Bridge Too Far (21 page)

Though he was anxious to get into action, Frost “hated to leave for Holland.”  Secretly, he hoped for a last-minute cancellation or postponement.  He had enjoyed the area of Stoke Rochford in Lincolnshire and wished for “perhaps another day or two just doing all the pleasant things I had done in the past.”  But with these thoughts were others, “telling me that we had been here long enough and it was time to get away.”  Frost slept soundly on September 16.  Although he wasn’t na@ive enough to think the battle of Arnhem would be “much of a lark,” he did tell his batman, Wicks, to pack his gun, cartridges, golf clubs and dinner jacket in the staff car that would follow.

On the mirror above the fireplace in the sergeants’ mess, now empty, there was one last notation, scrawled before men became too busy to bother.  It read: “2 hours to go … no cancellation.”

A Bridge Too Far

Part Three THE ATTACK

The thunder of the huge formations was earsplitting.  Around British glider bases in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, horses and cattle panicked and bolted in the fields.  In southern and eastern England thousands of people watched in amazement.  In some villages and towns road traffic jammed and came to a halt.  Passengers in speeding trains crowded one another to stare out of windows.  Everywhere people gaped, dumfounded, at a spectacle no one had ever seen before.  The mightiest airborne force in history was off the ground and heading for its targets.

By coincidence on this bright Sunday morning, September 17, 1944, special services were being held all over England to commemorate “the valiant few,” the handful of R.a.f. pilots who had boldly challenged Hitler’s Luftwaffe four years before and fought them to a standstill.  As worshipers knelt in prayer, the steady, overpowering drone of propellers completely drowned out some services.  In London’s great Westminster Cathedral the soaring organ tones of the solemn Magnificat could not be heard.  In twos and threes, people left their pews to join the crowds already gathered in the streets.  There, Londoners stared upward, overwhelmed by the din as formation after formation of aircraft passed overhead at low altitude.  In north London, a Salvation Army band overpowered by the noise gave up, but the bass drummer, his eyes on the sky, thumped out a symbolic beat: three dots and a dash—in Morse code, V for victory.

To the onlookers, the nature of the attack was clearly revealed by the great streams of planes towing gliders.  But it would be six more hours before the British people learned that they had witnessed the opening phase of the most momentous airborne offensive ever conceived.  A Red Cross worker, Angela Hawkings, may have best summed up the reactions of those who saw the vast armada pass.  From the window of a train, she stared up, astonished, as wave after wave of planes flew over like “droves of starlings.”  She was convinced that “this attack, wherever bound, must surely bring about the end of the war.”

The men of the First Allied Airborne Army were as unprepared as the civilians on the ground for the awesome spectacle of their own departure.  The paratroopers, glider-borne infantry and pilots who set out for Holland were staggered by the size and majesty of the air fleets.  Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje, a Dutch officer attached to the 82nd Airborne, thought the sight was “unbelievable.  Every plane the Allies possessed must have been engaged in this single scheme.”  In fact, some 4,700 aircraft were involved—the greatest number ever used on a single airborne mission.

The operation had begun in the predawn hours and continued on throughout the morning.  First, more than 1,400 Allied bombers had taken off from British airfields and had pounded German antiaircraft positions and troop concentrations in the Market-Garden area.  Then, at 9:45 A.m. and for two and one quarter hours more, 2,023 troop-carrying planes, gliders and their tugs swarmed into the air from twenty-four U.s. and British bases.  * C-47’s carrying paratroopers flew in long 45-plane formations.  More C-47’s and British bombers—Halifaxes, Stirlings and Albemarles—pulled 478 gliders.  In seemingly endless sky trains, these huge equipment- and troop-carrying gliders bounced behind their tow planes at the end of 300-foot-long ropes.  Swaying among the smaller Horsa and Waco gliders were massive slab- * Many official accounts give 10:25 A.m. as the time when the first Market aircraft left the ground.  Perhaps they had in mind the departure of the pathfinders, who arrived first.  From an examination of log books and air controllers’ time schedules, it is clear that the airlift began at 9:45 A.m.

sided Hamilcars, each with a cargo capacity of eight tons; they could hold a small tank or two 3-ton trucks with artillery or ammunition.  Above, below and on the flanks, protecting these huge formations, were almost 1,500 Allied fighters and fighter-bombers—British Spitfires, rocket-firing Typhoons, Tempests and Mosquitoes; U.s. Thunderbolts, Lightnings, Mustangs and low-level dive bombers.  There were so many planes in the air that Captain Neil Sweeney of the 101/ Airborne Division remembered that “it looked like we could get out on the wings and walk all the way to Holland.”

The British glider forces were the first to take off.  Farther north on the Market-Garden corridor than the Americans and with different requirements, General Urquhart needed the maximum in men, equipment and artillery—especially antitank guns—in the first lift, to capture and hold his objectives until the land forces could link up.  Therefore, the bulk of his division was glider-borne; 320 gliders carried the men, transport and artillery of Brigadier Philip “Pips” Hicks’s 1/ Airlanding Brigade.  They would reach landing zones west of Arnhem a little after 1 P.m. Thirty minutes later, Brigadier Gerald Lathbury’s 1/ Parachute Brigade, in 145 troop-carrying planes, would begin dropping.  Because the unwieldy gliders and tugs were slower—120 miles per hour versus 140 for the paratroop-carrier planes—these immense “sky trains”—or serials, as the airborne called them—had to be launched first.  From eight bases in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, gliders and tugs rolled down runways and rose in the air at a launch rate never before attempted: one combination per minute.  Forming up was especially intricate and dangerous.  Climbing slowly to altitude, the planes headed west over the Bristol Channel.  Then, speeds synchronized, the tugs and gliders echeloned to the right in pairs, turned back, flew over the takeoff bases and headed for a marshaling point above the town of Hatfield, north of London.

Even as the first British glider serials were forming up above the Bristol Channel, twelve British Stirling bombers and six U.s.

C-47’s began taking off at 10:25 A.m. for Holland.  In them were U.s.  and British pathfinders—the men who would land first to mark landing and drop zones for the Market forces.

Simultaneously, the men of the U.s. 82nd Airborne and the paratroop elements of the British First Division took off from bases around Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 625 troop-carrier planes and 50 C-47’s towing gliders.  With astonishing precision, the planes of the IX Troop Carrier Command left the ground at five- to twenty-second intervals.  In wave after wave they rendezvoused above the town of March, Cambridgeshire, and from there set out in three parallel streams to cross the coast at Aldeburgh.

At the same time, from southern airfields around Greenham Common, the 101/ Airborne took to the air, in 424 C-47,’s plus 70 gliders and tugs.  Forming up, they too passed over the traffic control point at Hatfield and flew east to cross the coast at Bradwell Bay.

In immense triple columns, together at least ten miles across and approximately a hundred miles long, the vast armada swept over the English countryside.  The 82nd Airborne and British 1/ Division, enroute to Nijmegen and Arnhem, flew along the northern track.  A special serial of 38 gliders carrying General Browning’s Corps headquarters, bound for Nijmegen, traveled with them.  On the southern route, passing over Bradwell Bay, the 101/ Airborne headed for its drop zones slightly north of Eindhoven.  By 11:55 A.m., the entire force—more than 20,000 troops, 511 vehicles, 330 artillery pieces and 590 tons of equipment—was off the ground.  First Lieutenant James J. Coyle of the 82nd Airborne, looking down on the English countryside from an altitude of only 1,500 feet, saw nuns waving from the courtyard of a convent.  He thought “the beautiful day and the nuns made a picture that had the quality of an oil painting.”  Waving back, he wondered “if they could possibly know who we were and where we were going.”

For the majority of the airborne troops, the mood of the initial

part of the journey, across England, was lighthearted.  To Private Roy Edwards of the 1/ Parachute Brigade, “everything was so serene it was like going on a bus outing to the seaside.”  Private A. G. Warrender remembers that “this was a perfect Sunday; a morning for a walk down a country lane and a pint at the local.”

The commanding officer of the Glider Pilot Regiment, Colonel George S.  Chatterton, piloting the glider carrying General Browning, described the Sunday as “an extremely fine day.  It did not seem possible that we were taking off for one of the greatest battles in history.” Chatterton was struck by Browning’s entourage and equipment.  With the General were his batman, headquarters’ medical officer, cook, as well as his tent and personal jeep.  Browning sat on an empty Worthington Beer crate between the pilot and copilot, and Chatterton noted that he was “immaculately dressed in a Barathea battle dress, with a highly polished Sam Browne belt, knife-edge-creased trousers, leather holster gleaming like glass, a swagger stick and spotless gray kid gloves.” The General, says Chatterton, “was in tremendous form, because he realized he had reached one of the climaxes of his career.  There was an air of immense gaiety.”

In another glider serial, the quiet Scot with the most difficult Market-Garden assignment, the 1/ Airborne Division’s General Roy Urquhart, thought it was “difficult not to feel excited that we were off at last.”  Yet the popular officer’s mind, as always, was on his men and the job that lay ahead.  Like Browning, he had an entourage.  Now, looking down the length of the Horsa glider—which was carrying his aide Roberts, batman Hancock, the Reverend G. A. Pare, padre of the Glider Pilot Regiment, a signaler, two military police, their motorcycles and the General’s jeep—Urquhart felt a pang of conscience.  He thought of his paratroopers, laden down with packs, guns and equipment, crowded into heavy transport planes.  Urquhart carried only a small shoulder pack, two hand grenades, a map case and a notebook.  He was bothered by his own comfort.

Almost up to the moment of takeoff Urquhart had been called

on to make difficult decisions.  Some hours before leaving, his chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, had received a telephone call from a senior American air force officer.  Was the mental asylum at Wolfheze to be bombed?  The American, Mackenzie had reported, “wanted a personal assurance from Urquhart that there were Germans in it and not lunatics; otherwise the Americans could not accept responsibility.”  The asylum was dangerously close to the division’s assembly point, and Urquhart’s staff believed it to be held by the Germans.  Mackenzie had accepted responsibility.  “On your head be it,” the American had replied.  Urquhart had approved his chief of staff’s action.  “I meant to be as prepared as possible and that’s all there was to it,” he remembered.

As Mackenzie was about to leave for his own glider, Urquhart had taken him privately aside.  “Look, Charles,” he had told Mackenzie, “if anything happens to me the succession of command should be as follows: first, Lathbury, then Hicks and Hackett in that order.”  Urquhart’s choice was based on experience.  “Everyone knew that Lathbury was my deputy,” he later recalled.  “Hackett was senior in rank to Hicks, but he was much younger and I was quite convinced that Hicks had more experience in handling infantry.  My decision was no reflection on Hackett’s ability to command.”  Perhaps, Urquhart reflected, he should have informed each of his brigadiers of his decision earlier, but he had “frankly considered the whole question quite academic.”  The chance of the division losing both Urquhart and Lathbury was remote.

Now, all decisions made, Urquhart idly watched “squadrons of fighters flashing past the glider trains.”  This was his first operational trip in a glider, and earlier he had taken a couple of airsickness pills.

His throat was dry and he had difficulty swallowing.  He was conscious,

too, that “Hancock, my batman, was watching me, a look of concern on

his face.  Like everyone else, he expected me to be airsick.”  Urquhart

did not oblige.  “We were in a huge stream of aircraft and I

concentrated on impressions.  We were committed.  We had made a good

plan.  I still wished we

could have gotten closer to the bridge, but I did not brood on it.”

In spite of the operational efficiency displayed in launching the giant armada, mishaps occurred almost immediately.  Just before takeoff, the port wing of one glider was chewed off by the propeller of a Stirling bomber.  No one was hurt.  As the glider carrying Lieutenant Alan Harvey Cox of the Airlanding Brigade lumbered into the air, it ran into trouble.  Low clouds obstructed the glider pilot’s view and he was unable to line up with the tail of his tug.  The glider went in one direction, the plane in another, the tow rope threatening to loop the glider’s wing and overturn it.  Unable to realign with his tug, the glider pilot grabbed for the red-topped release lever and cast off.  Cox’s glider landed without damage in a hay field at Sandford-on-Thames.  A more bizarre incident occurred in a C-47 carrying the men of the 82nd Airborne, who sat facing each other on opposite sides of the plane.  Five minutes after takeoff, Corporal Jack Bommer saw “the cargo hatch directly behind the men facing me spring open.”  The force of air almost sucked the men through the hatchway into space.  As they desperately hung on, recalls Bommer, “the pilot did a beautiful tail flip and the hatch slammed shut.”

Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who was so anxious to leave his base near Keevil and the activities of the mole in his mattress, now felt lucky to be alive.  After more than an hour of uneventful flight, his glider ran into cloud.  Emerging from the cloud bank, the glider pilot saw that the tow rope had twisted itself around the port wing.  Over the intercom to his tug, Nunn heard the glider pilot say, “I’m in trouble!