The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  A few miles upstream, 40,000 Ninth Army gunners cut loose at one A.M. with a barrage exceeding a thousand shells a minute. An hour later Simpson’s XVI Corps, swollen to 120,000 men, hoisted the first of seven hundred assault boats up over a dike and into the river. Medical heating pads had been used to warm the outboard motors, and now the frenzied yank of starter cords sent, in one writer’s description, “shoals of small boats scudding across the water” under a three-quarter moon. Machine-gun tracers guided the initial waves until colored airfield landing lights could be emplaced on the far shore. German resistance evinced “no real fight in it,” a lieutenant reported, and the two assault divisions tallied only thirty-one casualties. On the near shore, beachmasters in white helmets hectored stragglers, and twenty-ton cranes hoisted the larger landing craft into the Rhine.

  By Saturday morning, March 24, thirteen U.S. infantry battalions held the east bank on an eight-mile front. Engineers in five equipment dumps west of the river whipped off camouflage covers—garnished fishing nets, chicken wire, tar paper, and fabric darkened with coal dust—to reveal endless acres of pontoons, stringers, trusses, and anchor cables. The bridge-builders set to work on the river with a will, and a way.

  * * *

  Rested and exultant, Churchill shortly before ten A.M. on Saturday settled into an armchair placed for his benefit on a hillside in Xanten, five miles west of Wesel. A clement sun climbed through a cloudless sky, marred only by the milky contrail of a V-2 streaking southwest toward Antwerp, or perhaps London. Booming British guns battered targets far beyond the Rhine, and the orange starbursts of exploding shells twinkled through the morning haze. Gazing at the pageant of boats and rafts plying the river below him, the prime minister mused, “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge. But now my armies are too vast.”

  A deep droning from the rear grew insistent. Churchill sprang to his feet with unwonted agility. Flocks of Allied fighters abruptly thundered overhead, trailed by tidy formations of transport planes, low enough for those on the ground to discern paratroopers standing in each open jump door. Following behind, as far as eye could see or imagination conjure, came aerial tugs, each towing a glider or two. The prime minister capered downhill for several steps, shouting, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” Just north of Wesel the first red and yellow parachutes blossomed, in Moorehead’s description, “like enormous poppies.”

  Here then was VARSITY. The British 6th Airborne Division, flying in column from eleven airdromes in East Anglia, had merged south of Brussels with the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, flying from a dozen fields near Paris. Protected by three thousand Allied fighters, their combined amplitude darkened the sky: seventeen hundred transports and thirteen hundred gliders, bringing to battle seventeen thousand paratroopers and glidermen. Their orders were to seize the high ground and woodland above Wesel in reinforcement of the PLUNDER bridgeheads—“to loosen up the scrum,” as a British airborne commander put it, “and set the armies behind us swanning.”

  In this they would be modestly effectual, seizing ten landing zones and drop zones with alacrity. But the stupendous bomb tonnage, the tens of thousands of artillery shells, and the hundreds of attack sorties against suspected antiaircraft positions had failed to winkle out all the enemy batteries, or to discourage mobile 20mm flak guns rushed to the field. “About the time we crossed the Rhine, holes started appearing in the wings and fuselage,” an officer in the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment later wrote. “Flak hitting on the plane body reminded me of the noise made by hail on a corrugated iron roof.” Paratroopers groggy from Dramamine narrowed their shoulders and squeezed tight their buttocks as bullets punched through steel floor matting. A battalion commander in the same regiment reported that as his parachute opened, “I looked back and saw the left wing of our aircraft burst into flame. Almost immediately the entire aircraft was afire and falling.” Sevareid watched as another plane “parted with a wing.”

  The body of the plane plummeted earthward while the wing followed, fluttering and scudding like a big leaf. Another plane was streaming fire from both engines. The flames were beautiful golden ribbons.

  Enemy tracers ignited wooden glider frames and fabric skins. A flight lieutenant reported seeing a British Hamilcar disintegrate in midair, the occupants “falling like puppets.” A parachutist corporal watched another glider bank above a landing zone when ground fire “cracked it open like an egg and the jeep, gun, blokes all fell out.” Of four hundred 6th Airborne gliders, only eighty-eight landed unscathed, and another thirty-two were destroyed on the ground by German artillery and incendiaries. One-quarter of the British glider pilots were casualties. More than fifty American gliders were destroyed by gunfire or in collisions with trees, poles, and other gliders in what one officer called “a flaming hellhole.”

  “Controls hit by flak in air,” a glider account noted. “Wings and nose gone. Pilot and co-pilot hit. 12 EM WIA [enlisted men wounded-in-action].” On Landing Zone N, many glider men reportedly were “slain in their seats, and many loads burned or destroyed by mortars.” Robert Capa, who jumped with an American battalion, watched as German marksmen riddled paratroopers helplessly snagged on a tall tree; hearing Capa swear furiously in his native Hungarian, a GI told him, “Stop those Jewish prayers. They won’t help you now.” A low-flying B-17 Flying Fortress carrying other combat cameramen and reporters fled in flames back across the Rhine. A survivor who bailed out of the stricken bomber watched as “all around us … burning and disabled C-47s crashed into the fields.”

  The morning proved even more hazardous for the new C-46 Curtiss Commando, flying in combat for the first time. Much larger than the C-47, with twin jump doors and a bay that carried twice as many paratroopers, the C-46 also was more vulnerable “due to the position and size of the fuel tanks and maze of hydraulic lines,” a Pentagon study later concluded. Bullets striking aluminum often generated sparks up to five inches wide, while leaking gasoline from punctured C-46 tanks tended to dribble through the hot exhaust stacks toward the fuselage. The AAF also had chosen not to install self-sealing fuel bladders in the three thousand C-46s eventually bought. The self-sealing technology had been developed since the 1920s and further refined after the dissection of German Messerschmitt fighters shot down in England during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Two layers of rubber lined the fuel tank, one vulcanized and impermeable, the other more absorbent; the latter, when saturated with gasoline from a bullet puncture, expanded to plug the hole, like blood clotting in a wound. Self-sealing tanks had been installed in fighters and recently in some C-47s. But production priorities, and concern about adding weight and reducing fuel capacity, caused the Pentagon to exclude the C-46, despite earlier airborne calamities in Sicily and noisy charges by one disaffected lieutenant colonel that the decision was “criminal negligence” and “little short of murder.”

  “I saw pieces of the plane’s skin tearing off when shells whizzed through,” a sergeant who survived VARSITY later recalled. “There was another C-46 alongside us with the jumpers already in the door. Suddenly it was hit and flames shot from its wing roots.” That spectacle recurred again and again above Wesel. “The C-46 seemed to catch on fire every time it was hit in a vital spot,” crewmen reported. Of the seventy-three C-46s flown by the 313th Troop Carrier Group, nineteen were destroyed and thirty-eight damaged. Investigators found that fourteen of those lost were “flamers,” planes “destroyed by fire originating [in the] gas tanks.” The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, which had flown in Sicily, Normandy, and Holland, concluded that “the C-46D is not a suitable troop carrier aircraft for combat operations.”

  One final calamity remained to unspool in VARSITY. Just after one P.M., as the airborne divisions finished the three-hour assault, waves of Eighth Air Force B-24 Liberators flew over the battlefield dropping six hundred tons of ammunition, gasoline, and other supplies from as low as one hundred feet. At that altitude, the lumbering, four-engin
e bombers became shooting-gallery targets, and 15 of 240 Liberators were lost, with another 104 damaged.

  Among those shot down just north of Wesel was B-24 J 42-50735, nicknamed Queen of Angels and flying from Suffolk with the 704th Bombardment Squadron. The eight dead crewmen included First Lieutenant Earle C. Cheek of Missouri, the navigator, “a genial friend, a good companion, and a lovable comrade,” according to the unit chaplain. Cheek had survived many harrowing sorties in bombing runs from Italy and then from England: crewmen wounded on his thirteenth mission; an emergency landing in France on his fifteenth; two engines knocked out on his seventeenth; and flak damage to the wings, tail, and bomb bay over Magdeburg on his twenty-first. This was his thirtieth, the one that would fulfill his quota and send him home. “It shouldn’t take much longer,” he had written his girlfriend in Texas on March 18. “There are so many things we could do together.”

  The sole survivor from Queen of Angels, a waist gunner who bailed out almost at the treetops, subsequently wrote Cheek’s mother in Missouri, “The ship crashed about 500 yards from where I landed and killed the rest of the boys, leaving me as the only survivor.… This is about the hardest letter I ever wrote to anyone.” Another officer in the bomb group confirmed the disaster: “They were last seen with one engine on fire and going toward a crash landing in enemy territory.… Fate is definite and there is no altering—the suit always fits.”

  * * *

  Churchill at day’s end returned to Montgomery’s encampment in the pine clearing. With His Majesty’s forces now firmly entrenched east of the Rhine, the prime minister was in high feather. “The German is whipped,” he declared. “We’ve got him. He is all through.” During dinner, Churchill entertained the mess with dramatic recitations from The Life of the Bee, an ode by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck to the most orderly society on earth, with chapters entitled “The Swarm” and “The Massacre of the Males.” The prime minister and his field marshals then pushed back from the table and strolled to the map caravan to hear British officers describe VARSITY PLUNDER’s progress.

  All in all, the reports ratified Churchill’s buoyancy. From the 51st Highland Division on the left to the American 79th Division on the right, the Allied bridgehead extended for twenty-five miles along the east bank and reached as deep as seven miles beyond the water’s edge. Engineers were at work on various spans: the first tank-bearing bridge would open in the Ninth Army sector within a day. Three thousand enemy prisoners had been bagged on this Saturday, and PLUNDER ground units had made contact with airborne troops. The uncommonly fine weather would continue for at least another day.

  The utility of VARSITY’s vertical envelopment would long be debated, much as Montgomery’s operatic staging of PLUNDER would be ridiculed as unnecessary by the likes of Patton and Bradley. Enthusiasts believed the airheads had disrupted enemy artillery, kept counterattacking Germans away from the river crossings, and opened an alley toward the Ruhr. General Brereton, commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, deemed the day a “tremendous success.”

  Yet VARSITY bore a taint, a reminder that rarely in war did success and sorrow exclude each other from the battlefield. Given the supine state of enemy defenses, no objective seized by paratroopers would have long eluded a three-corps ground assault. No great depth had been added to the Allied purchase over the Rhine, nor had bridge building been expedited. The two airborne divisions incurred nearly 3,000 casualties, including more than 460 dead. In addition to C-46 and B-24 losses, some 300 C-47s had been damaged and another 30 destroyed. Troop carrier crews suffered another 357 casualties, more than half of them dead or missing. Relatively few gliders could be salvaged. Once again, airborne forces appeared to be coins burning a hole in the pockets of Allied commanders, coins that simply had to be spent. Soldiers soon mocked the operation as VARSITY BLUNDER, and burial squads with pruning saws and ladders took two days to cut down all the dead. Fate is definite. The suit always fits.

  The next morning, March 25, Churchill, Brooke, and Montgomery attended Palm Sunday services celebrated by a Presbyterian chaplain in a captured German church near the river. The prime minister offered his troops a brief homily on “an influence, supreme and watchful, which guides our affairs.” Then with a V-for-victory waggle he was off with his entourage to the river town of Rheinberg for a rendezvous with Eisenhower, Bradley, and Simpson.

  Together in the brilliant sunshine the six men picnicked on fried chicken served upon a white tablecloth in the garden of a colliery manager’s house. “Our men muttered about camouflage,” a British lieutenant reported, “and helped themselves to a few cakes left behind.” Strolling close to the river, where soldiers swarmed with a purposeful buzz worthy of Maeterlinck, Brooke congratulated Eisenhower on Allied successes in recent days. The supreme commander would later quote him as saying, “Thank God, Ike, you stuck by your plan. You were completely right,” a statement repudiated by Brooke. “It will be clear that I was misquoted,” the field marshal subsequently wrote, “as I am still convinced that he was completely wrong.”

  For the moment such disputes seemed picayune. After Eisenhower and Bradley took their leave, Churchill’s mischievous eye lighted on a nearby landing craft. “I am in command now that Eisenhower is gone,” he declared. “Why don’t we go across and have a look?” Across the Rhine they went, prowling about for half an hour, ears cocked to the to-and-fro shriek of artillery. The prime minister “seemed more perturbed about lighting his cigar in the wind than about shellfire,” a British officer noted, but at length an anxious Simpson told Montgomery, “Get him out of here before he gets killed.”

  Back on the west bank, Churchill scrambled onto the iron trusses of a demolished rail span as German shells in search of American bridge-builders began to plump the river three hundred yards upstream and even nearer downstream. “Prime Minister,” Simpson pleaded, “there are snipers in front of you, they are shelling both sides of the bridge, and now they have started shelling the road behind you.” By Brooke’s account, Churchill “put both his arms round one of the twisted girders of the bridge and looked over his shoulder at Simpson with pouting mouth and angry eyes.” At length he climbed back to shore and shambled off to safety.

  After presenting Montgomery with a fine set of Marlborough: His Life and Times—Churchill’s four-volume paean to his illustrious warrior ancestor—the prime minister reboarded his plane and flew home to London, a dozen Spitfires his attending courtiers. “He never fought a battle that he did not win, nor besieged a fortress that he did not take,” Churchill had written in volume one. “He quitted war invincible.”

  * * *

  In short order, seven Allied armies finished jumping the river. On the far left wing, Canadian First Army troops funneled through the Wesel bridgehead. Simpson bridled at the pinched frontage allocated his Ninth Army and at what he considered the languid British pace. But by March 27, 21st Army Group had advanced twenty miles beyond the Rhine to begin enveloping the north rim of the Ruhr.

  On the right flank, in the south, Patch’s Seventh Army had crossed in a two-division assault at Worms early on March 25, supported by three dozen amphibious tanks. XV Corps captured twenty-five hundred Germans at a cost of only two hundred American casualties, and within seventy-two hours Patch built enough momentum to burst from the bridgehead against an enervated enemy pared to fewer than six thousand combat effectives.

  The French, who had been first on the Rhine in November, were last to leap it, whipped on by De Gaulle, who cabled General de Lattre, “My dear General, you must cross the Rhine, even if the Americans do not help you and you are obliged to use rowboats.… Karlsruhe and Stuttgart await you, even if they do not want you.” General Devers readily assented, but the retreating Germans had sunk all watercraft at Speyer, forcing the French to make do with a single rubber boat; ten riflemen at a time paddled across until a bigger flotilla could be assembled. A solitary company would hold the east bank at dawn on March 31, enough to plant a tricolor and satisfy Deux Mètres
, at least for the moment.

  “This is the collapse,” a British Second Army intelligence assessment concluded on March 26. “The enemy no longer has a coherent system of defense between the Rhine and the Elbe. It is difficult to see what there is to stop us now.” Hodges’s First Army agreed, in intelligence estimate No. 77: “The enemy is capable of collapse or surrender in successive groups.”

  Alas, the enemy was capable of more than that, and gouts of blood would yet be spilled. But the Allied conquest intensified and accelerated. Eleven thousand daily air sorties contributed to what SHAEF called “a systematic annihilation of the German armed forces.” March proved the heaviest bombing month of the war: 130,000 tons. Upon returning from his Rhineland expedition, Churchill suggested in a March 28 memo that “the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, through other pretexts, should be revised. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.” An outraged Bomber Harris counterattacked so vigorously, accusing Churchill of “stigmatizing a policy for which he had been personally responsible,” that the prime minister withdrew his minute. Yet the strategic bomber fleets soon found their war “petering out in diminuendo,” as one officer wrote, simply for lack of targets to pulverize.

  Not so for the ground forces, surging across a 250-mile front. The war had again become mobile and mechanized, precisely the war for soldiers with “machinery in their souls,” as John Steinbeck described his fellow Americans. A war of movement, distance, and horsepower was suited, as Time rhapsodized, to “a people accustomed to great spaces, to transcontinental railways, to nationwide trucking chains, to endless roads and millions of automobiles, to mail-order houses, department stores and supermarkets.”