Bridge Too Far (42 page)

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 11th 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 11th.  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, andwitha 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 mat@eriel 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 But’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 for 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.”

Others knew the difficulty of carrying out Model’s commands.  Lieutenant Colonel Harzer, commander of the Hohenstaufen Division, had run out of men.  All his forces were fully engaged.  No additional reinforcements had arrived, and the size of the second lift posed grave doubts as to the ability of his soldiers to halt and contain the enemy.  Like Bittrich, Harzer was convinced that “the Allies had dropped no more than an airborne spearhead.  I was sure that more would follow and then they would drive for the Reich.”  With limited armor, Harzer did not know whether he could stop the enemy.  He had, however, succeeded in making one place secure—the grounds of his own headquarters.  There, with cynical disregard for the rights of prisoners, he had ordered several hundred British troopers to be held under guard in wire enclosures.  “I was quite sure,” he was to recall, “that the R.a.f.  would not bomb their own troops.”

Harzer, a self-professed Anglophile (“I had a real weakness for the English”), had once studied as an exchange student in Great Britain.  He enjoyed sauntering among the prisoners trying to engage in conversation to practice his English and, hopefully, to elicit information.  He was struck by the British morale.  “They were contemptuous and self-assured, as only veteran soldiers can be,” he recalled.  The caliber of his prisoners convinced Harzer that the battle was far from won.  To keep Urquhart’s forces off balance and to prevent any kind of cohesive attack, he ordered his Hohenstaufen Division on the evening of the eighteenth “to attack unceasingly at whatever cost throughout the night.”

The commander of the Frundsberg Division, General Harmel,

was “too busy to worry about what might happen next.  I had my hands full fighting the Lower Rhine.”  Charged with the capture of the Arnhem bridge and the defense of the Waal crossing and the area in between, Harmel’s problems were far more acute than Harzer’s.  The move of his division by ferry across the river was proceeding at a snail’s pace.  Troops, equipment and tanks were loaded on makeshift rubber or log rafts.  Roads leading down to the water’s edge had become quagmires.  Tanks and vehicles had slid off rafts, and some had even been swept away.  Worse, because of constant strafing by Allied planes, nearly all ferrying and convoying operations had to take place during darkness.  In twenty-four hours Harmel’s engineers had succeeded in moving only two battalions with their vehicles and equipment into the Arnhem-Nijmegen area.  To speed up operations, truck shuttles carrying troops ran back and forth between the south bank landing stage and Nijmegen.  But the movement was far too slow.  To be sure, Harmel’s men were now in the center of Nijmegen and on the southern side of the highway bridge, but he doubted that they could stop a determined attack by the Anglo-Americans.  Although he had been ordered not to destroy it, Harmel was prepared for the eventuality.  His engineers had already laid charges and set up detonating apparatus in a roadside bunker near the village of Lent on the northern bank.  He hoped Bittrich would approve the blowing of the highway and railroad bridges if they could not be held.  But if he did not, Harmel’s decision was already made.  If British tanks broke through and started across, he would defy his superiors and destroy the bridges.

The prosperous village of Oosterbeek seemed infused with a strange mixture of gaiety and uneasiness.  Like an island in the middle of the battle, the village was assaulted by the noise of fighting on three sides.  From the drop zones to the west came the nearly constant thunder of guns.  To the northwest the chattering of machine guns and the steady cough of mortars could be clearly heard in the flower-lined streets, and to the east, two and a half miles away in Arnhem, black smoke hung over the horizon, a somber backdrop to the unceasing timpani of heavy artillery.

The bombing and strafing preceding the troop and glider landings on the previous day had produced casualties among the villagers and some damage to shops and houses, as had infiltrating snipers and ill-directed mortar bursts, but the war had not so far made serious inroads into Oosterbeek.  The neat resort hotels, landscaped villas and tree-lined streets were still largely untouched.  Yet it was becoming obvious with every hour that the fighting was coming closer.  Here and there, concussion from distant explosions splintered panes of glass with startling suddenness.  Charred particles of paper, cloth and wood, carried like confetti by the wind, rained down into the streets, and the air was acrid with the smell of cordite.