Armageddon - Max Hastings [272]
Whatever surprises the Allies had been able to inflict on the Germans elsewhere on the Rhine, at Wesel for weeks the defenders had anticipated Montgomery’s crossing. The amphibious assault units profited greatly from the Germans’ transfer of forces to Remagen. But behind the river bank, beyond reach of significant damage from the British bombardment, the Germans had deployed formidable anti-aircraft power. Some 357 German flak positions—about a thousand gun barrels—had been identified. Four wings of RAF Typhoons mounted a standing anti-flak patrol through the attack. Yet, as the great airborne armada approached for Operation Varsity, ferocious ground fire rose to meet it. The British gliders, in particular, suffered severely. It was a painful irony that, despite the negligible losses of the waterborne divisions, on 24 March the American 17th Airborne took some 1,500 casualties, including 159 men killed. The British lost 1,400 men, including a quarter of their glider pilots, out of 7,220 landed. Forty-four transport aircraft were destroyed and 332 damaged. Twenty-two of the seventy-two C-46 aircraft dispatched were lost. “The casualties to glider pilots and their passengers, though by no means light, were not sufficient to affect the course of the battle, though the loss of equipment was serious,” concluded a British after-action report soothingly. Yet about half the gliders in the American sector and 60 per cent in the British zone suffered flak damage. Their passengers found the experience of the assault horrendous, and remain bitter that it has received so little attention from posterity.
The American 17th Airborne, making its first drop into battle, was to seize the Diersfordter Forest, from which it was feared that the Germans could fire upon the river crossings. The original plan called for the commitment of the U.S. 13th Airborne as well, but shortage of aircraft caused them to be excluded. The men of the 17th took off from twelve airfields around Paris after a hefty pre-dawn breakfast of steak, eggs and apple pie. Their formations rendezvoused with those of the British 6th Airborne over Brussels, then swung north-east for the last 103 miles of the approach to the river, where Eisenhower, Churchill, Brooke and a host of other Allied luminaries waited to witness this last great spectacular of the Anglo-American campaign.
Private Patrick Devlin of 6th Airborne’s Royal Ulster Rifles attended mass the day before he boarded his platoon’s glider for the Rhine. He had just returned from home leave in County Galway, after surviving the Normandy campaign. His mother begged him to stay snug in Ireland, “but to me it was all a big adventure which I would not have missed.” A sniper by trade, for this operation he preferred to carry a Bren gun. On the runway at Rivenhall near Col-chester, he and his mates kicked a football before take-off. Then he dozed, not discontentedly, through the three-and-a-half-hour flight into Germany.
Dr. David Tibbs of 13 Para was moved by the “wonderful spirit of the men.” Yet not all were eager for action. The night before the assault, the doctor was woken twice to deal with self-inflicted wounds. He also found himself ministering to an Irishman who displayed a urethral discharge and suggested himself as a VD case. Tibbs was confident that the man had used toothpaste to simulate the symptoms. “Here’s your tablets,” he told his patient brutally. “Tomorrow you jump, clap and all!”