Four Hours of Fury

by James M. Fenelon

  Braced in the right door, Coutts felt the plane lurch as it took a hit. Pieces of the engine fell away as it was consumed in flames. Several more rounds ripped through the plane’s belly. As he leaned back into the aircraft, Coutts spotted blood running down the deck, a clear sign someone had been hit. With the C-46’s future in doubt, he and a sergeant dragged the wounded trooper up front and pushed him out the door. Seconds later they all followed.

  • • •

  Texan Lendy McDonald, hooked up and waiting, had a narrow escape when a shell sliced up through the seat he’d just vacated. Green light on, he rushed for the door but found it blocked by bright sheets of orange flame wicking back from the wing. He turned to William Trigg and yelled, “Jump the other door!”

  “No time!” Trigg yelled back. The plane was going down.

  They both leapt through the inferno. McDonald was terrified the heat would melt his nylon canopy. As the chute popped open, he estimated his altitude to be 300 feet. Twisting, he looked over his shoulder to see the aircraft explode on impact. The entire crew was lost.

  Landing hard, but in a well-plowed field, McDonald shed his chute and loaded his carbine. By hacking at the camouflage canopy with his combat knife he was able to cut out a big section to use as a battle blanket. While he stuffed the nylon into his pack, McDonald recoiled from a sickening thud. A trooper had slammed into the ground just a few yards away.

  McDonald sprinted over, but there was nothing he could do. The trooper’s chute had failed and he was clearly dead. Because the man had landed on his left side his face looked like a macabre mask: the left side was a deep purple and the right an alabaster white.

  • • •

  Several pilots coaxed their stricken aircraft back across the Rhine to bail out over friendly territory. One pilot recalled, “Our right wing tank was opened up and on fire. We tried to get back over the river, but when the skin of our wing started to peel, I said ‘Get Out!’ I trimmed the plane as much as possible so I too could get out. All you can do at a time like this is get up out of your seat and run like hell for the door.”

  Bad luck continued to plague Chalk 13. Their replacement aircraft flew in on the tail end of the formation, never having managed to catch up. They were hit by flak on their pass over the DZ and the plane caught fire. Several troopers jumped before the pilot banked hard to get back over the Rhine. The rest of the stick, refusing to abandon their comrades, jumped on the west side of the Rhine. They planned to make their way to DZ X as soon as possible.

  Out of the 2,000-odd Thirteeners only a few refused to jump. In Noah Jones’ plane the stick watched an unwilling trooper shed his chute. The man, a veteran of the Bulge, had been given the option to skip the mission—due to his still-healing wounds—but had said that he wanted to go. Jones never learned why the trooper lost his nerve. Just after the men jumped, the aircraft went down in flames, taking the crew and the frightened jumper with it.

  It took approximately nine minutes to drop the Thirteeners along with their sixty-four tons of mines, demolitions, medical supplies, ammunition, and radios. The cost to get them over the Rhine was staggering. In what a troop carrier historian would later call a disaster, fourteen of the seventy-two C-46s were shot down, five crash-landed in friendly territory, and another thirty-eight were damaged. One crew, lucky to make it back, gave up counting the number of holes in their aircraft when they hit 200. The aircrews suffered accordingly, with more than thirty killed and twenty-two wounded.

  • • •

  Hitting the ground like a rag doll, Robert Capa rolled onto his stomach to fish out his camera. “We lay flat on the earth and nobody wanted to get up,” he recalled. “The first fear was over, and we were reluctant to begin the second.”

  Ten yards from Capa, fellow jumpers drifted into the tall trees and their chutes entangled in the upper branches. Before their feet touched the ground, they were riddled by a German machine gunner. Capa erupted with the frustrated rage of a useless bystander, letting out a long string of Hungarian profanities.

  “Stop those Jewish prayers,” a trooper lying nearby yelled at him. “They won’t help you now.”

  Capa rolled onto his back and waited for the firing to die down before he risked moving. A silver B-17 circling above the DZ caught his attention. He thought about his friend and fellow correspondent, Chris Smith, who was aboard the plane. Brereton had arranged for the Flying Fortress to serve as a platform for reporters so they could capture the operation’s grandeur from the air.

  The newsmen in the B-17 knew they’d been pushing their luck. Having flown in on the armada’s flank, the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Benton Baldwin, had taken them down to almost 700 feet so the photographers could get favorable shots of the Ruffians’ drop. With its aluminum skin catching the sun, the big, four-engined bomber proved too tempting a target. The first shell hit with no noticeable damage, so Baldwin continued his course, circling back to follow the Thirteeners into DZ X.

  Then the B-17 took another hit, on the left wing. The big bomber was already near stalling speed and it shuddered with the blast. Flames engulfed the inboard engine and spread along the wing to the second engine as well as toward the main fuselage; smoke poured into the cabin through the open waist gunner window. The reporters dropped their cameras, ditched their flak vests, and donned their parachutes. Baldwin had already turned back toward the Rhine, and just as they cleared the friendly shore everyone bailed out.

  On the ground, Capa watched the smoking plane lose altitude and was relieved that “just before the plane disappeared behind the trees, I saw seven black dots—seven black dots transforming into seven silken flowers. They had jumped; their chutes were open.”

  One of the reporter’s chutes malfunctioned, but Capa would learn later that his friend Chris had made it.

  • • •

  Back on the DZ troopers were chased by bursts of bullets from every direction, so they sought refuge wherever they could find it: in irrigation ditches, behind fence posts, among hedgerows, and even behind dead cattle. The fumping sound of mortars mixed with the blasts of rifles, machine guns, 20mm cannons, and high-velocity 88s.

  One man recalled his first minutes on the ground: “Two bullets hit the dirt not three feet from my head. I did a hundred and fifty yards on my stomach to a nearby mortar crater in nothing at all. A burp gun opened up on me as I rolled in and hit bottom in a shower of stones and dirt. I cautiously raised my head to look out and was treated again to a burst from the burp gun fired from a farmhouse 50 yards away. Rifle fire from the opposite direction began throwing dirt around my hole. Every time I raised my head I received burp fire from the other.”

  Unknown to the troopers, civilians were also trying to stay out of the crossfire. Fourteen-year-old Wilhelm Westerfeld sheltered from the pandemonium with his mother and little sister in their cellar. His mother had placed a white pillowcase near the entrance to signal no harmful intent should be expected from the occupants. After several low-flying transports had passed over, Wilhelm risked peeking from the shelter. Not far away he spotted a camouflage parachute draped over a pear tree, at the foot of which lay a dead American. As the family emerged for a closer look, the trooper jumped to his feet and brandished a pistol.

  “Soldat? Soldat?” he asked, gesturing toward the shelter.

  “Nix Soldat, Nix Soldat!”

  The trooper stepped into the cellar and fired a few rounds to make sure. As he emerged, a squad of Germans came into the yard. Caught in the crossfire, the family stood helpless with their hands over their heads, afraid to move. Wilhelm’s sister, Hani, cried out, a finger on her left hand having been severed by a bullet.

  Drawn by the firing, more troopers arrived, and the Germans threw down their weapons. The Westerfelds along with the POWs were herded toward a temporary aid station set up alongside the railroad embankment.

  While medics attempted to save Hani’s finger, Wilhelm watched as troopers escorted in more prisoners. The POWs had their hands over the
ir heads, and most appeared happy to still be alive. One, however, wearing a long camouflage smock, refused to keep his hands up. Instead, he stood at attention with his right arm raised in a Nazi salute. In the middle of his loud diatribe about the Führer, a paratrooper gunned him down with a burst from his tommy gun.

  • • •

  John Magill, the forward artillery observer who jumped with the Thirteeners, landed close to his equipment bundle where he was to rally with the rest of his four-man section. He wanted to get his radio set up; the artillery support would be dropping in five minutes, and when the first 75mm howitzer was assembled, he needed to be ready to relay fire missions.

  Almost ten minutes later it became apparent that the howitzers had dropped elsewhere.

  They’ll be shot to pieces trying to put their howitzers together under direct enemy fire, thought Magill. Where have they landed?

  Led by Captain James Cake, Magill and the other two artillerymen tried to keep up with the advancing Thirteeners, but the weight of their bulky radio equipment slowed them down. They soon found themselves caught in the open with only one pistol per man to defend themselves. Enemy rifle fire from a nearby barn reinforced the absurdity of their situation. Desperate calls on the radio for artillery support went unanswered.

  They agreed to take turns leapfrogging to better cover. Magill went first. He made it a few feet before being knocked to the ground by a bullet ricocheting off the radio on his back. The captain made his bound successfully, but the third man was hit. Before Magill and the captain could reach him, the nineteen-year-old had bled out. They stripped him of his radio and left his body; it would have to be dealt with later.

  A squad of Thirteeners, seeing their predicament, came on line and advanced to within bazooka range of the barn. The explosion brought out eight Germans with their hands over their heads. Magill wanted to kill all of them in retaliation for his dead friend, but cooler heads prevailed.

  10:24. Drop Zone X. Saturday, March 24, 1945.

  Magill was right. The forty-five C-47s of serial A-7 had accurately dropped the artillerymen and their howitzers onto DZ X. But because the Thirteeners had been dropped two miles off target, the artillerymen were alone. The serial’s aircraft made it out comparatively well; sixteen had been damaged, with just one shot down. But what happened on the ground was a different story.

  While keeping his feet and knees together, John Chester crashed into a heap fifty yards from his howitzer. With the deftness of a rattlesnake, he slipped out of his parachute harness and slithered across the field toward the equipment bundles, his crew’s rally point.

  Lying prone, Chester tugged at the straps of the bundle containing the howitzer’s tail section. A few seconds later a bullet smacked into a discarded packing board just inches from his head. A German in the upper window of a nearby house had spotted him. Chester realized the rifleman “had friends and plenty of ammunition up there too,” so he decided to abandon the howitzer for the moment.

  He grabbed his carbine, rolled to his feet, and serpentined to a nearby hedgerow, diving behind a pile of lumber. In midair he realized he was about to land on a German. He tried to change course, but it was too late. He crashed next to the man, who thankfully was dead.

  Chester searched the corpse and got his hands on arguably the most prized of GI souvenirs: a semiautomatic Luger pistol. Chester tucked it into his combat jacket, along with several extra magazines of 9mm ammunition.

  Twang! Chester had tried to peek out of the woodpile, but the piece of lumber in front of him splintered in his face. He hadn’t escaped the attention of the rifleman after all. A third shot got Chester moving again. As he followed the hedge to a stand of trees, he gathered up members of his crew as he ran. That’s when he found his section chief, Sergeant Ralph Foulk, hit by shrapnel just above the knee.

  Chester examined the wound. It didn’t look too deep, but it was bad enough that Foulk would be down for a while. Chester told him, “I’d better get on with the fight but I’ll send the first medic I can find your way.” Chester’s crew was now down to five men, and whether he wanted the responsibility or not, he was back in charge.

  Chester’s A Battery had been hit hard. Their commander, Captain Charles Duree, had taken a bullet in the stomach while leading an attack. Duree’s second in command was killed, along with several others, as they dashed out to assemble a howitzer. And inexplicably, one entire planeload was missing. It was later reported they’d dropped early—on the friendly side of the Rhine.

  The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Booth, landed just twenty yards from the farm complex designated for his command post. But heavy rifle fire from the main house wounded several troopers before it could be stormed. Two of the enemy were killed before the other twenty-three surrendered. The buildings were then occupied, with radios set up in one and an aid station in another.

  Two troopers crashed through the roof of a barn. The botched landing probably saved their lives, and they instantly set upon the defenders who were firing at descending paratroopers. Their surprise attack from within the strongpoint bagged them sixteen prisoners.

  One wounded trooper—shot in the thigh—was found still lying in his harness. Twenty-five feet away lay the body of a farmer missing half his head. “I got hung up in this goddamn tree,” the trooper explained, “and while I was struggling to get out of the harness this old bastard rushed out of the house and shot me. Then I plugged him.”

  • • •

  Meanwhile, from the protection of the trees, Chester and his small group sporadically shot back at Germans in a stone farmhouse, but their small-caliber carbines had little effect. Private Gene Buswell spotted an equipment bundle lying in the open area between them and the enemy. Based on the markings it contained a bazooka, but they all agreed it would be suicide to attempt its recovery.

  As the men strategized their next move, a trooper dashed past them and into the kill zone. Chester didn’t know the man’s name, but knew he had a reputation as an “8-Ball, who spent half his time in the guardhouse.” As the tinny burrrrrrrp, burrrrrrp of German machine pistols erupted from within the house, bullets kicked up dirt all around 8-Ball as he dragged the bundle back to the group. Buswell assembled the bazooka, while 8-Ball darted back out, zigzagging his way across the open ground to a crate of rockets. The troopers, in awe, poured suppressing fire at the house as 8-Ball once again miraculously avoided getting hit and returned with the rockets.

  Buswell’s first shot missed, the rocket soaring over the roof with a loud whoosh. As he waited for his assistant gunner to load the next round, he took a deep breath to settle into his aim. The second round exploded inside a third-story window, sending smoke and debris out of the gaping hole. Buswell’s plan was simple: put a round through every window of the building. His next shot exploded in a room on the second floor. The effect was immediate, as the volume of fire from the farmhouse dropped significantly. Before Buswell could fire again, the defenders waved several white rags and pillowcases from the windows. They’d had enough.

  Troopers advanced cautiously as coughing Germans filed out of the smoking building with their hands up. They pushed past the Germans to clear out the building and deal with any stragglers.

  Trooper Anthony Moon, making his way alongside the structure, was surprised by an old man coming at him with a double-barreled shotgun. Chester raised his rifle, but Moon was faster. The farmer slumped to the ground, shot twice.

  • • •

  All over the DZ the devastating ground fire was taking its toll. Once the transports had picked up speed and banked away, German anti-aircraft gunners lowered the barrels of their 20mm cannons to rake the assembling artillerymen. The quad-barrels skipped thousands of rounds across the DZ, ripping apart whatever they hit.

  The Germans had the area well covered. There were at least eight 20mm guns dug into shallow pits surrounded by infantry foxholes. Additionally there were ten of the heavier 76mm guns protected by at least twenty machine g
un positions.

  The American artillerymen, who were now fighting as infantrymen, abandoned the idea of assembling their howitzers. They’d have to push the Germans back before pinned-down crews could get to the equipment bundles.

  An unexpected respite came in the form of British gliders released over the DZ. The Germans shifted fire to engage the slow-circling Horsas, which gave the momentum back to the Americans, who took advantage of the distraction to press their attacks. Rifle grenades eliminated one 20mm position. Another was taken out by deft marksmanship as troopers picked off the gunners one by one. A captured gun was pressed into action and used against other enemy positions.

  Finally, an hour after landing, Chester and his men heard the sweet sound of booming artillery fire from one of their own howitzers on the far side of the DZ. A crew in B Battery had assembled one of their guns and leveled it in direct fire at enemy strongpoints. The 75mm, ten-pound projectiles, with a forty-five-yard kill radius, gave them the firepower they desperately needed.

  With enemy fire waning, the troopers were able to piece together more howitzers. But some German zealots remained stubborn. A crew led by Sergeant James Guy wheeled their howitzers into position to engage a German-held building. Over a dozen rounds exploded in the building, and still the defenders refused to give up. Troopers dashed out to get more ammunition from equipment bundles. It took several more shots before a surrender flag waved from a window. Over two dozen battered but defiant Germans came out with their hands up.

  As the artillerymen mopped up resistance on the DZ, they wondered: Where in the hell were the Thirteeners?

  10:35. Two miles north of Drop Zone X. Saturday, March 24, 1945.

  One of the first to realize he’d been dropped in the wrong place was the Thirteeners’ 2nd Battalion commander, thirty-three-year-old Colonel Allen “Ace” Miller.