The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (32 page)

But it was the Germans who were attacking, the Americans who were dug in. Dawson was short on ammunition, out of food. His supporting tanks were out of gasoline.  The artillery behind him was limited to a few shells a day. If he was going to go anywhere, it would be to the rear. The U.S. Army’s days of all-out pursuit were over.

There was one more punch left to the Allies, the Airborne Army, consisting of the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne, which had been refitting and recuperating in England since early July. From Eisenhower on down, everyone had been eager to use this asset, but although a number of operations were laid on, the troops on the ground always overran the drop zones before the operations could be mounted. In early September, however, Montgomery came up with a daring plan that called for dropping the paratroopers along the main north-south road through Belgium, to seize the bridges and thus open a way through the Netherlands for the British Second Army. The final objective was Arnhem. Once across the bridge there, the British would be beyond the Rhine River, with open country between them and Berlin. Code name for the operation was Market-Garden.

September 17 was a beautiful end-of-summer day, with a bright blue sky and no wind. No resident of the British Isles who was below the line of flight of the hundreds of C-47s carrying three divisions into combat ever forgot the sight.  Nor did the paratroopers. Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd was jumpmaster for his stick; he stood in the open door as his plane formed up and headed east. “In spite of my anxiety about the jump and subsequent danger,” he recalled, “it was exhilarating to see thousands of people on the ground waving to us as we flew over the British villages and towns.” It was even more reassuring to see the fighter planes join the formation.

When the air armada got over Holland, Schultz could see a tranquil countryside.  It was Sunday. Not many people were on the roads. Cows grazed in the fields. The Luftwaffe wasn’t to be seen. There was some anti-aircraft fire, which intensified five minutes from the DZ (Drop Zone), but there was no breaking of formation or evasive action by the pilots as there had been over Normandy. The jump was a dream. A sunny midday. Little or no opposition on the ground. Plowed fields that were “soft as a mattress.”

Gen. James Gavin led the way for the 82nd. His landing wasn’t so soft; he hit a pavement and damaged his back. Some days later a doctor checked him out, looked Gavin in the eye, and said, “There is nothing wrong with your back.” Five years later at Walter Reed Hospital, Gavin was told that he had two broken disks. It was too late to do anything; Gavin’s comment was, “Now I have one heel higher than the other to account for the curvation in my back.” To indulge in a generalization, one based on four decades of interviewing former GIs but supported by no statistical data, Jim Gavin was the most beloved division commander in ETO. Some veterans can’t remember their division commanders’ names because there were so many of them, or because they never saw them; others don’t want to remember. But veterans of the 82nd get tongue-tied when I ask them how they feel about General Gavin, then burst into a torrent of words-bold, courageous, fair, smart as hell, a man’s man, trusted, a leader, beloved.

Gavin (USMA 1929) was thirty-seven years old, the youngest general in the U.S.  Army since George Custer’s day. His athletic grace and build combined with his boyish looks to earn him the affectionate nickname of “Slim Jim.” Dutch Schultz wasn’t necessarily the best soldier in the 82nd, but he was one of the most insightful. After landing in Holland, Schultz saw Gavin come down, struggle to his feet in obvious pain, sling his M-1, and move out for his command post. “From my perspective,” Schultz wrote, “it was crucial to my development as a combat soldier seeing my Commanding General carrying his rifle right up on the front line. This concept of leadership was displayed by our regiment, battalion, and company grade officers so often that we normally expected this hands-on leadership from all our officers. It not only inspired us but saved many lives.”

There were but a handful of enemy troops in the DZ area. Lt. James Coyle recalled, “I saw a single German soldier on the spot where I thought I was going to land. I drew my .45 pistol and tried to get a shot at him but my parachute was oscillating. I was aiming at the sky as often as I was aiming at the ground.  When I landed I struggled to my knees and aimed my pistol. The German was no more than 15 feet away, running. Just as I was about to shoot him he threw away his rifle, then his helmet and I saw he was a kid of about seventeen years old, and completely panicked. He just ran past me without looking at me. I didn’t have the heart to shoot him.”

Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 82nd had developed a “soft spot in my heart” for the cows of Normandy because whenever he saw them grazing in a hedgerow-enclosed field, he knew there were no land mines in it. In Holland, he had another bovine experience. His landing was good, right where he wanted to be. He gathered up his men and after recovering the 81mm mortars, ammunition, and equipment, set out for his objective in Nijmegen. He spotted two cows. He had plenty of rope.  So “we commandeered the cows and hung our mortars and equipment on them. They were very docile and plodded right along with us.  “As we neared Nijmegen, the Dutch people welcomed us. But while pleased and happy to be liberated, they were quite shocked to see paratroopers leading two cows. The first questions were, ‘Where are your tanks?’ We were not their idea of American military invincibility, mobility and power. We could only tell them, ‘The tanks are coming.’ We hoped it was true.”

The Germans had been caught by surprise, but were waking up. They got units to the various bridges, to defend them or blow them if necessary. The GIs, moving into Nijmegen and Eindhoven and their other objectives, started taking casualties.

Sgt. Ben Popilski of Coyle’s platoon, who had just lost his British girlfriend, was shot in the head. A trooper reported it to Sgt. Otis Sampson. “I just happened to be looking his way,” the trooper told Sampson. “He turned white before he was hit, as if he knew it was coming.” Sampson recalled Popilski’s last words back in England, “I hope this jump straightens it all out,” and thought, He got his wish.

As the troopers moved toward their assigned objectives, gliders bearing soldiers and equipment began coming into the DZs.

One crash-landed on the edge of a wooded area and was under German small-arms fire coming from the tree line. Capt. Anthony Stefanich (Captain Stef to the men) called out to Private Schultz and others to follow him, and headed toward the German positions.

Stefanich was one of those officers brought up by General Gavin. Schultz remembered him as a man “who led through example rather than virtue of rank. He was what I wanted to be when I finally grew up.” Stefanich got hit in the upper torso by rifle fire, which set afire a smoke grenade he was carrying. Lt. Gerald Johnson jumped on him to put the fire out, then carried the wounded captain back to the assembly point, where an aid station had been set up. As he bent over his captain, Schultz’s mind went back to his mother. She had taught him that if he said three Hail Marys daily he would never go to hell. Then he thought of his teachers, all nuns, “who taught me about the power of the rosary, and that if I really wanted something from Jesus Christ I should use our Blessed Mother as my emissary. That made sense, because more than once I had used my mother as an intermediary in trying to get my Dad to change his mind.”

So he prayed to the Blessed Mother for Captain Stef’s life.  But it was too late. Just before he died, Stefanich whispered to Lieutenant Johnson, “We have come a long way-tell the boys to do a good job.” The medic, a Polish boy from Chicago, stood up beside the body. He was crying and calling out, “He’s gone, he’s gone. I couldn’t help him.” It was, Schultz said, “a devastating loss. It was the only time in combat that I broke down and wept.” On September 19, Lt. Waverly Wray, the man who had broken up the German counterattack on the morning of June 7 at Ste.-Mère-Eglise, and killed ten Germans with a single shot to the head of each, led an assault on the bridge.  “The last I saw of him,” one trooper reported, “he was headed for the Germans with a grenade in one hand and a tommy gun in the other.” As Wray raised his head over the railroad track embankment, a German sniper firing from a signal tower killed him with a single shot in the middle of his head.  On the afternoon of September 19, Gavin met with Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commanding the Guards Armored Division. Horrocks said he could provide tank support for an attack on the Nijmegen bridges, and that he could have trucks bring forward assault boats for a crossing of the river downstream from the bridges. Gavin decided to hit the western ends with Lt. Col. Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, and to give the task of crossing the river in the boats to Maj. Julian Cook’s 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR.  Cook wanted to cross under cover of darkness, but he was helpless until the trucks carrying the boats came up. They were promised for late that afternoon, but were delayed because the Germans were putting heavy fire on the single road running back to the start point in Belgium. So effective were these attacks that the GIs were calling the road “Hell’s Highway.” Bulldozers and tanks were assigned to roam its length, pushing wrecks out of the way. Traffic jams ran for miles and took hours to unsnag. Hitler authorized one of the Luftwaffe’s final mass raids on the clogged road-two hundred bombers hit Eindhoven, while another two hundred fighter-bombers went after the troops and vehicles jamming Hell’s Highway-Jabos in reverse.

At 1530 of September 19, Gavin flung Vandervoort’s battalion at the bridges. The boats had not come up, but Gavin hoped the combination of British tanks (all Shermans) and parachute infantry could break through Nijmegen and take the bridges.

Vandervoort’s men rode into the attack on the backs of more than forty British armored vehicles. They got to the center of the city without much difficulty.  There Vandervoort split the regiment, sending half for the railroad bridge and the other half for the highway span. Both attacks met fierce opposition from 88s, self-propelled guns, mortars, and well-placed machine guns.  Lieutenant Coyle and Sergeant Sampson’s platoon led the assault. “On approaching the last houses before the open area in front of the railway bridge,” Coyle recalled, “the lead tank began firing its cannon. The roar was deafening. I was moving up alongside the third tank in the column. When I cleared the last house and could see the bridge, I got quite a shock. I didn’t expect it to be so large. I learnt after the war that it was the largest single-span bridge in Europe.”

As the two Shermans in front of Coyle moved across the traffic circle, two hidden 57mm antitank guns fired. The tanks shook, stopped, began to flare up.  The tank beside Coyle went into reverse and backed into a street leading to the traffic circle. Coyle had his platoon retreat into houses on the outer ring, then take up positions on the second floor.

From there, the GIs could see Germans on foot and bicycles coming across the bridge. The men wanted to set up their machine guns in the windows and fire at the enemy, but Coyle ordered them to stay back, because he didn’t want the Germans to know he was there, at least not until those antitank guns had been found and knocked out. He was passing this order on to Sergeant Sampson when Sampson saw a German running through the street not twenty yards away.  Instinctively, Sampson raised his tommy gun and stepped toward the window. Coyle pushed the weapon aside.

“Not yet,” Coyle whispered.

Looking out, he saw the Germans manhandling an antitank gun from behind some bushes in the park and bringing it forward to a spot ten meters in front, pointing it up the street. The Germans were unaware of his presence.  Just at that moment Vandervoort came into the room. Coyle explained the situation, showed him the German gun, and said he wanted to coordinate an attack with the British tanks. Vandervoort agreed. He told Coyle to open up in five minutes; then he dashed downstairs to find the British tanks and put them into the attack. But before Vandervoort could get the tankers organized, someone opened fire from a building adjacent to Coyle. The Germans started firing back.  Coyle motioned Pvt. John Keller forward. He fired a rifle grenade at the antitank gun in the street and knocked it out.

“Kla-boom!” as Coyle remembered it. There was a terrific explosion in the room.  Another 57mm had fired; the shell went through one wall and exploded against the other. Then another, and another. Coyle pulled his platoon out of the house and occupied the cellar of another. By now dark had come on. Coyle got orders to button down and wait for morning.

Dawn, September 20. One mile downstream from the bridges, Major Cook’s battalion waited. The men were ready to go but the assault boats had not arrived. Through the morning, they waited. Vandervoort’s battalion, meanwhile, was unable to drive the Germans out of the park, despite great effort (Sergeant Sampson was badly wounded that morning by shell fire).

Vandervoort described the fighting: “The troopers fought over roof tops, in the attics, up alleys, out of bedroom windows, through a maze of backyards and buildings. . . . Where feasible, tanks served as bulldozers, smashing through garden walls, etc. A tank cannon thrust through a kitchen door really stimulates exodus. In the labyrinth of houses and brick-walled gardens, the fighting deteriorated into confusing face-to-face, kill or be killed show downs.” Meanwhile, Cook’s battalion waited for the boats. Cook went to the top of a tower at a nearby power station to survey the opposite bank of the Waal. A young captain with Cook, Henry Keep, wrote a letter home, “We had a glimpse of a scene which is indelibly imprinted on my mind. What greeted our eyes was a broad flat plain void of all cover or concealment . . . some 300 meters, where there was a built-up highway [where] we would get our first opportunity to get some protection and be able to reorganize. . . . We could see all along the Kraut side of the river strong defensive positions, a formidable line both in length as well as in depth-pillboxes, machine gun emplacements. . . .” Cook had support; ten British tanks and an artillery battery were lined up along the river to give covering fire when he crossed. But not until 1500 did the trucks arrive. What they brought wasn’t much. There were only twenty-six assault boats, instead of the thirty-three that had been promised. And they were the frailest of tiny craft, six meters long, of canvas with a reinforced plywood bottom. And there were only three paddles per boat. The Waal was almost four hundred meters wide, with a swift current of about ten kilometers an hour.  The paratroopers dragged the boats to the shore, pushed off into deep water, climbed in (thirteen men to a boat, plus three British engineers with the paddles) and tried to use their rifle butts as paddles. But as they got out into the current, some of the boats started whirling in circles. The tanks and artillery fired away. A smoke screen was laid down-but the wind blew it away. As the boats got straightened out and headed for the bank, the Germans opened fire.  Cook and Keep were in the first boat. That was not where the battalion commander ought to have been, but Cook had been brought up by Gavin.  “It was a horrible picture, this river crossing,” Captain Keep wrote his mother, “set to the deafening roar of omnipresent firing. It was fiendish and dreadful.  . . . Defenseless, frail canvas boats jammed to overflowing with humanity, all striving desperately to cross the Waal as quickly as possible, and get to a place where at least they could fight.”