Of the contingent of Pathfinders aboard 981, the bodies recovered at the crash site and identified by their dog tags belonged to Privates George L. Sarlas and Michael Rofar, and to Corporals Roy L. Stephens and Delbert S. Brazzle. Not found were Privates Earnest A. Robinson, Alvin Haux, Spencer E. Everly, and Lester R. Hunt; T/5 Richard H. Beaver; and their group leader, Lieutenant Charles M. Faith.
Faith, of course, knew Hunt had survived and been taken prisoner. Since he’d never seen their chutes in the air, he might have been surprised to learn that the four other troopers whose bodies weren’t found had also survived and been captured by the Germans.
But at that point the lieutenant was just trying to stay alive and a free man. After roving more than a mile through woods, fields, and streams, he was tired and hungry and wondering how he would manage to stay out of sight until he made contact with friendly forces.
Concealed in his patch of shrubbery, he would wrestle with these questions through the long afternoon and night of his first day of hiding from the enemy.
2.
At Drop Zones B/C, the Pathfinder teams led by DeRamus and Rothwell were to stay out in the field for several days marking and guarding the DZs for glider lifts and resupply drops. But with no further landings scheduled in the smaller fields to the north, Headquarters had given Team A the assignment of helping the paratroops of the 501st PIR’s 1st Battalion seize the town of Veghel and its four bridges—two spanning the River Aa in the village proper, and two south of it across the Willemsvaart Canal. Specifically, the Pathfinders were told to take and hold the bridge that ran into town across the River Aa, and to do it with all necessary haste. So great was the concern that the Germans would blow the crossings as they retreated, and eliminate them as rear supply lines for Montgomery’s troops, that the goal was to have the bridges under the regiment’s control by 1300 hours, or one o’clock in the afternoon, just half an hour after the Pathfinders touched down behind the lines.
The battalion’s march from its drop zone had proceeded at a grueling clip. With their navigational beacon lost when Lieutenant Faith’s flight was shot down, its forty-two sticks had been dropped at the wrong location, finding themselves around a spired medieval castle—Kasteel Heeswikj—in the village of Kameren, about six miles northwest of their intended DZ. The misdrops were remarkably concentrated, with all the paratroopers finding themselves within a short distance of the castle, and many coming down in its moat or surrounding trees.
There were relatively few casualties among the battalion’s six hundred men, and those that occurred were accidental. From Kameren the paratroopers double-timed it to their objective without opposition, jogging sweatily in the warm sunlight under the arduous weight of their equipment. A few were given bicycles by the castle’s caretaker and his companions, and would remember it as the first time they’d actually pedaled into battle. It was a peculiar feeling for them.
The Pathfinders and the battalion’s forward element converged at the outskirts of Veghel to find themselves greeted by cheerful townspeople. They waved orange paper from doors and windows and poured from their tile-roofed homes onto the road, men, women, the old, and the young, all gathering around the Americans in their Sunday finest. There were boys in double-breasted red vests and baggy dress trousers, and pigtailed girls wearing white-winged caps, church dresses, and wooden clogs. They sang and danced with joy; they tossed flowers at the soldiers’ feet and exchanged Dutch pounds for their invasion currency; they handed them bread, cheese, cake, apples, jugs of fresh milk, even ice cream.
As they neared the Aa River Bridge into the village proper, the troopers continued to be mobbed by civilians. A parade of children following behind him, one soldier felt a tug on his leg and saw a little boy with a red wagon pointing to his radio, trying to tell him he’d wheel it into town. Since the radio had been damaged in the jump, the trooper agreed and took it off his back. He would recall thinking the boy seemed “about the happiest little Dutch boy in the entire country. You could see the pride in his face.”
The exuberant reception gave the soldiers a much-needed boost. For a short time it seemed to suspend the war and simultaneously remind them why they were fighting it. It was a recollection many would later reference, something that would sustain and replenish their morale in the dark days to come.
The small group of Pathfinders split up at the bridge. Per his orders, Lieutenant Robert Smith stayed behind to hold the span with four of the men, while Sergeant John O’Shaughnessy, T/5 Glenn Braddock, and the rest of the team joined the 501’s forward element moving on along the Willemsvaart Canal into Veghel. Their task was to clear the village streets and establish a blockade at the market square’s main intersection.
Before their departure at Chalgrove, the troopers had received mimeographed translation sheets from S-2 with basic Dutch phrases on them, and they’d folded the slips of paper into their pockets or under their helmets as they boarded their planes. They proved more than handy. Walking off the bridge, O’Shaughnessy, Braddock, and the others used the phrases to ask the locals to guide them to the square and point out possible German hiding places.
The canal dead-ended at the intersection, where the soldiers found a camouflaged gun nest. After a quick inspection revealed it to be unoccupied and strewn with rubbish, they hastened to set up their roadblock.
Braddock would remember that they’d barely gotten started when someone shouted, “There’s Krauts running into that building on the left!”
He and Sergeant O’Shaughnessy looked around, saw a group of Germans running toward a long brick building across the square, and took off in heated pursuit, several other troopers following them from the gun emplacement. But the enemy soldiers had gotten a head start and already reached the house. They bolted in different directions, most racing through the front door, the rest fleeing around behind the building.
Close on their heels, Braddock and O’Shaughnessy ran straight up to the door, the other troopers staying with the Germans who’d gone around back. As the door practically slammed shut in O’Shaughnessy’s face, he kicked it open and threw in a hand grenade.
There was a loud explosion inside the place. Braddock, also fisting a grenade, was about to pull the pin, but the sergeant had charged inside with his Thompson ablaze. Braddock hurried after him through the door, his own sub raised in his hands.
They were on the ground floor of an industrial warehouse, the room around them cavernous in its dimensions, an open door on its opposite side. Both men knew at once the Germans must have fled through it.
Their footsteps echoing flatly off the walls, the Pathfinders ran across the room toward the doorway, and were about to enter it when they heard heavy fire outside. Braddock stopped and peered through.
Three Germans lay dead on the ground, their uniforms riddled with bullets, blood flowing from their wounds into the spaces between the cobblestones. A lieutenant and several of the others who’d swung around behind the building had shot them as they emerged, then moved on up the street. Glancing in that direction, Braddock saw the bodies of two more German soldiers.
The lieutenant’s name was O’Connell, and he was new to combat. Jumping over the bodies of the Germans, he had thought, Thirty seconds ago they were alive.
Thirty seconds.
That was the moment the reality of the war came to him. A man had to be ready to kill, and ready to die, and the difference between one fate and the other could be as simple as deciding whether or not to step through a doorway, or turning right or left. O’Connell knew it could have easily been him on the cobbled ground, and a German soldier glancing down at his body as he ran past. Could have been his mother, and not the mother of one of the men whose lives he’d ended, who soon would be mourning the loss of a son. In a strange way, the realization formed an inseparable link between him and the enemy, an awareness of how much the same they really were under their uniforms. Soldiers. Their live
s were all hanging on slender threads, and they controlled far less about how and when those threads would be cut than any of them might have chosen to believe.
Standing in the doorway, Glenn Braddock could not have known the lieutenant’s thoughts. But he would avoid looking too closely at the bodies before he turned from the doorway into the warehouse and then walked back out and across the street to the end of the canal.
3.
Not far from the warehouse, toward the center of the square, the townspeople skipped, bobbed, and held hands doing their circle dances, while the village priest stood passing out beer and pretzels in the courtyard of the old gothic church. Smiling and joking amid the hoopla, he resembled a pudgy, cheerful penguin in his black-and-white vestments.
Back at the gun emplacement with the 1st Battalion men, Braddock would recall the sudden clanking sound—and then one of the troopers commenting on it as they worked to set up the roadblock. He thought it was a British tank, and so did several of his companions. They’d heard Montgomery had broken through the enemy lines, and figured his armored forces had come right on time to provide them with support.
Then another soldier’s voice cut in, its tone very different than the first.
“It’s a Kraut light tank!”
The troopers were all looking into the square now. The treaded vehicle barreling toward them had an Iron Cross painted in front, and a man in a black officer’s cap standing up out of the turret with a German Luger.
Braddock heard somebody call for a bazooka team, and then remembered passing one on the way from the bridge. He was starting back there at a fast clip when the Panzer’s machine gunners opened fire, their long, rattling volleys followed by the heavy boom of the Panzer’s cannon. Then came the answering sound of American rifles and submachine guns.
Braddock would always believe the officer spotted him right before ducking down into the hatch. Possibly he took him for one of the soldiers firing at the tank and got angry. Whatever the reason, it was then that that the Panzer turned in his direction, rolling straight at him, its huge steel gears making a tremendous clamor in the square.
Only a short while after Braddock had chased the group of doomed Germans into the warehouse, the tables had turned. He’d become the pursued, and was running for dear life.
Reaching a corner building, he hooked around into the street behind it, thinking he could make for the opposite corner and dash out of sight. Instead, he found himself staring at a high rock wall or fence behind the house. He had no idea what it was doing there but knew he couldn’t get through. He’d been cut off from the other side of the street.
Braddock was trying to decide what to do when he heard the clanking of the armored machine’s gears again. Turning, he saw that it had swung into the backstreet and was rumbling closer.
He looked desperately around, realized he was standing outside a door, and kicked it open. As he barreled through, he heard the cannon boom a second time, pulverizing a section of the building’s exterior.
Then he was inside the house. There was an entry to another room in front of him, two women and a small boy huddled tight against the opposite wall. He waved a hand to let them know he meant no harm, paused in the middle of the room, and listened.
The tank seemed to be drawing away from him. Listening some more, he grew convinced of it. The gunner had backed off.
Although Braddock could not see it from inside the house, the tank had returned to the corner and made a sharp right into the square, plowing through the gathered townsfolk, scattering them in all directions.
As it tore through the intersection, Sergeant O’Shaughnessy drew his Colt .45 and took off after it, pumping rounds between its chassis and turret, aiming for the soft spot he’d been told about in basic training. At the same time another soldier was vainly attempting to jam his M1 rifle between the tread and the wheels. But the vehicle roared toward the bridge, its machine gun spraying the intersection. Miraculously, not a single person was hit.
The troopers were still firing away at the tank when Braddock left the house where he’d taken cover. He stood in the square and saw the Panzer vanish down the road, bearing out of town. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
The square was quiet, but not for long. As American troopers continued marching in over the canal and river bridges, the gaiety began to build. Soon the dancers were again skipping and bobbing across the cobblestones outside the church, post office, and town hall.
As he looked around the square, Braddock would have seen the 326th engineers arriving to construct their secondary bridges for the armor and trucks heading on to Arnhem. But first the town’s entry and exit points had to be secured.
Crossing the square, he went to the intersection, joined the men at the abandoned German gun emplacement, and got back to work.
4.
Two days after landing at their DZ, the Pathfinders of Team B/C continued marking the drop zones for gliders and supplies. On September 18, Colonel Joel Crouch had decided that Rothwell and DeRamus would themselves require an immediate resupply of essential items. “Due to the weight and bulk of navigational aids,” a top secret report stated, “it was impossible for them to carry in enough smoke and batteries to provide continuous operation of all aids for subsequent landing of gliders.”
The resupply was to consist of a complete CRN-4, extra batteries for it and the Eureka set, plus additional smoke.
Lieutenant Al Burckhardt, in IX TCC’s Plane 086, made the successful drop, and the equipment landed within twenty yards of the Eureka on which his aircraft homed in.
On the ground, the Pathfinders were growing tired and frayed. Bluford Williams had repeatedly found his mind going back to the dozen or so German tanks he’d seen lined up under the trees along the road. Whether or not it had been one of their cannons that struck down Zamanakos, he’d never seen them pull out and couldn’t stop imagining what would happen if they left the highway and came rolling across the field, their guns turned on the two sticks of Pathfinders.
Think what damage they could do, an inner voice kept repeating. Think what they could do.
Although these thoughts continued to trouble Williams as he guarded the T, Allied fighter planes had annihilated or driven off most of the Panzers lurking in the area. The fighters had roared down over the treetops, hitting them with bombs and machine-gun fire while they sought concealment in fruit orchards or tried to rumble off across the fields.
For the residents of nearby villages, the aerial pursuit of the Germans was a harrowing experience. The Allied planes came circling in low over homes, schools, hospitals, and church steeples, hunting out enemy tanks and cars, spraying anything that moved with bullets, and dropping racks of bombs on the streets and gardens. Explosions rocked the walls and sent dust cascading down over huddled, fearful men, women, and children in the underground shelters where they’d taken cover from the strikes.
At the drop and landing zones, the Pathfinders were finding out that the Army had held to its pledge—nothing on the ground had been allowed to move against them while they set up and guarded their equipment. Exposed and vulnerable in the open field, they had known their lives depended on that promise being kept. More importantly, they’d needed to trust it would be kept. They would guard the T with their lives, and their leaders would do everything to protect them while they stood their ground. It was more than an assurance to the men. It was a bond of honor that would allow them to move past their fears and carry on despite the unforgettable horrors they were to witness.
In the first hour of the landing, they’d seen about seventeen C-47s shot down in the fields around them, so many that it had made DeRamus suspect the Germans had gotten advance word of the drop. Johannes van Gorkum, the Dutch freedom fighter, noticed the cannonades coming from the direction of Best to the south, and informed the Americans about the placement of Nazi troops in the village and neighboring S
on.
But Gorkum’s intelligence, if ultimately used, had been received too late to cut those early losses. Some of the wounded planes had come on hard and fast above the ground like blazing comets, several with troopers hanging from their wings. One transport with flames sprouting from its engines had plowed out of control through a stick of paratroopers as they hung suspended from their canopies, killing at least two of them before it crashed. Williams would remember watching several transports swoop down no more than fifty feet above the Pathfinders’ heads and wondering if their pilots were dead, if they were being flown in by their copilots or crew chiefs, or if there was anyone at all alive in the cockpit to man their controls. Barreling though the sky at that altitude, the soldiers aboard those damaged transports had been left with no time for their chutes to open in the air, and probably no time to hook up their static lines. But they’d leaped from the planes in futile attempts to evacuate and fallen to their certain deaths, hitting the ground like rag dolls, their bodies left shattered and bloody on the field.
Williams would always recall the image of one badly wounded glider transport that had flown burning over the DZ, losing altitude at first, and then veering upward in a steep, sudden climb with the glider still in tow. His neck craned backward, shielding his eyes with his hand, he’d watched it soar up and up and up like a fiery arrow, straight up, shooting a half mile into the sky, or what seemed a half mile, dragging the Waco behind it by its cable, the two aircraft dwindling in Williams’s vision until they seemed no larger than scale models, then reaching the peak of their ascent and exploding before his dumbfounded eyes.
As the Pathfinders steadfastly followed procedure and guided in the planes, Snuffy Smith would feel an identical, lasting sorrow over the men that were shot out of the air. In Normandy, they’d seen planes and gliders downed by antiaircraft batteries. But in the skies over Holland, Luftwaffe fighters would defy the Allied escorts buzzing over the unarmed C-46 transports and sweep in to pick them off like predatory hawks.
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