotentin Peninsula is now a “Parc Naturel” will keep it that way. But seventy-five years ago this picturesque countryside proved deadly for hundreds of American paratroopers.
Imagine being a teenage or twenty-something American soldier, sitting on a wood frame bench along the interior plywood fuselage of a glider being towed across the English Channel. It’s D Day, June 6, 1944. Your M-1, M-1 Carbine, or Thompson submachine gun is butt-down between your legs on the deck of the pitching craft.
I’ve imagined it many times because my dad was on this glider.
The destination is “Landing Zone (LZ) E”, an area of hedgerow-bordered farm fields near Hiesville, in Normandy, directly inland from Utah Beach. The glider is at the end of a tow rope attached to a C-47 transport plane, and the propwash from the plane and the weather makes the ride for those inside a roller coaster on steroids. They will endure this discomfort for over two hours from their departure airfield, Aldermaston, forty-six miles west of London. There is a pilot, copilot and most likely ten soldiers, five on each side at the aircraft’s front section, and a Jeep with an equipment-packed trailer strapped down at the rear.
The glider is assigned to Mission “Keokuk,” the third of three phases of the D-Day invasion assignment of the 101st Airborne Division. The first was Mission “Albany,” the midnight parachute drop of three infantry regiments. The second, at 4 AM via fifty-two CG-4A Waco gliders, was Mission “Chicago” bringing in Infantry reinforcements, light artillery, anti-aircraft, jeeps and the first signal and medical specialists. “Keokuk” consists of thirty-two Horsa gliders, and the troops are predominantly signal, medical and division headquarters staff personnel. It’s approaching 9 PM, and in a few minutes the glider will crash land in a field, killing many on board. My dad survived but suffered a severe concussion, broken ribs (four of which punctured a lung) internal bleeding, and severe body-wide impact trauma. He endured protracted physical and progressive cognitive issues from a traumatic brain injury for the remainder of his life.
My dad’s D-Day service was family lore that was cherished and revered, but, given that such history was unfathomable to us, no one asked for a more in-depth description of what he endured. The cliche of the old soldier who won’t speak of his experiences is more often a function of the ignorance of the inquirer than it is the vet’s reluctance to talk. In 1969, he and a few other local vets were interviewed by the Evansville Courier for the 25th anniversary of D- Day. In his interview he mentioned what he’d heard from other wounded vets while recovering in the hospital in England, that his glider had been hit by German ground fire and subsequently collided with either trees or possibly telephone poles erected by the Germans, ‘Rommel’s Asparagus,’ at likely landing sites. Only recently did I acquire a copy of his hospital record stating his injuries as caused by, “Crash, result of enemy gunfire.”
When my own military service ended following a tour in Vietnam, my dad and I had many conversations about our Army days. My experience made it far easier to imagine what he went through and ask more insightful questions. While he could offer some elaboration, he seemed unable to recall a lot. Quite often he’d shake his head in frustration and say, “I just can’t remember” this or that item and, looking back, I believe this was the first evidence of the TBI dementia that would progress until his death in 1990, at age seventy-six.
However, one detail he did provide would be quite profound as respects his personal D-Day story, but I wouldn’t realize it for many years. One evening at the end of a family holiday dinner, we talked about the glider in use by US forces, the CG-4A “Waco.” He mentioned the numerous hair-raising training flights, including a few that were “familiarization” events for division paratroopers. He chuckled as he recalled being told by those guys that they’d much rather jump than ride down in those “plywood coffins.” Having myself done a night jump from a C-47 over a peaceful Fort Bragg, NC, their preference to jump rather than ride spoke volumes about the bad reputation of glider operations. But a question about his crash on June 6 that I assumed was in a Waco glider brought a surprise answer: “We were in Horsas”, he said. It seemed they’d trained extensively in the Waco, but on D-Day they rode in a British-built craft twice as large as the Waco and in which they’d had less training.
Over the years I’d do internet searches of the 101st’s D-Day history, and those periodic reviews often provided new information. In 2019, my wife and I planned a river cruise from Paris down the Seine River, which included a coach tour to Omaha Beach and the Normandy American Cemetery above. In preparation for that trip, I started looking for any information I could dig up on glider crash sites, or anything else that might add to my dad’s story. A major find was that there was a memorial site at Hiesville marking the location of the original 101st Airborne field hospital established late on the 6th as Missions Chicago and Keokuk brought in the first medical units. I planned to visit that site regardless of the logistics involved, believing he must have been taken there after he was extracted from the wreckage.
Dad had been in the Signal Corps (we shared anecdotes about pole-climbing training we’d each had, mine being as a Mountain Bell telephone installer) and was attached to Division headquarters company. Numerous websites detailing the three missions showed no Signal personnel in Albany, but some in Chicago. Keokuk showed “Signal, Medic & Staff.” More digging eventually produced a major surprise: only CG-4A Wacos were used in Chicago, and only Horsas were used in Keokuk. My dad had said, “We were in Horsas.” Now there was almost no question – his Signal unit arrived in a Horsa also carrying medical and headquarters personnel, and their landing took place the evening of June 6. This was a daylight landing since, during the war, England was on extended “Double Summertime” time, thus 9 PM would be followed by two more hours of daylight. I wondered why he’d never mentioned the time frame of his landing. Had he considered it irrelevant given that D-Day was a “day” and the invasion was certainly not over at sunrise? Possibly he felt diminished by having arrived “late” in the day. I’ll never know, and certainly only care insofar as getting the most accurate extant history. More likely is that he actually could not recall or even suppressed that memory given the extent of his injuries.
He remembered the descent towards landing as being a steep-banked turn, then an extended glide. To his shock, the co-pilot suddenly exclaimed, “Where the hell are you going!” The panicked pilot answered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Then blackness. Many Keokuk gliders were fired on as they landed by Germans, who were in pitched battles with US paratroopers in the very fields they were now landing in. Planners, no doubt, believed that the LZs would be secure by then, and the cloak-of-darkness of the Albany and Chicago missions would be unnecessary. The crash impact sent the Jeep and trailer careening through the men on the forward jump seats. A “101st Signal Company” casualty list for the 6th shows four killed, twenty wounded/injured and eight missing/captured. Another statistical table shows total Keokuk “Landing casualties-Horsa” at 44 out of 157 total troops (in thirty-two gliders in total), with no differentiation between killed and wounded from crashes or German fire. No doubt, some of the Signal and Medical/Staff KIAs were on my dad’s Horsa.
After the crash, as he faded in and out of consciousness, he was aware of being in the wreckage and hearing a voice say, “Don’t bother with him. He’s dead.” Then, he recalled being on a litter carried, incredibly, by German soldiers taken prisoner earlier in the day, and a memory, after much time had passed, of laying on another litter on Utah Beach as German planes bombed and strafed. “I wet my pants,” he laughed. Eventually his group of casualties was loaded on an LST and taken back to England.
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The language skills of my North African driver added to my angst about the cost of the trip, and I watched the meter ticking until I calculated a hundred Euros worst case. Hiesville was a charming rural crossroads, but the driver’s GPS failed to pinpoint the memorial and he was all for a quick round trip. Luckily, on one pass through the village an expensive Mercedes sedan cruised by us and pulled into the courtyard of a stately chateau with ornate stone gateposts. I had the driver pull over and I waved at the French gentleman who was getting out of the sedan. “Pardon monsieur, ou et l’hopital des Americans?” He smiled and said in accented English, “Go back through the village, take the first left and follow the road about a quarter mile.” I saluted and off we went.
The memorial, an eight-foot, flat-topped pillar on a dead-end farm lane, is rarely visited except for the annual D-Day pilgrimages. But it was beautiful in its simplicity, stating its purpose in English and French, the 101st patch above this narrative:
“In tribute to the 101st Airborne Division who established here at the
Chateau De Colombiere, the first allied surgical hospital on the Normandy soil on
June 6th 1944.”
Having been around battle casualties in Vietnam, I could visualize my dad lying on a litter with scores of other injured and wounded soldiers, the doctors and medics moving among them. Some would be in awful pain and desperate for attention, others wanting to be left alone, many unconscious from injury and/or morphine. I hoped my dad was in the latter category. Stepping off the road and into a bordering hedge row, I knelt and pressed my palms onto the soggy Normandy soil in a gesture of respect, reverence, and connection.
Then it was time to let my impatient driver take me back to the tour group and a visit to Omaha Beach. Rolling along the modern N-13 highway of the Cotentin Peninsula, it was unimaginable to visualize the thousands of soldiers running and firing along this coastal route, smoke billowing, tracers arching across the sky, casualties of both armies scattered around, parachutes hanging from trees and hedgerows, broken glider hulks in the fields.
Save for the concrete German pillboxes, wave-washed “Mulberry” breakwater sections, and the many museums and memorials, the Omaha and Utah invasion beaches show little evidence of the destruction and carnage of June 6, 1944. The areas of airborne operations further inland, around Saint Mere Eglise and Hiesville left even less. Those had a light footprint to begin with, and the rapid movement of the fighting away from the drop and landing zones left virtually no trace. Vacation homes and golf courses seem almost sacrilegious to the history-steeped visitor, although the Normandy American Cemetery, a short walk from Omaha is a stunning and vast tribute to over nine thousand American dead from the invasion through the Saint Lo breakout.
So, the fog of war has been lifted for our family, thanks to the internet data input of D-Day historians, government agencies, and countless groups and individuals with official or personal interest in its lore and minutiae. My dad’s been gone over thirty years, and the handful of living American veterans of June 6 won’t be with us much longer. That my own father had been part of that momentous event stuns me even now, and to have missed so many opportunities to hear his personal story while he was younger and clear-headed saddens me beyond words. But now his story is as complete as the written record allows, and the three subsequent generations of his bloodline are justly proud.
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William Gritzbaugh is a Vietnam veteran (draftee), currently retired, and volunteers with the Red Cross, VA Hospital, and USO. He has several nonfiction works published in As You Were: The Military Review and is the author of a novel, A Long Day to Denver.
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