Armageddon (75 page)
Meanwhile further south, on 13 March Patton launched his own attack south-eastward across the Moselle. Four days later, Third Army had trampled over the remains of the German First and Seventh Armies. American armour passed through the infantry and began a dramatic drive across the Saarland. As Patch’s U.S. Seventh Army attacked north-eastwards through the last remaining sector of the West Wall still in enemy hands, Patton’s men were already pushing far behind the German front. The attackers faced local spoiling actions, which could change nothing but only inflict delay. Moving east out of Neustadt towards Speyer on 23 March, for instance, the spearhead of 10th Armored Division met a Panther and promptly blew off its turret.
A young American armoured engineer officer ran alone on foot ahead of the tanks, looking for a way round the barricades blocking the road. The lead tank drove through an underpass before being hit. The Americans spotted two panzerjäger, covered by infantry, tucked in beside a nearby building. A Sherman fired at them and missed. Its next shell did better, hitting one of the German armoured vehicles at the junction of its gun and shield, jamming the recoil mechanism. The German tried to retire, but lost a track to another shell. The panzerjäger collided with its mate, wedging it against a wall. Both German armoured crews bailed out and fled, except one driver who remained in his seat, concussed by the first hit. As the Shermans engaged the infantry with their machine-guns, the commander of the leading American tank collapsed in his turret, shot by a rifleman. His tank pulled aside, allowing its successor to overtake and drive on. This little firefight had lasted only four minutes. The Americans now drove on into Speyer in thick fog which reduced visibility to a hundred yards. They suffered a steady trickle of casualties for some hours before the town was secured.
Such small encounters, repeated again and again every day along the front, made hard pounding for the men of the Allied vanguard. Yet it was plain that organised resistance was collapsing. Patton’s spearheads were moving fifteen to twenty-five miles a day. Third Army collected 68,000 prisoners and Seventh Army 22,000 in the Saarland–Palatinate operation. Patton’s men suffered 5,000 casualties, Patch’s some 12,000. This was a small price to pay for rolling up a major part of the surviving defences of central Germany.
T
HERE WERE FEW
jokes in the north-west Europe campaign, and indeed it was never easy to be funny about events which were matters of life and death. But the U.S. Army relished to the utmost the spectacle of Montgomery’s forces preparing to stage a huge, formal military pageant on the Rhine, more than two weeks after its own soldiers had crossed seventy miles further south. It was true that the bridgehead at Remagen did not diminish the need for Allied forces to secure big crossings north of the Ruhr. Montgomery’s Operation Plunder had not become redundant. But the Americans’ spectacular achievement robbed Plunder of glamour and glory.
Patton twisted Montgomery’s tail by staging another assault crossing of his own, on the middle Rhine at Nierstein and Oppenheim, just south-west of Frankfurt, on the night of 22 March, twenty-four hours before Montgomery’s big moment. Third Army’s 5th Division met negligible resistance. On the morning of 23 March, Patton triumphantly telephoned 12th Army Group and announced: “Brad—don’t tell anyone, but I’m across . . . I sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Krauts around that they don’t know it yet. So don’t make any announcement.” Patton’s bulletin to 12th Army Group further taunted the British, by describing how his forces had crossed “without benefit of aerial bombing, ground smoke, artillery preparation and airborne assistance,” all of which 21st Army Group was employing on a prodigious scale.
For ten days before Montgomery’s forces crossed, a smokescreen shrouded the Allied bank of the river at Wesel, to conceal troop and vehicle movements from German artillery observers. A massive bombardment preceded H-Hour. At 2100 on the evening of 23 March, 51st (Highland) Division staged a diversionary crossing near Rees. The Scots traversed the great river in seven minutes and were soon secure on the eastern bank, having met slight resistance. At 0200 on the 24th, the main crossing began north-west of Xanten, led by 15th (Scottish) Division, even as the first wave of 120,000 men of Simpson’s Ninth Army launched their own American landing craft. Tracer flew overhead, to guide the course of the assault vessels amid the fierce current. The U.S. 30th and 79th Divisions suffered just thirty casualties in crossing the great river which had been the focus of so many Allied hopes and fears for so long. The Germans had abandoned the attempt to defend the Rhine shore against overwhelming firepower, and dispatched many of the Wesel defenders to the Remagen perimeter.
Yet an easy success for Montgomery was now succeeded by an equally spectacular shambles. The 21st Army Group’s commander had determined that, alongside the amphibious assault on the Rhine, Allied parachute forces should be committed. Eisenhower gave him not only the British 6th Airborne, which had done so well in Normandy, but also a division of Ridgway’s U.S. XVIII Airborne Corps. Their task was to secure the higher ground behind the river, together with six bridges over the River Issel. To ensure that the airborne landing did not disrupt the artillery preparation, the paratroopers and gliderborne forces were committed only after the river crossings had been made, at 0900 on 24 March. This was the last great airborne operation of the Second World War.
Whatever surprises the Allies had been able to inflict on the Germans elsewhere on the Rhine, at Wesel for weeks the defenders had anticipated Montgomery’s crossing. The amphibious assault units profited greatly from the Germans’ transfer of forces to Remagen. But behind the river bank, beyond reach of significant damage from the British bombardment, the Germans had deployed formidable anti-aircraft power. Some 357 German flak positions—about a thousand gun barrels—had been identified. Four wings of RAF Typhoons mounted a standing anti-flak patrol through the attack. Yet, as the great airborne armada approached for Operation Varsity, ferocious ground fire rose to meet it. The British gliders, in particular, suffered severely. It was a painful irony that, despite the negligible losses of the waterborne divisions, on 24 March the American 17th Airborne took some 1,500 casualties, including 159 men killed. The British lost 1,400 men, including a quarter of their glider pilots, out of 7,220 landed. Forty-four transport aircraft were destroyed and 332 damaged. Twenty-two of the seventy-two C-46 aircraft dispatched were lost. “The casualties to glider pilots and their passengers, though by no means light, were not sufficient to affect the course of the battle, though the loss of equipment was serious,” concluded a British after-action report soothingly. Yet about half the gliders in the American sector and 60 per cent in the British zone suffered flak damage. Their passengers found the experience of the assault horrendous, and remain bitter that it has received so little attention from posterity.
The American 17th Airborne, making its first drop into battle, was to seize the Diersfordter Forest, from which it was feared that the Germans could fire upon the river crossings. The original plan called for the commitment of the U.S. 13th Airborne as well, but shortage of aircraft caused them to be excluded. The men of the 17th took off from twelve airfields around Paris after a hefty pre-dawn breakfast of steak, eggs and apple pie. Their formations rendezvoused with those of the British 6th Airborne over Brussels, then swung north-east for the last 103 miles of the approach to the river, where Eisenhower, Churchill, Brooke and a host of other Allied luminaries waited to witness this last great spectacular of the Anglo-American campaign.
Private Patrick Devlin of 6th Airborne’s Royal Ulster Rifles attended mass the day before he boarded his platoon’s glider for the Rhine. He had just returned from home leave in County Galway, after surviving the Normandy campaign. His mother begged him to stay snug in Ireland, “but to me it was all a big adventure which I would not have missed.” A sniper by trade, for this operation he preferred to carry a Bren gun. On the runway at Rivenhall near Col-chester, he and his mates kicked a football before take-off. Then he dozed, not discontentedly, through the three-and-a-half-hour flight into Germany.
Dr. David Tibbs of 13 Para was moved by the “wonderful spirit of the men.” Yet not all were eager for action. The night before the assault, the doctor was woken twice to deal with self-inflicted wounds. He also found himself ministering to an Irishman who displayed a urethral discharge and suggested himself as a VD case. Tibbs was confident that the man had used toothpaste to simulate the symptoms. “Here’s your tablets,” he told his patient brutally. “Tomorrow you jump, clap and all!” The paratroopers were assured that the opposition would have been flattened by air and artillery strikes. The medical teams, however, were briefed to expect heavy casualties.
At the airfield, Tibbs and his comrades were a trifle disheartened to hear that their American pilots had never before carried paratroopers. The fliers inquired innocently about the long cylinders attached to parachute packs and clipped beneath the fuselage—“Are those things explosives?” Yes indeed, said the British, bangalore torpedoes. At that moment, the whole plane lifted and there was a resounding thud as the bangalores were dumped on the tar-mac. A head leaned out of the cockpit: “Just testing the clips!” the pilot cried cheerfully. The frightened doctor shook his fist at the American, and helped the signals officer to reattach their dangerous cargo. When most of Lieuten-ant Peter Downward’s platoon were already aboard their Dakota, a young soldier suddenly broke down and announced that he could not go on. Downward took the boy aside and remarked that, since he would be one among 8,000 men of 6th Airborne dropping, the odds were that he would make it. “Also, that as a young man he would hate himself if he looked back on this act of cowardice. He had to think of his family. How would they feel, to have a son labelled a coward by a court martial?” The boy boarded the aircraft, jumped, survived, and afterwards thanked his officer, little older than himself.
One of Downward’s men, Porrill, relieved the monotony of the long flight by serenading the aircraft with his mouth organ. As David Tibbs’s C-47 approached the dropping zone, the doctor was horrified to see through the door a long stream of men descending into a thick forest. Their dispatcher gestured at their own stick to jump. Tibbs’s sergeant, No. 1 in the C-47’s doorway, shook his head violently, pointing down at the trees and a row of pylons. Then the landscape cleared, and they threw themselves into the air. The doctor watched curiously as a German 88mm gun crew beneath him loaded and fired their piece. He hit the ground 200 yards from the battery. Seeing two paras close by, he pointed to the enemy guns. Weighed down with equipment, the soldiers waddled towards them with agonizing sluggishness. But every German eye was on the sky. The British threw grenades and successfully rushed the guns.
Colonel Edson Raff and 700 men of his U.S. 507th were dropped two miles off target, because their transport pilots were confused by haze. Marching through the woods towards their rendezvous, he chanced upon a German artillery battery, which his “Ruffians” immediately stormed, killing most of the gun crews. By 1400, Raff’s men had secured all their objectives. Brigadier-General William Miley, commanding the 17th, was also landed miles from his intended dropping zone and separated from his staff. Indeed, all he could initially see on the ground were three soldiers and a container labelled as a .30 calibre machine-gun. The general took the weapon and the soldiers in charge, and started his battle commanding a single machine-gun crew, which opened a brisk fire on the enemy.
At least part of the 507th had landed where it was intended. By contrast, Colonel James Coutts’s entire 513th Parachute Infantry suffered an awkward trip. First, while still in the air their C-46 transports passed over a German flak belt. Twenty-two American aircraft were shot down in flames, the nightmare mitigated only by the fact that all their paratroopers were able to jump before the C-46s crashed. The undamaged aircraft dropped their men not on the designated DZ-X, but on 6th Airborne’s glider landing zone at Hammelkiln, which was under heavy German fire. The American paratroopers found themselves engaging enemy gun positions even as gliders crashed in around them. Ridgway was so dismayed by the readiness with which the C-46s had caught fire that he gave orders that the type was never again to be used for carrying paratroopers into action.
This was the most ambitious glider operation of the war. The British Hamilcars carried loads of eight tons. 6th Airborne’s glider lift alone landed beyond the Rhine 4,844 men (dead and alive), 342 jeeps, 348 trailers, three gun trailers, seven Locust tanks, fourteen lorries, two bulldozers, eleven Bren-carriers, nineteen five-hundredweight cars, fifty-nine portable motorcycles, 127 heavy motorcycles, sixty-eight bicycles, twenty field cycles, ten 4.2-inch mortars, two 75mm guns, fifty six-pounder anti-tank guns, twelve seventeen-pounders, and two twenty-five-pounders.
Lieutenant Jack Curtis Goldman flew an American glider carrying the combat surgical team of 17th Airborne. As they approached the landing zone, he could catch only glimpses of the ground through holes in the vast riverside smokescreen. They cast off and approached the LZ undamaged, “but then as we were about six or eight feet off the ground, it sounded as if a giant popcorn machine had exploded in the back of the glider—machine gun bullets ripping our fuselage to shreds.” He was sickened to feel the glider’s wheels bumping over the bodies of dead paratroopers. At last they shuddered to a halt. The occupants leaped out and ran to the shelter of a belt of trees. When Goldman got there, he found that he was so shaken that instead of bringing his Thompson gun, he was clutching a big can of fruit cocktail. Lacking anything else useful to do, he sat down and ate it. It was two hours before gunfire subsided sufficiently for him to return to the glider and retrieve his weapon and equipment. He saw lying in the wreckage the bodies of several men whom he knew well. He unclipped the reserve parachute from a dead man and later sent the silk to a girl in Brownfield, Texas. She took it as a proposal of marriage.
