Band of Brothers (19 page)

It had to be reopened. Although the strategic objective of MARKET-GARDEN had been lost by now (on September 20 the Germans had retaken the bridge at Arnhem from Col. John Frost’s battalion of the British 1st Airborne Division, and the division as a whole had been thrown on the defensive and the Guards Armored Division had been halted on September 22 some 5 kilometers south of Arnhem), it was still critical to keep the road open. Tens of thousands of Allied troops were dependent on it totally for their supplies. The units north of Veghel included the U.S. 101st at Uden and the 82d at Nijmegen, the British 1st Airborne north of the Lower Rhine, outside Arnhem, the Guards Armored and the 43d Wessex Divisions, the Polish parachute regiment, and the British 4th Dorset and 2d Household Cavalry regiments, all between Nijmegen and Arnhem. If the 101st could not regain control of the road and keep it open, what was already a major defeat would turn into an unmitigated disaster of catastrophic proportions.

General Taylor ordered Colonel Sink to eliminate the German salient south of Veghel. At 0030, September 25, Sink ordered his battalions to prepare to move out. At 0445 the 506th began marching, in a heavy rain, south from Uden toward Veghel. The order of march was 1st Battalion on the right, 3d Battalion on the left, 2d Battalion in reserve. At about 0700 the weary men passed through Veghel. At 0830 the 1st and 3d Battalions began the attack on the salient. Initially the advance went well, but soon the German artillery and mortar fire thickened. German tanks, brand-new Tiger Royals with 88 mm guns, dug in along the road, added their own machine-gun and shell fire. They were supported by Colonel von der Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment, Easy’s old nemesis at Ste. Marie-du-Mont and Carentan. The concentration on the narrow front was murderous. About noon, the battalions were forced to halt and dig in.

Sink ordered Lieutenant Colonel Strayer to have 2d Battalion make an end run, a flanking move to the left. It would be supported by British Sherman tanks. There was a wood of young pine trees along the left (east) side of the highway to provide a screen for the flanking movement. Company E led the way for the battalion.

Company E’s first attack in Holland had been to the south, toward Son and then Eindhoven. The second had been to the east, toward Nuenen. The third had been to the north, into Uden. Now it would be attacking to the west, thus completing the points of the compass. That is the way surrounded troops fight. That was the way the airborne had been trained to fight.

·    ·    ·

Nixon joined Winters to scout the terrain. They found a pathway on the edge of the woods that was solid and firm, providing traction for the tanks. Good enough so far, but the woods ran out 350 meters from the highway, giving way to open ground that provided no cover whatsoever for the final assault.

Winters put the company into formation: scouts out, two columns of men, spread out, no bunching up. They got halfway across the field when the Germans opened up with machine-gun fire. Everyone hit the ground.

Guarnere and Malarkey got their 60 mm mortar into action. Guarnere called out range and direction; Malarkey worked the mortar. He was the only man in the field at that point who was not flat on his stomach. His first round knocked out a German machine-gun post.

Winters was shouting orders. He wanted machine-guns to go to work. The crews found a slight depression in the ground and set up the gun. They began to lay down a base of fire. Winters spotted a Tiger Royal dug in hull-defilade on the other side of the road and told the machine-gunners to take it under fire.

Turning to his right, Winters noticed Nixon examining his helmet, a big smile on his face. A German machine-gun bullet from the first burst had gone through the front of his helmet and exited out the side at such an angle that the bullet simply left a burn mark on his forehead. It did not even break the skin.

The German fire was too intense; Winters decided to pull the company back to the woods. The process would be to maintain the base of fire from the machine-guns while the riflemen backed off the field; when the riflemen reached the woods, they would begin firing to permit the machine-gunners to pull back.

When Lipton reached Winters, on the edge of the woods, Winters told him, “They [the machine-gunners] will need more ammo. Get some out there to them.” Lipton ran to a Sherman tank (all the tanks were behind the woods, out of sight from the Germans — much to the disgust of the men of Easy). Shermans used 30-caliber machine-guns, the same as Easy Company’s machine-guns. Lipton got four boxes of ammunition from the British. He gave two to Sergeant Talbert and took two himself. They ran out to the machine-guns in the middle of the field, which were firing continuously, dropped the boxes, circled around, and ran back to the edge of the field as fast as they could run. “The Germans were poor shots,” Lipton remembered. “We both made it.”

Just as the German parachute troops began to drop mortars on the machine-gun positions, Easy’s riflemen went to work and the machine-gunners were able to withdraw.

Winters ran back to the tanks. He climbed on the lead tank “to talk nose to nose with the commander.” He pointed out that there was a Tiger Royal dug in on the far side of the road. “If you pull up behind the bank on the edge of the woods,
you
will be hull-defilade, and you can get a shot at him.” As Winters climbed down, that tank and the one to its left cranked up and began plowing straight through that stand of small pine trees, knocking them down.

As the first tank got to the far edge of the woods, it wheeled left to line up for a shot at the Tiger.
Wham!
The Tiger laid an 88 into it. The shot hit the cannon barrel and glanced off the hull. Evidently the German commander had fired blind, lining up on the falling tops of the trees.

The British commander threw his tank into reverse, but before he could back out, the Tiger put a second round dead center through the turret. It penetrated the armor. The commander’s hands were blown off. He tried to pull himself up through the hatch with his arms, but his own ammunition began to explode. The blast killed him and blew his body up and out. The remainder of his crew died inside. The tank burned through the afternoon and into the night, its ammunition exploding at intervals.

The Tiger turned its 88 on the second tank and knocked it out with one shot.

·    ·    ·

Easy spent the remainder of the day, and all that night, in a miserable constant rain, raking the roadway with mortar fire. Headquarters Company brought up some 81 mm mortars to add to the fire. Artillery at Veghel joined in, but cautiously, because elements of the 502d PIR were attacking the salient from the south.

It was a long, miserable, dangerous night for the company, but the battalion S-2, Captain Nixon, had a lovely evening. He found a bottle of schnapps somewhere, and drank it himself. He knew he had a perfect excuse — his close call that afternoon when the bullet went through his helmet. He got roaring drunk and spent the night singing and laughing until he passed out.

In the early hours of September 26, the Germans withdrew from the salient. At first light, the 506th advanced on the road, unopposed. Once again, the American paratroopers occupied the ground after a fierce fire-fight with German paratroopers.

That afternoon, in the rain, the regiment marched back to Uden. Easy Company arrived after dark, dead tired. The following afternoon, the men received their first mail since leaving England ten days earlier. This strengthened a general feeling that for the Americans at least, the campaign in Holland was over.

·    ·    ·

That supposition turned out to be wrong, but it was true that the offensive phase of the campaign had ended. And failed.

For Easy, as for the 101st, the 82d, and the British armored and infantry outfits involved in MARKET-GARDEN, it had been a dispiriting experience. For the British 1st Airborne Division, it had been a disaster. It had landed on the north side of the Lower Rhine on September 17 with 10,005 men. It evacuated on September 26 only 2,163. Nearly 8,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured. Not only had there been no strategic or tactical gain to compensate for such losses, now the Allies had a salient leading nowhere that had to be defended. It was a narrow finger pointed into German lines, surrounded on three sides by a superior German force, dependent on the vulnerable Hell’s Highway for supplies.

Ten days earlier, the euphoria in the Allied camp had been running very high. One more operation and the war would be over had been the feeling. The Germans had been on the run ever since the breakout in Normandy, from the beginning of August right on through to the middle of September. It had been assumed that their unit cohesion was gone, their armor was gone, their ammunition was gone, their morale was gone. Those assumptions proved to be one of the great intelligence failures of the war.

In fact, by mid-September the Germans were well on their way to pulling off what came to be called the Miracle of the West. They put their units back together, resupplied and refitted them, brought in replacements, established a coherent defensive line. Eisenhower learned from the experience; in March 1945 he wrote his wife, “I never count my Germans until they’re in our cages, or are buried!”
³

MARKET-GARDEN was a high risk operation that failed. It was undertaken at the expense of two other possible offensives that had to be postponed because Eisenhower diverted supplies to MARKET-GARDEN. The first was the Canadian attack on the approaches to Antwerp, Europe’s greatest port and essential to the support of any Allied offensive across the Rhine. In the event, Antwerp was not opened and operating until the end of 1944, which meant that through the fall the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) fought with inadequate supplies. The second postponed offensive was that of Patton’s Third Army, south of the Ardennes. Patton believed that if
he
had gotten the supplies that Monty got for MARKET-GARDEN, he could have crossed the Rhine that fall and then had an unopposed path open to Berlin. That seems doubtful, but we will never know because it was never tried.

To the end of his life, Eisenhower insisted that MARKET-GARDEN was a risk that had to be run. In my interviews with him, between 1964 and 1969, we discussed the operation innumerable times. He always came back to this: the first rule in the pursuit of a defeated enemy is to keep after him, stay in contact, press him, exploit every opportunity. The northern approach to Germany was the shortest, over the terrain most suitable to offensive operations (once the Rhine had been crossed). Eisenhower felt that, given how close MARKET-GARDEN came to succeeding, it would have been criminal for him not to have tried.

Until I undertook this study of Easy Company, I agreed with his analysis. Now, I wonder. Easy Company was as good as any company in the AEF. It had won spectacular victories in Normandy. Its morale was high, its equipment situation good when it dropped into Holland. It had a nice mix of veterans and recruits, old hands and fresh men. Its officers were skilled and determined, as well as being brave. The N.C.O.s were outstanding.

Despite this, in the first ten days in Holland, just as Winters told Strayer the night of the attack at Neunen, it took a hell of a licking. It failed to get the bridge at Son, it failed to get through at Nuenen on its way to Helmond and for the first time was forced to retreat, it failed in the drive to Uden, it failed in its initial attack on the German salient south of Veghel.

The causes of these failures were many. First and most critical, in every case the German opposition outmanned and outgunned the company. The airborne troops did not have the artillery or the manpower necessary to launch a successful attack against German armor. Second, these were crack German troops, including their elite parachute regiment. They did not outfight the men of Easy, but they fought as well as the Americans did. Third, the coordination between the British tankers and the American infantry was poor. Neither Easy Company nor the Guards Armored Division had any training in working with each other. This shortcoming hurt Easy at Nuenen, at Uden, and again south of Veghel. At Brécourt Manor and at Carentan in Normandy, Easy had worked effectively with American tanks. In Holland, it worked ineffectively with British tanks.

On a larger scale, the trouble with MARKET-GARDEN was that it was an offensive on much too narrow a front. The pencil-like thrust over the Rhine was vulnerable to attacks on the flanks. The Germans saw and took advantage of that vulnerability with furious counterattacks all along the length of the line, and hitting it from all sides.

In retrospect, the idea that a force of several divisions, consisting of British, American, and Polish troops, could be supplied by one highway could only have been accepted by leaders guilty of overconfidence. Easy was one of 150 or so companies that paid the price for that overconfidence. It jumped into Holland on September 17 with 154 officers and men. Ten days later, it was down to 132.

1. Rapport and Northwood,
Rendezvous with Destiny,
269.

2. Rapport and Northwood,
Rendezvous with Destiny,
359.

3 John S. D. Eisenhower, ed.,
Letters to Mamie
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1978), 244.