Aug. 27, 1944,
Dearest Wife –
In just a few days now our 10th wedding anniversary will come to pass.
These 10 years have been the happiest of my life. I say truthfully that the best thing I ever did was to bind myself to you with the bonds of matrimony. I still marvel at and congratulate myself on such a stroke of good fortune.
To me, the passing years have only enhanced your attractiveness; an attraction not only physical but also of the mind and spirit.
And now that our first anniversary apart is about to occur I find myself filled with treasured memories of our years together.
We both know that the bond between us is too strong to be broken by the present crisis and we have the strength given us by 10 wonderful years of marriage to be true to the trust we have in each other’s faithfulness. Being apart is hard and doubts will assail your mind, but believe me, Darling, never shall I deviate in my love and devotion to you. None shall ever take your place as the mistress of my heart. Merely thinking of you is balm for my loneliness. I find it easy to solace myself by recalling vivid experiences with you from the past. What I am trying to say, my Angel, is that after all our years together there is still only one who can claim my love.
So, on this anniversary soon to come I find that, due to circumstances, I am unable to bring you some tangible gift as evidence of my devotion, but must be content to express with pitifully inadequate words how I adore you.
Let now a doubt or uneasy thought creep into your mind but be secure in the knowledge that ours is an enduring union of man and woman and when this enforced separate is at an end we shall pick up the threads of our lives together and go on to an even greater happiness.
Your husband forever and ever,
John
Seventy years ago, 34-year-old Pvt. Johnny Smith of Catherine Street in Springfield knew that, after 22 months of training, worry and delay, Operation Varsity was a go.
As chalk commander of a WACO CG4 designed in Troy, Ohio, Smith was responsible for ensuring the load would be balanced in the canvas, plywood and steel tube glider carrying two pilots, 13 Army Airborne soldiers, and a quarter-ton truck over the Rhine.
Its purpose was for Smith’s 194th Glider Infantry Regiment and other American and British airborne force to help ground troops cross the Rhine River.
The airborne deployment, the last of the war, involved more than 17,000 American and British soldiers and 4,000 aircraft lined up in a sky train that stretched more than 200 miles.
The air train was so long that, toward the end of the landing time, Allied troops on the ground were in danger of being crushed by Allied gliders just touching down.
In his e-book “Airborne All the Way,” former Springfielder Joe Hatfield tells the story of the March 24, 1945, raid, doing his part to remind Americans of the “forgotten finale” to airborne operations against Germany and the “forgotten airborne division” involved.
Assembled and written over a period of eight years, Hatfield’s work is a gift not only to the memory of Smith, but to Hatfield’s father, Dick, to whom “Uncle Johnny” was a surrogate.
Joe Hatfield said he remembers “being very fond” of Johnny Smith and his wife, Mary, during his childhood visits to their home and garden. Joe was 33 when Johnny died in 2003.
Most everyone but Johnny called his wife “Toody,” a name she wasn’t fond of but had been called since a Schaefer sibling stuck it on her in the home across the street from her eventual husband, who would become a plumber.
In 1943, the two were months from their 10th wedding anniversary when a draft notice arrived in the mail, summoning Johnny to Fort Hayes, Columbus, for processing, then to Fort Thomas, Ky., and Fort Mackall, N.C., the latter freshly renamed for the first U.S. paratrooper killed in World War II.
From among a score of sources, Joe Hatfield quotes a soldier of Johnny’s regiment calling the camp area a “strange, parched land.” It was parched enough that in their earliest days there that members of the 193rd Glider Infantry Regiment (more later about the 194th) were fighting not the enemy but forest fires.
At the end of his grueling basic training, Johnny got a visit from Toody, who stayed at the Latana Hotel in nearby Aberdeen, N.C.
With basic over, Johnny specialized first in the 37mm recoilless rifle, then the 57mm found to be more effective against German Panzers.
He also joined others of the 17th Airborne Division, nicknamed “Thunder from Heaven,” in increasingly longer installments of the “Airborne Shuffle,” an up-tempo march that, in their fittest days, had division travelling 26 to 35 miles a day.
They did so not only at lower pay rates and lower status than members of the airborne soldiers jumping out of planes, they did so during a time when the advisability of using the gliders they were going to be strapped into was very much in question.
Designed by the Weaver Aircraft Company (WACO) in Troy, the gliders’ plusses were thought to be the short space they needed to land, their near silence in flight, the absence of dangerous gasoline, ease of pilot training and the ability to carry both personnel and equipment.
The disadvantages were summed up in the gliders’ most popular nicknames: Sitting Ducks and Flying Coffins.
In 1943, those nicknames seemed apt. On July 9, a headwind prevented all but 54 of the 144 gliders towed toward Sicily from landing on ground. Of the 605 soldiers killed in Operation Husky, 306 drowned in 73 gliders that crashed in the Mediterranean.
In an attempt to counterbalance the actual and public relations disaster, the mayor of St. Louis and other dignitaries involved in glider production there agreed to take seats in a glider for a demonstration flight at the St. Louis Airshow.
“In front of 10,000 horrified spectators,” Hatfield writes, “a wing broke loose from the glider and it plummeted 2,000 feet straight into the ground.”
All 10 aboard died, and when the story appeared on Page 1 of the Springfield Daily News, as it did across the nation, Toody Smith had real reason to fear for her husband’s safety.
But training went on in North Carolina, then at the Tennessee Maneuver Area, a place whose topography was thought to be European enough in nature that more than one million American troops trained their before going overseas.
After getting his vaccinations and choosing the $10,000 life insurance policy option, Johnny then was among 8,000 to board the USS Wakefield in Boston for the trip across the pond. They arrived in Liverpool to a bagpipe rendition of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” before the train and truck trip to Camp Chiseldon west of London.
They might have remained there for further training until 1945, but Adolph Hitler launched what would be called the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944, and the 193rd Glider Infantry got its first taste of war when trucks it was riding in were strafed on the way to their first barracks in France.
Traveling by land, the 17th Airborne was thrown into the battle with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, and paid dearly. An initial force of 12,859 men suffered 3,722 casualties, with Johnny Smith’s regiment suffering 102 killed, 63 of them in a single day. Smith would never speak to his family about those days.
After the battle, Hatfield writes, 193rd Glider Infantry regiment “was folded into the 194th.” He then quotes a veteran whose words hum with the disorientation of loss: “For a while you seldom saw a familiar face in the chow line.”
By March of 1945, Allied troops were getting ready to cross the Rhine near Wesel, and an altered Operation Varsity was planned. A shortage of powered planes meant that each would tow two gliders, rather than one. Because of a shortage of glider co-pilots, officers were given three-day courses (the adjective “crash” was avoided) in landing the gliders.
Although daytime drops were chosen for better accuracy and safety, “as a fair warning,” Joe Hatfield writes, “the men were told that this could possibly result in a 50-percent casualty rate. A glider trooper quickly translated the meaning: For every pair of soldiers shaking hands and wishing one another luck, one might not be around at mission’s end.
Hatfield skillfully quotes sources again about the terror of the flight in: “The sheer concentration of anti-aircraft fire was far beyond our expectations. I watched in awesome disbelief as planes all around us burst into flames and plunged earthwards, most with their precious cargo aboard.”
“Fierce fighting began as soon as the 194th got out of splintered plywood, pipe and fabric gliders,” reports the unit’s history. “Many never lived to see the success of the team. Murderous fire with incendiaries set afire the highly flammable fabric.”
Despite the 1,521 casualties (259 killed) that first day, the operation was considered a success, and the 194ths role in particular.
Assembling “amid the wreckage of dozens of gliders,” one report said, the unit by noon had accomplished most of its goals. “While suffering heavy casualties, the 194th took 1,150 prisoners, eliminated fifty artillery pieces, and destroyed ten tanks.”
Military historians report that the capture of the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen lessened the strategic need for Operation Varsity, though not the courage of those involved.
Airborne glider troops joined the ground advance, fighting at Munster, Hamm, Warstein, Dortmund, Essen and Mulheim. They fought on until Victory in Europe (VE) Day, May 8.
Johnny returned home to Toody, resumed his career as a plumber, kept up with some of his service friends, and led the good life until it was eroded by Alzheimer’s disease.
Two things about Johnny’s character contributed mightily to the current book. One was his penchant for preserving the vast number of photos he sent back home and documents of his service time. A remarkable example is the manifest for his glider flight in Operation Varsity, which had been ordered destroyed.
The second aspect of Johnny’s character that affected the book was his unwillingness to talk about the war.
“We always knew he had done something important in the war,” Joe Hatfield said, “but we were told he didn’t like to discuss it.”
He recalls, too, the Christmas his father gave Johnny a World War II photo book. “The reaction on his face, I’m still thinking about it,” said Joe. The tearfulness and hurt it bore “sent a little shiver in my spine.”
Johnny’s reticence led Joe Hatfield to search out other sources, to use the accounts of other soldiers who shared the experience, and to collect in his research in a treasure trove of maps, press reports, regimental histories, and glider company advertisements that invoke the period.
Smith’s penchants for collection and privacy combine to keep the part he played in Operation Varsity to match the rank he held during most of the war: Private first class.
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