Armageddon (76 page)

One British platoon leaped from a glider as it shuddered to a halt, deployed around the wreckage and opened a brisk fire. A British loudspeaker broadcast a hasty message: “You are in friendly territory . . . cease firing . . . you have been dropped short of your target.” Harry Pegg’s glider of the Royal Ulster Rifles crashed disastrously. He was one of only three men out of thirty-two who were unwounded. American medics who came to their aid reported grimly that they had recovered sixteen unattached legs from the wreckage. “It was chaos,” said Pegg. As most of his platoon was dead, he found himself acting as bodyguard for the battalion CO. He remained concussed for the rest of the day. Private Harry Clarke of 2nd Ox & Bucks was appalled by the dead and wounded strewn around the wrecked gliders: “At the front of one burning aircraft was its pilot, still wearing his headphones, arms outstretched and forming the shape of a crucifix in the flames.”

Pat Devlin’s glider was one of only five in his battalion which got down undamaged. His stick jumped out to find themselves on the right landing zone, but a thousand yards from their objective, a T-junction just west of Hammelkiln. He saw some Germans by a farmhouse and threw himself down with his Bren, too late to get a shot at them. Someone shouted: “Tanks!” Spotting two big half-tracks packed with Germans, Devlin fired a long burst, and heard screams as their heads disappeared beneath the hulls. The vehicles sped on past the British, leaving the Irishman pleasantly elated. He had emptied seventeen twenty-round magazines since landing. He felt that, whatever happened next, he had made a small dent in the German Army. He called to his sergeant, a Belfast Protestant: “Geordie, we’d better start moving to the objective.” Picking up a fistful of empty magazines and his gun, which had jammed from overheating, he trotted forward. There was a burst of fire. Suddenly, he suffered a jolt and gave an exclamation, dropped the Bren and fell flat. Devlin had been hit in the right side and forearm. “It felt as if somebody had struck me a severe blow across the small of my back with a big stick. The pain wasn’t too bad, like a nagging toothache, but I couldn’t move.” He was disturbed, however, to find his thigh soaking wet. Would he bleed to death? Then he realized that a bullet had pierced two condensed-milk tins in his side-pack. A glider pilot crawled past. Devlin begged the man to drag him into a ditch. The flier ignored him and moved on. Then McCrea, one of his platoon mates, appeared and pulled him into cover, observing: “This’ll serve you bloody right for playing silly soldiers.” Devlin was a volunteer. No Irishman faced conscription.

There was another shout of “Tanks!” McCrea promptly disappeared. Two German armoured cars dashed past, their hulls draped with wounded. One crashed into a wrecked glider near by and was shot to pieces by the British. A German officer slid into the ditch beside Devlin and sat clutching his head in his hands in shock, muttering repeatedly: “
Deutschland kaputt
.” Two other Germans walked forward with their hands in the air. McCrea returned, excusing himself for abandoning him by saying: “You don’t hang around when there’s tanks about!” Devlin was taken to an aid post.

David Tibbs, 13 Para’s doctor, found himself some 400 yards from his intended landing point. He walked across the field towards the rendezvous, gazing in horror at crashed gliders and dead men in scores. He later found twenty-four of his own battalion hanging dead in their harnesses in the forest where they had been misdropped. The CO of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was shot by the Germans, like Tibbs’s comrades, as he hung helpless from the trees in his harness. The enraged Canadians stormed the neighbouring town of Schnappenburg, giving short shrift to those Germans they encountered on their passage, though in truth it was no more rational to expect mercy for a paratrooper in transit than for a bailed-out tank crew. The business of war is not to give the enemy a fair chance, but to do everything possible to deny him one.

Tibbs came upon the corpse of a staff-sergeant to whom he was much attached, turned over the man’s body and was repelled by the sight of an earwig crawling out of the man’s nose. He thought: this is the reality of war. Tibbs had just begun to treat British wounded when a tall, distinguished-looking German Army doctor presented himself and gave a smart salute. “Good morning,” said the man in English. “Why have you been so long? We have been up all night waiting for you.” For some hours, the British and German medical teams worked beside each other: “We got on well. The Germans were always pretty good on these occasions.” “The landing zone was a pretty horrific sight. People were deeply upset—about a third of our gliderborne element were casualties.”

Peter Downward was overwhelmed by the spectacle of parachutes in the thousands filling the air, each one differently coloured to denote whether it bore man, ammunition or medical supplies. Every company commander of 13 Para possessed a hunting horn, and sounded this as he hit the ground in differing Morse letters to summon his men. One of Downward’s NCOs inquired after his health, and only then did he realize that the lieutenant was bleeding from a tiny fragment of shrapnel which had struck his nose during the drop. He was lying among his men, peering cautiously over the rim of a ridge to pinpoint his position, when his attention was distracted by the spectacle of his colonel, Peter Luard, cantering up to him astride a large captured German farm horse. “For God’s sake, Downward—there’s your objective!” Luard pointed. “Take it!” Thus inspired, the young officer got up and sprang forward with his platoon towards a barn which he found already occupied by men of the battalion. “Things were starting to fall into place amid this absolute mayhem.” As he stood among the casualties at the regimental aid post, he saw a popular Canadian officer lying motionless on a stretcher. Downward said how sorry he was to see that the boy had been killed. This provoked an angry cry from the stretcher: “I’m not fucking dead—I’ve been hit and I can’t bloody well move.” The young man was paralysed for the rest of his life.

The third American unit of 17th Airborne, 194th Glider Infantry, landed in the right place, at the cost of twelve C-47 towing aircraft shot down and almost every glider damaged. The men, led by the relatively elderly forty-five-year-old Colonel James Pierce, spewed out of the wreckage to find themselves instantly engaged with German flak-gunners, who depressed their weapons to fire at the airborne soldiers on the ground. By the time the shooting stopped, the 194th had captured forty-two guns, ten tanks, two mobile flak-wagons and five self-propelled guns.

One of the stranger cargoes in 6th Airborne Division’s gliders was a team from the British intelligence organisation SOE. Two British officers were landed with a group of agents, mostly Polish, whom they were instructed to infiltrate into the German lines, with orders to gather information as far forward as they could get. Major Arthur Winslow reported that he had taken one man to the forward British positions and left him in the hands of the local company commander, to penetrate the German line as best he could: “I cannot say I was altogether hopeful about his chances.” He left three more Poles on a road near Osnabrück. “They had shown a certain amount of doubt about getting away,” he said, but finally each agent in turn kissed the British officer on both cheeks and started walking towards the last fragment of Hitler’s empire. Winslow watched “three rather forlorn-looking figures disappear into the blue.” Nothing is known of their fate.

General Matthew Ridgway, who had characteristically decided to jump with 17th Airborne, almost became its last casualty of the Rhine operation. Late on the night of the 24th, the two jeeps carrying him and his aides left a meeting with the British and were driving back to the American zone. Suddenly, they saw Germans in front of them. The paratroopers hastily stopped and jumped out of the vehicles. There was a brisk firefight, in which a German grenade landed among the Americans. Ridgway’s jeep took most of the blast, but a fragment wounded the general in the arm and shoulder. The Germans retired, no doubt as surprised and shaken as the Americans. The Americans crowded into their surviving jeep, and reached the 17th CP unscathed. Ridgway needed major surgery on his arm, but pronounced himself too busy to have the grenade fragment removed until the war was over. He suffered severe discomfort from it through the weeks that followed. Airborne command was no sinecure.

I
F
M
ONTGOMERY
’
S
Rhine operation was plodding and over-insured, those who crossed the water could be grateful that their objectives were gained at small price. But the casualties incurred by the airborne assault were out of all proportion to its contribution. Gliders were never again employed in war. Operation Varsity was a folly for which more than a thousand men paid with their lives—almost as many as 1st Airborne lost killed at Arnhem. Once again, a baleful reality had been permitted to steer events: the airborne divisions existed, and consumed rations. So they had to be used. Thereafter, however, for the remaining weeks of the campaign American and British paratroopers fought as infantry.

Alan Brooke expressed relief when he got Churchill safely home after witnessing the crossings at Wesel. He had been alarmed by the old statesman’s eagerness to expose himself to German fire, his exultation when the odd shell landed near him. “I honestly believe that he would have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success,” Brooke wrote in his diary. “He had often told me that the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Yet if Churchill had reached a stage of his life at which personal survival seemed unimportant, younger men did not share his indifference. Exploitation beyond the Rhine by the American and British armies proved embarrassingly sluggish. Once again, the Allies found themselves engaged in sharp fighting against remnants of such formations as 116th Panzer. Town by town and village by village, the Allies pressed on into the surviving strongholds of the Reich, halting where they met opposition, bombarding the defenders into submission whenever this was possible. The effectiveness of German resistance in the west was diminishing daily, but there always seemed just enough men and just enough guns to sustain some kind of defence. “With hindsight,” observed Kurt von Tippelskirch sagely, “following the breaching of the Rhine, the last symbolic and military obstacle in the west, it becomes difficult to perceive any purpose in the continuance of the war. But the struggle continued, because there was no one who would or could end it, as long as the man who had begun it all remained at his post.”

A few, a very few Allied soldiers enjoyed the battles in Germany. “My only experience of war was being on the winning side,” said Captain John Langdon, a twenty-three-year-old officer with 3rd Royal Tanks. “It may sound a terrible thing to say, but I found it all terrifically exciting. I loved it.” Most of his comrades did not. “There was an impatience, even desperation to get this thing over,” said Major John Denison of 214th Brigade. “The liberation of Germany is a sight to see,” wrote George Turner-Cain, “hardly one stone left upon another, furniture taken out and burnt, china and bottles all broken. I do not like to see this kind of action, and do not encourage my men to do it. It is the Canadians and Yanks who are determined to create such havoc.” Every soldier supposed that excesses were the prerogative of some army other than his own.

They all hated street fighting. Supporting artillery, so effective in open country, became almost irrelevant. Among houses tactical radios, unreliable at the best of times, ceased to function at all. Tanks were vulnerable to grenades or petrol bombs dropped from above on to the turrets, always their most vulnerable points. The whole weight of endeavour fell on the infantry. “Clearing a town is an arduous process which cannot be hurried,” observed a British briefing note. Men were told to leave behind packs which caught on windows, and warned that German paratroopers customarily occupied ground floors and cellars of houses. Clearing a street, infantry squads covered each other as they ran from house to house, sometimes grenading and sub-machining every room before entering. It was a laborious business which became ever more painful as the same routine had to be repeated through towns and villages across Germany, wherever resistance was met.

W
ILHELM
P
RITZ
had endured a terrible war: two years on the Eastern Front and three wounds as an infantryman, before he gained the merciful deliverance, as it seemed to him, of a posting as a heavy mortar NCO with the 766th Regiment in Saarland. They blew up their remaining tubes and escaped across the Rhine north of Heidelberg in March 1945, suffering the bitter reproaches of civilians west of the river: “So—you’re quitting and leaving us to face the enemy.” When a
Kettenhunde
—military policeman—tried to herd him into the ranks of a battle group on the east bank, Pritz said simply: “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you.” He and some fifteen other stragglers banded together for protection against further MPs and began walking towards Heidelberg. At first, they also led a horse pulling a 37mm gun, but they wearied of this burden, and abandoned horse and gun in a shed. At the small town of Schlecheim, they took refuge among the local inhabitants in the cellar of a house. They had made up their minds to surrender. But surrender could be intensely dangerous.

Early next morning, 1 April, they sent a small boy into the town to look around. He returned to report that American troops were already searching houses. The civilians with them insisted that the soldiers should pile their weapons in another room, which they did. They were frightened, “but nothing to what we would have been if we had been facing the Russians.” At last, an American shouted from up the stairs: “
Kamerad! Kommen!
” They filed out of the cellar, hands high. A GI briskly removed their watches and medals. An American officer demanded in perfect German: “So what are we going to do with your Hitler and your Himmler?” “You can do what you like as far as I am concerned,” said Pritz wearily. He felt a surge of relief that his own war was over.