Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Dear Bo:

  I told you, didn’t I, that missing in action does not necessarily mean death? I am sorry that you worried. . . . The news looks very good and I hope that the Stars and Stripes will wave over Berlin very soon. I sure hope I can be there to see it. Keep your fingers crossed that I can. . . . I still hope to find my parents and brothers in this European mess.

  The alert came a few days later for the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, and British 1st Airborne. British ground forces under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had already reached the northern Belgian border, and a plan was quickly dashed together to drop the three airborne divisions ahead of them into Nazi-occupied Holland, to prevent the Germans from blowing up the many Dutch bridges, including the long spans over the Waal River and the lower Rhine River, which in Holland was called the Nederrijn. Wholesale destruction of the bridges would delay the Allied push into Germany’s northern industrial heartland. Nearly thirty-five thousand paratroopers were to be dropped—most by parachute but others by gliders—along a narrow fifty-mile corridor to secure the only north-south highway through Holland. Their orders called for the U.S. airborne divisions, equipped with only light artillery weapons that could be dropped by parachute, to “seize and hold” their objectives deep behind enemy lines until the British infantry, armored tanks, and heavy artillery could link up with them. Then the ground forces would continue racing northward through Holland and reach Arnhem in four days.

  At least, that was the plan, called Operation Market Garden. Werner learned its details at his regiment’s intelligence briefing on September 16. In the south, the 101st would drop at Eindhoven, near the Belgian border, and seize bridgeheads required for the pass-through of ground forces. Smack in the geographic middle of the ambitious operation, the 82nd was given a crucial assignment: to drop over Nijmegen, secure the bridges across the Waal River and a nine-span bridge across the Maas River, and capture the highest ground in Holland, located between Nijmegen and Groesbeek. Nine thousand British paratroopers were to drop the farthest north, at Arnhem, and seize the span across the Nederrijn, the Dutch part of the Rhine, which, once taken, would allow ground forces to advance into Germany. Defenses around Arnhem were thought to be fairly weak, only a few thousand Germans. But if Arnhem turned into more of a battle and the U.S. airborne units failed to open up the road northward, the British airborne division would be cut off, with no avenue open to resupplying or reinforcing them.

  Werner knew Holland well. Nijmegen was near that country’s eastern border with Germany and just seventy miles from Amsterdam, where he had left his family five years earlier. He had not heard anything from them since his mother’s last letter—shortly before Germany and the United States went to war—reporting that his father had been imprisoned in Berlin for taking the family’s money out of the country. Werner emerged from the regimental briefing excited about their destination. Holland! My God! I might be able to see my family! He also hoped to get some better news about his father. Perhaps by now he had served his prison sentence and been released and was even back with the family in Amsterdam.

  Compared to the fiasco of parachutists scattered in the dark all over Normandy on D-Day, the daylight jump on Nijmegen on September 17 was every paratrooper’s dream. All but two of the 482 planes filled with seventy-three hundred troopers of the 82nd reached their target zones. One of the division’s few jump casualties was Gavin, who, as always, jumped first out of the lead plane. He fractured two vertebrae in a hard landing, but with barely a grimace, he unhooked his chute, picked up his M1 rifle, and was soon giving orders in his calm and cool manner. Even with a broken back, he regularly showed up, rifle in hand, at the front where the fighting was taking place.*

  Werner’s regiment was dropped, as planned, a mile east of Nijmegen, to occupy a range of hills on the division’s flank closest to the German border. Werner had still not received any parachute training, but took his second combat jump like a true veteran, making a soft landing in a potato field, surrounded by the familiar faces of his comrades. While descending in his chute, Werner had noticed a nearby German antiaircraft gun with its long barrels pointed skyward. Its five crewmen, upon seeing the sky fill with hundreds of aircraft and thousands of green, orange, blue, and red canopies of U.S. paratroopers, had lined up next to their big gun without firing a single shot at the planes.

  “Hände hoch!” Werner yelled as soon as he hit the ground, and the German artillerymen, happy to surrender to such overwhelming forces rather than fight and die, raised their hands in the air.

  For the first few days, Werner’s IPW team stayed in a Dutch monastery about a mile from where they landed. When they first entered the building, which had served as a German headquarters, they found an empty dining hall with rows of tables that still held plates of warm food and steins of beer. It had clearly just been abandoned, and in a hurry.

  That first night, Werner went up to the monastery’s roof garden with several other Ritchie Boys. They looked down at Nijmegen, one of Holland’s oldest cities, which was now without power and completely in the dark. A battalion of the 508th regiment was fighting Germans in its winding streets, trying desperately to reach the Waal bridge. The gunshots and red glow of fires raging throughout the city were close enough, yet strangely far off. Werner turned pensive. A poem from World War I came to mind, and he recited the only lines he could remember:

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death,

  At midnight in some flaming town.*

  The men with him were amused with Werner’s spontaneous recitation but quickly changed the subject to something less morbid, and Werner didn’t mind at all. He had done it partly to impress them with his literary recall, but he realized that a poem about death in the middle of a shooting war was not the best subject for young soldiers.

  The next morning, as captured German troops were brought in to the monastery for interrogation, the IPW team learned something surprising. The enemy commanders were so certain they could hold the massive, 650-yard-long, steel-girdered highway bridge across the Waal at Nijmegen that orders had not been issued to blow it up, which the Germans often did before retreating. But the bridge, built in 1936, with a steel superstructure that rose nearly as high as a twenty-story building, had been wired with explosive charges. For now, the Germans, reinforced by heavy artillery, were succeeding in holding both the northern and southern approaches to the bridge along a nearly mile-wide sector.

  The taking of the Waal bridge was so important that the Market Garden plan called for it to be captured intact on the first day, but that objective lapsed into the third day as the 82nd fought off six major counterattacks. The 82nd was operating under British Corps commander General Brian Horrocks, who met face-to-face with Gavin and told him that the bridge must be taken or the entire Market Garden operation could fail. Gavin knew that the lives of the British 1st Airborne in Arnhem depended on the British ground forces reaching them without further delay, which meant the span had to be taken by his men immediately.

  Horrocks and Gavin decided the only way to end the stalemate was to outflank the defenders by sending a regiment across the fast-flowing river in flat-bottomed assault boats. At midday on September 20, Gavin ordered his 504th regiment to do just that, under withering enemy fire from 88 mm cannons, 20 mm cannons, mortars, and machine guns. Each of the boats had only a pair of oars, so the troopers used the butts of their rifles to row faster and their helmets to bail out water pouring in from bullet holes in the flimsy boats. In the first wave of the attack, just thirteen of the twenty-six boats reached the other side.

  The Waal crossing would cost more than two hundred American lives. The paratroopers who made it ashore assaulted a high bank on top of which were entrenched Germans, and, using grenades and bayonets, they attacked them fiercely in their foxholes and fought their way to the northern approach of the bridge. There, they fought in the steel girders of the bridge itself, where dynamite and detonators had been lashed to catwalks, picking off Germ
ans before they could blow the bridge sky high.

  Once the bridge was secured, Werner’s regiment crossed the Waal and occupied Bemmel, a village just north of Nijmegen. The paratroopers dug slit trenches and foxholes, and prepared to hold their positions against an anticipated counterattack. But the German assault never came, and things remained quiet over the next few days, during which the Americans took a number of prisoners, including deserters from a regiment of Volksgrenadier directly across from them. From his interrogations, Werner learned this regiment comprised reserve troops—some drawn from the German navy and Luftwaffe—who had little infantry training. They had been sent here as an occupational force when Holland was a backwater affair. Now that there was real fighting, the prisoners said, there were many others like them ready to desert.

  A patrol of twenty-five paratroopers was organized to reach the Volksgrenadier lines and bring back as many disenchanted Germans as possible. Of course, they needed a German speaker with them, and the officer in charge asked for Werner.

  They left shortly after sundown, and within ten minutes, they realized something was not right. There was a great deal of activity on the German side. As they were crossing a meadow, the Germans sent up an aerial flare, bathing the area in white light. When caught in the open by a flare, they knew the best way to not be seen was to freeze. This went against every human instinct to dive for cover, but a man standing perfectly still could pass in the shadows for a tree or other inanimate object, so Werner and the others froze like statues until the flare died out.

  Then they crept forward until they came to a wide ditch, both ends of which disappeared into thick shrubbery. Checking it carefully, the officer said the ditch had been mined. At that instant, another flare went up. They were close enough for the Germans to spot them and to open up on them with machine guns. This time, everyone dove for the ground and whatever cover they could find. When the enemy fire tapered off, the officer in charge of the patrol ordered them all to turn around and head back to their own lines. It was too dangerous to proceed.

  They made it back, having accomplished nothing other than not losing anyone on the patrol. The men considered the mission a failure until a couple of days later, when Werner found out from some new prisoners that the Volksgrenadier regiment had been relieved a week earlier.

  They had been replaced on the front lines by an elite SS division.

  Shortly after Manny Seinfeld finished his jump training, the 82nd Airborne returned to England from Normandy. He was assigned to the division’s lone Order of Battle team. His teammates were First Lieutenant Leonard Abel, a Camp Ritchie–trained photo interpreter, and Staff Sergeant Edward Wynne, who had been in Manny’s IPW class as well as his postgraduate OB course. Attached to Gavin’s headquarters under the division’s intelligence officer (G-2), Lieutenant Colonel Walter Winston, they were the 82nd’s only OB team and as such were the division’s experts on the makeup and fighting capabilities of hundreds of different German army units.

  After what Manny had gone through to qualify as a parachutist, he saw the irony in being assigned to ride into Holland—his first airborne operation—aboard a silent, engineless glider rather than by parachute. Nicknamed Flying Coffins, these craft were built for just one flight and a violent end once they were released by their tow plane a mile or so from their drop zone. The most widely used glider—the Waco CG-4A—was forty-eight feet long with an eighty-foot wingspan, constructed of steel tubing and canvas skin. Flown by two trained glider pilots, the Waco had sufficient load capacity to carry thirteen combat-equipped troopers, a jeep, or a field artillery piece and small crew to operate it. The gliders could deliver troops and equipment to more precise locations than parachutes could, but they were even more dangerous. More casualties had occurred during glider landings than parachute jumps in Normandy, where the Germans had planted interlocking ten-foot poles—some wired with explosives—in open fields where gliders were likely to land. Many gliders were impaled or had their wings sheared or blown off as they came in. Even without such manmade obstacles, the two-ton gliders dropped like runaway garbage trucks, slamming into trees or rocks or the ground so hard that they often split open, spilling soldiers and materiel.

  Still, Manny was relieved that he wouldn’t have to leap out of a plane for Operation Market Garden. He was responsible for the OB team’s jeep, and he cautiously backed it up a ramp into one of the gliders that would carry the 82nd Airborne to Holland. He then put blocks under the wheels and helped secure the jeep so it wouldn’t shift in flight.

  The planes towing the gliders started taking off after the transports carrying the paratroopers had gone. In an airborne operation, the gliders were always timed to arrive last because it was too dangerous for them and their tow planes to fly through a sky filled with paratroopers descending in their chutes. Given that the element of surprise was lost by the time the gliders swooped in, they often had to fly through intense flak. Several gliders carrying 82nd troops came unhooked from the tow planes over the Channel and crashed in the frigid waters, taking to the bottom their pilots and the heavily laden paratroopers. Others were lost when they or their towing planes were struck by enemy fire and went down.

  Aboard a glider being towed three hundred feet behind a C-47, Manny was seated in the driver’s seat of the jeep. In the passenger seat next to him was Captain George Wood, a thirty-three-year-old regimental chaplain known as Chappie. An Episcopalian minister who conducted nondenominational services and attended to soldiers’ spiritual needs regardless of religious affiliation, Chappie was a veteran of three combat jumps with the 82nd Airborne, in Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. Men of all faiths loved him. Not only did he expose himself to great danger—unarmed and wearing a Red Cross armband—to care and pray for the wounded and dying, but he was appreciated for his soaring sermons and powerful words as well. He was famous in airborne circles for having written “A Paratrooper’s Prayer” on the eve of D-Day.

  Manny Steinfeld, 82nd Airborne. (Family photograph)

  Almighty God, Our Heavenly Father . . . Drive from the minds of our paratroops any fear of the space in which Thou art ever present. Give them confidence in the strength of Thine Everlasting arms to uphold them. Endue them with clear minds and pure hearts that they may participate worthily in the victory which this nation must achieve in Thy name through Thy will. Make them hardy soldiers of our country. . . .

  On the glider, Manny was seated next to Chappie, and he took that as a sign that they would make it to Holland without mishap.

  Early that Sunday afternoon, in Holland’s fifth year of German occupation, the streets in Dutch towns and villages throughout the country were crowded with young people on bicycles and families strolling along myriad canals and streams. Suddenly there was a roar of several hundred Allied bombers. Instead of continuing on, as they usually did, to bomb cities and factories in Germany, they dropped their high-explosive payloads all over Holland on German positions and antiaircraft batteries. Barely had the bombers left when coming in from the west were waves of transport planes carrying American and British paratroopers who bailed out from low altitudes in order to get on the ground quickly and lessen the chance of being shot as they floated down under their chutes. After the sky emptied of their billowing canopies, the big gliders, cut loose by their tow planes at about two thousand feet, silently swooped down like birds of prey.

  As a first-time passenger on a glider, Manny didn’t know how it should feel after the tow plane cut them loose. But as they came closer to the ground, he sensed they were coming in much too fast. When he looked over and saw Chappie vigorously praying, he knew something was wrong. Before Manny could start his own prayer, the glider belly-flopped at more than 100 mph and slid amid loud grinding and screeching noises before flipping over. The glider was totally demolished, its sides split open, and Manny was thrown clear, landing some distance away, unconscious. He awakened groggily in a first aid station with bandages on his arms and back. He asked about Chappie, who was sa
id to be a little banged up but already out ministering to his flock. Scratch one OB team jeep, however.

  Manny rested on an army cot the remainder of the day. The reprieve allowed ample time for contemplation, and he slept fitfully that night. By the time he joined his team in the morning, he had decided that jumping out of an airplane with a parachute was not so bad after all.

  Manny went right to work with the OB team. His job was to translate the information gained from interrogations, quickly and accurately. He would receive the interrogation reports filed by the division’s four IPW teams and then determine the identification, strength, and capabilities of the enemy units facing them, and post the results on a situation map at Gavin’s headquarters. The most vital information made its way into daily briefings the team prepared for the G-2, Lieutenant Colonel Winston, and Gavin’s chief of staff, Colonel Robert Wienecke.

  For one ten-day period, Manny and Sergeant Wynne were assigned to an observation post in a dense forest on the border between Holland and Germany. Reconnaissance squads were making nighttime forays into the German lines specifically to bring back prisoners for interrogations, which Manny and Wynne conducted on the spot, then rapidly passed along by messenger anything they knew about the makeup of the German units in front of them. On a daily basis, the two Ritchie Boys exchanged small-arms fire with German forward positions. On the gun range at Camp Ritchie, Manny had qualified as an expert, which had shocked him because he had never fired a gun before joining the army. But in the dense forest, he discovered that shooting at a concealed enemy who was shooting back was much different from hitting a bull’s-eye on a range, and after ten days and dozens of rounds he had no idea if he had hit anyone or not.

  When the two Ritchie Boys returned to division headquarters, they found it had moved into a grove of trees at the south end of Nijmegen, off St. Anne Street. Although there were structures in town available to house the staff, Gavin believed the accommodations for his headquarters personnel should be no more comfortable than what was available to the men on the front lines. He set the example by sleeping in a tent, which meant everyone else did, too. Manny and Wynne dug a six-by-six foot hole, pitched a tent over it to keep the rain out, placed sandbags around the perimeter, and called it home for the rest of their time in Holland.