First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Page B

the DZ without them.
    At least with regard to Lillyman, that would prove unnecessary. The entire group breathed a collective sigh of relief when he stepped out of the night with Tom Walton, having met up with him while following all the clicks and clacks. Walton and Council were T/5s, or technician fifth grades, trained at operating the Eureka beacon; with both men present, the group was at last entirely capable of readying a drop zone.
    Their big problem was timing. Or more precisely, the amount of time left to them. Lillyman had already determined that the Pathfinders wouldn’t be able to reach their assigned DZ before the flights came in, leaving him to present them with a simple contingency plan: namely to get as close to the original location as possible in the minutes they had left and find a field large enough for the 502nd to use as an alternate landing spot. The members of the stick—and security detail—who were still missing when they headed out would hopefully follow in that same direction and catch up to them.
    As for Lieutenant Dickson and his men: The S-2s hadn’t been seen by anyone since before the jump, but they’d also been last to exit the transport, meaning they would have landed farthest from the troopers closest the door. More important—if cold-blooded—was the realization that their classified mission had nothing to do with preparing the DZ. Wherever Dickson’s party had come down, the bottom line was that they were on their own.
    Finished with his huddle, Lillyman gave the men a brisk order to move out, Jones slipping an arm under Snuffy Smith’s shoulder to help him along, another member of the group relieving the medic of his Eureka. It was obvious to all of them that he was barely able to stand up on his own, let alone carry the weighty instrument.
    Their course of action set, the Pathfinders hastened northeast across the fields, looking for a suitable place to lay out their beacons.
    16.
    About six weeks before the invasion, in mid-May, the U.S. military’s G2 Intelligence Corps had begun noticing tiny black specks on their aerial surveillance photos of projected drop zones across the Cotentin Peninsula. The number of specks multiplied daily and were soon identified as vertical wooden poles spaced between seventy-five and a hundred yards apart, with cables strung between them in a way that they could shred alighting Allied gliders to pieces and kill or maim descending paratroopers on landfall. Fabricated out of logs and railroad ties, they would become known as “Rommel’s asparagus” after the German field marshal who’d masterminded the Atlantic defenses and ordered them planted in the ground like the vegetables they resembled. Spied among them outside the farming hamlet of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville were two buildups of casemented 105mm howitzers, and parking bays for military vehicles—including heavy armor.
    The poles were so numerous and easily replaceable that little could be done about them. But the heavy guns were another story. They presented a grave threat to the ships bringing men and supplies ashore on Utah Beach, making them prime targets of the 502nd PIR’s airborne troops. In fact, regimental HQ was convinced that “the fate of the northern half of the operation could have turned” on whether the coastal batteries were taken out before the arrival of the amphibious assault waves.
    Destroying the batteries would be a challenge for two main reasons, however: The Allies were unfamiliar with the local roads leading up to them, and many of those roads had been deliberately flooded by the Germans to make them impassable.
    That was where Buck Dickson, his men, and their bags full of maps and top secret orders entered the picture. Contrary to what the Pathfinders might have jokingly asserted, the S-2s hadn’t only piggybacked Lieutenant Crouch’s transport to stoke their curiosity. Their top secret mission was