Four Stars Of Hell

Laurence Critchell

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786257482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The wartime exploits of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment are told here in the most vivid and appropriate way; by one of the men who experienced their battles firsthand – Captain Laurence Critchell. The author fought with the men of the Screaming Eagles from the tough training at camp Toccoa, Georgia to their hellish night drop on D-Day and all the way to the capture of Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. During 1944-1945 the author and his comrades soldiers would be involved in some of the heaviest and bloodiest fighting in Europe, during the Operation Market Garden at Njimegen and the Battle of the Bulge at Bastogne. A gripping read of the Second World War as told by a decorated combat veteran."It is fitting that the story of the 501st Parachute Regiment of the famed 101st Airborne Division should be told by a parachute captain."—The New York Times"A personalized record, told in terms of the men of all ranks, of how they trained and fought and died... the story has an authentic ring."—U.S. Quarterly"The greatest airborne operation of this or any other war." —Lewis H. Brereton, Former Lt. General, First Allied Airborne Army, World War II

PART I—…FIVE HOURS BEFORE THE SEABORNE LANDINGS....

4—”This Blessed Isle...”

It is difficult to remember what we thought about and how we felt in the days in England before the invasion of Normandy. That bleak winter before the last and greatest task of the war seemed afterwards to be dimmed out behind the great blaze of combat. Later we understood the fear of death, which was an animal fear of detached and recoiling flesh; but in England, before the invasion, when the gray winter days succeeded each other without change, and the rain came down forever, sometimes in dreary moderation, sometimes in vertical glittering lines, we lived always with the fear of the unknown. The future was an emptiness, a space, which no thoughts could bridge. We were ignorant. We worked blindly. There were the good hours and the bad hours, but we had always a tightness within us. Something was coming that we were powerless to prevent.

I do not think the soldiers of World War I knew anything quite like this. It had its root in the immensity of what we were about to do. And perhaps our airborne soldiers felt it most of all, for they knew from the beginning what they would have to do. Whether the invasion came in Italy or Southern France or the Channel shore or the Low Countries, they knew they would have to lead. It was not a question of getting up out of a muddy trench at a certain hour and going forward into fire already experienced and known; it was not even a question of struggling up through water to a shell-swept beach. It was a question of going out into the unexperienced, the unimaginable, at night and from a roaring plane.

On the surface, our lives were matter-of-fact. But disquiet lay deep within us all.

2

The area of England in which Colonel Johnson set up headquarters was on an old estate at Hempstead Marshall, two miles from Newbury, in Berkshire.

The tents were laid out in neat rows beside the elms. They occupied fields which were not quite gardens, not quite wilderness, but that casual mixture of the two which seemed to be the greatest charm of the English landscape. Behind the Nissen huts containing regimental headquarters and the messes, behind the rows of officers’ tents and the drill fields, a small valley deep in grass gave pasturage to cattle living out their lives on its slopes. And beyond that valley the manorial estate continued in the same tranquillity: an indefinite repetition of greenhouses, gardens, cottages; greenhouses, gardens, cottages...

It had been raining for weeks when we arrived. The pools of water that had refused to soak into the ground had trickled underneath the sides of the tents and gathered in new pools around the stoves. Morning had succeeded morning with somber skies. Sometimes in the late afternoon the sun came out for a brief space of time, like a benediction, and made the great patrician trees sparkle. But then the sun set and inevitably the stars were hidden. Night followed night without stars.

A small group of officers and men had preceded the regiment overseas to lay out the base camps—both the one at Hempstead Marshall and another, for the 1st and 3rd Battalions, at a town called Lanboume, eight or nine miles away. Lieutenant Strasser had been one of the leaders. So, as soon as the regiment had arrived, he was sought out and questioned.

“What the hell do you do around here in the evenings?” was the first demand.

“There, my friend,” said Strasser, who enjoyed the role of humorist, “you have a long, sad story.”

“It’s simple, Lieutenant,” volunteered an enlisted man. “You go to the movies in Newbury. A week later there’s a new movie, so you go again. That’s all there is to it.”

“What’s at Newbury besides movies?”

Strasser ticked off on his fingers. “A hotel. Ale and bitters every night. Scotch once a month. A bicycle store—”

“Good idea to buy a bicycle,” the enlisted man interrupted.

“That’s right. Put your name on the waiting list.” Strasser went on: “Three or four antique shops. One English version of a ‘Five and Dime.’ One hardware shop, one junk shop, two flower shops and a church. After that you have the wide open countryside.”

“How far is London?” someone wanted to know.

“About an hour. Trains every day.”

“That’s for me.”

“One London pass once a month,” continued Strasser. “Then you have Reading. Reading is a jolly little version of Waukegan. At Maidenhead you can rent a boat and go for a jolly row on the river. North of here on the Oxford road are the Downs, where you can go for a jolly constitutional. You can get a jolly cup of tea anywhere. And if you don’t like any of those things you can stay in camp and go jolly well mad.”

Everybody laughed. One of the officers asked: “Is there an officers’ club?”

“Now you ask,” said the enlisted man.

“Six miles from here,” put in Lieutenant Strasser. “The Mill House. Two floors, a bar and a dance hall. A dance once a week, Bogart says.”

“And that,” said the enlisted man, “touches on the heart of the problem. The women. Who keep you from going jolly well mad.”

Everybody laughed again. “What about ‘em?” asked somebody.

“In Newbury,” said Strasser, “you have an English military hospital—various assorted nurses of different resistances. Most of them blow a fuse under high voltage. If you want American girls, the 98th General Hospital will oblige. Or you can walk the streets and take your pick.”

“How’s the liquor supply?”

“Three pounds ten for Scotch. That’s fifteen dollars a bottle in real money. Twelve dollars a bottle for gin.”

“When do we start getting mail?”

Strasser grinned. “They have a very interesting system over here. All arriving letters are put into five categories for rerouting—by South Africa, South America, South Australia, South India and ‘No delay.’ Those marked for Africa, America, Australia, and India eventually reach you. Those marked ‘No Delay’ go to Ireland for the duration.”

3

On an ordinary morning there at Hempstead Marshall we were awakened by an explosion of dynamite—a hair-raising sound that brought everybody out of a sound sleep. The band played reveille, and then the musicians marched around the area for a while, usually followed by numbers of mongrel dogs.

Breakfast was comprised of powdered eggs, a strip of flabby bacon, some cereal and coffee. For variety the cooks sometimes omitted the bacon. On Sundays there were pancakes, and on rare mornings, perhaps twice a month, there were cold-storage eggs. Those were a treat.

Everyone was at work by half-past seven. By eight o’clock the meadows and open ground in the area were in use by the platoons for calisthenics; at nine o’clock the company officers took their men for forty-five-minute runs along the roads to Newbury or Denford. Rest periods of ten minutes divided the hours. If the eternal clouds broke, everyone crowded into one of the dark Nissen huts for a lecture on map reading or the tactics of the squad, while the rain beat a steady tattoo on the corrugated tin roof. The neighboring villages were attacked with blank cartridges and considerable enthusiasm, while the villagers watched with dubious patriotism from the windows.

The latrines at the camp were all outdoors. The showers were called ablutions. There was never enough hot water, and often the rooms were freezing. For toilet supplies and other necessities, the P.X.—first set up in a tin hut and later in a glider crate—opened for business twice a week, selling liquor to officers as a sideline. Coca-Colas and beer were unavailable.

At night almost everybody went to town. The English girls were friendly, and no one worried much about conventions. From time to time a prostitute from London, called a Piccadilly Commando, was caught in one of the tents, or out on the meadow behind the camp, but those incidents failed to ruffle the monotonous existence; and British “bobbies” appeared with pompous regularity to take them away.

England in 1944 was in its fifth year of war. Life there could no longer be compared to the bright and essentially still untouched life of the United States. With the end of the siege of London, the nation had entered a phase that resembled the long, bitter, gray pull of a windjammer rounding Cape Horn. It was not war in the picture-book sense, but it was war in the sense of a word that was almost as ugly: deprivation.

The people seemed alive and cheery. The children were ruddy-faced and in good health. Everybody had enough to wear. And the destruction of homes had not been so widespread as the news pictures, those incorrigible concentrators of tragedy, had led everyone to believe. England appeared to be quite all right.

But there were little things. Only the newcomers with discerning eyes noticed them. The girl at the railway station in Glasgow who served the hot tea had laughed when we asked whether she had any sugar. Civilian travelers who looked as though they might have been wealthy once upon a time wore square black patches on the knees of their trousers, or had sewed the edges of their coats with reinforced lining. Nobody showed any embarrassment at his shoddiness. On the sidewalks in front of the meat shops (which had bare windows), long lines of women waited in the rain for a few ounces of food. The grass was long in the city parks. Everybody’s spectacles were horn-rimmed. And in the fields and gardens of the countryside where the houses with thatched roofs made the settings tranquil, the men who hoed and ploughed were old enough to have been our grandfathers.

“Got any goom, choom?”

“Got any sweets?” Behind those innocent and familiar queries of the English children lay a starvation for sugar. Behind the soiled clothes that made them ragged-looking, and the griminess of the adults, lay not only an utter lack of soap but also not enough coal to heat water. The bus systems were inadequate, because there was not enough gasoline. The stores were empty-looking (except for useless luxuries like Chippendale furniture), because nothing was being manufactured to sell. And there were no restaurants with anything to offer the soldiers, because there was not enough food for the people of England.

English dignity was too deeply ingrained for them to allow the visitor—even the men who would fight by their side—full understanding of how the war had transformed England. The English believed, for the sake of their own pride, in keeping up appearances; they lacked the American trait, behind which lay another kind of pride, of honestly admitting they were hard up.

So we never understood the real story. Our criticisms of England were based on what the English allowed us to see—what they could not prevent us from seeing. And the curious distortion of this picture made our opinions tragic in their inconsistency and tragic in their finality. For England at war was the only England that most of us ever proposed to see.

5—Behind the Scenes

About four miles from Hempstead Marshall and on the other side of Newbury was an airdrome called Greenham Common. In a great English manor house at the edge of the airdrome was the headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division. Colonel Johnson’s regiment had become a part of this division. The other regiments of the Division, like the 506th Parachute Infantry under Colonel Sink, the 502nd Parachute Infantry under Lieutenant Colonel Michaelis and the 327th Glider Infantry were stationed in the same neighborhood, where the small roads were fragrant with the scent of lilac and where the only people laboring in the fields were the Land Army girls, who liked to work in sweaters and shorts.

Whatever the future held would come to us through the 101st Airborne Division. On the second floor of its headquarters was a place called the war room, where the field orders and maps of the coming invasion would—when they arrived—he kept. As long as there was no guard on the door of that room, we knew that our quiet life would continue. So the officers or the enlisted men who had business up that way always glanced along the second-floor hall before they left.

Months passed. The cold dreary English winter drew to an end. And then one day the guard was there.

2

Just prior to the arrival of the regiment in England, Field Marshal Rommel had, at Hitler’s direction inspected the coast defenses of the Atlantic Wall. Part of what he saw was evidently displeasing, for increased activity became evident all along the critical part of the French coast. Intelligence officers at SHAEF were kept busy identifying units moving in, units moving out. Much of ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• PROLOGUE-”THE WHISPER OF A DISTANT DRUM....”
• PART I-…FIVE HOURS BEFORE THE SEABORNE LANDINGS....
• PART II-INSCRIPTION ON GLIDER: “IS THIS TRIP REALLY NECESSARY?”
• PART III-”... THERE HAS BEEN A BREAK-THROUGH...”
• PART IV-IT WAS NOT PEACE. IT WAS ONLY SILENCE.
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX