Bridge Too Far (69 page)

The decision to withdraw Urquhart’s force—subject to confirmation by Montgomery, who was not to finally approve the order until 9:30 A.m.  Monday, September 25—was reached by General Dempsey at the St.  Oedenrode conference with Horrocks and General Browning on Sunday afternoon.  After considering his Corps commander’s plan for a full-scale crossing of the Rhine, Dempsey turned it down.  Unlike Horrocks, Dempsey did not believe the assault could succeed.  “No,” he said to Horrocks.  “Get them out.”  Turning to Browning, Dempsey asked, “Is that all right with you?”  Silent and subdued, Browning nodded.  Immediately Dempsey notified General Thomas in Driel.  Even as the St.

Oedenrode conference was taking place, the Germans, once

again, severed the corridor north of Veghel.  Cut off, Horrocks used an armored carrier and broke through the German lines to return to his headquarters at Nijmegen.  Field Marshal Model’s latest attacks would keep the corridor closed for more than forty hours.

In Driel, most of Lieutenant Colonel Tilly’s battalion had now arrived.  He walked among his troops picking the men he would take.  Tapping soldiers on the shoulder, Tilly said, “You go” … “You’re not going.” The real purpose of the assault was secret.  He could not tell protesting men why they were being left behind.  Tilly “picked those veterans who were absolutely sure—essential—leaving the others behind.”

The decision was bitter.  Looking at the officers and men who, he believed, “were going to certain death,” Tilly called over Major Grafton.  “Jimmy,” Grafton remembers Tilly saying, “I’ve got to tell you something, because someone other than me has to know the real purpose of the crossing.”  Outlining the change in plan, Tilly added quietly, “I’m afraid we’re being chucked away.”

Stunned, Grafton stared at Tilly.  It was vital, Tilly added, that no one else have the information.  “It would be too risky,” he explained.

Grafton knew what Tilly meant.  It would be a terrible blow to morale if the truth was known.  As Grafton prepared to leave, Tilly said, “Jimmy, I hope you can swim.”  Grafton smiled.  “I hope so, too,” he said.

By 9:30 P.m., as Tilly’s men moved down to the river, there was still no sign of the assault craft.  “How the hell do they expect me to cross without boats?”  Tilly asked his engineering officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Henniker.  Rations for his men had not arrived either.  Testy and burdened by his knowledge of the true reason for the mission, Tilly spoke with Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey Coad, commander of the 5th Dorsets.  “Nothing’s right,” Tilly told him.  “The boats haven’t come and we haven’t been issued rations.  If something isn’t done soon, I’m not prepared to go.”  Coad ordered his battalion to turn over rations to Tilly’s men.

For three long hours, in a cold, drizzling rain, Tilly’s force waited for the assault craft.  At midnight word arrived that the boats were now in Driel.  But only nine had come through.  In the darkness, some trucks had taken a wrong turn and driven into enemy lines; two others, skidding off a muddy dike road, had been lost.  At the rendezvous point the boats were carried on the shoulders of the infantry for 600 yards through a swampy marsh to the launching point.  Stumbling and slithering over the mud of the polder, the men took more than an hour to wrestle the boats to the river.  Not until after 2 A.m. on Monday, September 25, was the assembly complete.

As the men prepared to launch, Tilly handed Major Grafton two messages for General Urquhart: one was a letter from General Browning; the other, a coded message from General Thomas outlining the withdrawal plan.  There were two sets of these letters.  Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, Urquhart’s engineering officer, had returned from Nijmegen and his meeting with Browning.  Now Myers, bearing the same letters, was waiting to cross.  “Your job,” Tilly told Grafton, “is to get through to Urquhart with these messages in case the engineering officer doesn’t make it.”  The paper containing the withdrawal plan was “absolutely vital,” Tilly stressed.

At the river it was clear that the Germans were completely prepared for another crossing.  Only some fifteen British assault craft—including three DUKW’S and the remnants of the little fleet used on the previous night—remained.  At the very last minute, because of the boat shortage, it was decided to halt a diversionary crossing scheduled by the Poles to the east of the Dorsets’ launching area—and put Tilly’s men over in five three-boat waves.  As the preparations went on, mortar shells exploded on the southern bank, and heavy machine guns, apparently now carefully lined up along both edges of the perimeter base, swept the water.  Lieutenant Colonel Tilly stepped into a boat.  The first wave began to cross.

Although every available British gun on the southern side hammered

away, sending a canopy of shells above the Dorsets,

the crossing was brutally assaulted.  The canvas-and-plywood craft were raked, holed and swept away.  Some, like Major Grafton’s, caught fire before leaving the south bank.  Quickly Grafton set out in another.  Halfway over he discovered his was the only remaining boat in the wave.

In fifteen minutes, feeling “lucky to be alive,” Grafton was across.

In the rain and darkness, hemmed in by well-sited machine-gnn fire, each of the five waves sustained heavy losses.  But the worst enemy by far was the current.  Unused to the boats and the unexpected current, which increased in speed after midnight, the helpless Dorsets were swept past the perimeter base and into the hands of the enemy.  Scattered for miles, those who survived were quickly cut off and surrounded.  Of the 420 officers and men who set out for the perimeter, only 239 reached the northern bank.  Lieutenant Colonel Tilly, who upon landing was met by an avalanche of grenades rolled like bowling balls down a hill, was heard leading his men out of the inferno, yelling “Get them with the bayonet!”  * * One of the bouncing grenades actually hit Tilly’s head and exploded.  Incredibly he was only slightly wounded and survived as a prisoner of war until the end of hostilities.

The Dorsets were unable to link up as an effective unit with Urquhart’s men.  Only a few reached the Hartenstein perimeter, among them Major Grafton, who, with the withdrawal plan intact, came in through Major Dickie Lonsdale’s positions near the lower Oosterbeek church.  Lieutenant Colonel Myers had already arrived at Urquhart’s headquarters with the documents he was carrying.  Neither man knew the contents of Thomas’ coded message, or its cruelly ironic name.  When Montgomery had originally pressed Eisenhower for “a powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin … to thus end the war,” his single-thrust suggestion had been turned down.  “Operation Market-Garden” had been the compromise.  Now the withdrawal plan for Urquhart’s bloodied men had been officially designated.  The remnants of the British 1/ Airborne Division were to be evacuated under the code name “Operation Berlin.”

Now Market-Garden, the operation Montgomery hoped would end the war quickly, proceeded inexorably toward its doom.  For sixty terrible miles men hung on to bridges and fought for a single road, the corridor.  In General Maxwell Taylor’s sector north of Eindhoven, troopers bolstered by British armor and infantry repelled one fierce attack after another while trying to reopen the empty stretch of highway severed at Uden; in General Gavin’s 82nd area the great Waal bridge was under constant bombardment and the enemy continued to press in from the Beichswald in steadily growing strength.  Gone was the attitude of a week before, that the war was almost over.  Enemy units were being encountered that had long been written off.  The Nazi war machine, thought to be reeling and on the verge of collapse in the first week of September, had miraculously produced sixty Tiger tanks, which were delivered to Model on the morning of September 24.  * Market-Garden was strangling, and now the principal objective of the plan, the foothold across the Rhine, the springboard to the Ruhr, was to be abandoned.  At 6:05 A.m., Monday, September 25, General Urquhart received the order to withdraw.  * “The tanks arrived in the early hours of the morning,” notes General Harmel in Annex No.  6 of his war diary, September 24th, adding that “II Panzer Corps headquarters allocated the bulk of this detachment, 45 tiger tanks, to the 10th SS Frundsberg Division.”

In the planning of the Arnhem operation Urquhart had been promised

relief within forty-eight hours.  General Browning had expected the 1/

Airborne Division to hold out alone for no longer than four days at

maximum.  In an unprecedented feat of arms for

an airborne division, outnumbered and outgunned, Urquhart’s men had hung on for more than twice that long.  To the courageous Scot, commanding an airborne division for the first time, withdrawal was bitter; yet Urquhart knew it was the only course.  By now his strength was fewer than 2,500 men, and he could ask no more of these uncompromising troopers.  Galling as it was to know that relieving British forces sat barely one mile away, separated from the division only by the width of the Rhine, Urquhart reluctantly agreed with his superiors’ decision.  The time had come to get the valiant men of Arnhem out.

At the Hartenstein, a weary Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers delivered

the two letters—Browning’s and the withdrawal order from General

Thomas—to Urquhart.  Browning’s congratulatory and encouraging

message, written more than twenty-four hours earlier, was outdated.  In

part it read, “… the army is pouring to your assistance, but … very

late in the day,” and “I naturally feel, not so tired and frustrated as

you do, but probably almost worse about the whole thing than you do

…”

The withdrawal order—especially coming from Thomas, whose slowness Urquhart, like Browning, could not forgive—was by far the more depressing.  The 43rd Wessex was now beginning to feel the weight of increasing German pressure, Thomas’ message said.  All hope of developing a major bridgehead across the Rhine must be abandoned; and the withdrawal of the 1/ Airborne would take place, by mutual agreement between Urquhart and Thomas, at a designated date and time.

Urquhart pondered his decision.  As he listened to the continuing mortar and artillery bombardment outside, he had no doubts about the date and time.  If any of his men were to survive, the withdrawal would have to be soon and, obviously, under cover of darkness.  At 8:08 A.m.  Urquhart contacted General Thomas by radio: “Operation Berlin,” he told him, “must be tonight.”

Some twenty minutes later Urquhart released the message prepared for

Browning that he had given Lieutenant Neville Hay to encode the night

before.  It was still pertinent, particularly the

warning sentence, “Even slight 574-576 enemy offensive action may cause complete disintegration.”  For at this moment Urquhart’s situation was so desperate that he did not know whether his men could hold until darkness.  Then the agonized general began to plan the most difficult maneuver of all: the withdrawal.  There was only one way out—across the terrible 400 yards of the Rhine to Driel.

Urquhart’s plan was designed along the lines of another classic British withdrawal—Gallipoli, in 1916.  There, after months of fighting, troops had finally been pulled out under deceptive cover.  Thinned-out lines cloaking the retreat had continued to fire as the main bulk of the force was safely withdrawn.  Urquhart planned a similar maneuver.  Along the perimeter small groups of men would keep up a fusillade to deceive the enemy while the larger body of troops slipped away.  Gradually units along the northern face of the perimeter would move down along its sides to the river, to be evacuated.  Then the last forces, closest to the Rhine, would follow.  “In effect,” Urquhart said later, “I planned the withdrawal like the collapse of a paper bag.  I wanted small parties stationed at strategic places to give the impression we were still there, all the while pulling downward and along each flank.”

Urquhart hoped to contrive other indications of “normality”—the usual pattern of radio transmissions would continue; Sheriff Thompson’s artillery was to fire to the last; and military police in and about the German prisoner-of-war compound on the Hartenstein’s tennis courts were to continue their patrols.  They would be among the very last to leave.  Obviously, besides a rear guard, other men would have to stay behind— doctors, medical orderlies and serious casualties.  Wounded men unable to walk but capable of occupying defensive positions would stay and continue firing.

To reach the river, Urquhart’s men would follow one route down each side of the perimeter.  Glider pilots, acting as guides, would steer them along the escape path, marked in some areas with white tape.

Troopers, their boots muffled by strips of cloth, were to make their

way to the water’s edge.  There, beachmasters would load them into a

small evacuation fleet: fourteen powered

storm boats—managed by two companies of Canadian engineers—each capable of carrying fourteen men, and a variety of smaller craft.  Their number was indeterminate.  No one, including the beachmasters, would remember how many, but among them were several DUKW’S and a few canvas-and-plywood assault craft remaining from previous crossings.

Urquhart was gambling that the Germans observing the boat traffic would assume men were trying to move into the perimeter rather than out of it.  Apart from the dreadful possibility of his troops being detected other hazardous difficulties could occur as more than two thousand men tried to escape.  If a rigid time schedule was not maintained, Urquhart could foresee, an appalling bottleneck would develop at the narrow base of the perimeter, now barely 650 yards wide.  If they were jammed into the embarkation area, his men might be mercilessly annihilated.  After the futile experience of the Poles and the Dorsets in trying to enter the perimeter, Urquhart did not expect the evacuation to go unchallenged.  Although every gun that XXX Corps could bring to bear would be in action to protect his men, Urquhart still expected the Germans to inflict heavy casualties.  Time was an enemy, for it would take hours to complete the evacuation.  There was also the problem of keeping the plan secret.  Because men might be captured and interrogated during the day, no one, apart from senior officers and those given specific tasks, was to be told of the evacuation until the last minute.