Bridge Too Far (41 page)

As he neared the ground the stutter of machine guns and the dull thud of mortar bursts seemed to engulf him.  He hit ground, careful to roll onto his right shoulder to protect Myrtle, and quickly shucked off his harness.  Nearby, Glover’s batman, Private Joe Scott, had just set down.  Glover handed him Myrtle’s bag.  “Take good care of her,” he told Scott.  Through the haze covering the field, Glover spotted yellow smoke which marked the rendezvous point.  “Let’s go,” he yelled to Scott.  Weaving and crouching, the two men started out.  Everywhere Glover looked there was utter confusion.  His heart sank.  It was obvious that the situation was going badly.

As Major J. L. Waddy came down, he too heard the ominous sound of machine-gun fire that seemed to be flaying the area on all sides.  “I couldn’t understand it,” he recalls.  “We had been given the impression that the Germans were in flight, that there was disorder in their ranks.”  Swinging down in his parachute, Waddy found that the drop zone was almost obscured by smoke from raging fires.  At the southern end of the field where he landed, Waddy set out for the battalion’s rendezvous area.  “Mortars were bursting everywhere, and I saw countless casualties as I went along.”  When he neared the assembly point, Waddy was confronted by an irate captain from Battalion headquarters who had jumped into Holland the previous day.  “You’re bloody late,” Waddy recalls the man shouting.  “Do you realize we’ve been waiting here for four hours?”  Agitatedly, the officer immediately began to brief Waddy.  “I was shocked as I listened,” Waddy remembers.  “It was the first news we had that things weren’t going as well as had been planned.  We immediately got organized, and as I looked around, it seemed to me that the whole sky up ahead was a mass of flames.”

On both landing zones west of the Wolfheze railway station—at Ginkel

Heath and Reyers-Camp—paratroopers and glider-borne infantrymen were

dropping into what appeared to be a raging battle.  From the captured

Market-Garden documents the Germans had known the location of the

landing areas.  And through enemy radar installations in the

still-occupied Channel

ports such as Dunkirk, they, unlike the British on the ground, could calculate with accuracy the time the second lift was due to arrive.  SS units and antiaircraft, hurriedly disengaged in Arnhem, were rushed to the zones.  Twenty Luftwaffe fighters, vectored in, continuously strafed the sectors.  Ground fighting was equally intense.  To clear parts of the heath of the encroaching enemy, the British, as they had during the night and early morning, charged with fixed bayonets.

Mortar bursts, hitting gliders that had landed the day before, turned them into flaming masses that in turn ignited the heath.  Infiltrating enemy units used some gliders as cover for their attacks and the British set the machines on fire themselves, rather than let them fall into enemy hands.  Nearly fifty gliders blazed in a vast inferno on one section of the field.  Yet Brigadier Pip Hicks’s Airlanding Brigade—minus the half battalion that had been sent into Arnhem—was managing with dogged courage to hold the zones.  The paratroop and glider landings, bringing in 2,119 men, were far more successful than the men in the air or on the ground could believe.  Even with the battle underway, 90 percent of the lift was landing—and in the right places.

Flight Sergeant Ronald Bedford, a rear gunner in a four-engined

Stirling, found Monday’s mission far different from the one he had

flown on Sunday.  Then, the nineteen-year-old Bedford had been frankly

bored with the routineness of the flight.  Now, as they neared the

landing zone, firing was continuous and intense.  Spotting an

antiaircraft battery mounted on a truck at the edge of the field,

Bedford tried desperately to turn his guns on it.  He could see his

tracers curving down, and then the battery stopped firing.  Bedford was

exuberant.  “I got him!”  he shouted.  “Listen, I got him!”  As the

Stirling held steady on its course, Bedford noticed that gliders all

around seemed to be breaking away from their tugs prematurely.  He

could only assume that the heavy fire had caused many glider pilots to

release and try to get down as fast as possible.  Then he saw the tow

rope attached to their own Horsa falling away.  Watching the glider

swoop down, Bedford was sure it would collide with others before it

could land.  “The

entire scene was chaotic,” he recalls.  “The gliders seemed to be going into very steep dives, leveling off, and coasting down, often, it looked, right into each other.  I wondered how any of them would make it.”

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.  * * The story is probably apocryphal but the Dutch like to tell it.  According to Mrs.  Ter Horst of Oosterbeek, when the British troopers and their equipment, including an antitank gun, boarded the Driel ferry, Pieter was faced with a dilemma: whether or not to charge them for the trip.  By the time they reached the northern bank, Pieter had decided to give them the ride free.

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.  * * Although numerous witnesses confirm the story, I have withheld the officer’s name.  There is still doubt that he shot himself.  He was both popular and brave.  He may, indeed, have used his pistol, or he may have been killed by a sniper.

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, Mackenzie—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.