A Bridge Too Far

  Sergeant Roy Hatch, copiloting a Horsa carrying a jeep, two trailers filled with mortar ammunition, and three men, wondered how they were going to get down when he saw the antiaircraft fire ahead of them on the run-in. As Staff Sergeant Alec Young, the pilot, put the glider into a steep dive and leveled off, Hatch noticed to his amazement that everyone seemed to be heading toward the same touch-down point—including a cow which was frantically running just in front of them. Somehow Young put the glider down safely. Immediately the men jumped out and began unbolting the tail section. Nearby, Hatch noticed three gliders lying on their backs. Suddenly, with a tearing, rasping sound, another Horsa crash-landed on top of them. The glider came straight in, sliced off the nose of Hatch’s glider, including the canopy and the cockpit where Hatch and Young had been sitting only moments before, then slid forward, coming to a halt directly in front of them.

  Other gliders missed the zones altogether, some crash-landing as far as three miles away. Two came down on the southern bank of the Rhine, one near the village of Driel. Leaving casualties in the care of Dutch civilians, the men rejoined their units by crossing the Rhine on the forgotten but still active Driel ferry.*

  Several C-47’s were hit and set afire as they made their approach to the zones. About ten minutes from landing, Sergeant Francis Fitzpatrick noticed that flak was coming up thick. A young trooper, Private Ginger MacFadden, jerked and cried out, his hands reaching for his right leg. “I’m hit,” MacFadden mumbled. Fitzpatrick examined him quickly and gave him a shot of morphia. Then the sergeant noticed that the plane seemed to be laboring. As he bent to look out the window, the door to the pilot’s compartment opened and the dispatcher came out, his face tense. “Stand by for a quick red and green,” he said. Fitzpatrick looked down the line of paratroopers, now hooked up and ready to go. He could see smoke pouring from the port engine. Leading the way, Fitzpatrick jumped. As his chute opened, the plane went into a racing dive. Before Fitzpatrick hit the ground he saw the C-47 plow into a field off to his right and nose over. He was sure the crew and Ginger MacFadden had not escaped.

  In another C-47 the American crew chief jokingly told Captain Frank D. King, “You’ll soon be down there and I’ll be heading home for bacon and eggs.” The American sat down opposite King. Minutes later the green light went on. King glanced over at the crew chief. He seemed to have fallen asleep, slumped back with his chin on his chest, his hands in his lap. King had a feeling something was not quite right. He shook the American by the shoulder and the man fell sideways. He was dead. Behind him, King saw a large hole in the fuselage which looked as though it had been made by a .50-caliber machine-gun bullet. Standing in the doorway ready to jump, King saw that flames were streaming from the port wing. “We’re on fire,” he shouted to Sergeant Major George Gatland, “Check with the pilot.” Gatland went forward. As he opened the cockpit door a sheet of flame shot out, sweeping the entire length of the plane. Gatland slammed the door shut and King ordered the men to jump. He believed they were now pilotless.

  As the troopers went out the door, Gatland estimated the plane was between two and three hundred feet off the ground. He landed with a jar and began a head count. Four men were missing. One man had been killed by gun fire in the doorway before he had a chance to leave the plane. Another had jumped but his chute had caught fire; and a third, Gatland and King learned, had landed a short distance away. Then the fourth man arrived still in his parachute. He had come down with the plane. The crew, he told them, had somehow crash-landed the plane and they had miraculously walked away from it. Now, fifteen miles from Oosterbeek and far from the British lines, King’s group set out to make their way back. As they moved out, the C-47, blazing a quarter of a mile away, blew up.

  In some areas paratroopers jumped safely only to find themselves falling through waves of incendiary fire. Tugging desperately at parachute lines to avoid the tracers, many men landed on the edges of the zones in dense forests. Some, as they struggled to shed their chutes, were shot by snipers. Others landed far away from their zones. In one area, part of a battalion came down behind the Germans, then marched for the rendezvous point bringing eighty prisoners with them.

  Under fire on the zones, troopers, discarding their chutes, ran swiftly for cover. Small clusters of badly wounded men lay everywhere. Private Reginald Bryant was caught by the blast of a mortar shell and so severely concussed that he was temporarily paralyzed. Aware of what was happening around him, he could not move a muscle. He stared helplessly as the men from his plane, believing Bryant dead, picked up his rifle and ammunition and hurriedly struck out for the assembly point.

  Many men, surprised by the unexpected and unremitting machine-gun and sniper fire that swept the zones, sprinted for cover in the woods. In minutes the areas were deserted except for the dead and wounded. Sergeant Ginger Green, the physical-training instructor who had optimistically brought along a football to have a game on the zone after the expected easy action, jumped and hit the ground so hard that he broke two ribs. How long he lay there, Green does not know. When he regained consciousness, he was alone except for casualties. Painfully he sat up and almost immediately a sniper fired at him. Green got to his feet and began to dart and weave his way toward the woods. Bullets pinged all around him. Again and again, the pain in his ribs forced Green to the ground. He was certain that he would be hit. In the billowing smoke rolling across the heath, his strange duel with the sniper went on for what seemed like hours. “I could only make five or six yards at a time,” he remembers, “and I figured I was up against either a sadistic bastard or a damned bad shot.” Finally, hugging his injured ribs, Green made one last dash for the woods. Reaching them, he threw himself into the undergrowth and rolled against a tree just as a last bullet smacked harmlessly into the branches above his head. He had gained vital yardage under the most desperate circumstances of his life. Spent and aching, Green slowly removed the deflated football from inside his camouflage smock and painfully threw it away.

  Many men would remember the first terrible moments after they jumped. Running for their lives from bullets and burning brush on Ginkel Heath at least a dozen troopers recall a young twenty-year-old lieutenant who lay in the gorse badly wounded. He had been shot in the legs and chest by incendiary bullets as he swung helplessly in his parachute. Lieutenant Pat Glover saw the young officer as he moved off the zone. “He was in horrible pain,” Glover remembers, “and he just couldn’t be moved. I gave him a shot of morphia and promised to send back a medic as soon as I could.” Private Reginald Bryant, after recovering from his paralysis on the drop zone, came across the officer as he was heading for the assembly area. “When I got to him, smoke was coming from wounds in his chest. His agony was awful. A few of us had come upon him at the same time and he begged us to kill him.” Someone, Bryant does not remember who, slowly reached down and gave the lieutenant his own pistol, cocked. As the men hurried off, the fire on the heath was slowly moving toward the area where the stricken officer lay. Later, rescue parties came across the body. It was concluded that the lieutenant had committed suicide.*

  With characteristic precision Brigadier Shan Hackett, commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, landed within three hundred yards of the spot he had chosen for his headquarters. In spite of enemy fire, the Brigadier’s first concern was to find his walking stick, which he had dropped on the way down. As he was searching for it, he came across a group of Germans. “I was more scared than they were,” he recalled, “but they seemed eager to surrender.” Hackett, who spoke German fluently, brusquely told them to wait; then, recovering his stick, the trim, neatly mustached Brigadier calmly marched his prisoners off.

  Impatient, prickly and temperamental at best of times, Hackett did not like what he saw. He, too, had expected the zones to be secure and organized. Now, surrounded by his officers, he prepared to move out his brigade. At this moment, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, General Urquhart’s chief of staff, drove up to perform his painful duty. Taking Hackett aside, Macke
nzie—in his own words—“told him what had been decided and concluded with the touchy matter of command.” Brigadier Pip Hicks had been placed in charge of the division in Urquhart’s and Lathbury’s absence. Mackenzie went on to explain that Urquhart had made the decision back in England that Hicks was to take over in the event both he and Lathbury should be missing or killed.

  Hackett was none too happy, Mackenzie recalls. “Now look here, Charles, I’m senior to Hicks,” he told Mackenzie. “I should therefore command this division.” Mackenzie was firm. “I quite understand, sir, but the General did give me the order of succession and we must stick to it. Further, Brigadier Hicks has been here twenty-four hours and is now much more familiar with the situation.” Hackett, Mackenzie said, might only make matters worse if he “upset the works and tried to do something about it.”

  But it was obvious to Mackenzie that the matter would not end there. A delicate rift had always existed between Urquhart and Hackett. Although the volatile Brigadier was eminently fit for command, in Urquhart’s opinion he lacked the older Hicks’s infantry experience. Additionally, Hackett was a cavalryman, and Urquhart was known to hold a lesser opinion of cavalry brigadiers than of the infantrymen with whom he had long been associated. He had once jestingly referred to Hackett in public as “that broken-down cavalryman”—a remark that Hackett had not found amusing.

  Mackenzie told Hackett that his nth Battalion was to be detached from the brigade. It would move out immediately for Arnhem and the bridge. To Hackett, this was the final insult. His pride in the brigade stemmed, in part, from its qualities as a highly trained integrated unit that fought as an independent team. He was appalled that it was being separated and broken into parts. “I do not like being told to give up a battalion without being consulted,” he told Mackenzie hotly. Then, on reflection, he added, “Of course, if any battalion should go, it is the nth. It has been dropped in the southeastern corner of the zone and is closest to Arnhem and the bridge.” But he requested another battalion in exchange and Mackenzie replied that he thought Hicks would give him one. And there the matter ended for the moment. The brilliant, explosive and dynamic Hackett bowed to inevitability. For the time, Hicks could run the battle, but Hackett was determined to run his own brigade.

  For the British it was a grim and bloody afternoon. With a problem-ridden second lift, the fate of General Urquhart and Brigadier Lathbury still unknown, with Colonel Frost’s small force precariously clinging to the north end of the Arnhem bridge, and with a swelling clash of personalities developing between two brigadiers, one more unforeseen disaster had taken place.

  Depleted in numbers, worn out by constant fighting, the troopers of Hicks’s Airlanding Brigade watched in despair as thirty-five Stirling bomber-cargo planes dropped supplies everywhere but on the zones. Of the eighty-seven tons of ammunition, food and supplies destined for the men of Arnhem, only twelve tons reached the troops. The remainder, widely scattered to the southwest, fell among the Germans.

  In Antoon Derksen’s house less than five miles away, General Urquhart was still surrounded by Germans. The self-propelled gun and crew on the street below were so close that Urquhart and the two officers with him had not dared risk talk or movement. Apart from some chocolate and hard candy, the men were without food. The water had been cut off and there were no sanitary arrangements. Urquhart felt a sense of desperation. Unable to rest or sleep, he brooded about the progress of the battle and the arrival of the second lift, unaware of its delayed start. He wondered how far Horrocks’ tanks had advanced and if Frost still held at the bridge. “Had I known the situation at that moment,” he later recalled, “I would have disregarded the concern of my officers and made a break for it, Germans or no Germans.” Silent and withdrawn, Urquhart found himself staring fixedly at Captain James Cleminson’s mustache. “The enormity in hirsute handlebars had earlier been lost on me,” he wrote, “but now there was little else to look at.” The mustache irritated him. It looked “damned silly.”

  With all his preoccupation, Urquhart had never thought of the decision he had made regarding chain of command within the division, a last-minute instruction that was fast building toward a complex confrontation between Hicks and Hackett. By now, at 4 P.M. on Monday, September 18, Urquhart had been absent from his headquarters for almost one full day.

  General Wilhelm Bittrich, commander of the II SS Panzer Corps, was shocked by the enormous size of the second lift. Badgered by Field Marshal Model to quickly capture the Arnhem bridge and pressed by Colonel Harzer and General Harmel for reinforcements, Bittrich found his problems growing increasingly acute. As he grimly watched the skies west of Arnhem blossom with hundreds of multicolored parachutes, then fill with an apparently unceasing stream of gliders, he despaired. From the Luftwaffe communications net, he learned that two other massive drops had taken place. Trying to guess the Allied strength, Bittrich greatly overestimated the number of Anglo-Americans now in Holland. He believed that maybe another division had landed, enough to tilt the balance in favor of the attackers.

  To Bittrich, the buildup of Allied strength versus the arrival of German reinforcements had become a deadly race. So far only a trickle of men and materiel had reached him. By comparison, the Allies seemed to have inexhaustible resources. He feared that they might mount yet another airborne drop the following day. In the narrow confines of Holland, with its difficult terrain, bridges, and proximity to the undefended frontiers of Germany, a force that size could mean catastrophe.

  There was little coordination between Bittrich’s forces and Colonel General Student’s First Parachute Army to the south. Although Student’s men were being constantly reinforced by the remnants of Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, that shattered force was desperately short of transport, guns and ammunition. Days, perhaps weeks, would be needed to re-equip them. Meanwhile, the entire responsibility for halting Montgomery’s attack lay with Bittrich, and his most pressing problems remained the crossing at Nijmegen and the unbelievable defense by the British at the northern approach of the Arnhem bridge.

  So long as the Allied troopers held out there, Bittrich was prevented from moving his own forces down the highway to Nijmegen. Harmel’s Frundsberg Division, trying to get across the Rhine, was dependent entirely on the ferry at Pannerden—a slow, tedious method of crossing. Ironically, while the British at Arnhem were experiencing their first tentative doubts of their ability to hang on, Bittrich was gravely concerned about the outcome of the battle. He saw the Reich as dangerously close to invasion. The next twenty-four hours might tell the story.

  Bittrich’s superiors had problems of wider scope. All along Army Group B’s vast front, Field Marshal Model was juggling forces, trying to stem the relentless attacks of the American First and Third Armies. Although the reinstatement of the illustrious Von Rundstedt to his old command had brought a renewal of order and cohesion, he was scraping the bottom of the nation’s manpower barrel for reinforcements. Locating gasoline to move units from one area to another was also becoming an increasingly critical problem, and there was little help from Hitler’s headquarters. Berlin seemed more preoccupied with the Russian menace from the east than with the Allied drive from the west.

  Despite his other worries, Model seemed confident of overcoming the threat in Holland. He remained convinced that the country’s marshes, dikes and water barriers could work for him in providing time to halt and defeat Montgomery’s attack. Bittrich had no such optimism. He urged Model to take several important steps before the situation worsened. In Bittrich’s view, the destruction of the Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges was necessary immediately, but that proposal irritated Model every time Bittrich suggested it. “Pragmatic, always demanding the impossible, Model visited me every day,” Bittrich was to recall. “On the spot, he would issue a stream of orders referring to immediate situations, but he never stayed long enough at any conference to hear out or approve long-range plans.” Model, Bittrich feared, did not grasp the appalling eventualities that could ensue fo
r Germany if an Allied breakthrough occurred. Instead, he seemed obsessed with details; he was particularly concerned about the German failure to recapture the Arnhem bridge. Stung by the implied criticism, Bittrich told the Field Marshal, “In all my years as a soldier, I have never seen men fight so hard.” Model was unimpressed. “I want that bridge,” he said coldly.

  On the afternoon of the eighteenth Bittrich tried again to explain his view of the over-all situation to an impatient Model. The Nijmegen bridge was the key to the entire operation, he argued. Destroy it and the head of the Allied attack would be severed from its body. “Herr Field Marshal, we should demolish the Waal crossing before it is too late,” Bittrich said. Model was adamant. “No!” he said. “The answer is no!” Not only did Model insist that the bridge could be defended; he demanded that Student’s army and the Frundsberg Division halt the Anglo-Americans before they ever reached it. Bittrich said bluntly that he was far from sure the Allies could be contained. As yet there was almost no German armor in the area and, he told Model, there was grave danger that Montgomery’s overwhelming tank strength would achieve a breakthrough. Then Bittrich expressed his fears that further airborne drops could be expected. “If the Allies succeed in their drive from the south and if they drop one more airborne division in the Arnhem area, we’re finished,” he said. “The route to the Ruhr and Germany will be open.” Model would not be swayed. “My orders stand,” he said. “The Nijmegen bridge is not to be destroyed, and I want the Arnhem bridge captured within twenty-four hours.”