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Belt 9 - Page 4

grenades and in addition, his rifle and musette bag. Wright lost both reels of wire.
The opening shot ripped two panels out of William Knutson's chute. He couldn’t get
at the release handle of the reserve chute and he came down very hard breaking his
pelvis. Try jumping out of a plane traveling at 150 miles an hour and see what
the blast of air does to your body and any gear attached to it. The more signifi-
cant, the planes broke their neat type formation. That did it. Instead of land-
ing close togeter, 1st Company, platoons and squads were scattered far and wide.
John Taylor's squad of the 2nd Platoon landed seven miles apart. They dropped every-
where -- in town squares, ditches, trees, water, on roads, church steeples, wagon
trains, railroad tracks, buildings -- everywhere but where they were supposed to
land. Yochum landed on a lonely road. "God, what a feeling being alone there with
all those hedgerows around. I could see men dropping out of planes. It seemed like
machine gun fire was hitting every one of them. I said to myself, "Poor sons-of-
bitches." Richard Buchter and Erland Hale fell in trees near Ste. Mere Eglise.
They were cut into two by machine gun fire. Here the Jerrys had a house ablaze
the better to see dropping paratroopers. Bob Hoge, who lands in the ditch legs up
in the air with machine guns spitting only fifteen yards away -- he mumbled to
himself, "You silly son-of-a-bitch, you ought to die." Lieutenant Tuck lit on
top of the schoolhouse in Ste. Mere Eglise hitting the chimney. He woke up hours
later a captive but escaped. Lieutenant Roge dropped in the public square, his
face and mouth bleeding badly after bullets struck him just ad he jumped out. Ste.
Mere Eglise provided after some fire. Here too was the place of that
tolling bell you could hear from mid-air. It was the airborne alarm and it sent
shivers through a man's spine -- so forbidding and weird did it sound on this dark,
fitful morning of June the 6th. Out of the entire 506th only Colonel Sink and his
staff landed where they planned to land. Not only that, he dropped within touching
distance of the little house which Colonel Sink had spotted from an aerial photograph