Combat Jump : The Young Men Who Led the Assault into Fortress Europe, July 1943

by Ruggero, Ed

• ISBN13: 9780060088750
• ISBN10: 0060088753
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-02
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

<p>The hair-raising, frontline account of the first American airborne invasion of World War II and of the young paratroopers who risked their lives for freedomBy 1943, the war in Europe had reached a turning point. General Dwight Eisenhower was given orders to invade Sicily and head north. To achieve this, Ike had a new weapon: U.S. paratroopers. Their mission was to seize the approaches to the invasion beaches and to hold off German attacks.</p><p><i>Combat Jump</i> tells the little-known story of these paratroopers and how they changed the American way of war. It takes readers on their journey from civilians to citizen soldiers, through training in the United States and later in North Africa, and then shows their daring jump into the darkness over enemy-held Sicily. </p><p>By first light on D-day, July 10, 1943, it looked as if the mission would fail. Inexperienced pilots, lost or blown off course, dropped 80 percent of the troopers from one to sixty-five miles from their targets. The American commander, James Gavin, landed so far from his objective that he was not even sure he was in Sicily. Arthur Gorham, commanding 500 men of the First Battalion, encountered two surprises when the sun came up. He and just over 100 of his men were the only GIs -- out of 3,400 dropped -- near their objective. He also discovered that the Germans on Sicily had tanks. The lightly armed paratroopers, with their rifles and hand grenades, were not equipped to take on the forty-ton panzers. But against all odds, they did. The costly lessons they learned shaped the war in Europe, for without Sicily, there might have been no airborne invasion of France in June 1944.</p><p><i>Combat Jump</i> recounts the extraordinary contributions these young men made when their country called them to war, and it tells a classic tale of military action and remarkable courage.</p>

Author Biography

Ed Ruggero is the author of Duty First: West Point and the Making of American Leaders, in addition to five novels about the military. He is an experienced keynote speaker on leadership and leadership development, and was an infantry officer in the United States Army for eleven years

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
In Theory	p. 7
From Every Corner of the Land	p. 30
The Oh-Five	p. 46
The All-Americans	p. 71
Two Steps Back	p. 93
The Hour Upon Them	p. 109
Dove Palermo? Dove Siracusa?	p. 127
Small Battles	p. 145
Wrong Place, Right Fight	p. 174
The Road to Gela	p. 188
Landings	p. 211
Mission First	p. 243
Seventy-Two Hours	p. 258
A New Mission	p. 280
Desperate Hours	p. 305
"It was a Good Fight"	p. 330
Epilogue	p. 340
Author's Note	p. 351
Casualty List	p. 355
Endnotes	p. 359
Works Cited	p. 369
Acknowledgments	p. 373
Index	p. 377
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Combat Jump
The Young Men Who Led the Assault into Fortress Europe, July 1943

Chapter One

In Theory

The United States Military Academy at West Point was a backwaterassignment in the winter of 1941. While the cadets studied theNapoleonic Wars and waited out the endless gray days in upstate NewYork, the Army was in an uproar. America's first peacetime draft hadbeen signed into law during the hot summer of 1940, though the termof enlistment for draftees and federalized National Guard troops wasoptimistically limited to one year. Although large segments of the publicstill hoped the war raging in Europe and Asia would pass Americaby, a million men were about to be inducted into the armed forces.Whatever happened in the diplomatic world, the nation was girdingfor war. For professional soldiers like Captain James M. Gavin, theonly prudent thing to do was to prepare.

Gavin was thirty-three years old that winter, tall and slender -- hisnickname was Slim Jim -- with movie-star looks and a passion for athletics.He was also one of the most junior officers assigned to theAcademy's Tactical Department. He didn't draw one of the plum assignmentsfor a "Tac," overseeing the military development of a companyof cadets, but his duties did include supervising the seniors whoran the cadet corps. Like other members of the Tactical Department,he spent time enforcing the mind-numbing minutiae of regulations: inspecting how cadets folded their clothes, polished their shoes,cleaned their weapons and their rooms. Officers in the Tactical Departmentalso taught classes about the organization of the Army andthe role of the junior officer. Major Johnny Waters even instructedcadets on the proper table etiquette an officer and a gentlemanneeded to know. Waters was aided in this by his wife, Bee, who washerself the daughter of a not-yet-famous West Pointer named GeorgePatton.

Though classes on the Army supply system were necessary, theywere hardly inspiring, for instructors or cadets. Fortunately, the departmentwas also responsible for teaching tactics: how small elementsactually battled the enemy, the artistry of fire and maneuver, the use ofartillery and machine guns and tanks to overwhelm an enemy positionor defend a hilltop, all the things the cadets, as future combat leaders,had to master. Jim Gavin shone as a teacher, and the cadets could seethe fire in the young infantry officer as he coached them on the technicalside of their new profession. Like all good teachers, Gavin wasn'tsatisfied with simply covering the curriculum; he expanded his students'horizons to an in-depth study of modern war. He wanted thecadets to see the bigger picture.

In his classes, often conducted in the high-ceiling rooms above themess hall, where the cadets learned to draw engineering diagrams ofbridges, roads, and machinery, Gavin took the cadets on a world tour ofmodern military organizations. Together they dissected the GermanWehrmacht -- at that point the world's most formidable and successfularmy -- studying how it was built and how it fought. The young captainand his younger charges discussed how the Germans blended tanksand low-flying attack aircraft with their maneuver formations, how theycoordinated all the arms -- artillery, air power, armor, and infantry -- tobring the greatest amount of force to bear on the critical spot on thebattlefield. The cadets began to understand that war, particularly sincethe introduction of the internal combustion engine and all that did for speed, required a complex set of skills. It was more than a matter oftraining individual soldiers and pointing them toward an enemy (whichhad proved so disastrous in the trenches of World War I). The moderncommander had to choreograph air and sea power, had to communicateover vast distances to put his units at the exact right place at theexact right time, with the right arms and the will to use them. He hadto master new techniques: faster artillery, motorized formations, morelethal weapons. He had to understand his enemy, and that understandinghad to go beyond organization, tactics, and weapons. It had toinclude the social system that put enemy soldiers on the battlefield, allthe cultural and political factors that made men fight.

Gavin was soft-spoken for a soldier, but he made the war headlinescome alive, and in his teaching there was always an undercurrent,that this was knowledge the West Point class of 1941 would soonput to use. The lessons on how small units fought were often conductedover sand tables, large flat boxes filled with dirt the instructorused to shape hills and valleys, like museum dioramas. (Although theorganizations varied depending on the mission, the basic element inthe infantry was a squad of ten or eleven men, led by a sergeant. Threeto four squads made up a platoon, led by a lieutenant, and three orfour platoons made up a company, commanded by a first lieutenant orcaptain. West Point cadets who went into the infantry could expect tobecome platoon leaders.)

Gavin would brief the cadets on situations they might face as platoonleaders. While these lessons were designed to help cadets seeand understand how to employ soldiers, they had another use as well.Gavin and other instructors added elements to drive home the pointthat warfare, especially the up-close kind of fighting they would see asjunior officers, was often a confusing mix of incomplete information,rapidly shifting priorities, and the highest stakes imaginable.

Most important, Gavin wanted his cadets to think -- not just spitback programmed responses to questions about military history or tactics. Although he didn't invent it, the technique he used would becomethe norm in all the forces Gavin would command: he pushed decision-making down to the level where decisions would actually bemade, to the junior leaders on the ground ...

Combat Jump
The Young Men Who Led the Assault into Fortress Europe, July 1943. Copyright © by Ed Ruggero. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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