Bridge Too Far (62 page)

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 1/ Airborne Division.

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.  * * Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe, p. 516.

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 Nijmegen; 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 1/ 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.

Like Essame, others were angered by the sluggish progress of the attack.  Lieutenant Colonel George Taylor, commanding the 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, * could not understand “what was holding everything up.”  He knew the Garden forces were already three days behind schedule in reaching the 1/ * The names of the famous British regiments involved always caused confusion for Americans—especially when they were abbreviated.  At First Allied Airborne headquarters a message concerning the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry arrived, reading, “5DECLAREI are to make contact with 1 Airborne Division …” The puzzled duty officer finally decoded the message.  He reported “Five Duck Craft Landing Infantry” were on their way to Urquhart.

Airborne.  He was uncomfortably aware that higher command headquarters was worried, too.  On Thursday he had met General Horrocks, the Corps commander, who had asked him, “George, what would you do?”  Without hesitation, Taylor had suggested rushing a special task force to the Rhine on Thursday night carrying 2-astb-ton amphibious vehicles (Dukw’s) filled with supplies.  “My idea was a shot in the dark,” Taylor recalls.  “Horrocks looked slightly startled and, as people do sometimes when they consider a suggestion impractical, he quickly changed the conversation.”

Taylor now waited impatiently for orders to move his battalion across the Waal river.  It was not until midday Friday that a major, a staff officer from XXX Corps, arrived to tell him that his battalion would be given two DUKW’S loaded with supplies and ammunition to take up to Driel.  Additionally, Taylor would have a squadron of tanks of the Dragoon Guards.  “The situation at Arnhem is desperate,” the major said.  “The DUKW’S must be moved across the river tonight.”  Looking at the heavily laden DUKW’S that arrived in the assembly area at 3:00 P.m.  on Friday afternoon, Taylor wondered if they carried enough supplies.  “Surely,” he remarked to his intelligence officer, Lieutenant David Wilcox, “we’ve got to get more than this across to them.”

Even as the infantry was moving out of the Nijmegen bridgehead, Colonel Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers had reached Sosabowski and the Poles at Driel.  Their crossing of the Rhine had been surprisingly uneventful.  “Only a few shots were fired at us,” Mackenzie says, “and they went over our heads.”  On the southern side a full-scale battle was in progress and the Poles were hard pressed, holding off enemy infantry attacks from the direction of Elst and Arnhem.  For some time Mackenzie and Myers had waited on the Rhine’s southern bank for the Poles.  “They had been told by radio to watch out for us,” Mackenzie says.  “But there was quite a battle going on, and Sosabowski had his hands full.”  Finally, riding bicycles, they were escorted to Sosabowski’s headquarters.

Mackenzie was heartened to discover the Household Cavalry units.  But

his hopes of reaching General Browning at Nijmegen

quickly were dashed.  To Lord Wrottesley and Lieutenant Arthur Young, the failure of Hopkinson’s third troop of reconnaissance vehicles to reach Driel meant that the Germans had closed in behind them; nor had the attack of the 43rd Wessex yet broken through.  Mackenzie and Myers would have to wait until a route was opened.

Wrottesley recalls that “Mackenzie immediately asked to use my radio to contact Corps headquarters.”  He began to relay a long message via Wrottesley’s squadron commander for Horrocks and Browning.  Urquhart’s chief of staff made no effort to encode his signal.  Standing beside him, Wrottesley heard Mackenzie “in the clear” say, “”We are short of food, ammunition and medical supplies.  We cannot hold out for more than twenty-four hours.  All we can do is wait and pray.”” For the first time Wrottesley realized “that Urquhart’s division must be in a very bad way.”

Mackenzie and Myers then conferred with Sosabowski about the urgency of getting the Poles across.  “Even a few men now can make a difference,” Mackenzie told him.  Sosabowski agreed, but asked where the boats and rafts were to come from.  Hopefully DUKW’S, which had been requested, would arrive by night.  Meanwhile, Myers thought, several two-man rubber dinghies, which the airborne had, could be used.  Linked by hawser they could be pulled back and forth across the river.  Sosabowski was “delighted with the idea.”  It would be painfully slow, he said, but “if unopposed, perhaps two hundred men might be shipped across during the night.”  By radio, Myers quickly contacted the Hartenstein to make arrangements for the dinghies.  The pathetic and desperate operation, it was decided, would begin at nightfall.

In the bridgehead across the river, Urquhart’s men continued to fight with extraordinary courage and resolution.  Yet, at places about the perimeter, even the most resolute were voicing worry about relief.  Here and there a looming sense of isolation was growing, infecting the Dutch as well.

Douw van der Krap, a former Dutch naval officer, had earlier been placed in command of a twenty-five-man Dutch underground unit which was to fight alongside the British.  The group had been organized at the instigation of Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer at Urquhart’s headquarters.  Jan Eijkelhoff, who had helped make ready the Schoonoord Hotel for casualties on Monday, was charged with finding German weapons for the group.  The British could give each man only five rounds of ammunition—if weapons could be found.  Driving as far as Wolfheze, Eijkelhoff found only three or four rifles.  At first the newly appointed commander of the unit, Van der Krap, was elated at the idea, but his hopes dimmed.  His men would be instantly executed if captured while fighting with the paratroopers.  “Without relief and supplies for themselves, it was obvious the British couldn’t last,” Van der Krap recalls.  “They couldn’t arm us and they couldn’t feed us and I decided to disband the group.”  Van der Krap, however, remained with the paratroopers.  “I wanted to fight,” he says, “but I didn’t think we had a chance.”

Young Anje van Maanen, who had been so excited by the paratroopers’ arrival and the daily expectation of seeing “Monty’s tanks,” was now terrified by the continuous shelling and constantly changing battle lines.  “The noise and the hell go on,” she wrote in her diary.  “I can’t bear it any longer.  I’m so scared and I can’t think of anything but shells and death.”  Anje’s father, Dr.  Gerritt van Maanen, working alongside British doctors at the Tafelberg Hotel, brought news to his family whenever he could, but to Anje the battle had assumed unrealistic proportions.  “I don’t understand,” she wrote.  “One side of a street is British, the other German, and people kill each other from both sides.  There are house, floor and room fights.”  On Friday, Anje wrote, “the British say Monty will be here at any moment.  I don’t believe that.  Monty can go to hell!  He will never come.”

In the Schoonoord Hotel, where British and German wounded crowded the

wide veranda and lay in the reception rooms, passageways and bedrooms,

Hendrika van der Vlist could hardly

believe it was Friday.  The hospital was constantly changing hands.  On Wednesday the hotel had been taken by the Germans, on Thursday by the British; and by Friday morning it had been recaptured by the Germans.  Control of the Schoonoord was less important than the need to prevent it being fired on.  A large Red Cross flag flew on the roof, and numerous smaller ones were spotted around the grounds, but the dust and flying debris often obscured the pennants.  Orderlies, nurses and doctors worked on, seemingly oblivious to anything but the constant flow of wounded men.

Hendrika had slept in her clothes for only a few hours each night, getting up to assist doctors and orderlies as fresh casualties were carried in.  Fluent in English and German, she had originally noted a pessimism among the Germans in contrast to the patient cheerfulness of the British.  Now many of the severely wounded Red Devils seemed stoically prepared to accept their fate.  As she brought one trooper the minuscule portion of soup and a biscuit that constituted the only meal the hospital could provide, he pointed to a newly arrived casualty.  “Give it to him,” he told Hendrika.  Pulling down the man’s blanket, she saw he wore a German uniform.  “German, eh?”  the trooper asked.  Hendrika nodded.  “Give him the food anyway,” the Britisher said, “I ate yesterday.”  Hendrika stared at him.  “Why is there a war on, really?”  she asked.  Tiredly, he shook his head.  In her diary she put down her private fears: “Has our village become one of the bloodiest battlefields?  What is holding up the main army?  It cannot go on like this any longer.”

In Dr.  Onderwater’s cellar, where the Voskuil family was sheltering along with some twenty others, both Dutch and British, Mrs.  Vosktiil noticed for the first time that the floor was slippery with blood.  During the night two wounded officers, Major Peter Warr and Lieutenant Colonel Ken Smyth, had been brought in by British troopers.  Both men were seriously wounded, Warr in the thigh and Smyth in the stomach.

Shortly after the injured men were laid on the floor, the Germans burst

in.  One of them threw a grenade.  Lance Corporal George Wyllie of

Colonel Smyth’s 10th Battalion remembers “a flash of light and then a deafening explosion.”  Mrs.  Voskuil, sitting behind Major Warr, felt “red hot pain” in her legs.  In the now-dark cellar she heard someone shouting, “Kill them!  Kill them!”  She felt a man’s body fall heavily across her.  It was Private Albert Willingham, who had apparently jumped in front of Mrs.  Voskuil to protect her.  Corporal Wyllie saw a gaping wound open in Willingham’s back.  He remembers the woman sitting on a chair with a child beside her, the dead paratrooper across her lap.  The child seemed covered with blood.  “My God!”  Wyllie thought as he lost consciousness, “we’ve killed a child.”  Suddenly the fierce battle was over.  Someone shone a torch.  “Do you still live?”  Mrs.  Voskuil called out to her husband.  Then she reached for her son, Henri.  The child did not respond to her cries.  She was sure he was dead.  “Suddenly I didn’t care what happened,” she says.  “It just didn’t matter any more.”

She saw that soldiers and civilians alike were terribly wounded and screaming.  In front of her, Major Warr’s tunic was “bloody and gaping open.”  Everyone was shouting or sobbing.  “Silence,” Mrs.  Voskuil yelled in English.  “Silence!”  The heavy burden across her body was pulled away and then she saw Wyllie nearby.  “The English boy got up, shaking visibly.  He had his rifle butt on the floor and the bayonet, almost level with my eyes, jerked back and forth as he tried to steady himself.  Low animal-like sounds—almost like a dog or a wolf—were coming from him.”

Corporal Wyllie’s head began to clear.  Someone had now lit a candle in the cellar, and a German officer gave him a sip of brandy.  Wyllie noticed the bottle bore a Red Cross insignia, and underneath the words, “His Majesty’s Forces.”  As he was led out Wyllie looked back at the lady “whose child was dead.”  He wanted to say something to her but “couldn’t find the words.”  * * Wyllie never again saw the Voskuils, nor did he know their names.  For years he worried about the woman in the cellar and the child he believed dead.  Today young Henri Voskuil is a doctor.

The German officer asked Mrs.  Voskuil to tell the British “they have

fought gallantly and behaved like gentlemen, but now they must

surrender.  Tell them it is over.”  As the paratroopers were