Four Hours of Fury

by James M. Fenelon

  Sleep deprivation aside, Brereton must have been pleased. Ridgway had the operation well in hand, the airborne troops had accomplished their mission, and just as important, the press corps was behaving admirably, reporting VARSITY with Brereton’s name at the top of the press release. That positive news coverage was critical to Brereton was made ridiculously clear on D-Day, when he sent an urgent message to Ridgway’s command post at 23:15 requesting an update: “Have not received any copy from correspondents. Can you check the units to which they were attached and find out what has happened? . . . Request you reply immediately.” That Brereton dedicated more diary pages to the performance of embedded reporters than his two airborne divisions confirmed his priorities.

  Before departing back to the peace and quiet of his Parisian HQ, Brereton took a short jeep tour to witness Miley’s advancing glider riders. As the escorting squad of MPs cleared a path through the marching infantry, a dust-covered trooper yelled: “Okay, fellows, unload your rifles, here come the MPs. The war is over. Here comes the big brass!” Unfortunately, the war wasn’t over.

  • • •

  While Brereton had been tossing and turning to the sounds of strafing aircraft and rattling anti-aircraft fire, British General Eric Bols was dispatching patrols from his 6th Airborne’s sector to reconnoiter Phase Line PARIS. They found it lightly held. Ridgway sensed an opportunity to advance aggressively and ordered his legions to “disregard” PARIS and push farther east, “to obtain maximum exploitation with minimum delay.” Miley echoed his commander’s intent, issuing clear instruction for the day: “Advance to Dorsten. This is a pursuit.”

  Miley’s troopers, wanting to maintain their momentum, continued to plunder any form of available transport they could find: horses, carts, wood-burning trucks, cars, bicycles, and in at least one case, a wheelchair. As one observer noted, “Their columns sometimes resembled gypsy caravans.”

  To take advantage of what Montgomery’s Second British Army commander General Miles Dempsey called a German collapse, Miley’s division was split up and attached to units surging up the left flank of the Ruhr’s envelopment. The Thirteeners served as infantry for a British armored brigade, and the Ruffians went to the village of Haltern to relieve another British armored unit, while the glider riders were farmed out to an infantry division. Simultaneously, American units having crossed the Rhine south of Cologne swept up the Ruhr’s right flank as part of the encirclement campaign.

  For Miley’s scattered combat teams, the next several days became a blur of clanking forward on tanks and dismounting to clear out stubborn pockets of resistance. One of the Thirteeners remembered the skirmishes as “sporadic and rang[ing] from several highly intensive, costly encounters to almost unopposed dashes down major highways and roads.”

  The rapid progress, represented by sweeping grease-penciled arrows on map boards, belied a series of nasty scraps. “Moderate resistance” to a general back at HQ was often something quite different to a sergeant and his squad of trigger pullers on the ground. Closing with the enemy to conquer villages and farmhouses still often required spilling blood. And lots of it.

  Private Noah Jones and his platoon of Thirteeners jumped off the tanks to clear out one such enemy position. He recalled, “They [the Germans] were in the woods and when we got there, they really put up a fight. We thought we had them whipped good when we got orders to return to our unit. When we started back, they came out of the woods after us. That was their worst mistake, coming out in the open. We went back and clobbered them good. I think we shot some of them twice to be sure they were dead. We killed all of them. They had decided they wanted to die for Hitler so we gave them the privilege.”

  It was the same all across the front. On March 28, as the glider riders advanced into the village of Lembeck, the lead platoon went to ground under sweeping machine gun fire from two entrenched positions. Sergeant Clinton Hedrick sprung into action, charging the positions while firing his Browning Automatic Rifle from the hip.

  One of Hedrick’s platoon mates described the BAR as “a long, unwieldy weapon, a cross between a rifle and a machine gun, highly effective, but designed to rest on a bi-pod and be fired from ground position.” Hedrick, a lanky twenty-six-year-old, preferred to wield it like a submachine gun. He knew his business; he’d enlisted in 1940 and had been fighting since 1942, when he landed in North Africa. VARSITY was his second glider assault, having flown into Southern France before being reassigned to the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment for the Battle of the Bulge.

  Hedrick’s platoon was reorganizing when six well-armed Germans attempted to flank them. Hedrick again leveled his automatic rifle and cut them all down with a twenty-round burst. Wanting to avoid a direct attack, he led his squad in a sweeping maneuver to get around the enemy positions. Hedrick’s squad, according to one witness, flushed more than a hundred of the enemy before them.

  The aggressive assault was typical of Hedrick, who was known for plunging forward. When asked why he never took cover, he replied, “It makes no difference. I’m six feet standing up and lying down. If I’m going to get it, I’m going to get it.”

  The Germans fell back as the glider riders advanced. They retreated through the grand portico of Lembeck Castle, sprinting across its low stone bridge over the wide moat. Hedrick, well in front, led a handful of troopers in pursuit.

  A German with his hands up waited for the Americans inside the gatehouse. He said the garrison wanted to surrender. Hedrick, with four troopers close on his heels, entered the courtyard to accept the surrender. An explosion ripped through Hedrick, tossing him like rag doll against the wall. A German self-propelled gun idling in the courtyard blasted at the Americans. Though he was badly wounded, Hedrick held his ground in the sally port, belting out suppressing fire and urging his men to withdraw.

  When the glider riders rallied to counterattack back across the moat, they discovered that Hedrick had succumbed to his wounds. Hedrick’s father was later presented his son’s posthumous Medal of Honor. For those at the tip of the spear, the end of the war was still a hazy concept. In the month of April 1945 the Americans suffered 10,677 killed in action—almost the same butcher’s bill as June 1944.

  • • •

  Miley’s division was reunited two days later to seize Münster. On the outskirts of town, a Panzerfaust streaked out of the dark, detonating into the tank on which Texan Lendy McDonald was riding. He was blasted off the tank and collapsed into a heap. His body lay in the mud until several of his comrades dragged it clear of oncoming tanks. The men left the body there, figuring a Graves Registration team would be along to collect it later. Fortunately, the assessment of McDonald’s demise proved premature. He awoke some sixteen hours later in a hospital, unable to speak and with his two legs and right arm paralyzed. That was the end of the war for McDonald. He’d spend the next eight months in Army hospitals before making his recovery.

  Münster was taken on the third of April. Thad Blanchard, leading his squad across a bridge into the city, was almost killed by a thirteen-year-old Hitler Youth member sniping from a church steeple. The Ruffians’ commander, Edson Raff, had his own close call when a dud artillery shell landed just a few feet from where he stood. Raff and his bodyguard had hightailed it by the time the following three rounds hit.

  As Miley’s combat teams rambled up the left flank of the encirclement to take the industrial cities of Mülheim, Duisburg, and Werden, Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps were going the opposite direction; they’d been relieved on the morning of March 30. With the reassignment of the two airborne divisions, Ridgway’s HQ staff began their trek back to Épernay. The 300-mile journey took over twelve hours by jeep due to congestion and poor road conditions.

  Tagging along were the OSS agents of Team Algonquin. The rapid advance made further infiltration attempts impractical; they simply couldn’t get out in front fast enough to be of use. Team Alsace had been found refusing to leave the DZ, and Team Poissy had returned on the afternoon of March 27, aft
er attempting their second infiltration through Wesel. After several close calls, culminating in artillery shrapnel mangling their radio, they returned to friendly lines. Helmut Steltermann had been evacuated to a hospital in Paris due to his infected wounds. There, wrapped in bandages and in between surgeries, he dictated a letter to his fiancée: “Here I am—happy and well, waiting to be sewn up. I’m walking now. I think a few pieces of shrapnel must still be taken out and then I’m all set. The Doc said I’ll be out in 2 weeks so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. . . . The rest I’ll tell you personally. That is if you still think the same of me now that I’m air-conditioned . . .”

  • • •

  The speed at which the Allies were slicing across Germany also put the First Allied Airborne Army out of business. The momentum was such that ground commanders were unwilling to wait days for Brereton to marshal his air armada. But Ridgway and his XVIII Airborne Corps were back in the war soon enough. The five divisions under Ridgway’s charge became part of the effort to destroy the German forces occupying what was now called the Ruhr Pocket—the 4,000 square miles of surrounded industrial cities. The Allies had closed the noose on April 12. Ridgway’s corps attacked north into the Pocket while other corps crashed in from the flanks. Ridgway later described the next eight days of combat as a “meat-grinder.”

  Certainly, the fight was stiffer than anyone had anticipated. Intelligence officers estimated the Pocket contained 150,000 enemy troops—far fewer than was the actual case. When it was over, Ridgway’s corps alone had bagged 160,892 prisoners, with the total number at more than 300,000. More poignant was the liberation of over 200,000 slave laborers and 5,639 Allied POWs.

  At the end of April, despite rumors of a jump into Berlin, the troopers of the 17th were relieved from the front and sent to occupy the area surrounding Duisburg, a mere fifteen miles upstream from Wesel, where their journey into the Reich had begun. There they finished out the war as occupation troops, policing and providing local governance functions.

  In several of the villages, Miley’s paratroopers found local dentists willing to put their skills to work in exchange for liberated Reichsmarks. The troopers waited patiently while the dentists drilled small holes in their jump wings, allowing them to attach the much-revered bronze star signifying a combat jump. The troopers of the 17th Airborne were now counted as part of a unique, elite fraternity.

  • • •

  Downstream, the VARSITY battlefields were still littered with crashed gliders, downed aircraft, charred panzers, destroyed anti-aircraft guns, scorched homes, rotting livestock, and dead bodies.

  Glider recovery had started almost immediately. GIs sent to prevent further vandalism discovered most of the instruments had already been stripped. The recovery rate was worse than “even the most conservative estimates.” Of the 889 American CG-4A gliders that had made it over the Rhine River, only 148 were structurally sound enough for recovery; of the 416 British gliders, 24 could be salvaged. Quartermaster units scoured fields and wrecks for whatever could be reclaimed, filling 47 cargo trucks and 30 trailers with instruments, tires, wheel assemblies, wireless sets, and towropes.

  Civilians had been scrounging too. Most of the parachutes had disappeared before they could be recovered; meanwhile, farmers used glider wheels on their carts and mended fences with plywood glider spars.

  Families returned to find their homes at best pockmarked by bullets, or at worst burned to the ground. One farmer found a grisly scene in his basement: several dead Wehrmacht soldiers, including a gruesome corpse with his jaw torn off by shrapnel and his ring finger cut off by a souvenir hunter.

  The Allies had started collecting and evacuating their dead three days after the drop across the Rhine. Over the next several days they recovered hundreds of American, British, and German dead. But many Wehrmacht and civilian bodies were left for the local authorities to deal with. The dead had been buried where they lay until they could be formally processed for proper identification. Finding wood for crosses was next to impossible due to the demands of postwar reconstruction. Count Bolko Graf von Stolberg-Wernigerode, the owner of Diersfordt Castle, donated land for a cemetery, which is now the final resting place for 532 German soldiers, including 159 known but to God.

  Tragedy continued to plague the farmers even after the guns had stopped. One child lost his hand when playing with a discarded detonator. Another was killed digging through a pile of unexploded ordnance. The massive blast disintegrated the youngster instantly and blew out surrounding windows for several hundred yards.

  • • •

  Troopers of the 17th Airborne were relieved from occupational duty in mid-June, more than a month after the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. General Bud Miley’s division was then converted to a paper organization, a holding unit, for the transfer of airborne troops back to the zone of the interior—the United States.

  GIs were sent home based on a point system that tallied time in service, days in combat, and medals earned. With the exception of veterans in the Ruffians’ 507th PIR, who’d been overseas since 1943 and had jumped into Normandy, the majority of Miley’s men were shy of the requisite points. They were transferred out to other airborne divisions for continued occupational duty, while men with enough points transferred in to sail home.

  Miley’s troopers were scattered far and wide, and wherever they were sent, many went alone. Lynn Aas, the trooper who’d taught himself to hate by kicking frozen German corpses, was one such lonely case. His platoon of close to fifty men walked out of the Bulge as an understrength squad, five strong. Of those five, John Madoni was killed in VARSITY, William Simington was wounded in his glider by shrapnel, Richard Elzey lost a leg in Germany, and Aas himself was wounded on March 25. The only original member of their platoon to survive the war unscathed was Private William Mincks. Aas described him as “a Missouri hillbilly who could neither read nor write, the world’s worst garrison soldier, but the most reliable in the field of combat. I shared my last foxhole with him.”

  Lieutenant Frank Dillon, along with many others, was transferred to the 82nd Airborne in Berlin. Thad Blanchard was among those sent to the 101st Airborne. Dozens were sent to the 13th Airborne Division for redeployment to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. On August 15, 1945, these men were sailing to New York when the Japanese announced their surrender. The whoops of relief most certainly could have been heard for miles.

  • • •

  After two and a half years of existence, the 17th Airborne Division was deactivated on September 16, 1945, having been credited with sixty-six days of combat in three campaigns: Ardennes, Rhineland, and Central Europe. Scattered across those battlefields were 1,382 dead comrades, temporarily interred in cemeteries that marked the division’s path across Europe. Another 4,713 men had been wounded, and at war’s end a staggering 420 remained classified as missing in action.

  The division’s sixty-six days in combat were storied in comradeship, loss, tragedy, and valor, with troopers earning 4 Congressional Medals of Honor—all posthumously—3 Distinguished Service Medals, 43 Silver Stars, and more than 6,200 Purple Hearts.

  The final resting place for 279 of Miley’s troopers is the Margraten Cemetery in the Netherlands. One of several postwar cemeteries established in Europe, the 65.5 acres contain the graves of 8,301 American dead and a memorial for 1,722 missing. Each headstone, each name, represents a uniquely unfulfilled life of hopes and dreams that was cut short in the battle to stop the Third Reich. Among those buried in Europe is Clyde Haney, whose wife, not yet knowing of her husband’s death, wrote to him on March 25, 1945:

  I have heard the reports on the radio with commentators that were right with the Gliders, & gave a complete description of them landing on the east side of the Rhine. Even told how some of the Gliders crashed. You could even hear the motors of the planes. The radio commentators say that the soldiers of the Glider Infantry are “the finest fighting men of the war.” I haven’t had any mail from you for nearly 2 weeks now, I
think they must be holding it up for awhile while this big push across the Rhine is going on. I sort of wonder if this war in Germany won’t be over by the 23rd of April! What an anniversary that would be for us, darling.

  She learned of her husband’s death on April 6, 1945, via an official government telegram. Her unread letter was returned with “Deceased” scribbled across the envelope.

  There would be no fifth wedding anniversary celebration.

  EPILOGUE

  While America’s 17th Airborne Division played a crucial role in VARSITY, so too did the British 6th Airborne Division, which seized the village of Hamminkeln and repelled German counterattacks in their sector. Equally critical were the glider and troop carrier pilots of both the US Air Force and the RAF who skillfully delivered their cargo into battle.

  The combined effort across multiple branches of two Allied nations made VARSITY the largest single-day airborne mission of World War II. VARSITY’s massive display of power reflected the Allies’ industrial advantage at the time: their combined resources marshaled an air armada of 1,596 transports, 1,348 gliders, and 240 B-24 bombers to deliver 19,782 armed men, 133 howitzers, and well over 1,800 tons of ammunition, medical supplies, gasoline, and communications equipment.

  All arrived roughly on target, within four hours.

  The ambition, scope, and execution of Operation VARSITY remains unparalleled in the annals of warfare. The invasion was the culmination of Allied airborne experience earned the hard way over the previous three years. The Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, later declared VARSITY the “most successful airborne operation carried out to date.”

  But kicking in the door of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich exacted a steep price. The 17th Airborne Division sustained 1,307 casualties, including 430 killed in action. British airborne troops suffered another 347 dead, 731 wounded, and dozens missing. The glider pilots of both nations were also hard hit: British casualties in this group included 38 killed and 77 wounded while the American losses stood at 35 dead and 106 wounded. The power aircrews—pilots, navigators, crew chiefs, and radio operators—of the parachute transports and glider tugs also paid a price: the US Air Force totaled 41 such personnel killed, 316 wounded, and 163 missing; the RAF added another 23 dead. The B-24 crews of the Eighth Air Force, flying in on the tail end of the armada, were even more badly mauled: 109 bomber personnel were killed and dozens more wounded.