by Bruce Barrymore Halpenny
Since the Arnhem slaughter, film makers and historians have re-fought the battle. So, too, ex-Paratrooper Jack Cooper; for him it was not battle strategy but just a matter of trying to stay alive.
Operation Market-Garden was a combined airborne and ground offensive. Market, the airborne phase of the operation; Garden, the ground phase with tanks massed along the Belgian-Dutch border. It was Field Marshal Montgomery’s scheme to end the war before Christmas, but was one of the Allies’ most ghastliest mistakes.
In front of Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps tanks was a 60-mile stretch that had four major water barriers. The object was to capture intact the bridges in front of the British Second Army at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem respectively. XXX Corps tanks could then outflank the Siegfried Line and invade Germany and pierce its industrial heart, the Ruhr.
It was to be done in a single maneuver by dropping the mightiest airborne force ever known behind enemy lines. Three airborne divisions—two American and one British and the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade. There were 4,700 aircraft of all types involved: bombers, fighters, fighter-bombers, troop carriers, and more than 2,500 gliders. The Douglas C-47 Dakota, the workhorse of the Second World War, was the main aircraft for the parachutists.
Major-General Robert E. Urquhart of the First British Airborne Division had the principal target, the three-span concrete-and-steel highway bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem. This objective was the furthest point from the Garden forces and without this bridge the operation would fail—and fail it did as history shows. The Red Devils went to Arnhem with the knowledge that they would be relieved in forty-eight hours, but against overwhelming power they held the area north of the river for nine days and nights. The courage and self-sacrifice of the Arnhem Paratroopers was superhuman. But their losses were enormous and the First Airborne was almost annihilated. Out of a strength of 10,005 they lost 7,578. Major General Gavin’s 82nd U.S. Airborne Division lost 1,432. Major General Taylor’s 101st U.S. Airborne Division lost 2,118. The number killed, wounded, or missing for the entire operation was 13,974.
The heaviest losses were sustained by the 4th Parachute Brigade. By the 22nd, casualty returns showed that only one hundred men remained of the 156th Parachute Battalion, and the 10th Parachute Battalion had only thirty men and all officers had been killed.
The 1st Airborne Division’s attempt to capture the Arnhem bridge commenced as planned on Sunday, 17 September 1944, and they should have seized their objective while the 1st Air-Landing Brigade cleared the landing zones, before the arrival of the 4th Parachute Brigade the following day.
It was just before 2 p.m. on Monday, 18 September, that the first wave of the 6,674 airborne troops along with approximately 600 tons of supplies, 681 vehicles, and sixty artillery pieces neared the drop zone. One of those in that first wave was Paratrooper Jack Cooper and at twenty-five he was already a hardened veteran, having joined the Army in 1939 and fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. A short while earlier he had taken off from his Cottesmore base, south of Grantham, and now he sat listening to the drone of the Dakota’s engines as it neared the drop zone south of the Ede–Arnhem road, his thoughts fleeting between his wife Eileen back at his home town of Market Rasen and what lay ahead. “Stand by”—the green light flashed and Paratrooper Cooper flexed his toes and fingers as he waited his turn to jump; the next moment he was out of the aircraft and falling through space.
His rapid descent was halted as his chute blossomed above him. The sky was filled with men and parachutes, but he could not take in the magnitude of it all. As he looked down he could see shells and mortars bursting all over the landing zone and that he was dropping into some pine trees. Tugging desperately at his parachute lines to avoid the tracers from the waves of incendiary fire that spat up to welcome him, and at the same time correct his descent from landing in the trees and the inferno, he managed to come down in a clearing. He hit the heathland with a jolt and quickly chucked off his harness, looking around as he did so for he could hear the stutter of machine guns close by. He had landed close to two other paratroopers.
“What a bloody hell-hole we’ve dropped in … must be the bloody wrong place,” shouted one of them as they quickly teamed up with him and at the same time he bent down to pick up some heather. As he did so there was a hail of bullets and as he stood up the other two were already falling down dead. They had been killed in those split seconds that he had bent down to pick up the heather. He crouched down and looked around him, expecting another burst of fire, but it did not come.
The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of parachutes and burning aircraft. All around him the dull thud of mortar bursts, a holocaust of death and destruction. A nervous excitement gripped him as he picked up his .303 rifle and ammunition, then hurriedly headed for the assembly point, weaving and crouching as he made his way, past many dead bodies. His brigade was the 4th Parachute Brigade under Brig. John W. Hackett, and Cooper recalls, “It was chaotic and confusion reigned everywhere and I had great difficulty making for the yellow smoke signal for the firing was continuous.”
He dashed across to some trees amidst a hail of bullets and as he dived for cover two more paratroopers did likewise. Surfacing from behind the fallen tree he was confronted with a body, hanging lifeless in a tree by the parachute harness.
“It was eerie, for the dead man’s hand swung to and fro in front of my face and I could hear the ticking of the watch,” recalled Cooper. He turned away and at the same time fired in the direction of some bushes, where firing seemed to be coming from.
“They’re Jerries and I think it’s us they’re shooting at,” Cooper remembers shouting, but getting no reply he turned to find that both paratroopers were dead, with blood streaming from the head of the one nearest to him.
Not waiting to be next he scrambled out of the shell hole with a last glance at his two dead comrades and the dead man’s watch still ticking in his ears he made a dash to another shell hole and was immediately joined by two more paratroopers. As they surveyed their position they came under heavy fire. The Red Devils returned the fire simultaneously and saw the three Germans fall. Immediately they jumped up and charged forward, firing as they did so at the still bodies in front of them. They were three Waffen-SS and their skull insignia a macabre identification. Cooper recalls, “Instinctively I poked my rifle barrel into the side of the German and turned him over … he was dead and I instantly bent over and ripped off the black SS insignia as a souvenir.”
From their drop zone, Cooper and a small group moved out and made their way along the railway line to Wolfheze. There was heavy fighting en route and Cooper killed five more Germans, his second with a shot through the head and chest and he collected the cap badge for everything else was blood-stained. Four of their group had been killed, but they had killed many and taken some prisoners which they handed over on reaching Wolfheze.
“At Wolfheze I searched the Hotel Van Dijk and in the cellar shut out the horrors of the war while I ate a jar of pears,” remembers Cooper quite vividly.
As darkness settled in the fighting was still fierce all around with dead and wounded everywhere. The paratroopers were split up and it was little bands of men running all about with nobody to lead them and lacking communications. No one had any idea what was going on or what to do next. There were Germans everywhere and they appeared to have the upper hand for tanks and self-propelled guns roamed everywhere.
Like the Germans, the British requisitioned the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek and, from the evening of 18 September it was the headquarters of the British First Airborne Division.
On the 19th, Cooper and a few other paratroopers formed under Capt. Kavanah who decided that he and Corporals Bell and Wiggins would take the jeep and try to get through to brigade. Cooper recalls, “They had only gone a few yards when they were cut down with a murderous hail of machine gun fire.” With the loss of their captain they decided to make their way to Arnhem via Oosterbeek. The situation was now very serious for the bulk of their supplies had dropped into German hands. The lightly armed paratroopers were no match for the German armor. However, one in their group, a Pvt. Laws, did have a PIAT (anti-tank weapon) and he managed to stop a Tiger tank, but they were now running out of ammunition. “The stench of death was all around us and there were dozens and dozens of dead bodies and I remember seeing a Dutch family covering some of the British paratroopers with white sheets,” Cooper recalls.
As they fought their way into Oosterbeek, Cooper and two other paratroopers took prisoner six German women soldiers. They put them in a tennis court with a wire around it and used it as a prison cage. “Very appropriate,” recalls Cooper, for before the war he was Capt. Flannigan for the lion tamer at Skegness. During the night as one of the paratroopers took one of them to the toilet she stabbed him to death. She was promptly caught and shot.
Two nights had passed and they were now pinned down in the Hartenstein area. During the ensuing days, without sleep and food Cooper and his brave comrades were almost continuously engaged in very fierce fighting. Tired and exhausted they fought on as the enemy brought to bear on them, at very close range, six-barreled Nebelwerfers, mortars, 88-mm guns, machine guns, flame throwers, and infantry attacks with phosphorous ammunition. Cooper was living minute-by-minute and having to use the guns from dead Germans for he had long since been out of ammunition for his own rifle.
Having run out of ammunition, Cooper and another paratrooper holed up one dark night and, as they settled into the shell hole, two tanks approached them and came to a halt a few yards away. Two of the tank crews got out and as they moved towards Cooper he cowered down in his make-shift foxhole, expecting death—instead, he and his comrades were urinated on.
By the 24th the position was impossible and, under cover of darkness, the first and main part of the withdrawal started the next night and the remainder of the men, apart from the more seriously wounded, pulled out just after dawn on the 26th. For Jack Cooper it was too late for on the 24th he was captured. Having managed to re-equip himself from a dead German, he and two others were fighting from an upstairs bedroom window of a large detached house when all at once a Tiger tank smashed in the house side.
Vividly Cooper recalls, “Suddenly the floor had gone and we were down in the kitchen. Me and a lad called Hatton, we scrambled out of the house and ran across the road into a sort of park but was cut down in a hail of bullets. Hatton was killed and they hit me in the leg and stomach and I fell to the ground with blood coming from my stomach.” The SS infantry came and gave him a kick, rolled him over and left him for dead, along with the others. He lay there in a semi-conscious state and heard them move off.
With the darkness came the rain. Wet and in great pain he managed to turn on his side and get from his pack the bottle of White Horse Whiskey that he had picked up while in the house. He kept drinking it during those long dark painful hours and, fortified with the whiskey and the supreme courage to live, he survived the night and was found the next morning by two SS men. Cooper recalls, “There was one with a long black mac on, an officer, and a blonde private. I remember him pointing a gun at me and thought he was going to shoot. Then they fetched a door from somewhere and an old rug and laid me on the door, put the rug on me and took me in a little old shop where they gave me a drink of coffee and a bit of bread and then they started interrogating me. They even knew from three days before we left England about two that had been promoted from privates to corporals.”
As he lay in a semi-conscious state, a medic went to work on his two bullet wounds. In a very crude fashion the bullet was taken out of his kneecap, but no attempt was made to remove the one from his stomach. His wounds were then bandaged with paper bandages and he soon after was moved to Arnhem and then to a big school in Apeldoorn that was being used as a hospital for the SS. It was like a Red Cross collection center for wounded and he was made to clean their boots while lying on a stretcher.
Except for Cooper, all the other soldiers were Germans and it was here that one of them, who could speak a bit of English, asked him for his name and address for he said when the British came they would shoot him. He thought that to show his name they would be lenient with him. Cooper gave him a photo which was later found on a dead German and with having the name and address on it was sent to Waterloo Street, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, and at the time it was a mystery as to why and how the photo came to be on a dead German and made news in all the national newspapers, including The Times.
After a few days Cooper was moved from his work bed in Apeldoorn to Stalag 7A. This was a prison camp just outside of Munich and the journey by train, in cattle cars, had taken over a week. By the grace of God he survived the journey and was taken straight to prison camp sick quarters and they removed the bullet from his stomach. After only four days he was cleaning bomb rubble in Munich.
On 27 April 1945 they were liberated by the American Seventh Army at Effringham and on 11 May, Paratrooper Jack Cooper was back in the arms of his wife.
Today the severe pain from his wounds is a constant reminder of the “Black Monday” when he dropped headlong into hell, but he is proud to have worn the Red Beret and fought at Arnhem. In a letter dated 28 September, Field Marshal Montgomery wrote:
In years to come it will be a great thing for a man to be able to say—”I fought at Arnhem.”
The plan could have worked but the main flaws were:
British intelligence should have been better, for the truth about German troops in the Arnhem area was disregarded.
The opposition was underestimated.
The choice of dropping and landing zones, to effect surprise, were about eight miles from the main objective.
For the First Airborne, failure to land enough troops in the first 24 hours.
Radio communication failed completely and commanders had to use runners as in World War I.
No airborne command post was set up as was done at Corregidor with great success.
Also, where were the reconnaissance light aircraft or fighters?
Adverse weather conditions delayed the 4th and Polish Brigades.
The 390 tons of ammunition and supplies that were dropped on zone ‘V’ north of Warnsborn fell into German hands. During the battle at Arnhem only seven percent of the supplies fell into First Airborne’s hands.
I agree with General Jim Gavin who was of the opinion that if it had been Patton’s tanks waiting on the border, they would have rolled into battle, regardless of the consequences, and that was what was needed. But, sad to say, Patton was not involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment