Combat Jumper, the hair
raising, frontline account of the first American airborne invasion of World War
11 and of the young paratroopers who risked their lives for freedom.
By 1943, the war in Europe
had reached a turning point. General
Dwight Eisenhower was given orders to invade Sicily and head north. To achieve this, Ike had a new weapon: U.S.
paratroopers. Their mission was to
seize the approaches to the invasion beaches and to hold off German attacks.
Combat Jump tells the
little-known story of these paratroopers and how they changed the American way
of war. It takes readers on their
journey from civilians to citizen soldiers, through training in the United
States and later in North Africa, and then shows their daring jump into the
darkness over enemy-held Sicily.
By first light on D-day,
July 10, 1943, it looked as if the mission would fail. Inexperienced pilots, lost or blown off
course, dropped 80 percent of the troopers from one to sixty-five miles from
their targets. The American commander,
James Gavin, landed so far from his objective that he was not even sure he was
in Sicily. Arthur Gorham, commanding
500 men of the First Battalion, encountered two surprises when the sun came up. He and just over 100 of his men were the
only GIs---out of 3,400 dropped---near their objective. He also discovered that the Germans on
Sicily had tanks. The lightly armed
paratroopers, with their rifles and hand grenades, were not equipped to take on
the forty-ton panzers. But against all
odds, they did. The costly lessons they
learned shaped the war in Europe, for without Sicily, there might have been no
airborne invasion of France in June 1944.
Combat Jump recount the extraordinary
contributions these young men made when their country called them to war, and
it tells a classic tale of military action and remarkable courage.
Ed Ruggero is the author of
Duty First: West Point and the Making of American Leaders, in addition to five
novels about the military. He is an
experienced keynote speaker on leadership and leadership development, and was
an infantry officer in the United States Army for eleven years.