Bridge Too Far (71 page)

By the time Major George Powell’s men reached the river from their long trek down the eastern side of the perimeter, Powell believed that the evacuation was over.  A boat was bobbing up and down in the water, sinking lower as waves hit against it.  Powell waded out.  The boat was full of holes and the sappers in it were all dead.  As some of his men struck out swimming, a boat suddenly appeared out of the dark.  Powell hastily organized his men and got some of them aboard.  He and the remaining troopers waited until the craft returned.  On the high embankment south of the Rhine, Powell stood for a moment looking back north.  “All at once I realized I was across.  I simply could not believe I had gotten out alive.”  Turning to his fifteen bedraggled men, Powell said, “Form up in threes.”  He marched them to the reception center.  Outside the building, Powell shouted, “156th Battalion, halt!  Right turn!  Fall out!”  Standing in the rain he watched them head for shelter.  “It was all over, but by God we had come out as we had gone in.  Proud.”

As General Urquhart’s crowded boat prepared to leave, it got caught in

the mud.  Hancock, his batman, jumped out and pushed them off.  “He got

us clear,” Urquhart says, “but as he struggled to

get back aboard someone shouted, “Let go!  It’s overcrowded already!”” Irked by this ingratitude “Hancock ignored the remark and, with his last reserves, pulled himself into the boat.”

Under machine-gun fire Urquhart’s boat was halfway across when the engine suddenly stuttered and stopped.  The boat began to drift with the current; to Urquhart “it seemed an absolute age before the engine came to life again.”  Minutes later they reached the southern bank.  Looking back Urquhart saw flashes of fire as the Germans raked the river.  “I don’t think,” he says, “they knew what they were firing at.”

All along the bank of the Rhine and in the meadows and woods behind, hundreds of men waited.  But now with only half the fleet still operable and under heavy machine-gun fire, the bottleneck that Urquhart had feared occurred.  Confusion developed in the crowded lines, and although there was no panic, many men tried to push forward, and their officers and sergeants tried to hold them in check.  Lance Corporal Thomas Harris of the 1/ Battalion remembers “hundreds and hundreds waiting to get across.  Boats were being swamped by the weight of the numbers of men trying to board.”  And mortars were now falling in the embarkation area as the Germans got the range.  Harris, like many other men, decided to swim.  Taking off his battle dress and boots, he dived in and, to his surprise, made it over.

Others were not so lucky.  By the time Gunner Charles Pavey got down to the river, the embarkation area was also under machine-gun fire.  As the men huddled on the bank a man came swimming toward the place where Pavey lay.  Ignoring the bullets peppering the shore he hauled himself out of the water and, gasping for breath, said, “Thank God, I’m over.” Pavey heard someone say, “Bloody fool.  You’re still on the same side.”

Sergeant Alf Roullier, who had managed to cook and serve a stew on Sunday, now attempted to swim the river.  As he floundered in the water a boat drew alongside and someone grabbed his collar.  He heard a man shout, “It’s O.k., mate.  Keep going.  Keep going.”  Roullier was totally disoriented.  He believed he was drowning.  Then he heard the same voice say, “Bloody good, old boy,” and a Canadian engineer lifted him into the boat.  “Where the hell am I?”  the dazed Roullier mumbled.  The Canadian grinned.  “You’re almost home,” he said.

It was nearing daybreak when Signalman James Cockrill, still at his set under the veranda of the Hartenstein, heard a fierce whisper.  “Come on, Chick,” a voice said, “let’s go.”  As the men headed for the river, there was a sudden sharp burst of noise.  Cockrill felt a tug on his neck and shoulders.  His Sten gun, slung over his back, had been split wide open by shrapnel.  Nearing the bank, Cockrill’s group came across a few glider pilots standing in the bushes.  “Don’t go until we tell you,” one of the pilots said.  “The Germans have got a gun fixed on this area, a Spandau firing about waist high.”  Coached by the pilots, the men sprinted forward one at a time.  When Cockrill’s turn came he crouched down and began to run.  Seconds later he fell over a pile of bodies.  “There must have been twenty or thirty,” he remembers.  “I heard men shouting for their mothers and others begging us not to leave them there.  We couldn’t stop.”  At the river’s edge a flare exploded and machine guns began to chatter.  Cockrill heard someone shout for those who could to swim.  He went into the chilly water, striking out past panic-stricken men who appeared to be floundering all about him.

Suddenly Cockrill heard a voice say, “All right, buddy, don’t worry.

I’ve got you.”  A Canadian hauled him into a boat and seconds later

Cockrill heard the boat ground on shore.  “I nearly cried when I found

I was back where I started,” he says.  The boat had gone on in to pick

up wounded.  As men all around helped with the loading, the craft

started off again and Cockrill remembers a rush as men climbed in from

all sides.  Although their boat was weighted down and under fire, the

Canadians made it to the far shore.  After hours under the veranda and

his nightmarish trip across the water, Cockrill was dazed.  “The next

thing I knew I was in a barn and someone gave me a cigarette.”  Then

Cockrill remembered one thing.  Frantically he searched his pockets

and

brought out his single piece of ammunition: the .303 dummy bullet with his cypher code inside.

Shortly before 2 A.m. what remained of the 1/ Airborne’s ammunition was blown up.  Sheriff Thompson’s gunners fired the last remaining shells and artillerymen removed the breech blocks.  Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes and the remainder of his crew were told to pull back.  Parkes was surprised.  He had not thought about the withdrawal.  He had expected to stay until his post was overrun by the Germans.  He was even more amazed when he reached the river.  The area was jammed with hundreds of men and someone said that all the boats had been sunk.  A man near Parkes took a deep breath.  “It looks like we swim,” he said.  Parkes stared at the river.  “It was very wide.  In full flood the current looked to be about nine knots.  I didn’t think I could make it.  I saw men jumping in fully dressed and being swept downstream.  Others made it across only to be shot scrambling out of the water.  I saw one chap paddle across on a plank, still carrying his pack.  If he could do it, I could.”

Parkes stripped to his shorts, throwing away everything including his gold pocket watch.  In the swift current his shorts slipped down and Parkes kicked them off.  He made it over and, hiding by bushes and in ditches, eventually reached a small deserted farm cottage.  Parkes went in to find some clothing.  Emerging a few minutes later, he encountered a private from the Dorsets, who directed him to a collection point, where he was given a mug of hot tea and some cigarettes.  It took the exhausted Parkes some time to understand why everyone was staring at him.  He was dressed in a man’s colored sports shirt and wore a pair of ladies’ linen bloomers tied at the knee.

Private Alfred Dullforce of the 10th Battalion swam to the south bank

nude but still carrying a .38.  To his embarrassment two women were

standing with the soldiers on the bank.  Dullforce “felt like diving

straight back into the water.”  One of the women called to him and held

out a skirt.  “She didn’t bat an eyelash at my nakedness,” he

remembers.  “She told me not to

worry, because they were there to help the men coming across.”  In a multicolored skirt that reached to his knees and wearing a pair of clogs, Dullforce was taken to a British truck driving the survivors back to Nijmegen.

By now the Germans were flaying the embarkation area and mortar shells were screaming in.  As Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters ran behind a line of men for a boat, there was an explosion among the group.  “I was absolutely unharmed,” Wolters recalls.  “But around me lay eight dead men and one severely wounded.”  He gave the man a shot of morphia and carried him to the boat.  In the already overloaded craft there was no place for Wolters.  He waded into the water and, hanging onto the side of the boat, was pulled across the river.  He staggered onto the southern bank and collapsed.

As dawn came, the evacuation fleet had been almost destroyed, yet the Canadian and British engineers, braving mortar, artillery and heavy machine-gun fire, continued to ferry the men across in the boats that remained.  Private Arthur Shearwood of the 11th Battalion found Canadian engineers loading some wounded into a small boat.  One of the Canadians motioned for Shearwood to get aboard.  The outboard motor could not be restarted, and the Canadians asked all soldiers still carrying rifles to start paddling.  Shearwood tapped the man in front of him.  “Let’s go,” he said.  “Start paddling.”  The man looked at Shearwood without expression.  “I can’t,” he said, pointing to his bandaged shoulder.  “I’ve lost an arm.”

Major Robert Cain had put all his men across by dawn.  With Sergeant

Major “Robbo” Robinson, he waited on the bank so he could follow, but

no more boats appeared to be heading in.  In a group of other men

someone pointed to a slightly holed assault craft bobbing on the water

and a trooper swam out to bring it back.  Using rifle butts, Cain and

Robinson began rowing, while troopers who still had helmets bailed.  On

the south bank a military policeman directed them to a barn.  Inside,

one of the first men Cain recognized was Brigadier Hicks.  The

brigadier came

over quickly.  “Well,” he said, “here’s one officer, at least, who’s shaved.”  Cain grinned tiredly.  “I was well brought up, sir,” he said.

On the perimeter’s edge scores of men still huddled in the rain under German fire.  Although one or two boats attempted to cross under cover of a smoke screen, it was now, in daylight, impossible for the evacuation to continue.  Some men who tried to swim for it were caught by the swift current or by machine-gun fire.  Others made it.  Still others, so badly wounded they could do nothing, sat helplessly in the pounding rain or set out north—back to the hospitals in the perimeter.  Many decided to hide out and wait until darkness again before trying to reach the opposite shore.  Eventually scores succeeded in making their escape this way.

On the southern bank and in Driel, exhausted, grimy men searched for their units—or what remained of them.  Sergeant Stanley Sullivan of the pathfinders, who had printed his defiant message on the school blackboard, remembers someone asking, “Where’s the 1/ Battalion?”  A corporal immediately stood up.  “This is it, sir,” he said.  Beside him a handful of bedraggled men pulled themselves painfully erect.  Gunner Robert Christie roamed through crowds of men searching for troopers of his battery.  No one looked familiar.  Christie suddenly felt tears sting his eyes.  He had no idea whether anyone but him was left from Number 2 Battery.

On the road to Driel, General Urquhart came to General Thomas’ headquarters.  Refusing to go in, he waited outside in the rain as his aide arranged for transportation.  It was not necessary.  As Urquhart stood outside, a jeep arrived from General Browning’s headquarters and an officer escorted Urquhart back to Corps.  He and his group were taken to a house on the southern outskirts of Nijmegen.  “Browning’s aide, Major Harry Cator, showed us into a room and suggested we take off our wet clothes,” Urquhart says.  The proud Scot refused.  “Perversely, I wanted Browning to see us as we were—as we had been.”

After a long wait Browning appeared, “as immaculate as ever.”  He

looked, Urquhart thought, as if “he had just come off parade, rather than from his bed in the middle of a battle.”  To the Corps commander Urquhart said simply, “I’m sorry things did not turn out as well as I had hoped.”  Browning, offering Urquhart a drink, replied, “You did all you could.”  Later, in the bedroom that he had been given, Urquhart found that the sleep he had yearned for so long was impossible.  “There were too many things,” he said, “on my mind and my conscience.”

There was indeed much to think about.  The 1/ Airborne Division had been sacrificed and slaughtered.  Of Urquhart’s original 10,005-man force only 2,163 troopers, along with 160 Poles and 75 Dorsets, came back across the Rhine.  After nine days, the division had approximately 1,200 dead and 6,642 missing, wounded or captured.  The Germans, it later turned out, had suffered brutally, too: 3,300 casualties, including 1,100 dead.

The Arnhem adventure was over and with it Market-Garden.  There was little left to do now but pull back and consolidate.  The war would go on until May, 1945.  “Thus ended in failure the greatest airborne operation of the war,” one American historian later wrote.  “Although Montgomery asserted that it had been 90 percent successful, his statement was merely a consoling figure of speech.  All objectives save Arnhem had been won, but without Arnhem the rest were as nothing.  In return for so much courage and sacrifice, the Allies had won a 50-mile salient—leading nowhere.”  * * Dr.  John C. warren, Airborne Operations in World War II, European Theater, p. 146.

Perhaps because so few were expected to escape, there was not enough

transport for the exhausted survivors.  Many men, having endured so

much else, now had to march back to Nijmegen.  On the road Captain

Roland Langton of the Irish Guards stood in the cold rain watching the

1/ Airborne come back.  As tired, filthy men stumbled along, Langton

stepped back.  He knew his squadron had done its best to drive up the

elevated highway from

Nijmegen to Arnhem, yet he felt uneasy, “almost embarrassed to speak to them.”  As one of the men drew abreast of another Guardsman standing silently beside the road, the trooper shouted, “Where the hell have you been, mate?”  The Guardsman answered quietly, “We’ve been fighting for five months.”  Corporal William Chennell of the Guards heard one of the airborne men say, “Oh?  Did you have a nice drive up?”