Bridge Too Far (64 page)

Brigadier Shan Hackett, who had brought his battered 10th and 156th battalions back to the Oosterbeek area after their brave but futile attempt to break through the German defenses to the north and east and get to Arnhem, visited his men constantly, offering them quiet words of praise.  Major George Powell was commanding two platoons of the 156th in perimeter positions to the north.  “We were short on food, ammunition and water,” Powell remembers, “and we had few medical supplies.”  On Friday Hackett suddenly appeared at Powell’s command post, where, says Powell, “we were literally poking right into the enemy’s lines.”  Hackett explained that he had not had time to visit Powell until now, “but you’ve been holding so well, George, I wasn’t worried about you.”  Powell was pleased.  “The only real mistake I’ve made so far, sir,” he said, “is putting the headquarters in a chicken run.  We’re all alive with fleas.”  To Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson, chief clerk of the 4th Brigade, Hackett earned respect because “he shared with us as though he had no rank.  If we ate, he did, and if we went hungry, so did he.  He didn’t seem to have a mess kit.  On Friday he sat down with us and ate a little piece of food with his fingers.” Pearson went to find a knife and fork.  On the way back he was wounded in the heel; but, he says, “I thought the Brigadier rather deserved something better than the way he was living among us.”

And Signalman Kenneth Pearce, attached to Command Artillery Signals at Division headquarters, will always remember the man who came to his aid.  Pearce was in charge of the heavy storage batteries, called “Dags”—each weighing approximately twenty-five pounds and encased in a wooden box with cast-iron handles—that powered the signal sets.  In the late evening Pearce was struggling to move a fresh Dag from the deep trench in which they were stored.  Above him, he heard someone Say, “Here, let me help you.”  Pearce directed the man to grab one handle and pull up the set.  Together the two dragged the cumbersome box to the command-post trench.  “There’s one more,” Pearce said.  “Let’s go get it.”  The men made the second trip and, back at the command post, Pearce jumped into the trench as the other man hoisted the boxes down to him.  As they walked away Pearce suddenly noticed that the man wore red staff officer’s tabs.  Stopping dead, he stammered, “Thank you very much, sir.”  General Urquhart nodded.  “That’s all right, son,” he said.

Step by terrible step the crisis was mounting; nothing went right on this day, which General Horrocks was to call “Black Friday.”  Weather conditions in both England and Holland again grounded Allied planes, preventing resupply missions.  In answer to Urquhart’s plea for fighter strikes, the R.a.f. replied: “… After most careful examination regret owing to storm unable to accept …”  And, at this moment, when Horrocks needed every man, tank and ton of supplies to retain Montgomery’s bridgehead over the Rhine and break through to the Red Devils, Field Marshal Model’s counteroffensive finally succeeded in cutting the corridor.  Thirty minutes after receiving Mackenzie’s message that Urquhart might be overrun in twenty-four hours, General Horrocks received another message: in the 101/ Airborne’s sector, powerful German armored forces had cut the corridor north of Veghel.

Model could hardly have chosen a more vital spot or timed his attack better.  British infantry forces of the XII and VIII Corps, advancing on either side of the highway, had only now reached Son, barely five miles into the 101/’s area.  Fighting against stiff resistance, they had made agonizingly slow progress.  The 101/’s commander, General Taylor, had expected the British to reach his sector of “Hell’s Highway” long before.  After more than five days of continuous fighting without support, Taylor’s hard-pressed troopers were thinly spread and vulnerable.  Along some stretches the highway was unguarded except by the British armor and infantry moving along it on the way north.

Elsewhere, the “front” was literally the sides of the road.  Field

Marshal Model had chosen to counterattack at Veghel for a particular

reason: throughout the entire length of the Market-Garden corridor

the

Veghel area contained the greatest cluster of bridges—no fewer than four, of which one was a major canal crossing.  With one stroke Model hoped to strangle the Allied lifeline.  He almost did.  He might have succeeded, but for the Dutch underground.

During the night and early morning, in villages and hamlets east of Veghel, the Dutch spotted the German buildup; they promptly phoned liaison officers with the 101/.  The Warning came not a moment too soon.  Massed German armor almost overwhelmed Taylor’s men.  Twice in four hours, in a wild melee that ranged over a five-mile stretch of the corridor, German tanks tried to push through to the bridges.  Desperately, Taylor’s men, aided by British artillery and armor on the road, threw back the attacks.  But four miles to the north, at Uden, the Germans succeeded in cutting the corridor.  Now, with the battle still raging and the forces in the rear cut off and isolated, Horrocks was forced to make a fateful decision: he would have to send armored units—urgently needed in his efforts to reach Urquhart—back south down the corridor to help General Taylor, whose need was now even more urgent.  The 32nd Guards Brigade was sent rushing south to support the 101/ in reopening the highway.  The gallant 101/ would hang on to the bridges, but even with the help of the Guards, not a man, tank or supply vehicle would move north along the corridor for the next twenty-four hours.  Model’s counteroffensive, though unsuccessful for the moment, had still paid enormous dividends.  In the end, the battle for the corridor would decide the fate of Arnhem.

By 4 P.m. on Friday, September 22, in the Nijmegen-Arnhem area—six and

one-half hours after they had first been pinned down by German tanks

and artillery—British infantrymen finally bludgeoned their way through

Oosterhout.  The village was in flames, and SS prisoners were being

rounded up.  The relief route west of the “island” highway, the

low-lying secondary roads used

by the enterprising Household Cavalry in their race to Driel at dawn, was now believed to be free or, at worst, only lightly held by the enemy.  The 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, supported by a squadron of Dragoon Guards’ tanks and carrying the precious two amphibious vehicles loaded with supplies, was ready to slam through whatever opposition remained and dash for the Rhine.  Lieutenant Colonel George Taylor, commanding the force, was so eager to get to Urquhart that he “felt a mad desire to sweep my infantry onto the tanks with my hands and get moving.”

In a small wood north of Oosterhout, his loaded vehicles waited to move out.  Suddenly, off in the distance, Taylor spotted two Tiger tanks.  Quietly he warned Lieutenant David Wilcox, his intelligence officer, “Don’t say anything.  I don’t want anyone to know about those tanks.  We can’t stop now.”  Taylor waved the relief column up the road.  “If we had waited five minutes more,” he says, “I knew the route would have been closed again.”

At full speed—his infantry mounted on tanks, carriers and trucks—Taylor’s column rolled through Dutch hamlets and villages.  Everywhere they were met by surprised, cheering villagers, but there was no slowdown.  Taylor’s only concern was to get to the Rhine.  “I felt a sense of great urgency,” he says.  “Any time lost would give the enemy an opportunity to move up a blocking force.”  The convoy met no opposition, and for Taylor, “it was an exhilarating feeling as the light faded rapidly and the head of the column reached Driel.”  They had covered the ten-mile journey in just thirty minutes.  At 5:30 P.m.  the first tanks of the Dragoon Guards reached the Rhine and, skirting northeast along its banks, moved into the outskirts of the village.  Taylor heard an explosion and guessed immediately what it was: on the cautious Sosabowski’s defense perimeter, one of the tanks had run over a Polish mine.

It was dark when Taylor reached Sosabowski’s headquarters.  The

information he had about Urquhart’s division was vague.  “I had no idea

where they were in Arnhem or if they still held one

end of the bridge.”  But Taylor planned to send his infantry and tanks immediately toward the southern end.  He knew the DUKW’S must get “across as soon as possible and if the bridge was still held it would be obviously quicker to drive them across than to float them over.”  At Sosabowski’s headquarters, Taylor was astonished to find Colonel Charles Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers.  Quickly they dissuaded him from heading out for the Arnhem bridge.  Nothing had been heard from Frost, Mackenzie explained, since Wednesday night and it was presumed at headquarters that “it was all over at the bridge.”

Reluctantly Taylor gave up his plan and ordered out a reconnaissance group to scout along the riverbank for a site from which the DUKW’S might be launched.  Sosabowski’s engineers were not optimistic; the awkward amphibious vehicles would prove cumbersome to manhandle across ditches and banks down to the river, especially in the dark.  A short while later Taylor’s reconnaissance group confirmed the Poles’ opinion.  The river could be approached, they thought, only by one narrow ditch-lined road.  In spite of the serious obstacles, Taylor’s men believed they could get the DUKW’S down to the Rhine.  Colonel Mackenzie, still unable to continue on to Nijmegen, would oversee the launching.  The DUKW’S would cross the river at 2 A.m. on Saturday, the twenty-third.  First priority, however, was to get men into the bridgehead: Sosabowski’s Poles had to be ferried over in the little string of rubber boats.

At 9 P.m. on Friday night that operation began.  Silently crouching along the riverbank, the Polish soldiers waited.  On both sides of the river engineers, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Myers, stood ready to pull the hawser attaching the rubber dinghies back and forth.

In just four boats—two 2-man and two 1-man dinghies—only six men

could cross the 400-yard-wide Rhine at a time.  Supplementing the craft

were several wooden rafts that the Polish engineers had constructed to

carry small supplies and stores.  On Sosabowski’s order the first six

men got into the boats and moved out.  Within a few minutes the men

were across.  Behind them came a string of rafts.  As fast as men

landed on the northern bank the boats and rafts were hauled back.  “It was a slow, laborious process,” Sosabowski noted, “but so far the Germans seemed to suspect nothing.”

Then, from a point to the west of the landing site across the river a light shot up into the sky, and almost immediately the whole area was brilliantly lit by a magnesium parachute flare.  Instantly Spandau machine guns began raking the river, “stirring up small waves and making the water boil with hot steel,” Sosabowski recalls.  Simultaneously, mortar shells began to fall among the waiting Poles.  Within minutes two rubber boats were riddled, their occupants heaved into the river.  On the southern bank, men scattered, firing at the parachute flare.  In the wild melee, Sosabowski halted the operation.  Men moved back and took up new positions, trying to avoid the bursting mortar shells.  The moment the flare dimmed and burned out, they ran to the boats and rafts, climbed in, and the crossings began again.  Another flare burst in the sky.  In this cruel game of hide-and-seek the Poles, suffering terrible casualties, continued to cross the river all night in the remaining boats.  At the schoolhouse in Driel which had been temporarily turned into a casualty station, Cora Baltussen tended the injured as they were brought in.  “We can’t get across,” a Pole told her.  “It’s a slaughter up there—and we can’t even fire back.”

At 2 A.m., Taylor’s amphibious DUKW’S began moving down to the river.  Because of heavy rain during the day, the low, narrow, ditch-lined road was inches thick in mud.  And, as the DUKW’S, surrounded by sixty men, slowly approached the river, a heavy ground mist formed.  Men could not see either the road or the river.  Again and again, struggling soldiers labored to straighten the vehicles as they slid off the road.  Supplies were unloaded to lighten the DUKW’S, but even this was not enough.

Finally, despite strenuous efforts to hold them back, the cumbersome

vehicles slid into the ditch only yards from the Rhine.  “It’s no

good,” the despairing Mackenzie told Taylor.  “It’s just hopeless.”  At

3 A.m., the entire operation came to a halt.  Only fifty men and almost

no supplies had been ferried across the river into Urquhart’s

bridgehead.  3

By the time Colonel Charles Mackenzie finally reached General Browning’s headquarters in Nijmegen on Saturday morning, September 23, he was “dead tired, frozen stiff, and his teeth were chattering,” Brigadier Gordon Walch, the chief of staff, remembers.  In spite of his determination to see Browning immediately, Mackenzie was promptly “put in a bath to thaw out.”

British forces using the relief route west of, and parallel to, the “island” highway were now moving steadily up to Driel, but the roads were far from clear of the enemy.  Still, Lord Wrottesley had decided to try to get Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers back to Nijmegen.  The brief trip, in a small convoy of reconnaissance vehicles, was hair-raising.  As the party approached a crossroads, they found a partly destroyed German half-track lying slewed across it.  Wrottesley got out to guide his vehicles, and at that point, a Tiger tank appeared farther down the road.  To avoid an encounter, the armored car carrying Mackenzie began backing away, when suddenly the road collapsed beneath it and the car turned over.  Mackenzie and the crew were forced to hide out from German infantry in a field as Wrottesley, yelling to the driver of his scout car “to go like hell,” headed up the road toward Nijmegen to find British troops.  Organizing a relief force, Wrottesley sped back down the road to find Mackenzie.  When the little force arrived the German tank was gone and Mackenzie and the crew of the armored car came up to meet them from the field where they had taken cover.  In the confusion Myers, following in a second armored car, became separated from the troop.

General Browning greeted Mackenzie anxiously.  According to his staff, “the week had been a series of agonizing and tragic setbacks.”  More than anything else the lack of full communications with Urquhart had contributed to Browning’s concern.  Even now, although messages were passing between the British 1/ Airborne Division and Corps, Browning’s picture of Urquhart’s situation was apparently very vague.  In the original Market-Garden plan the 52nd Lowland Division was to have been flown into the Arnhem area once Urquhart’s men had found a suitable landing site—ideally by Thursday, September 21.  When Urquhart’s desperate situation became known, the 52nd’s commanding officer, Major General Edmund Hakewill Smith, promptly offered to risk taking in part of his unit by glider, to land as close as possible to the beleaguered 1/ Airborne.  On Friday morning Browning had rejected the proposal, radioing: “Thanks for your message but offer not repeat not required as situation better than you think … 2nd Army definitely … intend fly you in to Deelen airfield as soon as situation allows.”  Later General Brereton, First Allied Airborne Army commander, noting the message in his diary, commented, “General Browning was over-optimistic and apparently then did not fully appreciate the plight of the Red Devils.” At the time, Brereton seemed no better informed than Browning.  In a report to Eisenhower, which was sent on to General Marshall in Washington on Friday night, Brereton said of the Nijmegen-Arnhem area: