Airborne troopers remember Operation Varsity

[Newsman]

Airborne troopers remember Operation Varsity

Bridgett Siter
Bayonet staff

John Cobb made a tactical error. In 1944, the 17-year-old high school junior told his study hall teacher to go to hell.

Her husband was the president of the draft board in Bridgeton, N.J. Cobbs was drafted the day he turned 18.

After basic training and Airborne School at Fort Benning, Cobbs was shipped to Europe to join the Allied Forces. He was assigned to the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment and "dropped into" the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge, where the 17th Airborne Division lost nearly half its troops. Cobb's C Company had only 17 men.

"Here I was in school, with war the farthest thing from my mind, and then suddenly I'm in the middle of War World II," recalled Cobbs, Wednesday. He joined 25 fellow 17th Division veterans on Fort Benning's Fryar Drop Zone, where 100 Soldiers from the 1st Battalion (Airborne) 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment conducted a mass tactical jump to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Operation Varsity

On March 24, 1945, 3,917 aircraft carrying American and British troops unfurled what has been called "a 200-mile airborne carpet over the skies" of Europe. More than 14,000 troops descended behind the Rhine River into the heart of the German defense near the town of Wesel.
The Germans outnumbered the Allies 10 to one.

No matter. Operation Varsity, which has never been matched in size, shook the war-weary Germans, whose resources were sorely depleted. Later, a German prisoner of war was quoted as saying, "They never told us they were going to drop the whole damn U.S. Army on us."

All told, the Allies took more than 2,800 German prisoners that day. Nearly 1,100 U.S. and British troops were killed and 522 wounded in what remains the single worst day in airborne history.

Despite its tremendous loss, the 17th Division secured all its objectives in less than four hours, and Operation Varsity was declared a success, ushering the Allies to eventual victory.

For 19-year-old Sgt. Eugene Howard, it was "an experience of a lifetime, like no other."
Howard had seen action on Utah Beach as a combat engineer. That experience proved extremely frustrating, Howard said. As an engineer he "couldn't shoot back," so after the battle, in what he called "an unguarded moment of unwarranted optimism," Howard volunteered for duty with the 17th Division.

"And I never regretted a day of it," he said, despite the massive loss of Allied Forces during Operation Varsity and despite the five times he came "within inches" of losing his life.
"We were young men. We didn't have any sense," Howard said with a laugh.

Then he grew serious.

"We knew we were there for a reason. They showed us pictures of German death camps, pictures of bodies stacked up by the ovens," he said. "I'll never forget that image."

"Those images" haunt Howard when he hears people disparaging the role of American forces in the war on terrorism.

"I have a lot of strong feelings about that," he said. "There are people out there who hate us, and the only thing they understand is force.

"People who think we can write a letter telling our enemies we love them and we want them to be nice, those people aren't living in the real world. Not the world we saw."