Armageddon - Max Hastings [275]
There was another shout of “Tanks!” McCrea promptly disappeared. Two German armoured cars dashed past, their hulls draped with wounded. One crashed into a wrecked glider near by and was shot to pieces by the British. A German officer slid into the ditch beside Devlin and sat clutching his head in his hands in shock, muttering repeatedly: “Deutschland kaputt.” Two other Germans walked forward with their hands in the air. McCrea returned, excusing himself for abandoning him by saying: “You don’t hang around when there’s tanks about!” Devlin was taken to an aid post.
David Tibbs, 13 Para’s doctor, found himself some 400 yards from his intended landing point. He walked across the field towards the rendezvous, gazing in horror at crashed gliders and dead men in scores. He later found twenty-four of his own battalion hanging dead in their harnesses in the forest where they had been misdropped. The CO of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion was shot by the Germans, like Tibbs’s comrades, as he hung helpless from the trees in his harness. The enraged Canadians stormed the neighbouring town of Schnappenburg, giving short shrift to those Germans they encountered on their passage, though in truth it was no more rational to expect mercy for a paratrooper in transit than for a bailed-out tank crew. The business of war is not to give the enemy a fair chance, but to do everything possible to deny him one.
Tibbs came upon the corpse of a staff-sergeant to whom he was much attached, turned over the man’s body and was repelled by the sight of an earwig crawling out of the man’s nose. He thought: this is the reality of war. Tibbs had just begun to treat British wounded when a tall, distinguished-looking German Army doctor presented himself and gave a smart salute. “Good morning,” said the man in English. “Why have you been so long? We have been up all night waiting for you.” For some hours, the British and German medical teams worked beside each other: “We got on well. The Germans were always pretty good on these occasions.” “The landing zone was a pretty horrific sight. People were deeply upset—about a third of our gliderborne element were casualties.”
Peter Downward was overwhelmed by the spectacle of parachutes in the thousands filling the air, each one differently coloured to denote whether it bore man, ammunition or medical supplies. Every company commander of 13 Para possessed a hunting horn, and sounded this as he hit the ground in differing Morse letters to summon his men. One of Downward’s NCOs inquired after his health, and only then did he realize that the lieutenant was bleeding from a tiny fragment of shrapnel which had struck his nose during the drop. He was lying among his men, peering cautiously over the rim of a ridge to pinpoint his position, when his attention was distracted by the spectacle of his colonel, Peter Luard, cantering up to him astride a large captured German farm horse. “For God’s sake, Downward—there’s your objective!” Luard pointed. “Take it!” Thus inspired, the young officer got up and sprang forward with his platoon towards a barn which he found already occupied by men of the battalion. “Things were starting to fall into place amid this absolute mayhem.” As he stood among the casualties at the regimental aid post, he saw a popular Canadian officer lying motionless on a stretcher. Downward said how sorry he was to see that the boy had been killed. This provoked an angry cry from the stretcher: “I’m not fucking dead—I’ve been hit and I can’t bloody well move.” The young man was paralysed for the rest of his life.
The third American unit of 17th Airborne, 194th Glider Infantry, landed in the right place, at the cost of twelve C-47 towing aircraft shot down and almost every glider