80 years later, Don Monson recalls participation in epic operation during World War 2

Nov. 10—ROCHESTER — Don Monson never told his mother. His dad, when he got wind of it, didn't want him to go. He was too young to join the Army.

"I wanted to get in there and help," said Monson, a Zumbrota native, who at 16 joined the Army to fight in World War II.

His parents' disapproval dictated Monson's subsequent moves. In May 1944, as U.S. involvement in World War II was reaching a crescendo and the Allied invasion of Normandy was approaching, Monson, at 2 in the morning, slipped out of bed and into the dead of night, walking along railroad tracks heading to downtown Zumbrota — and to war.

But to get to the war, he would have to drive a bus.

Monson was waiting near the hotel when the bus pulled up at 4 a.m. The bus driver — a man he knew — complained of being ill. Could he take the wheel? After showing him how to use the shift, the driver went to the back of the bus and laid down on a long bench next to a pail he could puke in.

Monson drove the bus and picked up passengers along the way until he reached the north side of the Mendota bridge, which was his stop.

"I pulled over and I woke him up. 'You gotta take it from here.' And I walked from there over to the Fort Snelling area where I enlisted," Monson, now 95, recalled.

Only four months later, Monson at 16 was a participant in one of the most daring airborne operations of the war. Called Operation Market Garden, the ambitious scheme — which ultimately failed but became one of the most famous battles of World War II — involved crossing the River Rhine and advancing deep into northern Germany.

By liberating the Netherlands, outflanking Germany's stout frontier defenses and making an armored drive deep into Germany's industrial heartland, the Allies hoped to deliver a decisive knockout blow to end the war.

At least that was the plan.

"They thought the war would be over by Christmas (1944). That's what Monty (British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery) thought," Monson said, recalling the battle nearly 80 years later in his Rochester senior home apartment. "They ought to have shot that bastard."

He decided to join the 82nd Airborne Division after encountering a recruiter from the elite paratrooper unit whose squared-away appearance dazzled him. The soldier stood like a statue with boots that shined like glass and pants with a knife-like edge. He embodied the professionalism and elite status that Monson desired. After basic training, Monson headed to Fort Benning, Georgia, for airborne training and jumping off 300-foot towers.

He jumped out of planes 28 times — or as he jokes, "one jump, but they pushed me out 27 times."

Monson completed jump school in England, after a trip across the Atlantic that started in Norfolk, Virginia, and sailed along the East Coast, picking up ships along the way until his ship was part of a 135-ship armada. Reaching past New York, they turned and headed toward England, where the physical training was even more intense.

"They didn't have towers or anything like that," he said. "They made us run — run, run, run. Run 50 minutes, walk 10. Run 50 minutes, walk 10."

One early morning, while he and other soldiers were sleeping, a sergeant barged in and began pounding on the steel lockers. "Get up," he yelled. "Get your combat gear ready. You're going to war! You're going to war!"

In the mess hall, they were served steak and eggs.

When they got out to the airfield, planes were lined up rows deep. It was one part of a vast Allied effort that included a dozen airports with planes and men ready to go. Up in the air, Monson recalled looking down and seeing people coming out of their houses and waving white handkerchiefs at the passing planes.

A sergeant had told the men not to weigh themselves down with ammo, because it would be there on the ground in the combat zone.

Even so, Monson prepared like Rambo. He draped three bandoliers of ammo around his neck, a weight that came to 35 pounds. In addition to his loaded M-1 rifle and a belt full of cartridges, Monson carried two mortar rounds in each of his large hip pockets. He also carried hand grenades and "all the ammo I could carry."

As the planes crossed the English Channel, they passed over a bunch of German-occupied islands off the coast of Holland whose job was to alert the Germans of incoming Allied planes.

Forty-five minutes from their drop zone, Monson and other paratroopers were given the order to stand up and hook up. If their plane was hit, "some of us could get out."

"That was the longest 45 minutes of my life because I had so much weight on and the plane was buffeting," he said. "I don't know how in the hell I made it."

The plan in the summer of 1944 involved the seizure of key bridges in the Netherlands by the 101st and 82nd divisions, and the 1st British Airborne Division, which would land by parachute and glider. Once the bridges were seized, a British corps would race through the opening, advance over the bridges, and cross the Rhine and its tributaries.

The bridges were at Eindhoven, 13 miles from the start, Nijmegen, 53 miles, and Arnhem, 62 miles away, as well as two smaller bridges at Veghel and Grave that lay between Eindhoven and Nijmegen.

The 82nd was assigned the task of securing the bridge at Nijmegen.

Monson said the pilot taking them to their jump zone had his own thoughts of self-preservation. The pilot didn't want to die, so instead of him approaching the drop zone at 110 mph, he was coming in at a screaming 150 mph. Monson and others didn't know that. So when the green light went on and they filed toward the door and jumped out, Monson felt a jolt like nothing he had felt before as his parachute opened.

In the process, the three bandoliers of ammo slipped from his neck. The mortars ripped through his pockets and fell earthward. And he lost his grenades.

"The only thing I had was my cartridge belt and my canteen. I lost my helmet and medical kit, so when I hit the ground I didn't have anything," Monson said.

Monson found himself in a foxhole behind enemy lines, regularly showered with artillery bombardment. At one point, an artillery shell hit a tree above, scattering shrapnel all around him.

"I'm laying there with my hand over my head and my face down. And I got hit right at the base of my spine with a piece of shrapnel. And I couldn't feel my legs. And I was bleeding real bad," Monson said.

A soldier heard Monson yelling for a medic and came running through the barrage ("I don't know how he made it because he had to run about 200 yards through that.") When he got to the foxhole, he cut Monson's belt and pants in the back. Blood was pouring out of the wound. He took a towel from around his neck, pressed it against the wound, and was able to stanch the bleeding.

Monson was paralyzed from his legs down.

He was hoisted on a stretcher to a Jeep and was hauled to a church in a nearby town. There, along with other wounded soldiers, Monson spent the next nine days in a church basement paralyzed and without medical care. Eventually, alerted by the Dutch underground of the Market Garden operation, a doctor and nurse arrived at the church to treat the wounded.

The plan, according to historians, failed because of the British corps' inability to reach the furthest bridge at Arnhem before German forces overwhelmed British defenders. The history of the battle is memorialized in the book "A Bridge Too Far." Allied intelligence had failed to detect the presence of German tanks, including elements of two SS Panzer divisions.

U.S. losses totaled nearly 4,000 dead, wounded or missing, while British and Polish losses were 11,000 to 13,000 dead or wounded and 6,450 captured. German casualties numbered 7,500 to 10,000.

Monson was put on a medical ship and sent back to the States. As his ship crossed the Atlantic, he could sense feeling returning to his legs. When he arrived in Norfolk, he walked off the ship.

Monson raised a family, opened a travel business in Rochester, and made 87 trips to Europe over the next 80 years.

One of the most poignant trips was taken four years ago when Monson and three other surviving 82nd Airborne veterans journeyed to the Netherlands. They were there to participate in ceremonies commemorating Operation Market Garden.

In the Dutch city of Nijmegen, earnest, school-aged children came up to Monson, stretched out their hands and thanked him.

"It made you cry," Monson said. "They come up and put their arms around you and said, 'Thank you for our freedom.' "