Armageddon - Max Hastings [30]
In the last year of the war, Allied commanders often found themselves constrained by decisions made long before, in very different strategic circumstances. Ships and tanks were designed and committed to mass production before it became plain that other types of war machine could better serve navies and armies. Likewise, back in 1940 and 1941 the Germans had achieved spectacular successes with parachute troops. The imaginations of even such austere officers as Marshall and Brooke were seized by the possibilities of airborne assault. Both the British and Americans hastened to create parachute units, for which some of their boldest and best soldiers volunteered. British paratroopers carried out several notable small-scale raids. One British and two American airborne divisions achieved great success on D-Day in disorganizing the German defences. But sceptics drew attention to the fact that, wherever lightly armed, air-landed forces encountered serious opposition, they suffered heavily. The cost of paratroops in personnel and resources was enormous. U.S. and British airborne divisions showed outstanding fighting skills in Normandy. Critics asked why they could not simply be used as elite infantry rather than reserved for a parachute role, the relevance of which seemed increasingly doubtful. The Germans, indeed, never again deployed their Fallschirmjäger for massed drops after suffering terrible losses in Crete.
But the Allied Airborne Army had been created, and the apostles of the new art of envelopment from the sky were determined that it should be used. “Brereton [U.S. commander of First Airborne Army] seems determined to use paratroops, as is Browning,” wrote Bradley’s aide Colonel Chester Hansen on 1 September. “They have had any numbers of schemes . . . [Brad] had to remind [Brereton] of the parallel here with Patton’s envelopment by sea [in Sicily], when it was not necessary.” Major-General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, a passionate advocate of parachute war, voiced the impatience of many comrades about the failure to find them a role in what looked like the last act of the north-west Europe campaign. The brilliant thirty-seven-year-old “Slim Jim” Gavin, a former ranker who had reached West Point by way of a Brooklyn orphanage, wanted his division either thrown into action or transferred to Asia: “I am for the latter. This affair is practically wound up.”
Although the Airborne were considered crack troops, they could not carry into battle the heavy weapons essential for sustained survival on the battlefield against enemy armour and artillery. Lacking significant transport, they could only occupy and hold ground below or close to their dropping points. But when the plan to seize the bridges to the Rhine was conceived in the first days of September, just a fortnight after the German Army in the west had suffered catastrophe in the Falaise Gap, it seemed unlikely that the airborne invaders would face much opposition. Many men felt as assured as Major Bill Deedes that “This is the end, this is it, we’ve beaten them.” Deedes’s unit took Lille with a squadron of tanks and a company of riflemen: “There seemed no limit to what we could achieve.”
Release of the files of German signals intercepted by Bletchley Park has conclusively demonstrated Allied knowledge that 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer Divisions were refitting in the Arnhem area. Commanders had no need of the aerial photographs which were the focus of thirty-five years’ post-war controversy. The German formations were, however, shadows of their old selves. They still possessed their reconnaissance battalions, together