The Inception of the Pathfinders: LTG John Norton

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Private First Class Robert Earl Sechrist. Sechrist served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper and pathfinder during World War II. As a Pathfinder, Secrist was one of the first men to parachute into France before the invasion of Normandy, tasked with guiding other Paratroopers to their landing zone.

LTC John Norton:

Well, I'm John Norton. I retired from the US Army as a Lieutenant General, Airborne Infantry in 1975. I served in many different units, but during World War II, I spent five years doing an after the war with the 82nd Airborne Division. And within that division, I commanded a rifle company, H Company, Third Battalion 505. Then I was executive officer of the second battalion for Sicily, and then I was a regimental operations officer for the jump in Italy and for the Normandy operation. And in Holland, I was promoted to General Gavin's Division G-3, and became a lieutenant colonel for that operation and the Bulge and crossing the Elbe, going into Berlin, Victory Parade. Then after the war, I commanded the 505 parachute entry regiment and the 325.

Later in my career, many times, many hours, days later, I commanded the first Air Cavalry division in Vietnam in '66-'67.

Well, back in April of 1943... I'm sorry, it was March, I know exactly March of '43, General Gavin decided he'd had to prove beyond doubt. The question that General Marshall wanted to know: "Can we marshal this large number aircraft and fly at low altitude and drop our troops behind the enemy lines in a control pattern where they can fight?" So General Gavin at Camden, South Carolina as a regimental commander in March of 1943, he made the first mass parachute jump in the history of our army. While they were perfecting all the details of the formations, the V of V's, the para-racks that were loaded under the bellies of the aircraft, the machine gun, mortar, and larger loads, they weren't jumped out of the door. They were dropped in para-racks like bomb bays.

In the excitement of getting all this done before we went overseas, we didn't have all the answers for what happens if an airplane loses its flying speed. So in one of these V of V's, if you can visualize a bunch of ducks flying, the inside airplane or one of the formations lost an engine. It was critically loaded with its payload. And the pilot knew he couldn't go down because there were chutes ahead of him. He couldn't fly through them. So he tried to horse back on the stick and get the airplane out of the formation. But unfortunately, it didn't have enough flying speed, and it fell through this formation. It picked up chutes on the wings and the tail. And I don't know exactly, but I'd say we probably had about five, six or seven men that were killed, and quite a few who barely got out of the airplane that was in trouble. So that was a real wake-up what would happen if that happened?

The jump in Sicily was the first US combat nighttime regimental combat team operation. This was Gavin's dream, infantry, artillery, any tank, combat engineers, all supporting arms, which was a big jump ahead of what the Germans or the Japanese had ever done. So this was our big test. And everything went well, the briefings, the training, the so-called team work with the troop carrier command, the IX Troop Carrier Command. But the [inaudible] the miscalculations on the ground, some of our own, you might say friendly fire, shot down some of our airplanes the second night.

We were in three aircraft, and I was in the third airplane. I was sort of the junior jump master. But I remember taking off at twilight from that airfield, I believe, it was Agrigento in southern Sicily. And I knew that we had to get in ahead of the main body or else we're going to lose the regiment. We flew very low over the landscape. I remember flying around Mount Etna. It was something like a daydream looking down over Mount Etna, and we skirted around the right side of Mount Etna over the Straits of Messina.

And we were just off the water, I would say maybe 500 feet. And German fighter aircraft, you can see them buzzing in and out of the airspace ahead of us. You could see flak coming up over the beach at Salerno, and that's where the heavy fighting was taking place. And so, as we lumbered along, going about I guess 140 miles an hour, the uncertainty of whether the airplanes were going to turn off the line of direction along the coast and go inland and look down and see that volcano valley. There's a big frog in my throat. But it's the three planes turned on the red lights, stand up and hook up. I'm standing in the door. I see us go over that little silver beach at Salerno, and I'd say within about four to five minutes, the green light came on. And sure enough, below us on the ground were some big sand gasoline cans that had been lighted. And to see those sort of lighting up as we went out of the door, and I knew we'd made it. Yeah, the equipment landed perfectly. Radars were online.

Now, there's a peculiar part about this jump. The first battalion came in on time. They all had a time scheduled to arrive over the drop zone, but the last two battalion combat teams were obviously off course. And they later reported as my after-action report says, they picked up the signal and made a correction. And the two flights of about 45 aircraft each crossed over that drop zone almost at the same time. So, if the chutes had been dropped earlier for one flight and the other one had come in low, we'd have had the same catastrophe we had in training, but fortunately, they were the proper interval and all two battalions landed on a drop zone.

So it was not an enemy-resistant landing, except as we flew in, we had to avoid the German fighters, we had to avoid the German flak, and we had to land right in that little volcano valley. I mean, you're talking like jumping in a barrel. It was a very small drop zone.

Well, we arrived on the Sicilian coastline right after midnight in a quarter moon thinking we were on target. By that time I was a battalion exec, as I said earlier, and all of a sudden the airplanes that are right on the water pop up over the landscape, and most of us figured we were jumping at about maybe 150 to 200 feet, going very fast and scattered us all over that landscape. So we had people spread out all over the place, trying to get organized and going up against the best German Hermann Goring division tanks.

So it was a very, I might say, frightening moment that we weren't going to be able to carry out our mission. So we had a lot of people, you might say, on their own fighting in small units, but when they came together, they won the battles against the German tanks. They protected the landings of the 45th division and the first infantry division coming across the beaches. That was our big contribution.

But all these things together told us that we had to find a more certain way of getting our troops on the ground at the right time at the right place. And then we found out the British had the homing equipment, that generated a lot of thought. And in a very hasty fashion, when we jumped in Italy, the second nighttime airborne operation, we just rapidly trained with this equipment and used it for a very accurate jump in a very small volcanic valley near Salerno.

Well, we wanted if we were going to have any more airborne operations. This was the best we could do. It looked like it might be a lost cause. So we immediately latched onto this British homing equipment. We got together with the troop carrier pilots, their top guys, and we figured out if we got in the radar equipment with a small group of guys early on, they could bring in the rest of the troops. You're talking about a regimental drop combat team of 145 C-47 flying right off the deck looking for a place to drop. And you can imagine they've got to be on target. And you have to land together infantry, artillery, anti-tank, and engineers in order to take care, you might say the worst the enemy can throw at you.

Well, this was above my head. All I know is that as a young officer down at the battalion level, I was told to report to the vision headquarters and General Ridgway and then General Gavin said, "We're going to use this new equipment. Get the guys together. Let's figure out how to do it." So we did a little bit of training on the island of Sicily before we went into Italy. And we knew just enough on how to get the equipment set up and get it turned on. And we were sort of relied on the good lord, I guess, to make sure it worked.

Well, the radar on the ground dropped in early with a small select group of guys, some of them are technicians, some of them are security. It sends out a beam. Depending on the terrain and the altitude of the approaching, you might say, a mode of aircraft, they can probably pick up a signal which gives them direction and distance to the target out to maybe 20 to 30 miles. And so, as soon as the lead airplane carrying the companion equipment called the Rebecca, as soon as it gets the blip, no matter where they are on the landscape, they're mainly holding on that signal.

Well, I guess the division commander General Ridgway said to Colonel Gavin and Colonel Tucker, the 504, "We're waiting to get orders to go into Italy, but you've got about one week to take this British equipment at this airfield," where we were then, you might say spread out at Agrigento, I believe it was, "You've got a week's time to figure out how to use this equipment." So we had reach down and get the lieutenants and the sergeants, really all volunteers, who wanted to take on this new mission. And we did. We went out in the local area and we made some drops with the equipment. Now, first thing we found out you got to carry about a 45-pound load of radar equipment on your body. And since you're already say weighing about 170 with your own body and with your parachutes and your other equipment, you've got another 100 pounds, that's 270, and when you add this radar equipment, you could break your leg just landing. So we had to make a special bag, carry the radar equipment so you could let the bag down after you shoot open, you see, and it would hit the ground first and then you would come down on top of it. So we had all these little details to work out. Absolutely. And the amazing thing was that the troop carrier pilots. For the first time, they felt comfortable, that they weren't only going to sacrifice themselves to go in at low altitude over enemy flak, but now they had a chance to be sure they delivered us properly. You could imagine how they felt at the Sicily operation, going home, knowing they'd dropped guys all over the place who didn't have a very good chance to carry out their mission.

Well, I didn't go in the first night, the night of the 12th, but some of the officers that went on with that first night came back as observers. And we knew right away from their observations that that pathfinder team of the 504 were dropped exactly in the middle of this volcanic valley called the Saale River Valley. And they homed in on it and every one of those battalions of the 504 landed smack on the target. So we were reassured. And the second night, the night that I went in with Colonel Gavin, we repeated the same performance. Every battalion. Some of them would've gone off on the wrong direction, but as soon as they picked up the signal, they corrected their courses and came right over the drop zone.

We had two sets of equipment, but always as a backup. Now the typical formation that we used in Italy, as it contained in my report, three airplanes. Each airplane had a senior officer, you might say the as the jump master and behind him came the guy with a leg pack with a radar, and behind him came the guy with some lights, and with him also came a security team. So we actually had three plane loads of people to do the job, but always a backup radar, backup lights.

We had a lot of heavy fighting in Italy towards the end of October. We liberated Naples and we attacked north up to the Volturno River, and General Ridgway knew that we had to do more than just have a quick fix. So the order came down, and I was appointed to head up a team of a number of officers and noncoms to work with the troop carrier. We were pulled out of the line. We were flown back to an airport in Sicily called Comiso; it's been carefully reconnoitered, and we were given 30 days. The Army team and the Air Corps troop carrier team, we were given 30 days to get answers to the following questions: what would be the best tactic? What would be the best scheme, if you will, of putting pathfinders on the ground with equipment? Should they go in 10 minutes early, 30 minutes early, 60 minutes early? We calculated in the answer to that question by our experiment that we knew the airplanes were going to be flying at about 90 miles an hour over the drop zone. And we figured that at a proper altitude, they would pick up our signal at a given distance, and that turned out to be 30 minutes. So we wanted to be set up 30 minutes ahead of the main body coming in. Then, were we going to jump out of airplanes only or were we all going to jump out of airplanes towing gliders? In other words, how are you going to get the maximum number of people on the ground? So we experimented jumping out of airplanes at all altitudes, jumping out of gliders, being towed, tugs, and we also had to practice everything you can do with a glider: landing on a road, landing at nighttime, landing from different altitudes.

The final product was the complete doctrine for the Army and the Air Corps to put the pathfinders on the ground with certain kinds of equipment, sending out certain signals, and you might say SOPs in case anything went wrong. But I think the final doctrine was about an inch thick.

Well, I'm no longer with the pathfinders in Normandy, so I'll give you this as a, you might say, after-action report. For Normandy, I'm a regimental S-3, but I'm very much aware of my pathfinder buddies and their operations. They were highly trained, highly organized, and the best men we had in the regiment. All the equipment was up to speed, everything was perfectly arranged. As you recall now from the history reports, a little bit like Sicily as the 82nd Airborne and the 101st approached that Normandy shoreline, as soon as they got above, you might say the water and above the cliffs. Huge, huge clouds. Big bank of clouds. So different pilots reacted different ways. The flak was mixed in with the clouds. There was a lot of, you might say, threats to the aircraft.

The 505 pilots carrying the pathfinders held their course, took their risk in the clouds running into each other, and they homed in on their drop zone, which was drop zone as I recall, drop zone O. And those pathfinders landed right on the target and brought in the regiment. We'd call that almost a 95% performance. The 507 and the 508 who were new to war, new to combat, they had the same equivalent pathfinder teams, but they were scattered. Those teams were scattered. They didn't land on the drop zone. Some of them didn't recover their equipment. And the net result of the weather and the flak and the scattered pathfinders, those two regiments had very, very poor drops and never did really get completely organized.

The units in the 507 and 508 reported that when they were sure they were in the wrong place or they weren't sure they were in the right place, they did not turn on their equipment. No. And whether that was a bad call or not, you can only judge where they were and where the enemy was. But yeah, usually if you're in the wrong place, you don't turn on your equipment.

I think by and large, the requirement for volunteers who want to go in first with this equipment, cause you start counting noses on who's going in with you and what your chances are of surviving? These guys, they don't have any supporting artillery. They don't have any supporting any tank equipment. There's just a few infantry guys with some signal equipment who are going to have to survive long enough to set up this equipment and they can't engage the enemy. They got to do everything they can to avoid the enemy. So they can, you might say, slip by and get their equipment up.

I think they like to say, "I was dragooned into it. First Sergeant called me in and said, 'You're my next volunteer.'" But in the real world, no, I think they all took the challenge. And by the way, when they found out who their officers were, like Mike Chester and some others, I can name Bob Bales in our regiment. As soon as they found out which officers and non-cons were going, that was a big incentive.

Well, the pathfinder profile, I guess, you'd call them super paratroopers. All of our men had this extra zeal. We always like to tell a story. If you like to fly in an airplane at night and in low altitude, carrying a hundred pounds on your back, jumping in a strange place where you might land in the river on top of a building or in the trees and you would jump out at nighttime with everybody shooting at you, that's the basic requirement for being a good paratrooper.

The pathfinder guys also were picked because they had a lot of ingenuity. They were known to be men that could improvise. I guess you might call them mavericks. And they wanted that extra, you might say, excitement of going in first knowing that everything they did was going to condition, whether the regiment got in, whether the vision got in and whether we carried out the mission. So I guess you might say they were men who were super volunteers, but we also had to have guys that were very good with their brains and working equipment. You couldn't have any guys with big thumbs trying to set up that radar. So I can't really say much more than that they were highly selected and highly trained.

I would say it had greater risk. It had greater risk because you were going down, let's say this stick of 18 men that I tell you about, each plane had 18 men. Well, by the time they landed set up, they're not doing anything to protect themselves. They're only trying to get set up. If you drop as a member of a rifle company, you got a big pattern on the ground, there's a lot of security in a larger force. So I'd say this small select group going in, I wouldn't call it a suicidal mission, but I would call it super risk. Yeah, absolutely. If you asked them what they thought, yeah, they all said... They were probably more, what's the word, afraid... There was a higher fright factor going into Normandy because of the nature of the mission of invading Europe. But the pathfinder guys knew that many of them were not going to come back. A lot of them had already been in combat in Sicily and Italy, so they knew. Your number comes up, you see, sooner or later.

They were great team members. They all knew each other's jobs by and large. I don't remember any big disagreements within the group. All I know is a lot of competition as to who had the best team. Matter of fact, we had a lot of competition among the teams who could get down on the ground, who could get, might say a stick had to be rolled up, the stick had to be organized, equipment... At least to run test on who could get down first, get organized, assemble, and whose equipment was online first.

You will probably read in one of those tapes I gave you that the 505 parachute team in Normandy were on the ground and assemble and equipment was operating in 10 minutes. That's the kind of competition we had.

Well, if you think of the mechanics of how the pathfinders get in, which I haven't explored with you, this lead plane of the pathfinders, you didn't have any homing equipment. All they have is dead reckoning. So the troop carrier pilots, as I said in my report after the jump in Italy, the troop carrier pilots that had to put the pathfinders on the ground without any homing equipment, they had to be super navigators. And what most of them did, they'd go into a dark room for 24 hours before the jump and they would visualize the terrain they were going to fly over, just like they had, you might say, Hawkeyes. And they would memorize all the land features, like leaving the airfields in southern Italy, flying around Mount Etna, swooping down over the Messina Straits and following along the coastline towards Naples, and then knowing exactly where to turn in and find that volcano valley. They had that all imprinted on the back of their heads.

And the biggest risk was that those lead pilots that took the pathfinders in, would get their job done right. Everything depended on their dead reckoning. And we can name all those pilots and their skills, and most of them were top pilots, some of the airlines, most of them had been in combat. Joel Crouch I know was one of the top guys, and Bill Kirkpatrick is still around, he was one of those pilots. They were the cream of the crop. So the biggest risk really was in the navigation ability at nighttime of those pilots.

After the risk of whether or not the pilots were going to be able to navigate the pathfinders into their drop zones without homing equipment, once the pathfinders left the airplane, the next big risk was whether they were going to land in terrain like tall trees, much supposed to, but tall trees, building tops, or landing in a swamp. So their contact with a ground would really determine how well they could roll up the stick, assemble on the center of the pattern with their equipment. And then, would the equipment survive the drop? Because you're coming down like jumping off a fifteen-foot platform, and even though you release that radar equipment on that long or tethering line to keep from breaking your leg, it was hitting the ground at quite an impact. So it was carefully packed with all kind of absorbing material. Then you've got the chance, the problem of landing in the midst of enemy forces. And some of the troops in Normandy did that, couldn't get to their equipment. Some of them lost their equipment in the marsh, water. And then after you got assembled, you might say you had to hope the enemy didn't interrupt your operation before you contacted the incoming airplanes. There were a lot of iffies. Everything had to go just right.

We didn't have any room for fears. I'm telling you flat out, fear was off base. I know there was an inward concern of individuals who were maybe worried about their third combat jump, their time was running out. They knew that the Germans were all over the damn place in Normandy. I mean, just the fact that we were going in with one, think of this now, we had one combat experienced regiment of the six U.S. Airborne Regiments, and the three British Airborne Regiments, only the 505 had shaken down, found out who their combat leaders were. And we thought about the guys coming across the beach, three infantry divisions coming across the beach, only the big red one had had combat experience. The 29th division was green, the fourth was green. So as we looked at the calculated odds, who was going to be fighting whom, all we could see were the German professionals and all of the so-called new guys on the block going in on the U.S. side. No. If you want to get really stir it up, it looked like a bad match. But down at the troop level, squads, platoons, all they had was a positive, a real confident attitude. They could do anything. That was the key.

After you have so many exercises like we had down in Sicily, I can't tell you how many times we tried different ways of doing things, and finally it gelled. This one works. We had the men, we had the equipment, we had the practice, and we had the confidence. Yeah, I didn't have any, you might say, reservations at all. I did worry about the enemy reaction. I did worry about the terrain. I did worry about the weather. But after all, those are constant. Those are always going to be problems.

It is maybe seen as an overstatement, But if the pathfinders hadn't done their job in the 505 in Normandy and the 505 regimental combat team hadn't have seized and defended that critical land, you might say target area called Sainte-Mere-Eglise, stopping the Germans coming down from Schubert, flak wagons, tanks, you name it, 91st German division of the Germans coming from the west trying to get across the Merderet River, if the pathfinders hadn't have gotten to 505 RCT in and stopped the Germans, it might've been a different war. So yeah, they were the critical link. They were the critical link. Ridgway picked the 505 because of their combat experience to take the main objective in Normandy for his division. The 505 regimental combat team wouldn't have made it if the pathfinders hadn't put them on the drop zones. So yeah, they were the critical link.

The history of Holland is quite different from Normandy. We were going to go in much deeper. You are dropping across the English Channel just beyond the beaches, so you expect you to link up in, say, 24 hours, which is terribly important. In Holland, we're going to be 40 miles. I believe the 101st was about 15 to 20 miles across the lines of Wilhelmina Canal, we were 40 miles deep. The British were up at Arnhem, probably 60 miles. You can check this out. So we were going to be exposed a lot longer before the link-up could take place.

Now, because of the infusion of all these new pilots who didn't have much training, it was somehow decided at the highest level, this is going to be a daylight jump. They could navigate better with daylight visual observation of the terrain beneath the airline, the airplanes. Well, the pathfinders thought this was going to be their easiest jump. They were going to also make a good landing and they'd be more effective bringing in the airplanes behind them. Fortunately, most of that worked out as planned. But flying over the English Channel on Sunday afternoon and then crossing the Dutch-Belgian coastline, I remember there was one island called Overflakkee. What a name for a German position! And I mean, the flak really came up... We were only flying, I guess, at about 1500, 2000 feet just above the small arms range.

So we took a lot more flak going in. We arrived in perfect formation of the pathfinders from the 504, 505, and 508 on target, and all the drops were on target. So I might say it was an easier mission for the pathfinders. But when any aircraft, you might say, strayed off their course for one reason or another, engine trouble, enemy flak, or what have you, if it hadn't have been for that pathfinder equipment for them to guide in on their own, see individual aircraft, a lot of them probably wouldn't have made it.

We were more than fortunate. Our drop zones in Holland were defended, you might say, by only scattered German rear guard or rear area troops. It was only after we got on the ground that you might say brought in their major units against us. So the potential for the daylight drop and the hazards were high, but the actual results were not.

We had a lot of planned operations that go through the back of my head. I can't tell you how many different ways. I guess for every operation we carried out, we did four. I would say for every one, we probably planned three, four or five. We had a plan to jump on Berlin after Holland. And pathfinders were going to be really key getting into those areas because the condition of those airfields we had to jump on Tempelhof and Tegel, I've forgotten the other one. But we had three airfields that the pathfinders were going to have to get in early. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, we never had to make that jump.

Well, I felt challenged probably more than anything else that had happened to me in my time with the 82nd Airborne division. I was proud of being a rifle company commander. I was proud of being a Battalion Exec, the second Battalion. But when I realized that everything was going to depend on my ability to lead these young officers, the lieutenants and the sergeants, with this new highly technical equipment, I felt I had to say a prayer. And I did. I prayed about this. And I was very close to these men.

I actually came down with hepatitis B in the middle of the experiments down in Sicily, and I didn't know whether I was going to live or die for the time that I had the hepatitis. But I came away knowing that maybe the most important thing I'd done during the war was to find a solution for how we got our airborne troops on the ground with a chance of carrying out their mission. So I was very proud of that. And my airborne pathfinder buddies, some of which are living and some of which are not, they still carry that same pride, "We got the job done."

Well, it's awful easy to overstate the case, but I think history will record over and over again the critical link in air airborne operations as far as the 82nd division was concerned and I dare say the 101st as well. If the pathfinders got their job done and put us on target, we were able to get our missions accomplished.

They were like my brothers. We had a very tight relationship within the teams. And I guess I could say that I'm here to even talk about it because I have such great respect for what they did. They made a difference.

These guys, I guess, had a sense of mission. They had a sense of challenge. They had a sense of destiny. And no matter what happened, well, they lived or died, they were going to get the job done. And they lived up to their billing. They had the physical prowess. They had the mental, you might say, dexterities, that go with doing difficult jobs with equipment, particularly that radar equipment. But the confidence they had in each other, I guess, was the overriding factor. Hell of a team.

I like to sort of daydream sometimes that I'm back there with those same guys, and I can rattle off the names when I have to. Three or four of us still living out of that original group, but most of it passed on. I guess my bottom line, it's a real honor to represent them. It's a great honor. Because of what they stood for, what they meant to our nation, what they meant to our army. They were all special men.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant General John Norton.

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