A Bridge Too Far

  OOSTERBEEK, THE QUIET ISLAND in the midst of the war, was now the very center of the fighting. In less than seventy-two hours—from Wednesday on—the village had been pounded to a shambles. Artillery and mortar fire had reduced it to one vast junk heap. The serene order of the town was gone. In its place was a ravaged raw landscape, pitted with shell craters, scarred by slit trenches, littered with splinters of wood and steel, and thick with red brick dust and ashes. From fire-blackened trees, fragments of cloth and curtains blew eerily in the wind. Spent brass cartridge cases glinted in the ankle-high dust along the streets. Roads were barricaded with burned-out jeeps and vehicles, trees, doors, sandbags, furniture—even bathtubs and pianos. Behind half-demolished houses and sheds, by the sides of streets and in ruined gardens lay the bodies of soldiers and civilians, side by side. Resort hotels, now turned into hospitals, stood among lawns littered with furniture, paintings and smashed lamps; and the gaily striped canopies, which had shaded the wide verandas, hung down in soiled, ragged strips. Nearly every house had been hit; some had burned down; and there were few windows left in the town. In this sea of devastation, which the Germans were now calling Der Hexenkessel (the witches’ cauldron), the Dutch—some eight to ten thousand men, women and children—struggled to survive. Crowded into cellars, without gas, water or electricity and, like the troops in many sectors, almost without food, the civilians nursed their wounded, the British defenders and, when the occasion arose, their German conquerors.

  In the Schoonoord Hotel, now one of the main casualty stations sitting squarely on the front line, Hendrika van der Vlist, the daughter of the owner, noted in her diary:

  We are no longer afraid; we are past all that. There are wounded lying all around us—some of them are dying. Why shouldn’t we do the same if this is asked of us? In this short time we have become detached from everything we have always clung to before. Our belongings are gone. Our hotel has been damaged on all sides. We don’t even give it a thought. We have no time for that. If this strife is to claim us as well as the British, we shall give ourselves.

  Along lanes, in fields and on rooftops, behind barricaded windows in the ruins of houses, near the church in lower Oosterbeek, in the deer park about the wrecked Hartenstein, tense, hollow-eyed paratroopers manned positions. The noise of the bombardment was now almost continuous. Soldiers and civilians alike were deafened by it. In Oosterbeek the British and Dutch were shocked into a kind of numbness. Time had little meaning, and events had become blurred. Yet soldiers and civilians helped to comfort each other, hoping for rescue, but almost too exhausted to worry about survival. Lieutenant Colonel R. Payton-Reid, commander of the 7th KOSB’s, noted: “Lack of sleep is the most difficult of all hardships to combat. Men reached the stage when the only important thing in life seemed to be sleep.” As Captain Benjamin Clegg of the 10th Parachute Battalion put it, “I remember more than anything the tiredness—almost to the point that being killed would be worth it.” And Sergeant Lawrence Gold-thorpe, a glider pilot, was so worn out that “I sometimes wished I could get wounded in order to lie down and get some rest.” But there was no rest for anyone.

  All about the perimeter—from the white Dreyeroord Hotel (known to the troops as the “White House”) in the northern extremity of the fingertip-shaped salient, down to the tenth-century church in lower Oosterbeek—men fought a fiercely confused kind of battle in which the equipment and forces of defender and attacker were crazily intermingled. British troopers often found themselves using captured German ammunition and weapons. German tanks were being destroyed by their own mines. The Germans were driving British jeeps and were bolstered by the captured supplies intended for the airborne. “It was the cheapest battle we ever fought,” Colonel Harzer, the Hohenstaufen commander, recalls. “We had free food, cigarettes and ammunition.” Both sides captured and recaptured each other’s positions so often that few men knew with certainty from hour to hour who occupied the site next to them. For the Dutch sheltering in cellars along the perimeter, the constant switching was terrifying.

  Jan Voskuil, the chemical engineer, moved his entire family—his parents-in-law, his wife, Bertha, and their nine-year-old son, Henri—to the home of Dr. Onderwater, because the doctor’s reinforced sand-bagged cellar seemed safer. At the height of one period of incessant shooting, a British antitank team fought from the floor above them. Minutes later the cellar door burst open and an SS officer, accompanied by several of his men, demanded to know if the group was hiding any British. Young Henri was playing with a shell case from a British fighter’s wing gun. The German officer held up the casing. “This is from a British gun,” he shouted. “Everyone upstairs!” Voskuil was quite sure that the cellar’s occupants would all be shot. Quickly he intervened. “Look,” he told the officer, “this is a shell from an English plane. My son found it and has simply been playing with it.” Abruptly the German motioned to his men and the group moved to the upper floor, leaving the Dutch unharmed. Some time later, the cellar door burst open again. To everyone’s relief, British paratroopers entered, looking, Voskuil thought, “unearthly, with their camouflage jackets and helmets still sprouting twigs. Like St. Nicholas they handed around chocolates and cigarettes which they had just captured from a German supply truck.”

  Private Alfred Jones, of Major Boy Wilson’s pathfinders, was also caught up in the confusion of battle. Holding positions in a house at the crossroads near the Schoonoord Hotel, Jones and other members of a platoon saw a German staff car approach. The bewildered troopers stared as the car pulled up at the house next to them. “We watched openmouthed,” Jones remembers, “as the driver opened the door for the officer and gave the Hitler salute and the officer made for the house.” Then, Jones recalls, “we all woke up, the platoon opened fire, and we got them both.”

  Some brushes with the enemy were less impersonal. Leading a fighting patrol through dense undergrowth on the northern shoulder of the perimeter near the Dennenkamp crossroads, Lieutenant Michael Long of the Glider Pilot Regiment came face to face with a young German. He was carrying a Schmeisser submachine gun; Long had a revolver. Yelling to his men to scatter, the lieutenant opened fire, but the German was faster “by a split second.” Long was hit in the thigh and fell to the ground; the German was “only nicked in the right ear.” To Long’s horror the German tossed a grenade “which landed about eighteen inches from me.” Frantically Long kicked the “potato masher” away. It exploded harmlessly. “He searched me,” Long remembers, “took two grenades from my pockets and threw them into the woods after my men. Then he calmly sat on my chest and opened fire with the Schmeisser.” As the German sprayed the undergrowth, the hot shell cases dropped down into the open neck of Long’s battle dress. Irate, Long nudged the German and, pointing at the shell cases, yelled, “Sehr warm.” Still firing, the German said, “Oh, ja!” and shifted his position so that the spent ammunition fell on the ground. After a few moments the German ceased firing and again searched Long. He was about to throw away the lieutenant’s first-aid kit, when Long pointed to his thigh. The German pointed to his ear which Long’s bullet had grazed. In the undergrowth, with firing going on all around them, the two men bandaged each other’s wounds. Then Long was led away into captivity.

  Slowly but surely the perimeter was being squeezed as men were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Staff Sergeant George Baylis, the glider pilot who had brought his dancing pumps to Holland because he believed the Dutch loved to dance, was “winkled out” of a camouflaged slit trench in a garden by German soldiers. Lined up against a wall, Baylis was searched and interrogated. Ignoring his questioner, Baylis calmly took out a hand mirror and examining his grimy, unshaven face, asked the German, “You don’t happen to know if there’s a dance in town tonight, do you?” He was marched off.

  Other paratroopers actually did hear dance music. From German loudspeakers came one of World War II’s popular songs, Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” In trenches and fortified positions, haggard troopers listened sile
ntly. As the record ended, a voice speaking English told them, “Men of the First Airborne Division, you are surrounded. Surrender or die!” Sergeant Leonard Overton of the Glider Pilot Regiment “fully expected now not to leave Holland alive anyway.” Overton and everyone nearby answered with machine-gun fire. Sergeant Lawrence Goldthorpe heard the loudspeaker, too. A few hours earlier he had risked his life to retrieve a resupply pannier—only to discover that it contained, not food or ammunition, but red berets. Now, when he heard the call to “Give yourselves up, while you still have time,” he yelled: “Bugger off, you silly bastards!” As he lifted his rifle he heard other men in woods and trenches take up the cry. There was a blaze of machine-gun and rifle fire as enraged troopers trained their guns in the direction of the loudspeaker. Abruptly the voice stopped.

  To the Germans, surrender seemed the only sensible course left to the British—as Major Richard Stewart of the 1st Airlanding Brigade discovered. Stewart, captured and found to speak German fluently, was taken to a large headquarters. He remembers the commanding officer vividly. General Bittrich “was a tall, slender man, probably in his early or middle forties, wearing a long black leather coat and cap,” Stewart recalls. Bittrich did not interrogate him. “He simply told me that he wanted me to go to my division commander and persuade him to surrender to save the division from annihilation.” Stewart politely refused. The General went into “a long dissertation. He told me it was in my power to save the ‘flowering manhood of the nation.’ ” Again, Stewart said, “I cannot do it.” Bittrich urged him once more. Stewart asked, “Sir, if our places were reversed, what would your answer be?” The German commander slowly shook his head. “My answer would be No.” Stewart said, “That’s mine too.”

  Although Bittrich “had never seen men fight as hard as the British at Oosterbeek and Arnhem,” he continued to underestimate the determination of Urquhart’s troopers, and he wrongly interpreted the Polish drop at Driel. While he considered the arrival of the Poles “a morale booster” for the embattled 1st British Airborne, Bittrich believed Sosabowski’s principal task was to attack the German rear and prevent Harmel’s Frundsberg Division, now using the Arnhem bridge, from reaching the Nijmegen area. He considered the Polish threat so serious that he “intervened in the operations against Oosterbeek” and ordered Major Hans Peter Knaust to rush his armored battalion south. The powerful Knaust Kampfgruppe, now reinforced with twenty-five 60-ton Tiger tanks and twenty Panthers, was to defend Elst and prevent the Poles from reaching the southern end of the Arnhem bridge and Horrocks’ tanks from linking up with them. Harmel’s Frundsberg Division, after it reformed, was ordered “to throw the Anglo-Americans in the Nijmegen area back across the Waal.” To Bittrich, the British drive from Nijmegen was of utmost importance. Urquhart’s division, Bittrich believed, was contained and finished. He had never considered that the Poles’ objective was to reinforce Urquhart’s bridgehead. Nevertheless, Bittrich’s strategy—developed for the wrong reasons—would seal the fate of the 1st Airborne Division.

  Early in the morning of Friday, September 22, as the last of Knaust’s tanks arrived at Elst, General Urquhart heard from Horrocks, the XXX Corps commander. In two Phantom messages sent during the night Urquhart had informed British Second Army headquarters that the ferry was no longer held. Horrocks apparently had not been informed. The Corps commander’s message read: “43rd Division ordered to take all risks to effect relief today and are directed on ferry. If situation warrants you should withdraw to or cross ferry.” Urquhart replied, “We shall be glad to see you.”

  In the wine cellar of the wrecked Hartenstein Hotel—“the only place remaining that was relatively safe,” Urquhart recalls—the General conferred with his chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie. “The last thing we wanted to be was alarmist,” Urquhart remembers, “but I felt I had to do something to effect relief—and effect it immediately.”

  Outside, the “morning hate,” as the troopers called the usual dawn mortaring, had begun. The shattered Hartenstein shook and reverberated from the concussion of near hits, and the harried Urquhart wondered how long they could hold. Of the 10,005 airborne troops—8,905 from the division and 1,100 glider pilots and copilots—that had landed on the Arnhem drop zones, Urquhart now estimated that he had fewer than 3,000 men. In slightly less than five days he had lost more than two thirds of his division. Although he now had communication with Horrocks and Browning, Urquhart did not believe they understood what was happening. “I was convinced,” Urquhart says, “that Horrocks was not fully aware of our predicament, and I had to do something to acquaint them with the urgency and desperateness of the situation.” He decided to send Colonel Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, the chief engineer, “who would handle the special arrangements for ferrying across men and supplies,” to Nijmegen to see Browning and Horrocks. “I was told,” Mackenzie says, “that it was absolutely vital to impress Horrocks and Browning with the fact that the division as such had ceased to exist-that we were merely a collection of individuals hanging on.” The limit of endurance had been reached, Urquhart believed, and Mackenzie was to impress on them “that if we don’t get men and supplies over by tonight, it may be too late.”

  Urquhart stood by as Mackenzie and Myers prepared to leave. He knew that the trip would be dangerous, perhaps impossible, yet it seemed reasonable to assume—if Horrocks’ messages were to be believed and the 43rd Wessex attack was launched on schedule—that some kind of route would be open to Nijmegen by the time Mackenzie and Myers crossed the river. As the men left Urquhart had “one final word for Charles. I told him to try and make them realize what a fix we were in. Charles said he would do his best, and I knew he would.” Taking a rubber boat, Myers and Mackenzie set out by jeep for lower Oosterbeek and the Rhine.

  Ten miles away, in the Nijmegen area north of the Waal, twenty-six-year-old Captain Lord Richard Wrottesley, commanding a troop of the 2nd Household Cavalry, sat in an armored car ready to give the command to move out. During the night his reconnaissance unit had been ordered to lead the squadron ahead of the attacking 43rd Wessex Division and make contact with the airborne forces. Since the day before, when the Irish Guards had been stopped, Wrottesley had been “fully aware of the German strength north of Nijmegen.” No news had been received from either the Poles at Driel or the 1st Airborne, “so somebody had to find out what was happening.” The squadron’s role, young Wrottesley remembers, was to “find a way past the enemy defenses by bashing through.” By avoiding the main Nijmegen-Arnhem highway and traveling the gridiron of secondary roads to the west, Wrottesley believed, there was a good chance of sprinting through the enemy defenses under cover of an early morning mist “which could contribute to our luck.” At first light Wrottesley gave the order to move out. Quickly his two armored cars and two scout cars disappeared into the fog. Following behind him came a second troop under Lieutenant Arthur Young. Traveling fast, the force swung west of the village of Oosterhout, following the Waal riverbank for about six miles. Then, looping back, they headed due north for Driel. “At one point we saw several Germans,” Wrottesley remembers, “but they seemed to be more startled than we were.” Two and a half hours later, at 8 A.M., Friday, September 22, the first link between the Market-Garden ground forces and the 1st British Airborne was made. The forty-eight hours that Montgomery had envisioned before the link-up had been stretched out to four days and eighteen hours. Wrottesley and Lieutenant Young, surpassing the attempt of the Guards Armored tanks on Thursday, had reached Driel and the Rhine without firing a shot.

  Lieutenant H. S. Hopkinson’s third troop, coming up behind them, ran into trouble. The morning mist suddenly lifted and as the unit was sighted, enemy armor opened up. “Driver Read in the first car was immediately killed,” Hopkinson says. “I went forward to help, but the scout car was blazing and enemy tanks continued to fire on us. We were forced to retire.” For the moment, the Germans once more had closed off a relief route to Urquhart’s 1st Airborne Division.
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  The strange, crippling paralysis that had steadily invaded the Market-Garden plan from its very beginning was intensifying. At dawn on Friday, September 22, General Thomas’ long-awaited 43rd Wessex Division was to break out from Nijmegen to aid the Guards Armored column still stalled at Elst. The plan called for one brigade—the 129th—to advance along each side of the elevated highway, through Elst and on to Arnhem; simultaneously, a second brigade, the 214th, was to attack farther west through the town of Oosterhout and strike for Driel and the ferry site. Incredibly, it had taken the Wessexes almost three days to travel from the Escaut Canal—a distance of a little more than sixty miles. In part this was due to the constant enemy attacks against the corridor; but some would later charge that it was also due to the excessive cautiousness of the methodical Thomas. His division might have covered the distance more quickly on foot.*

  Now, mishap overtook the 43rd Wessex again. To the bitter disappointment of General Essame, commander of the 214th Brigade, one of his lead battalions, the 7th Somersets, had lost its way and had failed to cross the Waal during the night of the twenty-first. “Where the hell have you been?” Essame heatedly demanded of its commander when the force finally arrived. The Somersets had been held up by crowds and roadblocks in Nijme-gen; several companies were separated in the confusion and directed over the wrong bridge. Essame’s plan to take advantage of the dawn mist and drive toward Driel was lost. The two-pronged attack did not jump off until 8:30 A.M. In full light the enemy, alerted by the Household Cavalry’s reconnaissance unit, was prepared. By 9:30 a resourceful German commander at Oosterhout, skillfully using tanks and artillery, had successfully pinned down the 214th Brigade; and the 129th, heading toward Elst and trying to support Colonel Vandeleur’s Irish Guards, came under fire from Major Knaust’s massed tanks, which General Bittrich had ordered south to crush the Anglo-American drive. On this critical Friday, when, in Urquhart’s opinion, the fate of the British 1st Airborne was dependent on immediate relief, it would be late afternoon before the 43rd Wessex would capture Oosterhout—too late to move troops in mass to help the surrounded men in Oosterbeek.