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After barely escaping from their burning aircraft, two members of the 101st Airborne discovered that the only way back to their unit was up the towering cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc.
Just over half an hour after the Douglas C-47 took off from southwest England late on the evening of June 5, 1944, bound for the French Cotentin Peninsula, the light over the door to the cockpit went on, diffusing a dim red glow through the plane's interior. The flight engineer emerged from the cockpit, crouched beside Lieutenant Homer Johnson and muttered something in his ear. The engineer then opened the outside door, and fresh air rushed in, dissipating the thick blanket of cigarette smoke in the cabin. Dozens of other C-47s were dimly visible through the open door as Lieutenant Johnson stood up and shouted, "Stand up and hook up, stand by for equipment check." Seventeen keyed-up paratroopers of Company 1, 3rd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, clambered to their feet, hooked their static lines to the cable that ran the length of the cabin and prepared to jump into German-occupied Normandy.
Among the paratroopers were Private Leonard "Sam" Goodgal and Sergeant Raymond Crouch. The two men and their comrades had been confined to their marshaling area at Exeter, England, since May 27 to await the invasion of occupied Europe. To ensure tight security, the camp had been surrounded with barbed-wire fences and guarded by machine-gun-armed sentries in watchtowers that encircled the camp. Unable to leave, the men spent their idle time checking and rechecking their equipment and talking about what lay ahead. Few of them had ever been in combat before. "We just talked among ourselves and wondered what it would be like," Crouch recalled.
As it happened, there was little time for wondering. The troopers were issued live ammunition and grenades, invasion currency, escape maps, emergency rations and all the other equipment they would need in combat. "That's when we really knew that this was not just another exercise," remembered Goodgal. "They wouldn't have trusted us with all of that live ammunition if this had been a training operation."
Although the men had been training intensively since their arrival in England nine months earlier, few knew exactly where they would...