Assignment to Hell (63 page)

O
N DAY THREE
of M
ARKET
Garden, Cronkite heard about an amazing—and lifesaving—piece of Yankee ingenuity from Lieutenant Colonel Ned Moore of Guthrie Center, Iowa.

Moore and his twelve-man patrol were reconnoitering a Wilhelmina Canal bridge. Along with two bazooka specialists, Moore got separated from the rest of his unit when a Tiger tank and a small detachment of enemy soldiers abruptly surfaced. The bazooka men fired at the enemy tank and missed; one of them fled in panic. Moore and Private J. J. McCarthy slid down the canal bank and toward a shed where they hoped to hide. Just then, the Tiger blew up the building, the flames shooting sky-high.

“Afraid the Germans would spot their silhouettes, Moore recalled a kid stunt and made a donkey head with his hands against the flickering flames from the house. ‘The fire threw the silhouette of the donkey, as big as a house, right in front of the tank,’” Moore told Cronkite.

The German patrol chose not to investigate the “mule” on the side of the road. At which point McCarthy asked Moore what they should do. “We lie low,” Moore whispered.
¹⁹

A few minutes later a different bazooka unit knocked out the Tiger. Moore and McCarthy made their way to safety. Cronkite’s donkey piece got huge pickup in the States, cracking page one of the
Atlanta Constitution
and being reprinted in the
Stars and Stripes
.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER THE BATTLE
for Holland was still raging; the Allies’ hopes for a quick thrust into the Ruhr had been thwarted. Much of the fighting west of the Rhine that fall took on the veneer of World War I—the very thing the Supreme Command had feared most. Operation Market Garden, in fact, had been designed to avert the ugly stalemate now taking root along the long stretch from the North Sea to Luxembourg and below.

Cronkite spent several days in early fall shadowing the U.S. Seventh Armored Division, the British 11th Armored, and the British Third Infantry in southeastern Holland. The Allied thrust was part of Operation
Aintree, a hastily patched-together offensive aimed at holding on to the narrow salient between Eindhoven and Nijmegen and uprooting the German bridgehead west of the Meuse. Aintree, named after a British racecourse, turned out to be Market Garden in microcosm: bold but naïve planning, extraordinary heroism, and an eventual withdrawal.

“For five days last week,” Cronkite wrote in a piece picked up by the
Stars and Stripes
on October 16, “500 Americans and 800 Germans fought in a bloody miniature of World War I in a tiny boot-shaped wood near the crossroads town of Overloon. For 120 nightmarish hours, Americans and Germans with fixed bayonets chased each other from foxhole to foxhole and from tree to tree. They fought without quarter day and night, in sunlight and driving rain.”
²⁰

Overloon has been largely forgotten but was among Holland’s bloodiest clashes. Despite heavy losses, Overloon was eventually captured by Allied troops. The village of Venray was the next Allied target, but the Germans had flooded and mined the area surrounding Loobeek Creek. Overloon-Venray was Market Garden’s only big tank-on-tank clash, with Montgomery’s forces losing dozens of tanks they could ill afford. The advance toward the Meuse was postponed, in large measure because the Allies could not replace men and matériel sacrificed in Overloon’s forest.
²¹

Cronkite probably had to retreat to Brussels and its more pliable censors to get the following lines approved: “The boot-shaped wood had been a trap. Ostensibly, it was held light by a German labor battalion…. The 500 [Americans] infiltrated and met a hail of death. Three mounds of dirt turned out to be pillboxes, and the clearing beside the wood, through which the tanks had planned to roll in a flank movement, turned out to be alive with mines. The Americans were immobilized on the edge of the wood and then German artillery and ‘moaning minnies’ (huge rocket mortars) blasted their hastily-dug positions. The ‘labor battalion’ turned out to be fanatical German SS troops.”
²²

Overloon-Venray was grisly stuff: For five successive nights, grenades and potato mashers were tossed back and forth at point-blank range. Cronkite’s
Stars and Stripes
piece concluded with: “As the lieutenant-colonel commanding the battalion ordered the withdrawal over his
‘walkie-talkie,’ two Germans appeared out of a bush five feet away and ordered his surrender at gunpoint. Before the colonel could reply the Germans crumpled under the fire of Americans in the next foxhole. The colonel summed up the battle with, ‘We killed a lot of Germans.’”
²³

The Brits and the Yanks had indeed killed a lot of Germans—but at horrific cost, with little territorial gain to show for it. Twenty-five hundred Allied soldiers died in and around Overloon in October 1944.

G
EORGE
P
ATTON WAS NEVER INVOLVED
in Market Garden’s planning or execution. But by then Patton was far from the only U.S. commander suspicious of Bernard Montgomery’s motives and modus operandi. By September of ’44 the rivalry between Montgomery, head of the 21st Army Group, and Omar Bradley, head of the 12th Army Group, had become a full-blooded feud. Bradley had grown weary of Monty’s petulant-child act, not to mention his recurring tendency to go hors de combat. Monty’s unwillingness to press what appeared to be his advantage at Operation Goodwood and at other moments in northern Europe perplexed Bradley and Eisenhower. At the September 10 conference where Monty sold Ike on Market Garden, he got so peevish that, in midmeeting, Ike had to grab his knee and scold, “Steady, Monty. You can’t talk to me that way. I’m your boss.”
²⁴

Despite Monty’s rudeness, Ike approved the incursion into Holland—a move that left Bradley scratching his head. Eisenhower should have listened to his West Point classmate. Even if Market Garden had gone like clockwork, the chances of it attaining Montgomery’s dreams were slight. Bradley wanted Monty to concentrate his resources on capturing the Schelde estuary between Antwerp and the North Sea. As long as the Germans maintained control of the Schelde, Antwerp’s ports would be useless.
²⁵

W
ES
G
ALLAGHER
, H
AL
B
OYLE’S BOSS
at AP, ordered him into Holland three days after the initial parachute drop. Boyle, his back still aching from its collision with the motorcycle cop in Paris three weeks earlier, bumped
into an extraordinary story as he hitchhiked into the Netherlands. On the French-Belgian border on September 2, an unnamed major general mobilized a group of just ten Americans and held up a heavily armed Nazi column for fifteen critical minutes while U.S. Shermans maneuvered to launch an ambush. Panicked by the Allied advance, the Germans were trying to push through the French village of Marchiennes and get back behind friendly lines.

The major general and a colonel had just greeted a Second Armored Division that rumbled through Marchiennes when a villager ran up, crying, “
Les Boches! Les Boches
!” The general sent a messenger after the tankmen, then “quickly organized his little army, deploying them to cover every route into town.” The colonel happened to be a former national champion marksman; he and the tommy gun–wielding general took cover behind posts in the middle of town.

Boyle wrote: “The Nazi column was met by a stream of harassing small arms fire from four directions. The startled Germans, swearing and mystified by fire which they believed came from a far larger force, began shooting as the vehicles jammed up.”

The tiny American force emptied their ammunition clips—rifles, carbines, and tommy guns—then slipped away before the Nazis wised up. The major general’s plan worked, Boyle observed. “The Germans reorganized their column and swept on through the town and ran right into the flaming guns of waiting American tanks. The Nazis were cut to pieces before they knew what had happened to them.”
²⁶
Thanks to the quick-thinking major general, all but one of the enemy tanks, trucks, and half-tracks was destroyed or disabled. Some three hundred of the 470 soldiers in the German unit were killed in the ambush. Sixty were captured; only seventy or eighty escaped. No Americans were lost in the firefight, Boyle reported; the only casualty was an FFI fighter.

On September 16, Boyle was near Romorantin, France, when twenty thousand Germans, weary of the constant strafing from P-47s and P-51s, surrendered en masse. Most members of the “lost column,” as Boyle called them, had been stationed in the south of France—some as far south as the Spanish border.
²⁷

One Nazi asked Boyle if American prison camps had whiskey. Another inquired if he could take a correspondence course at Harvard.

“I watched for more than two hours the long and sorry columns which told more vividly than words the plight of dying German military might,” Boyle wrote. “There were no rumbling panzers, no motorized blitzkrieg. Only the slow, tedious plodding of tired horses and tired men, the gasping cough of badly worn trucks.

“‘You defeated us only because you had better matériel,’ said one. Oberleutnant Ben Wise, former South American steel exporter, said: ‘It is destiny.’

“Always the excuse—never an admission that Germany is beaten because she just didn’t have the stuff on the ball,” Boyle wrote.
²⁸

Along with other Allied correspondents, Boyle had been shown a captured document in which Berlin had directed all German officers—except “expendable junior officers”—to save their own lives in battle so that Hitler’s thousand-year Reich would have the leadership necessary to wage the next war.

“The junior commanders,” Boyle wrote, “have been nominated to die a hero’s death to spur the flagging troop morale while their superiors save their own skins in emergencies.” The chilling order had been issued in the waning days of the Battle of France when desertion was becoming commonplace. “Noncommissioned offices were instructed to ferret out dissident soldiers and put them in the front-line posts,” Boyle noted, “where they would be killed or send them back home on leave where the Gestapo or S.S. (Elite Guard) officers could arrest them.”
²⁹

H
AVING JUST FILED ARTICLES HERALDING
the Reich’s imminent collapse, it must have been jarring for Boyle to size up the situation in Holland. The Germans on the business end of Market Garden were not saving their own skins by retreating behind the Rhine. Five days into his visit to the Netherlands, Boyle must have realized that he couldn’t write about triumphant Allies on an inevitable march to victory, so he went back to his tried-and-true formula: American GI’s fascination with a foreign culture. “The
national salute by Hollanders to every jeepload of American soldiers is ‘Hello, boys,’” Boyle wrote. “Gone is that preliminary period of doubt and uncertainty when troops met with almost blank stares or covert ‘V’ signs.”

“No country has been more of a surprise than that section of Holland now occupied by the [Americans]. Its wooded hills and green farmlands full of grazing black and white cows and neat brick towns look more like a corner of rural Pennsylvania than the land of dikes. In dress these people differ little from those the troops left behind in the small towns of America.

“Somehow most of the soldiers thought that all parts of Holland were full of quaintly attired folks and whirling windmills.”
³⁰

I
N THE FALL OF
’44, the
Stars and Stripes
sent Andy Rooney to the land of whirling windmills, too. But not before the kid reporter had finished the First Army’s sweep across France and actually stood on German soil—if only briefly. On September 3, Rooney filed an amusing piece from “Somewhere in France” about how a bunch of First Army Texans had corralled a couple hundred fine German saddle horses that had been abandoned by the Wehrmacht.

“The main trouble with the outfit was that none of the horses understood ‘whoa’ and ‘giddap’ and none of the brand-new cavalrymen knew how to say ‘whoa’ in German,” Rooney kidded. One private confused his horse by naming it “Jackson,” Rooney noted. “The name ‘Jackson’ held no significance whatsoever for the horse.”

While the Texans went joyriding on German dobbins, the “Eastern boys,” Rooney wrote, “picked themselves out maybe a neat-looking German amphibious jeep complete with ‘propeller’ or [a] command car” and, while awaiting orders, spun donuts in an orchard.
³¹

Eleven days later, Big Red One GIs were hardly joyriding as they cracked the Siegfried Line near the border village of Roetgen—a coup that drew front-page treatment in the
Stars and Stripes
and most U.S. papers. The Germans had engineered their defenses to “funnel” invaders into tight spots that would leave them vulnerable to attack.

One of those traps, Rooney explained, invited invaders to attack a deep
gorge dotted with thousands of concrete tank obstructions. Six-foot triangular obstacles ran fifty feet deep through the gorge. An armored task force led by Third Armored Division lieutenant colonel William B. Lovelady was “mousetrapped” in the gorge on September 13, some three and a half miles onto German soil.

The Germans tried a clever ruse. They left abandoned artillery guns and pillboxes on the road into Roetgen “to make it look,” Rooney wrote, “like they had made a hasty retreat. The German antitank and self-propelled guns opened up on the column from three sides when the tanks and half-tracks came into the town and knocked out several before they were wiped out by our artillery and tanks.”
³²

The lead American Sherman, driven by Second Lieutenant Paul Bear of Reading, Pennsylvania, was instantly disabled by
Panzerfäuste
. Bear’s tank mate, Private Wesley White of Belleville, Illinois, jumped out and dragged a wounded comrade to safety.

Residents of Roetgen feared retribution. Almost every house in the village, Rooney noted, hung a white bedsheet of surrender. Many civilians, told by their country’s soldiers that they’d be shot on sight, sought refuge in haystacks, barns, or the woods. Those villagers that remained clasped trembling hands over their heads.