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Essay Twelve
My Talisman
In the Normandy invasion, the troops that came ashore in landing craft to storm
the beaches were not the first to arrive. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed
first, behind the beaches. They came arrived in two different ways: by parachute and by
glider.
The gliders were made of plywood, which was light in weight and cheap to
construct. Flimsy, too, it turned out. They were manufactured in Great Britain, and the
model used was called the "Horsa" after a leader of the Jutes, who spearheaded the
Anglo-Saxon invasion of England during the Dark Ages.
Gliders were towed by aircraft and released high over the target area, or drop
zone (DZ). Then the glider pilots tried to make a soft landing near the spot the troops in
the glider were supposed to assemble. This was a tricky job, because there was no engine
in the glider, and it could only glide. And until it landed, it was a slow, easy target for
anti-aircraft fire.
Landing was made even trickier by the fact that there aren't many good spots to
land in Normandy. Roads were about the only places long and straight enough for
runways, and they were mostly overhung by trees. I have told elsewhere about the tiny
fields surrounded by tree-high hedges. Furthermore, as a final gesture of inhospitality, the
Germans had planted the larger fields with heavy, sharp-pointed steel stakes.
A day or two before the invasion, all allied aircraft, including gliders, were
painted with broad black and white stripes on the wings and fuselage, so they would not
be mistaken for enemy planes and shot down by our own troops.
And that is why, when we landed, we saw fields full of shattered pieces of gaudy
black-and-white plywood, and why almost all the glider troops had broken bones.
So far as I know, this was the last time airborne troops used gliders. Jumping was
safer.
The paratroopers left evidence of their drop, too. Each man came down by aid of
a nylon parachute with a camouflage pattern in shades of green and brown. Pretty, in its
way. Items of equipment and supplies had their own parachutes, in bright solid colors.
Each type of cargo was identified by the color of the 'chute.
Since tens of thousands of men had jumped, and most of them had better things to
do than worry about policing up their parachutes, there were acres and acres of nylon
cloth all over and around the beachhead. I'm sure someone was charged with making an
organized effort to salvage the stuff for recycling, but a lot of it got picked up as
souvenirs.
Our battery barber had a big piece of it to spread over his customers to catch the
cut hairs. Most soldiers, however, were satisfied with smaller samples. I had a scrap of
my own, not a prepossessing one, since it was made up of two narrow strips set on a bias
to one another, with a heavy flat-felled seam holding them together.
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