Armageddon - Max Hastings [276]
One of the stranger cargoes in 6th Airborne Division’s gliders was a team from the British intelligence organisation SOE. Two British officers were landed with a group of agents, mostly Polish, whom they were instructed to infiltrate into the German lines, with orders to gather information as far forward as they could get. Major Arthur Winslow reported that he had taken one man to the forward British positions and left him in the hands of the local company commander, to penetrate the German line as best he could: “I cannot say I was altogether hopeful about his chances.” He left three more Poles on a road near Osnabrück. “They had shown a certain amount of doubt about getting away,” he said, but finally each agent in turn kissed the British officer on both cheeks and started walking towards the last fragment of Hitler’s empire. Winslow watched “three rather forlorn-looking figures disappear into the blue.” Nothing is known of their fate.
General Matthew Ridgway, who had characteristically decided to jump with 17th Airborne, almost became its last casualty of the Rhine operation. Late on the night of the 24th, the two jeeps carrying him and his aides left a meeting with the British and were driving back to the American zone. Suddenly, they saw Germans in front of them. The paratroopers hastily stopped and jumped out of the vehicles. There was a brisk firefight, in which a German grenade landed among the Americans. Ridgway’s jeep took most of the blast, but a fragment wounded the general in the arm and shoulder. The Germans retired, no doubt as surprised and shaken as the Americans. The Americans crowded into their surviving jeep, and reached the 17th CP unscathed. Ridgway needed major surgery on his arm, but pronounced himself too busy to have the grenade fragment removed until the war was over. He suffered severe discomfort from it through the weeks that followed. Airborne command was no sinecure.
IF MONTGOMERY’S Rhine operation was plodding and over-insured, those who crossed the water could be grateful that their objectives were gained at small price. But the casualties incurred by the airborne assault were out of all proportion to its contribution. Gliders were never again employed in war. Operation Varsity was a folly for which more than a thousand men paid with their lives—almost as many as 1st Airborne lost killed at Arnhem. Once again, a baleful reality had been permitted to steer events: the airborne divisions existed, and consumed rations. So they had to be used. Thereafter, however, for the remaining weeks of the campaign American and British paratroopers fought as infantry.
Alan Brooke expressed relief when he got Churchill safely home after witnessing the crossings at Wesel. He had been alarmed by the old statesman’s eagerness to expose himself to German fire, his exultation when the odd shell landed near him. “I honestly believe that he would have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success,” Brooke wrote in his diary. “He had often told me that the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.” Yet if Churchill had reached a stage of his life at which personal survival seemed unimportant, younger men did not share his indifference. Exploitation beyond the Rhine by the American and British armies proved embarrassingly sluggish. Once again, the Allies found themselves engaged in sharp fighting against remnants of such formations as 116th Panzer. Town by town and village by village, the Allies pressed on into the surviving strongholds of the Reich, halting where they met opposition, bombarding the defenders into submission whenever this was possible. The effectiveness of German