Churchill stands on a demolished Rhine rail bridge on March 25 during VARSITY PLUNDER. When U.S. officers demanded that he return to a safer position, the prime minister “put both his arms round one of the twisted girders of the bridge and looked over his shoulder…with pouting mouth and angry eyes.” (William Simpson Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute)
Churchill had proposed riding into battle in a British tank during Operation VARSITY PLUNDER, the 21st Army Group attack over the Rhine. “I’m an old man and I work hard,” he later explained. “Why shouldn’t I have a little fun?” Dissuaded, he instead donned the uniform of a colonel in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars—the regiment in which he had been commissioned half a century earlier—and on the afternoon of March 23, he boarded a C-47 Dakota with Brooke to fly to Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. An Anglo-American smoke screen fifty miles long already hugged the river, “a thick black haze,” one witness reported, “for all the world like Manchester or Birmingham as seen from the air.”
They found Montgomery’s command post in a pine forest, occupying a clearing once used by an equestrian school. Photos of Rommel and Rundstedt still adorned the caravan walls, like the vanquished ghosts from battles past. After supper, the prime minister repaired to Montgomery’s map wagon, where caged canaries sang their arias. A few hours earlier, the field marshal explained, he had put his master plan in motion with a code phrase to his lieutenants: “Two if by sea.” The British were coming.
Under Montgomery’s command, more than 1.2 million Allied soldiers now leaned forward, in an operation that rivaled OVERLORD for complexity and grandeur. Three armies crowded the west bank of the Rhine, with the British Second squeezed between the Canadian First to the north and the U.S. Ninth to the south, all imperfectly concealed by that smoky miasma. On the east bank, arrayed around Wesel, their foe was reduced to what a German general called the “shadow of an army” that could “only pretend to resist.” The British Army might be melting away—the bloody slog from Nijmegen had cost the equivalent of thirty-five infantry battalions, for which there were few replacements—but Montgomery intended to stage one last, glorious military pageant, worthy of an empire.
The plan for PLUNDER called for three corps, two British and one American, to assault the river that night. Less than twelve hours later, in VARSITY, they would be followed by an Anglo-American airborne corps that would descend onto the reeling enemy—a reversal of previous battle sequences. Sixty thousand engineers had gathered on this stretch of the Rhine. Fifty-five hundred artillery tubes stood elevated and poised to fire: a single 105mm howitzer could spray almost two tons of lethal fragments over nine acres in an hour. Fifteen thousand tons of bombs had been dropped in the past three days to soften up the battlefield. The British alone had amassed 120,000 tons of matériel, half of it ammunition; American stocks were larger still. Churchill already had chalked a message on one huge shell: “Hitler Personally.”
With a final pinch of his cheek and clipped assurances that all would be well, Montgomery retired to his sleeping trailer. The distant grumble of guns signaled that PLUNDER had commenced. Churchill and Brooke strolled among the pines in the balmy evening, reflecting on how far they had come in the past thirty months, from Alam Halfa and Alamein in Egypt to Hitler’s inner keep. Just before ten P.M. Churchill took a final draw on his cigar and then he, too, turned to bed, an aging hussar in need of sleep.
Twenty miles east, the Rhine attack had grown febrile with “the unbearable whip and lash of the guns,” in Alan Moorehead’s phrase. Flame and steel seared the far shore with as much hellfire as several thousand tubes could deliver. Concussion ghosts drifted back across the river, rippling the battle dress of Tommies assembled in water meadows, where they drained their rum mugs and blackened their cheeks with teakettle soot. Commandos “appeared in long files, coming out of the woods,” wrote Eric Sevareid. “There was the sound of creaking boots and straps.… They were slightly bent under their packs. Some were singing.” Into storm boats and amphibious Buffaloes they clambered, and soon the flotillas beat for the far shore, following an azimuth of Oerlikon tracers that stretched to the east like bright strands of rubies. Chandelier flares hissed overhead, dripping silver light into the river. “If you happen to hear a few stray bullets, you needn’t think they’re intended for you,” a British officer had told his troops. “That, gentlemen, is a form of egotism.”
From the second floor of a holiday villa overlooking the Rhine, Moorehead watched a Pathfinder aircraft orbit above Wesel’s church spires to mark the target for British bombers. He thought the plane resembled “a single hurrying black moth in the air.”
He shot his clusters of red flares into the center of the town, which meant—and how acutely one felt it—that Wesel had just about ten minutes to live. Then the Lancasters fill[ed] the air with roaring and at last the cataclysmic, unbelievable shock of the strike.… Buildings and trees and wide acres of city parkland simply detached themselves from the earth.… A violent wind came tearing across the river.
“A great crimson stain of smoke and flame poured up like a huge open wound,” wrote R. W. Thompson, “and the river seemed the color of blood.” A British major wondered in his diary “if more than mortal powers had been unleashed.” The bombers flew off, a thousand tons lighter, and a violet pall draped Wesel as the Commandos, who had gone to ground on the east bank, now rose to claim their prize. “Burglar-like and in single file, the leaders paying out a white tape, the whole brigade crept into the town,” Moorehead wrote. Wesel, or rather its charred carcass, soon was theirs. Two British corps, the XII and XXX, surged over the river in force.
A few miles upstream, 40,000 Ninth Army gunners cut loose at one A.M. with a barrage exceeding a thousand shells a minute. An hour later Simpson’s XVI Corps, swollen to 120,000 men, hoisted the first of seven hundred assault boats up over a dike and into the river. Medical heating pads had been used to warm the outboard motors, and now the frenzied yank of starter cords sent, in one writer’s description, “shoals of small boats scudding across the water” under a three-quarter moon. Machine-gun tracers guided the initial waves until colored airfield landing lights could be emplaced on the far shore. German resistance evinced “no real fight in it,” a lieutenant reported, and the two assault divisions tallied only thirty-one casualties. On the near shore, beachmasters in white helmets hectored stragglers, and twenty-ton cranes hoisted the larger landing craft into the Rhine.
By Saturday morning, March 24, thirteen U.S. infantry battalions held the east bank on an eight-mile front. Engineers in five equipment dumps west of the river whipped off camouflage covers—garnished fishing nets, chicken wire, tar paper, and fabric darkened with coal dust—to reveal endless acres of pontoons, stringers, trusses, and anchor cables. The bridge-builders set to work on the river with a will, and a way.
* * *
Rested and exultant, Churchill shortly before ten A.M. on Saturday settled into an armchair placed for his benefit on a hillside in Xanten, five miles west of Wesel. A clement sun climbed through a cloudless sky, marred only by the milky contrail of a V-2 streaking southwest toward Antwerp, or perhaps London. Booming British guns battered targets far beyond the Rhine, and the orange starbursts of exploding shells twinkled through the morning haze. Gazing at the pageant of boats and rafts plying the river below him, the prime minister mused, “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge. But now my armies are too vast.”
A deep droning from the rear grew insistent. Churchill sprang to his feet with unwonted agility. Flocks of Allied fighters abruptly thundered overhead, trailed by tidy formations of transport planes, low enough for those on the ground to discern paratroopers standing in each open jump door. Following behind, as far as eye could see or imagination conjure, came aerial tugs, each towing a glider or two. The prime minister capered downhill for several steps, shouting, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” Just north of Wesel the first red and yellow parachutes blossomed, in Moorehead’s description, “like enormous poppies.”
Here then was VARSITY. The British 6th Airborne Division, flying in column from eleven airdromes in East Anglia, had merged south of Brussels with the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, flying from a dozen fields near Paris. Protected by three thousand Allied fighters, their combined amplitude darkened the sky: seventeen hundred transports and thirteen hundred gliders, bringing to battle seventeen thousand paratroopers and glidermen. Their orders were to seize the high ground and woodland above Wesel in reinforcement of the PLUNDER bridgeheads—“to loosen up the scrum,” as a British airborne commander put it, “and set the armies behind us swanning.”
In this they would be modestly effectual, seizing ten landing zones and drop zones with alacrity. But the stupendous bomb tonnage, the tens of thousands of artillery shells, and the hundreds of attack sorties against suspected antiaircraft positions had failed to winkle out all the enemy batteries, or to discourage mobile 20mm flak guns rushed to the field. “About the time we crossed the Rhine, holes started appearing in the wings and fuselage,” an officer in the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment later wrote. “Flak hitting on the plane body reminded me of the noise made by hail on a corrugated iron roof.” Paratroopers groggy from Dramamine narrowed their shoulders and squeezed tight their buttocks as bullets punched through steel floor matting. A battalion commander in the same regiment reported that as his parachute opened, “I looked back and saw the left wing of our aircraft burst into flame. Almost immediately the entire aircraft was afire and falling.” Sevareid watched as another plane “parted with a wing.”
The body of the plane plummeted earthward while the wing followed, fluttering and scudding like a big leaf. Another plane was streaming fire from both engines. The flames were beautiful golden ribbons.
Enemy tracers ignited wooden glider frames and fabric skins. A flight lieutenant reported seeing a British Hamilcar disintegrate in midair, the occupants “falling like puppets.” A parachutist corporal watched another glider bank above a landing zone when ground fire “cracked it open like an egg and the jeep, gun, blokes all fell out.” Of four hundred 6th Airborne gliders, only eighty-eight landed unscathed, and another thirty-two were destroyed on the ground by German artillery and incendiaries. One-quarter of the British glider pilots were casualties. More than fifty American gliders were destroyed by gunfire or in collisions with trees, poles, and other gliders in what one officer called “a flaming hellhole.”
“Controls hit by flak in air,” a glider account noted. “Wings and nose gone. Pilot and co-pilot hit. 12 EM WIA [enlisted men wounded-in-action].” On Landing Zone N, many glider men reportedly were “slain in their seats, and many loads burned or destroyed by mortars.” Robert Capa, who jumped with an American battalion, watched as German marksmen riddled paratroopers helplessly snagged on a tall tree; hearing Capa swear furiously in his native Hungarian, a GI told him, “Stop those Jewish prayers. They won’t help you now.” A low-flying B-17 Flying Fortress carrying other combat cameramen and reporters fled in flames back across the Rhine. A survivor who bailed out of the stricken bomber watched as “all around us … burning and disabled C-47s crashed into the fields.”
The morning proved even more hazardous for the new C-46 Curtiss Commando, flying in combat for the first time. Much larger than the C-47, with twin jump doors and a bay that carried twice as many paratroopers, the C-46 also was more vulnerable “due to the position and size of the fuel tanks and maze of hydraulic lines,” a Pentagon study later concluded. Bullets striking aluminum often generated sparks up to five inches wide, while leaking gasoline from punctured C-46 tanks tended to dribble through the hot exhaust stacks toward the fuselage. The AAF also had chosen not to install self-sealing fuel bladders in the three thousand C-46s eventually bought. The self-sealing technology had been developed since the 1920s and further refined after the dissection of German Messerschmitt fighters shot down in England during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Two layers of rubber lined the fuel tank, one vulcanized and impermeable, the other more absorbent; the latter, when saturated with gasoline from a bullet puncture, expanded to plug the hole, like blood clotting in a wound. Self-sealing tanks had been installed in fighters and recently in some C-47s. But production priorities, and concern about adding weight and reducing fuel capacity, caused the Pentagon to exclude the C-46, despite earlier airborne calamities in Sicily and noisy charges by one disaffected lieutenant colonel that the decision was “criminal negligence” and “little short of murder.”
“I saw pieces of the plane’s skin tearing off when shells whizzed through,” a sergeant who survived VARSITY later recalled. “There was another C-46 alongside us with the jumpers already in the door. Suddenly it was hit and flames shot from its wing roots.” That spectacle recurred again and again above Wesel. “The C-46 seemed to catch on fire every time it was hit in a vital spot,” crewmen reported. Of the seventy-three C-46s flown by the 313th Troop Carrier Group, nineteen were destroyed and thirty-eight damaged. Investigators found that fourteen of those lost were “flamers,” planes “destroyed by fire originating [in the] gas tanks.” The 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, which had flown in Sicily, Normandy, and Holland, concluded that “the C-46D is not a suitable troop carrier aircraft for combat operations.”
One final calamity remained to unspool in VARSITY. Just after one P.M., as the airborne divisions finished the three-hour assault, waves of Eighth Air Force B-24 Liberators flew over the battlefield dropping six hundred tons of ammunition, gasoline, and other supplies from as low as one hundred feet. At that altitude, the lumbering, four-engine bombers became shooting-gallery targets, and 15 of 240 Liberators were lost, with another 104 damaged.
Among those shot down just north of Wesel was B-24 J 42-50735, nicknamed Queen of Angels and flying from Suffolk with the 704th Bombardment Squadron. The eight dead crewmen included First Lieutenant Earle C. Cheek of Missouri, the navigator, “a genial friend, a good companion, and a lovable comrade,” according to the unit chaplain. Cheek had survived many harrowing sorties in bombing runs from Italy and then from England: crewmen wounded on his thirteenth mission; an emergency landing in France on his fifteenth; two engines knocked out on his seventeenth; and flak damage to the wings, tail, and bomb bay over Magdeburg on his twenty-first. This was his thirtieth, the one that would fulfill his quota and send him home. “It shouldn’t take much longer,” he had written his girlfriend in Texas on March 18. “There are so many things we could do together.”
The sole survivor from Queen of Angels, a waist gunner who bailed out almost at the treetops, subsequently wrote Cheek’s mother in Missouri, “The ship crashed about 500 yards from where I landed and killed the rest of the boys, leaving me as the only survivor.… This is about the hardest letter I ever wrote to anyone.” Another officer in the bomb group confirmed the disaster: “They were last seen with one engine on fire and going toward a crash landing in enemy territory.… Fate is definite and there is no altering—the suit always fits.”
* * *
Churchill at day’s end returned to Montgomery’s encampment in the pine clearing. With His Majesty’s forces now firmly entrenched east of the Rhine, the prime minister was in high feather. “The German is whipped,” he declared. “We’ve got him. He is all through.” During dinner, Churchill entertained the mess with dramatic recitations from The Life of the Bee, an ode by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck to the most orderly society on earth, with chapters entitled “The Swarm” and “The Massacre of the Males.” The prime minister and his field marshals then pushed back from the table and strolled to the map caravan to hear British officers describe VARSITY PLUNDER’s progress.
All in all, the reports ratified Churchill’s buoyancy. From the 51st Highland Division on the left to the American 79th Division on the right, the Allied bridgehead extended for twenty-five miles along the east bank and reached as deep as seven miles beyond the water’s edge. Engineers were at work on various spans: the first tank-bearing bridge would open in the Ninth Army sector within a day. Three thousand enemy prisoners had been bagged on this Saturday, and PLUNDER ground units had made contact with airborne troops. The uncommonly fine weather would continue for at least another day.
The utility of VARSITY’s vertical envelopment would long be debated, much as Montgomery’s operatic staging of PLUNDER would be ridiculed as unnecessary by the likes of Patton and Bradley. Enthusiasts believed the airheads had disrupted enemy artillery, kept counterattacking Germans away from the river crossings, and opened an alley toward the Ruhr. General Brereton, commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, deemed the day a “tremendous success.”
Yet VARSITY bore a taint, a reminder that rarely in war did success and sorrow exclude each other from the battlefield. Given the supine state of enemy defenses, no objective seized by paratroopers would have long eluded a three-corps ground assault. No great depth had been added to the Allied purchase over the Rhine, nor had bridge building been expedited. The two airborne divisions incurred nearly 3,000 casualties, including more than 460 dead. In addition to C-46 and B-24 losses, some 300 C-47s had been damaged and another 30 destroyed. Troop carrier crews suffered another 357 casualties, more than half of them dead or missing. Relatively few gliders could be salvaged. Once again, airborne forces appeared to be coins burning a hole in the pockets of Allied commanders, coins that simply had to be spent. Soldiers soon mocked the operation as VARSITY BLUNDER, and burial squads with pruning saws and ladders took two days to cut down all the dead. Fate is definite. The suit always fits.
The next morning, March 25, Churchill, Brooke, and Montgomery attended Palm Sunday services celebrated by a Presbyterian chaplain in a captured German church near the river. The prime minister offered his troops a brief homily on “an influence, supreme and watchful, which guides our affairs.” Then with a V-for-victory waggle he was off with his entourage to the river town of Rheinberg for a rendezvous with Eisenhower, Bradley, and Simpson.
Together in the brilliant sunshine the six men picnicked on fried chicken served upon a white tablecloth in the garden of a colliery manager’s house. “Our men muttered about camouflage,” a British lieutenant reported, “and helped themselves to a few cakes left behind.” Strolling close to the river, where soldiers swarmed with a purposeful buzz worthy of Maeterlinck, Brooke congratulated Eisenhower on Allied successes in recent days. The supreme commander would later quote him as saying, “Thank God, Ike, you stuck by your plan. You were completely right,” a statement repudiated by Brooke. “It will be clear that I was misquoted,” the field marshal subsequently wrote, “as I am still convinced that he was completely wrong.”
For the moment such disputes seemed picayune. After Eisenhower and Bradley took their leave, Churchill’s mischievous eye lighted on a nearby landing craft. “I am in command now that Eisenhower is gone,” he declared. “Why don’t we go across and have a look?” Across the Rhine they went, prowling about for half an hour, ears cocked to the to-and-fro shriek of artillery. The prime minister “seemed more perturbed about lighting his cigar in the wind than about shellfire,” a British officer noted, but at length an anxious Simpson told Montgomery, “Get him out of here before he gets killed.”
Back on the west bank, Churchill scrambled onto the iron trusses of a demolished rail span as German shells in search of American bridge-builders began to plump the river three hundred yards upstream and even nearer downstream. “Prime Minister,” Simpson pleaded, “there are snipers in front of you, they are shelling both sides of the bridge, and now they have started shelling the road behind you.” By Brooke’s account, Churchill “put both his arms round one of the twisted girders of the bridge and looked over his shoulder at Simpson with pouting mouth and angry eyes.” At length he climbed back to shore and shambled off to safety.
After presenting Montgomery with a fine set of Marlborough: His Life and Times—Churchill’s four-volume paean to his illustrious warrior ancestor—the prime minister reboarded his plane and flew home to London, a dozen Spitfires his attending courtiers. “He never fought a battle that he did not win, nor besieged a fortress that he did not take,” Churchill had written in volume one. “He quitted war invincible.”
