After the Sicily landings the Allied airborne divisions were pulled back to North Africa to regroup in readiness for the expected fighting in Italy, and the ground crews set about repairing and renovating the aircraft that had been damaged in the assaults. Italy surrendered on 3 September 1943 and soon afterwards the 1st Airborne Division landed from warships at Taranto. The division was used as light infantry and fought its way up the east coast into and beyond Foggia. Foggia was important to the Allies since it had one of the few good airfields in the area, and bombers could be based on it. Fortunately for the precious parachute brigades the casualties were light, although the fighting was sharp, and the initiative was kept in the hands of the airborne units. Just as winter was settling in the division was withdrawn altogether and shipped back to England for retraining and reinforcement in preparation for the invasion of North-West Europe.
The invasion, Operation Overlord, was top priority for the Allies and England was steadily filling up with troops and equipment. The lessons of Sicily had been assessed and digested, and the future of airborne forces was assured, at least for the time being. In September the US 101st Airborne Division arrived in Liverpool from New York, and were put into camps around Newbury. From there they trained hard on the Berkshire Downs and in the West Country. The British had just raised the 6th Airborne Division and it was in camps in the Cotswolds where it was training just as hard. The 82 Airborne remained in Italy where it was intended that it should support the Italian campaign by providing parachute assaults from bases in Sicily. After several operations had been mounted and cancelled, two battalions were dropped into the Salerno perimeter as reinforcements and eventually the entire division was committed to the Salerno battle and later sent to garrison Naples. Fortunately casualties had not been heavy, and after a not too strenuous winter the division was sent back to Britain, arriving on 22 April 1944, just in time for the invasion.
By 1944 the output of the American factories was making itself felt and the number of aircraft and gliders was steadily mounting. By January there was enough air lift to move two divisions at one time, almost all of it in C-47s and Horsa gliders. The IX United States Troop Carrier Command had overall control of all US C-47s and by the early spring there were 1,166 machines on its airfields around southern England. The RAF had a further 150 plus 144 heavy bombers, mainly Stirlings, for glider towing. Between them the Allies had 2,500 gliders, which was rather less than the 3,300 they had hoped for. Most of these were Horsas and Wacos, with a small proportion of the new tank-carrying Hamilcar. The divisions made full use of this unusual quantity of aircraft, and exercises and training went on at full pitch.
The proof of the value of airborne forces was that they were now to be incorporated into the main Allied plan for the invasion. The first intention was to put four infantry divisions onto the Normandy beaches and support them with simultaneous drops by two US airborne divisions just inland and to the west where they would block any German reinforcements coming to the aid of the beach defences. The eastern side would be secured by a British parachute brigade dropping and seizing the bridges over the River Orne and the Caen canal to the north of the town of Caen. However, in December 1943 General Eisenhower decided that it would be necessary to take Cherbourg as soon as possible after the landings in order to get a good deep-water port to supply his armies. To be sure of taking Cherbourg it was necessary to make a landing on the Cotentin Peninsula, and this meant increasing the shipborne invasion to five divisions, which was the limit that the available landing craft could carry.
This western extension of the beach-head altered the picture entirely. The new beach was code-named ‘Utah’, and it was separated from the remainder by the mouths of two rivers, the Douve and the Vire, both of which effectively cut off any lateral communication until they narrowed down some distance inland. Utah was on its own. Worse still the ground inland from Utah was flooded and marshy as a result of deliberate inundations by the Germans and there were only four roads leading over them, all four on raised causeways which were easily blocked by quite small forces. To compound the difficulties a tributary of the Douve, a small river called the Mederet, ran parallel to the beach about 5 miles inland, and it too was flooded so that it was an obstacle to practically all movement. General Omar Bradley took one look at the maps and air photographs and demanded an airborne division to drop and take the causeways. Shortly afterwards he asked for another to drop further south and west in order to seal off the peninsula from any German reinforcement coming up from that direction. Cherbourg was beginning to affect the whole plan, and it was soon necessary to recast the entire airborne assault.
The British airborne division which was going to take Caen was shifted to the eastern end of the beach-head to guard the left flank, and the original idea of using small British drops to take isolated gun batteries and strong points was shelved also. Since there were now three airborne divisions involved it became vital that the air lift was increased and the invasion date was put back to 1 June to allow time for the extra aircrews to be trained and the aircraft to be brought in from the other tasks. General Eisenhower continued to press the combined planning staffs for more air lift and for simultaneous drops of all three divisions with the fourth in reserve to come in if needed in a second lift. By the end of April the position was sufficiently strong in aircraft and gliders to allow both the US divisions and two-thirds of the British 6th Division to be dropped at the same time. Better than that was not possible unless the Supreme Commander was prepared to wait several months for more aircraft to be built and more aircrew to be trained.
Whilst this build-up period was being pushed forward there was an unwelcome diversion in the form of an alternative plan from Washington. Generals Marshall and Arnold, both experienced and respected commanders, proposed that the airborne army deserved to be used in a much bolder and more sweeping manner which, they affirmed, would bring far greater results. They offered a daring and imaginative idea which had clear origins in the Chindit operations in Burma. The basis was to establish a firm stronghold or ‘Citadel’ about 50 miles inland and at least half-way to Paris, where it could dominate the crossings of the Seine and attack the German supply lines. It would also divert the German defence in that it would invite attacks on itself and by being heavily supported by fighter aircraft it was confidently predicted that any such attacks would be smashed up before they made any impression. Better still, the concentrations of German troops necessary to contain the ‘Citadel’ would themselves become targets for air strikes and the German forces would be destroyed before they ever got to battle at all. It was a tempting idea, and might have worked. Equally so, it might not, for the only way to supply the ‘Citadel’ would have been by air, and to keep a large force of four or more divisions in battle would have taken just about every aircraft that the IX Troop Carrier Command had, as well as almost all the available fighter support. The beaches would have been very sparsely supported and Eisenhower had correctly surmised that the German plan would be to smash the invasion on the beaches before it got inland. So the ‘Citadel’ would have played into enemy hands and there would have been a distinct danger of both Allied invasions being defeated in detail one after the other. In retrospect this is correct, for we now know that the airborne drops on both flanks were instrumental in the beach-head being held at all, and all the air support was needed to achieve this. The ‘Citadel’ would have been a nuisance to the Germans, but they could have contained it until they were ready to turn on it and clean it up.
The airborne plan was now becoming clear. On the right flank, or western side, the 82nd and 101st Divisions were to drop just after midnight onto a series of regimental drop zones with the 101st on the dry ground inland from the causeways and the 82nd further off astride and to the west of the Mederet. Both divisions were substantially stronger than their establishment allowed, and they owed this to the experience gained in Sicily. Eisenhower had allowed each to take on an extra parachute regiment and had split a glider regiment between them so that they each now had three parachute regiments and a three-battalion glider regiment plus two parachute artillery battalions with 75mm pack howitzers and a glider battalion with 105mm howitzers. The 101st was to open the way for the US 4th Division which would land on Utah, and the 101st would also secure the southern flank of this move and hold off any German attacks from the direction. The 82nd was to seal off the western half of the peninsula and prevent Cherbourg being reinforced. It was reckoned that the two divisions would be strong enough to hold the area until the 4th Division joined them, particularly if both were delivered at the same time.
On the other flank the British 6th Division could only drop two brigades in the first lift since the majority of the air lift had gone to the 82nd and 101st. To compensate for this to some extent, General Gale was allotted the 1st (Commando) Special Service Brigade which would land from the sea, but would be on the extreme flank of the beach and would march directly to his divisional area and come under his command. The 1st Airborne Division would form an airborne reserve, always an important feature of any operation, and would come in as required, on any beach. Alternatively the division could be used as a quick reinforcement in the same way as the 82nd had been at Salerno. The left flank also had two small rivers cutting off the beach area; here they were the River Orne and its attendant canal running north from Caen, and a few miles to the east the River Dives, also running north. The Orne and its canal were crossed by one road; the Dives by four roads and a railway. The general plan was to seize and hold all bridges and dominate the land in between, thus sealing off the left flank and safeguarding the beaches from attack from that direction. Another task, and a more difficult one, was to silence a battery of four coastal defence guns which were sited at Merville where they could sweep the entire eastern end of the beach and engage shipping for several miles out to sea. Bombing could not smash the emplacements and a special task force was set up to make a surprise raid on the battery to ensure that by half an hour before the first landing craft appeared all four guns were out of action. For the Orne bridge General Gale decided on another surprise assault, this time using a silent glider approach in the same manner as the Eben-Emael flight, though from a shorter distance, and to rely on his two parachute brigades for the others.
The British division was short of aircraft. All the IX Troop Carrier Command planes went to the 82nd and 101st, so did all the Waco gliders and some of the Horsas. The division was left with the 150 RAF C-47s, the remainder of the Horsas, the Hamilcars and as many RAF bombers as could be raised. But the 6th Division had a special advantage: the RAF aircrews were all highly skilled in night navigation. Also the 3rd Brigade of the 6th Division had had the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion attached to it since August 1943. It had been trained at Fort Bragg and played a gallant part in Operation Overlord and later in Operation Varsity. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Nicklin, was killed and Corporal Frederick George Topham of its medical unit was awarded the VC. Now the troops knew what was required and trained furiously. The special units for the surprise attacks were rehearsed continuously on models and replicas. Meanwhile the Allied air forces mounted fighter sweeps, bombing raids and, most important of all from the point of view of the ground commanders, photographic reconnaissance sorties over all the proposed landing areas.
On the German side there was no illusion about the coming invasion. The only unknown factor was the timing – when would it come? And also, exactly where? Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel commanded Army Group B, stretching from Brittany to Calais, with the Seventh and Fifteenth Armies under his command. The Seventh Army faced the invasion beaches, and the Fifteenth Army had the rest of the coast from just east of Caen onwards. Because the invasion was expected somewhere in the Pas de Calais area the Fifteenth Army had been given priority in all defence stores and in tanks and vehicles. On the Cotentin Peninsula the majority of the troops were in second-lines units and short of transport and tanks.
Rommel based his defence on the idea of a thin, hard crust along the beaches with infantry divisions a short distance behind to deal with any determined landings. About 50 miles inland were the Panzer divisions that would move to counter-attack any penetration of the Atlantic Wall and stop a break-out. In the area inland of Utah Beach, the 709th Coastal Division was responsible for defence, and its under-strength regiments had spent most of the spring in digging and wiring, so that their training had suffered. On the left flank the 711th held the Orne and Dives area; it too was a poor quality and low-strength formation. On 18 May Rommel set off on a lightning tour of the coast defences, praising, upbraiding, but particularly cursing the slow erection of his special antiglider landing obstacles. These were long poles dug into the ground on all flat places where gliders might land. They came to be known as ‘Rommel’s Asparagus’ or ‘Rommelspargel’ and caused much consternation at Allied Supreme Headquarters when they were identified on aerial photographs.
The Allied air force commanders were pessimistic about the chances of the troop transports surviving the Germans flak and predicted losses of up to 50 per cent. Unfortunately the leader of this train of thought was the Air Supremo himself – Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory – and he viewed the impending decimation of his aircrews with marked gloom. To his credit, when it was apparent at the end of D-Day that there had been only light opposition, he was the first to congratulate Eisenhower.
Pathfinder techniques had been learned since Sicily, and one other lesson which had been fully absorbed since then was the need for a simple flight plan. For both sides of the beach-head the planes were routed to fly in straight lines along well marked routes using ships as markers where possible. The chances of error were cut down as far as they could be, even though it was known that all aircrew had had to chop and change during the work-up period, doing routine transport flying as well as training for the airborne assault, and this had left some of them less than perfect in the special skills of flying parachutists.
At 2130 hours on the evening of 5 June the US pathfinders took off from near Grantham and flew without interference to their drop and landing zones west of Utah Beach. All dropped on time and all dropped off their planned drop zones by about a mile. One drop zone, the one intended for the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Division, was defended and the pathfinders set up their beacons under fire. An hour later 822 C-47s carrying 13,000 men flew over the west coast of the peninsula, heading east for the drop zones. As they crossed the coast the alerted anti-aircraft gunners opened fire and the tight formations broke up. Pilots began to weave about, which was strictly forbidden, and in many aircraft the heavily laden men who were standing up ready to jump, were flung about and thrown off their feet. Navigators, struggling to identify their drop zone, were confused by the changes of direction, and had to guess where they were. The green jump lights came on anyhow, and some aircraft were actually in cloud when the parachutists were dropped.
The 101st Division landed in an area about 25 by 15 miles, the 82nd in rather less. There were men all over the Cherbourg Peninsula, a few even landing at Cherbourg itself – 29 miles from the drop zone. About 1,500 men were casualties of one kind or another on landing, and little groups of American parachutists began fighting isolated battles all over the area as the Germans started to round them up. But the very fact that the drop was so scattered helped to confuse the defence, and as always in these circumstances, grossly exaggerated stories began to fly around the German Command structure. The two divisions were not able to seal off the beach as cleanly as they would have liked, nor could they clear the exits fully, but the confusion that they caused stopped all coherent German movement and allowed the landings to take place on Utah Beach without too much opposition. Contact was quickly made with the airborne divisions and armoured vehicles were pushed ahead to stave off the determined German counter-attacks which lasted throughout 6 June. By the 8th the beach-head was secure, and Cherbourg was captured at the end of the month. The air assault succeeded in all its essential features, even though the execution was scrappy. The plan had been simple enough, for which the lessons learned in Sicily could be thanked, and the use of the two divisions in mass close together in the same geographical area was entirely right and sensible, the more so since the 82nd had not really had long in which to work up for the operation. The difficulties had arisen from the poor delivery and indifferent navigation by the aircrews and they once more underlined the terrible dangers of launching a night air assault without highly trained and experienced airmen to fly the troops to the right place at the right time.
On the east flank the 6th Airborne Division landed at almost the same time as the Americans and quickly gained a firm grip on its objectives, though here too the night had its dramas. Each drop zone was to have two separate pathfinder sticks dropped onto it, but in each case only one actually arrived. One dropped on the wrong drop zone and its beacon brought in 14 aircraft of the wrong stream before the mistake was realized, otherwise all the parachutists arrived reasonably accurately. The difficulty was that an error of as little as 400 or 500 yards in the high corn crops and thick hedgerows meant that men could become hopelessly lost for an hour or more. Many did not find their way to their rendezvous until dawn, and at daylight came the expected German counter-attacks. The 3rd Parachute Brigade suffered more than the 5th Brigade from the problem of collecting the troops partly because their pathfinders arrived late and had not set up their beacons when the main lift flew in. Luckily the navigators were skilled and dropped on their own calculations.
The two bridges over the Orne and the canal were successfully taken by six gliders, three to each, which flew in from a release point over the sea and by remarkably skilled piloting were landed within yards of their bridges. The navigation of these gliders was masterly, and the first one to reach the canal bridge actually crashed through the German perimeter wire around the weapon pits. The bridges were taken within minutes. One glider was somehow directed to a bridge over the Dives, nearly 5 miles away, and it made an accurate landing alongside an undefended bridge which was promptly secured and held.
The other surprise attack was the Merville Battery which had been most carefully and comprehensively rehearsed by the 9th Parachute Battalion and all four companies were involved in the attack together with a glider-borne engineer party. The plan was complicated and relied for its success on several different groups being in the right place at the right time, and on the help of a preliminary bombing of the battery to daze the defenders and shake their morale. Despite the meticulous planning and rehearsal misfortune dogged the entire enterprise, which is something not unusual in airborne operations. The bombing was inaccurate and only succeeded in scattering the reconnaissance party of the 9th Parachute Battalion and damaging the village of Merville; the battalion drop was dreadfully scattered; light flak caused some of the pilots to jink at the last minute and their men were thrown off balance; the sticks straggled out as best they could and the battalion was spread over 50 square miles of country instead of 2. However, the CO collected about 25 per cent of his men and less than a quarter of the special equipment and assaulted the battery. By a combination of luck and sheer nerve they drove out the 130 defenders and put the guns out of action just before the landing craft approached the beach.
The remaining two battalions of the 3rd Brigade were dropped further east from the Merville Battery with the task of destroying the River Dives’ bridges and crossings. The drop was scattered, but both battalions found their bridges and then went into the strongest defensive positions they could make to await the inevitable German counter-attacks. In the 5th Brigade area around the Orne bridges the battalions closed up and took position to hold the bridges intact against increasing German assaults until the Commando Brigade arrived on foot in the early afternoon, having marched from the beach. Further out from the bridges the battalions were in houses in the villages and their 6-pounder guns held off tanks and self-propelled guns which had come up from south of Caen. Luckily General Gale had flown in the anti-tank guns in gliders, despite the dangers from the ‘Rommel-spargel’, and these saved the day by keeping the German armour at a distance. By early evening the second glider lift came in and in it were the huge Hamilcars carrying 17-pounder anti-tank guns and a few Tetrarch light tanks. The eastern flank was then secure, and the bridges were held. Although the battalions were not all in the best possible positions they were able to survive the hard fighting that lay ahead for the next few days. There had been some discrepancies in the operation, but by and large it was a remarkably successful airborne assault by any standards and undoubtedly the finest example of an airborne operation that had been undertaken thus far in the war. The RAF in particular, could take pride in the way that they had delivered the force with commendable accuracy to different drop zones and landing zones, using aircraft of different performances and speeds, and against different intensities of flak and ground opposition.
The planning staffs could take comfort too from the successes of the Normandy assaults. They were proved to have been right to have used the divisions on the flanks and not in front as they had first thought. They were proved right too in keeping to a simple and direct plan, although in the 6th Airborne area it was complicated in its detailed execution. They were also proved right in keeping to a simple flight plan and in using pathfinders. All told, the differences between the Sicily operation and the D-Day landings were enormous in the way in which they were carried out and it was apparent that the Allies had forged and almost perfected a most formidable weapon.
The opportunities to use such a weapon were not going to be very frequent in the following months since the one thing that the airborne army demanded was time to prepare and launch anything over a very small force. In the race across France the airborne units were briefed and prepared for one operation after another, but in every case the speed of the ground troops overtook the planners before the aircraft could get away from the airfields. The 6th Airborne remained in action until the end of August fighting as an infantry division and advancing as far as the Seine. In that advance more than 1,000 prisoners were taken, for the loss in the division of 4,305 all ranks killed, wounded and missing. Much the same happened on the west flank where the US divisions remained in the line for three weeks after the bridgehead was established and took part in the capture of Cherbourg and the consolidation of the Allied right wing. Then they too were withdrawn back to England to prepare for the next round.
When the 1st Airborne left Italy in the autumn of 1943 it left behind one brigade, the 2nd Parachute Brigade who quickly became the 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade and operated as a normal line formation in the fighting northwards through Italy. At one time they even had a spell in front of Cassino, but at no time did they parachute or have an opportunity to use their specialized techniques of airborne warfare. The US Army also had some airborne units in Italy and they too were fighting as normal infantry. As the Allied advance swept across northern France, a diversionary invasion was planned for southern France with the intention of drawing off the German effort still further and offering another advance route up the Rhône valley towards the German frontier. The plan called for an assault landing from the sea supported by an airborne landing whose task was to hold off the known large German reserves so that the beach landings could go ahead without interruption. For this an airborne task force was required and during June 1944 all the available airborne troops in Italy were withdrawn and formed into the 1st Airborne Task Force under the command of Major-General Robert T. Frederick, US Army.
There were five US parachute battalions from the 550th and 551st Regiments, one US glider regiment and the 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade with three battalions, the 4th, 5th and 6th and in support the 64th Light Battery and 300th Air-Landing Anti-Tank Battery. The plan called for the task force to seize the area between La Motte and Le Muy, about 10 miles inland from the beach-head, and hold it until relieved. The drop zones were known to be rough, but not defended. However, it was expected that the force would be heavily attacked within a few hours of landing.
The air plan allotted aircraft of the 51st US Troop Carrier Wing to the operation, with 125 aircraft carrying parachutists and 61 towing the Hadrians and Horsas of the anti-tank artillery. The mounting base was on airfields around Rome and D-Day was to be 15 August. By 0330 hours on that day the pathfinders had been dropped on the exact drop zones and the main force came in just over an hour later. Unfortunately a thick morning mist obscured the ground and many troops were dropped wide as the pathfinder beacons were not accurate enough at that stage to do more than guide a plane to where it could see the drop zone, and with the mist the navigators were guessing. Some men landed up to 20 miles away, but 73 of the 125 C-47s dropped right onto the drop zone and the task force rallied to find that it was at half strength. Luckily there was very little enemy interference or opposition and the expected attacks did not materialize; the gliders landed without trouble at 0930 hours and by 1015 all the objectives were secure. The gliders had a longer flight than planned since the mist which confused the parachute aircraft did the same for them, and the glider stream was held over Corsica where it had to circle for an hour. The C-47s towing the Horsas ran out of fuel and had to take their gliders back to Rome for more. At the airfield this was totally unexpected and it took some time for the aircraft and gliders to be lined up and sorted out for another take-off. In the end the Horsas arrived in the afternoon, and it was fortunate that their absence was not critical. The only place where there was any sharp fighting at all was at the holiday resort of St Tropez where some men of the 509th had been wrongly dropped. They stormed the beach defences from the rear and were engaged in some heavy action, after which they took the town and waited for the seaborne landing to come into the harbour and relieve them.
Apart from a few minor local actions against a rapidly retreating enemy there were virtually no other operations in southern France and the task force was soon broken up and its units sent to other formations. The divisions in northern France called it the ‘Champagne Campaign’.
The 2nd Independent Brigade was withdrawn back to Rome and waited for the Germans to pull out of Greece. They waited until October and at mid-day on the 12th a company group of the 4th Battalion jumped onto Megara airfield to seize it for air-landings. By mistake the company was dropped in a 35mph wind and had 50 per cent casualties on landing. Men were hurt by hitting the ground at high speed, and, due to injuries, could not collapse their parachutes. They were then dragged across the airfield and into rough ground, walls and other obstacles where they were further injured. The remainder of the brigade came by sea or were air-landed. Thereafter they were embroiled in purely ground fighting.
By the middle of September 1944 the Allied armies were all more or less at, or near to, the German frontier. In the south General Hodge’s First US Army was actually at the Siegfried Line, in the centre General Patton’s Third US Army was already starting to cross the Mosel and in the extreme north General Dempsey’s Second British Army was already at the Meuse-Escaut Canal and reaching into northern Belgium. The rush across France had been enormously tiring and expensive in men and machinery, but it now looked as if one more effort would push the crumbling Germany Army right back into Germany and then to all intents and purposes the war would be over. All it wanted was that last determined push, the Germans were demoralized, or so it was thought, and they were definitely short of supplies and ammunition of all kinds. On the Eastern Front the Russians were steadily pressing in towards the German frontier, and the time seemed right for a spectacular leap forward to catch the enemy off balance. Given time he would collect himself and regroup his forces, and it seemed highly likely that he could gain that time by holding the succession of rivers in front of the Second Army.
Stretching across the British Front were four major water barriers in the next 60 miles. Just beyond Eindhoven, in Holland, was the Wilhelmina Canal. Beyond that, at Grave, was the Maas. A few miles further on at Nijmegen was the Waal and finally at Arnhem the Rhine flowed, having diverted just before Arnhem into the Ijssel which ran off to the north. The ground could easily be flooded so as to stop almost all movement, and then the whole area could be held with comparatively light forces while the remainder were held well back to counter any breakthroughs. For the Allies a purely ground attack would have been doubly difficult as they were now nearly 400 miles from their supply ports and another was urgently needed. Antwerp had been captured, but could not be used until the river approaches to it had been cleared, and the Germans held the north bank of the Scheldt thereby stopping all shipping. A strong drive to ‘bounce’ the river lines across the front would also cut off Antwerp and allow the approaches to be cleared. So it would fulfil two purposes, and it appeared to be an ideal task for a large airborne operation.
On 2 August 1944 the Allied airborne divisions had been formed into one airborne army under the command of Lieutenant-General Lewis H. Brereton, who had started his airborne career under the famous Billy Mitchell in 1918. Brereton had been the Commanding General of the US Ninth Air Force, and since he was an air force general it was decided that the control of ground operations should be the concern of corps commanders, so two corps were formed. The army consisted of the following forces:
1. US XVIII Airborne Corps, commanded by Major-General Ridgway, newly promoted from command of the 82nd Airborne Division. XVIII Corps had three divisions, the 82nd, 101st and 17th, plus some independent support units, particularly engineers, and the promise of the 13th Airborne Division when it came to Europe.
2. British I Airborne Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General F.A.M. Browning, who was also Brereton’s deputy. Under his command were the 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions, the 1st Special Air Service Brigade and the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade.
3. British 52nd (Lowland) Division as the air-landing formation for the army.
4. US IX Troop Carrier Command.
5. 38th and 46th Groups RAF, when needed for operational tasks. Otherwise these two groups were employed on other duties, particularly sorties in support of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and underground actions in Europe.
In the event the 52nd (Lowland) Division was never used for air-landing, nor was it used in the other role for which it had trained extremely hard, namely mountain warfare. After standing by for several months it was put ashore at Walcheren Island in an amphibious landing, and far from fighting on mountains or from aircraft, the ground it actually fought over was below sea level! But this was not known at the time, and the fact that a whole division was allotted to air-landing seemed an indication of a determination to make the airborne method work.
The only criticism of the airborne army came from Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory; again he was against the IX Troop Carrier Command being a permanent part of the First Airborne Army because, he maintained, if the troop-carriers were to carry out their functions correctly they should be under the command of the one air force headquarters. But Eisenhower would not alter the arrangements. He was adamant that the aircraft had to be under the one overall airborne commander, and he pointed out that both Sicily and Normandy had shown how necessary this was. The troop-carriers therefore remained under Brereton, which was entirely right and sensible. Under his enlightened and vigorous leadership the army soon became an efficient and effective force, although there was never complete harmony between Brereton and Browning over how it should be used. However, the differences were quickly sunk when the planning started for the biggest airborne operation of the war.
This was to be Market Garden, the operation in which the airborne forces were to seize the bridges in front of the Second Army and allow it to push right through to the Zuider Zee to cut off all the German forces in western Holland, outflank the Siegfried Line from the north, and sweep round to the right and down into the Ruhr and the middle of Germany in one huge movement which would bring the war to a close in 1944. It was a vast plan in the best tradition of General Montgomery, who devised it, and based on the experiences of the advances across France during the summer there seemed no reason why it should not work exactly as described. Many German units were undoubtedly demoralized and tired, nearly all were under-strength and under-equipped; and fuel was short for all vehicles and aircraft.
In the Allied forces it was the complete opposite: morale was high, equipment was plentiful, one is tempted to say almost lavish, units (with few exceptions) were well up to strength and there was a feeling that nothing could stop the Allied war machine. Berlin was nearly in their grasp, all that was needed was a final all-out push and the war with Germany would be over. There was a good deal of substance in that assessment, for at the end of August the Germans had just one division in the whole of southern Holland and virtually no reserves. Their army had just suffered a terrible defeat and had been chased right across France, losing men and equipment all the way. For a space of two or three weeks they were exhausted and shattered, and there is no doubt that one good drive would have cut right through into Germany. But men recover quickly, and by early September the position in Holland was rapidly being put right. Units were being pulled together, reserves were being brought up, order was emerging from chaos, defensive positions were being dug and a general grip and control were established. The opportunity to take Holland was passing quickly.
All was not quite as rosy as it was painted on the Allied side. Although the ground forces had been phenomenally successful and had astonished themselves by their summer advances, by late August they were much restricted in what they could do to launch another offensive. All supplies had to come the 400 miles from Cherbourg and until a nearer port could be opened up there was little hope of a rapid build-up for the Montgomery plan. Time ticked away while the convoys of lorries shuttled to and fro along the overloaded roads of France and Belgium, and in Holland the Germans rapidly recovered their composure.
The ground forces were led by XXX British Corps under Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, and their part of the operation was code-named ‘Garden’. This was the force which was to push through at all costs to the Zuidee Zee. The airborne force was a mixed corps made up of the 82nd and 101st US Divisions and the 1st British Division under the command of Browning, a fact that did not please the Americans since they had provided the largest proportion of the troops and were also providing the aircraft. The airborne plan, the ‘Market’ part of the operation was in general terms as follows:
1. The 101st US Division was to seize the bridges over the obstacles between Eindhoven and Grave. These were the nearest watercourses to XXX Corps’ front.
2. The 82nd US Division was to drop in the area around Grave, capture the crossings at Nijmegen and Grave and, in addition, hold the only piece of high ground in the area at Groesbeek. The Airborne Corps Headquarters would land with the 82nd Division and establish itself somewhere in the Nijmegen area.
3. The 1st British Airborne Division, with the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade Group under its command, was to capture the bridges at Arnhem and establish a bridgehead around them so that XXX Corps could continue their advance to the north.
4. The 878th US Aviation Engineer Battalion and 2nd Air-Landing Light Anti-Aircraft Battery, Royal Artillery, were to be flown in by glider as the situation permitted, with the task of preparing and defending airstrips on the north side of Arnhem.
5. The 52nd (Lowland) Division would be flown in onto the prepared strips in Dakotas to reinforce the bridgehead and provide a firm base for the launching of the drive to the Zuidee Zee and into Germany.
Both US airborne divisions were to be withdrawn as soon as the ground forces caught up with them, but the 1st Airborne Division might have to fight on in the ground role. Despite the resources of IX Troop Carrier Command, the whole corps could not be flown in as one lift, and it would be necessary to spread the drops and glider landings over four days, with due allowance for resupply at the same time.
The misfortune about the plan was that it was delayed. The necessary backing for it came too slowly thereby giving the Germans time to regroup in Holland. During the second week of September Colonel-General Student’s First Parachute Army was pieced together and moved into the ground just ahead of XXX Corps, blocking the way to the Rhine. The II SS Panzer Corps, with two low-strength divisions, the 9th and 10th, was refitting in Arnhem and to the north of the town. Although Obergruppenfuhrer Dietrich’s Corps had very few operational tanks or self-propelled guns, they had enough to represent a serious menace to a lightly-equipped airborne division. Day by day the picture changed, and it changed for the worse from the Allied viewpoint. They, however, were almost entirely unaware of this shift in the German strength and to some extent were guilty of seeing only what it suited them to see. This was understandable in view of the experiences of the past months, but as always, it is a dangerous habit to under-rate one’s opponents and certainly so far as the Airborne Corps was concerned, this was exactly what was done.
When General Browning gave his orders to his divisional commanders on Sunday 10 September, there were just seven days until the first troops were to drop along the ‘airborne carpet’ as he termed the assault. It was a desperately short space of time but there had been 17 previous operations since D-Day which had been planned and then cancelled just before they were launched, so there was a good deal of experience and ability in rapid preparation throughout the entire First Airborne Army. Unfortunately there was also a dangerous tendency not to take any operational order too seriously, ‘wolf’ had been cried too often and now nobody believed it could ever actually happen. The 17 cancelled parachute assaults were a fertile breeding ground for cynicism and the wags were already calling the 1st Airborne the ‘1st Stillborn Division’. More unfortunately still, there were some fatal flaws in the main plan.
The flaws are worth examining because they led to the failure to hold the Arnhem bridges. The first flaw, and the one which had most influence on the subsequent battle, was the choice of the drop and landing zones. These were well outside the town to the north and west and were roughly 8 miles from the main objective, the road bridge leading back to XXX Corps. The reasons for this choice have been debated endlessly since 1944, and the responsibility for confirming it has been tossed from one side to the other. Everyone now argues with the benefit of hindsight and a full knowledge of the battle, but it is clear that at the time there was some muddled reasoning. The RAF were convinced that there was more flak in the area than there actually was, furthermore they were convinced that there were batteries around the bridges. This information came from aircraft who reported being fired upon from near the bridges, yet it was never substantiated by any aerial photos. However it was enough to ensure that the RAF opposed any idea of landing on or near the objectives, or of flying near the military aerodrome to the north of Arnhem, for this too was thought to be well defended with guns. In fact the ground on the southern bank of the road bridge was perfectly good for glider landings and it is inexplicable that there was no attempt to repeat the coup de main landings that had been so spectacularly successful at the Orne bridges; a company could have been put down in five or six gliders and then the bridge would have been secure. Boldness is the great ingredient of airborne assaults, but in many puzzling ways the Arnhem operation seems to lack the essential spark that was so vividly present on D-Day.
The other flaw was the task given to the 82nd Airborne. The division was given a 10 mile sector in which were two large bridges, over the Maas and the Waal, at least two other smaller bridges and the Groesbeek Heights. The Heights, actually a series of low wooded hills, dominated the area south of Nijmegen in daylight and their eastern side ran along the frontier with Germany. Behind the frontier was the Reichswald Forest where it was known that some German units were resting, hence the Groesbeek Heights could expect to be a battleground soon after the drop went in. It was a tremendous task for the 82nd and when General Jim Gavin assembled his staff and told them to start planning his Chief of Staff, Colonel Wienecke, simply shook his head and said ‘We’ll need two divisions to do all that’. Gavin had learned some hard lessons in Sicily and Normandy and this time he was determined not to have his men scattered for miles over the countryside, so one aspect of his plan was to ensure that he put everyone down right on top of their objectives and his priorities for those objectives were the Groesbeek Heights, the Grave Bridge, the Maas-Waal canal bridges, and lastly the bridge in Nijmegen. Browning agreed the order and insisted on the Groesbeek being secure, for if the Germans took it they could control the entire road stretch below Nijmegen. He also agreed to the idea of leaving the huge Nijmegen Bridge to the last, since without the other bridges Nijmegen was useless anyway. Gavin planned to put two regiments, the 505th and 508th onto Groesbeek and the 504th just by Grave, where they could rush the bridges over the Maas and the Canal. Instead of a glider coup de main he aimed to drop one company of the 504th near the Maas Bridge to be sure of getting that immediately. Once again there were no direct assaults on the bridges, despite the lessons of D-Day, though as the 82nd had never used gliders in this way in Europe they could be forgiven for not trying it now. However, with so many objectives to take it might have been reasonable to try and put more company parachute attacks onto specific bridges, but Gavin was obviously wary of his aircrew’s ability to make pinpoint drops, as well he might have been with his experience. It meant that the Nijmegen Bridge was not even approached until the others were taken, and this could give the Germans more than enough time to blow it.
The 101st were little better off then the 82nd. General Maxwell Taylor would only have his infantry with him on the first day’s drop; his artillery and support troops were to fly in the second lift the next day. His divisions had to cover 15 miles of the corridor and take two main canal bridges and nine minor ones with three regiments. Like Gavin he had been dropped wide once too often and he aimed for only two main dropping areas; one to the north was for the 501st on their own and they would take the northern bridges around the village of Veghel. The other two regiments, the 502nd and 506th, together with the headquarters were to drop close together in the middle of the divisional area and take the bridges south of Veghel right down to, and including, the town of Eindhoven. It was an extremely difficult task, the more so since the regiments would be without any real anti-tank defence and the 506th had an approach march to Eindhoven of at least 4 miles. A few German armoured vehicles in the right places would play havoc with the timetable, but Taylor was quietly optimistic, and unlike Gavin he only expected to have to take the bridges. There was no German frontier to look after, and no Groesbeek Heights to defend.
The 1st Airborne Division was to ‘capture the Arnhem bridges, with sufficient bridgeheads to pass the Second Army through’. A somewhat broad task, but the term ‘bridges’ meant first and foremost the main road bridge over the Rhine in the middle of the town. Secondly it meant a pontoon bridge which had been built by German engineers just over half a mile to the west, and it also meant the railway bridge to the west of that. It could be roughly interpreted as meaning that the entire town was to be captured, as well as a lodgement on the south bank of the river beyond each bridge. It was to be an action in which the major part of the fighting would be in a built-up area, street fighting in fact, a type of warfare which mops up men like a sponge mops up water. It is also a type of fighting in which there is less need for heavy weapons and vehicles than in the open country, and this was known in the British Army at that time, for there had been enough street fighting in the advances through France and Italy. It was therefore vital that the 1st Airborne landed as many men as possible right at the beginning of the operation. Unfortunately the air plan was restrictive and in the event not enough troops were landed on the first day.
The difficulties with the air plan became apparent the morning after Browning gave his orders. The staff of IX Troop Carrier Command were up all night assessing the requirements for the three divisions and it became clear that the available aircraft could only carry about half of the force in the first lift. Worse than that, the majority of the gliders would have to wait until the next day since there would not be enough daylight to fly two lifts on the first day. The decision to drop in daylight had been taken early on in the planning by Brereton, and it was now too late to change. The actual air lift worked out fairly evenly for all three formations in the end. The 101st were given 494 C-47s, the 82nd were given 530 and the 1st Airborne together with the Corps Headquarters had 519. The US divisions had C-47s entirely, all from the troop carrier command, but the 1st Airborne was given a mixture, in much the same way as the 6th Airborne had been for Normandy. There were 149 American C-47s and another 130 from the RAF and these were all that were to drop parachutists, so the division was well behind the other two in the number of parachutists who would be carried on the first day. In addition to the C-47s there were 240 RAF bombers all of which would tow a glider each, but they could drop parachutists if need be, though the numbers they could lift usually ruled this out as being uneconomical. So the divisional staff found that they could lift far more in the gliders than in the C-47s, and the unwritten rule that only C-47s dropped parachutists went unchallenged. A very pedestrian decision was then taken to fly in one parachute brigade and one air-landing brigade on the first day, together with divisional headquarters and a substantial number of jeeps, trailers and equipment, so that the 1st Airborne was going to be light in men for the first 24 hours of the battle, whereas the American divisions were putting down three brigades each in the first lift and waiting for their support equipment until next day. They were proved to be right and the British were horribly wrong.
The 1st Airborne’s air plan relied on three consecutive lifts to build up the divisional strength, they were to be as follows:
Sunday 17 September: the 1st Parachute Brigade and 1st Air-landing Brigade were to drop and land on a combined drop zone and landing zone nearly 7 miles to the west of the centre of Arnhem. The Air-Landing brigade was to hold the landing area and secure those landing zones needed for the drops the next day. All of these were in roughly the same area, to the west of the town, though they were a mile or more away. After that, it moved into the town to reinforce the troops on the bridges. The 1st Parachute Brigade was to move directly to the road bridge and seize it as soon as possible; then the brigade was to set up a defensive position around the bridges and to the east of the town. In view of the distance of the objective from the drop zone the brigade was given the divisional reconnaissance squadron, who were carried in armed jeeps, to make a dash for the bridge as soon as their gliders landed. They had over 7 miles to go, the first half of it through woodland and the latter part through a straggling built-up area of suburban housing, which thickened up as the town proper was reached and became confined streets with solid buildings on either side. It was all clearly visible on the aerial photographs.
Monday 18 September: the 4th Parachute Brigade were to drop onto another drop zone, a mile further from the town than that of the 1st Brigade. The remainder of the equipment of the 1st Air-Landing Brigade would be landed on another landing zone and finally there would be a resupply drop of containers onto yet another drop zone, all of them some distance from the original one. The 4th Brigade was to move on foot and occupy the high ground to the north of Arnhem.
Tuesday 19 September: the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade Group was on call to drop onto a small drop zone to the south of the road bridge from where it could be of help if there was any fighting around the bridge. If not, it was to cross the river and link up with the 4th Brigade to the north of the town. At the same time there would be another resupply drop in the western area.
Not all of this plan was bad, and in view of the expected anti-aircraft defence around Arnhem it was wise from the point of view of the air planners to take the fewest possible risks, since they had to come back to the same places again and again on successive days. Yet someone might have reasoned that if the dangers from anti-aircraft guns were so great, then there must be men on the ground who were firing them and these same men might play a part in the ground fighting too; but there was great confidence and after all, the other divisions were taking equally great risks, particularly ‘Jumping Jim’ Gavin and the 82nd who were proposing to fight their way into Nijmegen after giving it plenty of advance warning, and after having fought one or two other battles beforehand. So the 1st Airborne was no worse off than any other part of the corps. But in one particular it was, and this was the fatal failure to put enough men on the ground in the first lift. The other two divisions were putting their infantry in straight away and relying on fighting men on the ground to take the objectives. The 1st Airborne was only committing one brigade on the first day and not giving it any reinforcement until the end of the second day, over 24 hours later. One thing that had been learned in Italy and in France was that the Germans always reacted fast. They might not have much with which to react, but whenever they were caught off guard they picked themselves up and hit back almost immediately. They had also shown themselves to be masters of improvisation; all this was known from bitter battle experience and to give away 24 hours in which the enemy could react to a brigade-sized assault on a major communication junction was inviting trouble.
The whole operation started at 1330 hours on Sunday 17 September with a massive artillery bombardment in front of XXX Corps and the first ground troops moved forward. At the same moment the first aircraft were on their way to Holland and as the lifts arrived over their drop zones XXX Corps were making excellent progress northwards along the road. The 101st Airborne was dropped more or less accurately and in a short time was moving to its objectives.
The first lift was a massive air effort, with nearly 4,700 aircraft of all types. Preceding the troop carriers were the bombers, 1,400 of them had plastered German anti-aircraft guns and unit positions along the entire Market Garden route. Later in the morning came the troop-carriers, the tugs and the gliders, 2,023 of them in all, filling the sky in huge formations, and protecting the whole enormous armada were 1,500 fighters and fighter-bombers. It seemed to take hours for the planes to pass over any one point on the ground, and the troops of XXX Corps looked up in amazement. So too did the Germans, and not least Colonel-General Student who had his headquarters between Eindhoven and Nijmegen and so had a ring-side seat for all the air activity. The sight of the endless stream of troop-carriers affected him deeply and in his memoirs he quotes himself as turning to his chief of staff and saying ‘Oh, if ever I’d had such means at my disposal. Just once to have as many planes at this!’ To which his implacable staff officer replied, ‘General, we’ve got to do something!’ And they set about planning their counter-attack. Student was astute enough to realize that such a huge force could only be attacking the bridges, but significantly, he never thought they would go as far as Arnhem.
The whole battle of Arnhem has been described too often for it to need detailed repetition here and this account will confine itself to the purely airborne aspects of what was predominantly a ground battle, as indeed is every airborne action once it has been delivered. Arnhem was unusual in that the air plan dominated the ground plan to a greater extent than normal, and in that lies its interest. The nearest division to XXX Corps, the 101st, dropped accurately and in a short time was moving on to its objectives. The 506th Regiment found that the bridge at Zon had been blown but it crossed the canal and pressed on to Eindhoven where it met with the advancing Guards Armoured Division on the morning of the 18th, the 502nd seized the second canal bridge at St Oedenrode within hours of landing and the Guards crossed that too on the 18th. At Veghel the 501st had held on to the canal and river bridges against weak German counter-attacks and early in the morning of the 19th the Guards passed through there, moving quite fast, but not up to schedule. The 101st now became a flank guard for XXX Corps and took little part in the remainder of the battle.
The Guards were now approaching the 82nd divisional area. The 504th had seized the Grave and Maas-Waal bridges, though there was still a fight for one of the latter. The 505th took the Groesbeek Heights and held off German attacks, which started by evening and were supported by tanks. The 508th marched to Nijmegen, but were bogged down in street fighting before they could get to the bridge. XXX Corps arrived that night and the next day in one of the momentous and daring exploits of the war, one which ranks with any other for sheer bravery and determination. The 3/504 under the inspired leadership of young Major Julian Cook, made a daylight, opposed, river crossing in canvas assault boats and took the bridge. The way to Arnhem now lay clear ahead, but the Germans had had time to prepare, and the defences to the north of Nijmegen were thickening hourly. The operation was already behind schedule and now it began to go badly wrong.
At Arnhem the 1st Airborne Division had been dropped accurately onto their drop zones and the three battalions had moved off exactly according to the divisional plan. The 1st went north to hold the high ground, the 2nd and 3rd went for the road bridge in the middle of the town with the 3rd going direct and the 2nd veering slightly to follow the river. Only the 2nd reached the bridge, under Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost, and they were immediately confined to the houses on the north side of it. The 3rd Battalion was stopped by the 9th Panzer Division and, bogged down in the town, was soon forced to pull back. Armoured troops now closed in on Frost’s force and tried to cross the bridge from the south bank. They were stopped.
The scene was then set for the remainder of the battle. At the bridge Frost and his force were isolated but were blocking the road; to the west the remainder of the brigade was turned back every time they probed forward and slowly the rest of the division were forced into a defensive pocket to the west of the suburb of Oosterbeek, separated from the bridges and the planned drop zones. Radio communication within the division failed almost completely. Nobody, whether in or out of Arnhem, knew exactly what was going on, units were out of touch with each other and with their own brigade, and General Urquhart was himself trapped in a house for 48 hours while going forward to make contact with his forward units. In these conditions commanders returned to the World War 1 systems of runners, and few of these got through. A very realistic replica of the fog of war fell on Arnhem and all the time Frost and his men held on against steadily mounting armoured attacks. This was when the rigid inflexibility of the air plan began to affect the outcome. Browning was near to Nijmegen, and unaware of the true position in Arnhem. There was no effective reserve except the Polish Brigade and the succeeding lifts were mounted from airfields scattered all over southern England. What Browning needed more than anything else was up-to-date information, yet there was no apparent way to get it. Also needed at that moment were sorties by reconnaissance fighters, or light aircraft, or any aircraft that could fly over the battle area and see what was happening. Better still if the aircraft could drop a couple of wireless sets and operators, then another link could have been opened. Nothing like this was done, and the Germans soon brought up enough light flak to discourage later attempts had they been tried. The aircraft only seem to have been used for the purposes of flying men to the area and providing some fighter support during the flight. There was no question of an airborne command post as was done at Corregidor with such spectacular success; the whole operation had a set-piece air of finality about it, and nowhere was this better exemplified than in the way that the resupply aircraft continued to drop containers on to drop zones that had been held by the Germans for days.
On Friday 21st, Frost was finally overrun at the bridge. His small force of highly trained and splendidly determined men had fought for three and a half days, having come prepared for a 48-hour battle. Within the narrow perimeter of the northern end of the bridge they had carried out the main task allotted to the entire division, and now they were reduced to an exhausted and bloodstained remnant, out of food, water, ammunition and medical aids. The German self-propelled guns and tanks from the 9th and 10th Panzer Divisions finally overcame them by systematically shelling every house to ruin before the infantry moved in. About half the force were killed or wounded, Frost among them, and the other half were captured when they tried to make a fighting withdrawal; the very few who escaped were sheltered by the Dutch resistance and helped across the river during the next few days.
The turning point in the Arnhem battle was probably Tuesday 19 September, when fog blanketed the English airfields where the Polish Brigade was waiting to enplane for Arnhem and caused a postponement for 24 hours. However on that day a Polish glider-borne anti-tank contingent landed west of Arnhem, onto a defended landing zone, and had no option but to join the divisional perimeter at Oosterbeek. The worst setback of that day was a resupply drop by 163 aircraft of the 38th and 46th Groups who flew with incredible bravery through heavy and accurate flak to drop 390 tons of badly needed ammunition and supplies onto a drop zone which was firmly held by the Germans, because the radio messages had failed to get through giving the position of the new drop zone.
The Polish Brigade, the only reserve force for the 1st Airborne, had to wait for three agonizing days before they took off, and then it was in heavy cloud and rain. About half were turned back, but the other half dropped south of the river, in a hail of fire, and were unable to make any impression on the battle since there was no way for them to cross. By the 24th the position was impossible; XXX Corps had barely reached the Poles’ perimeter and the decision was taken to pull out the survivors of the 1st Airborne, if it could be done. The evacuation started the next night by which time some assault boats had been brought up and the last organized party crossed under sporadic fire just after dawn on the 26th. The front stabilized north of Nijmegen and there was no advance into Germany for another four months.
The losses had been enormous. The 1st Airborne was almost completely destroyed, and lost 7,578 out of a total strength of 10,005. The 82nd Airborne lost 1,432 and the 101st 2,118. During the entire operation, including losses from ground troops and aircrew, the number killed, wounded and missing was 13,974 while the Germans probably lost much the same number. It was, as Browning had presciently remarked to Montgomery on 10 September, ‘A bridge too far’. It need not have been a bridge too far; the plan almost worked, and it could have been successful but for some unexpected and still largely unexplained failings. The plan was bold, and it was a time when boldness could still pay, though only if everything went right, for the German strength was rapidly growing. The weather played a significant part in delaying aircraft and obscuring the ground from those that did fly. The intelligence should have been better, and there is some evidence to show that there was such optimism that hard facts about German troops in the Arnhem area were disregarded. But the two crippling blows to the entire operation in Arnhem were firstly the failure to land enough troops on the first day, and secondly the inexplicable and totally frustrating loss of all radio communication. Without communications the British side of the battle was even slower than Blenheim or Waterloo and commanders at all levels were helpless. But despite the losses and the failures, it was the biggest air operation the Allies had mounted and it had worked. It proved that the airborne theory of warfare was effective and that big airborne operations were actually worth the enormous effort involved in mounting them. Arnhem was the apogee of the Allied airborne operations of the war; it was the biggest, the one which lasted the longest, and the one which got the most publicity – both then and now. It deserves it.
Early in the morning of 6 December 1944 the Germans launched their last full attack on the Western Front; the battle of the Ardennes. Late the following night the last German airborne assault of the war was dropped. When the Ardennes Offensive was being planned Colonel-General Student demanded to have a part in it with his Parachute Army. After some prevarication he was given eight days in which to prepare a one-battalion parachute drop onto a cross-roads 8 miles to the north of Malmedy, where he was to open up a route for the advancing German Army and also to block the road and hold off any attempt by the US Army to reinforce to the south. The cross-roads was on a high marshy heath known as the Hohes Venn and Student found that at best he could not expect to be able to fly more than 1,200 men to the drop zone. There would be no anti-tank weapons beyond the hand-held rocket launchers and Panzerfausts, and no heavier support weapons than could be packed into a container. It was expected that the relieving force would reach them in 25 hours, which gave them a good chance of being able to hold the objective by relying on the element of surprise to still be in their favour. If anything went wrong with the timetable the outlook was not good for the parachutists, since they would not able to hold off a properly co-ordinated attack using infantry and armoured vehicles. However, there was much confidence on the German side that the timetable would not slip, indeed it could not be allowed to slip as it was crucial that the armoured columns reached the crossings of the Meuse before the Allies had sufficient time to react.
Student nominated one of his most experienced parachute commanders to lead the assault, Colonel von der Heydte, who had commanded the 1st Battalion, the 3rd Regiment in Crete, but his men were rather less reliable. Hitler had taken a hand in their recruitment and had ordered the commander of every parachute regiment to send his hundred best men to von der Heydte’s special battalion. The results were predictable and resulted in all the ‘Bad Hats’ and doubtful characters from the Parachute Army arriving at the same time. However, 250 men of von der Heydte’s own regiment volunteered and joined him of their own volition. He did his best to lick the battalion into some sort of shape. The aircraft were 100 Junkers 52s who had last seen action at the battle of Stalingrad. They were old, tired and not too reliable and their pilots were mainly young and inexperienced. The original plan was for a day drop, which at least gave some sort of chance that the aircraft could keep together and arrive at the drop zone at the same time, but von der Heydte was put under the command of General ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, commanding the Sixth Panzer SS Army and Dietrich insisted on a night drop on the first night, at a time when the Americans opposite would be alerted, and when the untrained force stood the least chance of success.
To compound the difficulties, the weather worsened to strong winds and snow flurries. Nevertheless, with as much cheerfulness as they could muster the men went to their aircraft and took off from two airfields, Paderborn and Lippspringe, and flew west with the intention of converging over a large hill just 10 miles from Malmedy. To help the green pilots there was a searchlight route marked in the moonless sky; even so a few managed to get lost, but after crossing the lines the straggling became appalling and planes were weaving and dodging about, being blown by the high winds and wandering off course through bad navigation. Von der Heydte’s pilot was the one who had flown him into Crete, and his plane arrived over the drop zone on time, to find the flare markers exactly in place, having been dropped a few minutes before by a Messerschmitt fighter. About 15 Junkers followed their commander into the drop, though several failed to drop accurately. The drop zone was strewn with parachutists, many of them hurt, and three hours later there were no more than 100 at the rendezvous. By morning about 350 had been mustered, and that was the total. There were no support weapons and no radios, as the signal platoon had all been dropped miles away. There were parachutists all over the American back areas, some as far as 20 miles away, and many were injured by dropping onto rocks and trees. Some were not found for months until the thaw revealed their bodies.
Undeterred, von der Heydte did what he could with his tiny force, but there was no question of holding up reinforcements or blocking the road. He split his men into small parties and laid ambushes or raided small units, but they were all rounded up after a few days and their actual contribution to the German offensive was very small. However, the scattered nature of the drop acted in the German favour in just the same way as the scattered drop in Normandy had done for the Americans, and the whole rear area was thrown into a state of alarm by exaggerated stories of parachutists dropping everywhere. For the second day of the offensive the US headquarters was in some doubt as to whether another airborne invasion had been launched on the same scale as Crete or Holland.
These invasion scares held up the reinforcing units who were made into a mobile reserve to combat the parachutists, but when it was seen that the menace was by no means as bad as expected, the men were released again and the gain to the German formations was only slight. Far more confusion was caused by the 30 or so men of Otto Skorzeny’s Special Force who dressed in American uniforms and rode in jeeps around the US rear areas. Their reputation became so powerful that there was near panic and movement was continually held up by the need for perfectly bona fide troops to identify themselves.
When von der Heydte was captured it was the end of the German parachute operations. What had started with such a magnificent flourish and such overwhelming promise nearly five years before had withered away almost to nothing and in their final scene the last of the Fallschirmjaeger, dirty, tired and cold, were led into captivity with hardly a whimper.
The only other airborne operations during the offensive were some particularly gallant American resupply drops and glider flights into the perimeter of Bastogne. The drop and landing zones were marked by pathfinders who parachuted in carrying beacons and despite losses from German flak the C-47s and Wacos kept the garrison supplied until the counter-offensive moved down and relieved them.
After the defeat of the Germans in the Ardennes it was necessary to keep the pressure on them to prevent them reorganizing and forming yet another coherent defence. On all fronts the Allied troops pushed steadily forward throughout the winter, and in the north the Reichswald Forest and the land up to the banks of the Rhine were cleared. It was from here that Montgomery proposed to make a bridgehead and sweep into Germany. By March 1945 there were 4,000,000 men in the Allied Expeditionary Force, and five armies, one British and four American, lined up waiting to cross the Rhine. By a brilliant stroke the US First Army took the Remagen bridge, and so gained a bridgehead, but all the others were going to have to fight to cross. The main thrust was to be in the north, with the British Second and US Ninth Armies, using the town of Wesel as the chief objective. The two armies could dispose of a huge force between them; it was no less than six armoured divisions, 17 infantry divisions, one specialized armoured division, equipped with such vehicles as mine-clearers, five independent armoured and one infantry brigade and a commando brigade. Despite this apparently overwhelming might Montgomery considered that he needed to use airborne troops to assist in the crossing.
The responsibility for the airborne plan lay with the First Allied Airborne Army who gave the task to XVIII Airborne Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Matthew Ridgway and consisting of the 6th Airborne and 17th Airborne Divisions. The First Army then set up a most comprehensive and elaborate set of planning teams and staffs. The result was the complete opposite to Market Garden in almost every way. Varsity as the operation was called, was the best planned and best executed airborne operation of the war, and perhaps it is no accident that it was the last. Indeed, it was so well done that there are some who maintain that it was not necessary at all, and that the generals had been frightening themselves with exaggerated ideas of the German opposition to the crossing. But in fact they had not, and the flak barrage alone is sufficient indication of the prepared defences on the far banks, though it was afterwards found that all the German units around Wesel were well below strength and most were only at 30 per cent. The general airborne plan was for the two divisions to be dropped at the same time on the far bank of the Rhine and the task given to the Corps was ‘To disrupt the hostile defence of the Rhine in the Wesel sector by the seizure of key terrain, by airborne attack, in order to deepen rapidly the bridgehead to be seized in an assault crossing of the Rhine by British ground forces, and facilitate the further offensive operations of Second Army’. To achieve this aim the Corps was to seize the high, wooded ground immediately opposite the landing places.
There were various features of the plan that merit a quick survey, if only to show how clearly the lessons of Market Garden had been assimilated. The first and most important one is the time given to planning and the issuing of orders – in all it was about a month and it was remarkably thorough. Next, all the landing and drop zones were to be within range of artillery sited on the west bank to obtain immediate support. Troops were to be dropped or flown on to their objectives, there were to be no long approach marches, nor any fighting through one objective and on to another. It was decided on a daylight drop and the glider troops were to be flown in onto battalion landing zones right alongside their particular target. Parachutists were to be dropped onto bridge drop zones actually on the objective. This would mean that the entire corps was proposing to land on defended landing and drop zones, and in order to give the defenders the least possible time to react both divisions would be dropped simultaneously in one lift, with the least possible time between aircraft. Since the C-47 only carried 20 men this meant that there was going to be a very large number of planes in the air at the same time which it was hoped would swamp the anti-aircraft guns. These guns, and it was known that there were many in the Wesel area, were also to be dealt with by counter-battery fire from the artillery and by continuous and spirited fighter ground-attack sorties right up to the moment when the transports were overhead.
After the landings the fighter support would continue, with forward air controllers on the ground with the airborne units, using aircraft radios to talk to the planes – a common enough practice now, but fairly new then. Resupply would be immediate and on to the same drop zones as the brigades had dropped on to, but careful radio arrangements were made so that any alterations of subsequent resupply drop zones could be passed to the squadrons well before take-off. Finally, and most importantly, the link-up with the ground forces would be on the same day.
The plan actually worked on these lines, and on 24 March 1945 the assault went in. It was a fine spring morning and almost 19,000 men were delivered on to four drop zones and four landing zones within the space of 40 minutes. Over 540 paratrooping C-47s took off, together with 1,050 glider tugs towing 1,350 gliders (300 of them were on double tow). Opposition was strong, the anti-aircraft guns that were undamaged after the preliminary strafing were able to open fire as the transports flew overhead, and all the landing and drop zones were covered by fire from concealed positions. Fifty-three aircraft were shot down and a further 440 badly damaged, but all units reached their objectives, all the communications worked and the losses were far lighter than had been expected. By 1500 hours the ground forces linked up and from then on Varsity ceased to be an airborne operation. The divisions passed under the command of the Second Army and fought on foot for the next few weeks in the rush across Germany.
One useful lesson that came out of Varsity was that a daylight assault against defended landing and drop zones was possible provided that the landings took place in the shortest possible time, and were well supported by fighters. A number of lessons were learned about rallying and organizing troops on the drop zone when under fire, and it was found that the private methods of rallying so beloved of some commanding officers, such as blowing hunting horns or bugles, were quite useless because of the sound of firing and that smoke or flares were far better. It was also found that to try to rally on a prominent landmark such as an isolated wood or hill was inviting trouble as the enemy always knew the range to it and could bring artillery on to it with no loss of time. The losses in glider troops were heavy in some places, and it was concluded that the casualties were far less from parachuting onto defended areas than from landing gliders. The moment a glider landed it became the target for every machine gun that could see it, and many were shot up before anyone could get out. Others were lost in the air as they flew in and several blew up when their petrol loads were hit by tracer bullets. Eight Locust light tanks were landed from Hamilcar gliders, but only two got into action in full working order. One was lost over the channel when its Hamilcar broke up in mid-air due to turbulence in the slipstream, one overturned on landing, one was set on fire and one was knocked out. Four reached the rendezvous, but two went little farther. It was the second time the tanks were actually flown into battle.
When the war with Germany ended the 1st Airborne was reforming in England and was sent to Norway to take control of the country and disarm the German troops there. They returned to England in August and were disbanded on 15 November 1945. The 6th Airborne went to the Middle East and then on to Palestine where they stayed until the withdrawal in 1947. The US kept the 82nd and 101st in Europe for some months, and they played their part in the operations in the closing stages of the war. The 82nd finished up policing Berlin, and gradually all the other divisions were disbanded and absorbed into the 82nd.
Fewer than three weeks after the evacuation from Dunkirk and the collapse of France the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, directed the War Office to investigate the possibility of forming a corps of at least 5,000 parachutists including a proportion of men from all the Dominions and some from France and Norway. He was anxious to take advantage of the summer to train these men so that they would still be available for Home Defence in the event of invasion.
It is usually thought that this historic minute is the basis for the British airborne force that still exists today, but in fact Churchill was 24 hours behind his Director of Military Operations who had opened the Central Landing School at Ringway in Manchester the day before; 21 June 1940. The school was asked to investigate the problems involved in the carriage of troops by glider and also in parachuting both men and equipment. Shortly after this the Air Ministry and War Office agreed to build four prototype gliders and conduct flight trials, after which they would select the most suitable. Parachute training started in July and on 6 August Churchill was told that 500 men were under training, but that there was no suitable aircraft for them to use. It was to become a familiar cry, heard with varying intensity for the next 30 years. In 1940 the school at Ringway had to be content with six Whitley bombers, obsolescent, uncomfortable and slow.
The Air Ministry was not convinced that parachuting was the best way to send troops to battle, and leant strongly towards gliders, though they had some naïve ideas on the piloting of them. In assessing the type of operation that airborne forces were best suited to they decided that the proportion of parachutists to glidermen should be about one to nine, so only one-tenth of the force needed be dropped, the remainder flying in the gliders. Quite what prompted this leaning towards gliders is no longer clear, but there was a definite feeling that unarmed transport aircraft should not drop parachutists, and the numbers of parachutists were therefore related to the armed bombers that could be spared to fly them. It was quickly discovered that bombers were almost useless for parachuting and those that had to be used were heartily disliked by all. The difficulty was that there was no suitable British troop transport and with the aircraft factories working flat out to build fighters and bombers there was no hope of there ever being one. Obsolete bombers were usually good enough for glider towing, though not all were even capable of doing that, and the British airborne forces had to wait until mid-1942 before the first American Douglas C-47 Dakotas arrived with the US Army. The Dakota was ideal, a civilian airliner with plenty of space for 19 or 20 men, a good range, good speed and climb and both rugged and simple to maintain. It was a godsend, but it was also a bone of contention since there were never enough Dakotas to go round and the US formations rightly and properly looked upon them as their own. The major restriction on the size of the British airborne arm throughout World War II was the availability of transport aircraft. This is remained a problem throughout the history of airborne warfare. In 1940 and 1941 it was a constant complaint of the fledgling British airborne units, and it encouraged a steady trickle of querulous minutes from Churchill.
By the end of 1940 the 500 parachutists were still under training and were not expected to be ready until the following spring. No arrangements had been made to train any more parachutists, no role existed for them, no units had been allotted as glider troops, and so far there were no gliders. This was hardly surprising, for the danger of invasion still existed and priority in manpower and material was very much directed towards defending the United Kingdom. There was in fact no real idea as to how these airborne troops would or could be used once they were trained, and this problem was to remain unresolved until late in 1941.
But, while the staffs deliberated, the training went on. The first parachutists were introduced to their new element from a small platform which replaced the rear gun-turret, at the extreme end of the Whitley. Standing on this flimsy piece of plywood, battered by the freezing slip-stream, the unhappy pupil was plucked off backwards when his instructor reached out and pulled his ripcord for him. From this terrifying beginning the class went on to jump through a hole in the floor of the plane, as this was the only practical way to get a man out of the cramped fuselage, because the door was far too small. Landing training used the same forward roll as did the Germans, simply because no-one had time to think of any other method. Luckily the professional physical training instructors quickly devised what has now become the standard parachute landing fall all over the world in which the shock of landing is absorbed over the side and back by rolling sideways and round in a controlled fall. The injury rate went down noticeably.
The selection system was very similar to that used by any other nation, though in the early days of 1940 there was only the German pattern to follow. All men were volunteers and came, not without protests from their commanding officers, from any unit of the army. All were sent to what soon became the Depot of Airborne Forces, Hardwick Hall, near to the Parachute School at Ringway. At Hardwick Hall the volunteers underwent two weeks of intensive, almost harsh, physical training with the simple object of weeding out the weak and poorly-motivated. The failure rate was always quite high at this stage, but the standard was never lowered, despite one or two attempts to do so from various directions.
After Hardwick Hall the next stage was the actual parachute training at Ringway. Ringway was the pre-war aerodrome for Manchester and most of the training took place in converted hangars. Unlike many other countries the British parachutist never packed his own parachute, and so the training course could concentrate on the techniques of jumping, controlling the canopy in the air and the landing. Two weeks was all that was needed for this and it was very nearly as strenuous as the time at Hardwick Hall. One piece of apparatus which often failed otherwise good men was the fan. The fan was a mock jumping tower about 30ft high set up in the hangar against a wall. The pupil climbed up and stood on a tiny platform above the ground, and hooked on a skeleton harness. From the harness ran a wire, up over a pulley and down on to a small drum where it was wound on by the instructor. There were small paddle wheels on the axle of the drum and it was perfectly free to revolve; the only braking effect which slowed the man’s fall was the air resistance on the paddles. At first sight it looked dangerously insufficient, but it was perfectly safe and lowered the heaviest man quite gently. However, the newcomer had no way of telling that and to step off into space was a test of nerve that some found too much for them.
The jumping programme started at the end of the first week with two balloon jumps and was followed in the second week by five aircraft descents, two with a weapon or a leg-bag and at least one by night. After that the pupil was a trained parachutist and qualified for a small increase in pay together with the right to wear blue and white cloth wings on his right sleeve.
Ringway was not the only training centre, though it was the largest and the most famous. The statistics of training at Ringway are remarkable, over 400,000 descents made by parachute and just over 60,000 men trained between 1940 and 1945. There was another and very similar centre at Kabrit in Egypt where the 6th Airborne Division trained its local recruits, and another in India at Chakala. Neither of these subsidiary schools achieved anything like the output of Ringway but they served to keep men in practice and to provide a steady flow of trained recruits to the divisions.
By the end of 1940 just over 2,000 descents had been made at Ringway using the six Whitleys, but it was obvious that this was too slow a pace. In April 1941 the peculiarly British invention of balloon jumping was introduced. By taking five men and a despatcher in a car below a large balloon the training could be speeded up enormously, and the flight instruction could be much more personal since the pupil could hear his instructor shouting from the ground. The method was still used in Britain well into the 1980s, though no other country has seen fit to try it. Those who can afford to, or who enjoy reasonably settled and predictable weather, prefer to use aircraft.
Throughout this early formative period there was much experimenting with clothing and equipment, most of which was patterned on that of the Germans. The first trainees wore leather flying helmets and a copy of the German overall. After a few weeks the helmet was changed for a strange-looking canvas helmet with a thick pad of sorbo rubber round it. This was extremely comfortable and effective, but was useless in battle and in time a rimless pot-shaped steel helmet was made, held by a three-point leather strap with chin cup. Even so, the sorbo headgear continued to be used by trainees. The German overall with its shaped legs and snap fasteners was not replaced until November or December 1941 when the familiar and still surviving Denison smock became standard airborne issue. Even the German idea of using side-laced boots was tried, and immediately dropped. From then on British airborne troops wore the same boots as the rest of the army though they gave precious little ankle support for hard landings.
One great problem was how the man could carry sufficient equipment, since he had to drop through a hole only 3ft in diameter in the floor of the Whitley and when wearing a parachute there was little room for any other bulk. One idea was to do without the conventional webbing equipment and carry everything in smock pockets, and to this end there was an experimental issue of trousers with leather-lined pockets which were meant to be strong enough to take ammunition. Weapons had to be dropped in containers carried under the wings, and it was already obvious from Crete that the delay in collecting a container could be fatal to the entire unit, but until Dakota became a reality in 1942 there was no other way of getting weapons larger than a pistol or sub-machine gun down to the drop zone. With the Dakota came the introduction of door-jumping and immediately a completely new horizon was opened up. One interesting change was that the number of refusals in training went down sharply; it was far less frightening to jump through a door than to drop through a little hole in the floor. The next change was that the man could carry much more equipment with him, and from 1943 onwards it became commonplace to take kitbags as well. By 1945 the British parachutist was carrying heavier loads than any other in the world, though he may not have been particularly happy doing it.
The first parachute unit actually appeared at Ringway in the middle of 1940. This was No. 2 Army Commando and all men in it who had accepted parachute training were fully trained by the start of 1941. In August the unit became a battalion, and in September 1941 was named the 1st Parachute Battalion, and incorporated into the 1st Parachute Brigade. The idea of enlarging the airborne troops into brigades originated in May 1941 when it was decided to form two of them, one in the United Kingdom and one in the Middle East, together with a glider force sufficient to lift 10,000 men and their equipment. The RAF agreed to provide ten bomber squadrons for troop transport and glider-towing. The gliders were to be made by civilian non-essential industry so that they did not interfere with the vital flow of aircraft from the factories of the established makers. By mid-1941 the trickle of trained parachutists was gathering impetus and the lesson learned in Crete had changed the views of many of the sceptics. From now on fewer and fewer objects were put in the way of the new airborne ideas: confidence was growing.
In October 1941 the 1st Air-landing Brigade was formed from a brigade which had just completed mountain training, and so was accustomed to moving with lightweight equipment. There were no gliders for this brigade, and the concept of its use foresaw that the troops might just as often be delivered by aircraft landing on an airfield as the Germans had done, hence the name ‘Airlanding’ rather than ‘Gliderborne’. It was a substantial force, with four infantry battalions and supporting arms and from the start it was realized that there would never be enough aircraft to carry all the units in one lift. One question that needed investigation was the best way of delivering such a force in successive groups, and how best to organize those groups. At this time the War Office still thought that there would be little difficulty in flying troops into battle as air-landed units, and that very little special training would be needed. To some extent this was true but while it may make only small differences to the job of the individual infantryman, air-landed operations make a tremendous difference to the way the force is supported and supplied. Artillery support may be only minimal, and ammunition may run short. There is no line of communication up which more men and more ammunition come, and down which the wounded and the tired go. The fighting is on all sides and movement is rarely any quicker than that of a marching man. All of this was dimly realized, but nobody had actually examined it or tried to work out how to overcome the difficulties.
With two parachute brigades being formed and an air-landing brigade already in existence there was an obvious need for some higher formation to look after them and control them, and on 29 October Major General F.A.M. (Boy) Browning was given command of all airborne forces, and his headquarters was designated as the 1st Airborne Division. In the following month another significant step occurred. The US Military Attaché in London was a close friend of Major-General Browning and showed the new divisional commander the latest plaything which the US Army had sent over. It was the first jeep ever to arrive in England. Two days later it was being loaded into a mock-up of a Horsa glider at Ringway. To everyone’s relief it fitted, and Browning knew that his division could be mobile on the ground.
By December 1942 the 1st Airborne Division was just about up to strength and had tried some small operations, notably the Bruneval raid in February. But despite the steady recruitment when the 1st Parachute Brigade was sent to North Africa in September, it had to be made up to strength with cross-postings from the 2nd Parachute Brigade. The first Horsa gliders appeared in spring 1942 and the summer was spent in learning how to load and fly them. The RAF were particularly anxious to find a suitable towing aircraft since the Whitley could not manage a loaded glider. The Air Ministry and the War Office had settled on two types of glider. The smaller one, the Horsa, carried 28 fully equipped men or a jeep and a 75mm gun, or similar trailer load. It was ugly, ungainly and rather heavy, but it performed magnificently in all weathers from Norway to India and was even used by the US airborne forces on some occasions. With the next glider the British scored a notable triumph. This was the Hamilcar, the largest wooden aircraft to be built during World War II and the only glider ever to go into service anywhere in the world that could lift an armoured fighting vehicle.
The development of airborne techniques became so rapid during 1942 that it cannot be covered in detail here. By 1943 the Glider Pilot Regiment had been formed, with the express intention of providing the pilots for the air-landing units. There had been much experimenting with dropping techniques, though the variety of RAF aircraft did little to help this sort of research, and the personal equipment and armament of the individual men had been settled upon. The airborne units began to look more professional and complete and the air of improvisation that had been present in 1941 and early 1942 largely disappeared. Recruitment was not as fast as had been hoped, and the standard of the volunteers was rather low, but the strength of the units steadily increased and expertise improved.
Despite the shortages and difficulties, the chiefs of staff considered that airborne divisions were worthwhile and on 23 April 1943 the formation of another division was authorized to be known as the 6th Airborne Division. The 6th was to become as well known as the 1st, and more than made up for its late birth. It was formed by an inspiring and talented leader, Major-General ‘Windy’ Gale and got off to a flying start with the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades and the 6th Air-landing Brigade. It was intended to be the Middle East Division, though in fact it spent the major part of the war in Europe and only went east as a division in 1945.
The 50 Indian Parachute Brigade had been formed at Delhi in October 1941 and by 1943 was well up to strength, but with no aircraft available to carry it the brigade was committed to land operations in Burma in 1943. Early in 1944 it was decided to expand it to a division, and the 44th Indian Airborne Division was formed with two parachute brigades and one air-landing brigade. It was never to operate as a division in the airborne role, although there was an idea in 1945 to form an airborne corps with the 44th and 6th Divisions in readiness for the expected campaign to force the Japanese back to their homeland.
These divisions were not the only airborne troops serving in the British Army. In addition there was the Polish Parachute Brigade, which fought magnificently at Arnhem and the Special Air Service Brigade, which included, besides two British SAS regiments, two French battalions, a Norwegian, a Dutch and a Belgian parachute company. In all the brigade contained about 2,000 men and was rather more mobile than a normal parachute battalion, though not so well supplied with heavy weapons.
By 1945 the three divisions and the independent brigades and units totalled just under 40,000 men most of whom had been delivered to battle by air at some time or other. A year later that total strength was halved and 18 months after that it was halved again. By 1950 it was down to about 3,000 each in Britain and India. It stayed at that for the next 25 years.