Soon after first light on what was to be a very busy day, a total of eighty-four Mosquito fighter-bombers, as well as Boston and Mitchell medium bombers of the 2nd Tactical Air Force, took off to attack German barracks at Nijmegen, Cleve, Arnhem and Ede. This followed the raids on Luftwaffe airfields during the night by Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force. At the same time another 872 B-17 Flying Fortresses, loaded with fragmentation bombs, were heading out in groups to smash identified flak and troop positions in the Netherlands. They were escorted by 147 P-51 Mustangs, flying flank and top cover. The escorts had little to do. ‘Luftwaffe reaction was hesitant,’ was the verdict that day. Only fifteen Focke-Wulf 190s were seen and seven were shot down for the loss of one US fighter.
While the Allied aircraft were on the way to their targets, American and British paratroopers queued for breakfast. The Americans had hotcakes and syrup, fried chicken with all the trimmings and apple pie. British paratroopers in John Frost’s 2nd Battalion piled their mess tins with smoked haddock, ‘quite a lot of which ended up on the floor of the aircraft’, a sergeant remarked.
Frost himself had eggs and bacon. He was in a good mood. Having been dismayed by Operation Comet, he thought that this time the arrangements at least seemed much better. Frost, who had led the highly successful Bruneval Raid in February 1942, seizing a German radar set in northern France, had also known disasters in Tunisia and Sicily. He did not expect the coming battle to be easy, but he still ordered his batman Wicks to pack his dinner jacket, golf clubs and shotgun ready to come over with the staff car later. He then checked his own equipment, including a forty-eight-hour ration pack, his Colt .45 automatic and the hunting horn with which he rallied the battalion. Frost, a religious man of firm convictions, was admired by his men. ‘There’s old Johnny Frost,’ they would say, ‘a Bible in one hand and a .45 in the other.’
By the time the three divisions deployed to their respective airfields, eight for the British and seventeen for the Americans, the sun was starting to burn through the morning mist to make a beautiful early-autumn day. Altogether a total of 1,544 transport aircraft and 478 gliders stood ready for the first lift of more than 20,000 troops. The runways provided an impressive sight, with each tug aircraft and glider lined up perfectly for take-off. The troop carrier command C-47 Dakotas were also carefully aligned ready to become airborne at twenty-second intervals.
General Boy Browning was at Swindon airfield in excellent spirits. He was finally taking an airborne corps to war. His glider, which was to be flown by Colonel George Chatterton, who commanded the Glider Pilot Regiment, would carry the general’s entourage including his batman, cook and doctor, as well as his tent, Jeep and luggage. According to his biographer, Browning had also packed three teddy bears. The fact that he had appropriated no fewer than thirty-eight gliders for his corps headquarters in the first lift, especially when the 1st Airborne’s allocation had been cut back, struck a number of people as an act of pure vanity. The three divisions would be operating independently of each other, so there would be very little a corps headquarters could usefully do, above all on the vital first day.
At the airfield, Urquhart suddenly realized that he had not clarified which of the brigade commanders should take over if he became hors de combat. So he drew his chief of staff aside and said, ‘Look, Charles, if anything happens to me, the succession is to be Lathbury, Hicks, Hackett in that order.’ ‘All right, sir,’ Mackenzie replied, not imagining that it would ever come to that. They would both regret later that Urquhart had not made it clear in advance to the brigadiers concerned.
As the 1st Airborne lined up for tea and sandwiches before boarding, some paratroopers seemed to display an ostentatious optimism. A sergeant had brought a deflated football ready for a game once they had captured the bridge. Another soldier, when asked why he had a dartboard with him, replied that a game of darts always helped ‘to pass away dull evenings’. And a captain with the 1st Parachute Brigade headquarters insisted on taking a bottle of sherry to celebrate the taking of the bridge. Those going by glider competed in the ribald messages they chalked up on the fuselage of camouflage canvas. General Urquhart noted an ‘Up with the Frauleins’ skirts’ scrawled on a Horsa. Gallows humour abounded. ‘The chaps are just the same,’ a glider pilot recorded in his diary. ‘One fellow is taking bets as to how many of us will get the chop; I wonder if he will come back to collect his debts, or maybe pay out.’
American optimism appeared to consist mostly of fantasies about yet another foreign country. A young lieutenant remembered wondering ‘what all those blonde girls really looked like, with wooden shoes on their feet and windmills in their eyes’. A number of paratroopers had heard that the Netherlands was the country of diamonds, and they dreamed of returning home with enough loot to set themselves up in style.
On the other hand, the possibility of imminent death revived religious thoughts. Catholics especially took the opportunity of spiritual consolation. The American airborne divisions included a rich ethnic mix from Catholic cultures, including men of Spanish, German, Polish, Irish and Italian descent. As there was no time for individual confession, Father Sampson of the 101st Airborne gave a general absolution to the group of bare-headed men kneeling at the edge of the airfield. ‘The gold and white vestments of the Catholic priest looked incongruous against the olive drab around,’ wrote an onlooker.
Far from feeling optimistic, a few young paratroopers were in a state of mortal dread. The day before, two had gone absent without leave after the briefing. Then, just before the 101st climbed on to trucks to be taken to the airfield, another had shot himself through the foot with his M-1 rifle. Next to the runway, yet another one had slipped behind a C-47 where he did the same. ‘Some men went AWOL and quite a few parachutes accidentally on purpose came out of their packets in the aircraft,’ Brigadier General McAuliffe acknowledged later. A parachute spilled in that way meant that a man could not jump, but if it was deliberate, then he faced a court martial for cowardice. Many were afraid of losing their nerve in the aircraft at the last moment and refusing to jump.
Paratroopers were so heavily loaded that they could hardly move, and needed to be pushed or pulled up the steps into the aircraft. They had helmets covered with camouflage netting and strapped under the chin, webbing equipment, musette bags with personal items such as shaving kit and cigarettes, three days of K-rations, extra ammunition in beige cloth bandoliers, hand grenades and a Gammon grenade of plastic explosive for use against tanks, their own M-1 rifle or Thompson sub-machine gun, as well as mortar rounds, machine-gun belts or an anti-tank mine for general use, and of course every man carried his parachute behind. Bazooka men, mortar men, machine-gunners and signallers shouldered all or part of their own weapon or radio. On average each man carried the equivalent of his own weight. Since few of them could reach their cigarettes, a sergeant moved down the aisle of the aircraft handing them out and lighting them.
Before boarding his plane, Brigadier General Jim Gavin was talking to his attached Dutch officer, Captain Arie Bestebreurtje, who revealed that he had never jumped from the door of a C-47. He had only dropped through a hole in the floor from British aircraft, so Gavin gave him a lesson on the spot. ‘Just step out, like stepping out of a bus,’ he said. Bestebreurtje, who at six foot three was taller than Gavin, wore a commando green beret and British battledress with a shoulder patch showing an orange lion and ‘NEDERLANDS’ written underneath. He was a member of a Jedburgh team, one of which was attached to each airborne division and another to corps headquarters. These teams, formed by the British Special Operations Executive in co-operation with the American Office of Strategic Services, trained small multi-national groups to parachute in to join up with the local Resistance and create mayhem behind German lines. Their main task in the Netherlands was to liaise with the underground and organize their activities in support of the Allied forces.
The first aircraft to take off carried each division’s pathfinders. They would land on their drop and landing zones, fight off any Germans, set up Eureka homing beacons to guide in the waves of troop carriers and set off coloured smoke grenades on their approach. Twelve RAF Stirlings from Fairford in Gloucestershire took the 21st Independent Parachute Company to mark the 1st Airborne’s drop and landing zones. At least twenty of its members were German and Austrian Jews who had transferred from the Pioneer Corps. In case of capture, their dog-tags and identity papers carried Scottish or English names, usually with ‘Church of England’ marked under religion so that they could not be identified as Jews. They would fight ferociously, taunting the enemy in his own language.
Next to leave were the tug planes and their 320 gliders carrying the 1st Airlanding Brigade, divisional headquarters and the field ambulances. As well as troops, supplies and ammunition, the Horsa gliders carried Jeeps, trailers, motorcycles and 6-pounder anti-tank guns, while the larger Hamilcars took Bren-gun carriers and the 17-pounders. The tug plane advanced slowly until the tow rope tightened and then finally the glider began to move down the runway. The glider pilot would shout back over his shoulder, ‘Hook your safety belts, the towline is fastened . . . they’re taking up the slack . . . hold on!’ Then with a lurch, a second lieutenant recounted, ‘the tail comes up, the nose goes down, the plywood creaks, and we are barrelling down the runway. Long before the tow plane leaves the ground the speed sends the flimsy glider skywards.’
Finally, it was the turn of the C-47 troop carriers. With a deafening roar their engines suddenly speeded up, the propeller blast flattening the grass beside the runway, then the heavily laden aircraft accelerated away. Inside the strutted metal cave of the fuselage the paratroopers sat wedged in their aluminium bucket seats, facing each other across the narrow aisle, mostly avoiding eye contact until they reached cruising height.
In Belgium General Horrocks asked Colonel Renfro, the liaison officer of the 101st Airborne, to brief him again on the airborne plan. ‘How many days’ rations will they jump with?’ he asked. ‘How long can they hold out?’ These questions slightly surprised Renfro after Horrocks had declared at the briefing that the Guards Armoured Division would be in Eindhoven in a few hours. Horrocks and his chief of staff Brigadier Harold Pyman then asked Renfro what he thought of their plan. ‘It’s all right,’ he replied without any warmth. Horrocks, aware of his hesitation, laughed. Renfro could not tell whether this was a nervous laugh or bluff.
While they were speaking, the corps and divisional artillery near the canal carried on with their preparations to support the Guards Armoured attack. One heavy, three medium and ten field artillery regiments were ready in their gun lines to provide a rolling barrage which would advance at 200 yards a minute. They had been ordered to avoid cratering the road ahead at all costs. Fortunately the road was quite straight. The massive convoy of vehicles which would follow the Guards Armoured Division was being sorted out in the rear by movement officers and military police.
The bombers and fighter-bombers attacked flak positions in Nijmegen and Arnhem just before 10.30. Electricity for the whole area was cut off almost immediately because the PGEM generating plant on the banks of the Waal had been hit. The wise began filling baths and pails immediately in case the pumps would not come back on. Those who had binoculars or old telescopes climbed on to roofs and tried to watch the action. They had to be quick. Mosquito fighter-bombers screamed in at low level over Arnhem to attack the main barracks, the Willemskazerne, but they also hit the Restaurant Royale opposite. An antiquarian bookseller near by saw ‘Germans stumbling from the blasted rubble of the Willems barracks with blood pouring from their noses and ears from the concussion.’ By mistake, Allied bombers hit an old people’s home, the St Catharina Gasthuis, next to a German warehouse, which the Wehrmacht had in fact abandoned. A number of residents were buried under the rubble. Strafing fighters came in low. Sister Christine van Dijk saw German soldiers ducking round tree trunks to avoid their machine-gun fire.
The Dutch used to joke that the safest place to go in an air raid was the railway station as the RAF never managed to hit it, but in parts of Arnhem there was little cause for laughter. A large number of houses round the barracks caught fire, and nothing could be done to help. ‘Fire engines [are] unable to work as Germans are shooting at them,’ an anonymous diarist recorded in this first example of revenge against the Dutch for supporting the Allied attack, even though some 200 civilians were killed in the raid. The RAF’s key targets were the anti-aircraft batteries around the Arnhem road bridge, yet Model’s headquarters instinctively assumed that the ‘air raids on flak positions near Arnhem were believed to be made in an effort to destroy the bridge’.
Ton Gieling, a young keeper at the Arnhem zoo, was on his way home on that Sunday morning when the Allied bombing raid started. German soldiers were lying dead and wounded in front of a café in the Bloemstraat. Then, to his surprise, ‘a badly burnt rabbit dashed across the road in front of me and disappeared.’ Further on, he found a gravely wounded man being helped on to a stretcher. Gieling, who was strong, grabbed one end and they hurried the injured man to the St Elisabeth Hospital only to find that he had died on the way. Gieling, like many others, stayed at the hospital to help as a Red Cross volunteer. West of Arnhem, the town of Ede which contained just 180 German soldiers was smashed by air attack.
Wolfheze was also heavily hit at 11.40, having been targeted at General Urquhart’s request. Unfortunately one of the bombs scored a direct hit on the artillery ammunition dump under the trees, and the massive explosion caused great damage and killed a number of people. After the Wolfheze Institute for the Blind had been hit, the matron organized a well-disciplined evacuation to a shelter prepared in the woods. But many of the 1,100 mentally infirm patients at the next-door institute were traumatized by the bombing. The nurses began laying out white sheets on the ground in the shape of a huge cross in case more aircraft came to attack. Dr Marius van de Beek and other doctors began operating on some eighty wounded, and the eighty-one dead were buried on the following Friday.
On this Sunday morning, both Catholic and Dutch Reformed churches were not as full as usual, as the congregations were made up almost exclusively of women and children. The men had ‘dived’ to avoid being taken hostage or shot in reprisal for the attack on the viaduct. Explosions made windows rattle and the sudden cut in the electricity supply brought church organs to a groaning halt as the lights went out. In some churches, the priest blessed the congregation and everyone filed out quickly. The Dutch Reformed congregation in Oosterbeek guessed that the attacks signified imminent liberation. Spontaneously, they burst into the national anthem, ‘Het Wilhelmus’, which dated back to the sixteenth-century revolt against the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands.
In the Betuwe, the low-lying land between Arnhem and Nijmegen, people hurried to climb the dykes for a better view of the columns of smoke rising from both towns. In the city of Nijmegen itself, people were understandably anxious after the disastrous American bombing of 22 February mentioned earlier, but soon relaxed when they saw that the main targets for the Typhoons and Mosquitoes were the flak batteries by the bridges on the north side and German positions on the Hazenkampseweg to the south-west. As soon as the hissing whoosh of the rockets had died away and the aircraft disappeared into the distance, people poured out into the streets. There was an air of expectancy after all the premature rumours of the Allied advance.
Generaloberst Student and his First Fallschirm Army headquarters were south of Vught not far from the notorious concentration camp. Student was struggling under a mountain of paperwork in a villa taken over by his staff. ‘Annoying red tape followed us even here on to the battlefield,’ he complained. ‘I had opened wide the windows of my room. In the late forenoon, enemy air activity suddenly became very lively. Columns of fighter planes and formations of small bombers flew over constantly. In the distance one could hear bombs dropping, aircraft machine-guns, and anti-aircraft fire.’ He did not regard it as particularly significant at the time.
In Arnhem railway station, panzergrenadiers from the 9th Panzer-Division Hohenstaufen continued loading weapons and equipment on to trains to return to Germany where the formation was to be rebuilt. A certain amount had already been handed over to the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg, and although part of the Hohenstaufen had departed over the last two days, there was still quite a force left in the area. It included tank crews from the 9th SS Panzer-Regiment which had no tanks, two battalions of panzergrenadiers, an artillery battalion, the 9th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion next to Deelen airfield, an engineer company, the divisional escort company and a couple of half-tracks with quadruple 20mm flak guns.
At 10.30, just as the bombing attacks started, Standartenführer Harzer, accompanied by two of his officers from the Hohenstaufen, drove to the reconnaissance battalion’s base at Hoenderloo on the northern edge of Deelen aerodrome. The battalion of around 500 men commanded by SS- Sturmbannführer Viktor Gräbner was drawn up in an open square on parade, flanked by several eight-wheeler armoured cars and half-tracks. Harzer addressed them, and then presented Gräbner with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his bravery and leadership in Normandy. When the ceremony was over, Harzer accompanied Gräbner and his officers to lunch.
Harzer was well aware that Gräbner, reluctant to transfer his vehicles to the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg, had had his men remove many of their guns, tracks and wheels so that he could declare them ‘not ready for use’. With the nearest enemy forces at least ninety kilometres to the south, there appeared to be no reason why their armoured fighting vehicles needed to be ready to move at short notice.
The Irish Guards Group moved across Joe’s Bridge and took up position in the bridgehead a thousand metres south of the frontier. They could just see the border post through their binoculars. Many had that strange feeling of imminent danger in the pit of the stomach. Joe Vandeleur, who had been a keen horseman before he severely damaged a leg, thought that ‘it felt like the start of a race. We were lining up at the start line and the finish was the Zuyder Zee ninety miles away.’ He had been partially reassured by the promise of the rolling barrage and rocket-firing Typhoons swooping down to attack enemy gun positions ahead. He had a forward air controller from the RAF in the next vehicle and a direct radio link to the artillery.
Vandeleur wore his usual parachute smock, the Micks’ emerald-green cravat around his throat and a pair of corduroys. Horrocks, who was hardly in a position to criticize, liked to tease him on his unguardsmanlike turnout. Mounted in a scout car, Vandeleur took up position behind the second squadron of tanks. His infantry were riding on the Sherman tanks of the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion of the Irish Guards commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur. The two cousins were closer than brothers.
As the C-47 troop carriers circled, waiting for their formations to assemble, a number of men began to suffer from airsickness. A lieutenant in the 82nd was entranced when he looked down from the open door and saw a convent below, with a group of nuns in the courtyard staring up at them in amazement. Others gazed at the ‘tiny checker box fields’ of the English countryside.
The glider, because it was so light, always tended to fly higher than the tow plane, which gave their occupants a chance to see the sky full of other aircraft. But their flimsy construction made them dangerous. To the horror of the crew in one Stirling, the wings broke off the Horsa glider they were towing, and the fuselage crashed to the ground, killing everyone inside. In a very different case, a soldier in one of the 101st Airborne’s Waco gliders over East Anglia was suddenly overtaken by panic. He ‘jumped up and released the control that connected the glider to the tow ship. The glider went down in England.’ He faced a general court martial and a long prison sentence. A British glider pilot, on glancing over his shoulder, saw to his disbelief that a group of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were brewing up a mess tin full of tea on the plywood floor. He shouted back, furious at such recklessness, but they just asked if he wanted a cup too. Another example of obtuseness was demonstrated by a newly arrived second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne. He wore a white silk scarf, which he evidently considered rather dashing. He was advised to take it off since anything white made an easy aiming mark, but he did not and received a serious head wound soon after landing.
The coastline slipped by a thousand feet below. They were now over the North Sea, what American pilots called ‘Blitz Creek’. After all the earlier aborted operations, someone joked, ‘They’re leaving the cancellation a bit late this time.’ Looking down at the shadows of the aircraft on the sea, pilots spotted a couple of Horsa gliders and a C-47 which had crash-landed on the water. Men were standing on the wings, waiting for the RAF air-sea rescue tender, which was racing towards them. One glider ‘stayed afloat for two and a half hours and had to be sunk by naval fire’. The record established a few days later was a glider remaining afloat for seventeen hours. From time to time they spotted the odd warship, but the most impressive spectacle was the vast air armada, escorted by squadrons of Thunderbolts, Mustangs, Spitfires and Typhoons. ‘Wow!’ said a paratrooper from Ohio. ‘What Cleveland wouldn’t give for this air show.’
During the crossing, a Parachute Regiment private observed of his companions, ‘some [were] cocky and confident, some quiet and thoughtful, and some scared and on edge. Strangely enough the latter were mostly the veterans of the savage North African fighting. They knew what lay ahead.’ Another paratrooper remarked, ‘We tried to fake a smile at each other occasionally, but not much was said.’ On some planes, paratroopers – usually the replacements – tried to get an airborne song going. A universal favourite, sung to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’, was ‘Gory, Gory what a hell of a way to die . . . They picked him off the tarmac like a pot of strawberry jam.’ American paratroopers also sang to a similar tune, ‘I ain’t gonna jump no more, no more.’
Some slept, or at least pretended to by shutting their eyes. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cassidy, who was in the same aircraft as Major General Maxwell Taylor of the 101st, recorded that their divisional commander ‘slept most of the distance. He awakened once to eat a K-Ration, then dozed off again.’ Not surprisingly, there was no singing in his aircraft. ‘Most of the men also slept and there was little conversation.’
Pilots were nervous. The Netherlands was known as ‘flak alley’, because of the massive enemy anti-aircraft defences guarding the shortest route for Allied bombers heading to Germany. Glider pilots with so little control over their flimsy craft felt especially vulnerable when tracer bullets curved lazily up at them. The idea of shrapnel coming up from below made many sit on their flak jackets to give added protection to their private parts. A few pilots even brought a sandbag to sit on, not that it would have done much good. They were not allowed parachutes simply because their passengers did not have them.
The imminence of danger tended to prompt premonitions of death and superstition. A number read different passages in the Bible to find an indication of their likely fate. Pfc Belcher, a bazookaman in the 82nd, seemed convinced that he was going to die. He asked his team-mate, Patrick O’Hagan, to make sure his girlfriend got his ring and Bible. ‘He was shot in the air as he descended,’ O’Hagan recorded. On the other hand, most of those who had predicted their own death and survived tended to forget about it afterwards. Yet there was a certain logic among the veterans of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, who had started to believe that their ration of luck was running low. One staff sergeant described himself as ‘a fugitive from the law of averages’.
As they reached the Dutch coast, they also reached the line of anchored barges with flak batteries mounted on them. ‘We could see the tracers’, wrote Chaplain Kuehl, with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, ‘and knew that between each visible bullet there were many more rounds. We saw troopers jumping out of one of our wing planes and were shocked to look down and see only water below. Then we noticed the plane was on fire.’ One paratrooper described the apparently curving machine-gun fire as looking like ‘golf balls of red tracer’.
Much of the land in from the coast had been deliberately flooded by the Germans breaching the dykes. Those who had dropped in June on the base of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy were painfully reminded of comrades drowned there in similar circumstances. The sight of inundated villages, with just the roofs of houses, a church spire or the odd tree appearing out of this desolation, was most depressing. Only after they were over dry land did paratroopers discard their Mae Wests.
Captain Bestebreurtje, the Dutch officer attached to 82nd Airborne headquarters, was deeply moved as he looked at the familiar, flat terrain of the enemy-occupied country which he had not seen for four years. ‘It was a feeling of warmth for the land,’ he explained later. ‘I saw the fields and farmhouses and I could even see a windmill turning. I remember distinctly thinking to myself: “Here is my poor old [Netherlands] and we have come to liberate you.”’
Taking a more southerly route, the 101st Airborne passed over Belgium. As an aircraft carrying a stick of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment flew low over Ghent, exultant civilians in the street started giving the V for Victory salute. A cynic remarked to an excited private, ‘Look, they’re giving you two to one we don’t come back.’ A BBC correspondent in a scout plane over Belgium sighted the air armada. ‘The sky was black with transport aircraft flying in perfect formation,’ he recorded. ‘They were completely surrounded by Typhoons, Spitfires, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Lightning fighters. It was an aerial layer cake . . . As my pilot shouted to me, “No room up here for Jerry!”’
Some in that armada had never seen flak before. The C-47 with Major General Maxwell Taylor on board also carried a USAAF colonel who had come along as an observer. ‘What’s that stuff?’ he asked, pointing at the black puffs of smoke. ‘Colonel,’ the co-pilot replied, ‘you can rest assured it ain’t fluff.’ Paratroopers hated flak, because they felt helpless – ‘there is no way to fight back.’ Paratroopers wounded by flak in a plane and unable to jump were pushed to the rear and taken back to England for treatment. Some officers had their sticks stand up and hook up as soon as the flak started so that they were ready to jump if the plane caught fire.
Those in gliders felt even more vulnerable. As a group from the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion crossed the coast, flak shrapnel came through the floor, wounding the glider pilot in one leg, his chest and an arm. There was no co-pilot, so an airborne engineer called Melton E. Stevens climbed into the empty seat and the pilot was just able to give him some ‘instructions for flying and landing the glider before he passed out’. They carried on all the way to their LZ and somehow survived the landing, even though ‘dirt was piled against the nose of the glider up above the windshield.’ Stevens and his companions were then able to load the wounded pilot on to their hand-drawn ammunition cart and carry him off to find a medic.
British airborne sappers, strapped in a glider, spent most of the flight nervously eyeing the Jeep right in front of them, which was loaded with explosive. Even a near-miss from a flak shell could set off the whole lot. The only consolation was that death would be instantaneous. There was no alternative to ‘sweating out the flak’. Their only hope were their escorts. As soon as a German flak position opened fire, Spitfires, rocket-firing Typhoons and Thunderbolt P-47s would roll and dive steeply with all guns blazing. The men in one glider suddenly saw a P-51 Mustang come alongside them. The pilot waggled his wings in greeting, then dived on the offending flak position, knocked it out, then came up again to waggle his wings once more, before charging off again.
The redoubtable Colonel Robert Sink, who commanded the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was standing by the door of his C-47 watching the flak strike other aircraft in their formation. Suddenly, his own plane lurched and he saw that part of the wing had been blown off. ‘Well, there goes the wing,’ he said to the rest of the stick. Evidently the pilot performed miracles because he got them to the drop zone just north-west of the bridge at Son, their first objective. In several cases, the transport carrier pilots displayed self-sacrificial courage when their plane was on fire, by holding her steady to give all the paratroopers on board a chance to jump.
Lieutenant Colonel Cassidy watched flames start to consume a neighbouring plane. The pilot courageously kept it on the level to allow the paratroopers to jump, while knowing that he and his crew would crash to their deaths. Distracted by this drama, he failed to see that the green light had come. ‘Cassidy,’ General Maxwell Taylor said calmly, ‘the green light is on.’ ‘Yes sir,’ he said. And with his eyes still on the burning plane, he jumped, followed by his divisional commander. Bizarrely, General Taylor, later chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under President Kennedy, was then followed by his bodyguard, Stevan Dedijer, a Princeton graduate of Yugoslav origin, who claims to have shouted ‘Long live Stalin!’ as he threw himself out.
Inevitably, there were one or two paratroopers who panicked. According to Lieutenant Colonel Hank Hannah, the operations officer of the 101st, a paratrooper on his plane ‘suddenly chickened out and, pulling the rip cord of his reserve chute, said: “See, I can’t jump now.”’ Hannah bawled him out and told him he’d have to jump anyway. Then the plane was hit and the nervous paratrooper was glad to bale out using his emergency parachute. Another paratrooper, purely by accident, caught his ripcord on some projection and his chute opened. In furious embarrassment he had to return with the aircraft to England.
As they approached their designated drop zones, officers searched around trying to find landmarks to orientate themselves. Captain Bestebreurtje, with a pang of excitement, sighted the wooded ridge from Nijmegen to Groesbeek, where Gavin and his headquarters were to jump. After Colonel Mendez’s famous outburst about being dropped in Holland or in hell, some officers teased their pilot about how far they had been dropped from their DZs in Normandy. Lieutenant Colonel Warren R. Williams in the 504th had to eat his words. Their pilot put them down within 200 metres of the school which had been selected back in England as the regimental command post.
The broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, on one of the troop carrier planes, recorded for radio what he saw as it happened: ‘By now [we’re] getting towards the dropping area and I [sit] looking down the length of the fuselage. The crew chief is on his knees back in the very rear speaking into his inter-com, talking with the pilots . . . We [see] the first flak. I think it’s coming from that little village just beside the canal. More tracer coming up now, just cutting across in front of our nose. They’re just queued up on the door now, waiting to jump . . . you can probably hear the snap as they check the lashing on the static line – do you hear them shout 3–4–5–6–7–8–9–10–11–12–13–14–15–16–17–18 – there they go – every man out.’ Fortunately for Murrow’s listeners all went according to plan, but two paratroopers from the 506th died in a terrible way. Their own aircraft had disgorged the whole stick of paratroopers correctly, but ‘then a falling plane whose occupants had already baled out struck against them and the prop cut them to pieces.’
A jump-master in the 501st stood in the door of his plane and waved back to the Dutch jumping up and down in excitement a few hundred feet below. Some paratroopers were almost surprised to find that the countryside beneath them was exactly what they had expected, dykes, windmills and lush green grass. The senior officer present usually jumped first, with the next most senior acting as ‘push-master’, bringing up the rear and shoving out anyone who hesitated. Captain Ferguson in the 82nd stood ready in the open doorway, waiting for the green light, with ‘the plane throttling down, the wind screeching and tingling against my face, as I looked down and out’. The plane lurched with the blast from each shell burst, so it was a relief when the green light finally came on. In their eagerness to get out, the stick of paratroopers waddled forward in a line as rapidly as they could without slipping on the vomit and urine slopping around on the floor. The pilot also had to remember to pull the lever to release the parapacks with heavy loads fastened under the plane’s belly. One load of anti-tank mines dropped like a stone when its parachute failed to open, and caused a huge explosion.
‘Get ready, we’re cutting loose!’ a Waco glider pilot shouted back as he dropped the nylon tow rope. The glider then banked round and round to reduce speed, but it would still hit the ground at sixty miles an hour with dirt flying up all around as it ploughed across the landing field. ‘Let’s go!’ came the cry when they finally came to a halt, and everyone piled out of the side. Landing in a ploughed field was fine for the paratroopers as the freshly turned earth was soft, but it could be disastrous for gliders which did not land along the line of the furrows. They often ended up on their nose.
‘The medics’, wrote a doctor from the 101st, ‘had a busy time trying to extricate the broken and bloody bodies from the chewed up wreckage.’ The worst accident happened when two gliders of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment collided in mid-air, killing several of those on board and leaving the landing zone a mad crash-site of smashed plywood. As it was happening, ‘a Jeep came flying out making everyone scatter,’ a trooper remembered. ‘Among the hundreds of gliders in the awkwardest positions,’ wrote an officer in the 82nd, ‘one was jammed into a windmill with its tail jutting into the air at an angle of about 65 degrees.’
The British 1st Airborne which had followed the northern route came in over the orchards and polderland of the Betuwe, between the River Waal and the Neder Rijn. Tension mounted as they came close to the drop zone. ‘The transparent insincerity of their smiles’, wrote Colonel Frost, ‘and the furious last minute pulling at their cigarettes reminded me that the flight and the prospect of jumping far behind the enemy’s lines was no small test for anyone’s nervous system.’
Starting from the back, the stick lined up along the aisle with each man placing his left hand on the shoulder of the man in front. The C-47 bringing Captain Eric Mackay and men of the 1st Para Squadron Royal Engineers was hit on the approach, when a shell, almost certainly a 20mm, took out the red and green lights over the door. As a result, Mackay had to watch from the open door for when the paratroopers in the other aircraft jumped and simply follow suit.
A glider’s chance of survival was slim if hit by anything larger than a machine gun. Not far from the landing zone, the crew of a Stirling tug plane felt a sudden jolt. Flak had taken off the tail of the Horsa they were towing, then a wing sheared off and the tow rope broke. They heard later from the pilot of a neighbouring aircraft that he had seen bodies falling out as the glider disintegrated.
One glider pilot recorded their approach over the Neder Rijn. ‘We were almost at the release point now and the scene below looked exactly as it had appeared on the photographs at briefing the previous day. To starboard I could see the main reason for our trip – the bridge across the Rhine.’ There was chaos ahead as scores of gliders tried to land at the same time on the heathland north-west of Wolfheze. There was no air traffic control, so the co-pilot, if they had one, kept looking in all directions watching for other gliders while the pilot focused on landing. The other problem was cows. Sergeant Roy Hatch became desperate when a cow kept running ahead madly rather than escaping to the side. Even once the glider came to a rest, the men were still not safe. There was always the chance of another glider, out of control, crashing into it. Since it was safer in the open, and doors often jammed, soldiers slashed or smashed their way out of the side of the fuselage.
General Horrocks climbed an iron ladder and took up position on the factory roof near Joe’s Bridge. Once the formations of troop carriers and gliders with the 101st Airborne had passed over their heads, he passed the order to his signaller that H-Hour would be 14.35 hours. The 350 guns of the Royal Artillery behind opened fire at exactly 14.00 hours, and under cover of the bombardment the Irish Guards battle group moved into their final positions on the start-line. The clock ticked away until H-Hour, while the gunners continued to pound the forward German positions. Then, with the order ‘Driver advance!’, the lead tank commanded by Lieutenant Keith Heathcote set off.
For the first few minutes everything seemed to go well, but as they passed the border post into the Netherlands one tank after another was hit. Soon nine were blazing. Vandeleur called in the RAF. ‘It was the first time I had ever seen Typhoons in action,’ he recorded later, ‘and, Jesus, I was amazed at the guts of those pilots. They came in one at a time, head to tail, and flew right through our own barrage. I saw one disintegrate right above me. The noise was unimaginable. Guns firing, the screams of planes overhead and the shouts and curses of the men. I had to scream into the microphone to be heard.’ In the middle of all this mayhem, divisional headquarters radioed to ask how the battle was going. ‘My second-in-command Denis Fitzgerald just held up the microphone and said “Listen.”’ In the cacophony of explosions and shouting all around, one officer found the noise of wireless ‘mush’ in his earphones rather comforting.
Just behind Vandeleur’s scout car came two RAF vehicles with the forward air controllers, Squadron Leader Max Sutherland and Flight Lieutenant Donald Love. Love saw cows, maddened with fear, galloping in circles in the fields on either side as the battle raged. At the border post, ‘one of those little striped boxes’, he also spotted ‘a severed head, with a headless German body lying several yards away’. Love found to his dismay that some of the Typhoon pilots did not have the right gridded map, so when Squadron Leader Sutherland gave them their targets, they could do little. Instead, they had to use the tanks burning up front as ‘a landmark to show the positions of forward troops’.
The Typhoons were coming in so close that Sutherland wanted to use yellow smoke grenades to mark their own troops, but that was dangerous as German gunners would immediately use them as an aiming mark. Vandeleur thought the Typhoons were attacking his Irish Guards by mistake with cannon fire, then he admitted his mistake. What tank crews had thought to be rounds striking their turrets turned out to be the cannon shell cases ejected from Typhoons flying low overhead.
Lieutenant John Quinan, who had abandoned his blazing Sherman, was standing by a man who was shot through the heart by a sniper. ‘As he fell, he very clearly said “Oh, God!”,’ Quinan reminisced later. ‘I have often thought it a nice theological speculation whether he spoke before, or after, death.’
As soon as the Shermans of the second company had been set ablaze, Major Edward Tyler took his tanks down off the road on to the polder, which was fortunately dry, and swung round to the right. Lance Sergeant Cowan, famous for his eagle eye, spotted a camouflaged self-propelled assault gun and knocked it out with his Firefly’s 17-pounder. The crew commander surrendered to him, so Cowan told them to jump up on the back of his tank. He then continued his advance, only to find that his prisoner tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out another assault gun which he had not spotted. This too was destroyed. ‘And this extraordinary combination of ex-enemy self-propelled gun commander and Irish Guards sergeant went on to deal with a third.’ The German spoke reasonable English and was delighted with the Firefly’s straight shooting. His explanation for this bizarre behaviour was that he was a professional soldier, and he could not bear to see anyone adopting the wrong tactics, as he thought Cowan had.
Accompanying infantry from the 3rd Battalion brought back prisoners. The guardsmen were very rough with snipers, whom they forced to trot down the road at the double, while prodding them with bayonets. One prisoner, perhaps out of panic, tried to break away and run. ‘Frankly, he was dead the second the thought entered his mind. Everyone seemed to take a shot at him. He only got about fifteen to twenty yards before he was shot to pieces.’
As the German prisoners came back with their hands on their heads past the line of vehicles, ‘I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye,’ Vandeleur recorded. ‘One of the bastards had taken a grenade he had concealed and lobbed it into one of our gun carriers . . . I saw one of our sergeants lying in the road with his leg blown off.’ The German, who was gunned down in an instant, belonged to the Fallschirmjäger-Regiment von Hoffmann in Kampfgruppe Walther. Because of the dirty fighting methods of Hoffmann’s men, the Irish Guards took it for granted that they were to kill as many as possible.
The wild reconnaissance ride of Lieutenant Buchanan-Jardine a few days before had revealed that the Germans had forced locals to dig an anti-tank ditch outside Valkenswaard. As a result, Vandeleur had ordered a bulldozer-tank to take position close to the head of the column. This was fortunate since it was badly needed to clear the road of the nine shot-up tanks before those coming up behind could continue. After the nasty shock of the ambush destroying so many of their tanks, Vandeleur was concerned at what else lay ahead.