The Red Devils: How the British Troops Annihilated Hitler’s Most Fanatical Soldiers

The Red Devils: How the British Troops Annihilated Hitler’s Most Fanatical Soldiers

In September 1944, a German staff officer near Arnhem picked up a discarded maroon beret from a ditch full of dead paratroopers. He turned it over in his hands and found a small cloth badge sewn inside, a winged horse, Bellerophon astride Pegasus. He’d seen that badge before on prisoners who wouldn’t stop fighting even with three bullets in them.

 His men had a name for the soldiers who wore it, rote Teufel, red devils. But here’s what your history books leave out. The Germans didn’t give that name to men they’d beaten. They gave it to men who kept coming back again and again until Hitler’s most fanatical divisions simply ceased to exist. This is how a scattered, outnumbered force of British paratroopers spent two years hunting the Waffen SS and Fallschirmjäger elite to the point of extinction.

 The British Parachute Regiment was barely three years old when it faced its first real test. Formed in 1940 on Churchill’s direct order after watching German paratroopers seize Fort Eben Emael in a single morning, the regiment had no doctrine, no combat record, and almost no equipment. Major John Frost, a young officer with the 2nd Battalion, wrote later that the earliest recruits trained with dummy rifles because there weren’t enough real ones to go around.

 They jumped from converted bombers with parachutes borrowed from a design meant for cargo drops. Nobody in Berlin took them seriously. Therefore, when 600 British paratroopers dropped into Sicily in July 1943 to seize the Primasole Bridge, German intelligence assumed they were facing green troops who’d break at first contact.

 They were wrong. The bridge sat astride the road to Catania, and holding it meant holding the gateway to eastern Sicily. Opposing the British that day was a battalion of the German 1st Parachute Division, Fallschirmjäger, Hitler’s own airborne elite, the men who’d taken Crete in 1941 at horrific cost and never let anyone forget it.

 Fallschirmjäger officer Rudolf Böhmler wrote afterward that his men considered themselves the superior force by right, veterans against novices. What he found instead was a British unit that held the bridge for 9 hours against tank support with nothing but machine guns and grit and then, after being pushed off it, fought their way back onto it the following night in hand-to-hand combat in the dark.

Böhmler’s own account admitted, “They fought like men who had already decided they were dead.” That is a dangerous kind of enemy. British Corporal Harold Padget, who’d lost half his section crossing the bridge under fire, wrote in a letter home that never made it past the censor until decades later, “The Germans kept shouting we should surrender, that we couldn’t hold.

 We stopped answering them. We just kept shooting.” When the battle ended, the British had lost a third of their force, but the Fallschirmjäger battalion had lost more and word of the fight at Primosole Bridge spread through the German airborne community as a warning, not a footnote. 11 months later, in the first hours of June 6th, 1944, the British 6th Airborne Division dropped into Normandy in the dark, tasked with seizing the bridges over the Caen Canal and the River Orne before German armor could reach the invasion beaches. Major

John Howard’s glider-borne company landed with pinpoint precision beside the canal bridge, so close that the first German sentries didn’t realize an attack was underway until British boots were already on the structure. The bridge, later renamed Pegasus Bridge for the winged horse badge on the paratroopers’ shoulders, became the axis on which the entire eastern flank of the invasion turned.

Therefore, holding it mattered more than almost any other objective on D-Day and the German High Command knew it. They threw the 21st Panzer Division and elements of the fanatical 12th SS Panzer Division Hitler Youth at the position, a division built almost entirely from Hitler Youth teenagers indoctrinated since childhood and stiffened with veteran SS officers who’d fought in Russia.

 German tank commander Hans von Luck, whose regiment counterattacked toward the bridge that morning, wrote that his young SS adjacent troops fought with a ferocity that unsettled even him. They did not know how to retreat. It had not been trained into them, only how to die in place. But the British paratroopers holding the canal and river crossings had already learned at Premasol what fanatics like these would do if given an inch, and they gave nothing.

 Private Dennis Edwards, dug in near the bridge, later testified that German infantry probed the position 17 times in the first 24 hours alone, each assault breaking against a perimeter that refused to bend. By the time relief arrived from the beaches, the paratroopers had held for longer than anyone in London had thought possible, and the SS spearhead meant to crush the invasion’s eastern shoulder had bled itself out against 600 men with rifles and a canal bridge.

 That success, however, planted a dangerous idea in the minds of Allied planners. If lightly armed paratroopers could hold a bridge against Panzers for a day, could they not seize an entire chain of bridges deep behind enemy lines and end the war by Christmas? The answer came at Arnhem, and it came from the two SS divisions the Allies believed were finished.

 The 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg were supposed to be a broken, refitting rear echelon formation resting in the Dutch countryside near Arnhem after being mauled in Normandy. Allied intelligence downgraded the threat and dismissed a Dutch resistance report that specifically identified SS Panzer units in the drop zone.

 Therefore, on September 17th, 1944, the British 1st Airborne Division parachuted directly on top of two veteran SS Panzer divisions that were very much alive, refitting, and furious. What followed was not the quick link-up the planners had promised. It was 9 days of the most sustained close-quarters fighting British paratroopers would face in the entire war.

 SS-Obersturmführer Karl-Heinz Euling, commanding a battle group of the Frondsberg division in side Arnhem itself, wrote in a post-war account that his men initially treated the British paratroopers with contempt, expecting a swift mopping-up operation. Within 48 hours, that contempt had curdled into something closer to dread.

 Major John Frost’s 2nd Battalion, the same unit that had fought at Primusol Bridge a year earlier, seized the northern end of the Arnhem road bridge and refused to give it up, even as SS armor rolled directly at their positions and set the surrounding houses ablaze one by one. Frost’s men fought from burning buildings, moving room to room as the structures collapsed around them, holding a position that German commanders on the ground had assumed would fall within hours.

SS-Panzergrenadier Alfred Ringdorf, who took part in the assault on the bridge, later admitted, “We could not understand these men. We shelled them, burned them out, attacked from three sides, and still in the morning the bridge was theirs. I had fought in Russia. I had not seen this.

” British signalman James Sims, trapped in the perimeter at Oosterbeek as the wider battle deteriorated, wrote that the SS troops facing his position seemed almost personally offended that the British would not break, as though our refusal to die on schedule was an insult to their training. The bridge finally fell after 4 days, not because Frost’s men surrendered their will to fight, but because there were simply not enough of them left standing to hold it, and Frost himself was badly wounded.

 But the wider division, cut off and surrounded at Oosterbeek, kept fighting for five more days inside a shrinking perimeter, and every hour they held cost the two SS divisions men and machines they could not easily replace. German war diaries from the Hohenstaufen division for that period record repeated urgent requests for reinforcement and ammunition resupply.

 A formation supposedly resting and refitting instead grinding itself down against a trapped, starving pocket of British paratroopers armed with little more than small arms and desperation. When the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division were finally evacuated across the Rhine on the night of September 25th, fewer than 2,400 of the roughly 10,000 men who had dropped nine days earlier made it back.

 It was, by any conventional measure, a defeat, and it has gone down in history as one. But the two SS divisions that had inflicted that defeat paid a price the history books rarely tally alongside it. Both the Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg divisions had been so severely mauled in the fighting at Arnhem and Oosterbeek that they were pulled from the front entirely for extended rebuilding at the exact moment the German High Command desperately needed veteran armored formations to prepare for the coming Ardennes Offensive. SS General Wilhelm

Bittrich, who commanded both divisions during the battle, reported combat losses that left entire panzergrenadier battalions reduced to company strength and equipment losses that could not be replaced from German industry running at 1944 capacity. Therefore, the paratroopers who had lost the battle for the bridges had, without fully realizing it, crippled two of Hitler’s most feared armored divisions for months to come, right as those months would matter most.

A British intelligence assessment written weeks after the battle noted dryly that the SS units responsible for the Arnhem victory were now assessed as unfit for offensive operations. A A verdict that would have astonished the German officers who’d watched the British perimeter collapse at Oosterbeek and assumed they had won cleanly.

 Three months later, in the freezing forests of the Ardennes, the British airborne forces got a second chance and this time the fanatics they faced were a different insignia, but carried the same doctrine of no retreat. When Hitler launched his last great offensive on December 16th, 1944, aiming to split the Allied armies and retake Antwerp, he committed his most ideologically committed formations to the spearhead, including battle groups drawn from the 1st SS Panzer Division, Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, the Führer’s own bodyguard formation and the

most fanatical unit in the entire German order of battle. One of its battle groups, under Joachim Peiper, murdered dozens of American prisoners of war at Malmedy within the offensive’s first days. A massacre that spread through Allied lines within hours and hardened every unit in the path of the German advance, British paratroopers included.

The British 6th Airborne Division rushed from England to help plug the northern shoulder of the German salient, arrived already primed with the knowledge of what surrender to these particular Germans could mean. Private Ken Mills of the 6th Airborne wrote that briefings before the unit moved into the line made explicit reference to Malmedy and that after that nobody in the battalion was thinking about taking prisoners kindly.

We were thinking about not becoming one. Fighting through snow so deep that vehicles bogged to their axles, the 6th Airborne clashed repeatedly with SS reconnaissance and infantry elements probing toward the Meuse. SS Panzergrenadier Otto Funk, captured during one of these actions, told his interrogators that his unit had been assured the British paratroopers in the sector were exhausted survivors of Arnhem, unlikely to offer serious resistance, and that this assessment had proven catastrophically wrong within the

first exchange of fire. “They did not fight like beaten men,” Funk said. “They fought like men looking for a reason.” British airborne accounts from the fighting around the Ardennes describe a grim, methodical hunting of isolated SS patrols and outposts once the initial German momentum stalled. Small unit actions in which quarter was rarely extended to men wearing the Leibstandarte’s distinctive cuff title.

By the time the German offensive had been fully blunted in late January 1945, the SS spearhead divisions that had led it, the very formations Hitler had staked his last strategic gamble on, had been reduced to a fraction of their starting armor and manpower, ground down not only by American forces bearing the brunt of the fighting, but by British units, including the Red Devils, that refused to let the offensive’s flanks hold.

 By March 1945, there was only one river left between the Western Allies and the heart of Germany, and Hitler knew it. The Rhine crossing at Wesel, code-named Operation Varsity, would be the largest single airborne assault of the entire war, and this time the British paratroopers who dropped were not scattered novices facing an underestimated enemy.

 They were veterans of Sicily, Normandy, Arnhem, and the Ardennes, dropping in daylight directly onto prepared German positions manned by a mixture of Fallschirmjäger paratroop regiments and fanatical Volkssturm and SS remnants ordered to hold the last natural barrier protecting the Reich at any cost. German Fallschirmjäger commander Colonel Heinz Trettner, overseeing defenses in the drop zone, had been assured by Berlin that any airborne assault would be broken by concentrated flak and immediate counterattack before the British could

consolidate. Therefore, his men fought the landing itself with everything available. Anti-aircraft guns depressed to fire directly into descending parachutes, machine gun nests sighted to sweep the drop zones the instant boots touched ground. The British 6th Airborne took catastrophic casualties in the first minutes.

 Gliders shredded by flak before they even landed. Men killed in their harnesses before they could cut free. But this time the paratroopers who survived the landing did not need to be told what came next. They had done this before at Pegasus Bridge, at Oosterbeek, in the Ardennes snow, and each time the pattern had been the same.

 Absorb the first shock, then refuse to stop. Sergeant Roy Wildman of the 6th Airborne, who landed almost directly on top of a German machine gun position, wrote that his section cleared three separate strong points within an hour of landing, working from position to position without waiting for orders, because we all knew what needed doing, and none of us needed telling twice.

German paratroop officer Trettner’s own after-action account, recovered after his capture, described the British assault with a grudging, almost bewildered respect, noting that despite catastrophic losses on landing, the British paratroopers reorganized and attacked with a speed and coordination we had not anticipated from troops who had just suffered such casualties.

 By nightfall on the first day, the German defenses around Wesel, manned by some of the last committed Fallschirmjäger regiments Hitler had left, had been broken, and the Rhine, the final geographic barrier protecting Nazi Germany, belonged to the Allies. What followed in the final weeks of the war was less a battle than a pursuit.

 The remnants of the SS Panzer divisions that had fought at Arnhem, rebuilt with conscripts and boys pulled from the Hitler Youth, and the shattered Fallschirmjäger units that had defended the Rhine, retreated eastward through a Germany that was disintegrating around them. And the British Airborne forces that had spent two years learning exactly how these formations fought were among the units now pushing them back into the heart of the collapsing Reich.

Prisoners taken in these final weeks told a consistent story. One German officer captured near Osnabrück in April 1945 stated flatly to his interrogators that his men had been warned specifically about British paratroopers in the sector, told that these were the ones from Arnhem, and that we should expect no mercy if captured because we had shown none there.

 Whether that reputation was entirely deserved or had simply calcified into legend on both sides of the line scarcely mattered by that point. It had become a fact of the battlefield, and it worked on German morale exactly as the SS’s own reputation for fanaticism had once been meant to work on everyone else’s. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, the formations that had once been held up as the unbreakable core of Hitler’s war machine, the SS Panzer divisions that terrorized the Eastern Front and mauled the Allies at Arnhem, the

Fallschirmjäger who had taken Crete and defended every river line with suicidal tenacity existed only as fractions of their former strength, rebuilt again and again with ever younger and less experienced men until there was nothing left to rebuild them with. The Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg divisions that had won the tactical victory at Arnhem never recovered the veteran core they lost doing it.

 The Leibstandarte that spearheaded the Ardennes Offensive limped out of that battle a shadow of the force that entered it. The Fallschirmjäger who held the Rhine at Wesel were by April 1945 defending a collapsing map with conscripts wearing paratrooper insignia they had never earned through jump training. The badge alone, the only thing left of what the unit had once been.

 The maroon beret and the winged Pegasus badge that German staff officer picked up in a ditch outside Arnhem in September 1944 had been in that moment a trophy from what looked like a clear German victory. It would be easy and not entirely wrong to call Arnhem a defeat for the men who wore that badge. But defeat and destruction are not always the same thing and the two SS divisions that broke the British perimeter at Oosterbeek broke themselves doing it at the one moment in the war when Hitler could least afford to lose them. The Red

Devils never set out to annihilate anyone in a single battle. They did it the slower way, bridge by bridge, night by night, refusing every time to be the ones who stopped fighting first until the divisions built to embody Nazi fanaticism had nothing left to embody it with. If you enjoyed this story, hit subscribe for more fascinating World War II historical deep dives every week.

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