Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
Introductory Review
This is history as witnessed by participants in the greatest airborne operation of the entire war. The Market-Garden operation covered a period of a week, interrupted by bad weather during three days of the campaign.
The narrative includes the stories of pilots and crew members of the C-47 troop carrier transport planes, glider pilots, glider troops and paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, and one glider trooper from the British 1st Airborne Corps who was part of the 101st operation. The stories of former Dutch underground resistance fighters as well as Dutch citizens are included in the account.
The narrative takes the reader from the return of the bloodied but now veteran 101st Airborne Division from Normandy to England where they prepare for the second airborne operation after several aborted missions.
The pathfinder mission, the paratroop flights, and the glider lifts over several days are described by the participants. Descriptions of the operations to seize the objectives assigned to the Screaming Eagles are provided by the men with their little human interest tales.
No attempt is made to analyze the soundness of various moves but the tales unfold as they happened. Hell’s Highway has much that has not appeared in previous historical accounts of the Market-Garden campaign.
The actions of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions received very little attention from the media during or since the war’s end. The focus was concentrated on the plight of the gallant British 1st Airborne Division and the Polish Airborne Brigade in their losing battle in and around Arnhem. LTG Lewis H. Brereton, commander of the 1st Allied Airborne Army, stated that the 101st and 82nd American Airborne Divisions had fought their hearts out and whipped the hell out of the Germans and got very little credit for their efforts.
The corridor leading from Eindhoven to Arnhem needed to be kept open so the British 2nd Army, and particularly 30th Corps, could move quickly northward to relieve the beleaguered Brit- ish sky troopers. This was a continuing assignment of both the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions.
Hell’s Highway concentrates on the efforts of the 101st Airborne Division during the first two weeks of the operation in the area between Eindhoven and Uden, and then again when the 101st is involved in a defensive struggle on the island (Betuwe) between Arnhem and Nijmegen for a period of almost two months. Their responsibility during that time was to keep the enemy from attacking the Nijmegen bridge from the west and away from the one highway open to the British leading to the south bank of the Neder Rijn near Arnhem.
I have made considerable use of small-unit after-action reports for the Holland campaign. These reports covered actions of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment, the 502nd and 506th Parachute Infantry Regiments, the 81st Anti-Tank and Anti-Aircraft Battalion, and the 326th Engineer Battalion. An unpublished narrative by BG S.L.A. Marshall and his assistant, Lieutenant Westover, concerning the first-day moves of LTC Harry W. O. Kinnard’s 1st Battalion of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment was also used. Extensive use was made of an after-action report for the first ten days in Holland. It was prepared by BG Gerald J. Higgins and his staff. This report helped place the actions into the proper time sequence.
Diaries of individual soldiers play a key role in this book as it kept stories fresh in the minds of those who kept records of their days in combat in Holland. Where others may have forgotten the names of participants in specific actions, the diary notations brought the long-forgotten soldiers back into memory.
Because of my knowledge of the makeup of the entire 101st Airborne Division, unit by unit (company and battery), I was able to assist the men with their recall by providing company or battery rosters along with news about surviving members. Many of the men had been out of touch since the end of the war forty-five years ago. Many who had been wounded and never returned after the Holland campaign said they cried when they saw the names of close buddies as having been killed later in the Holland campaign, which extended over a period of seventy-two days, or later at or near Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Many happy reunions of long-lost buddies have resulted from the five years of extensive research done in writing to, and interviewing 1,382 former members of the 101st Airborne Division, troop carrier pilots and crew members, glider pilots, Dutch underground, some of whom now live in Canada and the United States. Dutch citizen participation in this project has been great. Many have sent descriptions of the airborne landings when the troops of the 101st descended from the sky by parachute and glider near their homes, or who came to their small Dutch towns and cities, pushing the enemy out ahead of them. They greeted us with a lot of pent-up emotion. We felt like heroes.
The Dutch in the corridor towns are an unusual people. They have not allowed their children to forget the sacrifices made on their behalf by soldiers who came thousands of miles from across the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. As Mrs. C. Cornuijt-Gosen of Eindhoven wrote in Static Line, an airborne news- paper published by Don Lassen in College Park, Georgia, “This gives me an opportunity to pronounce my gratitude to America, to the American people, especially to all those men who were willing to fight in another part of the world for countries and people they did not know. I thank all those men who were prepared to fight and, if necessary, to die, to sacrifice their lives for letting us live in peace. Thanks to these men for letting me live my life in freedom. God bless you all.”
The ceremonies each year at the U.S. Military Cemetery at Margraten are most impressive. Dutch children by the thousands file into the cemetery to place flowers on each of the 8,301 graves of our military dead. The gravestones are set in long graceful curves. On each side of the Court of Honor are two walls on which are recorded the names of 1,722 men who gave their lives in the service of their country but who sleep in unknown graves. Many Dutch people have written to me to relate how they have tended specific graves over four decades since the end of World War II. While the temporary cemetery was near Son, the family of Mrs. C. Boonman-Lammers tended the grave of 1Lt. Fred Gibbs on a weekly basis. She and her husband continue to visit his grave at Margraten each year. Rita van Loon of Eindhoven wrote: “My sister Oddy, now 64 years old, still tends the grave of S/Sgt. George S. Hunter of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. He was from Minneapolis. We will never forget the boys who fought for our freedom!” Her family adopted the graves of four 101st soldiers who were buried in the temporary cemetery near Son. The remains of some of those soldiers were sent back home to the States after the war.
In September of 1988, I stopped in the cemetery in the village of St. Oedenrode to pay homage to some of the local members of the underground who were executed by the enemy for their efforts in freeing their fellow countrymen from the yoke of an oppressive conqueror. I have learned from former resistance fighters that thousands of their fellows and women died for their efforts and beliefs. I choke up now as I write these lines about a Dutch girl whose story was related by PFC George K. Mullins: “One evening a Dutch girl came riding her bicycle through our outposts along a country road and headed through the German lines. It was related to us a few days later when that enemy territory was occupied that she was found dead in a barn hung by the neck.” Undoubtedly the young lady was suspected of being a courier for the Allied cause. Many women risked their lives during the war and particularly during the Market-Garden campaign, and many died at the hands of the enemy.
As related in the story, the youngsters took to the friendly airborne soldiers. Some of them were caught up in the fierce battles and died with their newfound friends. Former medic Paul R. Miller still thinks of fourteen-year-old Jac Wynen, who led Miller to avoid Germans and “Quislings” to tend to wounded, both military and civilian. The boy died during a heavy shelling.
Perhaps Wynen was the same lad described by PFC Leonard T. Schmidt of the same regiment who wrote: “We had a little Dutch boy of 14, an orphan, who followed us all around in combat and he finally got killed.”
This, then, is the story of airmen, soldiers, underground, Dutch men and women, told collectively in remembering those days of the war in Holland. A total of 612 participants sent me their recollections and I have pieced them together like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
As written in the introduction of our first book, D-Day with the Screaming Eagles, former mortar sergeant John Urbank said, “I feel I’m holding faith with some of the boys who didn’t make it. I remember more than once hearing Buford Perry and David Mythaler say, ‘If anyone asks what war is like—we’re going to tell them in the best way we know how—none of this crap that War is Hell and we can’t talk about it!’ So be it. So keep their faith.”
The feats of the airborne soldiers as we knew them have faded into legend as the helicopter has been replacing the parachute and glider. Now the extensive use of the helicopter as an airborne weapon may be questioned with the development of the heat-seeking missile, fired from a simple launcher from the shoulder of an individual soldier. It may alter the use of the modern means of moving the present-day airborne soldier to a quickly developing battle situation.
