Combat Jump by Ed Ruggero

Author:Ed Ruggero [Ruggero, Ed]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786755295
Publisher: Ed Ruggero (Perseus)

11

LANDINGS

Major General Matt Ridgway, the commander of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, made the crossing from Africa on the Monrovia, Patton’s command ship, and came across the beach around seven-thirty on the morning of D-day. (Although criticized by some for not jumping, Ridgway was merely letting Gavin do his job without interference.) Ridgway and his aide, Don Faith, made their way to Major General Terry Allen’s First Division command post, which was just a couple of hundred yards off the beach, east of Gela.

Ridgway still had no word from any of his men. There were no messages waiting for him in Allen’s headquarters. No runners had been dispatched from the paratroopers’ objective area just inland from Gela; the radio waves were silent. As far as he could tell, the thirty-four-hundred-man combat team had flown off into the darkness and had disappeared. He set off from Allen’s CP, accompanied by a few GIs for security, to find his soldiers. Once he and his security escort pushed past the forwardmost outposts of the First Division, he was just like the other paratroopers on Sicily, wandering around in enemy territory with little idea of where he was going.

Finally, he found I Company’s command post, with Bill Follmer sitting under an olive tree, his broken ankle stretched out in front of him. Ridgway offered help, but Follmer said he’d wait for a medic. Then Ridgway asked the company commander if Follmer knew were the regiment might be, where any of the troopers might be. Follmer didn’t know.1

As Ridgway and his small band pushed inland, they came across individual troopers and small knots of men, who eagerly shared stories of the jump and told the general about bumping into enemy patrols or stumbling across pillboxes with alerted sentries. But they weren’t sure where their companies were, and none of them had any idea where Gavin was.

At about this time on July 10, Gavin was some sixteen or seventeen miles to the east, making his fitful way cross-country with his small band of men, on the hills southwest of Vittoria. Gavin had reluctantly decided that he was going to have to wait for nightfall if he was going to have any chance of reaching his objective alive. As he scouted the hillsides for a likely place to hole up, Gavin was no doubt thinking of Ridgway, waiting for word and looking for some sign of progress down near the distant beachhead.

Both men were conscious that there was more on the line than just this one battle. Ridgway and Gavin had staked their professional reputations on this bet that a large body of airborne troops could arrive on a battlefield with enough concentrated power to make a difference. As Matt Ridgway climbed the gentle rise of the plain that lay inland from Gela, and as Jim Gavin scoured hillsides above the sea for a place to hold out until dusk, these two men of action had to be content with waiting to see what unfolded in the coming hours.

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