Armageddon - Max Hastings [273]
At the airfield, Tibbs and his comrades were a trifle disheartened to hear that their American pilots had never before carried paratroopers. The fliers inquired innocently about the long cylinders attached to parachute packs and clipped beneath the fuselage—“Are those things explosives?” Yes indeed, said the British, bangalore torpedoes. At that moment, the whole plane lifted and there was a resounding thud as the bangalores were dumped on the tar-mac. A head leaned out of the cockpit: “Just testing the clips!” the pilot cried cheerfully. The frightened doctor shook his fist at the American, and helped the signals officer to reattach their dangerous cargo. When most of Lieuten-ant Peter Downward’s platoon were already aboard their Dakota, a young soldier suddenly broke down and announced that he could not go on. Downward took the boy aside and remarked that, since he would be one among 8,000 men of 6th Airborne dropping, the odds were that he would make it. “Also, that as a young man he would hate himself if he looked back on this act of cowardice. He had to think of his family. How would they feel, to have a son labelled a coward by a court martial?” The boy boarded the aircraft, jumped, survived, and afterwards thanked his officer, little older than himself.
One of Downward’s men, Porrill, relieved the monotony of the long flight by serenading the aircraft with his mouth organ. As David Tibbs’s C-47 approached the dropping zone, the doctor was horrified to see through the door a long stream of men descending into a thick forest. Their dispatcher gestured at their own stick to jump. Tibbs’s sergeant, No. 1 in the C-47’s doorway, shook his head violently, pointing down at the trees and a row of pylons. Then the landscape cleared, and they threw themselves into the air. The doctor watched curiously as a German 88mm gun crew beneath him loaded and fired their piece. He hit the ground 200 yards from the battery. Seeing two paras close by, he pointed to the enemy guns. Weighed down with equipment, the soldiers waddled towards them with agonizing sluggishness. But every German eye was on the sky. The British threw grenades and successfully rushed the guns.
Colonel Edson Raff and 700 men of his U.S. 507th were dropped two miles off target, because their transport pilots were confused by haze. Marching through the woods towards their rendezvous, he chanced upon a German artillery battery, which his “Ruffians” immediately stormed, killing most of the gun crews. By 1400, Raff’s men had secured all their objectives. Brigadier-General William Miley, commanding the 17th, was also landed miles from his intended dropping zone and separated from his staff. Indeed, all he could initially see on the ground were three soldiers and a container labelled as a .30 calibre machine-gun. The general took the weapon and the soldiers in charge, and started his battle commanding a single machine-gun crew, which opened a brisk fire on the enemy.
At least part of the 507th had landed where it was intended. By contrast, Colonel James Coutts’s entire 513th Parachute Infantry suffered an awkward trip. First, while still in the air their C-46 transports passed over a German flak belt. Twenty-two American aircraft were shot down in flames, the nightmare mitigated only by the fact that all their paratroopers were able to jump before the C-46s crashed. The undamaged aircraft dropped their men not on the designated DZ-X, but on 6th Airborne’s glider landing zone at Hammelkiln, which was under heavy German fire. The American paratroopers found themselves engaging enemy gun positions even as gliders crashed in around them. Ridgway was so dismayed by the readiness with which the C-46s had caught fire that he gave orders that the type was never again to be used for carrying paratroopers into action.
This was the most ambitious glider operation of the war. The British Hamilcars carried