Green Light - Air Force Historical Studies Office

312 Falling Shorl
A few miles up the road we came up with the advance elements of British
armor. There a junior officer stopped me and told me I could go no further
because the road in front was swept with small-arms fire. So we stopped a
minute to watch how our good British comrades would take out this resis-
tance. They had the muzzles of their tank guns pointed down the road
toward where the enemy was supposed to be, but not a shot was being
fired. . . .
Having no command responsiblity for this operation, however, I
couldn’t order this tank commander to move on down the road. So, after
waiting about forty minutes, and seeing no visible effort being made to
outflank this resistance. . . . I took Dan Faith [Ridgway’s aide] and Casey
[his bodyguard], and we started walking down the ditch along the side of
the road. We went a mile and a half, perhaps, with every sense alert, but
not a shot was fired at us. . . .
We moved until we found General Max Taylor, at the CP [command
post] of the lOlst Division. I then sent back . . . for my jeep, and went on
for another couple of miles until I found General Gavin [now the CO of
the 82ndl. l6
After September, with our most recent combat assignment behind us, we
began to come to grips with the fact that there was no longer any hope the war
soon would be over. This unhappy prospect, plus the loss of several of our men,
made the atmosphere in the Squadron much more grim than during the previous
spring and summer. On rainy October days, grousing and arguing in our bar-
racks, we could not help but wonder whether part of the failure could be laid at
troop carrier’s doorstep.
During the fall of 1944, both British and American commanders who had
had some responsibility in MARKET-GARDEN, responding to questions from
high command, gave their assessments of the campaign, and added their sugges-
tions of how we could take advantage of our experiences in Holland to improve
future airborne invasions. What was at stake here, of course, were the possible
uses of the airborne arm in the coming invasions not only in Germany but also
in Japan. Many long and carefully detailed statements on troop carrier perfor-
mance were compiled, plus suggestions for possible reform of its structure and
tactics. At first top secret, these critiques later were deposited in military ar-
chives, and they are now open to military historians-who, of course, have
continued the arguments begun right after the end of MARKET-GARDEN. l7
The most chewed-over aspect of such critiques concerns the possibility of
the better use oi glider pilots once they got down on the ground. This is a point
I shall examine in some detail in the next chapter. Another important question
raised in these critiques was whether we had been forced to fly too long a dis-