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The recruits were excited, tense, eager, nervous. The veterans were worried. "I hate to think of going again," Webster wrote in his diary. What worried him most of all was the thought of being killed in his chute as he came down, swinging helplessly in the air, or getting caught in a tree or on a telephone pole and being bayoneted or shot before he could free himself. He had acquired a .45 automatic pistol, but it was no match for a distant machine-gun. He felt that if he could live through the jump, he could take the rest as it came.
Talking to the subdued veterans around him at the airdrome, he noticed that "the boys aren't as enthusiastic or anxious to get it over with as they were before Normandy. Nobody wants to fight anymore."
Some hope was expressed that with Patton racing across France, the Allies on the offensive in Italy, the Red Army moving forward relentlessly on the Eastern Front, and the Wehrmacht high command in turmoil after the July 20 attempt on Hitler's life, Germany might collapse any day. Most of the men would have welcomed such a development, but not Webster, who wrote his parents:
"I cannot understand why you hope for a quick end of the war. Unless we take the horror of battle to Germany itself, unless we fight in their villages, blowing up their houses, smashing open their wine cellars, killing some of their livestock for food, unless we litter their streets with horribly rotten German corpses as was done in France, the Germans will prepare for war, unmindful of its horrors. Defeat must be brought into Germany itself before this mess can come to a proper end; a quick victory now, a sudden collapse, will leave the countryside relatively intact and the people thirsty for revenge. I want the war to end as quickly as anybody wishes, but I don't want the nucleus of another war left whole."
August 19 was D-Day for Chartres. It was scheduled to be a daylight drop. All around Membury that morning, men were getting up at first light, after a more-or-less sleepless night spent mainly sweating on their cots, imagining all sorts of possibilities. They dressed silently. They were detached and gloomy. No one was cutting Mohawk haircuts. There were no shouts of "Look out, Hitler! Here we come!" It was more a case of "Momma, if you ever prayed for me, pray for me now."
Joyous news over the radio! Patton's Third Army tanks had just taken the DZ at Chartres! The jump was canceled! The men shouted. They jumped up and down. They laughed. They blessed George Patton and his tankers. They cheered and danced. That afternoon, they returned to Aldbourne.
On Sunday morning, August 28, the 506th held a memorial service for the men killed in Normandy. When it was announced that the men would have to give up their Sunday morning, there was terrific moaning and groaning; as one trooper put it, he would honor the dead on Saturday morning or all day Monday, but he'd be damned if he'd honor the dead on his own time. But that was just talk, a soldier exercising his inalienable right to grouse. He put on his class A uniform and went along with the rest.