First to Jump (18 page)

Their footsteps echoing flatly off the walls, the Pathfinders ran across the room toward the doorway, and were about to enter it when they heard heavy fire outside. Braddock stopped and peered through.

Three Germans lay dead on the ground, their uniforms riddled with bullets, blood flowing from their wounds into the spaces between the cobblestones. A lieutenant and several of the others who'd swung around behind the building had shot them as they emerged, then moved on up the street. Glancing in that direction, Braddock saw the bodies of two more German soldiers.

The lieutenant's name was O'Connell, and he was new to combat. Jumping over the bodies of the Germans, he had thought,
Thirty seconds ago they were alive.

Thirty seconds.

That was the moment the reality of the war came to him. A man had to be ready to kill, and ready to die, and the difference between one fate and the other could be as simple as deciding whether or not to step through a doorway, or turning right or left. O'Connell knew it could have easily been him on the cobbled ground, and a German soldier glancing down at his body as he ran past. Could have been his mother, and not the mother of one of the men whose lives he'd ended, who soon would be mourning the loss of a son. In a strange way, the realization formed an inseparable link between him and the enemy, an awareness of how much the same they really were under their uniforms.
Soldiers.
Their lives were all hanging on slender threads, and they controlled far less about how and when those threads would be cut than any of them might have chosen to believe.

Standing in the doorway, Glenn Braddock could not have known the lieutenant's thoughts. But he would avoid looking too closely at the bodies before he turned from the doorway into the warehouse and then walked back out and across the street to the end of the canal.

3.

Not far from the warehouse, toward the center of the square, the townspeople skipped, bobbed, and held hands doing their circle dances, while the village priest stood passing out beer and pretzels in the courtyard of the old gothic church. Smiling and joking amid the hoopla, he resembled a pudgy, cheerful penguin in his black-and-white vestments.

Back at the gun emplacement with the 1st Battalion men, Braddock would recall the sudden clanking sound—and then one of the troopers commenting on it as they worked to set up the roadblock. He thought it was a British tank, and so did several of his companions. They'd heard Montgomery had broken through the enemy lines, and figured his armored forces had come right on time to provide them with support.

Then another soldier's voice cut in, its tone very different than the first.

“It's a Kraut light tank!”

The troopers were all looking into the square now. The treaded vehicle barreling toward them had an Iron Cross painted in front, and a man in a black officer's cap standing up out of the turret with a German Luger.

Braddock heard somebody call for a bazooka team, and then remembered passing one on the way from the bridge. He was starting back there at a fast clip when the Panzer's machine gunners opened fire, their long, rattling volleys followed by the heavy boom of the Panzer's cannon. Then came the answering sound of American rifles and submachine guns.

Braddock would always believe the officer spotted him right before ducking down into the hatch. Possibly he took him for one of the soldiers firing at the tank and got angry. Whatever the reason, it was then that that the Panzer turned in his direction, rolling straight at him, its huge steel gears making a tremendous clamor in the square.

Only a short while after Braddock had chased the group of doomed Germans into the warehouse, the tables had turned. He'd become the pursued, and was running for dear life.

Reaching a corner building, he hooked around into the street behind it, thinking he could make for the opposite corner and dash out of sight. Instead, he found himself staring at a high rock wall or fence behind the house. He had no idea what it was doing there but knew he couldn't get through. He'd been cut off from the other side of the street.

Braddock was trying to decide what to do when he heard the clanking of the armored machine's gears again. Turning, he saw that it had swung into the backstreet and was rumbling closer.

He looked desperately around, realized he was standing outside a door, and kicked it open. As he barreled through, he heard the cannon boom a second time, pulverizing a section of the building's exterior.

Then he was inside the house. There was an entry to another room in front of him, two women and a small boy huddled tight against the opposite wall. He waved a hand to let them know he meant no harm, paused in the middle of the room, and listened.

The tank seemed to be drawing away from him. Listening some more, he grew convinced of it. The gunner had backed off.

Although Braddock could not see it from inside the house, the tank had returned to the corner and made a sharp right into the square, plowing through the gathered townsfolk, scattering them in all directions.

As it tore through the intersection, Sergeant O'Shaughnessy drew his Colt .45 and took off after it, pumping rounds between its chassis and turret, aiming for the soft spot he'd been told about in basic training. At the same time another soldier was vainly attempting to jam his M1 rifle between the tread and the wheels. But the vehicle roared toward the bridge, its machine gun spraying the intersection. Miraculously, not a single person was hit.

The troopers were still firing away at the tank when Braddock left the house where he'd taken cover. He stood in the square and saw the Panzer vanish down the road, bearing out of town. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

The square was quiet, but not for long. As American troopers continued marching in over the canal and river bridges, the gaiety began to build. Soon the dancers were again skipping and bobbing across the cobblestones outside the church, post office, and town hall.

As he looked around the square, Braddock would have seen the 326th engineers arriving to construct their secondary bridges for the armor and trucks heading on to Arnhem. But first the town's entry and exit points had to be secured.

Crossing the square, he went to the intersection, joined the men at the abandoned German gun emplacement, and got back to work.

4.

Two days after landing at their DZ, the Pathfinders of Team B/C continued marking the drop zones for gliders and supplies. On September 18, Colonel Joel Crouch had decided that Rothwell and DeRamus would themselves require an immediate resupply of essential items. “Due to the weight and bulk of navigational aids,” a top secret report stated, “it was impossible for them to carry in enough smoke and batteries to provide continuous operation of all aids for subsequent landing of gliders.”

The resupply was to consist of a complete CRN-4, extra batteries for it and the Eureka set, plus additional smoke.

Lieutenant Al Burckhardt, in IX TCC's Plane 086, made the successful drop, and the equipment landed within twenty yards of the Eureka on which his aircraft homed in.

On the ground, the Pathfinders were growing tired and frayed. Bluford Williams had repeatedly found his mind going back to the dozen or so German tanks he'd seen lined up under the trees along the road. Whether or not it had been one of their cannons that struck down Zamanakos, he'd never seen them pull out and couldn't stop imagining what would happen if they left the highway and came rolling across the field, their guns turned on the two sticks of Pathfinders.

Think what damage they could do
, an inner voice kept repeating.
Think what they could do.

Although these thoughts continued to trouble Williams as he guarded the T, Allied fighter planes had annihilated or driven off most of the Panzers lurking in the area. The fighters had roared down over the treetops, hitting them with bombs and machine-gun fire while they sought concealment in fruit orchards or tried to rumble off across the fields.

For the residents of nearby villages, the aerial pursuit of the Germans was a harrowing experience. The Allied planes came circling in low over homes, schools, hospitals, and church steeples, hunting out enemy tanks and cars, spraying anything that moved with bullets, and dropping racks of bombs on the streets and gardens. Explosions rocked the walls and sent dust cascading down over huddled, fearful men, women, and children in the underground shelters where they'd taken cover from the strikes.

At the drop and landing zones, the Pathfinders were finding out that the Army had held to its pledge—nothing on the ground had been allowed to move against them while they set up and guarded their equipment. Exposed and vulnerable in the open field, they had known their lives depended on that promise being kept. More importantly, they'd needed to
trust
it would be kept. They would guard the T with their lives, and their leaders would do everything to protect them while they stood their ground. It was more than an assurance to the men. It was a bond of honor that would allow them to move past their fears and carry on despite the unforgettable horrors they were to witness.

In the first hour of the landing, they'd seen about seventeen C-47s shot down in the fields around them, so many that it had made DeRamus suspect the Germans had gotten advance word of the drop. Johannes van Gorkum, the Dutch freedom fighter, noticed the cannonades coming from the direction of Best to the south, and informed the Americans about the placement of Nazi troops in the village and neighboring Son.

But Gorkum's intelligence, if ultimately used, had been received too late to cut those early losses. Some of the wounded planes had come on hard and fast above the ground like blazing comets, several with troopers hanging from their wings. One transport with flames sprouting from its engines had plowed out of control through a stick of paratroopers as they hung suspended from their canopies, killing at least two of them before it crashed. Williams would remember watching several transports swoop down no more than fifty feet above the Pathfinders' heads and wondering if their pilots were dead, if they were being flown in by their copilots or crew chiefs, or if there was anyone at all alive in the cockpit to man their controls. Barreling though the sky at that altitude, the soldiers aboard those damaged transports had been left with no time for their chutes to open in the air, and probably no time to hook up their static lines. But they'd leaped from the planes in futile attempts to evacuate and fallen to their certain deaths, hitting the ground like rag dolls, their bodies left shattered and bloody on the field.

Williams would always recall the image of one badly wounded glider transport that had flown burning over the DZ, losing altitude at first, and then veering upward in a steep, sudden climb with the glider still in tow. His neck craned backward, shielding his eyes with his hand, he'd watched it soar up and up and up like a fiery arrow,
straight
up, shooting a half mile into the sky, or what seemed a half mile, dragging the Waco behind it by its cable, the two aircraft dwindling in Williams's vision until they seemed no larger than scale models, then reaching the peak of their ascent and exploding before his dumbfounded eyes.

As the Pathfinders steadfastly followed procedure and guided in the planes, Snuffy Smith would feel an identical, lasting sorrow over the men that were shot out of the air. In Normandy, they'd seen planes and gliders downed by antiaircraft batteries. But in the skies over Holland, Luftwaffe fighters would defy the Allied escorts buzzing over the unarmed C-46 transports and sweep in to pick them off like predatory hawks.

The vicious dogfights between the warplanes were sights Smith would never be able to purge from his memory. For someone who'd always felt a calling to alleviate human pain and suffering, it was terrible to stand by and watch the battles overhead, knowing there was nothing he could do to help the men in the air. At the time, Smith was convinced that he would never experience anything that made him feel more hollow and impotent than those awful moments during Market Garden.

Four months later, outside the Belgian village of Bastogne, he would find out he was wrong.

5.

Almost five days after he'd bailed out of his burning transport, Lieutenant Charles Faith was wearing down. He'd spent most of that time in the evergreen hedge, leaving it only under cover of darkness to fill his canteen in the stream, attend to his bodily functions, and work the stiffness out of his neck and limbs. But he was simultaneously hungry and suffering from intestinal cramps and diarrhea—none of which surprised him.

Because of their heavy bulk and weight load, the Pathfinders had not been given the field rations normally issued to airborne troopers. Instead they'd jumped with only their emergency G rations—military chocolate—and eating them had sent the lieutenant's bowels into an uproar. Produced by the Hershey's company, the hard, bitter bars were intentionally unpalatable to discourage soldiers from consuming them as snacks. But the men had also found the high-energy chocolate indigestible and murder on the teeth, and it was no wonder that they'd dubbed it “Hitler's Secret Weapon.”

Going through one a day, Faith had already used up all five of his bars . . . and while it was difficult to lament their absence, they'd at least been crude sources of nourishment. Now he could feel himself starting to fade from hunger and exhaustion. He craved real food, something that wouldn't turn his stomach and give him the runs. The hedge where he'd spent the last five days had been a lifesaver. But he needed to move on.

He would never know whether to call it chance or a godsend that he heard the slow clomp of hooves and the creak of wooden wheels on the other side of the bushes. Peering through to the bordering lane, he saw a man in simple farm clothes riding toward him in a horse-drawn cart.

Faith's heart raced. This was his opportunity. As the big workhorse drew closer, Faith rose from his crouch and stepped out of the hedge into the middle of the lane, leaving his Thompson on his shoulder to demonstrate he meant no harm.