CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BY SEPTEMBER 17, 1944, ED ALBERS FELT FULLY INTEGRATED into Joe's old company, what was left of I Company after Normandy. Duber was still around, and though his crossbow was never fired in France, he continued to practice. One day he took aim at a royal oak that shaded the bus stop in Rams-bury. The bolt shattered bark, shaking the tree as well as the folks waiting for a bus. This time Duber was identified, for there were no other crossbowmen of any nationality in the county. His weapon was confiscated, the only instance Albers can remember of Duber being punished for anything. A prewar army man, thirty-eight years old when he became Airborne, Duber had the guile to disappear for a whole day undetected. Albers wondered how he had done in Normandy. The originals said fine: Duber dodged and defied the Germans as easily as he had his officers.
Third Battalion officers now included the recently promoted CO, Major Shettle, who had saved the day on D+1 by seizing and holding the Douve bridges with fewer than a hundred men. Commanding I Company was Captain Fred Anderson, a platoon leader in Normandy. His family, like Wolverton's, resided in Charlotte, North Carolina. That state was overrepresented in the Airborne, probably because it had been born there and the first wave of volunteeers were local. The Anderson and Wolverton families didn't know each other, but at war's end Anderson paid a call of respect to Wolverton's widow, a visit that led to their marriage.
Albers's platoon sergeant was the redoubtable Alex Engel-brecht from Syracuse, New York. Like the Beyrle family, his had spoken German at home, and he reveled in pouring profanities on SS POWs in their vernacular. Albers's squad leader was Ted Dziepak, a Polish-American from Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Not that there was ever much question, but Dziepak didn't have to be told what he was fighting for.
Fighting spirit was quiescent among the Screaming Eagles during the latter days of summer. The pre-D Day “can't wait to drop on the Wehrmacht” attitude had been replaced by memories from the invasion. New men like Albers soon comprehended from the veterans that Airborne recruiting posters delivered one message, combat quite another. Consequently, the troopers would get ready but were not raring to jump back into the fight. This was a temperament that somewhat discomfited hard-charging commanders like Sink, but they understood and in various degrees felt it themselves.
So the 101st cheered on Patton's Third Army as it drove across France, overrunning one planned Airborne objective after another. Sixteen division-size drops were planned, several to reach the stage where jumpers went into their marshaling area only hours from enplaning, but each time Patton beat them to the drop zones. The Screaming Eagles were like pinch hitters watching the regular lineup run up the score: Go, team! We're ready if needed but won't be disappointed if you keep circling the bases.
While the troopers waited to return to action, decorations for feats in Normandy came down. Three Blues received the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism: Captain Shettle, Donald Zahn and George Montilio. The latter two crossed the Douve under fire and held off a company-size counterattack. There was a glitch in Zahn's paperwork: his medal had not yet been fully processed before the ceremony at which General Omar Bradley presented the decorations. As soon as Montilio received his DSC he took it off, refusing to wear it till Zahn got one, which he consequently did, along with a battlefield commission. Montilio was promoted to sergeant, but in late April 1945 he became one of the last Screaming Eagles to be killed in action.
The third Currahee to win the DSC was Private Lee Rogers, a tree-topper from Aberdeen, Washington, who would become famous as “Ike's corporal.” With the 506th formed up on Wiltshire County's most impressive parade ground, Rogers's feat was read out by Sink's adjutant. Even in reserved official language the citation was awesome: how the private, after his leaders were killed, had rallied a few men, leading them to destroy a machine-gun nest and a score of Falls chirmjagers.
Eisenhower listened with eyes that began to glisten, attached the medal on Rogers's jacket, then shook his hand more slowly than he had those of the other heroes. As Rogers returned to ranks, Ike turned to General Taylor and asked softly why such an intrepid leader was no more than a buck private. Would Taylor permit the supreme Allied commander to promote Rogers and do it on the spot? Taylor's answer was of course affirmative, so Rogers marched away from the parade ground with the DSC and two more stripes than he had worn.
Sink, never one to shun publicity for his Currahees, pinned new chevrons on Rogers in front of the press. Soon pictures appeared in Yank and Stars & Stripes as well as stateside newspapers, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Rogers's fame, alas, then plummeted to infamy. A superb performer in combat, he was equally inept in garrison and soon took leave of it without authorization to celebrate his uniquely bestowed rank. He did so in London pubs, where praise and pints went to his head. Leg MPs returned him to regimental control— disheveled, disreputable, and reeking of Guinness.
Sink was away when Rogers was hauled in. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Chase, the deputy commander, took one sniff and look at yesterday's hero, then demoted Rogers to buck private as summarily as Ike had promoted him. When Chase briefed the CO on this outcome, Sink pushed back his hat, lit a cigarette, and exhaled with exasperation.
“Charley, you can't bust Ike's own corporal!” To which Chase replied with dignity, “Sir, I wasn't aware that General Eisenhower intended for the rank to be hereditary.”
Taylor related Rogers's volatile rise and fall to Ike, who reddened with laughter, promising to never again intervene in promotions. Rogers, perhaps sobered by his vicissitudes, jumped back into the fight to rise from buck private to buck sergeant, a rank he earned and kept in what Screaming Eagles remembered as Holland.
THE NAME GIVEN TO the second of the 101st's three great rendezvous with destiny was a misnomer. Holland is not the province of the Netherlands the Screaming Eagles dropped on as part of history's biggest airborne operation—that province is actually North Brabant. Holland is up around Amsterdam and Rotterdam, north of the Rhine and near its mouth.* The objective of benignly named Operation Market-Garden was to establish a bridgehead on the north bank, not at its estuary but at the industrial city of Arnhem, where there was a bridge, one that would become known as “too far.”
Blue chips were again on the table, almost as much so as on D Day. A mighty Airborne formation had been assembled the largest of all time, named the First Allied Airborne Army and consisting of the U.S. 101st, 82nd, and 17th Airborne Divisions, the British 1st (“Red Devils”) and 6th Airborne Divisions, plus an air-transported infantry division, along with the Polish Parachute Brigade. Despite a huge airlift capability, not all those units could be dropped on the enemy at one time; there simply were not enough transports in the world.
Ironically and increasingly, Eisenhower was fast running out of manpower on the ground while at the same time holding this vastly potent force of elite warriors ready to alight into the fight. There had been nowhere for them to attack while Patton galloped across France, but then his and all five Allied armies dashed like impotent waves against the breakwater of the Siegfried Line, the most formidable fortification in the world. It was a stalemate, and perhaps even trench warfare loomed unless Eisenhower came up with a good idea for how to commit the First Allied Airborne Army, ideally to vertically envelop the Siegfried Line.
The man whose idea prevailed was Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of Alamein. He did so over the customary fury of his inveterate rival, General George Patton, for if Monty got the First Allied Airborne Army, with it would go resources craved elsewhere, everywhere along the Western Front. Nevertheless, Ike turned to Montgomery, asking for a plan that featured imagination and daring, even though they were not characteristic of the field marshal's generalship.
An imaginatively daring plan was indeed produced. An “airborne carpet” was the Market half of it, landings to secure vital portions of the highway running from Monty's front lines on the Belgian border to Arnhem. The Garden half called for a powerful British armor corps to thrust up the corridor created by the Airborne and pile into the Arnhem bridgehead over the Rhine, flank the Siegfried Line, and open Germany's guts. The air-land jab was to strike with such surprise that Rundstedt would not have time to shift reinforcements into the Netherlands, apparently the least threatened sector of the Western Front.
Sounded good. Intelligence estimates were that the Germans had no more than a hundred tanks in all the Netherlands. Then by unhappy happenstance the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, Rundstedt's best, began regrouping and refitting around Arnhem after desperate fighting in France. Their addition to the equation was detected by Ike's code breakers and the ominous information passed along to Montgomery with a strong inference that changes to Market-Garden plans were called for, changes that represented only a theo-retical possibility of compromising “Ultra” intercepts, the basis for the Allied ability to read the Wehrmacht's radio messages coded by Enigma machines. Perhaps that remote possibility—even after the war Montgomery never revealed his reasons—is why he kept such utterly vital information to himself, though nothing is more important to Airborne planners than the presence of enemy tanks. Tanks are to paratroopers as dogs are to cats, as cats are to mice.
AFTER so MANY CANCELLATIONS and postponements I Company finally had a firm objective to study in detail. Originals were pleased by aerial photos showing expansive, perfectly flat drop zones, heartened that the drop would be in daylight. If only the fornicating pilots would fly straight and turn on the green light at jump speed, Blues would do the rest. This was the big-time test for rookies like Albers who now made up nearly half of the regiment. They looked to the originals but in order to show them. Albers was tired of hearing about Toc-coa, what real Airborne training had been like. The purpose of training is performance. Let's go out and we'll show you how we perform.
The Currahee yearbook put the mission this way, probably paraphrasing Sink, who recalled that this was September and football season had begun back in the States:
Take cities and bridges and you have the road. Fold the hostiles (Sink's terms for the Germans) back from that road— the Eindhoven-Arnhem road—and there's a touchdown pass thrown across the Rhine. You're running interference for the British ball carrier. It's the big game, the biggest of the season. The Airborne Associates (a derisive term for the 82nd whose shoulder patch is AA) are to our north and so are the British 1st Airborne and the Polish Parachute Brigade. The whole world is in the grandstands. Go to it, throw your blocks, get that ball carrier into the end zone.
With such an exhortation Currahees put on their game faces, but there was no camouflage this time, no Mohawks, no war dance. Just get on with the job—it may be the last one. Such was the thinking in the 101st, but there was something providentially added for the Blues as they waited for transportation to the marshaling area. A truck rolled up, and two troopers alighted. They were Jim Sheeran and Bernie Rainwater of I Company, captured in Normandy, paraded by the Nazis in Paris, but successful escapees who pried open the grille of their forty-or-eight and subsequently reached Pat-ton's forces. Now here they were, hours before the 101st's takeoff for Market.
There was no hesitation for Sheeran. Just give him a weapon; he was ready to jump back into the fight—even though he and Rainwater were entitled to thirty days' leave in the States before their status was resolved. Through a curious interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, that status presented a poison pill for any escaped POW who went on to fight against former captors. If recaptured by the Germans, both could be legally executed as spies because they presumably had seen German installations and deployments the way a spy would. So U.S. Army policy was that if a POW escaped from the Germans, in the unlikely event he wanted to go back to war, it would have to be against the Japanese!
Raised not far from Toccoa, Rainwater was a Currahee through and through, more so than any other man in the regiment by reason of his Cherokee blood. His escape with Sheeran had been stupefying. Sheeran spoke French and was costumed by the FFI as a Frenchman. Rainwater had to impersonate an Algerian, a mute, retarded Algerian, in Sheeran's charge. By hair-raising, hairbreadth evasions they came out of France together, and together they rejoined the Blues.
In Normandy they had been in Anderson's platoon. Now I Company's commander, Anderson, exhorted, C'mon, Bernie, you're not gonna get captured again. I guarantee it, guarantee it, Goddammit. Listen, I'll make you the company runner (courier between company HQ and the platoon leaders). Before you could be captured they'd have to get me first. You think that's gonna happen? Hell no, no way—not in Item Company. So you're with us, okay?
Not quite. As further persuasion the two celebrities were taken to battalion HQ, where Sheeran was promoted to buck sergeant and made a squad leader on the spot. Now, how'bout you, Bernie? Major Shettle put the question, an amazing question to which no sane civilian would have replied affirmatively. Rainwater's buddies like Engelbrecht and Dziepak offered an answer: come with us. He did. He was a Currahee. Albers was in awe, not so much at the time but months later after reflecting on what was to come on Dutch and Belgian battlefields. Sheeran and Rainwater didn't have to be burned in those crucibles—as heroes already they could have gone home, probably for the rest of the war—but an irresistible magnetism, overcoming the longing for family in America, drew them back to their army family. It was a tribute to both families.
At midmorning on the beautifully sunny Sunday of September 17, the 101st, less sleep-deprived than before D Night, took off for its part in Operation Market-Garden. So vast was this aerial armada that while the first troopers spilled out over the Netherlands the last had not departed from England. Captain Anderson, leading a stick that included Albers and Sheeran, was not about to tolerate a repetition of Normandy's unimaginable dispersion. Drawing his .45, he entered the C-47's cockpit, piloted by a gum-chewing Long Islander who looked fresh out of high school. If you miss the DZ, Anderson advised twirling his pistol, someone on this plane is going to come back and find you.
The pilot was nonplussed. “Captain,” he said, hardly glancing at the weapon, “we're going to put your whole company on a DZ the size of a football field.”
“Make it within the twenty-yard lines.”
This rendezvous with destiny was in full daylight. Albers gazed down on Montgomery's assembling formations in Belgium, poised and timed to crash north on Hell's Highway, pennants snapping in the wind, as armor troops waved to parachute and glider legions passing low overhead. At no other time in the war was there such a coordinated armor-airborne assault. The Germans executed plans to delay the British through a series of canals and torpid rivers, barriers to the Rhine some sixty miles north. What the Wehrmacht was not ready for was a vertical invasion to span those barriers by capturing existing bridges intact, and that is what made the saga of Market-Garden a story of bridges held and lost, captured and recaptured.
Anderson was impatient to inform the krauts that Screaming Eagle wrath was upon them again. He staggered to the howling door of the C-47, shook his fist, and screamed imprecations on the enemy below—whose response was flak bursts that drove him back to his bucket seat. Flak was ignored by the pilots and no evasive action was taken as the transports flew straight, true, and in formation.
Fulfilling the promise of Anderson's pilot, the brunt of the 506th dropped on a rectangular DZ about a half mile long by a quarter mile wide. Jump altitude was 600 feet, exit speed a mild 150 knots. The sky blossomed with multicolored parachutes, white for troopers, a whole spectrum designating loads like a howitzer or medical supplies. Dribbling German tracers added more color. Albers saw jumpers tuck their knees to present less of a target. A good idea—why hadn't someone told him that in England? Eyes wide open before his chute opened, he saw a chunk of metal flapping from the tail of his C-47, the only sign of damage. There had been fear that the Luftwaffe would take to the sky, but not a single German fighter plane contested the 101st's jump. With his leg bag full of machine-gun ammo and his gas-mask case full of candy, Albers landed surely and popped open the harness with a quick-release device (developed from a lesson learned in Normandy where jumpers used knives to cut open their harnesses—and in the dark and haste sometimes cut off then-thumbs).
The DZ swarmed with troopers assembling like chicks in a rookery, distinguishing their mother's call within a cacophony. Originals glanced at one another and nodded: hey, this plan is working, hell, better than any training exercise. That too was General Taylor's impression, for the drop of 6,800 Screaming Eagles produced only 2 percent casualties and an amazingly low 5 percent loss of equipment (better than jumps in England). His regiments set off for their objectives with confidence from evidence that this landing was the antithesis of Normandy.
Not that there was no mixture of units. Ed Manley of the 502nd found himself on the 506th's drop zone in a unique predicament. His legs were knee-deep in soft earth, while his canopy hovered overhead like an umbrella. Because of rare air currents it would not deflate, so there he stood suspended as the DZ emptied. Finally an artillery concussion knocked over his chute and he collapsed just as Taylor came striding by, map cases in hand.
“Don't you have a job today, trooper?” he asked Manley, still sprawled on the ground.
“General, the first sergeant said if I made it down okay, I could take the rest of the day off.”
Taylor and his staff were staggering with laughter as they caught up with Sink, whose first task was to speed about a mile south, through the neatly tended Zonsche Forest, to the little town of Zon, where a bridge spans the Wilhelmina Canal, a placid, banked waterway so narrow that barges passing in opposite directions almost scrape each other. This was the essential first crossing for British armor to meet the Market-Garden schedule. Sink was on the edge of the DZ to start the timetable tolling. As soon as each squad assembled he shoved it south. “Minutes count, men!” he shouted after them. “Minutes count!” For originals like Engelbrecht and Dziepak, memories went back to the Atlanta-Fort Benning forced march and its purpose of getting to an objective first with the most.
They reached it while the Germans were still pulling up their pants. Sink's Second and Third Battalions surged through and around Zon, which was defended by an 88 emplacement located for antiaircraft purposes. Another 88, its tube lowered for ground action, zeroed in on First Battalion. Starting the battle was the dry cough of the high-velocity flat-trajectory 8 8, a familiar sound for Normandy vets. The war was on again after a two-month leave, and this time it was a lot better: they were all together following the drop, with the Dutch underground surfacing like dragon's teeth. A man with an orange armband appeared beside Shettle and offered to guide his attack around the most threatening German position. Away they went on the double. At a corner the Dutchman halted to advise that the target was just beyond the next bend. Fine, said Shettle; lead on. For closer guidance there were the Dutch at high windows, pointing with their hands and holding up fingers to indicate the number of Germans ahead. The Blues felt like a posse about to close in on outlaws.
Albers remembers the Dutch as bird dogs on a duck hunt. After they got the troopers in position, all there was to do was look down the sights and cut loose. It wasn't a duck shoot— the ducks shot back—but that was okay; let 'em. For Albers it was dangerous fun, shooting it out against Deutschen the Dutch hated, and doing what he had been trained to do. That was satisfying, gratifying, realizing that those in charge knew some practical applications of training. For the originals it was all business, but they understood how Albers was feeling.
Aided immeasurably by the Dutch, within fifteen minutes the Currahees destroyed both 88s, killed thirteen Germans, captured forty-one, and rushed the Zon bridge—only to have it blow up in their faces. No army planned better than the Wehrmacht; the bridge had been prewired in the event of a British surge from Belgium just fifteen miles away.
That surge was coming, the Garden armor scheduled to meet the Market airborne near Eindhoven, the major city in the southern part of the Netherlands. The 101st had a plan to accomplish that even if the Zon bridge was blown. An engineer company that had jumped with the Currahees went to work and within an hour fashioned a footbridge that could bear a few men at a time. Taylor radioed the British to put a folding bridge among the first vehicles in their column. German planning could be thwarted by farsighted counterplans. And improvisations. “General Taylor,” Sink proposed, his helmet askew, “we're going to sweep east and west on the canal and look for barges.” Two big barges side by side would create excellent pontoons for a formidable bridge. But no barges were found floating. Allied air strikes had sunk them all.
During the night of September 17,101st engineers labored as Sink dribbled all his Currahees over the footbridge. Third Battalion was the last across, sprawling in irrigation ditches as they watched a fireglow of shells in dark skies. The dawn, they were warned, would start a regimental attack on Eindhoven. Remembering Carentan, originals were glum about the next day's prospects. Eindhoven was a city, a big city (population 100,000), its every building a potential fortress for defenders. World War IFs costliest battles were fought within cities. Albers was advised to get some extra grenades, the weapon of choice in urban fighting.
But he and innumerable Screaming Eagles were saved from that because of German planning, which rightly assumed that the Dutch would rise up in their cities and draw major elements of the Wehrmacht into an urban quagmire (as occurred in the Warsaw uprising). General Student, the major commander opposing the 101st, therefore kept his scant forces out of Eindhoven, kept them hovering to cut Hell's Highway in the countryside. Sink's orders for September 18 were don't spend any time killing hostiles, just get through Eindhoven and link up with the Brits. That's our job; don't forget it for a second.
What Albers remembers is how much the Dutch wanted to get rid of the Germans.* The Eindhoveners came out of houses and fell on their knees in prayer and thanks. He was darting across a street when a barrage of mortars bracketed his squad. Suddenly men with orange armbands tackled him and covered him with their bodies. When the shelling stopped they let him up. He asked what the hell they were doing. In broken English one of them said Albers was a soldier fighting the Germans. Protecting him was the best way to help get rid ofthem.
Dutch collaborators and Nazi sympathizers were also brought to reckoning, run out of town with their heads crudely and cruelly shaved, run north where their marks of shame would be further reviled by liberated countrymen. Eindhoven was the first Dutch city to be freed and jubilation became a serious problem for Sink as he tried to set up defenses and send out patrols to contact the British. Liberation joy was expressed in the downing of limitless quantities of schnapps and excellent beer as well as in showers of apples—at first ducked by troopers because they looked like hand grenades. Where German resistance had hardly slowed Sink's troops, Dutch gratitude and hospitality did.
The Germans' surprise had been utter. Whatever its local setbacks, Market-Garden was on track though twenty-four hours behind schedule because of coordination glitches between American and British forces such as planned radio frequencies that did not mesh. The sound of tanks, usually dreaded by paratroopers, was that of British armor rumbling north incessantly. Albers heard it during his shift on an outpost, and when he returned for another shift after two hours' sleep the sound had not changed. It carried up through Zon, on to St. Oedenrode, then Veghel, to pass into 82nd territory. The 101st's first mission, to open the corridor, had been accomplished. Now came the second: to protect it from counterattacks as the Germans shook off their surprise. A brigade of panzer grenadiers, recently arrived from Poland, nearly overran the 101st's division CR Currahees from Eindhoven were called north to help beat them back.
I Company was similarly detached to meet a threat from the German border less than thirty miles away. “The krauts have set up a roadblock,” Captain Anderson told his platoon leaders. “We're going to eliminate it.” It was difficult to assemble I Company for this mission, as so many were in the embrace of Eindhoven's ardent gratitude. Albers had never seen the originals so pissed, especially Duber, who had met a woman he called “the countess,” and was about to be married by a judge from the underground. All of I Company was pissed. No firefights or even fire could be heard but loading on full packs and extra ammo, they obeyed orders to march out of the festive city into the night. Then behind them Eindhoven lit up like flashbulbs. The Luftwaffe had slipped through, to kill thousands of civilians in a raid of terror and retaliation for Dutch joy. Duber's countess was among the missing.
GENERAL TAYLOR COMPARED the 101st's mission to the U.S. cavalry defending a railroad in Indian country. Except that the division had no horses. Between villages and bridges the Screaming Eagles rushed in “brown leather personnel carriers,” clashing with parties of Indians who probed gaps in a fifty-mile periphery, defended by about a hundred troopers per mile. At first the Currahees encountered mostly rear-echelon Germans with little combat ability. This was one of the assumptions of the Market plan—that against ferocious paratroopers, logistical personnel of the Wehrmacht would not last long. September 17-19 was pretty much a rout for Currahees. The British ball carrier looked to be heading directly for the end zone.
A battalion of Red Devils had seized the key Arnhem bridge but were encircled in house-to-house, hand-to-hand combat. They would be succored only if British armor could drive on to the bridgehead, the final and vital objective of Market-Garden. In tactical command to prevent his linkup was Army Group B commanded by Field Marshal Walther Model, as ardent a Lutheran as he was a Nazi, called “Der Fuhrer's fireman” for his genius in improvisation while plugging huge holes in the Eastern Front during 1942-1943. He was the man for the job in the Netherlands if the job could be done. To help him, Rundstedt pushed every resource on the Western Front to Army Group B. The campaign then boiled down to which side brought in the most reinforcements first.
The advantage seemed to be with the Allies, who when not grounded by days of extraordinarily bad weather could deliver soldiers and supplies by parachute and glider. The Luftwaffe tried to intervene but was held off by swarms of fighter planes. Defending transports, however, diverted Jabosfrom overwhelming attacks against ground targets of the kind they had experienced in Normandy. This allowed Model to maneuver forces to cut the corridor. He moved them by foot, bicycle, horse, rail, boat, truck—anything that could move— wherever he could, preventing British armor from reaching Arnhem before he wiped out the Red Devils. Any German in uniform or who could fit in one was Model's soldier: Luftwaffe ground crews, naval cadets, NCO academy students; even customs agents, Dutch Nazis, and convalescents closed in on the corridor like filings to a bar magnet. They were winnowed by gales of ground fire but sufficiently occupied the 101st and 82nd so that regular Wehrmacht units could concentrate and find openings into Hell's Highway.
Model's deputy, Kurt Student, a Fallschirmjager general, understood the 101st's difficulties. Obviously American artillery that had dominated battlefields in Normandy could not be centralized enough to provide coverage all around the division's perimeter in the Netherlands. He had an additional advantage: a glider had been shot down near his headquarters. Smoldering in the wreckage was a set of plans for how the 101st was to accomplish its mission, so Student had as clear a picture of Market-Garden as Taylor did.
Student's first panzer raid nearly killed Taylor in his CP at Zon. Tiger tanks rolled south, and orange bunting began to disappear in Eindhoven. By September 20, intelligence from the Dutch underground was not so helpful now that the Germans were in constant motion. Even with best guesses about Student's likely objectives, Taylor could not position a reserve force where it could respond to any threatened area. And his reserve was reduced to the division musical band because all four of his regiments were fully engaged and scattered. Never would the Screaming Eagles have to march so far to fight so much.
Urged on by Model, Student struck at Veghel, a small town just north of a significant canal. If the bridge was recaptured or destroyed, the Garden column would halt. Recognizing a major threat, Taylor rushed the entire 506th twenty-two miles north to Uden; Sink and Second Battalion reached Uden, but before the rest of the regiment arrived, panzers attacked from the east and Fallschirmjagers from the west, squarely cutting the corridor. They were dislodged after a brawl of twenty-four hours. Prisoners were taken on both sides. Colonel Sink and Colonel von der Heydte, commanding the 6th Parachute Regiment, wryly realized that they were up against each other as they had been in Normandy, so hereafter there would be a heavyweight fight. The ground was flat, silhouettes high, trees and barns prized for observation. Both regiments were good at this sort of whirligig warfare, circling in and around each other while British armor on the corridor awaited the outcome.
“Jumpin' Joe,” Camp Mackall, North Carolina, 1943. As an expert parachutist, he should have had his legs together. (Joe Beyrle)
Joe in front of his tar-paper barracks (built by the Civilian Conservation Corps) at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, 1942. (Joe Beyrle)
Top deck of the HMS Samaria as it crossed the Atlantic in September 1943. (U.S. Army)
Joe's cohort in I Company, England, 1944. His best buddies, Orv Vanderpool (top, second from left) and Jack Bray (bottom, second from left), were killed in the same plane on D Night. Two others in this group also died during the war. (Joe Beyrle)
Sergeant Barron Duber, I Company's master scrounger of illicit fish, game, and brandy. (Joe Beyrle)
Currahees, faces blackened with charcoal, about to take off on D Night. Draped over his reserve chute, the trooper on the right has a coiled rope to help him descend if he lands in a tree. (U.S. Army)
The church in St. Come-du-Mont where Joe landed on D Night. He slid down the long pitch (center left) into the small cemetery. The top of the steeple, used by Germans for observation and antiaircraft fire, was subsequently destroyed by American shelling. (Joe Beyrle)
Highway 13 in St. Come-du-Mont, where Joe flung grenades at a group of Germans on D Day. (Joe Beyrle)
Paratroopers advancing in Normandy. (U.S. Army)
Exhausted Screaming Eagles take a break by a hedgerow on D+2. (Jack Schaffer)
Joe with JoAnne, his wife, at the monument in Normandy where he was “buried” in 1944. (Joe Beyrle)
The obituary photo of Joe that appeared in the Muskegon Chronicle, September 1944. (Muskegon Chronicle)
A Nazi propaganda photo that humiliated American POWs in Paris, July 1944. Joe is second from the right.
The Germans' mug shot of Joe, with his kriege number, when he was first registered at Stalag XII-A.
Typical items in an American Red Cross parcel for POWs. (American Red Cross)
A kriege barters with a German guard. This remarkable picture was taken by Angelo Spinelli, a captured combat photographer who was able to smuggle a camera into Stalag III-B. (Angelo Spinelli)
Ed Albers in 1943. (Ed Albers)
In England, apprehensive Screaming Eagles listen to a briefing for Operation Market-Garden. (U.S. Army)
At a departure airfield for the Market-Garden jump, troopers get a last-minute briefing on what to expect. Censors scratched out Screaming Eagles shoulder patches. (U.S. Army)
Currahees board a C-47 to jump into the Netherlands for Market-Garden. (U.S. Army)
Charlie Eckman (right), who was wounded seventeen times, spars with Denver Madden, who was killed during Market-Garden. (Charlie Eckman)
American wounded in a makeshift aid station, Bastogne, Belgium. (U.S. Army)
The cold, the ruins, the dead of Bastogne. (U.S. Army)
Currahees, upon liberating the Landsberg concentration camp, approach some of the victims. (U.S. Army)
Russian soldiers receiving mail from home, an event that Joe never witnessed and that was probably staged for this photo. The soldier on the right holds a submachine gun like the one issued to Joe. (Novosti)
Waffen SS troops, exhausted from fighting the Red Army. (Imperial War Museum)
Russian troops during house-to-house fighting in Kustrin on the Oder River. The soldier on the left has a flamethrower. (Novosti)
Saint Joseph's convent in Warsaw, where Joe took refuge in 1945. He took this photo in 1989, and found the statue of Saint Joseph still pockmarked from World War II. (Joe Beyrle)
The basement of the convent, where the sisters treated his many wounds. (Joe Beyrle)
Joe with two Polish sisters in 1989. (Joe Beyrle)
Liberated krieges, April 1945. (U.S. Army)
I Ex-krieges of the 101st | Airborne were served i chow in April 1945 at | Fort Sheridan, Illinois, . by German POWs, some I of whom had SS tattoos. The result was an international melee in which several Germans were killed with steak knives and cafeteria trays. Joe is the third man from the right. (Daily News)
Joe embraced by his parents in Muskegon, May 1945. (Muskegon Chronicle)
Joe (left) and brother Bill with their mother, shortly after V-E Day. Bill unwittingly covered Joe for two clandestine jumps into France. (Joe Beyrle)
Joe in a convalescent hospital in the summer of 1945. Recuperation from his wartime traumas was erratic. (Joe Beyrle)
Joe in Normandy for the thirtieth anniversary of D Day. (Joe Beyrle)
In the White House Rose Garden, Joe presents Russian president Boris Yeltsin with a D Night cricket. (JoAnne Beyrle)
The Beyrle family, 1994. Seated, left to right: Kathy, Victoria, Jocelyn, Caroline, John, Alison, and Amanda Schugars. Standing, left to right: Christopher, Joe II, Joe III, Joe, JoAnne, Eric Schugars, Julie Schugars, and Jack Schugars. (James F. Keating, Reflections Studio)
As the bushwhacking swirled, after five hours of marching to Veghel, Albers's platoon was in a low crawl through waterlogged meadows, their objective a farmhouse with an overlook of Hell's Highway. He tried the door. It was locked, with no sound from inside except pigs squalling, a good sign to Dziepak: either no one was home, or the Dutch were still there because krauts would have turned those pigs into brat-wurst. Kick in the door, ordered Lieutenant Green, a nonorig-inal.* Dziepak was right, his squad doubly happy because great blocks of aging cheese hung in the kitchen.
There was little time for gorging. From the second floor Green could see burning skeletons of British vehicles. Growling from the west came six German half-tracks. Two disgorged troops then turned south on the road, weaving between wrecks. Green reported this on the radio, while a platoon of'Fallschirm-jagers warily advanced to check out the farmhouse. Green had bad news: no artillery was available; it's just us and them. Dziepak smiled as he set up a machine gun and a surprise for the approaching Germans. He identified the leader, pointed him out to the best marksman in the squad, a rookie who started to lean his rifle on the windowsill before Dziepak jerked him back.
Germans noticed the movement and went to ground as Dziepak's machine gun followed them with fire. Shell casings spurted and rattled around the upstairs room, soon faintly gray with gunsmoke. Outnumbered by the attackers, his squad had protection and a height advantage in the farmhouse, so the firefight devolved into a standoff. Ammo then became Green's main concern. The nearest resupply was a half mile away. “If you ain't got a kraut in your sights, don't shoot,” Dziepak announced, as if his men needed the reminder.
German bullets had been ineffective, but now their mortars ranged in. A scream, and a fragment was buried in Green's thigh. He had to be evacuated and more ammo brought up. The farmhouse fortress kept the Fallschirmjagers at bay while Albers, Dziepak, and Green went out the back door but were spotted. All hit the dirt, the wounded lieutenant dragged by his arms till they finally reached a shallow irrigation ditch.
Behind them the firefight intensified, and by wounding Green the Germans had taken out three men, a situation that caused Dziepak to rejoin his embattled squad. By himself Albers would have to drag Green back the rest of the way. Dziepak's rump disappeared in the grass. Albers looked at Green to explain, but the lieutenant's face was pale and distorted as a Halloween mask. A heavy man, heavy and strong, Green wrapped his arms around Albers's waist while with a swimming motion Albers slowly pulled him across the next field.
Green's arms weakened, and his leg became so bloated that it rose like some grotesque balloon. At a dip in the field Albers loosed the tourniquet, let blood flow till Green blanched silver-white, then retightened it. Albers wallowed on with Green draped on his back. They formed a profile so high that a bullet singed Green just as they reached a drainage ditch. Both men collapsed, one at the end of his strength, the other near the end of his life.
Like angels two medics appeared. While one gave Green first aid, the second dodged away under fire to return with a litter under each arm, assuming both blood-soaked infantrymen had been gravely wounded. Green went off on a litter, out of the war, never to return. After checking Albers, the medics, needed elsewhere, scurried off. He loaded himself with bandoliers and a machine-gun belt. He had crawled back to safety; now he would have to sprint back into danger. Bullets kicked up around him during the chest-heaving run. He burst into the farmhouse as his squad came down the stairs equally winded as incoming mortars exploded on the roof. Thatch ignited and timbers crashed while Dziepak distributed the ammo Albers had delivered. (“Why didn't ya get some grenades, Ed?”) Before the Germans completely surrounded the house, Dziepak's squad shot their way out, herding pigs as they retreated.
THUS ENDED A SUCCESSFUL German snip of the corridor, one to be reversed in a matter of hours, but too late for the Red Devils who expired around Arnhem, still waiting for Montgomery's tanks. Between the Waal and the Rhine, Screaming Eagles were now deployed on a large wedge of land they called the Island, where many of their grimmest Dutch memories were imprinted during seventy-two days, an American record for continuous contact with the Germans.
Albers remembers the Island as a dreary wetland, so sunken that dikes ringed it to hold off two rivers. Across the Rhine the Germans had observation posts overlooking every movement. “So they just plunked us all the time with artillery. That's how General Taylor got hit in the butt. The worst part was trying to keep dry. Dig a foxhole and it filled with water before you put down the shovel. We lost more guys to trench foot than enemy fire. Sort of like World War I.”
The 101st's losses from all causes had been crippling since September 17. Sink was the last regimental commander to have jumped in Normandy. The other two had been either killed or permanently evacuated with wounds. The 506th had lost a third of its officers and a quarter of the enlisted men. Al-bers's rifle squad had but one rifleman, him. There were plenty of mortars but no one left to load and fire them. No Airborne replacements; Ike's priority was for leg infantrymen, as his manpower pipeline from the States was running dry.
“I remember what the British we relieved said about the Island,” Albers says:” ‘Quiet as a bloomin’ churchyard, mate. The only thing you'll die from is boredom.” For a while that was right. My squad had an OP in a jam factory near Dode-waard. We ate jam, sweetened our coffee with it till we were sick of jam and just used it for trades. Arnhem Annie was the krauts' propaganda broadcaster. Her favorite saying was, ‘You can listen to our music but you can't dance in our streets.’ She'd play good swing and in between tunes ask us to come on over and surrender. We'd be treated well. Just bring a toothbrush, overcoat, blanket, and sit out the rest of the war.
“Some nights we'd paddle across the river in little rubber boats. One of these patrols left a toothbrush, overcoat, and blanket on the kraut side, with a note that they'd tried to surrender to Annie but she wasn't around. They also mentioned how much fun it would be to make contact with her, and offered a standing invitation for her to cross the river. Just wave panties instead of a white flag.”
In the foggy predawn of October 5 the Germans paddled across themselves, a full regiment swarming over the dikes. The surprise attack was preceded by the heaviest enemy artillery concentration that even Dziepak had ever experienced. Incoming flew over like flocks of birds. The jam factory had been zeroed in on. Civilians were huddled under big skylights that shattered into thousands of shards, cutting faces as if there had been a huge knife fight.
“There were lots of puddles from the drizzle,” Albers remembers. “I watched them turn red from the civilians' blood till Dziepak jacked me up. ‘Get on the machine gun!’ I started feeding in belts. The krauts were coming out of the fog—no targets till they were big enough to hear. They came on like Pickett's charge, but we were on the second floor where they couldn't get at us. Every burst seemed to take down a half dozen. As soon as the shell casings stopped bouncing, you could hear more krauts screaming and moaning out there. Dziepak was worried that when the fog lifted they could swing around the factory and we'd be cut off, same as almost happened at the farmhouse back at Veghel. What, me worry? That was the squad leader's job to worry. What we were doing was holding them off. Someone said every kraut we kill here we won't have to kill in Germany.”
When the fog lifted, Second Battalion counterattacked in a scene from nineteenth-century war when foes stood, rushed and fired at one another without cover. That didn't last long on the Island. Infantry on both sides grabbed mud when artillery found them. A windmill became crucial, a place from where artillery could be directed. Neither side could hold the windmill.
Albers changed machine-gun barrels as they began to glow red. Darkness set in with both sides blazing away extravagantly and insatiably devouring ammo as fast as it could be brought up. To develop a more thickly defended line, I Company was ordered to withdraw a thousand yards from the jam factory. Dziepak's squad nearly revolted. They had ruled from their roost and would not likely get another nearly as strong.
“We were saying, geez, we're slaughtering 'em. Why pull back?”
Because Sink wanted a free-fire zone for Jabos to trample on German reinforcements. Thus deprived of nourishment, the Germans' attack withered. As the Currahee yearbook related, “[It had been] the hottest action this side of hell…. Dusk settled its dark cloak, but the savage battle went on lit by fires from gutted houses…. The next morning was still as the krauts left their dead and dying among ruined buildings and lying along a railroad track. Our price was heavy, theirs ruinous.”
Albers recalls, “After that we finally were pulled off the Island. The next night in Nijmegen we were taking our first shower in weeks when what looked like a meteorite in reverse took off from across the Rhine. What the hell was that? Next day another launched, a long white streamer like skywriting. Those were the first V-2 missiles headed for England.
“So, when we left, Arnhem Annie was bragging how Hitler's secret weapons were going to change the war. We didn't know, didn't worry either, and celebrated leaving by throwing grenades into our old water-filled foxholes and cheering the fountains. Don't know what the Brits who relieved us thought about that. Maybe that we were as tired of the war as they were.
“We knew what the Dutch thought about us as we trucked on Hell's Highway for the last time. When they saw the Screaming Eagle on our shoulders they came out as they had in Eindhoven, hundreds of them, just as full of joy as the first time. They kept yelling, ‘Seventeen September! Seventeen September!’”*
The destination of the 101st was Camp Mourmelon, a former artillery garrison twenty miles from Eisenhower's headquarters at Reims. Since Caesar's time Mourmelon had been a military encampment and battlefield, still pocked by craters and scored with crumbling trenches from World War I. Most recently it had been a tank depot for the Germans, who left the barracks in graffitied tatters.
No matter: a roof overhead was luxurious compared with a chilled water-filled foxhole on the Island. Besides, passes were the order of the day, the first in nearly three months. Unleashed, Screaming Eagles took Reims by storm, frolicking and forgetting while swinging from crystal chandeliers as substitutes for parachute risers, doing PLFs from balconies onto feather beds. Drinking as if the dead were there with them, despising those who had not seen the elephant and smashed its tusks.
In early December General Taylor departed for Washington to represent the 18th Airborne Corps at a conference called by General Marshall concerning structural changes in Airborne divisions based upon their combat experience in Europe and the Pacific. The 101st's assistant commander went off to England for a critique of Market-Garden, leaving the Screaming Eagles to rest and recuperate under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who headed division artillery. The departure of the top of the chain of command raised no comment: the Western Front was quiet, the Germans seeming content to man the Siegfried Line while their hands were full of Russians on the Eastern Front. The prospective contest closest to combat was a football game between the 506th and 502nd on Christmas Day. Before then those troopers not on pass lazed about as the scent of a thousand turkeys from home wafted over mess halls.
Ed Albers was alone on duty in I Company's orderly room at 3:00 A.M. on December 17 when the phone rang. Uh-oh; at that hour it must be MPs holding some trooper who had closed a Reims bar with a smoke grenade. Instead it was Captain Anderson, ordering the cooks to produce breakfast in an hour.
“What's up, sir?”
“The krauts have broken through somewhere. That's all I know, but the division's been alerted to move.”
General McAuliffe knew little more. His orders from Reims were just to motor march toward Luxembourg, Tony. Flatbed trucks are en route to pick up the 101st. You'll be with either 18th or 8th Corps, we haven't decided yet. You probably won't see any action, and we're sorry if this spoils the holidays.
A peppery but self-commanded man, McAuliffe rose from his chair, muttering profanity, as he received those instructions on the phone. He gathered himself to point out to Ike's staffer that the 101st didn't have winter gear or even much ammo. “I've got companies that haven't received new weapons for the ones disabled on the Island. I've got hundreds of replacements who haven't even been assigned.”
We know, we regret, but just get moving and report to General Middleton. Things will sort out, sir, and you'll probably be back in Mourmelon by Christmas. Ike's looking forward to seeing that football game (he was a punter at West Point). What did you call it—the Champagne Bowl?
There was a total of forty players on the two football squads. In the next month seven would be killed and seventeen wounded around the Belgian town of Bastogne.
* The misnomer can only be attributed to Americans' typically poor knowledge of foreign geography. To them, the Netherlands meant Holland with wooden shoes and windmills. The error was never corrected, not even on a stone memorial at Arlington Cemetery or the 101st's monument at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. This is a source of polite annoyance for the Dutch where the 101st jumped, one of whom told the author, “If we had liberated New Jersey during World War II, what would you think if we had called it New Hampshire?”
* The author attended the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of “Remember September,” marking the liberation of the southern Netherlands. In 1994 commerce with neighboring Germany was brisk and cordial, but for the week of September 17 not a single German license plate could be seen on Hell's Highway.
* Survivors of the farmhouse fight cannot rememberthe lieutenant's name, a common lapse after searing combat and the passage of years. What Albers remembers is that “Green” had been a track star at the University of Southern California, one who would never run again.
* As did Robert Postma fifty-five years later, recalling that day when the 101st departed from his homeland: “I was eleven years old at the time of our liberation. We had been under Nazi occupation for almost five years. Our beautiful little country lay in wreck and ruin till 17 September, the day the sky filled with hundreds of planes. From the place I was watching I could see gliders coming down and paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division landing just north of Eindhoven, my home. Soon there was incessant gunfire and explosions. To me the Screaming Eagles were like ferocious gods from heaven. That has remained the greatest moment of my life: when I knew we were free, free to live, free to breathe the air. It meant the terror was over, the pain of cold and hunger would cease. It meant that we could laugh again. It meant that all the cherished things of life that were lost would gradually return to us. It meant that once again we could live as a people with dignity and respect.”