Sgt. SKY Jackson
My Part In The Invasion Of France
We left our base camp for the Marshalling area the latter part of May and were thoroughly briefed on our mission for long and tedious hours. Finally Sunday, June 4 we were notified that the mission had been postponed 24 hours due to bad weather. Monday June 5, General Eisenhower came around and wished us the best of luck and saw us off.
We were the spearhead of the whole show. It took a couple of hours to get the planes into formation and then when they all made their rendezvous we started off. The trip across the channel was smooth and uneventful. When we hit the coast of France we started getting our first bit of flak. About 5 miles inland it started getting pretty heavy, and tracer bullets were also flying at us.
We finally got the word to "hook up" and then it really started getting rough. The plane was bucking and lurching, and you could have almost gone out and walked on the stuff. The planes then broke formation, and how we ever missed getting hit, I don't know.
We finally got the word to jump. Boy ! I never was so glad to get out of a plane in my life. I had a perfect opening, and I was done on the ground so fast that I was not worried about flak or anything else. My chute tangled around a high tension wire, breaking my fall, which was a good thing as my ankle was still pretty weak from a previous injury.
I got out of my chute in record time and ran into 5 of our boys. we proceeded after the machinegun nests that were throwing the stuff at us. We knocked two out and then all hell broke loose. We had to get the hell out of there. A half hour later there were only two of us left, and we hid in a barn until daybreak.
We figured out on the map that we were 5 miles from our drop zone. We then went and looked for some of the rest of the men, which we finally joined up with about an hour later. We had assembled together a fairly sizable force at this time. We were harassed most of that morning by German Snipers but did not run into any large body of enemy until about 4 o'clock that afternoon.
Three of us went on a reconnaissance ahead and ran into an enemy patrol consisting of 28 men. We each had M-1 rifles, the best damn rifle in the world. We emptied clip after clip at them, killing 10 and capturing 18, 8 of whom were severely wounded. They were mostly kids of around 17, one of them could not have been older then 15. We then took them to our make-shift prisoner of war enclosure in an old monastery.
That night I got my first sleep in a Frenchman's house. The next two days consisted mostly of clearing out snipers and enemy strong points.
The fourth day we attacked the town of Carentan. There the Germans were really dug in, and they had been reinforced with their crack parachute regiments. After 30 hours of furious fighting through inundated areas we finally drove them out of town. In that drive I lost two of my best buddies, and for the first time I realized what hell war is. I have killed and I have seen dead Germans all over the place but to see your own buddies go kind of eats your insides out.
We took up a defensive position on the other side of town for several days. During this time I went on two patrols through the swamps and Boy are those swamps cold, crawling through on your belly. We did not get much sleep while in these defensive position as the Germans lobed mortars and 88's at us and our Command post. Luckily no one was ever hit.
We finally got relieved and moved towards Cherbourg to do mopping up of snipers and stragglers. We ate steak, drank wine and had plenty of cognac. The strain of war was off and it felt great ! We went to Cherbourg several times and went all through the fortress. It was like a miniature Gibraltar. The Germans could have held out indefinitely, but their morale was pretty low and they had no way of getting reinforcements. The Cherbourg Peninsula is probably one of the roughest pieces of land to fight on. It consists of nothing but small fields with deep gullies, hedgerows, and lots of flooded land.
We got word that we were going back to England. We crossed the Channel in a ITC Boat. The crossing was rougher then coming across the Atlantic. When we arrived in England we were greeted with bands who marched us to the railroad station. We got on the train and went back to our bases.
Written by Sky Jackson 1944