World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY (West): History in the Air

Rough-&-ready Lieut. General Lewis Hyde Brereton had fidgeted for weeks waiting for the moment to arrive. Seventeen times since his small-scale assists on D-day he had drawn up the detail of tactics for a historic stroke: the parachuting of an Allied army, a force of truly army size, capable of fighting on its own, behind the German lines. Seventeen times he had scrapped the plans: the Allied ground forces had advanced so swiftly that his First Allied Airborne Army was not needed.

This week the 18th plan went through. In scope it was unprecedented. In operation it was smooth and apparently initially successful—a rare thing for the first job of such a complex kind. In the sky of Holland multicolored parachutes etched a pattern of future military history.

Brereton, a perfectionist of air operations, climbed aboard his plane. Around it gathered hundreds of big C-47 transports, loaded to their stripped ribs with paratroopers and light weapons. The scene was repeated at a score of fields. The big bombers — 1,000 of them — were already out, plastering German airfields in The Netherlands and beyond. The trim fighters —hundreds of them — were out diving against flak towers and gun sites.

Da-Da-Da-Daaa. The big parade started: more than 1,000 C-47s accompanied by towed gliders that carried the field pieces, jeeps, munitions, food, even light tanks, even field-hospital equipment, all the thousand things a self-contained army needs.

For 90 minutes the air parade roared over various sections of London. It was Sunday noon and in the churches worshipers commemorated another day of history: “The Victory of the Few.” On this day, four years before, a few handfuls of R.A.F. fighter pilots had turned back Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Londoners cheered. A Salvation Army band tried to match its tootling against the drumming of the engines, gave it up. But the drummer, his eyes on the sky, thumped and rolled a theme for the scene: the da-da-da-daaa of the V-rhythm.

Brereton’s plane circled over The Neth erlands as the C-47s disgorged. The first paratroopers landed along the Rhine delta near the sea. Brereton’s craft left them be hind, flew on over a huge expanse of flooded lowlands, where the bright red roofs of the white Dutch houses showed above the blue waters. Here the Germans had created a vast last ditch.

Color Flutters. The sky trains sped past the inundation to the bright green of the gentle countryside around Tilburg and Eindhoven. The planes flew low, close to 500 feet through patches of flak. Then suddenly they spilled their men, cut off their gliders. Soon against the green in the grey day fluttered hundreds of white, yel low, red, blue, brown parachutes. In a matter of minutes, Brereton saw his army in action, forming two columns along a paved road, advancing on a town, their shells raising dust puffs, finally marching in.

More C-47s, the largest force of all, went farther eastward. Soon below them lay the great bend of the Rhine, where it turns west to the sea. There, near the Dutch town of Nijnegen, and only fourteen miles from the German city of Cleve, where the Siegfried Line ends, brown and white and yellow and blue parachutes soon filled the fields on both sides of the wide Rhine.

Brereton jumped his men — more thousands who soon fluttered in as reinforcements — with a reminder: “On the success of your mission . . . rests the difference between a quick decision in the west and a long-drawn-out battle.”

Open to his army were opportunities: 1) to trap the Germans left in The Netherlands; 2) to flank the West Wall at Cleve, and lead a drive to occupy the Ruhr and cut the communications of the Germans in the Siegfried Line.

Tied to the Ground. As the air army landed, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery sent his British Army crunching into Holland from the south. In 24 hours the British and the Airborne had joined at one wide point.

This northeast drive took the enemy off guard, but there was ample doubt that he could have done much about it, even with advance notice. He had committed the bulk of his dwindling forces to keeping the war from the Rhineland.

There the enemy’s plight was serious, but he was dying hard. He did panicky things, but where he had the troops he fought fiercely. At points the going was worse for the Americans than it had been back on the Norman beaches. At one point the Germans used a “psychological tactic” borrowed from the eastern front—a shoulder-to-shoulder frontal assault by screaming, yelling infantrymen. The Indian-silent G.I. reaction: mow ’em down.

After penetration of the Siegfried Line near Aachen, a combination of such fanatical defense and bad weather held the Allies along most of the line to small gains. The week’s action demonstrated that: 1) properly manned, the West Wall would have held the Allies; 2) the Allies had prevented proper manning by the speed of their advance.

Bonanza. Far, far back of the Siegfried Line, back on the Loire near Orleans, the Americans collected still another dividend from their bold strokes. It was a bonanza for a storybook. There 20,000 Germans were handed over to U.S. troops as stubby Major General Erich Elster, bemedaled and sticking to the Prussian amenities, flourished his pistol in surrender. His big force was the remainder of a German army that had held the Bordeaux-Biscay area. Cut off hundreds of miles behind the Allied lines, harried by Maquis, raked by aircraft on the roads, they had laboriously marched to the safety of U.S. custody.

The troops to whom Elster surrendered belonged to the U.S. Ninth Army headed by tall, hell-for-leather Lieut. General William H. Simpson. Newly arrived in France, this is the seventh army* to appear under Eisenhower’s command. It swelled the U.S. ranks in western Europe to far more than the 2,000,000 men whom General John J. Pershing commanded in 1918.

As he heard the Allied guns pounding 25 miles away, the editor of the Kölnische (Cologne) Zeitung wrote an editorial: “The steam roller of the Allied air force, supported by tank divisions, has driven back our Wehrmacht. If only we had three additional air fleets and ten additional Panzer divisions! . . .”

* The others: the U.S. First, Third and Seventh, the Canandian First, the British Second, the Allied Airborne.