Lights went out in several of the chateau’s rooms. Lieutenant Betts, who had reached the elephant, saw muzzle flashes from several windows. Another Ranger machine gunner opened up, holding the Bren against his hip, pouring bullets into one window, then the next. Ejected casings hit Betts’ arm and cheek. The window flashes stopped.
Betts waved his troops forward again. Twenty yards separated them from the chateau when the 44th Panzer arrived in force.
So many tanks rolled across the Gent road and into the garden that their procession resembled a freight train. They came in a column and quickly dispersed into a north-south line, six of them at first, more crowded than they would be on a battlefield. The southerly tank, a Pzkw III with regimental HQ markings on its turret, began to spin clockwise when a bazooka round shattered a tread. Their MG 34s blazed, plowing up the grass and everyone on it.
The bazookamen fell. In a crouch, Betts ran toward their weapon, which was lying on the grass near their bodies, but the lieutenant was met with the snout of another tank, poking around the chateau’s southwest corner. That tank, and the others behind it, meant only that Colonel Yates’ two platoons coming from the west had already been torn apart. Betts turned a full circle. More Rangers were down than remained standing, and they continued to fall, powerless against the unexpected onslaught.
Betts called a retreat, but was unsure anyone heard him over the snarl of tank machine gun fire. He motioned back to the woods. Several Rangers near him sprinted south. The lieutenant waited another few seconds, hearing the snap of bullets streaking over him. He could see no other Americans still on their feet. He turned to run.
A bullet shattered his wrist, then another shot through the meat of his forearm. Yet another creased his side. The ground around him seemed to be in a mixer, tossing and rolling as bullets dug into it. The tanks did not deign to fire their cannons. Nothing in the garden was worthy of a German armor-piercing shell. His wounded arm flapping behind him, Betts sprinted between the topiary animals toward the woods.
George Lukowski saw him coming, a mad hurdler frantically jumping over hedges. Two other Rangers made it back as far as the elephant, then a spray of bullets caught them, throwing them against a hedge. Lukowski waited until his lieutenant reached his post, then opened up with his machine gun.
“I might as well have been pissing into the wind,” he told me.
Betts slapped him on the helmet with his good hand and yelled, “Let’s get out of here.”
Lukowski abandoned his weapon. They ran blindly, bullets nipping at their heels like unruly terriers. The private collided squarely with a tree trunk, breaking his nose and jaw and lacerating a cheek. With his good hand, Betts helped Lukowski to his feet, and they staggered on.
In the pasture west of the chateau, Aaron Hirschorn felt his life seeping away through a wound in his back. He had no memory of how he had been wounded, only of waking and of hearing the pounding of automatic weapons and the cries of fallen men. He might have been out sixty seconds or thirty minutes or longer, he did not know. His back was hot. When he tried to reach around to feel for the wound, pain coursed up his arm. He tried to rise, and collapsed. Again he tried, and this time found his feet. He hobbled away, around the bodies of three Rangers piled like firewood.
Right on time, forty-five minutes after the drop, the Skytroopers landed on the field, one after another. The marker fires were still blazing. Perhaps the pilots had seen the melee at the chateau and had come down anyway, hoping for survivors. They had landed into the wind and had taxied the full length of the field to take off.
Not one Ranger met the planes. Instead, several Wehrmacht tanks rolled onto the hill and finally had a worthwhile use for their cannons. It was the work of a few seconds, an unfair match. The C-53s were ripped apart by the blasts. Fuel ignited in red and orange mushrooms. After a moment, not even the planes’ skeletons remained, just pools of fire on the pasture and unrecognizable pieces of charred metal.
From the edge of the woods, Betts and Lukowski saw the planes disintegrate. Lukowski tied a bootlace around the lieutenant’s wounded arm to stanch the bleeding. They returned to the woods.
They walked south all night, first through the woods, then across pastures and bogs. Sirens sounded behind them. A dozen times they threw themselves into ditches or ran into glades when vehicles passed on nearby roads. Betts began babbling, hallucinating, and at times Lukowski had to pull him along. At the first light of dawn, they entered a dilapidated barn and dug into a haystack. They ignored the yapping of a farm dog. Lukowski did not expect Betts to live another hour.
Nor did the private expect to be shaken awake by a man speaking Flemish. The farmer tried to clean Betts’ wounds, and wrapped a length of cloth around Lukowski’s head to prevent the private’s fractured jaw from dangling. Several hours later, about noon, members of the Belgian Resistance arrived in a hay truck to take the Rangers to a safe house in Deinze.
Sergeant Hirschorn’s story is shorter, because he knows little of it. His memory of that night is patchy. He stumbled along, he fell. He struggled to his feet and walked again, then fell. Over and over again. He has no recollection of being found by a Flemish dairyman, nor of being handed over to the underground. When I spoke with him twelve months after the war, he still carried pieces of shrapnel in the muscle tissue near his spine.
A number of Belgian farmers claim—and I believe them—to have seen eighteen or twenty Rangers being loaded into trucks near Viscount Le Marten’s chateau. Most wore bandages, head dressings, or slings. The trucks turned toward Gent, and those Rangers disappeared. There is no record of them. No German I spoke with after the war knew of their fate or would admit to it.
Only Betts, Lukowski, and Hirschorn survived Green Thumb. One hundred twenty-three Rangers and pilots perished.
General Clay had told his commanders that the Three Blows was the worst news they would hear. Not so, not for Clay. I was with him later that night when he was told the Skytroopers had vanished. He seemed to shrink before me. Then his face contorted. He turned away and for a moment I thought he might weep. But that passed.
Never again, not through S-Day and the calamitous days that followed, would I see the general as stricken or as vulnerable.
9
General Clay and I walked across the garden to his trailer. Our last meeting had just broken up. It was 1:30 in the morning. At West Point, the general had suffered an ankle fracture falling from a horse. He still limped late at night or when he heard bad news. As we crossed the grass, the hitch in his gait was pronounced. He had been unable or unwilling to speak of the Rangers since we had learned of their fate.
He pushed aside the blackout curtain over the door, and we entered the caravan. He lowered himself onto the settee and removed his shoes. I made him a scotch and water, stood by while he threw it back, then got him another. This one he put on the floor while he rubbed his ankle. I sipped a scotch.
“Some day the goddamn army will issue a decent shoe,” he said.
“There aren’t any reporters here, sir,” I chided. I was with him when he bought those brogans on Bond Street.
“Sorry. I forgot.” He picked up his drink and slumped back in the settee. “Jack, you’re a military historian. Someday you should do a study on what separates a brilliant commander from an adequate commander. What do you think?”
“Well, presumably there are—”
“Some say there are only two professions in the world where the amateur excels the professional. One is military strategy, and the other is prostitution.”