The Daring Dozen (33 page)

In February 1943 von der Heydte was transferred to the 2nd Parachute Regiment and in September of that year he was ordered to Rome to disarm the Italian forces following their armistice with the Allies. In a suburb of the Italian capital, tanks belonging to a pro-Allies Sardinian Division opened fire on von der Heydte’s men, so the commanding officer sat on top of an armoured car and advanced into Rome at the head of a small convoy to draw the Italians out into an ambush. One of his men, Captain Milch, recalled what followed:

Major Von der Heydte stopped at a marketplace and bought grapes, which we immediately ate. As we continued, we kept on seeing motorcycle messengers in Italian uniforms. Then we got to a tank obstacle … I went ahead, followed by the staff car and the armoured car. When we were not too far from the famous obelisks along the Via Ostiense, not far from the Coliseum, I saw tanks in a side street that were following our movements with their main guns. We were in a trap. In order to warn the vehicles following us, I fired at the closest tank with my rifle. A salvo from the tank’s main guns was the answer. The tanks rolled out, pursued the armoured car, which was able to escape, and ran into my battery. The battery turned back all of the Italian attacks into the afternoon.
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By such fearless behaviour did von der Heydte successfully disarm the Italian forces in Rome and its environs by 11 September. A short while later, while on a reconnaissance flight over the city in a Fieseler Storch, von der Heydte’s aircraft crashed and he was badly injured. When he returned to active service four months later, von der Heydte was appointed commander of the newly formed 6th Parachute Regiment, a unit comprised predominantly of young, raw recruits; as he had done three years earlier prior to the invasion of Crete, von der Heydte was obliged to prepare a mix of idealists, adventurers and ambitious young soldiers for the reality of war.

The regiment was based just outside Paris and throughout the spring of 1944 von der Heydte trained them thoroughly for the invasion that he knew to be imminent. At the start of June von der Heydte’s regiment moved north-west into Normandy and he established his command post in Carentan, a small town of 4,000 inhabitants, situated three miles from the coast on the main road (the Route National 13) between Cherbourg in the north and Caen in the east. One battalion he stationed in Carentan, another he sent seven miles north-west to Sainte-Mère-Église, and a third was dug in around Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, four miles to the north.

Though most of the German High Command were convinced the invasion, when it came, would occur further east at Calais, von der Heydte was not convinced and conducted regular aerial reconnaissance patrols, his love of flying undiminished despite his accident of the previous year. On the evening of 5 June von der Heydte was engaged in one such reconnoitre when his headquarters received a visit from General Kurt Student, Commander-in-Chief of the German airborne field army. Student dined with von der Heydte’s liaison officer and then departed for his headquarters in the city of Nancy in the east of France. ‘Be alert!’ he jokingly told the liaison officer as he left Carentan.

Early on the morning of 6 June, word reached von der Heydte of enemy paratroopers landing north of Carentan. He jumped on his motorcycle and raced to investigate, discovering on arrival that his men had captured more than 75 American paratroopers belonging to the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment and 101st Airborne Division. Von der Heydte radioed his superiors that he believed the invasion was underway. Next he drove to Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and scaled the church steeple at around 0630hrs to scan the horizon through his binoculars. What he saw was unforgettable. ‘All along the beach were these small boats,’ he recalled nearly 50 years later. ‘Hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before.’
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Racing down from the church, von der Heydte headed two miles north to Brecourt Manor but the four guns of the German battery positioned in the grounds of the manor were abandoned. He hurried back to Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and instructed his men to man the battery and open fire on the beaches. Meanwhile von der Heydte attempted to drive back the Allies as they advanced cautiously forward from the beachhead, launching an attack through Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and Turqueville. But his paratroopers encountered heavy fire from American airborne troops who had landed well ahead of the main invasion fleet and von der Heydte ordered his men to take up defensive positions and repel the Allied advance from the beaches. Fierce fighting raged for the rest of the day, and into D-Day+1, as gradually von der Heydte’s men began to withdraw across the marshy ground towards Carentan.

Von der Heydte was wounded in his arm, and the damage to the nerves meant he wore it in a sling as he led the remains of his regiment towards Carentan. On the evening of 8 June the German paratroopers took up positions on the northern and eastern outskirts of the town with orders from Field-Marshal Rommel to ‘defend Carentan to the last man’.

For two days von der Heydte and his men held up the American advance despite the heavy casualties they sustained. On 10 June, however, the American 29th Division arrived from Omaha Beach to join forces with the 101st Airborne and a call was made on von der Heydte to surrender. He declined, sending back a message politely asking the Americans, ‘What would you do in my place?’ The following day the
Wehrmachtbericht
(the German armed forces report broadcast daily on the wireless) declared that ‘during the difficult fighting in the enemy beachhead and the elimination of the enemy paratrooper and air-landed forces that were dropped in the rear area, the 6th Parachute Regiment of Major von der Heydte distinguished itself tremendously’.
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Not that the acclaim was of much material use to the remnants of von der Heydte’s regiment. That same day, 11 June, with his men down to the last of their ammunition and two of his three battalions terribly depleted, he ordered his regiment to pull back from Carentan to prepared positions further south, leaving behind one company of 50 men to hinder the American advance with heavy machine gun and mortar fire. The decision was in defiance of an order from SS Major General Werner Ostendorff to remain at Carentan until he arrived with his 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, to which von der Heydte’s regiment had been temporarily attached. Heydte’s disobedience, motivated as much by his hatred of the SS as his wish to escape entrapment, nearly resulted in his court-martial.

At dawn on 12 June the 101st Airborne attacked Carentan with Easy Company, led by Captain Richard Winters, in the vanguard. The assault, subsequently immortalized in the best-selling book
Band of Brothers
, developed into a series of bloody engagements between two elite detachments of paratroopers.

Eventually the Americans triumphed and Carentan was theirs. At first light the next day, 13 June, they prepared to push south-west towards the high ground. But before they could, von der Heydte counter-attacked, catching the Americans off-guard and causing one company of the 101st to fall back in confusion. Carentan was on the brink of being retaken by von der Heydte’s shattered and depleted forces when at 1630hrs 60 American tanks appeared, accompanied by infantry from the 29th Division.

Von der Heydte withdrew his men from Carentan once and for all. Throughout the weeks that followed the 6th Parachute Regiment fought courageously among the fields and hedgerows of the Normandy countryside; in one instance, 20 of their number on bicycles and supported by one tank ambushed a battalion of American infantry.

But inexorably the Allied advance continued until, at the end of July, they broke out from the Cotentin Peninsula and wheeled west, encircling thousands of German troops. Von der Heydte and his men fought their way through the Allied encirclement at Coutances, and on 12 August the 6th Parachute Regiment was finally withdrawn from Normandy, having been involved in fighting on an almost daily basis since 6 June. Casualties had been heavy with 3,000 men either killed, wounded or missing. The survivors who entrained for Güstrow were no longer the bright-eyed idealists or adventurers of six months earlier.

By November 1944 von der Heydte had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel and awarded the oak leaves to the Knight’s Cross. He was also in charge of a parachute combat school in Aalten, the Netherlands, an assignment cut short in early December. On the 9th of that month von der Heydte was summoned to see General Student and ordered to assemble an airborne battle group to participate in an imminent large-scale German offensive. Von der Heydte was not informed of where the offensive would occur, until on 15 December Field Marshal Walter Model revealed the nature of the mission.

The offensive would be in the Ardennes, the forested region on the Belgian border, along a front that ran from Monschau in the north to Echternach in the south. The aim was to punch through the Allies’ front line, splitting the British and American forces, and then seizing the port of Antwerp. Ultimately, Hitler hoped that the offensive would force the Allies to the negotiating table. If the strategic objectives seemed far-fetched to von der Heydte, it was nothing compared to the timescale in which he had to prepare his men for their role – 24 hours.

Model explained to von der Heydte that on 16 December he would drop into the Ardennes with his men and seize and hold a number of roads and bridges to facilitate the rapid advance of the 6th SS Panzer Army. It was to be a nighttime drop – the first and only such jump by German paratroopers in the war – and von der Heydte’s concerns over the limited intelligence supplied to him about the strength of Allied force in the region were dismissed. So too were his complaints about the lack of arms and ammunitions, the unreadiness of his men and the poor communications equipment.

Recognizing that he was being asked to lead his men on an exceptionally dangerous mission, von der Heydte decided to lead from the front. Shortly before midnight on 16 December, he and 1,200 paratroopers took off in 80 aircraft for the drop zone 50 miles behind enemy lines. In a post-war interview with author Franz Kurowski for the book
Jump Into Hell
, von der Heydte described the mission:

I was firmly convinced that in that type of operation the commander had to be the first one to jump. Not so much to make a good impression but rather to get a first impression on the ground of the terrain and the enemy situation and to assemble the forces that followed.

The scene at the drop zone was eerily beautiful. Above me, like lightning bugs, were the position markers of the aircraft and, whipping up towards me from below were the tracers of the light American anti-aircraft weapons. Beyond the black trees, like the fingers of a hand, were the probing beams of the searchlights. Then impact. The roll forwards worked. I unhooked. Initially I was alone. I ran to the designated fork in the road that was a collection point. On the road I encountered the first of my soldiers. There were only a few – far too few. There was also only a few at the collection point. What had happened to the rest?
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Von der Heydte only learned much later that many of the pilots who had transported the paratroopers to their DZ had lost their nerve in the face of heavy anti-aircraft fire and dropped them far too early. As dawn broke on 16 December, von der Heydte assembled his men at the fork that was seven miles north of Malmédy and counted 250 out of the original force of 1,200. ‘We pulled back from the fork in the road into the woods and formed an all-round defence,’ he remembered. ‘The radio equipment was damaged and did not work, with the result that we could not establish contact with our own forces. I had no way at all of forwarding the most important results of our reconnaissance.’
¹⁴

Lacking the men to carry out the original mission of seizing roads and bridges, von der Heydte sent out patrols to reconnoitre, and in one engagement with the enemy the German paratroopers retrieved the corps order (battle instructions) for the US XVIII Corps. But with no communications, and 50 miles behind enemy lines, there was no way to inform their superiors. Oblivious as to the progress of the main offensive, von der Heydte decided to head east in the hope of reaching German lines, but by now the Americans were hunting them down and they spent much of 21 December skirmishing with the enemy. Realizing that their best chance of survival was to split into small groups, von der Heydte instructed his men to head east as they saw fit. By now von der Heydte was suffering from the effects of cold and hunger as well as a fractured arm. On 24 December, unable to continue his slow trek east, von der Heydte knocked on the door of a farm near Monschau and asked the farmer to send a message to the Americans saying he wished to surrender. Three and a half years after the wounded English soldier at Crete had told von der Heydte that he hoped his war would soon be over, it was – and in the most ignominious fashion.

Von der Heydte remained a prisoner of war in England until July 1947 during which time he angered many of his fellow inmates with a series of outspoken attacks on the crimes of the Nazi regime. Upon his release, von der Heydte returned to West Germany and became a professor of law at the University of Würtzburg. His war memoirs were published in 1958 to much acclaim and from 1966 to 1970 he served as a member of the Bavarian State Parliament for the Christian Social Union. All the while he retained his links to the military, rising to the rank of brigadier general in the Reserves and teaching successive generations of young men about airborne warfare.