Bridge Too Far (28 page)

Fourteen minutes after the 82nd’s field artillery landed, Waco gliders carrying an airborne antitank battalion, engineers, elements of Division headquarters, guns, ammunition, trailers and jeeps began to come in.  Of the original fifty gliders leaving England, all but four reached Holland.  Not all, however, touched down on their landing zone.

Some gliders ended up a mile or two away.  One, copiloted by Captain

Anthony Jedrziewski, cut loose late from its tug and Jedrziewski saw

with horror that “we were

heading straight for Germany on a one-glider invasion.”  The pilot made a 180-degree turn and began to look for a place to land.  As they came in, Jedrziewski remembers, “we lost one wing on a haystack, the other on a fence and ended up with the glider nose in the ground.  Seeing earth up to my knees, I wasn’t sure if my feet were still a part of me.  Then, we heard the unwelcome sound of an 88 and, in nothing flat, we had the jeep out and were racing back toward our own area.”

They were luckier than Captain John Connelly, whose pilot was killed during the approach.  Connelly, who had never flown a glider before, took the controls and landed the Waco just inside the German border, six to seven miles away, near the town of Wyler.  Only Connelly and one other man escaped capture.  They were to hide out until darkness and finally reached their units by midmorning of September 18.

Yet, in all, the 82nd Airborne had successfully brought in 7,467 paratroopers and glider-borne men.  The last elements to touch down in the area were 35 Horsas and Wacos carrying General Frederick Browning’s Corps headquarters.  Three gliders had been lost en route to the drop zone, two before reaching the Continent; the third, south of Vught, had crash-landed in the vicinity of General Student’s headquarters.  Browning’s headquarters landed almost on the German frontier.  “There was little flak, if any, and almost no enemy opposition,” Browning’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers.  “We set down about a hundred yards west of the Reichswald Forest and my glider was roughly fifty yards away from Browning’s.”

Colonel George S. Chatterton, commanding the Glider Pilot Regiment, was at the controls of Browning’s Horsa.  After clipping off a front wheel on an electric cable, Chatterton slid into a cabbage patch.  “We got out,” Chatterton recalls, “and Browning, looking around, said, “By God, we’re here, George!”” Nearby, Brigadier Walch saw Browning run across the landing zone toward the Reichswald.  When he returned a few minutes later, he explained to Walch, “I wanted to be the first British officer to pee in Germany.”

While Browning’s jeep was being unloaded, a few German shells exploded nearby.  Colonel Chatterton promptly threw himself into the closest ditch.  “I shall never forget Browning standing above me, looking like some sort of explorer, and asking, “George, whatever in the world are you doing down there?”’” Chatterton was frank.  “I’m bloody well hiding, sir,” he said.  “Well, you can bloody well stop hiding,” Browning told him.  “It’s time we were going.”  From a pocket in his tunic, Browning took out a parcel wrapped in tissue paper.  Handing it to Chatterton, he said, “Put it on my jeep.”  Chatterton unfolded the tissue and saw that it contained a pennant bearing a light-blue Pegasus against a maroon background, the insignia of the British Airborne.  * With the pennant fluttering from the jeep’s fender, the commander of the Market forces drove away.  * Some accounts have stated that Browning’s pennant was made by his wife, the novelist Daphne du Maurier.  “I am sorry,” she writes, histo disappoint the myth-makers … but anyone who has seen my attempts to thread a needle would know this was beyond me.  It is a delightful thought, however, and would have greatly amused my husband.”  Actually, the pennant was made by Hobson and Sons Ltd., London, under the supervision of Miss Claire Miller, who also, at Browning’s direction, hand-sewed tiny compasses into 500 shirt collars and belts just prior to Market-Garden.

At Renkum Heath west of Arnhem, Lieutenant Neville Hay, the highly trained specialist in charge of the fact-gathering liaison unit “Phantom,” was totally baffled.  His team of experts had assembled their radio set with its special antenna and expected immediate contact with General Browning’s Corps headquarters.  Hay’s first priority on landing was to get through to Corps and give his position.  Earlier, he had learned that Division communications had broken down.  While he might have anticipated that problems would arise among the less experienced Royal Signal Corps operators, he was not prepared to believe that the difficulties he was having stemmed from his own men.

“We were set up on the landing zone and, although it was screened by

pine woods, we had got through in considerably worse country than

this,” he remembers.  “We kept trying and getting absolutely nothing.” Until he could discover where the trouble lay, there was no way of informing General Browning of the progress of General Urquhart’s division or of relaying Browning’s orders to the British 1/ Airborne.  Ironically, the Dutch telephone system was in full operation, including a special network owned and operated by the PGEM power station authorities at Nijmegen and connected with the entire province.  Had he known, all Hay had to do, with the aid of the Dutch resistance, was to pick up a telephone.

Fifteen miles away there was already anxiety at General Browning’s headquarters, now set up on the edge of the Groesbeek ridge.  Both of the 82nd Airborne’s large communication sets had been damaged on landing.  Browning’s had come through safely, and one of these was allocated to the 82nd, insuring immediate communication with General Gavin.  The Corps communications section had also made radio contact with General Dempsey’s British 2nd Army and Airborne Corps rear headquarters in England and Browning had radio contact with the 101/.  But the signal section was unable to raise Urquhart’s division.  Brigadier Walch believes that Corps signals was to blame.  “Before the operation was planned, we asked for a proper headquarters signals section,” he says.  “We were frightfully cognizant that our sets were inadequate and our headquarters signals staff weak and inexperienced.” While Browning could direct and influence the movements of the 82nd, the 101/ and Horrocks’ XXX Corps, at this vital junction the all-important battle at Arnhem was beyond his control.  As Walch says, “We had absolutely no idea what was happening in Arnhem.”

A kind of creeping paralysis was already beginning to affect

Montgomery’s plan.  But at this early stage no one knew it.  Throughout

the entire Market-Garden area, some 20,000 Allied soldiers were in

Holland, heading out to secure the bridges and

hold open the corridor for the massive Garden units whose lead tanks were expected to link up with 101/ paratroopers by nightfall.

From the flat roof of a large factory near the Meuse-Escaut Canal, General Brian Horrocks, commander of the British XXX Corps, watched the last of the huge airborne glider formations pass over his waiting tanks.  He had been on the roof since 11 A.m., and as he put it, “I had plenty of time to think.”  The sight of the vast armada was “comforting, but I was under no illusion that this was going to be an easy battle,” Horrocks remembers.  Meticulously, he had covered every possible contingency, even to ordering his men to take as much food, gas and ammunition as they could carry, “since we were likely to be out in the blue on our own.”  There was one worry the General could not eliminate, but he had not discussed it with anyone—he did not like a Sunday attack.  “No assault or attack in which I had taken part during the war which started on a Sunday had ever been completely successful.” Bringing up his binoculars, he studied the white ribbon of road stretching away north toward Valkenswaard and Eindhoven.  Satisfied that the airborne assault had now begun, Horrocks gave the order for the Garden forces to attack.  At precisely 2:15 P.m., with a thunderous roar, some 350 guns opened fire.

The bombardment was devastating.  Ton after ton of explosives flayed

the enemy positions up ahead.  The hurricane of fire, ranging five

miles in depth and concentrated over a one-mile front, caused the earth

to shake beneath the tanks of the Irish

Guards as they lumbered up to the start line.  Behind the lead squadrons, hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles began to move slowly out of their parking positions, ready to fall into line as the first tanks moved off.  And up above, a “cab rank” of rocket-firing Typhoon fighters circled endlessly, waiting on call for the commander of the Irish Guards Group, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur, to direct them to targets up ahead.  At 2:35 P.m., standing in the turret of the lead tank of No.  3 Squadron, Lieutenant Keith Heathcote shouted into his microphone, “Driver, advance!”

Slowly the tanks rumbled out of the bridgehead and moved up the road at eight miles an hour.  Now, the curtain of artillery fire lifted to creep ahead of the armor at exactly the same speed.  Tankers could see shells bursting barely one hundred yards in front of them.  As the squadrons moved forward, engulfed in the dust of the barrage, men could not tell at times whether the tanks were safely back of their own fire.

Behind the lead squadrons came the scout cars of Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur and his cousin Giles.  Standing in his car, Vandeleur could see, both in front of and behind him, infantry riding on the tanks, each tank marked with yellow streamers to identify it to the Typhoons above.  “The din was unimaginable,” Vandeleur remembers, “but everything was going according to plan.”  By now, the lead tanks had burst out of the bridgehead and were across the Dutch frontier.  Captain “Mick” O’Cock, commanding No.  3 Squadron, radioed back, “Advance going well.  Leading squadron has got through.”  Then, in seconds, the picture changed.  As Vandeleur recalls, “The Germans really began to paste us.”

Ensconced in well-hidden, fortified positions on both sides of the

road, German gunners had not only survived the tremendous barrage but

had waited until it passed over them.  Holding their fire, the Germans

let the first few tanks go through.  Then, within two minutes three

tanks of the lead squadron and six of the next were knocked out of

action.  Burning and disabled, they littered a half mile of road.  “We

had just crossed the border when we were

ambushed,” Lieutenant Cyril Russell recalls.  “Suddenly the tanks in front either slewed across the road or burned where they stood.  The awful realization dawned on me that the next one to go was the one I was sitting on.  We jumped into the ditches by the roadside.”  As Russell went forward to see how the remainder of his platoon was faring, a machine gun opened up; he was hit in the arm and fell back into the ditch.  For Russell, the war was over.

Lance Corporal James Doggart’s tank was hit.  “I don’t remember seeing or hearing the explosion,” he says.  “I was suddenly flat on my back in a ditch with the tank leaning over me.  I had a Bren gun across my chest and next to me was a young lad with his arm nearly severed.  Nearby, another of our men was dead.  The tank was on fire and I don’t recall seeing any of the crew get out.”

Lieutenant Barry Quinan, in the last tank of the lead squadron, remembers that his Sherman swung left into a ditch, and Quinan thought the driver was trying to bypass the burning tanks ahead.  But the tank had been hit by a shell which killed both the driver and codriver.  The Sherman began to burn and Quinan’s gunner, “trying to scramble out of the hatch, half lifted me out of the turret before I realized we were “brewing up.”” As the two men climbed out of the tank, Quinan saw others coming up behind.  One after the other, the tanks were hit.  “I actually saw the commander of one tank trying to shield his face from a sheet of flame that engulfed the entire machine.”

The breakout had been stopped before it had really begun and nine disabled tanks now blocked the road.  Squadrons coming up could not advance.  Even if they could bypass the burning hulks, hidden German gunners would pick them off.  To get the advance rolling again, Vandeleur called in the rocket-firing Typhoons and, aided by purple smoke shells fired from the tanks to indicate suspected German positions, the fighters screamed down.  “It was the first time I had ever seen Typhoons in action,” Vandeleur recalls, “and I was amazed at the guts of those pilots.  They came in, one at a time, head to tail, flying right through our own barrage.  One disintegrated right above me.  It was incredible—

guns firing, the roar of planes, the shouts and curses of the men.  In the middle of it all, Division asked how the battle was going.  My second in command just held up the microphone and said, “Listen.””

As the planes swooped down on their targets, Vandeleur sent forward an armored bulldozer to push the burning tanks off the road.  The bedlam of the battle now raged over several miles of highway, stretching back as far as Vandeleur’s own car and the R.a.f. communications tender, which called the Typhoons down on demand.  Flight Lieutenant Donald Love, the fighter reconnaissance pilot attached to the communications unit, was now convinced that he should never have volunteered for the job.  While Squadron Leader Max Sutherland directed the Typhoons, Love got out to see what was happening.  Black smoke billowed up from the road ahead and an antitank gun carrier, almost in front of the communications tender, was afire.  As Love watched, a Bren gun carrier came back along the road carrying wounded.  One man’s shoulder was blown off, and his clothes were burned and charred.  “I was sure we were surrounded,” says Love.  “I was horrified and I kept wondering why hadn’t I stayed with the Air Force, where I belonged.”

The waiting tankers farther back in the halted columns felt, as Captain Roland Langton describes it, “a strange sense of powerlessness.  We could go neither forward nor backward.”  Langton watched infantry moving up to clean out the woods on either side of the road with two Bren gun carriers out in front.  Langton thought the soldiers might be an advance party of the 43rd Infantry Division.  “Suddenly I saw both carriers catapulted into the air,” Langton remembers.  “They had run over enemy land mines.”  When the smoke cleared, Langton saw “bodies in the trees.  I don’t know how many, it was impossible to tell.  There were pieces of men hanging from every limb.”