Saints and Soldiers: Airborne Creed

14 JUNE 1944 0430 hours

Mile End, London, England

What the…? yelled a lean, athletic soldier as instinct sprang him off the couch. Alert and standing, he knew he had heard something but all was quiet now. Sergeant Antony Rossi immediately sat back down on the edge of his makeshift bed and quickly pulled on his olive drab issued trousers. From the bare light emanating from the bathroom, he could see wisps of plaster dust filling the room. Something shook his East London row house.

Reflex from years of military training had awakened him in the middle of a nightmare. He was grateful and wasn’t going back to sleep now. The room was quiet. He had been in England during the air raids earlier in the war and knew the high shrill of the auditory warnings. Tonight there was nothing but silence. Earthquake?

Rossi went to the window and looked up at the sky. From the courtyard in front of the red brick home, his silhouette looked like a trophy figurine awarded for track and field. His body took the form of a champion sprinter, slender but toned. His face was square, masculine and handsome but softened by deep brown eyes. The sides of his scalp, however, were as smooth and shiny as the oak floor on which he stood, bare except for a strip of close-cropped brown hair running along the middle of his skull.

Outside, Rossi saw nothing in the heavens but the waning moon and the glimmer of summer stars. Across the street, though, people began peering through their curtains and blinds. Obviously he wasn’t alone in his trepidation. He thought of Rachel upstairs. He hoped she was still sleeping due to the medication. Rossi pressed his palm against the glass pane. It still felt warm from the unusually hot June day. A beautiful night, he thought, if not for what experience made him fear.

The Allies had successfully completed the Normandy invasion the previous week and German retaliation was inevitable. Upon his return to Leicester, he was warned that there would be bombs over London. He hoped that wouldn’t be true. But he also knew that hope and truth were rarely the same.

He watched a woman pulling her nightgown tightly against her neck in the yard next door. He recognized Mrs. Dundee as well as the look of worry across her face. She was old enough to have lived through the first Great War and probably many wars before that. Her thinning gray hair and wrinkled skin told a story her words could not. She had known more bad times than good, more tragedy than triumph. She lost her father, first husband and more sons, brothers and uncles than the rest of the neighborhood combined in one war or another. And recently she lost her second husband to cancer. Rossi was convinced that Mrs. Dundee no longer hoped for things to be better. Rossi felt the same.

Sergeant Rossi had recently returned to England from Italy, where his battalion was currently stationed. He had joined the Airborne Division three years ago, had first arrived in England two years ago for additional training, and made his first jump later that fall on the sands of northern Africa. He spent the next eighteen months jumping across the Mediterranean and up the Italian coastline until they made it to Rome. Then, against his will, his CO made him come back to England.

He was an American first, jumper second and, unfortunately, a husband third. He loved Rachel, or at least he thought he had. But jumping out of a C-47 at drop heights up to 1000 feet and speeds more than 100 miles per hour was something spiritual, something beyond any connection he had to other human beings, including his wife. Rachel knew how he felt; women always seemed to know more than men wanted them to.

Still looking out the window, Rossi heard bees. Bees? In the middle of the night? What a strange sound, he thought.

Mrs. Dundee heard them, too. She raised her hand as if to swat them away, but she turned the motion into an awkward wave when she noticed Rossi staring at her from the window. Silence again. In the moonlight, her wave seemed to say goodbye, sad and hopeless. But before he could acknowledge her despondent communication, he saw two fireballs dropping from the sky. What was this? he thought as a flash of light exploded down the street with an unusual boom. These weren’t bees; they were bombs!

Rossi went deaf but his eyes captured everything. From down the street, bricks and tree limbs flew horizontally through the air. Shards of wood and glass ricocheted off the bricks and limbs. White light was followed by a yellow glow that quickly morphed into a red blaze. Echoes of the initial blast seemed to go on forever, bouncing back and forth off the tightly nestled row houses like it was knocking on their doors and announcing its entrance. The wood floor beneath his athletic frame rumbled. He braced himself against the warm windowpane.

Outside Mrs. Dundee stood firm, as if she existed in a different realm than the chaos exploding around her. The blast wind pulled her nightgown tight against her body. Her loose gray hair waved in slow motion past her face. Her feet didn’t move. She dropped her hands down to her sides as she continued to stare at Rossi. Fragments of fences, shrubs and homes shot past her like bullets, slicing and shredding her pale blue nightgown. She smiled. Odd, he thought. That was the first time he had seen her smile.

Across the street a family ran out of their house. That’s a mistake, he knew. It’ll be worse out there. But he understood their emotions. He knew how adrenaline boiled inside your arteries until it burst out the pores of your skin. He also knew how fear stiffened muscles until they felt like cold-hardened steel. A war broke out between those two forces inside one’s body, a war that was more deadly than any enemy. Rossi had seen experienced veterans freeze and crumble while the greenest of recruits ran, guns blazing, right to their deaths. The real battle resided not with the enemy but within one’s heart. And to Rossi, there was no telling from looking at a man what his heart would do.

Many families now began to run through the street seeming not to notice the debris falling from the sky. Each parent dragged a child and each child dragged a blanket, the material making streaks in the fallout dust that was beginning to cover the street. Rossi thought he saw another flash of light and heard another strange boom. More and more people spilled onto the narrow English road.

It had been just eight days since many of his friends jumped on the beaches at Normandy. D-Day they called it. He wished he had been with them. All the men knew what Normandy meant. He had seen more of the war than most; and survived it. But everyone, including Sergeant Antony Rossi, knew that jumping on Normandy meant the liberation of Paris, and the liberation of Paris meant defeating Germany. Despite his successes in Africa and Italy, he felt bitter that he had missed the most important jump of the war. And he was bitter about being back in England and away from his men. All he wanted to do was to jump; it was part of his creed, the Airborne Creed. It was an inspiration, a motive and a comfort. It was also something Rachel never understood.

Rachel!

Rossi unglued himself from the window and bolted past the couch where he had been sleeping since returning to London. Except for the down pillow, knit blanket and empty rocks glass smelling of bourbon, all else looked as it always had. A fake Tiffany lamp sat unmoved on a silk-embroidered doily on the end table next to the rose-colored, Victorian cameo-backed couch. These were not his choosing. Photos of Rachel’s family in silver frames lined the mantel of a small fireplace. The broken pocket door separating the front room from the hall hung askew as it had since the day they first rented the home as husband and wife. Across the foyer, a worn, white-tiled kitchen glowed blue in the moonlight streaming in from the window above the porcelain sink.

Something made him pause at the foot of the staircase. Was it the dingy and ugly café curtains above the sink that he had always hated or the drip of the leaking faucet he had always wanted to fix? No, it was the sound of bees again! Silence, and then another flash of light and another boom. Rossi fell to the ground and all went black.

"Yo! Tony! Wake up!" Private Gates yelled at his friend still unconscious from the over-abundant Chianti the night before. How his friend could drink that much wine and still walk back to his own bed baffled everyone and especially Gates. He had certainly seen his pals throw down shots of whiskey in the pubs back home in Chicago but Tony Rossi put them all to shame. Whether it was bottles of beer in basic training or tumblers of bourbon in the deserts of Africa, Rossi drank everyone under the table. But once they arrived in Italy, Rossi began lapping up the Chianti like it was water.

"Huh? What? Oh, man. Where am I?" Sergeant Rossi barely opened his eyes to the light of day streaming in from the window.

"I didn’t think I’d ever hear that from you, Tony. You’re exactly where you want to be—in your bunk! Oh, wait, that’s the second place you wanna be. We all know the only place where you’re really happy." Gates looked out the window of their makeshift barracks at the blue, cloudless sky above Ciampino, Italy.

"Oh, God. My head."

"No, I think it’s ‘oh, Chianti’," Gates laughed and kicked the cot holding the best friend since their first day of basic three years ago.

"What time is it? Rossi propped himself up on the thin mattress and rubbed his head. What the…"

"Ha, ha! I was wondering when you’d figure that out. Thought it wouldn’t be until the showers. I was kind of hoping you would walk around some before noticing."

Rossi jumped out of the sheets wearing only his GI-issue skivvies and ran to the lavatories, a jaunt that forced him to take a route across the open courtyard.

Private First Class Ronald Gates laughed. I wouldn’t go out there if I were you!

The Italian sun was already hot and the bright light bit into Rossi’s red and swollen eyes from his hangover. He squinted to see as his bare feet kicked up the dry dirt. Any former grass in the yard was long gone and all that was left were clods of crumpled soil. He was half way across the courtyard when he heard roars of laughter. Men began to emerge from the surrounding barracks (a former government building built and abandoned by the Fascists) or stuck their heads out the windows. The whole squad had been waiting all morning for this and they didn’t hold back their enthusiasm. The campaign to liberate Rome had been long and costly, in spirit as well as men. They needed the levity and what they were seeing running half naked across the yard did the trick.

Rome was officially liberated on June 4. In the last few days, Rossi and the other jumpers of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion wandered about the Roman countryside rooting out the few remaining Fascist and Nazi loyalists and worrying about their fellow jumpers on the other side of the continent.

Rossi’s and Gates’ platoon was temporarily stationed in the small town of Ciampino, just south of Rome, while the brass from America, England and Canada squabbled over who really freed the city, a subject of international contention. They were also trying to decide what their next move would be. The men knew that there was some big jump being debated and a couple of guys were taking bets on where it would take place. Somewhere over the Italian Alps was leading the odds. That plan would continue the push up Italy and right into Germany-held Austria. There were routine patrols but for the most part they were just relaxing in the Italian countryside.

The previous night most of the men of the 509th were in the mess hall listening to Army radio communications report the details of the jump on Normandy, something they were supposed to have done a year earlier. They listened to the reports of the successful landing of the 101st and their brothers of the 82nd Airborne Divisions in France. Thoughts of the beach invasion had the men in good spirits and they were looking to celebrate. Fortunately, a local vintner provided the means.

In Ciampino most of the locals were either ambivalent or only moderately grateful for the American presence. They went about their business ignoring the Americans and assuming some other army would eventually come through. But fortunately for Rossi’s platoon, one man was happy that the Americans had arrived. The owner of a small vineyard provided his wine and hospitality in true Italian fashion. The wine came straight from the oak storing casks housed in a nearby cave. Tony Rossi had emptied one himself. The men drank and laughed and celebrated the Normandy landings. When Rossi began singing Bella Ciao, in broken Italian no less, his buddies decided he needed a reprimand. The punishment: a new haircut!

The morning after the party, Rossi ran a gauntlet of cheering soldiers and entered the bathroom and stood at the sink. AHHH!! I can’t believe you did it! My wife’s gonna kill me! he screamed at the unrecognizable head in the mirror.

A chorus of laughter echoed in the courtyard.

Gates walked in and put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. He looked at his buddy’s reflection and said, I guess we’ll call you Tonto now?

"Tonto didn’t have a Mohawk!" Rossi groaned.

All artificial light was now gone on Primrose Lane in Mile End, outside London. Power outages were common during the War but this latest round from the bombs would keep them off for days. Rossi awoke from the blast. As he got up, he rubbed the strip of hair on his otherwise bald head. Blackness and the smell of smoke filled the Rossi’s home. The windows were shattered and he could feel the humid air rushing in. He heard the unfortunate but familiar noise that ensued outside.

Londoners had grown accustomed to air raid sirens, the whir of incoming German artillery, falling bricks, screaming and crying. Those sounds had become part of life during the last four years. Everyone had lost someone in the war. Husbands, fathers, sons and brothers had all been killed in the line of duty, for their country, for their King. Keep Calm and Carry On! But the Blitz over London wasn’t meant to destroy soldiers. Wives, mothers and children were the intended targets of these bombs that meant to scare and intimidate the people into submission. Hitler didn’t understand that the raids rarely succeeded with the English.

Antony Rossi had been gone for most of those dark London nights. He was off jumping out of a C-47 in some other foreign land to save some other foreign people. But during the last year, letters from Rachel always seemed to find him wherever he landed. He had become complacent that his wife wouldn’t become one of those targets, that what he was witnessing abroad wouldn’t happen at home. He knew how easy and necessary it was to forget in war.

His home was now crumbling. He could feel it. The building wouldn’t last long. He shot up the stairs, only grabbing the banister once with his right hand to propel himself into the hallway at the top. He landed with the sure-footedness of a seasoned paratrooper, both feet at once and a bend in the knee to absorb the shock, no roll necessary on this occasion. There were only two rooms on the second floor: their marital bedroom and a small room painted pink. Rachel said the room represented hope for a different future. They weren’t expecting, but Rachel had been convinced they’d have a girl someday. But that was all before… Before everything.

His bare feet scarcely touched the hall floor as he flew into the bedroom vainly hoping to find Rachel sound asleep and oblivious to the crashes outside the window. He hesitated at the door; in his mind he recognized why, even if he didn’t want to actually admit it. In war, opening a door was always a risk. He opened the door to their bedroom. He knew what he’d see.

The couple had received two pieces of bedroom furniture as wedding gifts from a collection taken by his jump buddies and purchased by the parish vicar. The parish of Mile End had been destroyed during the Blitz in December of 1940. The stone structure, originally built in 1635 by the hands of local stonemasons using local stone, looked more like it belonged to a farmer than a rector, and that suited its parishioners just fine. For centuries they prided themselves on self-sufficiency, hard work and their local parish. That all ended on one cold night before Christmas, just as the war was beginning.

In the early days, the Luftwaffe had been relentlessly bombing England, and London in particular, for months in an attempt to destroy morale. Many parts of the city lay in utter ruin, crumbled and desolate. Trekkers, what those who no longer felt safe in their own homes were called, would spend the night in the Underground or churches believing they were safer anywhere else but in their beds. The government hoped to censor the devastation, but Londoners’ own experiences revealed the truth. Bodies littered streets for weeks at a time and the skeletal remains of office buildings cast shadows of the reminder that the enemy was just across the channel.

Mile End was no different. Its sole parish has been reduced to a mound of rubble, revealing a few half walls and broken pews covered in the gray slate that used to be the roof. Even the pages of the hymnals still randomly appeared in backyards and treetops. The older residents were convinced God was reminding them that He was still there. Antony Rossi wasn’t so convinced. Almost four years later, and despite no further bombings on the town itself (until tonight), the church was still in ruin and the vicar displaced.

The vicar was a long-time family friend of Rachel’s father. They drank shots of scotch every Wednesday night and had done so for decades. When Rossi announced his engagement, his brothers in his company of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion had raised a few pounds and wired it to the vicar, who purchased a mahogany bed and dresser for their wedding and most likely a bottle of scotch for himself.

When he opened the door to their bedroom, the dresser, located by the window, had fallen over, but the mahogany bed was empty. More thoughts raced through his mind than he could rationally acknowledge. The window was broken and pieces of glass were strewn across the sheets.

Blood?

He looked for blood as he tore the sheets from the mattress. He found nothing. There was no blood. Then he heard it again.

Bees. Silence. And then another flash and boom. What are they hitting us with? he muttered out loud. The home shook. There was no roar of bomber engines and no shrill of incoming rounds. Rossi ran back down the staircase in the darkness. He could taste the bitterness of sulfur in the back of his throat. He heard crying coming from somewhere. Instantly he knew: the light in the bathroom was on when he woke up.

He stumbled his way through the darkness of the front room and slowly pushed open the bathroom door. There was Rachel, huddled in the corner between the sink and the tub, clutching the shower curtain. He crouched down and pulled her by the arm. He was a soldier and knew they could not stay there. The house was crumbling around them and he could see chunks of plaster hitting the ground.

No, no, I can’t leave. No, please! Rachel cried, tears running down her white cheeks. This is my home. I won’t leave my home. I won’t go out there! I won’t, I can’t, I won’t, she stammered, hung over from the drugs the army doctors had given her.

We have no choice! was his only response.

She looked up at him with the same fear he had seen in the eyes of many men, men and friends he had carried out of harm’s way.

Rossi lifted his wife and draped her over his shoulder. He had carried soldiers twice her weight up hillsides, across deserts and over rivers. A large piece of plaster fell from the ceiling almost hitting the both of them as he made his way through the parlor. When he reached the front door, he kicked it with his bare foot. It flew off its already broken hinges. As he ran to the street, he twisted so Rachel wouldn’t see Mrs. Dundee. It didn’t matter, however, as Rachel had passed out from the medication, exhaustion and fear.

This way! a neighbor yelled, waving his arms over his head like he was directing the C-47s Rossi jumped from.

The newly promoted sergeant looked back at his new home. The row house, like the identical ones on either side, was still standing, barely and remarkably, but it was certainly no longer inhabitable. The rest of the neighborhood fared much worse. Primrose Lane, Grove Road, Cochler Street, Abigail Lane, Macbean, Salisbury, Baird Gardens, all of them gone, decimated by these new weapons.

Tony! This way! Stephen Williams had lived across the street in one of the homes that no longer existed. He had been directing survivors when Rossi emerged with Rachel.

His new neighbors, like his jump buddies, always called him Tony. Only his mother and father continued to use Antony. He preferred it that way as it sounded more American. He was proud to be American and didn’t care much for the moniker of Italian-American. Even after helping liberate Italy, he wanted to be an American.

She OK?

Yeah, she’s fine, Rossi replied as he shifted Rachel to his other shoulder as easily as if he were hauling a sack of wheat. Where’s everyone headed?

Everyone’s going out to old man Aedan’s farm.

The Irishman?

Yeah. It’s never been hit and you know how superstitious everyone around here is. Luck of the Irish and all. Ha, ha.

It’s not the Irish. Trust me, Rossi returned without missing a beat. Then realizing Stephen’s attempt to lessen the somber mood around them, he said, It’s because there’s nothing out there to bomb unless Hitler’s got something against English cows.

I don’t see why he wouldn’t, Stephen muttered in exasperation. He has something against everyone it seems. Stephen Williams had served in the first war and life had worn him down. Despite everything, he was still a leader in the neighborhood. What the hell are those things anyway? I’ve never seen anything like that.

I have no idea. Never seen anything like ‘em before either. Rossi shook his head as he looked again at the sky. It was silent and dark.

Others now joined Rossi and Stephen. The air was quiet and they all hoped that it was over. Rescue vehicles approached from the north, the first sirens of the night. He knew it was pointless, but Rossi continued walking with the others. He desperately wanted to get back to his brothers in Italy. He missed them and he missed feeling useful. Even carrying his wife to safety amid the bombing felt futile.

They marched like POWs through what was left of Mile End, ignoring a few bodies along the way. Gray plumes of smoke rose from smoldering orange piles of rubble behind them. It had been less than thirty minutes since the first bomb fell but far more than thirty minutes had been taken from the sleeping inhabitants of Mile End. The question that Rossi refused to ask finally came out, even though he already knew the answer.

Gerald and Sarah?

Stephen shook his head then looked down at his feet.

Sergeant Antony Rossi had no idea how he was going to tell Rachel that her parents were dead. Dead. Now. And of all times, now.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

After the Allied invasion of Normandy, Hitler reignited his attempts to instill fear in the English. He had been bombing southern England for years. But quietly he had been developing what became known as the V Bomb. The V came from the German word, Vergeltungswaffen, or weapons of reprisal. The V Bomb was an early, pulsejet powered bomb and a predecessor of the cruise missile.

The bomb was launched from a ramp at 350 miles per hour from the French and Belgian coastlines under German control. They flew under their own power until, at a preset distance, the engines cut off and dropped their payload, a 1,870 pound warhead. The pulse engines created a buzzing sound that could be heard on the ground followed by a silence. The bombs were nicknamed buzz bombs or doodlebugs" due to that sound.

The first V Bombs (the V1) were launched late on the evening of June 13, 1944 as retaliation for the successful Allied landing in France on D-Day. Up to 100 bombs fell every hour on London that night, and over the next three months more that 6,000 people were killed and a million buildings wrecked or damaged.

The first bomb of the night hit Mile End, England.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

CURTIS HIDES I

15 JUNE 1944 2100 hours

Courbevoie, France

Oui, monsieur. Venez ici! Emilie whispered to the soldier who had been hiding in the hedgerow for the last two days.

I’m sorry. I don’t understand, he whispered back. He was shaking from exhaustion and hunger. The only food he had eaten was a few berries, some dry crusts of bread and bits of bitter cheese this unusual woman occasionally brought him. He had been either waiting or hiding for the last nine days since his jump on D-Day. Others had brought him this far through France, to this hedgerow on the edges of Paris. This young woman had brought him food, and he didn’t want to question her allegiance despite his misgivings about his situation. He didn’t know about her, but he knew one thing for certain: These French Resistance fighters were using him—but for what he hadn’t yet figured out.

The sun was just beginning to set and it cast an orange glow over the fields to the west, to America, and farther across America to his home in California, and Charlotte. It had been months since he left the states, but he thought France was beautiful, at least what he had seen of it from windows and haystacks. Standing now and seeing the skyline of Paris, he wanted his camera.

Here, please come, she replied along with the appropriate universal hand gesture. Then she reached toward him with a palm as rough as wood. Despite its odd feel for a woman, he took it gladly, and suddenly it felt like home. He was never one to recognize his feelings, but this woman felt right.

Private First Class Jonathan JD Curtis slowly crawled from the thick bramble of what appeared to be short, thorny trees tangled into one another. He was surprised that he was even able to fit his rather stocky torso between the course branches. Numbness in his limbs slowly warmed to stuttered movement. His mind wasn’t as quick to recover. The most he was able to put together from his uncanny string of good luck with kind French farmers and partisans was that he had landed far behind enemy lines and somehow made his way southeast toward Paris. So much for his drop zone, his training, his map, and broken compass. So much for anything, he thought, except his camera that survived the jump.

His first priority, however, was staying alive. Everything else, including following commands and finding his platoon, was a distant second. But for the last week he had been following the lead of others and was now having doubts.

Jonathan JD Curtis was part of Operation Neptune that took place on Tuesday the week before. He was assigned to the 101st Airborne for his first jump behind Utah Beach. The wing of his C-47 was hit by German 88s just minutes before the jump light was to go on. The plane careened toward land and the 27 paratroopers were thrown first toward the back of the plane and then rolled to the front. They were still tethered to the anchor cable by their static lines and bodies tumbled and tangled as smoke filled the gutted bay of the plane. Each man began to climb over the one in front in an attempt reach the jump door. Bodies scrambled along the metal flooring for what seemed like an hour but in reality was closer to just a few minutes as the pilots tried to maintain some control and altitude. The plane swerved right and left but couldn’t keep its nose up. Curtis was third in the lineup. Shrapnel instantly killed the two troopers in front of him when the ground mortar from the Flak 88s sliced through the plane.

The olive drab bird continued its deviated flight amid the chaos in the air and on the ground. Blind from smoke and dizzy from fear, Curtis jumped, or rather stumbled, out of the plane as soon as he felt the sting of the cold, outside air. He never felt the static line jerk him back, and his parachute opened without complications. Suddenly he was hanging in the darkness, swaying back and forth like a swing hanging from a tree limb. Instinctively