Operation Varsity

A few minutes before ten on the morning of 24 March 1945 the first transport aircraft appeared over the lower Rhine. For the next two and a half hours thousands of paratroops dropped and hundreds of gliders landed on the woods, fields and farmsteads on the east side of the river, between the town of Wesel and the village of Hamminkeln. So began Operation Varsity – the airborne part of the great Rhine crossing by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group. In a single day and a single lift, two divisions were put down: the British 6th Airborne Division, which included the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, and the US 17th Airborne Division – more than 16,000 men in all. It was the largest single-day airborne operation in the history of warfare.

Varsity differed from earlier operations of its kind in one fundamental respect: the paratroops did not precede the ground assault but followed it. The infantry of the British Second Army and the US Ninth Army had been crossing the Rhine since the evening of 23 March in Operation Plunder, and the airborne divisions landed a few kilometres beyond the river only once the first bridgeheads already existed on the east bank. They were to seize the high ground and woods overlooking the crossing sites, destroy the German artillery and link up as quickly as possible with the advancing infantry. They accomplished these tasks within a few hours, but at the cost of losses that still lead historians to ask whether the operation was needed at all.

Varsity is often described as Montgomery’s Anglo-American-Canadian airborne landing at Wesel; two points need clarifying. Varsity was part of Montgomery’s plan, but the drop itself was commanded by American headquarters: General Lewis Brereton’s First Allied Airborne Army and General Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps. The Canadians, for their part, provided one battalion within the British division. Nor did the paratroops land in Wesel itself, which was being taken by British commandos, but north and north-west of the town.

The plan: a drop after the crossing

When in March 1945 the Western Allies reached the Rhine along its whole length, beyond the river lay the North German Plain and the road to the Ruhr, the Reich’s main industrial centre. The bridge at Remagen, captured on 7 March, and the crossing by Patton’s Third Army at Oppenheim on the night of 22–23 March had given the Americans bridgeheads on the middle Rhine. The Supreme Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, nevertheless entrusted the main blow to the 21st Army Group on the lower Rhine, opposite Wesel and Rees.

From the outset Montgomery wanted the crossing to be supported by an airborne landing. The first plans even envisaged three divisions – besides the British 6th and the US 17th, the US 13th Airborne Division, which had not yet seen action. The 13th was dropped because there were only enough transport aircraft for two. Both of the remaining divisions had combat experience, though of different kinds. General Eric Bols’s British division was a veteran of the Normandy landings – on the night of 5–6 June 1944 it had seized the bridges over the Orne in Operation Tonga. General William Miley’s American division had fought on the ground in the Ardennes but had never yet jumped into battle.

The Varsity plan was to a large extent a response to the disaster at Arnhem. In September 1944, in Operation Market Garden, the airborne divisions had been dropped several dozen kilometres – and in the case of the British 1st Airborne Division about a hundred kilometres – ahead of the front, in several lifts spread over several days and on landing zones far from their objectives. When the ground forces failed to reach them, the 1st Division was surrounded and almost destroyed in the Battle of Arnhem. This time everything was reversed. The drop was to take place by day, in a single lift, onto landing zones only 3–10 kilometres beyond the river, within range of the artillery on the west bank, and a few hours after the crossing had begun, so that the infantry could link up with the paratroops the same day. A daylight landing had the advantage that units were less scattered and assembled more quickly on the ground; the price was greater vulnerability to anti-aircraft fire.

The objectives were set by the commander of the British Second Army, General Miles Dempsey. The most important was the Diersfordter Wald – a wooded rise above the Rhine north of Wesel from which German artillery could shell the bridge-building sites. The British 6th Division was to take the northern part of the forest, the Schnappenberg hill, the village of Hamminkeln and the bridges over the River Issel, which screened the bridgehead from the east. The US 17th Division was to take the southern part of the forest with the village of Diersfordt and the crossings over the Issel closer to Wesel. Once they had taken their objectives, both divisions were to hold the ground until the arrival of the infantry – the 15th (Scottish) Division, crossing between Xanten and Wesel, and the US 30th Division south of the town – and of the commandos from Wesel.

The other side

The sector of the assault was defended by General Alfred Schlemm’s German 1st Parachute Army, part of General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group H, which since 10 March had been subordinate to the new Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. It was an elite formation in name, but in reality it had been bled white in the February fighting in the Rhineland. In the area of the future landing zones stood the 7th Parachute Division and General Heinz Fiebig’s 84th Infantry Division, each numbering no more than about 4,000 men. The reserve was XLVII Panzer Corps with the 116th Panzer Division and the 15th Panzergrenadier Division, some 150 armoured vehicles in all.

The Germans did, however, have a great deal of anti-aircraft artillery. According to Allied intelligence, the number of anti-aircraft guns in the Wesel area rose in the week before the operation from about 250 to more than 800, the great majority of them light 20 mm and 37 mm guns – the most dangerous weapons against slow, low-flying transports and gliders. The German command expected an airborne landing; it simply did not know where it would come until the British began laying a smoke screen several dozen kilometres long opposite Emmerich and Wesel. In the week before the operation Allied aircraft flew more than 10,000 combat sorties against Luftwaffe airfields, railway junctions and bridges, and on the eve of the drop and on the day itself they bombed anti-aircraft positions and barracks in the area of the landing zones.

The armada

Early on the morning of 24 March, when the Plunder infantry already held bridgeheads on the east bank, aircraft carrying the British 6th Division took off from airfields in eastern England, and aircraft carrying the US 17th Division from airfields in France. The two streams met over Brussels and turned north-east towards the Rhine. According to the figures cited in the literature, some 1,600 transport aircraft were in the air – mainly Douglas C-47s, together with, for the first time in an airborne operation in the European theatre, the larger Curtiss C-46 Commando – and more than 1,300 gliders: American Waco CG-4s, British Horsas and heavy Hamilcars, which even carried M22 Locust light tanks. The formation stretched for more than 300 kilometres and took more than two and a half hours to pass over any one point. It was escorted by some 2,000 American and RAF fighters. The photographer Robert Capa joined the 17th Division as a correspondent and jumped with the 507th Regiment.

The fly-past was watched from the west bank by Winston Churchill, who had come to Montgomery’s headquarters to see the Rhine crossing with his own eyes. From the ground, too, one could see aircraft that had been hit catch fire and fall beyond the river.

The British landing

At 9.51 a.m., a few minutes before the appointed time, Brigadier James Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade began jumping onto the drop zone on the western edge of the Diersfordter Wald. The paratroops landed under fire from machine guns and light anti-aircraft guns, and some were caught in the trees. That was how the commander of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Nicklin, was killed – according to accounts, shot while trying to free himself, entangled in the branches. Despite its losses the brigade cleared the area, and the Schnappenberg was taken by the 9th Battalion together with the Canadians. At 1.45 p.m. Hill reported that all objectives had been secured.

Serving in the same battalion was Corporal Frederick Topham, a medical orderly. When he saw one orderly after another killed trying to reach a wounded man in the open, he went out to him himself under fire, and although he was wounded in the face he refused to be evacuated and for the next several hours carried out the wounded, including from a burning carrier. For these deeds he was awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military decoration.

East of the forest, Brigadier Nigel Poett’s 5th Parachute Brigade landed. Mist and smoke from burning buildings hampered its assembly and the drop zone was under mortar and artillery fire, but before 3.30 p.m. the brigade had taken up its assigned positions. The 6th Airlanding Brigade had the hardest day. Its gliders landed in small groups right next to their objectives – the bridges over the Issel and Hamminkeln – in thick smoke and under heavy anti-aircraft fire. Many caught fire in the air, crashed on landing or came down in the wrong place; according to the British official history of the airborne forces, of the 416 gliders that reached the ground only 88 were not hit, and losses among the glider pilots reached 20–30 per cent. Even so, the glider troops captured the Issel bridges intact and, with the help of American paratroops dropped there by mistake, took Hamminkeln.

The American landing

The first of the American regiments, Colonel Edson Raff’s 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was to jump onto drop zone W, about three kilometres north of Wesel. Haze misled the pilots, and roughly half the regiment, Raff included, landed north-west of the target, near Diersfordt. Raff gathered his men and led them to the drop zone, capturing a German artillery battery on the way. By 2 p.m. the regiment had taken its objectives, including the castle at Diersfordt. Private George Peters, who single-handedly attacked a machine-gun nest firing on the assembling paratroops and was killed, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The heaviest losses in the air were suffered by Colonel James Coutts’s 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, carried in C-46s. The column flew over a belt of German anti-aircraft guns and lost 22 aircraft, with several dozen more damaged. The C-46s had no self-sealing fuel tanks, and fuel from punctured tanks collected in the wings – aircraft that were hit often burst into flames. According to American accounts, after this operation Ridgway banned their use for dropping paratroops. The regiment jumped a few kilometres from its designated zone, onto the landing zones of the British airlanding brigade, and together with the British took part in the capture of Hamminkeln. During an attack on fortified buildings Private First Class Stuart Stryker was killed after leading his platoon in an assault on a machine-gun position; he, too, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Colonel James Pierce’s 194th Glider Infantry Regiment landed accurately, but right among the German batteries that were shelling the Rhine crossings. The guns were lowered to fire over open sights at the gliders while they were still on the ground. Nevertheless the glider troops took the positions and, according to American reports, destroyed or captured 42 guns and 10 tanks.

After the drop, Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers of the Eighth Air Force flew over the landing zones, dropping supplies from very low altitude. A dozen or more of them were shot down and over a hundred damaged.

During the day the American paratroops linked up near Wesel with the British 1st Commando Brigade, which had been fighting in the ruins of the town since the night, and in the evening the 6th Division linked up with the leading units of the 15th (Scottish) Division. By midnight the first bridge had been thrown across the Rhine. General Fiebig, commander of the German 84th Division, later said under interrogation as a prisoner that the sudden appearance of two airborne divisions in the rear of his weakened formation had had a “devastating” effect on the defenders.

The price of a single day

All the objectives of the operation were taken within a few hours, but the losses were high – according to many authors, higher than those suffered that day by the infantry crossing the Rhine. According to the most frequently cited figures, the British 6th Division lost some 1,400 men killed, wounded and missing on 24 March, nearly 600 of them killed, and the US 17th Division about 1,300 between 24 and 29 March, including more than 400 killed. To this must be added the losses among transport crews and glider pilots. The total number killed on the first day is usually put at just over a thousand; German regional studies, which include those who died of wounds and the fighting up to 26 March, give some 1,500 Allied soldiers killed. Depending on the source, the air forces lost anywhere from several dozen to more than 70 transport aircraft and bombers, and several dozen gliders shot down or wrecked; several hundred aircraft returned damaged. The two divisions took some 3,500 prisoners. The Germans, too, suffered heavy losses, as did the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, ruined by bombing, shelling and fighting.

Was the airborne landing necessary?

Immediately after the war the verdicts were enthusiastic. Eisenhower called Varsity “the most successful airborne operation carried out to date”, and Ridgway stressed in his report that in a few hours two divisions had eliminated defences that might have taken days to break from the ground. Supporters of the operation, including modern historians, point out that the lessons of Arnhem had been learned: the drop was concentrated, landed close to the front and under artillery cover, and its sudden appearance drew the attention and reserves of the defenders, making it easier for the infantry to break out of the bridgehead.

Some historians, however, judge the operation critically. According to James Huston, the same forces used on the ground might have speeded up the advance even more, and Barry Gregory regarded Varsity as “not entirely necessary”. The author of the US official history of the final campaign in the West, Charles B. MacDonald, questioned whether, in the conditions of the time, an airborne landing was needed at all, or even justified: the Plunder infantry had crossed the Rhine relatively easily and German resistance was already weak. Critics also point to the decision to land in daylight, which made the slow gliders and transports easy targets for German flak, and to the shortage of aircraft that ruled out a third division.

Significance

Varsity was the last great airborne operation of the Second World War in Europe and the largest airborne landing ever carried out in a single day. After it the Western Allies no longer used airborne divisions for large-scale drops on the Western Front – the war was now moving too fast, and successive plans for airborne landings became obsolete before they could be prepared. The paratroops fought on as ordinary infantry: the British 6th Division advanced across northern Germany as far as Wismar on the Baltic, which it reached in early May, and the US 17th Division took part in the capture of Münster and in the fighting for the Ruhr.

What mattered most, however, was the outcome of the crossing as a whole. By 27 March the 21st Army Group had a dozen or so divisions and a dozen or so tank-capable bridges across the Rhine, and its bridgehead was widening by the day. From it came the thrust that over the following weeks encircled the German Army Group B in the Ruhr and opened the way for the British to the Elbe and the ports of northern Germany. At Wesel the last great natural obstacle in the way of the Western Allies’ advance into the Reich had fallen.