TAKING THE FIGHT TO NAZI GERMANY
The crossing of the Rhine in March 1945 remains the biggest single-day airborne operation in history. But after the Market Garden disaster six months earlier, Operation Varsity would determine the future of the ‘Red Devils’, as a thrilling new history reveals
AT 7AM on March 24, 1945, the first of 240 Dakota transport planes took off from airfields in East Anglia carrying the six battalions of the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades, 6th Airborne Division. They were followed into the air by 429 tugs – mostly Stirlings and Halifaxes – towing Horsa and Hamilcar gliders with Major General Eric Bols’ Divisional HQ, the 6th Airlanding Brigade and supporting arms on board. It was a beautiful clear day, remembered Nigel Poett, commander of the 5th Parachute Brigade, as he watched the majestic sight of 450 parachute aircraft passing below the glider stream over Belgium from 1,000-ft up.
“As we approached the Rhine,” he wrote, “we could see ahead the battlefield, covered by haze and the dust of the bombardment.”
There were 540 Dakotas and 1,300 gliders in all, protected by almost 3,000 fighters. For James Hill, commander of the 3rd Parachute Brigade, the operation was a world apart in “skill, technique and planning” from his first primitive drop with 1 Para in November 1942 in North Africa (where the Germans first called them ‘Red Devils’). Watching the huge air armada approach its target, from a nearby hill top in The Netherlands, was Winston Churchill.
“It was full daylight, before the subdued but intense roar and rumbling of swarms of aircraft stole upon us,” he wrote. “After that in the course of half an hour over 2,000 aircraft streamed overhead in their formations.”
Soon they returned at a different altitude, their parachutists dropped or gliders released, and Churchill witnessed “with a sense of tragedy, aircraft in twos and threes coming back askew, asmoke, or even in flames”.
At 9.52am – eight minutes ahead of schedule – the first parachutes appeared over drop zones to the west of Hamminkeln, a small town east of the River Rhine in northern Germany. Hill had asked the American pilots of the US IX Troop Carrier Command to drop the 2,200 men of his brigade “in a clearing 1,000 by 800 yards in a heavily wooded area held by German parachute troops”.
The drop took six minutes and was “dead on target”. The huge airborne operation was part of Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery’s ambitious plan to jump the Rhine river. Like Market Garden, the ill-fated attempt the previous September to capture a
series of river crossings in Holland, it had separate ground and air components: Operation Plunder, the amphibious crossing of the Rhine; and Operation Varsity, the landing of paratroopers and glider-borne infantry in support on the east bank of the Rhine.
There were, however, important differences that underlined the bitter lessons of Arnhem. First, the drops would only begin after troops had got across the river, so the airborne forces would not once more be marooned. Second, the airborne troops would be dropped in one wave as close to their objectives as possible.
Third, the airborne forces would land within range of artillery support on the west bank of the Rhine, thus making the link-up with advancing ground troops as easy as possible.
The one similarity with Market Garden was the decision to land troops by daylight. The risk of exposing slow flying gliders and transport aircraft to flak was outweighed by the benefit of airborne troops being able to orientate themselves in daylight, assemble quickly, and locate and engage the enemy.
Another compromise – forced by the limited Allied airlift capability – was the use of two airborne divisions instead of the original
three: the US 17th Airborne, which had never dropped but did have recent combat experience in the Ardennes; and the British 6th Airborne, which had overcome the chaos of a night jump to achieve all its main objectives with such distinction on D-Day.
The plan was to drop them east of Wesel in an area between the town and the River Issel, where they would seize wooded high ground known as the Diersfordter Forest, the town of Hamminkeln, and several bridges over the Issel. They would then be in a position to prevent German reinforcements from counterattacking the amphibious bridgehead.
OPERATION Plunder alone, noted the official US history, “would rival D-Day in Normandy in terms not only of troops involved but also in build-up of supplies, transport, and special equipment, and in the amount of supporting firepower, in complexity of deception plans, and in general elaboration”. It is no exaggeration to say it was the “most elaborate assault river crossing operation of all time”. The British, alone, stockpiled 60,000 tons of ammunition, 30,000 tons of engineer stores and 28,000 tons of other commodities.
The US Ninth Army built up another 138,000 tons of supplies. The British had almost 3,500 artillery pieces, antitank and anti-aircraft guns, and rocket projectors; theAmericans 2,070. The total number of troops involved was 250,000.
The ground attack began near the town of Rees at 9pm on March 23 as assault waves of the British 51st (Highland) Division – part of Horrocks’ XXX Corps in the British Second Army – entered the river and began to cross in their Buffalo amphibious vehicles.
Within two-and-a-half minutes, facing only light opposition, they had reached the far bank. By dawn, nine small bridgeheads had been secured on the eastern bank of the Rhine and casualties were relatively light. The stage was now set for the arrival of the British
‘Speed and intiative is the order of the day. Risks will be taken. The enemy will be attacked’
6th and US 17th Airborne Divisions whose combined force of more than 14,000 men made Varsity the largest airborne operation in history. On March 24, James Hill’s Brigade HQ and 8 Para descended into a hail of smallarms fire from German troops dug into the edge of the Diersfordter Forest. “During the artillery barrage,” recalled Panzergrenadier Rolf Siegel, “we pressed ourselves into our trenches – they didn’t seem quite deep enough then – only to reemerge as the first aircraft arrived. By the time that we had set up the gun, parachutists were in the air. “Within a few minutes there were hundreds of them, and many were collecting at various points.”
Firing an MG-42 machine gun, Siegel claimed to have shot up to 20 British parachutists before his post was overwhelmed. Wounded by grenade fragments, he was the only member of his unit to survive. Hill had told his men: “Speed and initiative is the order of the day. Risks will be taken.The enemy will be attacked and destroyed wherever he is found.” They carried out his instructions to the letter, but many paid the price. They included Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Nicklin, commanding 1 Canadian Para, who was riddled with bullets as he dangled helplessly from the branches of a tall tree.
Also killed during the drop, or soon after, was Captain Alan Clements, the bookish, chess-playing member of Hill’s staff, and veteran of North Africa and Sicily, who, only eight days earlier, had told his sister how much he was enjoying life.
The War Office telegram, with the news his family had been dreading since 1942, would reach them on April 5. Among the personal effects returned to his parents were a pipe, a fountain pen, a bone-handled penknife, a chess set, three volumes of poetry and a History of England. Clements was 26.
The rest of the brigade fought on, with 8 Para securing the drop zone by 11am and the other two battalions, 9 Para and 1 Canadian Para, occupying the western edge of the Diersfordter Forest. “By noon,” recalled Major Fraser Eadie of 1 Canadian, “all companies had secured their objectives, but enemy fire that continually swept the east and south ends of the drop zone still had to be silenced.
“Our doctor Captain Pat Costigan’s medical crews really excelled in their rescue and evacuation of casualties through to our aid post… Corporal Fred Topham of the battalion medics displayed tremendous bravery in caring for and evacuating the wounded.”
THE 27-YEAR-OLD Topham had worked in the gold mines of Ontario before enlisting in 1942. For his “outstanding bravery” and “magnificent and selfless courage” on March 24 – notably his rescue of three wounded men from a burning Bren gun carrier – he became the only member of the 6th Airborne Division to be awarded theVictoria Cross.
Elsewhere, the men of the 6th Airlanding Brigade had been met by a blizzard of fire as they attempted to land their unwieldy gliders to the north and east of Hamminkeln.
Private Denis Edwards of the 2nd Ox and
Bucks Light Infantry, a veteran of the famous operation to capture Pegasus Bridge on D-Day, remembered rounds zipping through the flimsy plywood fuselage and out the other side. As they came in to land, “an aileron, and the tail section were shot to pieces by shellfire”. The battalion’s task was to capture a railway bridge and a road bridge over the Issel river and then take on German positions.
It achieved all of this, but at a fearful cost. Of its original strength of 600, 110 were killed in the landing and many more wounded, leaving the battalion’s effective strength at under 300. “The rest of the day,” noted one officer, “was just a question of resisting attacks and sending out patrols. That night the Germans began a real assault, with tanks, and we had to blow the bridge over the Issel which we had seized that day to stop them coming across”.
By late on March 24, the two airborne divisions had taken most of their objectives and managed to link up with each other and the 15th (Scottish) Infantry Division advancing from the Rhine, which meant their air resupply mission could be cancelled.
The operation cost the 6th Airborne Division 1,344 of its 4,976 men – including 238 killed – a casualty rate of 27 per cent. Yet these heavy but far from crippling losses were a fraction of those suffered by the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem.
And, unlike the lives wasted in North Africa and Sicily to less tangible gain, Operation Varsity might conceivably have saved more lives than it cost, in helping to consolidate the Rhine bridgehead, and thus shorten the war by a few months. General Eisenhower called it “the most successful airborne operation we carried out during the war”.
Britain’s airborne force – created in the dark days of June 1940, at Churchill’s behest, to take the fight to Nazi Germany’s “Fortress Europe” – had left the best until last, and in 1945 had reached its zenith. Now the ‘Red Devils’ would go from strength-to-strength.
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