Behind Hitler's Lines (26 page)

The man whose idea prevailed was Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of Alamein. He did so over the customary fury of his inveterate rival, General George Patton, for if Monty got the First Allied Airborne Army, with it would go resources craved elsewhere, everywhere along the Western Front. Nevertheless, Ike turned to Montgomery, asking for a plan that featured imagination and daring, even though they were not characteristic of the field marshal's generalship.

An imaginatively daring plan was indeed produced. An “airborne carpet” was the Market half of it, landings to secure vital portions of the highway running from Monty's front lines on the Belgian border to Arnhem. The Garden half called for a powerful British armor corps to thrust up the corridor created by the Airborne and pile into the Arnhem bridgehead over the Rhine, flank the Siegfried Line, and open Germany's guts. The air-land jab was to strike with such surprise that Rundstedt would not have time to shift reinforcements into the Netherlands, apparently the least threatened sector of the Western Front.

Sounded good. Intelligence estimates were that the Germans had no more than a hundred tanks in all the Netherlands. Then by unhappy happenstance the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, Rundstedt's best, began regrouping and refitting around Arnhem after desperate fighting in France. Their addition to the equation was detected by Ike's code breakers and the ominous information passed along to Montgomery with a strong inference that changes to Market-Garden plans were called for, changes that represented only a theo-
retical possibility of compromising “Ultra” intercepts, the basis for the Allied ability to read the Wehrmacht's radio messages coded by Enigma machines. Perhaps that remote possibility—even after the war Montgomery never revealed his reasons—is why he kept such utterly vital information to himself, though nothing is more important to Airborne planners than the presence of enemy tanks. Tanks are to paratroopers as dogs are to cats, as cats are to mice.

AFTER
so
MANY CANCELLATIONS
and postponements I Company finally had a firm objective to study in detail. Originals were pleased by aerial photos showing expansive, perfectly flat drop zones, heartened that the drop would be in daylight. If only the fornicating pilots would fly straight and turn on the green light at jump speed, Blues would do the rest. This was the big-time test for rookies like Albers who now made up nearly half of the regiment. They looked to the originals but in order to show them. Albers was tired of hearing about Toc-coa, what
real
Airborne training had been like. The purpose of training is performance. Let's go out and we'll show you how we perform.

The Currahee yearbook put the mission this way, probably paraphrasing Sink, who recalled that this was September and football season had begun back in the States:

Take cities and bridges and you have the road. Fold the hostiles (Sink's terms for the Germans) back from that road— the Eindhoven-Arnhem road—and there's a touchdown pass thrown across the Rhine. You're running interference for the British ball carrier. It's the big game, the biggest of the season. The Airborne Associates (a derisive term for the 82nd whose shoulder patch is
AA)
are to our north and so are the British 1st Airborne and the Polish Parachute Brigade. The whole world is in the grandstands. Go to it, throw your blocks, get that ball carrier into the end zone.

With such an exhortation Currahees put on their game faces, but there was no camouflage this time, no Mohawks, no war dance. Just get on with the job—it may be the last one. Such was the thinking in the 101st, but there was something
providentially added for the Blues as they waited for transportation to the marshaling area. A truck rolled up, and two troopers alighted. They were Jim Sheeran and Bernie Rainwater of I Company, captured in Normandy, paraded by the Nazis in Paris, but successful escapees who pried open the grille of their forty-or-eight and subsequently reached Pat-ton's forces. Now here they were, hours before the 101st's takeoff for Market.

There was no hesitation for Sheeran. Just give him a weapon; he was ready to jump back into the fight—even though he and Rainwater were entitled to thirty days' leave in the States before their status was resolved. Through a curious interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, that status presented a poison pill for any escaped POW who went on to fight against former captors. If recaptured by the Germans, both could be legally executed as spies because they presumably had seen German installations and deployments the way a spy would. So U.S. Army policy was that if a POW escaped from the Germans, in the unlikely event he wanted to go back to war, it would have to be against the Japanese!

Raised not far from Toccoa, Rainwater was a Currahee through and through, more so than any other man in the regiment by reason of his Cherokee blood. His escape with Sheeran had been stupefying. Sheeran spoke French and was costumed by the FFI as a Frenchman. Rainwater had to impersonate an Algerian, a mute, retarded Algerian, in Sheeran's charge. By hair-raising, hairbreadth evasions they came out of France together, and together they rejoined the Blues.

In Normandy they had been in Anderson's platoon. Now I Company's commander, Anderson, exhorted, C'mon, Bernie, you're not gonna get captured again. I guarantee it, guarantee it, Goddammit. Listen, I'll make you the company runner (courier between company HQ and the platoon leaders). Before you could be captured they'd have to get me first. You think that's gonna happen? Hell no, no way—not in Item Company. So you're with us, okay?

Not quite. As further persuasion the two celebrities were taken to battalion HQ, where Sheeran was promoted to buck
sergeant and made a squad leader on the spot. Now, how'bout you, Bernie? Major Shettle put the question, an amazing question to which no sane civilian would have replied affirmatively. Rainwater's buddies like Engelbrecht and Dziepak offered an answer: come with us. He did. He was a Currahee. Albers was in awe, not so much at the time but months later after reflecting on what was to come on Dutch and Belgian battlefields. Sheeran and Rainwater didn't have to be burned in those crucibles—as heroes already they could have gone home, probably for the rest of the war—but an irresistible magnetism, overcoming the longing for family in America, drew them back to their army family. It was a tribute to both families.

At midmorning on the beautifully sunny Sunday of September 17, the 101st, less sleep-deprived than before D Night, took off for its part in Operation Market-Garden. So vast was this aerial armada that while the first troopers spilled out over the Netherlands the last had not departed from England. Captain Anderson, leading a stick that included Albers and Sheeran, was not about to tolerate a repetition of Normandy's unimaginable dispersion. Drawing his .45, he entered the C-47's cockpit, piloted by a gum-chewing Long Islander who looked fresh out of high school. If you miss the DZ, Anderson advised twirling his pistol, someone on this plane is going to come back and find you.

The pilot was nonplussed. “Captain,” he said, hardly glancing at the weapon, “we're going to put your whole company on a DZ the size of a football field.”

“Make it within the twenty-yard lines.”

This rendezvous with destiny was in full daylight. Albers gazed down on Montgomery's assembling formations in Belgium, poised and timed to crash north on Hell's Highway, pennants snapping in the wind, as armor troops waved to parachute and glider legions passing low overhead. At no other time in the war was there such a coordinated armor-airborne assault. The Germans executed plans to delay the British through a series of canals and torpid rivers, barriers to the Rhine some sixty miles north. What the Wehrmacht was not
ready for was a vertical invasion to span those barriers by capturing existing bridges intact, and that is what made the saga of Market-Garden a story of bridges held and lost, captured and recaptured.

Anderson was impatient to inform the krauts that Screaming Eagle wrath was upon them again. He staggered to the howling door of the C-47, shook his fist, and screamed imprecations on the enemy below—whose response was flak bursts that drove him back to his bucket seat. Flak was ignored by the pilots and no evasive action was taken as the transports flew straight, true, and in formation.

Fulfilling the promise of Anderson's pilot, the brunt of the 506th dropped on a rectangular DZ about a half mile long by a quarter mile wide. Jump altitude was 600 feet, exit speed a mild 150 knots. The sky blossomed with multicolored parachutes, white for troopers, a whole spectrum designating loads like a howitzer or medical supplies. Dribbling German tracers added more color. Albers saw jumpers tuck their knees to present less of a target. A good idea—why hadn't someone told him that in England? Eyes wide open before his chute opened, he saw a chunk of metal flapping from the tail of his C-47, the only sign of damage. There had been fear that the Luftwaffe would take to the sky, but not a single German fighter plane contested the 101st's jump. With his leg bag full of machine-gun ammo and his gas-mask case full of candy, Albers landed surely and popped open the harness with a quick-release device (developed from a lesson learned in Normandy where jumpers used knives to cut open their harnesses—and in the dark and haste sometimes cut off then-thumbs).

The DZ swarmed with troopers assembling like chicks in a rookery, distinguishing their mother's call within a cacophony. Originals glanced at one another and nodded: hey, this plan is working, hell, better than any training exercise. That too was General Taylor's impression, for the drop of 6,800 Screaming Eagles produced only 2 percent casualties and an amazingly low 5 percent loss of equipment (better than jumps in England). His regiments set off for their objectives with confidence
from evidence that this landing was the antithesis of Normandy.

Not that there was no mixture of units. Ed Manley of the 502nd found himself on the 506th's drop zone in a unique predicament. His legs were knee-deep in soft earth, while his canopy hovered overhead like an umbrella. Because of rare air currents it would not deflate, so there he stood suspended as the DZ emptied. Finally an artillery concussion knocked over his chute and he collapsed just as Taylor came striding by, map cases in hand.

“Don't you have a job today, trooper?” he asked Manley, still sprawled on the ground.

“General, the first sergeant said if I made it down okay, I could take the rest of the day off.”

Taylor and his staff were staggering with laughter as they caught up with Sink, whose first task was to speed about a mile south, through the neatly tended Zonsche Forest, to the little town of Zon, where a bridge spans the Wilhelmina Canal, a placid, banked waterway so narrow that barges passing in opposite directions almost scrape each other. This was the essential first crossing for British armor to meet the Market-Garden schedule. Sink was on the edge of the DZ to start the timetable tolling. As soon as each squad assembled he shoved it south. “Minutes count, men!” he shouted after them. “Minutes count!” For originals like Engelbrecht and Dziepak, memories went back to the Atlanta-Fort Benning forced march and its purpose of getting to an objective first with the most.

They reached it while the Germans were still pulling up their pants. Sink's Second and Third Battalions surged through and around Zon, which was defended by an 88 emplacement located for antiaircraft purposes. Another 88, its tube lowered for ground action, zeroed in on First Battalion. Starting the battle was the dry cough of the high-velocity flat-trajectory 8 8, a familiar sound for Normandy vets. The war was on again after a two-month leave, and this time it was a lot better: they were all together following the drop, with the Dutch underground surfacing like dragon's teeth. A man with an orange armband appeared beside Shettle and offered to guide his
attack around the most threatening German position. Away they went on the double. At a corner the Dutchman halted to advise that the target was just beyond the next bend. Fine, said Shettle; lead on. For closer guidance there were the Dutch at high windows, pointing with their hands and holding up fingers to indicate the number of Germans ahead. The Blues felt like a posse about to close in on outlaws.

Albers remembers the Dutch as bird dogs on a duck hunt. After they got the troopers in position, all there was to do was look down the sights and cut loose. It wasn't a duck shoot— the ducks shot back—but that was okay; let 'em. For Albers it was dangerous fun, shooting it out against
Deutschen
the Dutch hated, and doing what he had been trained to do. That was satisfying, gratifying, realizing that those in charge knew some practical applications of training. For the originals it was all business, but they understood how Albers was feeling.

Aided immeasurably by the Dutch, within fifteen minutes the Currahees destroyed both 88s, killed thirteen Germans, captured forty-one, and rushed the Zon bridge—only to have it blow up in their faces. No army planned better than the Wehrmacht; the bridge had been prewired in the event of a British surge from Belgium just fifteen miles away.

That surge was coming, the Garden armor scheduled to meet the Market airborne near Eindhoven, the major city in the southern part of the Netherlands. The 101st had a plan to accomplish that even if the Zon bridge was blown. An engineer company that had jumped with the Currahees went to work and within an hour fashioned a footbridge that could bear a few men at a time. Taylor radioed the British to put a folding bridge among the first vehicles in their column. German planning could be thwarted by farsighted counterplans. And improvisations. “General Taylor,” Sink proposed, his helmet askew, “we're going to sweep east and west on the canal and look for barges.” Two big barges side by side would create excellent pontoons for a formidable bridge. But no barges were found floating. Allied air strikes had sunk them all.

During the night of September 17,101st engineers labored as Sink dribbled all his Currahees over the footbridge. Third
Battalion was the last across, sprawling in irrigation ditches as they watched a fireglow of shells in dark skies. The dawn, they were warned, would start a regimental attack on Eindhoven. Remembering Carentan, originals were glum about the next day's prospects. Eindhoven was a city, a big city (population 100,000), its every building a potential fortress for defenders. World War IFs costliest battles were fought within cities. Albers was advised to get some extra grenades, the weapon of choice in urban fighting.