Bridge Too Far (24 page)

At that moment, De Wit saw his wife, Adriana, standing in the street crying.  She ran to him.  “I thought you’d never get here,” she told him.  “Come quickly.  Our Tiny has been hit.”  De Wit went past his injured neighbor.  “I never thought of anything but my son.  When I got to him I saw that the whole of his right side was open and his right leg was cut almost through.  He was still fully conscious and asked for water.  I saw that his right arm was missing.  He asked me about his arm and, to comfort him, I said, “You’re lying on it.”” As De Wit knelt by the boy, a doctor arrived.  “He told me not to hope anymore,” De Wit remembers, “because our son was going to die.”  Cradling the boy, De Wit set out for the Duc George cigar factory, where a Red Cross post had been set up.  Before he reached the factory, his fourteen-year-old son died in his arms.

In all the terror, confusion and hope, few of the Dutch saw the vanguard of the Allied Airborne Army.  At approximately 12:40 P.m., twelve British Stirling bombers swept in over the Arnhem area.  At 12:47, four U.s. C-47’s appeared over the heaths north of Eindhoven, while two others flew across the open fields southwest of Nijmegen, close to the town of Overasselt.  In the planes were British and American pathfinders.

Returning to his farm bordering Renkum heath, less than a mile from Wolfheze, Jan Pennings saw planes coming from the west, flying low.  He thought they had returned to bomb the railway line.  He watched them warily, ready to dive for cover if bombs dropped.  As the planes came over Renkum heath, the astounded Pennings saw “bundles dropped, and then parachutists coming out.  I knew that in Normandy the Allies had used parachutists and I was sure this was the beginning of our invasion.”

Minutes later, cycling up to his farm, Jan shouted to his wife, “Come out!  We’re free!”  Then, the first paratroopers he had ever seen walked into the farmyard.  Dazed and awed, Pennings shook their hands.  Within half an hour, they told him, “hundreds more of us will arrive.”

Chauffeur Jan Peelen too saw the pathfinders land on Renkum heath.  He recalls that “they came down almost silently.  They were well-disciplined and immediately began to peg out the heath.”  Like other pathfinders north of the railway line, they were marking out the landing and dropping zones.

Fifteen miles south, near the town of Overasselt, nineteen-year-old Theodorus Roelofs, in hiding from the Germans, was suddenly liberated by 82nd Airborne pathfinders who landed in the vicinity of the family farm.  The Americans, he remembers, were “scouts, and my big fear was that this small group of braves could easily be done away with.”  The pathfinders wasted little time.  Discovering that the young Dutchman spoke English, they quickly enlisted Roelofs to help as guide and interpreter.  Confirming positions on their maps and directing them to the designated landing sites, Roelofs watched with fascination as the troopers marked the area with “colored strips and smoke stoves.”

Within three

minutes a yellow-paneled O and violet smoke clearly outlined the area.

The four C-47’s carrying the 101/ pathfinders to zones north of Eindhoven ran into heavy antiaircraft fire.  One planeload was shot down in flames.  There were only four survivors.  The other three planes continued on, and the pathfinders dropped accurately on the 101/’s two zones.  By 12:54 P.m. dropping and landing zones throughout the entire Market-Garden area were located and marked.  Incredibly, the Germans still had not raised an alarm.

At Hoenderloo barracks, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer, commander of the Hohenstaufen Division, toasted newly decorated Captain Paul [email protected]  A few minutes before, Harzer had seen a few parachutes fall to the west of Arnhem.  He was not surprised.  He thought they were bailed-out bomber crews.  In Oosterbeek, at the Tafelberg Hotel, Field Marshal Model was having a preluncheon aperitif—a glass of chilled Moselle—with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans Krebs, the operations officer Colonel Hans von Tempelhof and the headquarters adjutant Colonel Leodegard Freyberg.  As administrations officer Lieutenant Gustav Sedelhauser remembers, “Whenever he was at the headquarters, the Field Marshal was punctual to a fault.  We always sat down to luncheon at precisely 1300 hours.”  That time was H Hour for the Market forces.

Now, in tight formations, the great procession of C-47’s carrying the 101/ Airborne thundered across Allied-held Belgium.  Some twenty-five miles beyond Brussels, the serials swung north heading for the Dutch border.  Then, men in the planes looked down and, for the first time, saw their earthbound counterpart, the Garden forces whose ground attack was to be synchronized with the air assault.  It was a spectacular, unforgettable sight.  The vast panoply of General Horrocks’ XXX Corps spread out over every field, trail and road.  Massed columns of tanks, half-tracks, armored cars and personnel carriers and line after line of guns stood poised for the breakout.  On tank antennas pennants fluttered in the wind, and thousands of Britishers standing on vehicles and crowding the fields waved up to the men of the airborne.  Orange smoke billowing into the air marked the British front line.  Beyond was the enemy.

Skimming the ground, fighter-bombers led the way to the drop zones, attempting to clear everything ahead of the formations.  Even though the intense bombing that preceded the airborne assault had leveled many antiaircraft batteries, camouflaged nettings suddenly swung back to reveal hidden enemy positions.  Some men remember seeing the tops of haystacks open to disclose nests of 88 and 20 mm.  guns.  Despite the thoroughness of the fighter-plane attacks, it was impossible to silence all enemy opposition.  Just seven minutes away from their drop zones north of Eindhoven, the men of the 101/ ran into intense flak.

Pfc.  John Cipolla was dozing when he was suddenly awak-

ened by “the sharp crack of antiaircraft guns, and shrapnel ripped through our plane.”  Like everyone else, Cipolla was so weighted down by equipment that he could hardly move.  Besides his rifle, knapsack, raincoat and blanket, he had ammunition belts draping his shoulders, pockets full of hand grenades, rations and his main parachute plus reserve.  In addition, in his plane, each man carried a land mine.  As he recalls, “a C-47 on our left flank burst into flames, then another, and I thought “My God, we are next!  How will I ever get out of this plane!””

His C-47 was shuddering and everyone seemed to be yelling at the same time, “Let’s get out!  We’ve been hit!”  The jumpmaster gave the order to “Stand up and hook up.”  Then he calmly began an equipment check.  Cipolla could hear the men as they called out, “One O.k. Two O.k. Three O.k.”  It seemed hours before Cipolla, the last man of the stick, was able to shout, “Twenty-one O.k.”  Then the green light went on and, in a rush, the men were out and falling, parachutes blossoming above them.  Looking up to check his canopy, Cipolla saw that the C-47 he had just left was blazing.  As he watched, the plane went down in flames.

Despite the bursting shells that engulfed the planes, the formations did not waver.  The pilots of the IX Troop Carrier Command held to their courses without deviating.  Second Lieutenant Robert O’Connell remembers that his formation flew so tight, “I thought our pilot was going to stick his wing into the ear of the pilot flying on our left.” O’Connell’s plane was on fire.  The red prejump warning light was on, and “so much smoke was fogging the aisle that I could not see back to the end of my stick.”  Men were coughing and yelling to get out.

O’Connell “braced himself against the door to keep them in.”  The

pilots flew on steadily, without taking evasive action, and O’Connell

saw that the formation was gradually losing altitude and slowing down,

preparatory to the jump.  O’Connell hoped that “if the pilot thought

the ship was going down, he would give us the green in time for the

troops to get out.”  Calmly, the pilot held his flaming plane on course

until he was right over the drop zone.  Then the green light went

on and O’Connell and his men jumped safely.  O’Connell learned later that the plane crash-landed but the crew survived.

In total disregard for their own safety, troop-carrier pilots brought their planes through the flak and over the drop zones.  “Don’t worry about me,” Second Lieutenant Herbert E. Shulman, the pilot of one burning C-47, radioed his flight commander.  “I’m going to drop these troops right on the DZ.”  He did.  Paratroopers left the plane safely.  Moments later, it crashed in flames.  Staff Sergeant Charles A.  Mitchell watched in horror as the plane to his left streamed flame from its port engine.  As the pilot held it steady on course, Mitchell saw the entire stick of paratroopers jump right through the fire.

Tragedies did not end there.  Pfc.  Paul Johnson was forward next to the pilot’s cabin when his plane was hit dead center and both fuel tanks caught fire.  Of the sixteen paratroopers, pilot and copilot, only Johnson and two other troopers got out.  They had to climb over the dead in the plane to make their jumps.  Each survivor was badly burned and Johnson’s hair was completely seared away.  The three came down in a German tank-bivouac area.  For half an hour they fought off the enemy from a ditch.  Then, all three injured, they were overwhelmed and taken prisoner.

Just as the green light went on in another plane, the lead paratrooper, standing in the door, was killed.  He fell back on Corporal John Altomare.  His body was quickly moved aside and the rest of the group jumped.  And, as another stick of troopers floated to the ground, a C-47 out of control hit two of them, its propellers chopping them to pieces.

Typically, the Americans found humor even in the terrifying approach to

the drop zones.  Just after Captain Cecil Lee stood to hook up, his

plane was hit.  Shrapnel ripped a hole through the seat he had just

vacated.  Nearby, a trooper shouted disgustedly, “Now they give us a

latrine!”  In another plane, Second Lieutenant Anthony Borrelli was

sure he was paralyzed.  The red light went on and everyone hooked

up—except Borrelli, who couldn’t move.  An officer for only two weeks

and on his first combat mission, Borrelli, who was Number 1 in the

stick, was conscious

of all eyes on him.  To his embarrassment, he discovered he had hooked his belt to the seat.  Private Robert Boyce made the trip despite the good intentions of the division dentist, who had marked him “L.o.b.” (left Out of Battle) because of his dental problems.  With the intervention of his company commander, Boyce, a Normandy veteran, was permitted to go.  Besides a bad tooth, he had other worries.  Several new paratroop innovations—leg packs for machine guns, quick-release harness on some chutes and combat instead of jump boots—made him and many other men nervous.  In particular, the troopers were concerned that their shroud lines might catch on the buckles of their new combat boots.  As his plane flew low in its approach, Boyce saw Dutch civilians below holding up two fingers in the V-for-victory salute.  That was all Boyce needed.  “Hey, look,” he called to the others, “they’re giving us two to one we don’t make it.”

The odds against their ever reaching their drop zones seemed at least that high to many.  Colonel Robert F. Sink, commander of the 506th Regiment, saw “a tremendous volume of flak coming up to greet us.”  As he was looking out the door, the plane shuddered violently and Sink saw a part of the wing tear and dangle.  He turned to the men in his stick and said, “Well, there goes the wing.”  To Sink’s relief, “nobody seemed to think much about it.  They figured by this time we were practically in.”

In plane Number 2, Sink’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Chase, saw that their left wing was afire.  Captain Thomas Mulvey remembers that Chase stared at it for a minute and then remarked mildly, “I guess they’re catching up on us.  We’d better go.”  As the green light went on in both planes, the men jumped safely.  The plane in which Chase was traveling burned on the ground.  Sink’s plane, with its damaged wing, is thought to have made the journey back to England safely.

Similar intense flak engulfed the serials of the 502nd Regiment, and

planes of two groups almost collided.  One serial, slightly off course,

strayed into the path of a second group, causing the latter to climb

for altitude and its troopers to make a higher jump than had been

planned.  In the lead plane of one of the serials was the

division commander, General Maxwell D. Taylor, and the 502nd’s 1/ Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cassidy.  Standing in the doorway, Cassidy saw one of the planes in the group burst into flames.  He counted only seven parachutes.  Then fire broke out in another C-47 just off to the left.  All the paratroopers jumped from it.  Mesmerized by the blazing plane, Cassidy failed to notice that the green light was on.  General Taylor, standing behind him, said quietly, “Cassidy, the light’s on.”  Automatically Cassidy answered, “Yes, sir.  I know it,” and jumped.  Taylor was right behind him.

To General Taylor, the 101/ jump was “unusually successful; almost like an exercise.”  In the initial planning, Taylor’s staff had anticipated casualties as high as 30 percent.  Of the 6,695 paratroopers who enplaned in England, 6,669 actually jumped.  Despite the intense flak, the bravery of the C-47 and fighter pilots gave the 101/ an almost perfect jump.  Although some units were dropped from one to three miles north of the drop zones, they landed so close together that assembly was quick.  Only two planes failed to reach the drop zone, and the IX Troop Carrier Command took the brunt of all casualties by their heroic determination to get the troopers to their targets.  Of the 424 C-47’s carrying the 101/, every fourth plane was damaged, and sixteen went down, killing their crews.

Glider losses were heavy, too.  Later, as these serials began to come in, only 53 of the original 70 would arrive without mishap on the landing zone near Son.  Still, despite abortions, enemy flak and crash-landings, the gliders would eventually deliver nearly 80 percent of the men and 75 percent of the jeeps and trailers they carried.  * Now, Taylor’s Screaming Eagles began to move on their * Because Market-Garden was considered an all-British operation, few American correspondents were accredited to cover the attack.  None was at Arnhem.  One of the Americans attached to the 101/ was a United Press reporter named Walter Cronkite, who landed by glider.  Cronkite recalls that “I thought the wheels of the glider were for landing.  Imagine my surprise when we skidded along the ground and the wheels came up through the floor.  I got another shock.  Our helmets, which we all swore were hooked, came flying off on impact and seemed more dangerous than the incoming shells.  After landing I grabbed the first helmet I saw, my trusty musette bag with the Olivetti typewriter inside and began crawling toward the canal which was the rendezvous point.  When I looked back, I found a half dozen guys crawling after me.  It seems that I had grabbed the wrong helmet.  The one I wore had two neat stripes down the back indicating that I was a lieutenant.”