Behind Hitler's Lines (27 page)

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.
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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
Jabos
from 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)