The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (33 page)

Some boats took direct hits, leaving nothing but flotsam. Small-arms fire ripped through the boats. The flotilla seemed to scatter. Yet it came on. Only eleven of the twenty-six boats made it to the far shore, but when they did the paratroopers who had survived the ordeal had their blood up. They were not going to be denied.

“Nobody paused,” a British tank officer wrote. “Men got out and began running toward the embankment. My God what a courageous sight it was!” Cook led the way. Captain Keep commented, “Many times I have seen troops who are driven to fever pitch-troops who, for a brief interval of combat, are lifted out of themselves-fanatics rendered crazy by rage and the lust for killing-men who forget temporarily the meaning of fear. However, I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. The men were beside themselves. They continued to cross that field in spite of all the Kraut could do, cursing savagely, their guns spitting fire.” In less than a half hour Cook and his men had reached the top of the highway embankment and driven the Germans out. The engineers, meanwhile, had paddled back to the west bank and returned with a second wave. Altogether it took six crossings to get Cook’s battalion over.

As those crossings were being made, Cook led the first wave in an assault on the bridges. His men came on fast. Meanwhile Vandervoort’s people on the west side had finally overrun the park and were starting onto the bridges. The Germans scrambled frantically for the plungers to set off the explosives in place on the bridges, but Cook’s men did what they had been trained to do-wherever they saw wires on the ground they cut them. The German engineers hit the plungers, and nothing happened.

Cook’s men set up defensive positions at the bridges, facing east. As the British tanks with Vandervoort started across the highway bridge, their crews saw the Stars and Stripes go up on the other end. Cook had lost forty men killed, a hundred wounded, but he had the bridges. There were 267 German dead on the railroad bridge alone, plus many hundreds wounded and captured, plus no one could guess how many had fallen into the river. It was one of the great feats of arms of World War II. Lt. Gen. Miles Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, came up to shake Gavin’s hand. “I am proud to meet the commander of the greatest division in the world today,” he said.  It was 1910 hours. Darkness was descending. Arnhem was but eleven kilometers away. Lt. Col. John Frost’s battalion was still holding the eastern end of the bridge, but barely. General Horrocks decided to get up defensive positions for the night. When that was done, the guards began to brew up their tea.  Cook’s men were enraged. They yelled and swore at the Brits, told them those were their countrymen in Arnhem and they needed help now. Horrocks commented, “This operation of Cook’s was the best and most gallant attack I have ever seen carried out in my life. No wonder the leading paratroopers were furious that we did not push straight on for Arnhem. They felt they had risked their lives for nothing, but it was impossible, owing to the confusion which existed in Nijmegen, with houses burning and the British and U.S. forces all mixed up.” In the morning (September 21) the tanks moved out, only to be stopped halfway to Arnhem by two enemy battalions, including one of SS troopers, with tanks and 88s. There were Jabos overhead, but the radio sets in the RAF ground liaison car would not work (neither would the radios with the British 6th Airborne in Arnhem). That afternoon the 9th Panzer Division in Arnhem overwhelmed the last survivors of Frost’s battalion. Some days later the survivors of 1st Airborne crossed the Rhine to safety. The division had gone into Arnhem 10,005 men strong. It came out with 2,163 live soldiers.

Lieutenant Colonel Frost put the blame on the Guards Armored Division. Standing on the bridge on the fortieth anniversary of the event, he looked west, as he had so often, so fruitlessly, four decades earlier, and got to talking about the guards brewing up their tea, and then on to the relatively light casualties the guards suffered as compared to the 1st Airborne, and on to the magnificent performance of the 82nd.

His face blackened. As I watched, mesmerized, he shook his fist and roared a question into the air, a question for the guards: “Do you call that fighting?” Market-Garden was a high-risk operation that failed. It was undertaken at the expense of two other possible offensives that had to be postponed because Eisenhower diverted supplies to Market- Garden. The first was the Canadian attack on the approaches to Antwerp, Europe’s greatest port and essential to the support of any Allied offensive across the Rhine. In the event, Antwerp was not opened and operating until the end of 1944, which meant that through the fall the AEF fought with inadequate supplies. The second postponed offensive was that of Patton’s Third Army, south of the Ardennes. Patton believed that ifhe had gotten the supplies that Monty got for Market-Garden, he could have crossed the Rhine that fall and then had an unopposed path open to Berlin. That seems doubtful, but we will never know because it was never tried.  To the end of his life Eisenhower insisted that Market-Garden was a risk that had to be run. In my interviews with him, between 1964 and 1969, we discussed the operation innumerable times. He always came back to this: The first rule in the pursuit of a defeated enemy is to keep after him, stay in contact, press him, exploit every opportunity. The northern approach to Germany was the shortest, over the terrain most suitable to offensive operations (once the Rhine had been crossed). Eisenhower felt that, given how close Market-Garden came to succeeding, it would have been criminal for him not to have tried.  The trouble with Market-Garden was that it was an offensive on much too narrow a front. The pencil-like thrust over the Rhine was vulnerable to attacks on the flanks. The Germans saw and took advantage of that vulnerability with furious counterattacks all along the length of the line, hitting it from all sides.  In retrospect, the idea that a force of several divisions, consisting of British, American, and Polish troops, could be supplied by one highway could only have been accepted by leaders guilty of overconfidence.

14 -    Metz, Aachen, and the Hurtgen

PATTON’S THIRD ARMY had been stopped in its thrust through France not by the Germans but by a shortage of gasoline. But when the supply line caught up with Patton’s lead tanks, he discovered another problem, the mighty fortress system around Metz. The initial key to the system was Fort Driant, built in 1902 and strengthened almost every year since, either by the French or the Germans after 1940. In size, thickness, and firepower it was a monster, with clear fields of fire up and down the Moselle River. Patton could not cross that river until he held Driant.

Driant was surrounded by a deep moat, which in turn was surrounded by a twenty-meter band of barbed wire. It had living quarters for a garrison of two thousand, with sufficient supplies for a month or more of battle. Its big guns rose from the earth on hydraulic mounts, sniffed around, fired, and disappeared back into the earth. There were four outlying casement batteries, and concealed machine-gun pillboxes were scattered through the area. The only way in was over a causeway.

On September 27, Third Army had made its first attempt to take Driant. The Americans had assumed that the fort would be lightly garrisoned by inferior troops. Although they had only a vague idea of the fort’s works and surrounding terrain, they figured that a pre-World War I fortress system couldn’t possibly stand up to the pounding of modern artillery, much less air-dropped bombs of 500 to 1,000 pounds, not to mention napalm. From dawn to 1415 hours, the Americans hit the fort with all the high explosives in their arsenal. The men of the 11th Infantry Regiment, who led the assault, were confident that nothing could have survived inside the fort.

At 1415 the infantry began to move in on the fort. To their astonishment, when they reached the barbed wire surrounding the moat, Germans rose up from pillboxes to their front, sides, and rear and opened fire. Shermans came forward to blast the pillboxes, but their 75mm shells hardly chipped or scarred the thick concrete. The infantry went to the ground, and ignominiously withdrew under cover of darkness.

With that withdrawal Third Army’s advance came to a halt. It now faced a new problem in its experience, but the oldest tactical/engineering problem in warfare, how to overcome a fortified position. Like First Army to the north, Third Army began thinking and got started on the challenge of Driant by adopting some new techniques and weapons. It helped considerably that the Americans finally got their hands on the blueprints of the fort, which showed a warren’s den of tunnels.

No amount of high explosive was going to knock it down. Infantry would have to get inside the fort, kill the German defenders who resisted, and take possession. To do that, the 11th Regiment would have to get over the causeway.  To do that, there were a few new weapons. One was the tankdozer, another was a “snake,” a longer version of the bangalore torpedo. The dozer would clear away rubble, the snake would blast a path through the barbed wire. A third new weapon was the flamethrower. A Company got four of them.  On October 3 the second assault on Driant began. The snakes got shoved under the wire, but they broke and were useless. The tankdozers had mechanical failures.  Only one of the four flame- throwers worked. B Company, nevertheless, was able to get into the fort. Capt. Harry Anderson led the way, tossing grenades into German bunkers as he ran across the causeway, inspiring his men to follow him into Driant, where he established a position alongside one of the casements.  An intense firefight ensued. Germans popped out of their holes like prairie dogs, fired, and dropped back. They called in their own artillery from other forts in the area. Some American engineers got forward with TNT, to blast a hole in the casement so that the GIs could enter the fortress system. But the heavy walls were as impervious to TNT as to shells and bombs.  On top of the casement, Pvt. Robert Holmlund found a ventilator shaft. Despite enemy fire he managed to open the shaft’s cover and dropped several bangalore torpedoes down the opening. Germans who survived evacuated the area, and Captain Anderson led the first Americans inside the fort. The room they had taken turned out to be a barracks. They quickly took an adjacent one.  The Germans counterattacked. The ensuing firefight was a new dimension of combat. It shattered nerves, ears, and lives. One small firecracker set off in the bowels of one of the old forts is guaranteed to startle a tour group, and cause ringing ears; no one who had not been there can imagine the assault on the ears by machine-gun fire and hand-grenade explosions reverberating in the tunnels enclosed by the thick, dripping masonry walls.  The air was virtually unbreathable; men in the barracks room had to take turns at gulping some fresh air from firing slits. The stench was a mixture of gunpowder, gas fumes, and excrement. Wounded could not be treated properly.  Fresh water was nonexistent.

B Company was stuck there. It had neither the equipment nor the manpower to fight its way through the maze of tunnels. It couldn’t go back; being on top of the fort was more dangerous than being in it. At dark American reinforcements, accompanied by a half-dozen Shermans, crossed the causeway and assaulted another casement, but they were badly shot up and forced to withdraw when the Germans came up from the tunnels and filtered into their rear. These small, local counterattacks could be devastating. Four of the Shermans were knocked out by panzerfaust shells.

Capt. Jack Gerrie, CO of G Company, 11th Infantry, led the reinforcements. He had no illusions about the enemy. He had been in on the September 27 attack.  “Watch out for these birds,” he had told another company commander. “They are plenty tough. I’ve never run across guys like these before, they are new, something you read about.”

On October 4 Gerrie tried to knock down the steel doors at the rear of the fort.  Direct cannon fire couldn’t do it, and protruding grillwork made it impossible to put TNT charges against the doors themselves. The Germans again called down fire on Driant, which forced G Company to scatter to abandoned pillboxes, ditches, shell holes, and open bunkers, anywhere they could find shelter. That evening Gerrie tried to reorganize his company, but his efforts were hampered by the Germans, who came out of the underground tunnels, here, there, everywhere, fired and retreated, causing confusion and further disorganization in G Company.  Gerrie could count about half the men he had led to the fort the previous evening.

At dawn on October 5, German artillery commenced firing at Driant. After hours of this, Gerrie wrote a report for his battalion commander: “The situation is critical[;] a couple more barrages and another counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot and we just can’t go on. . . . We cannot advance. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions. The enemy artillery is butchering these troops. . . .  We cannot get out to get our wounded and there is a hell of a lot of dead and missing. . . . There is only one answer the way things stand. First either to withdraw and saturate it with heavy bombers or reinforce with a hell of a strong force, but eventually they’ll get it by artillery too. They have all of these places zeroed in by artillery. . . .This is just a suggestion but if we want this damned fort let’s get the stuff required to take it and then go. Right now you haven’t got it.”

Written from a shell hole, under fire, by a man who hadn’t slept in two days, nor had a hot meal, it is a remarkable report, accurate, precise, and rightly critical of the fools who had got him into this predicament. It was so compelling it moved right up to the corps commander, who showed it to Patton and said the battalion commander wanted to withdraw.  Never, Patton replied. He ordered that Driant be seized “if it took every man in the XX Corps, but he could not allow an attack by this Army to fail.” Over the next three days Third Army ignored Gerrie’s advice. It threw one more regiment into the attack, with similar ghastly results. The men on top of the fort were the ones under siege. The lowliest private among them could see perfectly clearly what Patton could not, that this fort had to be bypassed and neutralized because it was never going to be taken.  Patton finally relented. Still, not until October 13 were the GIs withdrawn.  About half as many returned as went up. This was Third Army’s first defeat in battle.