Bridge Too Far (50 page)

Covered by British smoke bombs Meddaugh succeeded in bringing the rest

of the company forward, and the commander,

Lieutenant J. J. Smith, consolidated his men in houses around Coyle.  As Meddaugh recalls, “Coyle’s platoon now had a perfect view of the enemy, but as we started to move tanks up, some high-velocity guns opened up that had not done any firing as yet.  Two tanks were knocked out, and the others retired.”  As Coyle’s men replied with machine guns, they immediately drew antitank gun fire from across the streets.  When darkness closed in, Euling’s SS men attempted to infiltrate the American positions.  One group got to within a few feet of Coyle’s platoon before they were spotted and a fierce fire fight broke out.  Coyle’s men suffered casualties, and three of the Germans were killed before the attack was driven back.  Later, Euling sent medics to pick up his wounded, and Coyle’s paratroopers waited until the injured Germans were evacuated before resuming the fight.  In the middle of the action, Private First Class John Keller heard a low pounding noise.  Going to a window, he was amazed to see a Dutchman on a stepladder calmly replacing the shingles on the house next door as though nothing was happening.

In late evening, with small-arms fire continuing, any further attempt to advance was postponed until daylight.  The Anglo-American assault had been abruptly stopped barely 400 yards from the Waal river bridge—the last water obstacle on the road to Arnhem.

To the Allied commanders it was now clear that the Germans were in complete control of the bridges.  Browning, worried that the crossings might be destroyed at any moment, called another conference late on the nineteenth.  A way must be found to cross the 400-yard-wide Waal river.  General Gavin had devised a plan which he had mentioned to Browning at the time of the link-up.  Then the Corps commander had turned down the scheme.  At this second conference Gavin proposed it again.  “There’s only one way to take this bridge,” he told the assembled officers.

“We’ve got to get it simultaneously—from both ends.”  Gavin urged that

“any boats in Horrocks’ engineering columns should be rushed forward

immediately, because we’re going to need them.”  The

British looked at him in bewilderment.  What the 82nd commander had in mind was an assault crossing of the river—by paratroops.

Gavin went on to explain.  In nearly three days of fighting, his casualties were high—upwards of 200 dead and nearly 700 injured.  Several hundred more men were cut off or scattered and were listed as missing.  His losses, Gavin reasoned, would grow progressively worse if blunt head-on attacks continued.  What was needed was a means of capturing the bridge quickly and cheaply.  Gavin’s plan was to throw a force in boats across the river a mile downstream while the attack continued for possession of the southern approaches.  Under a barrage of tank fire the troopers were to storm the enemy defenses on the northern side before the Germans fully realized what was happening.

Yet total surprise was out of the question.  The river was too wide to enable boatloads of men to escape detection, and the bank on the far side was so exposed that troopers, once across the river, would have to negotiate 200 yards of flat ground.  Beyond was an embankment from which German gunners could fire down upon the invading paratroopers.  That defense position would have to be overrun too.  Although heavy casualties could be expected initially, in Gavin’s opinion they would still be less than if the assault were continued against the southern approaches alone.  “The attempt has to be made,” he told Browning, “if Market-Garden is to succeed.”

Colonel George S. Chatterton, commander of the British Glider Pilot Regiment, remembers that, besides Browning and Horrocks, commanders of the Irish, Scots, and Grenadier Guards were present at the conference.  So was cigar-chewing Colonel Reuben Tucker, commander of the 82nd’s 504th Regiment, whose men Gavin had picked to make the river assault if his plan won approval.  Although intent on Gavin’s words, Chatterton could not help noting the differences in the men assembled.  “One brigadier wore suede shoes and sat on a shooting stick,” he recalls.

“Three Guards’ commanders had on rather worn corduroy trousers, chukka

boots and old school scarves.”  Chatterton thought “they

seemed relaxed, as though they were discussing an exercise, and I couldn’t help contrast them to the Americans present, especially Colonel Tucker, who was wearing a helmet that almost covered his face.  His pistol was in a holster under his left arm, and he had a knife strapped to his thigh.”  To Chatterton’s great amusement, “Tucker occasionally removed his cigar long enough to spit and every time he did faint looks of surprise flickered over the faces of the Guards’ officers.”

But the daring of Gavin’s plan provided the real surprise.  “I knew it sounded outlandish,” Gavin recalls, “but speed was essential.  There was no time even for a reconnaissance.  As I continued to talk, Tucker was the only man in the room who seemed unfazed.  He had made the landing at Anzio and knew what to expect.  To him the crossing was like the kind of exercise the 504th had practiced at Fort Bragg.”  Still, for paratroopers, it was unorthodox and Browning’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, recalls that the Corps commander was “by now filled with admiration at the daring of the idea.”  This time Browning gave his approval.

The immediate problem was to find boats.  Checking with his engineers, Horrocks learned they carried some twenty-eight small canvas and plywood craft.  These would be rushed to Nijmegen during the night.  If the planning could be completed in time, Gavin’s miniature Normandy-like amphibious assault of the Waal would take place at 1 P.m.  the next day, on the twentieth.  Never before had paratroopers attempted such a combat operation.  But Gavin’s plan seemed to offer the best hope of grabbing the Nijmegen bridge intact; and then, as everyone still believed, another quick dash up the corridor would unite them with the men at Arnhem.

In the grassy expanse of the Eusebius Buiten Singel, General Heinz

Harmel personally directed the opening of the bombardment against

Frost’s men at the bridge.  His attempt to persuade

Frost to surrender had failed.  Now, to the assembled tank and artillery commanders his instructions were specific: they were to level every building held by the paratroopers.  “Since the British won’t come out of their holes, we’ll blast them out,” Harmel said.  He told gunners to “aim right under the gables and shoot meter by meter, floor by floor, until each house collapses.”  Harmel was determined that the siege would end, and since everything else had failed this was the only course.  “By the time we’re finished,” Harmel added, “there’ll be nothing left but a pile of bricks.”  Lying flat on the ground between two artillery pieces, Harmel trained his binoculars on the British strongholds and directed the fire.  As the opening salvos zeroed in he stood up, satisfied, and handed over to his officers.  “I would have liked to stay,” he recalls.  “It was a new experience in fighting for me.  But with the Anglo-Americans attacking the bridges at Nijmegen I had to rush down there.”  As Harmel left, his gunners, with methodical, scythelike precision, began the job of reducing Frost’s remaining positions to rubble.

Of the eighteen buildings that the 2nd Battalion had initially occupied, Frost’s men now held only about ten.  While tanks hit positions from the east and west, artillery slammed shells into those facing north.  The barrage was merciless.  “It was the best, most effective fire I have ever seen,” remembers SS Grenadier Private Horst Weber.  “Starting from the rooftops, buildings collapsed like doll houses.  I did not see how anyone could live through this inferno.  I felt truly sorry for the British.”

Weber watched three Tiger tanks rumble slowly down the Groote Markt,

and while machine guns sprayed every window in a block of buildings

opposite the northern approaches to the bridge, the tanks “pumped shell

after shell into each house, one after the other.”  He remembers a

corner building where “the roof fell in, the two top stories began to

crumble and then, like the skin peeling off a skeleton, the whole front

wall fell into the street revealing each floor on which the British

were scrambling like mad.”  Dust and debris, Weber remembers, “soon

made it impos-

sible to see anything more.  The din was awful but even so, above it all we could hear the wounded screaming.”

In relays, tanks smashed houses along the Rhine waterfront and under the bridge itself.  Often, as the British darted out, tanks rammed the ruins like bulldozers, completely leveling the sites.  At Captain Mackay’s headquarters under the ramp in the nearly destroyed schoolhouse, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth estimated that “high-explosive shells came through the southern face of the building at the rate of one every ten seconds.”  It became “rather hot,” he recalls, “and everyone had some sort of wound or other.”  Yet the troopers obstinately hung on, evacuating each room in its turn “as ceilings collapsed, cracks appeared in the walls, and rooms became untenable.” In the rubble, making every shot count, the Red Devils, Stainforth recalls proudly, “survived like moles.  Jerry just couldn’t dig us out.”  But elsewhere men were finding their positions almost unendurable.  “The Germans had decided to shell us out of existence,” Private James W. Sims explains.  “It seemed impossible for the shelling and mortaring to get any heavier, but it did.  Burst after burst, shell after shell rained down, the separate explosions merging into one continuous rolling detonation.”  With each salvo Sims repeated a desperate litany, “Hold on!  Hold on!  It can’t last much longer.”  As he crouched alone in his slit trench the thought struck Sims that he was “lying in a freshly dug grave just waiting to be buried alive.”  He remembers thinking that “unless XXX Corps hurries, we have had it.”

Colonel Frost realized that disaster had finally overtaken the 2nd

Battalion.  The relieving battalions had not broken through, and Frost

was sure they were no longer able to come to his aid.  The Polish drop

had failed to materialize.  Ammunition was all but gone.  Casualties

were now so high that every available cellar was full, and the men had

been fighting without letup for over fifty hours.  Frost knew they

could not endure this punishment much longer.  All about his defensive

perimeter, houses were in flames, buildings had collapsed, and

positions were being over-

run.  He did not know how much longer he could hold out.  His beloved 2nd Battalion was being buried in the ruins of the buildings around him.  Yet Frost was not ready to oblige his enemy.  Beyond hope, he was determined to deny the Germans the Arnhem bridge to the last.

He was not alone in his emotions.  Their ordeal seemed to affect his men much as it did Frost.  Troopers shared their ammunition and took what little they could find from their wounded, preparing for the doom that was engulfing them.  There was little evidence of fear.  In their exhaustion, hunger and pain, the men seemed to develop a sense of humor about themselves and their situation which grew even as their sacrifice became increasingly apparent.

Father Egan remembers meeting Frost coming out of a toilet.  “The Colonel’s face—tired, grimy, and wearing a stubble of beard—lit up with a smile,” Egan recalls.  “”Father,” he told me, “the window is shattered, there’s a hole in the wall, and the roof’s gone.  But it has a chain and it works.””

Later, Egan was trying to make his way across one street to visit wounded in the cellars.  The area was being heavily mortared and the chaplain was taking cover wherever he could.  “Outside, strolling unconcernedly up the street was Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose company had taken the bridge initially,” he recalls.  “The major saw me cowering down and walked over.  In his hand was an umbrella.”  As Egan recalls, Tatham-Warter “opened the umbrella and held it over my head.  With mortar shells raining down everywhere, he said, “Come along, Padre.”” When Egan showed reluctance, Tatham-Warter reassured him.  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve got an umbrella.”  Lieutenant Patrick Barnett encountered the redoubtable major soon afterward.  Barnett was sprinting across the street to a new defense area Frost had ordered him to hold.  Tatham-Warter, returning from escorting Father Egan, was out visiting his men in the shrinking perimeter defenses and holding the umbrella over his head.  Barnett was so surprised that he stopped in his tracks.  “That thing won’t do you much good,” he told the major.

Tatham-Warter looked at him in

mock surprise.  “Oh, my goodness, Pat,” he said.  “What if it rains?”

During the afternoon, as the bombardment continued, Major Freddie Gough saw Tatham-Warter leading his company, umbrella in hand.  Tanks were thundering down the streets firing at everything.  “I almost fainted when I saw those huge Mark IV’S firing at us at almost point-blank range,” recalls Gough.  Then the tension was suddenly relieved.  “There, out in the street leading his men in a bayonet charge against some Germans who had managed to infiltrate, was Tatham-Warter,” Gough recalls.  “He had found an old bowler someplace and he was rushing along, twirling that battered umbrella, looking for all the world like Charlie Chaplin.”

There were other moments of humor equally memorable.  As the afternoon wore on, battalion headquarters was heavily bombarded and caught fire.  Father Egan went down to the cellar to see the wounded.  “Well, Padre,” said Sergeant Jack Spratt, who was regarded as the battalion comic, “they’re throwing everything at us but the kitchen stove.”  He had barely said the words when the building suffered another direct hit.  “The ceiling fell in, showering us with dirt and plaster.  When we picked ourselves up, there right in front of us was a kitchen stove.” Spratt looked at it and shook his head.  “I knew the bastards were close,” he said, “but I didn’t believe they could hear us talking.”

Toward evening it began to rain, and the German attack seemed to intensify.  Captain Mackay, on the opposite side of the bridge, contacted Frost.  “I told the Colonel I could not hold out another night if the attack continued on the same scale,” Mackay wrote.  “He said he could not help me, but I was to hold on at all costs.”