Operation Market Garden
On 17 September 1944 the Allies dropped three airborne divisions into Holland to seize a corridor of bridges for the ground forces to drive up to the Rhine at Arnhem. The 101st Airborne took the southern end of the road. Easy Company jumped near Son, and the next day the people of Eindhoven turned out to welcome them.
Nuenen, 19 September 1944
The battalion was sent east from Eindhoven to Nuenen, where Germans had been reported, with British Cromwell tanks of the 15th/19th King's Royal Hussars and some of the men riding on the hulls. Flat open fields, ditches and small farms lay between them and the village, and nobody knew how strong the enemy was.
At Nuenen the force ran into the German 107th Panzer Brigade, newly arrived with Panther tanks. British tanks were knocked out, and the paratroopers were pinned in open fields. After dark the battalion withdrew toward Eindhoven. It is remembered as Easy Company's first real setback, and it showed what light tanks faced against heavier armour in open country: a Cromwell's gun could not reliably go through a Panther's front armour. Sources disagree on the date, 19 or 20 September, on the losses and on the number of tanks.
In the game you advance on the village with the tanks under your orders. Keep infantry and tanks together, and if you find more than you can handle, the job becomes getting everyone back out.
The Crossroads, 5 October 1944
By October Easy Company held a long stretch of dike on the Island, the flat farmland between the Waal and the Lower Rhine, with the Germans on the high ground across the river. Before dawn on 5 October a patrol was ambushed near a crossroads on the Renkumse Veerweg at Heteren. German troops had crossed the river in the night.
Richard Winters went forward with one squad, found a German machine gun at the crossroads, and at first light saw a large German force sheltering behind the far side of the dike, close together and not yet aware of him. He attacked across open ground with about thirty-five men and drove them back toward the river. German strength differs by source, from about 150 to about 300 men; 11 were captured. As Easy pushed on toward the river, artillery and mortars from across the Rhine hit the company, and most of its roughly twenty wounded came then. Winters later wrote that the attack was one of the clearest moments of his war.
In the game your orders are to take the crossroads and the ditch beyond it, then stop. Anyone who moves in the open is seen from across the river, and the German guns are ranged on it. Do not chase toward the river.
The ground today
Nuenen has grown into a large suburb of Eindhoven, so the map leaves out every building the Dutch building register dates after 1945, and the fields are open again. At Heteren the crossroads and the Renkumse Veerweg survive, with a memorial; the river dikes were raised and widened in the 1990s, so the dike on the map is larger than in 1944.
