Excerpts
from Operation Jedburgh
 

Click here to read about why young Ted Baumgold, a New Yorker from a family of Jewish diamond merchants, decided to volunteer for this highly dangerous mission without being told any of the facts.

Click here to read about the night Bob Kehoe finally parachuted behind the German lines and into France and how he felt convinced he would be dead before he hit the ground.

Chapter Six: Anyone Here Speak French?

At Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, trainee radio operators in the U.S. Signal Corps crowded elbow to elbow at tables that ran the length of the fort’s cavernous former airplane hangars. After basic training’s weeks of push-ups, rugged marches, and weapons training and infantry exercises, their youthful bodies, in spite of their minds’ fears and doubts, ached to fight. Instead, they tapped out practice Morse code messages that meant nothing and went nowhere. To these kids just out of high school, it made as much sense as their parents forcing them to go to preseason football practice and then to take piano lessons when the games finally started.

Now, the hangar door flew open, and a paratroop lieutenant, a stranger to the Monmouth boys, stepped through. “Listen up!” he shouted. The clicking went suddenly quiet. A mass of eager heads turned. None of the fidgety boys needed to be told to take off his headphones. “Any of you guys speak French?” shouted the lieutenant, one of Canfield’s recruitment ambassadors. “We’re having a meeting you should attend.” He turned and went out, followed by a much bigger crowd of curious boys than a survey of language skills might have predicted. Bored men, of course, made good fodder for the secret services.

Private Ted Baumgold, one of the hundred guys who jumped up and ran along, could claim at least a small knowledge of French. He had spent his junior year of college in France, playing his violin and studying music. Now, nearly ten years later, Baumgold was older than most of the other boys traipsing after the lieutenant, and perhaps a little more resolved. Baumgold came from a New York family of Jewish diamond merchants. Because their business cut quartz crystals for the army’s radios, he had been exempted from the draft. He had enlisted voluntarily. Like others, he had his reasons for wanting to fight.

He wandered after the crowd to another of Monmouth’s obsolete hangars (they had once housed airplanes used by the Signal Corps to develop aerial photography, among other things, during World War I). A hundred or so boys jostled around the paratroop lieutenant. He had been sent, he told them, to drum up French-speaking volunteers with good radio skills for missions behind the lines in German-occupied territory. “I don’t know anything more about the missions,” he said, “except that they are extremely dangerous, and you have to be willing to go in by submarine or parachute. Now, go outside, smoke a cigarette, and if you’re interested, be back in ten.”

Earlier in the war, secret service recruiters like the lieutenant might have found their men more subtly and less publicly, like the way they had come upon Lucien Lajeunesse, by quietly fingering their way through personnel files. Overall, Operation Jedburgh required at least one hundred “pianists,” as the secret services called their radio operators—enough to nearly double the Allies’ clandestine radio contact with the French Resistance. The D-Day invasion date less than nine months away forced the Jedburgh bosses to accept the security risks of a certain lack of caution.

On military installations on both sides of the Atlantic, from September to November 1943, Jedburgh recruiters plastered bulletin boards with flyers, intoned announcements on camp PA systems, and dispatched letters for officers to read to their troops: “French speaking volunteers needed for immediate overseas assignment.” For their officer volunteers, the recruiters looked wherever they might find the gung-ho leaders they wanted, among the paratroopers in the United States, the Commandos in Britain, and the French officer-training schools in North Africa. For radio operator volunteers like Baumgold, the recruiters went wherever the radio trainees concentrated.

One Sunday morning that autumn, for example, in Britain’s Yorkshire, gunner-mechanic Norman Smith pulled himself from a tank engine he was repairing. He gathered with his unit around an officer who stood among the parked tanks of the North Hampshire Yeomanry. “We are looking for men willing to drop into occupied territories to work with the Resistance,” the officer said plainly to the crowd. The British Jedburgh recruiters trawled for their radio operators among the men of the Royal Armoured Corps, which trained at least one radioman for every tank.

In Algeria, Sergeant Jean Sassi, a French radio operator who had fought in the Tunisia campaign against Rommel, stood at attention on parade. “Qui veut rentrer en France aussi vite que possible?” shouted an officer: Who wants to get back to France as soon as possible? The French Jedburgh recruiters searched for radio operators like Sassi among the Free French divisions in North Africa, which had been idle since the Italians and Germans had surrendered there. Back in the United States, the recruiters fished from the Signal Corps training schools, from Camp Crowder in Missouri to Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, where Baumgold considered the paratroop lieutenant’s proposal and smoked his cigarette.

Many of the men the recruiters talked to had lined up outside enlistment offices long before their draft, spurred by news of the horrible losses at Pearl Harbor and, later, after ferocious battles like Guadalcanal. Finding tightly coiled soldiers who wanted to fight was not the challenge. At American camps, forts, and bases, hundreds of boys, like Baumgold and his comrades now inhaling their last drags from their cigarettes outside the hangar, flocked to hear what kind of adventure the secret service recruiters had to offer.

But many men at Monmouth puffed on their cigarettes without giving the paratroop lieutenant’s proposal a moment’s thought. Few men wanted to volunteer on the basis of recruitment presentations so long on suspense and short on detail. Lest an information leak end with new agents parachuting to wait-
ing platoons of well-armed Germans, the recruiters, if they knew anything about Operation Jedburgh themselves, could reveal little. Speak French? they might as well have said. Lay your life on the line here. Anxiety-provoking phrases like “high expected casualties” and “unusually dangerous” peppered their talks. They emphasized the danger, partly out of moral obligation, partly for lack of other allowable details, and partly to ensure that dropout rates did not skyrocket when volunteers finally discovered exactly what was expected of them.

The men at the paratroop lieutenant’s little Monmouth rally were already fated to take part in the biggest amphibious invasion in military history. Most of them thought their present duties would be hazardous enough. They began to drift, one by one, back to their radios to tap out their phantom messages.

Baumgold had more thinking to do. Nearly alone, he drew on his cigarette a little bit longer.

 ********************

Just as they repelled a large proportion of sane men, the Jedburgh recruiters’ presentations also attracted a particularly high number of lunatics. Calls for hazardous duty tended to attract a large proportion of people whose love affairs had gone wrong and who had decided either that life was not worth living or that heroism was the way to win back their sweethearts. These were the types the Jedburgh recruiters tried to avoid.

Instead, they chased down the smattering of men who, like Baumgold, had a special, personal hatred of the Nazis, and the eager warriors whose enthusiasm for regular soldiering had been exhausted on the military treadmill. Men like Corporal Bill Thompson, at Camp Crowder, and Private First Class Jack Poché, at Scott Field, Illinois, both of whom wanted to volunteer for this mysterious “hazardous duty,” were among those whom Jedburgh recruiters considered good possibilities.

Thompson, an amateur radio operator in civilian life, had volunteered for the Signal Corps right after Pearl Harbor, intent on delivering his communication skills straight to the front lines. Poché rushed himself into the Army Air Corps, romancing the idea of doing battle in the sky.

But for the gung-ho type, disillusionment with normal military service began with basic training. Men like Poché and Thompson wanted to practice killing the enemy at the rifle range; their sergeants emphasized bed-making, bouncing quarters off their bunks to check that they had tucked in their blankets tightly. Newsreels played in the cinemas of guys clawing up beaches in the Far East; at home, frustrated new interns did fifty push-ups because a fellow squadee left a shirt pocket unbuttoned. The boys stood in circles with their penises hanging out, and milked them like udders while a doctor checked for infectious discharge. They were forced to teach, on orders from their sergeants, backcountry hicks who had not yet learned to piss in a urinal, soap up in the shower, or eat with a knife and fork. Their companies progressed at the rate of the slowest man, and everyone else was kept from the war.

Other men might have been glad of the reprieve, but soldiers of Poché’s and Thompson’s type were too young and naive to be thankful. Their fathers, if they had been part of the Expeditionary Force in World War I, spared the boys the more grisly stories. The Great War’s flying aces and larger-than-life infantrymen had made for compelling adventures in the boys’ dime-store novels. Now, noble but romantic notions of heroically defending family and country excited their hopes that the prettiest girls from high school would write
to them abroad, and that they would finally prove their manhood to their families. A motley mix of human motivations, flying under the banner of
patriotism, propelled the boys to battle, and, ironically, it was too often the army that stood in their way.

As for Bill Thompson, the Signal Corps, in a random shuffle of some junior bureaucrat’s papers, suddenly discarded his radio expertise, then bolstered with months of specialist military training, and sent him to train as a stevedore, to load and unload ships. In a parallel twist of typical army irony, the Air Corps turned around and made Poché a radio operator, though his natural aptitude as a flyer had rocketed him through a six-month aviator course in only two. An army quack had noticed a slight curvature in Poché’s upper spine, diagnosed “stereololiphosis,” and grounded him (years later, Poché would discover that no such medical term existed). Thompson and Poché were furious.

“Never volunteer for anything,” the old army adage went. But to a certain brand of talented malcontents, in the absence of information the recruiters withheld, like expected casualty rates of 50 to 75 percent, or Hitler’s order to immediately execute any Allied personnel captured behind the lines, the recruiters’ scheme might offer the quickest way out of their quagmires. They just had to get themselves selected for it.

 *********************

Among the volunteers in Britain, tanker Gordon Tack ached for a quick entrance to the fighting. He wanted revenge for the death of his father, whom a German U-boat crew gunned down in his lifeboat after sinking his ship. Glyn Loosemore walked down streets littered with bodies after a German bombing in Swansea, Wales, and thought he would never get a chance to fight back in the Royal Armoured Corps, where the tanks seemed to break down every day.

Jean Sassi, typical of the French volunteers, had been part of the French army bulldozed by Hitler’s forces back in 1940. After a childhood filled with stories of the greatness of the French empire, he felt shamed first by the decisive defeat and then by the long German occupation. He waited until the Tunisia campaign to fight the Germans and then found himself idle again, unable to do anything about the Nazis marching up and down the streets of his native Nice. He itched to fight them again, and Jedburgh seemed like the fastest way. Like many of the British and French volunteers, Sassi had more personal axes to grind with the Nazis than most of the American volunteers.

But back in the States, outside the hangar at Fort Monmouth, Ted Baumgold had a personal reason of his own. He stubbed out his finished cigarette, just as the other guys had, but then he stayed put, waiting for the rest of the allotted ten minutes to pass. Baumgold knew that letters from the old countries carried awful news. Aunts, uncles, grandmothers, and grandfathers had disappeared from their homes in Poland and Germany and Belgium and France. The few escapees told macabre tales. The American government refused to countenance the stories, and even, in 1939, refused harbor to the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees from Europe. Baumgold knew the truth.

The ten minutes was over. Baumgold turned and marched back through the door and into the hangar. He had simply realized, in words echoing the saying of the Roman-era rabbi Hillel: “If not me, then who?”

Excerpted  from Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War
Copyright © Colin Beavan 2005

Click here to go back to excerpts menu

Chapter Sixteen: Suicide Pills

On the Normandy beaches, the light of a gray dawn pierced for a moment the fog that, beneath billowing rain clouds, blanketed the storm-tossed Channel. To the Germans peering through binoculars from their bunkers on the beaches, the armada of five thousand gray ships filling the horizon was momentarily revealed. Two purple flares suddenly flew a thousand feet into the air. The ships raised their cannons. In deafening concert with hundreds of U.S. Flying Fortresses and British Liberators flying overhead, they let fire a tremendous bombardment that spread an inferno of red flame over a hundred miles of coastline.

The entire cacophony, from the roar of bombers to the thousands of tons of pounding shells, was executed with one purpose in mind: to make safer the tens of thousands of boys and young men who would soon claw their way up the beaches against Hitler’s artillery and machine-gun fire. As the plan went, British and American airborne units who had dropped during the night would act as gatekeepers on the local roads, preventing nearby German panzers from roaring onto the beachhead and ensuring that the Allied troops could hustle off the landing craft to safety. The aerial and naval bombardments would mangle the machine-gun nests, pulverize the bunkers, and detonate the minefields already in place on Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall.” If all went well with these preliminary actions, D-Day might end with far fewer deaths than Churchill had despondently prophesied to his wife the night before.

But all did not go well.

Besides the hundreds of airborne troops who were blown apart by flak
or riddled by machine-gun bullets before they hit the ground, many other paratroopers landed in swamps and drowned under the weight of their equipment. Others touched down in the middle of German positions and were immediately mowed down. Over half of the 82nd Airborne’s troop-transporting gliders careened into trees and hedgerows. The crunch of snapping wood mingled with shouts and moans. By midmorning, the division could not account for four thousand of its men and 60 percent of its equipment.

Meanwhile, though the air force and navy had ceased their bombardment not one moment earlier than scheduled, the men aboard the hundreds of landing craft battling the high seas ran crucially late. Seasick soldiers used their helmets to help bail out a vile stew of salt water and vomit from their boats. Onshore, the German officers, taking advantage of the unexpected respite from the firestorm, shouted their men out of the rubble of their bunkers and into new defensive positions from which to blast the Allied troops who desperately charged from the shoreline at Gold, Juno, Sword, and Utah beaches.

At Omaha beach, unknown to the Allies, the crack troops of the German 352nd Division, battle-hardened by their experience on the Russian front, had recently dug themselves into the steep hundred-foot-cliffs that overlooked the vulnerable waterline. Here, the Allied bombardment, marked by insufficient naval fire and inaccurate aerial attack, had the undesirable effect of putting the Germans on alert while leaving many of their cliff-top machine-gun nests and bunkers intact.

The ramps of the boats destined for Omaha beach flipped open. The German machine gunners, safely ensconced in their pillboxes, opened fire. Row after row of American boys stumbled dead into the surf. Troops on assault boats hit by heavy German artillery simply vaporized. In their landing craft, the
V Corps of the First American Army drifted into a slaughterhouse. Without firing a single shot, the first company of the V Corps to go ashore lost 96 percent of its men.

Those who made it off the boats alive struggled for breath while machine-gun and mortar fire boiled the neck-deep water around them. Only a little more than a third of the first wave of attackers ever reached dry land. Land mines littered the only paths inland and the passages between the cliffs, trapping them on the beach. Forty percent of the army engineers who tried to clear the routes were dead within half an hour. The survivors huddled helplessly behind the dunes, having lost their heavy weapons in the surf. Below them, injured men bled on the beach, unable to escape the rising tide. The surf rolled in. The moans and cries of the wounded went silent.

Annihilation of V Corps might have been complete except that, at about three o’clock that morning, two tiny teams of three British soldiers each, along with hundreds of exploding dummies, had parachuted near Isigny on the southeast corner of the Cotentin peninsula. Armed with flare guns and phonographic recordings of soldier talk and gunfire, the teams, along with a few lost stragglers from the American paratroop divisions, managed to take on the appearance of an entire airborne invasion. A regiment of Germans based near Omaha had climbed into trucks and rumbled after them. The six men kept the couple of thousand enemy troops busy for half a day, by which time their return to the beachhead could not dislodge the Allied attack. By nightfall, thirty-four thousand Americans had inched their way forward and up the bluffs. Omaha’s coastal villages were in Allied hands.

By the end of D-Day plus one, as the strategists called it, more than 155,000 of Ike’s men had made their way ashore. None of the other D-Day objectives, however, had been achieved.

The four adjacent bridgeheads had not been joined to form a consolidated front; they all faced the danger of being surrounded and obliterated. At Omaha, the Americans had only a tenuous hold on a slender strip of shorefront; the German big guns had not been pushed back and, as Ike would later write, “sustained a most annoying artillery fire against our beaches and landing ships.” The British had failed to take Caen, which meant the ground south of the city had not been secured, as planned, to set up airstrips. And the heavy winds and high seas threatened to continue delaying the buildup of men and supplies. Eisenhower and his commanders had gained only a precarious toehold on the beach.

The good news was that back in England they still had many hundreds of thousands of men ready to flood into France. The bad news was that Hitler also had plenty of men and equipment ready to reinforce his defenses. The two warrior chiefs, in other words, now locked themselves in the exact race whose prospect had so frightened Eisenhower in the planning stage. In the opening gambit of a huge and lethal chess game, each hoped desperately to be the player who most quickly moved his pieces into position for the final attack. Everything depended on who moved fastest.

For their part, Resistance forces, ever since the transmission of the BBC messages, had begun cutting the rails and performing other sabotage to slow the Germans’ progress. The secret armies, and the bomber pilots of the air forces, were now frontline warriors in the Battle of the Buildup. Ike desperately wanted to squeeze from the Resistance its entire strategic “bonus” for his Transportation Plan, but the SFHQ had still not made contact with the Resistance in large swaths of France through which the German reinforcements would march. Some of the Jeds had been urgently called off the Scotland training scheme to establish that contact. In the four days following D-Day, the SFHQ sent its first seven Jed teams into France.

 ********************

Roaring down a runway at a secret air base outside London, a black-painted Stirling bomber bounced two or three times before slipping into the night and banking toward France. Bob Kehoe sat on the floor, behind the bomb bay, with his knees cramped to his chest and his parachute bunched up on his back. The full moon hung close to the horizon. The checkerboard of English farm fields slid past in the ivory glow below. The light oil and tinny smell of military aircraft filled the cabin. Kehoe felt suddenly nauseous.

At eight thousand feet, the jumpmaster’s dim lamp threw yellowed light and sharp shadows across the face of Major Adrian Wise, who faced Kehoe from the other side of the bomb bay. Wise, a graduate of the British military academy at Sandhurst and a former Commando, was Team Frederick’s leader. Crowded against Wise’s back sat Team Frederick’s second officer. Lieutenant Paul Aguirec, as Wise and Kehoe knew him, had taken a nom de guerre, like all the French Jedburghs, to protect his family in France from Nazi retaliation. His real name, Kehoe would not learn until later, was Paul Bloch-Auroch.

The rumbling engines made talk impossible, so Kehoe could only try to construe from their faces his teammates’ thoughts. Stretching into the recesses of the airplane’s cabin, both in front and back of Kehoe’s team, was a group of about fifteen other parachutists, wild men from the French battalion of the British Special Air Service (SAS). Suddenly, from toward the cockpit, Kehoe heard one of them hollering.

“What’s the matter with him?” Kehoe asked the SAS man behind him.

“Drunk,” came the answer. The SAS men had been confined to base for several days with nothing to do but sip from their hip flasks.

The inebriate settled down, and the silence rolled in again. Kehoe thought mostly about the uniform he wore and how he would stay alive while wearing it in what the briefing officer had said would be one of the highest concentrations of German soldiers in France.

Back at Milton Hall, when Kehoe, Knox, Cyr, Gardner, and their teams had been alerted, they went to the supply hut to draw their weapons, equipment, and ammunition. Bernard Knox took out a pen to sign for them. Throughout Knox’s career in the U.S. military, he had signed for every compass, every jeep, every item, in fact, that the army owned and expected to get back. “You don’t have to sign, sir,” the supply sergeant at Milton Hall said casually. There followed an unpleasant moment of realization. The army did not expect to get this equipment back. It did not expect to ever see these Jeds again.

Kehoe’s plane flew past the white sand beaches of Brighton and out of British airspace. The jumpmaster switched off his meager light and closed the blackout curtains over the bomber’s tiny windows. Complete darkness prevailed. When the jumpmaster moved about through the tangle of legs and webbing straps to hand out sandwiches, whiskey, and kindness to his serious-looking passengers, he used what the British called a torch, a flashlight. The Stirling droned on through the night and across the English Channel.

Team Frederick, their briefing officers had told them, would be dropped
in the Côtes-du-Nord department of northern Brittany, along with this detachment of SAS. Together, the two groups would set up a command post, Samwest, from which the Jeds would begin organizing Resistance groups to undertake sabotage missions while the SAS burst immediately into action, attacking targets and cutting rail lines of greatest importance to Eisenhower’s armies just over one hundred miles away. A second SAS detachment and Jed team, Paul Cyr’s Team George, would establish a similar base, Dingson, in Morbihan, in the south of the Breton peninsula.

Brittany had particular strategic importance both because of its deep-
water ports, which Eisenhower hoped to eventually conquer, and because of the three German paratroop and two other mobile divisions stationed there. At any moment, these German fighters might rush with crushing speed the couple of hundred miles to the Normandy beaches. The first mission for the Jed teams and SAS men at Samwest and Dingson was to cut off the German forces in Brittany from the mainland of France. That would leave sixty thousand fewer German cutthroats for Ike to worry about.

At a later stage, Jed Teams Frederick and George would turn their energies to quietly organizing, arming, and training the Breton Resistance. This, in fact, was the way most Jed teams would typically be used. They would jump in with a specific urgent task and then, while undertaking ongoing sabotage, turn their energies to quietly creating a huge underground force. Across France, each of the various Jed teams surreptitiously assembled forces to rise up in mass rebellion when it best suited the Allied cause. Until that call to action came, the
Jeds would carefully avoid German attention in order to ensure their mission’s
survival.

With all this pressing on his mind as he flew over the Channel, Bob Kehoe pretended to be as calm as everyone else pretended to be. To worry would simply make things more difficult.

At the air base after the briefing, a team of dressers had helped them strap on their equipment: a carbine across the chest, a bag filled with emergency rations, a first-aid kit, extra clips of ammo, a water canteen, a .45 pistol, a commando knife, and binoculars. Under all this was fastened a bulging money belt filled with several hundred thousand francs, counterfeited in London, to pay for requisition supplies and bribes. By the time Kehoe donned his parachute, he could barely hobble to the plane.

As Bernard Knox lumbered up to the aircraft ladder, a British officer approached him. “Good luck, old man,” he said. “Here are your pills.” He handed Knox a glass tube containing three large tablets. “This one is a knockout pill to drop in Jerry’s coffee. The middle one is Benzedrine when you need to make it through a few nights with no sleep. The last one’s a cyanide pill if things get too rough after capture. There you go. Good luck.”

Jedburgh officer Oliver Brown kept his suicide pill in a gap in his teeth throughout his entire mission in France. Lou Lajeunesse kept his glued to the indentation behind his collarbone with chewing gum. Knox simply could not remember which end of the tube held the suicide pill and which held the knockout pill. “Merde,” Knox’s French teammate said. “If I get wounded and left behind I’m going to shoot myself like a soldier.” They threw the pills out the window over the Channel.

Over Brittany, the pilot of Kehoe’s plane throttled back and shed altitude. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” Kehoe heard himself saying, though he had not been to church in nearly five years. The plane banked and turned.

Since Eisenhower’s forces back in Normandy so desperately needed whatever Resistance action would stymie the German reinforcement of Normandy, the shadow chiefs urgently dispatched not just Teams Frederick and George, but five other Jed teams in the four days that followed D-Day. Bernard Knox’s plane had to turn back when it couldn’t find the drop zone. But of the
rest, George and Frederick helped cut off Brittany, and Tommy Macpherson’s Team Quinine and Jacob Berlin’s Team Ammonia would do their best in the southwest to forestall the northward movement of two similarly huge panzer divisions at Toulouse and Bordeaux.

Team Harry parachuted into the Morvan Mountains to cut communications there. Team Hugh, led by William Crawshay, dropped in central France and would help cut all lines leading north and west to Normandy. Like Teams Frederick and George, these teams, with their initial tasks complete, would all later turn to quietly organizing, training, and arming in preparation for the “paramilitary” phase of the shadow war.

Meanwhile, on the same night Kehoe flew to France, at about the same time, another radio operator, Jesse Gardner, flew with his team in a black-painted bomber over the Drôme region of France, a few hundred miles away in the southeast. Team Veganin was dropping to help delay movement of the 164 tanks and fifteen thousand men of a panzer division in Avignon.

Gardner, a former tank operator, had been on leave eight months earlier when the SOE came around asking for volunteers. A friend put Gardner’s name down. “I’m not doing that,” Gardner said when he got back, but he had gone along, all the same, to be with his pal. He had even falsified his Morse speed, and then worked his butt off to make reality match the lie. Now, like Kehoe, he prepared to jump the six hundred feet into occupied France.

Over Brittany, Kehoe’s jumpmaster, following an order in his headset from the pilot, opened the bomb-bay doors and exposed the Joe hole. Next to it was an unilluminated green light. “Running in! Action station, number one!” the jumpmaster shouted. He raised his right hand above his head, and the first of the SAS men maneuvered into position with his legs dangling out of the bomb bay. Cold air rushed through the plane. The green light flashed on. The jumpmaster brought down his arm: “Go!” The SAS man disappeared into
the darkness.

Kehoe wiggled himself forward. “He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside still waters; he restoreth my soul.” Kehoe dangled his legs out the Joe hole. “Go!” shouted the jumpmaster. “He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.”

When Jesse Gardner, over the Drôme, launched himself out of the hole, he must, like the other Jeds, have felt the slap of prop wash against his face. What Gardner did not feel was the hard jerk on his shoulder straps.

Kehoe looked up to see his canopy unfolding into the moonlight. Gardner didn’t. In Brittany, Kehoe heard the bomber engines droning away, and a dog barking in a farmyard. In Drôme, Jesse Gardner’s body lay in a broken heap on the ground. His parachute had failed to open.

When the surviving Jeds heard about their first casualty, they would be furious. All their complaining, all their troublemaking had been a resistance against essentially one thing: futility. They could accept their deaths as long as their lives were not wasted. But Gardner had lost his life before exchanging his password with the Resistance.

Back in Brittany, Kehoe, still floating in the black sky, saw figures running in a field below. He strained to see if they were German or French. A futile fate like Gardner’s was what Kehoe now feared. He heard a sound like pistol fire—Pop! Pop! Pop! Kehoe wondered if Team Frederick might be killed in battle before they even hit the ground.

Excerpted  from Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War
Copyright © Colin Beavan 2005

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