Marvin N. GILLMAN

"Gil"

509^th Parachute Infantry Battalion

Source : Andy

Map of Normandy American Cemetery

 Best friends Jerry SEYMOUR and Marvin GILLMAN were members of the 509^th Parachute Infantry Battalion and both only sons.

Photo courtesy of the author

Monument erected in honor of the 17 paratroopers who jumped in the golf of St Tropez

Source : Andy

Early on the morning of August 15, 1944, my cousin Tech 4 Marvin Gillman and 15 other men of Company B of the Army’s elite 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion followed Captain Ralph Miller out the door of a C-47 and parachuted into the blackness. They were part of Operation Dragoon, code name for the invasion of Southern France. Their intended destination was Le Muy, a village about 10 miles inland from the resort town of St. Tropez.

The mission of the 509th was to kill or capture enemy forces, seize surrounding roads and hold them until relieved by amphibious assault troops.

Their plane, like the 44 other C-47s in the attack group, had no navigator, just a pilot, and co-pilot, who became confused and lost track of the formation. When the pilot turned on the green jump signal, hoping he was over Le Muy, he was actually skimming over the Mediterranean, probably 15 miles out to sea, the Army would conclude later.

Marvin and his buddies, each carrying approximately 100 pounds of gear wrapped around them like chain-mail, plunged into a rolling sea and sank like steel pilings. No trace of them was ever found.

“They had no chance,” laments Charlie Doyle, who was president of the 509th PIB Association. He’d also made the jump into Le Muy. The lost stick (planeload of paratroops) is an integral part of the outfit’s history and recalled at every reunion.

Marvin was 19, an only child, the son of Solomon and Belle Gillman of Union Pier, Michigan, where they owned a small cafe. Belle was my father’s sister. There were many thousands like Marvin, kids who graduated from high school just in time to be thrown into a world war against the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. Before the drop into France, Marvin had already endured terrible battles in Italy, where he’d been wounded in the fight to hang onto the precarious Anzio beachhead.

He was a larger than life figure in my family, his brief tenure on earth handed down to me in brief whispers, mysterious folklore. Belle, my favorite aunt, didn’t want him declared Killed in Action, preferring the Missing in Action definition even though this placed a hold on his G.I. insurance.

My older sister Phyllis had actually met Marvin. “If we don’t remember him,” she once said to me, “it will be like he never lived.”

By Ivan G. Goldman