Why the SS Feared American Paratroopers More Than Any Enemy They’d Met D

The smell reaches him before the sound. Cordite and wet Dutch clay and 200 meters up the road, the copper tang of a burning halftrack that had been his lead vehicle 40 minutes earlier. Sturm banfura, no oberlines reiner, 27 years old, is kneeling behind the low brick wall of a ruined farmhouse south of the Nyme bridge.

His helmet has slid forward on his brow. His left glove is missing. In his right hand, an unfired signal flare he cannot remember drawing. He can hear them, not their voices, their footsteps. They are not running. They are coming down the ditch line at a walk, and they are still coming.

Renegger would write it out later in a report to his regimental staff that survives in composite form in the divisional history of the 9inth Shut Stafle Panza Division, Hoen Stafen. The words are careful. The way a Karkov veteran’s words are careful. We were told the Americans jumped into battle by accident. That they were poorly led.

That they would surrender when pressed. All three of these things were lies. And I discovered them within 30 minutes of first contact. In 4 months, from a Dutch orchard to a Belgian pinewood, the Shuttle would try three times to break these men. Three times they would fail, and each time more of them would die learning why.

The Germans had a nickname for these Americans. It had come off the body of a dead officer at Anzio the winter before, a phrase copied out of his diary and passed up through intelligence channels until it reached the staffs of the Waffen Shuttle in Holland. Toyful invitan Hosen, the devils in baggy pants. It meant the 82nd Airborne Division, the All-American.

And by the autumn of 1944, no one on those staffs was laughing when they said it. What was it about these Americans that made ideological soldiers? Men who had walked through the ruin of Russia, and come out the other side, dread them above every other enemy they had ever met. That is the question this film will answer.

It will not answer it yet. To understand the dread, you must first understand the confidence that came before it. By September of 1944, the Waffan Shuttle in the West had been reforged from the ruins of Normandy. The second Shut Stafle Panza Corps under Wilhelm Bitrich had been pulled back to the country around Annem and Naimmean, ostensibly to rest and refit around two divisions.

The ninth should stuffle Hoen Stafen and the 10th Shut Stuff Frs. These men were not decorative. They were the survivors of Karkov, of Kursk, of the closing jaw of the Fer’s pocket. They had held ground against Soviet tank armies with a fraction of the armor they needed. They had watched entire British battalions collapse under a single concentrated Panza Grenadier assault delivered at the correct point of the correct line, at the correct hour.

They believed, and their belief was built on evidence they had gathered with their own hands, that the decisive blow at the Shvun, delivered by ideologically cohesive troops trained past the point of ordinary endurance, could shatter any Allied line the enemy dared put in front of them. What little they knew of American paratroopers going into operation market garden was thin and dismissive.

That they had jumped into Sicily and made a mess of it. That they had dropped scattered across the cotentan peninsula on D-Day and taken heavy losses on the way down. that they were, in the words of one ninth Shut Stafle staff officer paraphrased into a divisional situation report, sky troops, light infantry, no armor, no depth, and easy to isolate on the ground where they fell. The Shut Stafle were confident.

The Shut Stafle were experienced. The Shuttle were about to be wrong. On September 17, 1944, the American parachute regiments came down around Gbeek and Grave. Within hours, the 82nd had the grave bridge intact and was pushing north through the flat ditched country. A 9inth Shut Stafle Reconnaissance Patrol moving south to probe the drop zone in strength ran into a paratrooper outpost that by every rule of German experience should have been overrun in 20 minutes.

90 minutes later, the patrol had lost 11 men and had not moved forward 20 m. You cannot break a line that does not know it is supposed to break. The Shut Stafle command staffs in Annem heard the reports and did exactly what disciplined professionals do. They explained the anomaly. The paratroopers had been dug in already.

The patrol had been too small. The reconnaissance officer was inexperienced and had pressed his men too eagerly. A fluke. On the body of a dead American on the edge of that first firefight, a Shutz staff grenadier found a small book, a pocket New Testament with a rifle bullet stopped somewhere inside the pages of Deuteronomy, and beside it, a heavy fighting knife with the edge honed to a razor.

The grenadier turned the book over in his hand, handed it to his sergeant, and did not want to speak of it again. The belief held. Bitrich’s headquarters ordered a proper battalion strength counter thrust to clear the paratroopers from the Nimmean approaches and reopen the highway to Anne before British armor could arrive.

The right amount of force applied at the right place would end it. It always had. The denial spine begins here. Return now to the young man kneeling behind the ruined farmhouse wall. Ober Sterm Furer Carl Hines Reineer from a village outside Reagansburg, commander of a reinforced panzer grenadier company in the 9th Shut Stafle Hoen Stafen.

Karkov survivor, iron cross first class, quietly Catholic in a way he had learned never to speak of, carrying inside his breast pocket a small enamel medal of St. Michael that his men did not know about and would not have approved of. His force on the morning of September 18 numbered roughly 240 men, four half tracks, a pair of Sturm Gashut’s three assault guns borrowed from the divisional escort, and a mortar section.

His mission, briefed at first light, was to sweep the American paratroopers out of a stretch of orchard and farm ground south of the Nime Megan Highway Bridge, clearing the way for the armored column that would follow later that day. His confident reason, written out to himself in the pocket notebook he kept, was tidy and professional. They are lightly armed.

They have no anti-tank guns worth the name. They dropped last night, and they have not slept. I have two assault guns, and I have men who have done this before. He gave the order at 0740. He believed it would be over by noon. The advance began in a ground fog, still lifting off the beetfields.

Rhineer walked a 100 meters behind his lead halftrack, close enough to see the American positions when the fog opened. A fence line, a low farmhouse with a scorched south wall, the black spike of an orchard. First contact was a single M1 Garand shot from the orchard. Then 12 more in a rolling pattern, aimed, the point squad of his lead platoon went down as if their strings had been cut, not sprayed. chosen.

The sturm gashutza fired high explosive rounds into the treeine and the treeine answered with a bazooka round that punched the frontal plate of the left assault gun and killed the loader before the crew could shout. A Browning automatic rifle opened up from a position his forward observer had not identified.

Then another, then a third. Renegger’s men went to ground behind a low earthn bank and could not lift their heads. He is shouting. He knows he is shouting. He cannot hear himself. A mortar round lands 20 meters ahead of him, and a failed webbble he has known for two years is simply not there anymore.

The Americans are not falling back. The Americans are counterattacking. Down the ditch, at a walk, the smell of burnt cordite mixed with harvest sugarbead, the flat crack of garand fire that never seemed to slow. One paratrooper stood in the open in his jump smok and threw grenades underhand into the halftrack behind Renegger like a boy tossing apples across a fence.

The halftrack burned, the men inside did not come out. At the moment Rhina had expected surrender, the paratroopers had come forward. It was a thing so contrary to his experience that his mind briefly refused to process it. He had attacked positions his entire war. He had never been attacked by the position he was attacking.

By 11:00, his company had ceased to exist as a maneuver unit. He pulled the survivors back to the farmhouse and counted. 67 dead in the beatfield. Another 41 wounded who could not walk. Two assault guns burning on the road. One halftrack destroyed, another abandoned. His forward platoon reduced from 38 men to 9.

The ratio came from his surviving Feld Webble, who walked the ground later under a flag of truce to recover the wounded. He counted 11 American paratroopers dead in the orchard and along the ditch. 11. For Reiner’s 67, roughly one American for every six of his own. At nightfall in the farmhouse cellar, Renegger wrote his afteraction report by candlelight.

The last line of it in the composite version preserved through the ninth Shut Stafle’s regimental history was quiet and terrible. The failure of this action was not in my judgment the fault of my company. It was in the assumption that we had been sent against ordinary infantry. We had not. A line that will not break is one thing.

A line that walks toward you is another. The oberm furer had trained his career against the first. He had never in his life been asked to fight the second. He would survive Naim Megan. He would not survive the winter. What should have happened at Bitri’s headquarters when Renegger’s report was read aloud was a reassessment, a pause, a hard question about what kind of enemy had eaten a reinforced company in 90 minutes on flat open ground.

What did happen was different. The staff drew a red line under the exchange figure and concluded unanimously that Rhineer had lacked mass. A company was too small. The paratroopers were densely dug in around the orchard and needed to be crushed by weight, by armor and infantry combined at battalion scale with proper artillery preparation.

The solution was not to reconsider the enemy. The solution was to send more. They studied the losses. They did not study the men who caused them. And on the evening of September 19, the order went out to the 10th Shut Stafle Frsburg. A full armored battalion group with grenaders riding on the tanks would retake the Nimmeagan approaches and reopen the highway at dawn.

Enter Sterm Banfura Otto Linderman, 34 years old, 10th Shut Stafle Panza Regiment. In an earlier life, a gymnasium teacher of mathematics from Hanover, thin at the wrists, careful with his glasses, he drank four cups of coffee before dawn, and could not sleep without a fifth after midnight, and he had made a private joke of it with the young agitant who kept the pot on the stove.

His father, a great Warfeld Webbble, had died of the influenza in 1919. Linderman had commanded armor since Kursk. He had been wounded twice. He had never in his own careful reckoning lost a battalion action. His force numbered 15 Panza 4 tanks and four Panthers, two companies of Panza Granadias, a battery of towed 88 mm guns, and the confidence that came from having read Renegger’s report and drawn from it the wrong lesson.

The Ober Sturmfurer sent men where he should have sent tanks, Lindamman wrote in his tactical journal on the night of the 19th. That is his failure and it will not be mine. The paratroopers have no armor. I have 20 tanks. We will drive through them by 9:00 and be across the bridge by noon. He shared this assessment with his agitant, a young untorfer named Brooke, over the fifth cup. Brookke said nothing.

He had read the report, too. September 20, 1944. Lindamman’s camp grouper rolled south from the highway bridge in a wedge. Panthers leading grenaders on the decks with their rifles held between their knees. The morning was bright, a hard, clear autumn light on the Dutch fields. Civilians in the villages later said the tanks had looked going by like a parade.

Linderman’s doctrine held that armor unsupported by anti-tank guns cut through light infantry the way a knife cuts through paper. The paratroopers holding the road south of the bridge had no anti-tank guns worth the name. A scatter of bazookas, a captured panzer or two, the single tube 57 mm gun the 82 glider troops had brought in with them.

What Linderman’s doctrine did not tell him was what those men armed with those weapons would do with them. The lead panther, halfway to the paratrooper line, took a bazooka round in the flank from a hedge less than 15 meters away. Not disabled, merely scarred, but the crew, unnerved, jerked the tank sideways, and the second Panther bunched up behind it on the narrow road.

From the ditches on both sides, paratroopers rose and threw. grenades, satchel charges, the improvised gammon bombs the 82nd had learned to love in Italy. The lead panther brewed up. The second’s tracks were torn away from its road wheels in a shower of pins. The third traversed to shoot and took a 57 mm round in the mantlet at 200 m.

It stopped. It did not move again. Lindamman is standing in his command halftrack, radio at his ear, watching the parade come apart. A grenadier riding on the third tank is trying to jump off and cannot. His tunic caught on something and a paratrooper walks up out of the ditch and shoots him at 10 paces without breaking stride.

The paratrooper’s face is stre with mud and he is chewing something. Gum. Linderman realizes he is chewing gum. The paratroopers were not defending the road. They were hunting the tanks. His armor was prey. His infantry was running. And upstream at the great bridge itself, a rumor was beginning to reach him.

American paratroopers in canvas assault boats rowing across the wall river in broad daylight into the muzzles of his own machine guns and coming out the other side. Still coming. That crossing, executed that afternoon by Major Julian Cook’s third battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, would take the northern approach of the bridge from behind.

Half the boats did not make it. The men in the surviving half climbed the mud of the far bank, killed the machine gun crews at close range, and did not stop when they had done it. By late afternoon, Linderman’s camp group had been broken. Seven Panza 4 tanks and two Panthers destroyed or abandoned. Grenadier companies reduced to platoon strength.

The composite kill ratio delivered by Unto Furbrook to divisional staff and later recorded in the Frsburg’s regimental history was worse than Renegger’s. For every American paratrooper killed in the day fighting, eight of Linderman’s men had died and none of the American losses had bought them a foot of ground back.

Linderman survived the day. He would not survive the war. He would be killed near Cleaves in February of the following year. But that evening, in a farmhouse outside Bemel, he wrote a private note in his tactical journal that would become, in the composite reading of the regimental record, the closing testimony of the second wave.

I sent tanks against men in canvas boats and men in ditches, and my tanks came back burning while their men came back walking. I do not know what this means. I know it must not be said aloud. You cannot outweigh men who have already agreed on the cost. The dread now carried the weight of twice. Two defeats should have ended the assumption. They did not.

The Shut Stafle staffs pulled back from the Naimmeagan debacle, absorbed the loss of the Frsburg’s armor, absorbed the loss of the bridge, and with a discipline that was at once impressive and terrible, filed the paratroopers away as a peculiar problem of the September fighting.

Not a category error, a local difficulty of terrain and timing. When Hitler’s winter offensive was planned for the Ardens in December, the American 82nd Airborne was not the reason the northern shoulder of the salient became the battlefield it became. But when the paratroopers arrived by truck at Wammont on the night of December 18 hauled forward as the theater reserve, the Shut Stafle command in the sector reacted with the same conclusion they had drawn twice already. Send more. Send the best.

This time with the winter weather grounding Allied air power with fresh Panza divisions with the strategic weight of the whole offensive behind them. This time it would be decisive. The senior skeptic wore the black collar tabs of a standard furer. Wilhelm Roush, 46 years old of the first should stafle Panza cors northern axis camp grouper commander with a reinforced Panza Grenadier regiment, an armored battalion and priority claim on Tiger 2 tanks from the corsault battalion from Munich, twice wounded. The second time at Kursk, a fragment still lodged near his spine that troubled him when the cold came down. He wrote long letters to his 18-year-old daughter, Anna, and did not send them because the war had made him a man who no longer believed his own reassurances. The letters accumulated in an oil cloth wrapper in his kit. He would sit by lamplight after the day’s

orders were signed, and add to them one careful paragraph at a time, and then fold the paper away. Naimmeagan was fought on ground that favored them. Rouch wrote in the operations diary of his camp group on the night of December 20. Bridges, ditches, water. Here the country is open. Here I have tigers.

Here they are exhausted men rushed forward without their heavy weapons. Regger did not have enough. Linderman did not have the ground. I have both. Reading Reineer’s afteraction report that same evening, alone in the farmhouse he had made his command post, Rouch underlined one sentence twice. They did not know they were supposed to break.

He closed the file quickly, as if the words might climb out of the paper. December 21- 23, 1944. The northern shoulder of the bulge, Tuapon and Viels. The pine woods and the river bends along the Sm and the Amblev. Rouchers camp grouper attacked in three axes. Tigers leading, grenaders on foot in the deep snow, artillery walking the woodline ahead of them.

It was the largest coordinated assault of the three waves, and it was meant to be decisive. The 82nd’s response under Major General James Gavin was not to hold in the classical sense. It was to fight forward, to bleed the enemy at every farmhouse, to sell each stone wall for what the Shut Stafle could not afford.

The 54th and the 55th and the 58th Parachute Infantry Regiments were thinly spread across a front no book would have called defensible. They defended it anyway. A Tiger clears the wood line at Sheno. It is 30 meters from the American positions. A paratrooper of the 5004th is on top of it before its gunner can traverse.

He drops a white phosphorus grenade down the commander’s hatch. The tank lights. It does not stop moving for another 40 m. Nothing inside it is screaming because nothing inside it is alive. Another tiger comes on. Another paratrooper is running. The smell of white phosphorus and pine. The crump of tiger mane guns firing into farmhouses.

The paratroopers had already emptied. The cold that froze wounded men to the ground in 20 minutes if they could not be dragged out. Rouch’s grenaders stopping in the open because they had seen too many of their friends killed by a rifle fired from a place no rifle should have been.

The final shock for Roush was not the loss of the tanks. It was that he watched his own men break first. A grenadier company from his camp grouper ordered forward across a clearing at Tuapon. Refused. Not mutinied. Refused. The company commander, a young ober furer, looked at his standard furer through the open door of the command halftrack, said nothing and shook his head. Roush, let him.

He did not know at that moment that he was letting the assumption die. By Christmas Eve, his camp group had lost 31 tanks and armored vehicles, more than a thousand men killed or missing, and had not moved the northern shoulder, more than 3 km. The kill ratio, taken from Roucher’s own tally in one of the unscent letters folded here into the regimental record, was worse than either predecessors.

For every American paratrooper his campf group had brought down, 10 of his own had gone into the snow. 10. He would survive the battle. He would be captured on the west bank of the Rine in March 1945. And in his kit, the Americans would find the bundle of letters, none of them opened at the field post, the last of which would end this story.

After Tuapon, the standard and furer stopped writing operational orders that assumed the paratroopers would yield ground. He began writing orders that assumed they would not. You cannot defeat men who have already priced their own deaths and paid the invoice in advance. The dread at full weight remained unresolved.

Let the guns fall quiet for a moment now. Let the story slow. There is one American we have not yet named, and he belongs at the center of the coldest morning of the coldest month of the war. Sergeant Daniel Vauovich, known to his squad as Danny, 23 years old, F Company, Second Battalion, 5005th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division from Youngstown, Ohio.

His father had worked the open hearth furnaces at the Republic Steel Plant on the east side of the river, and had come home smelling of iron and slag every night of Dany<unk>y’s childhood. The summer Dany turned 15, his father had put a small brass boat compass in his hand, the kind a river captain might use, and told him he wanted the boy to know which way was north when he was in a place where nothing else made sense.

Dany had jumped into Sicily at 18. He had jumped into Normandy at 22. He had fought at St. Mary Glee in the dark hours after his stick had scattered. He had held the causeway. He had walked out of Holland in October, still holding the compass. On the night of December 20, he was in the back of a truck bouncing east through Belgium, and the compass in his breast pocket was pointing at a pinewood where a Shut Stafle camp grouper with Tiger tanks was getting ready to come through. It is 0420 on the morning of December 22. Danny Vauovich is in a shallow foxhole at the eastern edge of a farmhouse yard outside Bass Bodur and the snow is coming down in a way that eats every sound except the ones very close and very loud. He has been awake for 31 hours. He is not tired anymore. He is somewhere past tired in the place where the body simply keeps working

because it has been told to. His squad, nine men when they came off the trucks, seven men now, is arranged around the farmhouse in a rough horseshoe. He has walked the perimeter twice in the last hour. He knows where each man is by the sound of his breathing. A failed Webble, who might see them and say they are asleep at their posts, would be wrong.

They are listening. At 0426, a tiger’s engine starts up on the road 200 m east. Dany hears it. He does not move. He touches the compass in his breast pocket without looking down. He whistles once low and the seven men around him lift their weapons without a word. The tiger comes down the road slowly.

Grenaders walk beside it, boots crunching through the crust of the snow. Dany lets the tank pass. Lets it. because his orders were to let the armor through and take the infantry, and orders in the 82nd were things you obeyed, even when the thing you were letting past was a 60tonon monster 10 m from your head.

The grenaders come level with the farmhouse. Dany lifts his Thompson. He does not shout. He does not need to. The seven men fire at the same moment because they have practiced this until it is the same as breathing. The Grenadier column folds in the snow. Dany steps out of the foxhole, then deliberate.

Unhurried, he walks at a walk toward the wounded tank commander who has climbed halfway out of his hatch 100 m up the road and is fumbling with a sidearm in gloves he cannot feel. Lying in the ditch on the far side of the road, playing dead, was an 18-year-old Shut Stafle Grenadier named Peter Voss. He had come across the border with his replacement draft 9 days earlier.

He had never seen combat until that morning. He was captured at first light when the American medics working the ditch line found him breathing under a dead man. Voss in his interrogation later that week composite testimony folded into a post-war divisional history said this. I watched the American sergeant walk toward our tank as if he were walking to fetch bread. He did not run.

He did not crouch. He walked. Our commander shot at him with a pistol from the hatch and missed. And the American shot back once and did not miss. I understood then that we had been sent to fight men who had already decided what they were willing to lose. And I understood that we had not. The dread made flesh.

The line held. March of 1945. West Bank of the Rine near Wesle. Standard Furer Wilhelm Roush was captured by American infantry when the pocket around his camp group collapsed under artillery. He could not answer. In his personal kit, folded into an oil cloth wrapping tied with tred string was a bundle of 11 letters addressed to his daughter Anna in Munich.

None had been sent. The last was dated February 3, 1945. The composite reading of that letter, framed here as a captured document rendered through the divisional history, is the film’s final reckoning. It is not a confession of respect. It is the cleareyed testimony of a man who understood at last that he had never been going to win.

He wrote the numbers out. Reiner’s ratio, one American paratrooper for every six of his men. Lindamman’s 1 for eight, his own 1 for 10. And he wrote to Anna that the numbers had gotten worse each time he tried. And that when a man’s numbers got worse each time he tried, it was not because his enemy was getting better.

It was because his enemy had always been this, and he had refused to see. The Americans I fought were not braver than my men, Roush wrote, in the ordinary meaning of that word. They were something worse. They were men who did not need to be told a second time. They knew before they landed what they had come to spend and they spent it without arithmetic and that is how they defeated the arithmetic that I lived by.

Why they could never win. Answer the question the film opened with answer it directly so a listener who cared only for this paragraph could carry it away. It was not any one thing. It was not the M1 Garand, though the Garand was a better rifle for the fight than the Carabina 98K.

It was not the bazooka, though the bazooka killed tanks the doctrine had said were safe. It was not the American artillery, though the American guns fell on the Shut Stafle with a weight the Shut Stafle had never learned to answer. It was the whole of them, and the whole of them was a philosophy the Shut Stafle had encountered nowhere else on the map.

These Americans had been trained to a standard that treated the individual soldier as a decision maker, not a rifle holder. They had been taught to counterattack when doctrine said, “Fall back.” They had been taught to handle their own casualties as a price already agreed.

They had jumped three times in 18 months into places they were not supposed to survive, and they had survived, and each survival had told them a thing about themselves that no Shuttle training film could unteach. They were in the end what the Vuffen Shuttle had built itself to be, and had not become. Roush spent two years in American captivity and returned to a Munich that no longer existed to a daughter who was no longer 18.

He never spoke publicly of the letters. They were returned to him in 1947 and he burned all of them except the last one which was found among his papers when he passed away in 1971. Renegger, as we said, did not survive the winter. He was killed by American artillery near Bastau on January 5, 1945 in an action his regimental history describes in three sentences.

Linderman was killed near Cleaves in February in a wood outside a farm whose name is not recorded. The 82nd Airborne finished the war on the Elb. They took the surrender of an entire German army, 150,000 men. In the first days of May, Sergeant Danny Vauovich walked home to Youngsttown in the fall of 1945 and never spoke much of any of it. He kept the compass.

There is a meaning to draw from all of it, and the film owes it to say so plainly. The Shut Stafle had believed that shock and discipline and ideological cohesion would beat any enemy given the right mass at the right point of the line. They had built themselves around that belief.

They had been, by any honest reckoning, magnificent at the thing they had built themselves to be. The paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division beat them anyway. Not because the Americans were braver in any sense that could be printed on a poster, not because they were more ferocious, not because they loved their cause more, whatever that would mean.

The Americans beat them because they had built a different thing, and the different thing was better. The dread the Shut Stafle felt, Renegger and Lindamman and Roush and Voss and the thousand other names not written down, was the dread of a soldier who meets an enemy that has priced his own death and paid the price in advance, and who was therefore removed from the fight the one weapon the Shut Stafle had counted on most.

The moment the other side realizes it is losing, that moment never came at Naimme. It never came in the pinewoods above Trapon. It was not withheld. It did not exist. The men in the baggy pants had not been trained to notice it. You cannot break a line whose men have decided the price of the ground before you arrived. You can only pay to try.

From Roush’s last letter, the one he never sent. The one that survived the fire because his daughter found it in a drawer after he was gone. Read plain. Stopped clean. Emma, I fought the devils in baggy pants. Three times I lost three times.