Bastogne: The Story of the First Eight Days - US Army Center Of ...

CHAPTER 17
SUPPLIES ARRIVE 1
FROM DAYLIGHT on December 23 all guards stood alerted
for the first appearance of the C-47s. At 0935 a military
policeman on duty at the entrance to the 101st Division command
post carried the word to Colonel Kohls that several large planes
were circling the area.
A few minutes later, the pathfinders jumped in the area where
the 2d Battalion of Colonel Harper's 327th Glider Infantry was
deployed. They were quickly rounded up by his men. One minute
later, First Lieutenant Gordon o. Rothwell, commanding
the pathfinder team, was on the telephone explaining to Colonel
Kohls that the supply planes would arrive in about 90 minutes.
Kohls told him how to get to the drop zone and where to put the
radar set. Again the regimental supply men were alerted. Again
Major Butler displayed the panels. At 1150 on the 23d, men all
along the front saw the planes coming in; it was the most heartening
spectacle of the entire siege. (Plates 31 to 33.)
Men and vehicles were all set for it. The pathfinder mdar had
given Captain Huffman and Lieutenant Colonel John T. Cooper,
Jr. (Commanding Officer, 463d Parachute Field Artillery Battalion)
a half-hour advance warning that the planes were coming
in and the supply parties reached the field ten minutes before the
Hight, in time for Huffman to assign zones of retrieving to each
unit so that there would be a uniformly quick pick-up. There
was very little enemy fire on any part of the field.
Sixteen planes arrived in the first Hight, but these were just
the beginning. By 1606 of that day, 241 planes had dropped
1,446 bundles weighing 144 tons by parachute into the niilesquare
drop zone. The drop pattern was excellent and there was
about a 95 per cent recovery of the dropped material.
Working against the approaching darkness, the supply crews
threw whole bundles, parachute and all, into the jeeps and shuttled
between the drop zone and their dumps as fast as they could
tear over the ground. All supplies were in the unit dumps by
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