First to Jump by Jerome Preisler Read Free Book Online Page A

infiltration. While all those men surviving a plunge from the sky could have been viewed as a happy miracle, the captain couldn’t have been faulted if he’d been suspicious of what he saw, or even felt it an impossible strain on his credibility. As a flotilla commander, he bore a grave responsibility for the safety of four warships and their crews. He needed to be cautious.
    But caution was only part of the matter for Jones. The rest was the simple nature of his mission. HMS
Tartar
was not a search-and-rescue ship. He’d received strict instructions to keep the ship on patrol, to stop for nothing unless it was to engage an enemy vessel. Under the circumstances, he would be justified in simply radioing a message to the fleet about the men in the water, thereby making them someone else’s problem. In fact, it would be a full-out violation of orders if he stopped to pick them up.
    But the drink was rough tonight, and freezing cold, and it looked as if more than a score of the men were desperately trying to hang on to a single lifeboat. What if no one came to pull them out? The Germans had threatened to shoot Allied paratroopers as spies, without regard for the Geneva accords. If they were indeed who they claimed to be—and this was, after all, the American invasion sector—the enemy might discover them in the water and pick them off like ducks in a pond.
    Captain Jones stirred all these factors together and then weighed them, searching his heart and conscience. Mindful that orders were orders, he could really do just one thing.
    Soberly, he gave his command. The decision hadn’t taken him long. Right or wrong, he would have to live with it.
    11.
    If the irony of Private Ray “Snuffy” Smith’s predicament even occurred to him, it would have been a fleeting awareness. Once down on enemy soil, the Pathfinders were to a man living in the moment, propelled from one to the next by the dual imperatives of their mission and basic survival. He would have had other things on his mind.
    But whatever he may or may not have thought about his mishap, it was a wicked turn of fate. He was the team’s medic. His job was to tend to their wounded. Yet he was the first in his unit to be injured, breaking his foot on landfall.
    Nicknamed after the popular cartoon character Snuffy Smith—a moonshining hillbilly who shared Ray’s deep Southern-Appalachian accent and boisterous personality—the twenty-year-old Kentuckian had joined the army four years earlier after quitting high school, then trained as a medical corpsman with the 4th Infantry at Fort Benning, Georgia, and been promoted to sergeant by the time he was seventeen. A natural as a medic, he’d been handpicked for the Medical Corps officer training program, only to be disqualified when his paperwork revealed he hadn’t gotten past the eighth grade. Stung and disappointed by the rejection, Smith had volunteered for paratrooper school, knowing full well it would mean getting bumped down to private. But the parachute pay was fifty dollars a month better than the average enlisted man’s wage, and, besides, he’d wanted in on the action.
    After he earned his wings, the Pathfinder units put out a call for medics, and Smith decided to respond. Why not put his training to use where it counted? It had seemed like the way to go.
    Carrying the Eureka unit and first-aid supplies tonight, Smith had been among the most overloaded troopers aboard the lead flight. It is no mystery, then, why he was one of the men to jump without the reserve parachute. But he didn’t blame his tree landing on the bulky combat load. To him, it was just a nasty fluke.
    There had been no problems during the jump. Before clearing the door of the plane, he had looked out and seen nothing but the horizon. There was no incoming flak, no tracer fire. Then he’d felt a push from behind and leaped into the night.
    The grove of apple trees had appeared