Time Magazine Apr. 2, 1945
In the velvety darkness before dawn, fresh winds blew across dozens of airfields in France and England. By the thousands, sleepy-eyed, yawning warriors climbed into their big-pocketed jump suits and pulled on high combat boots. For the airborne troops it was another fateful morning of: "Well, here we go again!" This time they were going beyond the Rhine.
For breakfast there were fresh eggs. But many a tight-stomached trooper passed up this crashing luxury and wanted only scalding black coffee. Soon they were at the airstrips, piling aboard the transport planes and gliders, stacked nose to tail in neat, herringbone formation, with their towlines carefully coiled on the ground.
Once started, the take-offs had to be run with stopwatch accuracy. At ten-second intervals the tow planes moved in from the sides, gently tautened the line, then poured on power and roared down the runway and off into the sky. By then the day had dawned clear and bright, with a near-perfect ten-mile wind.
Big Parade. It was Saturday, March 24, 1945. The western Allies had launched the biggest push, the drive for Germany's throat. General "Ike" Eisenhower was moving more than a million men into action. To the broad picture of overall strategy, the First Allied Airborne Army was contributing its own ultramodern specialty: vertical envelopment of an enemy position.
Flying in double column, two great aerial task forces were converging on a target. Near Brussels the forces joined—the British 6th Airborne Division flying from England, the U.S. 17th Airborne from France. There were more than 3,000 transports, towing gliders and carrying men and equipment. They had 2,000 fighter planes and bombers running interference. If the planes had been strung out in single file they could have stretched in unbroken line from Paris to Berlin. The Allies' big parade was over its German objective for three hours.
Hit the Silk. On the roads below the roaring air fleet, guns, trucks and marching men were raising dust clouds. Farther ahead were smudges of black smoke where heavy bombers were still beating up the target area. Suddenly, out of the smoke, the now bridgeless Rhine appeared, flowing placidly. In the lead transports gum-chewing paratroops were tense. From the jumpmaster in each plane came a curt command: "Stand up!" Then, "Hook up! . . . Stand in the door! . . . Go!" They went tumbling out, 15 men in ten seconds.
To transport pilots and correspondents flying as observers it seemed that the operation was moving at the unreal pace of a speeded-up movie. Within 30 seconds the drop had begun, German flak opened up, colored equipment parachutes dotted the ground, a white parachute was hung up in a tree, a big Hamilcar (British) glider lay on its back, broken and burning.
Fighter pilots saw concealed flak positions open up on the plump transports; one ship exploded in the air, others tumbled and burned. The fighters, in rocket-firing P47 Thunderbolts, cursed and went in on the deck, taking desperate chances to silence the enemy ack-ack. One low-flying pilot had to weave his plane through a group of parachuting soldiers. He launched rockets against a flak emplacement, looked up and saw a paratrooper directly in front of him.
"I had to tip my left wing, and rolled past him with only inches to spare," the flyer said. "My tail almost got him, too, and the plane's slipstream must have shaken him up, but thank God I missed him—I don't know yet what my rockets did to that gun position."
Beyond the River. Down on the ground the Allied troops—airborne no longer, just expert infantrymen now—set about speedily to vanquish the first and most formidable foe: the inevitable confusion and disorganization of a large-scale drop. The fact that they were in the middle of enemy territory did not disconcert them. That is what the tough-trained, extra-paid airborne troops are trained for. Their corps spirit is as cocky as the marines'. The masters of many weapons, from the lovingly whetted knife to the .57-caliber antitank gun, they are prepared to fight without tanks or artillery support. They are well aware that their presence in the enemy's vulnerable rear zone is excruciatingly unpleasant to him. But men have to find their outfits; outfits have to get in line with each other for tactical operation; the whole organization has to establish communications and a functioning chain of command. The process takes time.
But once the first shock of landing was over, the men of the Rhine drop went into action smoothly, setting up their guns and mortars, unpacking ammunition, getting the command radios working, moving out to crush local opposition and drive for the main objective.
In this case the objective was a limited one: to help in the establishment of a Rhine bridgehead for the British Second Army by seizing and holding an oblong patch of high ground northwest of Wesel. The drop itself, made in great strength, went on from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. By late afternoon both the British and U.S. divisions had made contact with British troops working overland from the river; by 6 p.m. the skytroopers had taken all their assigned objectives, including several intact bridges over the Yssel River, regarded as the Nazis' next main line of resistance after the Rhine. Before midnight the airborne men had captured 4,000 German troops behind their own front lines.
Nazi resistance was spotty—weak at some places, iron hard at others. British paratroopers at the north end of the area ran head-on into the German 7th Parachute Division, dropped back before one counterattack, then drove forward again.
Through the night there were short, bitter patrol clashes all around the perimeter, especially where German detachments came to grips with bands of paratroopers who had dropped farther out and were making their way back to the main body.
But by the second day it was clear that the airborne attack had come off beautifully, and that it could stand almost as a textbook model of sound airborne doctrine: jump for the open spots and clip the enemy from the side; jump in real strength, not in penny packets for the enemy to chew up one by one; jump close enough to the main attacking ground force so that contact can be made before the airborne group is worn down.
For the quality of the performance, major credit was due to two U.S. generals who went in with their men: Major General William M. ("Bud") Miley, commander of the 17th Airborne, taking his outfit into combat for the first time, and Major General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, veteran airborne fighter and commander of the Airborne Army's XVIII Corps. They had led their troops across the enemy barrier on bridges of silk.
The Bosses. Overall commander of the First Allied Airborne Army is a colorful, hell-for-leather airman, Annapolis-trained Lieut. General Lewis H. ("Louie") Brereton. In Brereton's command setup, the role of deputy is filled by tall, bluff, ruddy Major General Richard N. Gale, who also doubles as active head of the First British Airborne Command. But the Airborne Army's heavyweight punch, the potent XVIII Corps with three known U.S. divisions, is wielded by husky, aggressive, driving General Ridgway, rated by U.S. Army chiefs as the world's No. 1 active airborne commander.
Six years ago Ridgway was not even involved in U.S. airborne training. Neither was anyone else. U.S. airborne activities began in 1940, in a shy and tentative way, with an experimental platoon of 48 men and a couple of lieutenants. There was no ready-made body of doctrine or data: in the beginning some of the best information came from the Department of Agriculture's forestry experts, who knew something about parachuting men & materials to fight forest fires.
Like a sensitive plant growing in a bull pit, the U.S. paratroop platoon modestly expanded to a battalion, then to a provisional group.
Nazi airborne coups in Crete and the Low Countries opened many military eyes, and some of the U.S. Army's best brains, including Air Forces General Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold and the late, great Ground Forces chief, Lieut. General Lesley J. ("Whitey") McNair, lent support and advice to the U.S. paratroop and glider program. That program really got rolling in 1942, with the setting up of two full airborne divisions.
