While we were training in Northern Ireland, word got around they were looking for someone to go on a special secret mission. I volunteered. We knew it had something to do with the invasion ‹ that's all we knew. With the whole battalion, we wound up with 15 or 16 of us. We went across to England in February and worked with British engineers on radar, which was very new then ‹ very hush-hush. We were going to be pathfinders. Our mission was to learn how to operate this radar equipment and how to bring in the planes ‹ to set up a drop zone, a DZ. When the invasion took place, we would be the first ones to land. All this equipment would be used to bring the other airborne troops in ‹ because it was going to be done at night.
I was the chief radar operator. I had to send the signal to the plane so the plane would know where to drop on top of us. While we were in England, we must've made a dozen jumps getting ready so we could do everything blindfolded.
We were ready to board the planes on the 4th of June. They scrubbed the mission, said we're calling it off because of the weather.
We did go on the night of June 5. It was 11 o'clock at night. There were three planes. Three battalions ‹ each battalion had a pathfinder team. Each team was made up of about 15 men. Each plane had four BAR (Browning automatic rifle) men who had already fought in Sicily and Italy. We were green troops ‹ we had never had any combat experience ‹ so they were going to cover for us. When we hit the ground, they were supposed to set up their BAR's and protect us while we did our jobs.
We flew down off the coast of Cornwall and flew over the Channel right between the islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Thd Germans were holding those two islands. They were shooting up at us. Then as we approached the Normandy peninsula from the west coast, we got more fire, anti-aircraft fire, all the way.
The interesting thing is how we knew where to go because there was nobody on the ground to tell us where to jump. The British had developed a radio triangulation system. They had radio stations set up along the southern coast of England. By picking up these signals and getting the point where they crossed, that was how they were able to tell us where we should jump.
Just before we got the signal to jump, the door of the plane was open. I was in line to be the fourth man out of the plane. You figure there were about 14 men in back of me. Everything coming up ‹ it's been described as Roman candles ‹ that's what I thought, too. Then you begin to realize these are real bullets. My toes were curling in my boots. I was just waiting for those things to come up and go tearing through the fuselage and through my feet. We wanted to get out of that plane as fast as we could.
Finally we got the signal, and out we went. The fellow who jumped in front of me was Fayette O. Richardson. He was only about 20 years old. I was 24 at the time. I was one of the older men. Most of the fellows I jumped with were only 19 or 20. So Fayette O. Richardson was in front of me. I know all the way down, a lieutenant was in back of me, Lt. Gene Williams. And then at the end was Lt. Czapinski.
I had a very nice opening for my chute. But we weren't more than four or five hundred feet off the ground because my chute took just one or two oscillations and bang! I was on the ground. If you jump too high, it gives them too much time to shoot at you, so we had practiced to jump as low as we could. Fortunately our pilot was good ‹ he kept us low enough.
We landed right near a major highway, and the Germans were patrolling, going up and down. We were in a beautiful apple orchard. Nice soft landing.
My first reaction when I hit the ground, I was so grateful to be on the ground and still alive that, just like the pope kisses the ground, I literally kissed that French soil.
So right away, first thing is to get out of your harness, see where everyone is, get my equipment ‹ because I'm jumping with this radar set and all this other stuff. I had about 60 pounds of equipment on me.
One of our fellows was hanging up on a tree. He was very much disturbed because the tracer bullets were going through the air right next to him. We had to cut him down. He was very grateful to get out of that tree.
It wasn't up to me ‹ it was up to the lieutenant to round everybody up. Fayette O. Richardson and I, we did get together, and I already had my set and was testing it. I had to send out a code. Our drop zone was "N" — "D.Z.N." Now if you know anything about Morse Code, "N" is "da-dit." Very simple ‹ all you had to remember was "da-dit." I hoped they were getting the signal in the plane. But we had to wait an hour, and in the meantime we didn't know whether or not the mission could've been scrubbed. They could've called off the whole thing.
We arrived on the ground about 1:30 in the morning on D-Day. It was almost 2:30 when the first planes came over. We finally saw them starting to fall on top of us in parachutes. So we felt overjoyed. We knew we were going to have some help.
Now we were waiting for a second wave of planes, another battalion. But on the second wave, only a very few men jumped. The third wave never showed up. Meantime we were just sitting there and trying to gather our wits with the people who were with us already. Who's here and who isn't here?
It wasn't till an hour later when the other men jumped that I realized that only nine of us were on the field from the original stick of 18. The other nine we never saw again. The ones at the end ‹ Lt. Czapinski was killed; one of our good friends, Ralph Nicholdson, he was struck in the air and one of his land mines went off, and he was dead before he even hit the ground. Those of us who did get together after the third wave of planes never showed up, there weren't more than 200 men when there should've been 2,000.
We didn't know what had happened till days afterward. The main armada took off from England and followed the same path we did. By the time they hit the west coast of the Normandy peninsula, a fog bank had developed. When they hit the fog bank, they had to break formation so the planes wouldn't collide, and when they broke formation, they lost visual contact with the plane that had the Rebecca (the receiving unit for the pathfinders' radar) because only the lead planes in each flight had the Rebecca. They were the only ones who knew when they were over the drop zone. When they realized what had happened, some of the pilots panicked, some of the jumpmasters panicked ‹ they didn't know "when should we jump?" In fact, G Company, the company I would've jumped with if I hadn't been a pathfinder, they waited so long to jump that when they got the signal to jump they were behind the German gun emplacements at Utah Beach. If they'd been in the plane one minute longer, they would've ended up in the English Channel. They were one of the few companies in the airborne armada that night ‹ there were something like 24,000 paratroopers who jumped ‹ Americans, British, Canadians ‹ they were one of the few companies that didn't lose a single man on the j ump.
They had a ringside seat. They were watching our own Navy shell those gun emplacements. Luckily none of those shells came over and hit them. So they were watching the invasion take place when they should've been with us, eight miles away, to prevent the Germans from coming to reinforce the beaches.
The Germans knew we were on the ground. But they were totally confused because the paratroopers were landing everywhere. They didn't know where the main body of the airborne invasion was taking place. Not only were we confused, but we confused the Germans. They didn't know where to go.
Our regiment, the 508th, had two bridges ‹ one over the Merderet River, one over the Douve ‹ and we were to prevent any reinforcements. Our intelligence knew there were German Panzer divisions and tanks that would have to come in to reach the beaches. If we could stop them from crossing the bridges, that would give the men coming in on the morning of D-Day the chance to get off the beaches and start moving inland.
Fortunately, with 200 men, we were on the west side of the Merderet River. The others were on the east bank, towards the Channel, where the invasion was taking place ‹ they had to fight their way up to where we were on the river. By the time they got to the river, we were surrounded by Germans. But they kept on pushing the Germans towards us. And we were keeping the Germans from coming. So we were in sort of a pincers movement with the Germans being pushed by our own troops towards us from the rear ‹ and the Germans themselves had no one to stop them except the 200 men that were on Hill 30, which is right in between these two rivers where we held our position. And for three days, without ammunition, without food ‹ we lived on cheese from a cheese factory ‹ someone had to swim across the river to bring us cheese ‹ I thought I'd never want to eat another piece of cheese as long as I Iived ‹ we did perform our mission. I didn't think I was going to live through that Hill 30 experience. In fact, the military historians have credited the action we took on Hill 30 with preventing serious German attack on the beaches. The Germans never got across those two bridges.
(Francis Lamoureux "fought all the way through Normandy ‹ 33 days straight ‹ without a clothes change and without a scratch."
He was seriously wounded during the fighting in Holland which followed the jump on Nijmegen. But he was back with the 508th in time for the Battle of the Bulge and the eventual push into Germany that ended the war.
After the war, he became a school teacher and a leader in Ludlow civic and veterans affairs.)