Jumping Into History - Harold Weisberg

[Pages:3]Men and equipment are dropped during a combat jump between Nice and Marseille in August, 1944. At right: Maj. Gen. James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division in 1944

Jumping Into History.

PARATROOPER The Life of Gen. James M. Gavin , By T. Michael Booth and Duncan Spencer Simon & Schuster. 494 pp. $27.50 PARACHUTE INFANTRY An American Paratrooper's Memoir Of D-Day and the Fall Of the Third Reich By David Kenyon Webster Louisiana State University. 262 pp. $29.95 By Clay Blair

/ N THE EARLY hours of D-day, June 6, 1944, about 18,000 airborne troopers descended on German-occupied Normandy in darkness. Their mission was to seize bridges and causeways and generate chaos behind two of the four invasion beaches, Utah and Sword. Notwithstanding

poor drops and landings in the American zone, the men of the American 82nd and 101st divisions and those of the British 6th division performed brilliantly. Allied airborne forces became the stuff of instant legend, and their exploits in Normandy and elsewhere continue to generate books and films.

For the 50th anniversary of D-Day, this spring's lists offer two very different and noteworthy entries: a detailed biography of the airborne pioneer and superb front-line fighter, the late Gen. James M. Gavin, and the rediscovered war memoir of an enlisted trooper.

Like his airborne peers, Matthew B. Ridgway and Maxwell D. Taylor, "Slim Jim" Gavin was a prolific author. His World War

II memoir, On to Berlin, was a bestseller.

Among other works, Ridgway and Taylor blished autobiographies but Gavin died in

19 t p before he could finish his. This biog-

raphy by the Washington-based writer Duncan Spencer and paratrooper turned histo rian, T. Michael Booth draws on Gavin's incomplete autobiography and personal papers and diaries, which were opened to them by Gavin's widow. Thus it fills a gap, sort of.

Born out of wedlock in New York City to an Irish Immigrant and adopted by an unstable, uneducated coal-mining family in Mount. C.a.rm.e_l, Pa., Gavin c_o_vered a lot of

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Gavin obsessively sought the company of the Taylor biography, is incomplete; we'll writer when he enlisted in the parachute

other women. Many, many women, the au- have to wait for the definitive work.

infantry in 1943, Webster jumped into Nor-

thors imply--but provide few details.

A momentous turn in the lives of all three mandy and Holland with the 101st. In both

In the summer of 1941, Gavin volun- airborne generals occurred when Army campaigns, he was wounded but recovered

teered for the Army's parachute school, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall directed and returned to serve in E company until his

then just beginning. It was a move that put the first commander of the 82nd division, discharge in 1946. In the postwar years, he

him on the path to professional acclaim and Omar N. Bradley, to rescue a National was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily

public fame. Perfectly suited for this new Guard division which had bogged down in News and the Wall Street Journal and wrote

form of infantry, he was soon a bird colonel, training. In Booth-Spencer prose, this event ; a book about sharks, Myth and Maneater. In

commanding a parachute regiment in the is described in the following, inappropriately 1961, while shark-fishing in his 11-foot sail-

82nd Airborne Division. At that time, Major slangy language: "High command consid- ing dinghy off the Santa Monica coast, he

Gen. Matthew Ridgway commanded the ered him one of the army's top commandJ, disappeared. Saga magazine and the Satur-

division and Brigadier Gen. Max Taylor ers, so when the 28th Infantry Division be-,, day Evening Post published brief excerpts

commanded the division's artillery. In mid- gan having organizational problems the 1/4 of his war memoir, but 29 publishers turned

training the 82nd divided to become the army grabbed Bradley to straighten things it down.

cadre of the 101st Airborne Division, but out." Yikes!

$ Ambrose was right to urge publicatio of

Ridgway, Taylor and Gavin remained with There are other editorial problems. Pre- this almost-forgotten memoir. It is be uti-

the 82nd, where they became archrivals.

cise dates of Gavin's posts and service are fully written and perfectly evokes life and

The 82nd entered combat first in Sicily lacking. When introduced, not all the impor- battle in a parachute infantry corn ny.

and then Italy. Taylor left to command the tant people get full names and some are re- Webster's account of the night jump into

unbloodied 101st. Gavin, age 36, moved up ferred to later by nicknames. A fleeting im- Normandy is absolutely superb. He re ails

to become Ridgway's number two and a plication that Robert Oppenheimer might standing beside the plane that would ke

chief planner in London for airborne oper-, ations in the Normandy invasion. When

have been tiation, to

a "Communist" say the least.

demands

subst-an-

him to France: "I shiver and sweat at the same time. My head is shaved, my ce

Ridgway rose to command the XVII Air-. The failure todevelop more fully Gavin's darkened with charcoal, my jump suit m-

borne Corps, Gavin replaced him as com- Don Juanism before his second marriage is pregnated for gas. I am carrying over a hun-

mander of the 82nd. The rivalry between unfortunate. For example, the authors brief- dred pounds of equipment. I have two ban-

Ridgway, Taylor and Gavin intensified as ly describe what they call an "unusual" lunch doliers and three hand grenades for ten

each rose to higher responsibilities, all three' after the liberation of Paris. Lunching at the thousand Germans . . . " This book ranks

vying to be "Mr. Paratrooper" in the public: Ritz were: Ernest Hemingway; Heming- right up there with the 1951 classic, Those

mind, or so it seemed.

way's wife, war correspondent Martha Gell- Devils in Baggy Pants, written by another

In the hot and cold wars of the 1950s, horn; Hemingway's new mistress, Mary enlisted man (of the 504th regiment of the

Ridgway, Taylor and Gavin became the Welsh; Marlene Dietrich and Jim Gavin. 82nd division), Ross S. Carter, who died

leading lights of the U.S, Army. Each reb- ? ' While Mary Welsh sought Hemingway's `shortly after the war.

elled against the air-minded Eisenhower eye, Martha Gellhorn and Marlene Dietrich I was mystified by one aspect of the Web-

administration and its strategy of "massive sought Gavin, who had affairs with both wo- !ster memoir. The description of the Nor-

retaliation," which left the Army little to do men, the authors assert, while also sleeping mandy campaign (on the ground) ends

in the putative big war and ill-equipped for a with his English-driver. "Unusual" lunch in- abruptly after merely a day or so with no

brushfire war. All left public service in a d ed, but where is the rest of the story?

further explanations. Only later in the text

huff, and all wrote similar dissenting books.

did I discover that Webster was wounded

Taylor and Gavin returned to public service

OUPLE of years ago, Stephen early in the Normandy fighting and evacu-

in the Kennedy administration, Gavin as

E. Ambrose, the indefatigable lec- ated to a hospital in England. An account of

ambassador to France. The rivalry contin-

turer, military historian and biog- his first wound and evacuation should have

ued: Ridgway and Gavin opposed the war in

rapher, published Band of Broth- been included at the end of the Normandy

Vietnam; Taylor urged an ever greater ers, a combat chronicle from Normandy to section. At the end of the war, Webster and

commitment.

VE-Day of E company, 506th Regiment of a small group were the first Americans to

Booth and Spencer have done a workman- the 101st Airborne Division. One of Am- arrive at Berchtesgaden, where they com-

like job with the Gavin biography. They brose's sources was an unpublished memoir mandeered the contents of Hitler's wine

touch all the requisite bases in Gavin's per- and the letters of a wartime- sergeant in E cellar.

ssonal and professional life. hnportantly, they Company, David Kenyon Webster. Ambrose I join Ambrose in recommending this

develop the fascinating (and ultimately bit- = wrote an introduction to the Webster mem- book to anyone of any age with an interest

ter) Ridgway-Taylor-Gavin rivalry, which oir, Parachute Infantry, and Louisiana State in the exploits of the airborne forces and

Taylor's son, John M. Taylor, unwisely chose ' University Press has now published it.

ground combat in the European Theater of

:to ignore in his recent biography of his fa- A 21-year-old English literature major at Operations, as told by a truly.lifted nar-

ther. Nonetheless, the Gavin biography, like Harvard University who aspired to be a rator.,

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