The First Man Into Normandy: Col. Vito S. Pedone

Ken Harbaugh:

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 Colonel Vito S. Pedone. Pedone served in World War II as a Pathfinder Pilot, and co-piloted the lead Pathfinder plane during the Invasion of Normandy.

Col. Vito Pedone:

I was in Europe in 1943 flying A-20s, a reconnaissance type Aircraft, going over taking photographs of targets along the coast of France. And when my tour was up, I had the opportunity of either coming back to United States or staying in England. By that time I had married a U.S. Air Force flight nurse by the name of Geraldine Curtis, and I decided it was best I stay with my wife. And I volunteered to go to troop carrier and they assigned me to the IX Air Force Troop Carrier Command. So, I was a staff officer in operations in Grantham, England with the IX Troop Carrier Command. Predominantly at that very moment they were in North Africa.

Well, what they did is the army complemented what we did with the ... They formed two platoons. One was commanded by captains, the 82nd Airborne had a platoon of maybe 90 to a hundred men, and the 101st had the same number. And so we trained with them. Because the purpose of the Airborne operations of Pathfinders, bear in mind, they had a radio receiver and transmitter called Rebecca/Eureka. It was the job of the Airborne Troop Carrier Pathfinders to get them to a drop zone. Then it was the job of the 101st or 82nd Airborne Pathfinders to install the transmitter so that the lead airplanes from each flight could home in on their individual drop zone. Each of the drop zones had different frequencies of the transmitters, so you could just hone in right on each one of them. That was a primary purpose and this is the kind of training that we did in England. We try to duplicate the kind of drop zones that we would expect in France, and checking out the equipment, because the equipment was pretty heavy.

Well, what you had to do now that we were forming the school, we had to melt the ground element of the 101st and 82nd with the air element. You had all strange pilots who've never flown together before, so you had a lot of formation flying, you had exercise drops, you had to do a lot of exercises on the Rebecca/Eureka, drop the drop stick, have them set up the transmitter, and then simulate an approach on those drop zones. Now remember, we're doing this in six, seven months, so we had a lot of work to be done just to train people. And the school itself was, everyone in the school was on temporary duty from their parent organizations, until after the Normandy invasion they made a provisional group out of it, but everybody was sort of a visitor you might say. So that predominantly the training was being aware of what the drop zone was going to be and what to accomplish as far as supporting the ground element that was coming across the Omaha Beach. Because the concept was, the airborne would drop behind the German defense lines and work themselves towards the beach and then you have the beach element and they would meet somewhere in the middle like Sainte-Mere-Eglise.

Well, you could do all the training you want to, you could do perfect formation flying. You could do perfect towing of gliders, you could do perfect interception of drop zones. You could home in on your Rebecca and Eureka system perfectly, and especially if you do it in the daytime a lot of time. But when you start doing it under the actual condition with adverse weather under the knowledge that someone's going to start firing at you, you got a whole new tone and approach in this whole thing.

Prior to the drop I was pretty interested, because I was flying light bombers and I knew I always flew low-level missions over France. And my primary job was to take photographs of barges, railroad tracks, towns, so they can get them back to the bomber forces. In those days we were hitting the coast, French coast. But the most important thing is that I was flying so low that I never worried about Flak or any anti-aircraft guns hitting me, because they'd have to deploy below the zero point to hit me. The only ones I worried about were guns, Flak guns that were on towers. Then they could easily deflect on it. That's the only time he worried about it. And when you saw a water tower in the early coast of France, you watched it very carefully. Because the side could open up and there would be a gun staring you in the eye, so you stayed away from those towers, so I was used to this.

But then when you get the C-47 airplanes, they're not used to this kind of operations flying three low and people firing at you. So, the funny thing about it's they gave us flak suits, it looks like the police wear now, and I was fortunate to get about 20 more flak suits by trading with a case of scotch. And when the day came in, we loaded on the airplane, Colonel Crouch comes up to me and he says, "What are you doing with all those flak suits?" I says, "I'll show you in a minute." I took the front part of that airplane and just made a beautiful blanket of flak suits on it, double layer of it, and I said, "Just did to protect you in my butt when it comes up on it."

My biggest fear is that we didn't want to make a mistake, because if we were dropping bombs, it would just be three ships dropping the bomb and when we get the hell out of there and go back home. But there was two or three groups behind us of about two or 300 airplane that we were saying, "You have to land your parachutist here," and that's different than dropping the bomb. And so that was our biggest concern is trying to get it in the right drop zone, even to the point that if we have to circle around and find the damn drop zone, that was our job. And I think that's one of the things that we learned later on we should have done a little bit more of that, because we had a extra hour, hour and a half ahead of time of looking for. But the combination of the cloud and the flock and all of that, we didn't accomplish any of that

When I was over the drop zone in Normandy, behind me was this armada of 1,500 airplanes that were 300 miles long, and I would say 95% of those crew members, it's the first time they were going to ever meet combat experience, the whole 95. Where in the bomber forces you had some more coordinated liaison among the crews so you could experience it so that everybody in the crew was a new at it. And that was one of the features that I think we went amiss on. We should have had bomber crews coming in and acknowledge what we are going to experience, or we should have put some of our crews in to go with some of the bomber forces, particularly in the ranks of leaders like majors and lieutenant colonels who would know what's happening. Because everybody in this force here had never had any experience of doing what they were just doing. It was done for the first time. And there was a lot of things that the army depended on the Air Force be knowledgeable about. And the Air Corps depended on the army should have been now knowledgeable on it.

My job was to see everything in front of me by map that I'm supposed to be seeing. Colonel Crouch was flying the airplane. So that's what I was doing going from point to point. We over of the Guernsey Islands then I saw were making landfall, then I knew we were supposed to hit a little town and then nowhere we were supposed to hit Sainte-Mere-Eglise I was doing. But when I got halfway down after I made landfall, all of a sudden there was a big cloud there at 300 feet and I said, "Oh my God, we got problems." And we just flew right through it. But that was easy for us. That's when I said, "I think we ought to let the troops know about it, because they're not going to make it." Because they had to go, it was at when you have a Y and everybody pairs off to go that formation. It was like right at that very point where that cloud was where they had to go through it to make their points.

I did mention it and says, "We're going to have problems with the clouds here because it's right in the middle." It's like a big cloud being in the middle of a football field and you have to do something about it, either either go around it or through. It was very easy for us to do it, to go through it because you only had two ships on it. We just go on instrument and go through it in about two or three minutes we'd be out of it, but when you got 50 or 60 ships behind you, that's impossible to do the go through the cloud, and that's when they start scattering around the countryside. That cloud did it. What we should have done is when we hit the cloud, we should have indicated to the force behind us, "You have a low cloud over the drop zone, you're going to have to move the whole thing to the right or to the left a few miles or go around it." And they would have let down a little lower and going more visible and go around the cloud. That didn't happen, because we were under strict orders not to break radio silence, and I thought that was not the way to do it.

My experience of being in the Air Force for 35 years, I learned one thing. Is when a flotilla, a single airplane, a multitude of airplanes are in the air, the senior pilot is the commander of that force. It's his responsibility for the welfare safety of that whole group. Now, the bomber forces most of the time was either senior colonel or general leading the whole procession, and if there was an action in front of him, he decided that we'd have to change, modify, or redo. He immediately made the decision right then and there, "You do this and you do that." He had that authority, okay? Unbeknownst to anybody else, whether it was forecast or not, my experience with the troop carrier was we were setting set rules.

I think we could have, if that authority had been in the same experience as the bomber forces, when we got to that key point where we had the cloud over the main entry point to the drop zone, I think someone should have had the authority in a good sense to say, "We're going to divert on pre-planning now, not just off the top of their head, on pre-planning, we're going to the alternate drop zone, we're going to alternate plan." And everybody would have got around that cloud. They wouldn't have got around the anti-aircraft guns, but it certainly would have got around the cloud, because every formation that you read in the book hit that cloud. And I think that's the difference between the two forces. I think we could have done a better job for them, and that's my personal feeling.

The low cloud that scattered the airplanes, then anti-aircraft guns became very, very strong. So between the bad weather, low clouds and the guns being fired and the airplanes being shot down and you could see them going down and exploding on the ground, that's when you have a problem of discipline. And that's one of the problems we had, because it's the first time anybody's experienced that before. If you had been experienced like that with the bomber forces, bomber crews have seen all that airplanes being blown up. They're shook up, but not that much.

After the war… Shortly thereafter they knew exactly where they got landed and where they should have gone. And there's lots of reports in which each one of these drop zones, "This is where you should have been, this is where you were dropped." Those are all available in history books. And so you get written comments on that, and some are good, some are bad and some are outrageous. But everyone was pretty disturbed the fact that they didn't get dropped in the right place. But bear in mind, places that we were supposed to drop in that showed nice grass fields, they didn't have any photographs. So if they had photographs, they were high altitude, they were really marshland that was three or four feet deep. And a lot of our troops drowned in the thing because they had too much heavy equipment and couldn't come out of it. So that we had no photographs to distinguish what was marshland and what was meadows.

Well, we dropped the 101st Pathfinder group. We had a lead people from the pathfinders, from the Army, from the 82nd and 101st. Almost all of them were veterans from the Sicily Drop, so they're pretty much savvy type people. I thought everybody on the plane was a sergeant, so you can see how much seniority he had on there. And so they knew what was going to happen and so it was no excitement there. You read about other airplanes where the crews and the airborne people were banged around pretty badly. We have no problems at all on getting them out very quickly. One of the problems we had, which was very easy, because we were the lead airplane, we had the land in London to report personally, Colonel Crouch reported personally to General Eisenhower's headquarters to tell them we had gone over the drop zone, we had made our drops and that we're going back to North Witham to get on the back end of this whole air armada. Because the next day we were doing the same thing, except we're dropping supplies, and that's all we did for three days after that.

We had Rebecca/Eureka that we were going to set up, but then we had K-boxes and we had radar systems that vectored into drop zone for us. In other words, they put out a beam and they crossed the target area and we flew that beam and when we knew when we hit that crossed the other one, we knew we were in our drop zone. So, we had a lot of help from the British with reference to navigational aids. But we are the only ones that had that equipment per se. We expected the follow on crews to be homing in on the Rebecca/Eureka and not on the what was being transmitted from the British Armed Forces. But we also had, some airplanes had two or three navigators on board. One was doing visual, one was doing the radar and the other one was doing VFR. Just plain ordinary navigation looking out and seeing where they were.

The most difficult thing about flying pathfinder missions is the fact that the air crews themselves are not trained for airborne operations per se. Most of their operations training is it's flying cargo around the countryside. I know that happened in Vietnam and dropping supplies, picking up wounded, and just being the transportation system of the system. They either do it air landing, they do the drops or air pickups, so that when you have an airborne operation, it's sort of like a make-up game and say, "We're going to do this operations and let's get the airborne together and the troop carrier and then we'll drop them." It isn't one of those things that's sustained training all the time, because you got new people coming in all the time.

I know in Vietnam we never had large airborne operation. Because most of the so-called troop carrier airplanes were just general supply ships. I think the fact is that you're trying to do two jobs with one airplane. And right now we have big airplanes with a lot of people on board trying to jump out, and they do a reasonably good job. But don't forget, the primary purpose of that airplane is to carry cargo around the world, strategic cargo.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Colonel Vito S.Pedone.

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