Maj. Richard Jacobson: Pathfinder Pilot in Normandy

Ken Harbaugh:

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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 Major Richard Jacobson. Jacobson served as a pathfinder pilot during WWII, and fought in the Invasion of Normandy. It was his job to fly small paratrooper groups called pathfinders to landing zones ahead of major paratrooper missions so that the area could be scouted and marked.

Maj. Richard Jacobson:

My name is Richard Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-O-N. I was a Pathfinder captain in the start of the Pathfinder era in early 1944, and then became Group Operations Officer as a major later that year. Stayed with Pathfinder until it was disbanded.

Well, the concept of Pathfinder grew up as a result of the difficulties that Troop Carrier Airborne had experienced in the Mediterranean, the Sicily operation and the difficulties there. And the decision had been made, and I think correctly so, that additional aid and assistance and equipment was needed to ensure that you could get to the right place and that you could get your Airborne troops together on the ground. That was the concept of Pathfinder.

The school was started in early '43 in England to train Pathfinder crews, the concept being that the crews were to be trained to lead their home groups, have the right equipment and the right training, and would lead their groups into the theater of operations.

After finishing the school, we were sent back to our original groups, in my case, the 435th Troop Carrier Group. But throughout the command, the airplanes were new, the navigators were well-trained, and in most cases, the group commander appropriated the airplane and the crew to try to perform the Pathfinder mission as the lead element. And this didn't work. And so, you were sent back, or many of us were, not all, but many were sent back to Pathfinder. Now, when you consider that we were intended to lead our groups, the criteria for the original selection was quite a difficult one. You had to have had 1,000 hours of flying time, which in those days was quite a bit, and be a senior officer within your operation. And you were coming back to lead your group. And so, I went to Pathfinder school, then came back. I was assigned to Pathfinder, the provisional group, and we flew as Pathfinders, not as the lead elements in our home groups.

I would say that there were no bad times. There was no fear on anybody's part. I don't know whether we thought we were invulnerable or whether you thought it made no difference, but we were eager to fly. We were eager to do what we had to do. We would have felt badly if they'd have left off a mission. I mean, that was the fear, that you wouldn't get to go, you wouldn't get to participate. You'd miss something. But we had good quarters, good food, all the best of things. It was not the war, you see, and the story of mud and trenches and so forth. We had a good life in England.

I would say this, and I've been quoted in the Airborne magazines this way, that the Airborne Pathfinders were the true heroes. They took all the risks that the Troop Carrier pilots did in getting into the target, and then they stayed to fight a war, and we came home. Were the pilots rabble-rousers? No, the original pilots were the best, I think, that Troop Carrier command had. Best trained. Excellent, excellent. The Normandy group was as good a group of pilots as I have ever known.

Later when the decision was made to expand from a school and a small unit to a full group, then we got some of the malcontents and some who were problems. But the original group, the Normandy group, were great officers, great pilots.

The question of what was the greatest danger as a Pathfinder pilot, quite frankly, and we've all talked about this, nobody felt that there was great danger. You knew that some of your crews didn't come back. You knew that there were training accidents, but nobody felt it would happen to them. I would guess that fear of failure was the greatest danger, not fear that you would get shot down. That wasn't even a consideration. It may have been the training. It may have been the peer pressure. It could have been that you were worried that people wouldn't think you were brave, but I don't think that was it. Just, that was what we had to do, and everybody knew you had to do it. And quite frankly, we've talked about that many, many times. Nobody ever refused a mission. People would fight to get on one. If you asked for volunteers, every man in the squadron would step forward. You didn't consider that to be a danger. I guess we thought we were in invincible, invulnerable.

Well, if you consider, and you're speaking what limitations did you have to deal with? If you consider that you were going absolutely blind in essence, except for what equipment you had on the airplane, into enemy territory, blacked out, no roadmaps, no signs on the ground. The limitation was can you get to where you want to go? Can you be in the right place? That was the one concern of Pathfinder. Could you get to the right place? And the equipment helped to do that. It took well-trained navigators to do it, and they were the strength of Pathfinder.

In the plane, you're getting instructions from your navigator. Now, remember that in Pathfinder, we didn't have Rebecca/Eureka because we were carrying it. So, we were dependent upon, in our case, the two electronic systems that we had, SCR-717, the radar, and the Mark II GEE equipment, which the British had developed. The navigator told you what to do. All you did was steer. Quite frankly. I'd like to say, "Oh boy, I did all these great things," but what I did was listen to my navigator.

For Normandy, everything we had done, and this is a period of some three years, was training for Normandy. Learning to fly, learning to fly formation, learning to fly at night, blacked out. Learning to fly without ground assistance, learning to operate as a crew.

The preparation for Normandy was that each element leader was allowed to pick his own route, now, within certain corridors and to plan his own way in. We had planned ours very carefully to try to avoid as much of the known flack as possible and to get to the right place. We flew at my option 50 feet off the channel, going in, with a radar altimeter set so that it would be at 50 feet, and showing red, and picked up salt spray on the windshield. Prior to crossing the coast, we pulled up to get out a small arms fire, and then descended again to altitude.

What's going through your mind is that, "We're quite low." You don't want to go any lower, that, "We're going to stay below radar coverage." And we did. Now, I'd like to say everything went just perfectly, but it didn't.

We had a board, not only the normal crew, but in addition, we had a British observer to observe our operation of the British equipment, the Mark II GEE. And the British observer and my navigator got into quite a discussion about exactly which lines we were on, and I pointed out we were approaching the IP because we had breaks in the clouds, and we could see the ground fairly well at times.

I received the instructions back, "We'll tell you when to turn," which was a normal Pathfinder operation. We actually flew all the way across the peninsula and out into the ocean, when I said, "I know we're past it and you guys have made a mistake." And then they discovered that they had in fact set it up wrong. So, we flew back across the peninsula, picked up, of course, again, flew into the IP and turned to the drop zone. Interesting, because first time across, we did not receive but a small amount of flack. Second time across, we could see quite a bit of flack coming up at us, but nobody on our airplanes was hurt, and we wound up in the right place and about the right time.

As they go out, the airplane tends to rise because of the lesser weight, and you know they're out. And you know, can turn and go home. And having jumped with a paratrooper stick for training, you know what the acceleration and the feel of that is. It's quite an experience.

We took the squadron of Pathfinders from England bound through North Africa and into the area near Rome, Marsigliano, and we were to lead the invasion of Southern France. I was the lead aircraft for all the British forces going in, airborne forces going in, and carried the commander of the British First Pathfinder company on my airplane. Tremendous character, wonderful soldier. The best I'd ever known.

Southern France, though, was... Like everything else you can plan it, but you've got to be there. As we flew into Southern France, about 20 miles off the coast we ran into a fog bank that extended from the surface up to about 2,000 feet. Not supposed to be there, and certainly not the kind of weather that Troop Carriers, groups and wings could fly in.

I turned on my running lights and pulled up above the clouds until we crossed the coastline, then descended into the valley, and dropped my British troops where they were supposed to go. We flew back to Rome. I reported to General Williams, who was the Troop Carrier commander, and to General Mark Clark, who was the overall military commander, that there was no way that the Airborne operation could proceed with that cloud bank, and the Airborne portion of the invasion was delayed until the clouds burned off, which was a very good decision. We found out later that one of the British paratroopers had had his static line wrapped around his neck by accident, and he broke his neck in the fall. The rest of them survived, and the British commander and I were friends then for the next 40 years.

When we crossed the Rhine... That's a story I think that has never been told. But we had a tremendous executive officer, non-flying executive officer, who was a politician. And a great one and a wonderful fellow. And he felt that it was necessary that he come out of the war not only being called colonel, but that he had combat decoration.

As a non-flying officer, it's awfully tough to get a combat decoration, and he had to fly a mission to do it. In the early days of the war, observers were allowed to go along, but there were so many deaths and accidents that General Eisenhower decided that from a certain point in time there would be no more observers flying unless there was a specific mission.

I was assigned the job, therefore, of finding a crew position for this politician so he could fly and get a medal. I couldn't have him be the engineer because might need the engineer. Couldn't be the radio operator. Couldn't be the co-pilot. Couldn't be the navigator. I mean, could be the co-pilot, but could not be the navigator. So, I chose to fly this non-flying officer as my co-pilot, and I am flying deputy command lead, which means there's a string of miles, hundreds of miles of Troop Carrier airplanes behind me. Joe Crouch is flying lead, and I'm number two in this whole formation, trying to maintain formation and trying to watch this non-pilot and be sure he knows what's happening. I had about a month to train him, and I had decided that I did not need to train him to take off an airplane because I was going to take off. The only reason we'd need a co-pilot is if something happened to me, so he needed to be taught to land an airplane. And so, I spent a month teaching him to land an airplane, and that was all the training that he had.

And we flew into Germany that way, with a non-flying officer on my right. He was really interested in seeing Germany, but when the flack came up, he thought he could hide better under the instrument panel than by watching out the window. So, he missed most of Germany. Into Germany, and that's daylight operation now. There was no Pathfinder operation.

We flew as a group into Germany, not as Pathfinders, but as a Pathfinder group flying an Airborne drop. As part of the overall- and because of the performance that we had previously demonstrated, we were selected to lead one of the two columns. We were the first group in our column.

Well, I think it is certainly true that everybody didn't get to the right place all the time, or on time all the time. There were Troop Carrier and there were Pathfinder crews that did not get to the right place. But the precise location is an argument I'll have with Ambrose any day. A point on the ground is selected as being the point, and what you try to do with an Airborne stick is drop them so they spread across that point. If you consider that you're moving some 170, 200 feet per second, it doesn't take much time to miss by several hundred feet or yards. The advertised distance was about quarter-mile, 440 yards or so. Most of us, wound up within that kind of area, but that meant that the first man out and the last man out would be off even if the stick were dropped exactly correctly. And if you miss by a second or two, you're ready out. Now, just consider how you're going to do this when there are no marks on the ground and no ground aids. And truly, the equipment, while it worked spectacularly, was primitive. So, I think that Ambrose needs to understand, and I think he does understand, that overall it was a very good operation. If it weren't, we wouldn't have continued to use it.

There were some that were miles off their mark. But on the other hand, given the Pathfinder operation, that would say that if they set up properly, there's going to be others coming into the same spot. And to put them in the same place was a big, big assistance to the Airborne troops when they weren't on the ground instead of having them all isolated. But yes, some of them missed.

The way in which you drop and Pathfinder and in the group is the lead group determines the lead airplane, determines the drop point, signals, and everybody drops. Now, if that's the case, the airplanes back in the box formation are going to be way off that same target. And how far apart are they going to be? How much of a delay is there? How long does it take to get a stick of paratroopers out the door? Not very long, I'll agree with that. But still, when you're moving at 200 feet per second, which is about speed of a C47, it doesn't take many seconds to be off by some significant distance. I think that the better trained Pathfinder navigators never missed. But some did. Some not properly trained or some of the new boys just did not understand the equipment well enough, or may have been in a hurry to drop their troops. I don't know. We never missed a drop zone in all the operations I flew. Proud of that, but I'm grateful to my navigators.

Oh, what kind of feelings do I have about my time as a Pathfinder pilot and the guys I flew with? I felt that I contributed to the war effort, to the winning of the war. I thought that the group we had assembled, and I'm talking now about the prior to D-Day group, were the finest group of officers and pilots I have ever known. And you see that in the fact that that group stays together still while we expanded later to a full group, we never see the rest. But that pre-D-Day group is still together, still in touch with one another. Great, great officers. Great people.

Did we feel like we had helped win the war? And the answer is yes. We were certainly a part of that. Other things were required, but we helped. We made it possible for the Airborne to operate efficiently, which is something, by the way, the Germans never learned to do. And it worked so that you saw an increasing use of Airborne throughout the course of the war.

There was concern initially, prior to D-Day, especially on the part of the British that operation was too risky. You couldn't do it, and you couldn't survive. Now, the Germans, after Crete, called off all their airborne operations, mass airborne operations, because of the heavy losses. We had to demonstrate our ability to get into an unknown or unmarked area at night in order to convince the higher ups that, yes, Pathfinder would work. And we did that.

No, everybody was young. You couldn't go to flying school if you were over 24. You know, had to be 21 to be commissioned, and if you were over 24, you couldn't get in. So, everybody was young. Group commanders were 33, 34-years-old. It was a young service. There wasn't a lot of old-time operation in it. Maybe that's why infantrymen were 17, 18, 19-years-old. Air Force pilots were originally 21, 22, 23-years-old. At 22 I was kind of like the old man, not in age, but in seniority within the group. Number two in the group, in terms of rank.

I won't say not a care in the world, but nothing interfered with their dedication or with their desire to perform their mission. They were, and they are. They're great people. I'm proud of them all. I can't take credit for the concept or for the development of the idea, but I'm certainly glad I was a part of it.

I'm proud that we accomplished it. I'm proud that we accomplished it well and that everybody stood up to what, I guess, one would call the test of fire. No shirkers in the Pathfinder. And nothing but dedication, truly. I'd like to take credit for instilling that pride and that dedication in them, but I just was a part of it. I thought it was a great outfit.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Major Richard Jacobson. Next time on Warriors In Their Own Words, we’ll hear from pathfinder co-pilot Capt. Harold Sperber.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

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