Scotti turned to his sergeant.
“Sergeant Donnelly, you may send up the flares signaling capitulation of the French airfield after a brief but fierce fight. The other planes can come in now.”
As Dick Donnelly, with a few of his men, hurried off to carry out the Lieutenant’s order, Jerry Scotti extended his hand to the French officer, who grabbed it and shook it heartily, mumbling happy phrases all the time in such an outpouring of words and exclamations that Scotti, whose French was limited, could understand nothing of what was said. But he did know that the man was delighted—so delighted, in fact, that a mere handshake would not suffice to demonstrate his enthusiasm. He flung his arms around Lieutenant Scotti, who looked a little embarrassed, especially at the grins of his own men who stood in a circle around him.
“I feel as if I ought to say something important,” he muttered, “like ‘Lafayette, we are here’ or something.”
The other groups of soldiers had gone forward to the hangar, searched the inside of the building, looked over the two obsolete French fighter planes standing in front, and watched Donnelly set off his signal flares. In a few minutes they were looking at half a dozen more transport planes as they circled and came in for a landing on the hard runway of the field. Their wheels had hardly stopped rolling when men in khaki uniforms piled from them, formed lines and were marched to the edge of the field by their commanding officers.
A half hour after the first plane had appeared from the cloud over the hills, there were two hundred American soldiers at the French airfield. In the hangar, Lieutenant Jerry Scotti saluted Captain Murphy, who came in with the air-borne troops, and made his report.
“Good work,” the Captain said, as he sat at the desk and began to look over the papers on it. “The transports will take you and the other parachute troops back to your base at once. They have to get off the field within ten minutes because the fighter squadron will be coming in. We’ve leap-frogged quite a jump this time. Oh yes—see that the French prisoners are taken back to your base, too. And you can tell them they’ll probably be fighting alongside us against the Germans within a few weeks.”
“They’ll like that, sir,” Scotti said. “I’ve talked with a couple of them. I’ve never had anyone so happy to see me as they were. Still, they had to put up that token resistance.”
“Yes, wonderful spirit,” Captain Murphy agreed. “You can inform Captain Rideau, the commanding officer, that his actions when we attacked the field will be relayed to the French authorities who will organize French forces in North Africa to battle the common enemy.”
Within two hours, Lieutenant Scotti, Sergeant Dick Donnelly, and all the paratroopers from their plane as well as the others, were back at the little town which had been their base for the past week. The Frenchmen, technically under military arrest, had the freedom of the town.