• • •
Small battles erupted across the LZ as troopers ran from their gliders and the chaos shifted from sky to ground. It was a 360-degree battlefield of barking sergeants, cracking guns, snapping bullets, coughing mortars, and screaming wounded.
To Major Carl Peterson, one of the glider riders’ staff officers, the unfolding scene seemed beyond horrific. He reckoned that at least a third of his regiment lay dead on the LZ.
Mortar fire proved devastating to the stationary gliders. The CG-4As were easy targets—even for inexperienced German crews. Hitting a glider with incendiary rounds often set it on fire. A favored tactic was to withhold fire until the pilots or troopers began unloading. With everyone focused on lifting the glider’s nose the Germans opened up with machine guns, raking the assembled group.
For the Germans it must have been a scene of hellish anarchy as more and more gliders swooped in. They came from every direction, plowing into the open fields, knocking down telephone poles, bowling through fences, and toppling trees. Germans firing at a glider were often surprised by another landing behind them. Several gliders ran over foxholes, and in at least one case a copilot fired his tommy gun through the nose of his glider, scattering an enemy machine gun crew as the CG-4A crashed into them.
The plan of organizing the landings into specific sectors paid off. Enough pilots overcame the challenges of stacked formations and congested patterns to get their cargo to the right area, facilitating a rapid assembly of organized fighting units. There was no doubt the glider pilots had earned their pay. In the battle for LZ S, the concentrated landing patterns saved the day. The platoons of the first serial were assembled and attacking within minutes, taking ground and prisoners as they advanced toward the Issel Canal.
• • •
Trooper Harry Ellis, first out of his glider, exited in a crouch and sprinted for a nearby road embankment. On the other side of the road a German anti-aircraft position was firing in the opposite direction. Two of the Kanoniers crouched in front of a bunker facing away from Ellis. Ellis, his rifle at the ready, hesitated to shoot his enemy in the back.
A trooper flopped down next to Ellis and pulled his trigger twice. First one, then the other German tumbled over.
A Soldat from inside the bunker emerged waving a white rag of surrender. He ran to the Americans and explained to Ellis—who spoke fluent German—that his battery would surrender if an American came over to accept the offer. Ellis agreed and sprinted back with his prisoner. Together they convinced the remaining sixteen Germans to give up. The negotiation took four anti-aircraft guns out of the fight.
Glider rider Bud Dudenhoeffer and his squad landed safely but came under immediate small arms fire. They kicked out the doors and evacuated as fast as possible, sprinting for the protection of a ditch at least a hundred yards away.
It wasn’t until the squad was bunched shoulder-to-shoulder, all trying to fit into the same ditch, that they realized they’d left all of the belt-fed machine gun ammunition back in the glider. Dudenhoeffer volunteered to fetch the ammo if the rest of them would increase their rate of fire to keep the enemy’s heads down while he made a run for it. Somehow he reached the glider and collected four of the metal ammunition boxes. His return now gave them real firepower, and they unleashed the .30-caliber machine gun.
With the machine gun in action, half the group darted to the next position. Once set they provided covering fire so the machine gun crew could join them. In this manner they leapfrogged their way off the LZ and toward their assembly point.
• • •
At 10:46 the first glider in the third serial cut loose, followed closely by seventy others. All angled for the same real estate: the eastern edge of the LZ. They dove into a maelstrom. Four exploded as they came in to land, their cargo detonated by ack-ack. Burning men and materiel cartwheeled across the furrowed fields. Another twenty-one gliders were raked by small arms fire or the vicious quad-barreled 20mms.
While most troopers emerged from their gliders brandishing a myriad of rifles, submachine guns, and pistols, one plucky corporal, Nick Bakarich, had a baseball at the ready. On it he had scribbled, “To Hitler from the 194 . . . we’re a tough gang!” He promised he’d throw it at the first German he saw, and his swagger lightened the mood. His squad was more worried about his sanity than their own safety.
Frank Dillon, peering between his two pilots, scanned the terrain below for landmarks. The haze blanketed everything, and the occasional break revealed only featureless fields. The pilot cut loose, banking hard left to avoid a glider edging in on them. Off tow, Dillon and his men could now distinctly hear the bursting flak and the rattle of German machine guns. Shrapnel hit one of Dillon’s men, but the fragment embedded itself in the man’s pack, leaving him startled, but uninjured.
As they descended, ground details emerged. Dillon spotted his platoon’s assembly point—a triangular patch of woods bordered by a dirt road along the eastern perimeter. They were right on target.
He called out the distance and direction to his men as they all braced themselves for a rough landing.
A power line loomed up out of the fog. The pilot pulled above it in time, but the tail struck the wire, pitching them forward until he leveled it back up. The quick maneuver kept them from crashing but increased their speed. Coming in too fast, the glider slammed into the ground and skidded across the field. Trees ripped off both wings. The fuselage continued forward, mowing down a row of fence posts before a large tree brought them to a bone-jarring halt. The tree trunk creased the cockpit between the two pilots, but neither was injured. Before the dust settled, Dillon and his men tumbled out into a nearby ditch. They left the 619 pounds of ammo and equipment in the glider for someone else to recover.
In the wood line their squad joined others and assembled into an organized platoon. The pilots had their own assembly plan, and Dillon’s platoon sergeant, Forrest Saffeels, conducted a head count, readying the troopers to move out. Among their number they already had their first prisoner, a lone German caught by surprise.
Their sector on the east side of the LZ was relatively quiet. Before moving to the company assembly area, Dillon’s men helped other platoons round up POWs and civilians and left them under guard at a farm.
By 11:10, 75 percent of the battalion had assembled, and Dillon’s unit joined the exodus of troopers headed toward their assigned bridges over the Issel River.
• • •
Meanwhile, a few hundred yards to the west, the fourth serial had released another seventy-two gliders. Clyde Haney felt his pilot bank right as they commenced their run into LZ S. They were hit almost as soon as they cast off. A shell exploded against the wood floor, sending splinters and shrapnel into the legs of the men riding in back. Haney slumped forward against his seat restraint.
Sergeant Henry Dorff could see Haney had been hit in the neck. The wound didn’t appear grievous, but Haney had either been knocked unconscious or had passed out. The glider’s jarring landing interrupted Dorff’s visual assessment, and before they came to a stop the POP-POP of bullets puncturing the glider chased the troopers out. The landing jolted Haney back to consciousness, and he stumbled out after the rest of his squad, then collapsed a few feet from the fuselage.
As the squad crawled to better cover, a medic darted over to treat Haney. The air was thick with heavy fire, and the medic worked feverishly as bullets snapped overhead. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t stem the bleeding and Haney bled out on LZ S. The medic scurried off in search of other patients.
George Buckley’s load of troopers jumped out of their glider while it was still skidding to a halt. Buckley and his copilot joined them in a ditch, where they huddled together trying to determine their location by comparing tactical maps and the pilots’ aerial photograph. Still unsure where they were, they agreed to head toward the sounds of the heaviest fighting.
The group departed up a narrow dirt road and was soon targeted by a German rifleman in the upper story of a farmhouse
. They ran forward to take shelter behind a low stone wall surrounding the yard.
Bullets whined off the masonry as they plotted their course of action. The clatter of stampeding hooves shifted their attention to a surreal raid. Six troopers with guns blazing from atop “captured” horses encircled the farmhouse. Each of the troopers fired into the windows as he wheeled his horse around for another pass. One of the cowboys broke rank long enough to fire a rifle grenade through a second-story window. The detonation terminated the enemy fire. Seemingly satisfied with their handiwork and oblivious to having rescued the group behind the rock wall, the six rancheros galloped off.
• • •
The following three serials aimed for the center of the LZ. They brought in more men and heavier firepower: 57mm anti-tank guns and the howitzers of the 680th and 681st Glider Field Artillery Battalions. A battery of German howitzers pulverized glider after glider as they skidded to a halt. Artillerymen of the 680th unloaded a howitzer and lugged it out into the field to duel with the enemy guns. They fired first, but missed. The German crew didn’t. A second group of Americans wheeled their howitzer into position, splattering the enemy battery with flanking fire. It was enough to take out several of the guns and bag twenty-five prisoners. Short but nasty little gunfights erupted throughout the 680th sector. The troopers gave better than they got, but it cost them dearly: two battery commanders were killed within a hundred yards of each other, along with seventeen troopers, in addition to more than fifty wounded in the melee.
Jim Lauria’s 75mm howitzer—one of twelve brought in by the 681st—was trapped inside the glider; the aircraft had hit a wire fence on landing and the collision had fouled the nose so badly the men couldn’t open it.
After enlisting the help of some glider riders with wire cutters, Lauria finally got out his gun. At the same time, one of the troopers spotted muzzle flashes coming from a hayloft, where a German machine gunner was methodically spraying the LZ. Lauria and crew nudged the howitzer into alignment and aimed down the tube like it was a rifle. When satisfied, Lauria jerked the lanyard. The 75mm shell whined across the field and flashed into the barn. From Lauria’s position it looked like the explosion lifted the roof off the barn. No more firing came from the hayloft.
In little more than an hour the gliders had delivered into LZ S 3,492 troops and 637 tons of cargo—including 202 jeeps and 78 mortars and artillery pieces. Like an oil spill, the combat team spread in all directions, drowning German resistance.
11:55. Landing Zone N, Germany. Saturday, March 24, 1945.
The armada’s last seven serials—all single-tow gliders—headed into Landing Zone N. LZ N, sandwiched between the British sector and the Thirteeners’ DZ, served as the destination for Miley’s supporting units of combat engineers, anti-tank gunners, signalers, medics, and additional artillery. In total the final serials would deliver 1,321 more troops and almost 400 tons of medical supplies, jeeps, communication equipment, anti-tank guns, mortars, ammunition, and body bags. The Thirteeners should have already secured LZ N, but due to their mis-drop, it was still full of Germans.
By the time the single-tow glider serials passed over Diersfordt Forest, the Ruffians were pushing back or overrunning much of the resistance in that sector. The British glider assaults and the artillerymen engaged on DZ X also reduced the anti-aircraft fire directed at the final serials.
However light the ack-ack was, the remaining gunners were still determined. One of the first gliders released over the LZ exploded in midair when tracers ignited its cargo of demolitions. A later count determined that 293 out of the 345 gliders were hit before landing. The Air Force lost another three transports over the LZ, with forty-four more damaged. What the German gunners couldn’t do, excessive speed accomplished: over 50 percent of the gliders came in too fast and were damaged in crashes.
Flight Officer Wes Hare’s glider smacked in hard, injuring almost everyone on board. Hare’s spine was fractured; one of the troopers in back had both of his legs broken while another soldier sustained severe internal injuries and two broken arms; three of the other troopers got away with minor injuries. With two men from his glider already shot, Hare hunkered down to stay below the flying bullets. From the shallow pit he’d scraped out with his hands he watched a trooper shepherding five prisoners across the LZ. As the trooper got closer, a squad of Germans took a few potshots at him. In a single movement the trooper mowed down all five of his POWs with a full magazine from his Thompson submachine gun and dropped to the ground, slithering into a ditch.
• • •
On his way into LZ N, George Holdren, the twenty-year-old Midwesterner with good teeth, couldn’t see much from his position in the back of the glider. He’d taken a seat on a stack of ammunition cases in front of his 57mm anti-tank gun while two fellow crew members occupied the only available seating.
But Holdren could see well enough to know that the pilot had released higher than he wanted to. What Holdren didn’t realize was that his pilot had also released too early. The fluctuating airspeeds had disrupted the formation, forcing the tow pilots to climb to avoid overrunning the preceding flights. Holdren’s pilot, recognizing the danger, disengaged the towrope early rather than risk being towed even higher. The decision made it difficult, if not impossible, for the glider to reach its designated landing sector.
Holdren ducked instinctively as machine gun bullets popped a row of neat holes through the tail section of the glider. The rounds clattered off the metal frame “like a string of firecrackers going off.” Tiny, precise rays of sunlight beamed through the bullet holes.
The pilot saw several gliders on the ground already getting hammered by enemy guns and pulled up to land farther away. The glider bounced a few times before slamming into the edge of a shell crater. The gun held, but Holdren didn’t. He woke up a few minutes later with a dent in his steel helmet and a concussion. Shaking it off, he scrambled out to join his crew and the two pilots peering over the edge of their crater.
They had front-row seats as more gliders dove in to land, including one that burst into flames after hitting a power line. There was no discernible landing pattern, and it appeared to be “every man for himself.” The accuracy of the release was commendable, but the landings were all over the place, which delayed assembly. Considering the poor visibility and that gliders from both British and American divisions were already cluttering the LZ—along with the burning hulks of several twin-engine transports—it was a tribute to the pilots’ skill that they landed on the LZ at all.
Gunfire poured in from every direction, and Holdren debated who had whom surrounded. Attempts by him and his fellow crew members to unload their glider proved futile as the frame was too mangled to surrender the gun. Holdren and one of the other troopers left in search of a jeep to pull the glider apart. Dodging bullets and running from glider to glider, they had no luck finding a jeep. The two troopers continued deeper into the LZ looking for their comrades.
They’d managed to find some members of their unit to help when they stumbled across a badly wounded German not far from the LZ. The back of the Soldat’s head had been blown off, exposing his brain. He weakly called out to them, “Hilfe”—“Help.”
“We were sure that moving him would certainly prove fatal,” recalled Holdren. “No one knew of anything else to do, so we just left him crying plaintively. Several fellows suggested that the kind thing to do would be to shoot him to end his suffering, and, while many agreed that it was probably the kindest thing to do, no one would actually do it.”
• • •
Several of the gliders landed on the southern perimeter, which overlapped with DZ X, where John Chester had landed. He watched two of the CG-4As circle on their final approach to land. Plumes of German mortar fire surrounded both gliders as they skidded across the furrowed field. The first was hit before it stopped moving, killing everyone aboard. The second was hit just as it nosed to a halt, and the whole contraption burst into flames.
From a hu
ndred yards away Chester saw two troopers stumble from the wreckage, both engulfed in flames and trailing smoke as they ran for their lives. Chester raised his carbine to put them out of their misery, but before he could fire they fell to the ground out of his line of sight. As he later admitted, “Fate had just delivered me from a hard thing to do.”
• • •
Once on the ground many glider pilots felt outgunned. Joseph Shropshire and his load of two troopers took shelter near their glider, digging shallow pits to get under the incoming fire. The bullets hummed and whined overhead with such ferocity that medic Thomas Helms decided his best chance for survival was to give up. He crawled to the edge of their tiny perimeter, waving a rag in surrender. Sergeant Jesse Twitty, a paratrooper none too happy to have arrived by glider, yelled that he’d shoot Helms himself if he didn’t stop it.
Shropshire’s carbine jammed and Twitty crawled over to provide covering fire. A bullet hit him in the side and tore out through his back. Shropshire and his copilot dragged him to the most protected spot they could find, a deep ditch four or five yards in front of the glider. A few minutes later Twitty called for help as the pain was excruciating. Though he was nearly petrified with fear, Shropshire crawled back through the murderous crossfire to give Twitty a shot of morphine.
In an attempt to reduce the incoming volume of fire, the two pilots stopped shooting at the enemy after Twitty was hit. By Shropshire’s estimate they were drawing four times more fire than they could dish out, and their carbines didn’t have the range in such open terrain to be effective. Their ploy didn’t work.
The mini-Alamo that Shropshire’s glider had become was a study in handling fear. Being shot at from every direction with only a peashooter to defend yourself would terrify any sane person. For Helms it was almost too much to bear, freezing him into inaction. Shropshire, on the other hand, although certain he would be killed, had overcome his fear enough to render first aid to someone in need.
Four Hours of Fury Page 30