The Blitzkrieg Defense: The Battle of Mook
The Blitzkrieg Defense: The Battle of Mook
Part 3 - Bracing for Impact
The Blitzkrieg Defense follows the men of a glider regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Allied liberation of the Netherlands. It is a series of four-parts, each of which are an 8-10 minute read. If you haven’t checked out the previous segments, we have you covered:
While the Kiekberg drama was playing out on the stage of war between September 24 and September 30, the men of Company C kept vigilant watch over the floodplain south of Mook. Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Sanford, commander of the 1st Battalion, felt that the front for which he was responsible was far too large to plug with the force he wielded. His three-company battalion had been cannibalized to support the Kiekberg. One of his companies, serving as the regimental reserve, was all but committed to Kiekberg. Another company had taken over the positions on Finger Ridge.
That left C Company.
They spread from the river bank south of the village, to the base of Finger Ridge. During the day, the men would stay in their water-logged holes and watch dogfights occur in the sky. On a couple occasions, Allied fighters belly-landed in the field between them and the Germans. At night, they would watch the firework displays created by glowing anti-aircraft fire reaching toward the stars. The mortar barrages and sporadic bursts of machine gun fire would keep the men on edge, and they were constantly told to be on alert for a German attack. “German artillery kept pounding Mook all night,” Leonard O’Brain remembered of one of his first nights on the line. “It began to rain and soon I was soaking wet. I lay in the mud at the bottom of my hole shivering from cold and fright. About midnight a machine gun opened up a little to my right. Here they come I thought. I jumped up and clicked the safety off my rifle, my heart in my throat. I heard something moving toward me. I leveled my rifle on the spot and was about to squeeze one off when the shape of a cow loomed out of the darkness. Whew!”
Despite the madness of humanity surrounding them, cows were still grazing on the field. They lived indifferent to the carnage of industrialized war. The men would take shots at the cows sporadically to ensure there were no infiltrating Germans mixed amongst them.
A couple days after O’Brian’s scare, his platoon—under the leadership of Lieutenant Disney—was ordered to infiltrate forward and close the gap with the Germans a little more. As they crept along a dike they were spotted. German mortars crashed around them in a cacophony. “We started digging,” O’Brian wrote, “but progress was slow in the wet soggy clay. We sweat out two more mortar barrages but still none of us got hit.” At dark the Germans stopped firing. The next day O’Brian and his platoon got a copy of Stars and Stripes, which informed them the British had lost Arnhem. Morale sagged. They wondered about the British armor columns until “one sunny afternoon an English soldier came riding down the road on a motorcycle with a beautiful girl on behind him,” O’Brian recollected. “We were surprised beyond speech. ‘I say, laddie, does this road lead to Brussels?’ he asked. We told him there were Jerries about 100 yards out in front of us. He turned tail and got out of there.”
About mid-day on the 30th, while the attack on Kiekberg Wood was in full swing, intelligence came to the 325th that the Germans were planning a severe, determined counterattack against Mook in division-strength, and reinforced with armor. The news of the prospective German attack was met with some concern by Lieutenant Colonel Sanford and his staff, considering how minuscule the force under their control. Sanford requested B Company be brought back to his control near Mook, but this was denied to him as the Germans were already beginning to launch light attacks within the Kiekberg Wood—again, teasing the Americans in the place they were most paranoid.
Despite this, Colonel Sanford began organizing a stand in the best way he could. Captain Robert Ward later wrote that “all available personnel from the battalion command post, including communications personnel, mess and supply personnel, and sick, lame and lazy, were organized into defensive position… The medical personnel from the battalion aid station had secured trench knives and dug foxholes along the defensive line. This was not time for the Geneva Convention to interfere with self-preservation.”
Around midnight, Second Lieutenant Steve Chiveris, leader of 2nd Platoon, detailed Staff Sergeant Ervin Kitchenmaster to take three men and go to the ammunition supply point in Mook and start bringing more ammunition forward. The journey proved life-changing for Kitchenmaster.
In our defensive position at Mook, I had many mortar shells explode around my foxhole and a tree burst right over my head. So far I had escaped injury and this led me to feel as though I was immune to getting hit… We reached our destination, loaded up with all [the ammunition] we could carry and were ready to start our return trip. In my load, I had a mortar case full of hand grenades. The others heard the “swish” of a mortar shell coming in and tried to duck for cover. The shell was coming right at me. I did not hear it until BOOM! and I was a mangled mess on the ground in the darkness.
My right leg was almost blown off, left leg had a double compound fracture through the knee and femur, right arm was broke above the wrist. I was losing blood so rapidly, was so weak and was gasping for breath. Fortunately the medics were close by. They came over immediately. I was so weak from the loss of blood that I could not speak but I was conscious and could hear. One medic said, ‘He’s gone.’ Another said, ‘I can’t feel a pulse.’ Then I heard a voice say, ‘His veins won’t take blood plasma.’ Then, ‘I feel a faint pulse!’ and ‘the vein is taking the blood plasma.’ I was put on a stretcher, loaded on a jeep and taken to a better equipped medical evacuation station. The doctors there did all they could for me.
I came too enough at this aid station that I observed wounded troopers on both sides of me were dying and blankets were thrown on their faces. Two medics told me later that after the doctors had done all they could for me they did not expect me to live so they had placed me with those not expected to live.
Back on the C Company line, the night passed uneventfully. No German attack came, but at the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division was bustling with plans for the 325th.
Set Piece of Battle
The 325th was ordered to extend its right flank to a point on the Maas River south of Katerbosch. The fixing of the line at Katerbosch was necessary in order to cover proposed bridging operations of the British VIII Corps. The British were anxious that no identification of that group be obtained on that front until the bridging operations were well underway.
—Gavin to Ridgway, Situation Update, October 3
About two miles to the rear of the positions at Mook, the Heumen Lock Bridge stretched across the Maas-Waal Canal. Since its capture by the 504th Parachute Infantry on D-Day, it had served as the critical lifeline for the division’s supply. Its criticality was further solidified when the British arrived, as the bridge was strong enough to carry heavy armor across the canal. Without it, the British armor and the division’s supplies would be almost as good as stranded on an island, unable to get to the forward line positions east of Nijmegen in any efficient manner.
The bridge was also within observation and artillery range of the Germans, which proved to make things more difficult as the British divisions built up strength in the area. Simply put, the British needed more room to deploy and they needed the Germans pushed far enough away to keep the bridge out of artillery range. They also wanted to build another bridge near Mook to increase the supply capacity as formations continued to build in the Nijmegen salient. After the restless night of the 30th, bracing for the possible German attack at Mook and repelling attacks in the Kiekberg, Lieutenant Colonel Sanford and the rest of the battalion commanders were summoned to regimental headquarters to receive an attack order.
The attack was planned to be a four-company assault, and was scheduled to begin before dawn on October 2. It was a herculean task. Firstly, two battalions had to disengage the enemy in the Kiekberg Woods, conduct a march to assembly areas, and then under darkness with absolute light discipline, deploy on the forward line in a sector unknown to them, and finally be prepared to launch an aggressive attack. They had less than 24 hours to accomplish all of these things—and then uninterestingly engage the Germans in combat.
The set pieces of battle began to move around at 2 P.M. on October 1. First, to free up the manpower needed for the operation, the 505th Parachute Infantry conducted a relief of the units in and around the Kiekberg Wood. The 3rd Battalion then marched for two hours until they reached the eastern outskirts of Mook where bed rolls were brought to them. They were able to get about six or seven hours of sleep.
Secondly, Company B came back to the control of Lieutenant Colonel Sanford. The company was earmarked to be the main effort in the attack. First Lieutenant Robert Naylor, a new replacement officer who had never been in combat before, was its commander. Naylor was hardly the only one; most of his men were of similar experience. Naylor took his company into Mook and made a check of their fitness for combat and got them rations and ammunition. Lieutenant Naylor was nervous, but tried to hide it, Captain Ward remembered as they prepared for battle. “The men had the look of weariness and fatigue etched on their faces,” Ward later wrote. “Some of their uniforms were torn.” The men had been two days without sleep. One of Naylor’s men described their condition in one word: “Weary.”
At half past midnight, October 2, the 3rd Battalion troops were awoken from their slumber. Under darkness, the battalion passed through Mook and continued south to take over a frontage of the line as the regiment began to pack itself into the floodplain. The entire deployment was like musical chairs. Company C, having been defending the entire sector, was spread throughout the floodplain. The men of the 3rd Battalion relieved a platoon of Company C, which then shifted to the far left of the line near the base of Finger Ridge.
The complexity and difficulty in the movement of troops to their departure points was compounded by another factor: it required the upmost secrecy. The floodplain south of Mook was a picturesque pasture of emerald grass as flat as a pool table. Visibility was far, the horizon low. The Germans well knew the American positions in front of Mook were lightly held because they were plainly visible. The slightest movement of building strength would be picked up. And because the terrain was so flat, with wide fields of fire and nothing for cover, the success of the American attack depended on absolute surprise. All the movements would have to occur at night, under absolute noise and light discipline—and the attack would have to start before the sun rose.
By approximately 3:15 A.M., the 3rd Battalion was set with Company E on the right, bordering the Maas River, and Company F on the left. Lieutenant Naylor’s Company B relieved another portion of Company C—which then did another shift left—and linked into the flank of F Company.
It was less than three hours until the attack would shove off, and still there was work to be done.
Stay tuned for these upcoming installments of Ridgway’s Notebook:
Next week, the series finale of “The Blitzkrieg Defense: The Battle of Mook”
On Saturday, July 22: “Sharpening the Talon: Part 1”