Bridge Too Far (25 page)

objectives—the bridges and crossings over the vital fifteen-mile stretch of corridor ahead of the British ground forces.

Colonel General Kurt Student and his chief of staff, Colonel Reinhard, stood on the balcony of the General’s cottage near Vught and “simply stared, stunned, like fools.”  Student remembers clearly that “everywhere we looked, we saw chains of planes—fighters, troop carriers and cargo planes—flying over us.  We climbed onto the roof of the house to get a better idea of just where these units were going.”  Streams of planes seemed to be heading in the direction of Grave and Nijmegen and, only a few miles to the south near Eindhoven and Son, he could clearly see troop carriers—one after the other—coming in and dropping paratroopers and equipment.  Some aircraft flew so low that Student and Reinhard instinctively ducked.  “On the grounds of the headquarters, our clerks, quartermasters, drivers and signalmen were out in the open, firing with all sorts of weapons.  As usual, there was no sign of our own fighter planes.” Student was completely baffled.  “I could not tell what was happening or where these airborne units were going.  In these moments, I never once thought of the danger of our own position.”  But Student, the paratroop expert, was filled with admiration and envy.  “This mighty spectacle deeply impressed me.  I thought with reflection and longing of our own airborne operations and I said to Reinhard, “Oh, if ever I’d had such means at my disposal.  Just once, to have this many planes!””

Rein-

hard’s feelings were very much in the present.  “Herr General,” he told Student, “we’ve got to do something!”  They left the roof and went back to Student’s office.

Only the previous evening, Student, in his daily report, had warned, “Heavy columns of traffic south of the Maas-Schelde Canal indicate an impending attack.”  The problem was: had it already begun?  If so, then these airborne units were after the bridges around Eindhoven, Grave and Nijmegen.  All the spans were prepared for demolition and protected by special engineer parties and security detachments.  A bridge commander had been assigned to each crossing with strict orders to destroy the bridge in case of attack.  “The obvious move for the Allies,” it occurred to Student, “was to use airborne troops in this situation to seize the bridges before we could destroy them.”  At this time, Student did not even think of the importance of the Lower Rhine bridge at Arnhem.  “Get me Model,” he told Reinhard.

Reinhard picked up the phone to discover that the telephone lines were out.  The headquarters was already cut off.

In Oosterbeek, some thirty-seven miles away, at the Tafelberg Hotel, Lieutenant Gustav Sedelhauser, Model’s administration officer, was angry.  “Are you hung over from last night?”  he shouted into a field phone.  Unteroffizier Youppinger, one of the 250-man company which, under Sedelhauser, was assigned to protect Model, repeated what he had said.  At Wolfheze, “gliders are landing in our laps,” he insisted.  Sedelhauser slammed down the phone and rushed into the operations office, where he reported the message to a startled lieutenant colonel.  Together, they hurried to the dining room, where Model and his chief of staff General Krebs were at lunch.  “I’ve just had news that gliders are landing at Wolfheze,” the colonel said.  The operations officer, Colonel Tempelhof, stared; the monocle fell out of Krebs’s eye.  “Well, now we’re for it,” Tempelhof said.

Model jumped to his feet and issued a flurry of orders to evacu-

ate the headquarters.  As he headed out of the dining room to collect his own belongings, he shouted back over his shoulder, “They’re after me and this headquarters!”  Moments later, carrying only a small case, Model rushed through the Tafelberg’s entrance.  On the sidewalk he dropped the case, which flew open, spilling his linens and toilet articles.

Krebs followed Model outside in such haste that, Sedelhauser saw, “he had even forgotten his cap, pistol and belt.”  Tempelhof had not even had time to remove the war maps in the operations office.  Colonel Freyberg, the headquarters adjutant, was equally rushed.  As he passed Sedelhauser, he shouted, “Don’t forget my cigars.”  At his car, Model told his driver, Frombeck, “Quick!  Doetinchem!  Bittrich’s headquarters!”

Sedelhauser waited until the car drove off and then returned to the hotel.  In the operations office, he saw the war maps—showing positions all the way from Holland to Switzerland—still on a table.  He rolled them up and took them with him.  Then he ordered the Hartenstein Hotel and the Tafelberg immediately evacuated; all transport, he said, “every car, truck and motorbike, is to leave here immediately.”  The last report he received before leaving for Doetinchem was that the British were less than two miles away.  In all the confusion he completely forgot Freyberg’s cigars.

Surrounded by ground haze and the smoke and fire of burning buildings,

the mighty British glider fleet was landing.  Already the areas marked

by orange and crimson nylon strips were beginning

to look like vast aircraft parking lots.  Blue smoke eddied up from the two landing zones—“Reyers Camp Farm” to the north and “Renkum Heath” to the southwest—near Wolfheze.  From these zones, in chain after chain, tugs and gliders stretched back almost twenty miles to their approach point near the town of s’Hertogenbosch, southwest of Nijmegen.  Swarms of fighters protected these ponderous columns.  Traffic was so dense that pilots were reminded of the rush-hour congestion around London’s busy Piccadilly Circus.

The serials—each group separated from the next by a four-minute interval—flew slowly over the flat, water-veined Dutch countryside.  The landmarks pilots had been briefed to recognize now began to pass beneath them: the great wide rivers Maas and Waal and up ahead, the Lower Rhine.  Then, as each formation began its descent, men saw Arnhem off to the right and their vital objectives: the rail and highway bridges.  Incredibly, despite the R.a.f. prediction of intense antiaircraft fire, the immense glider cavalcade encountered virtually no resistance.  The preassault bombings had been far more effective around Arnhem than in the Eindhoven area.  Not a single tug or glider was shot down in making the approach.

With clocklike precision, the skilled pilots of the R.a.f. and the Glider Pilot Regiment came over the zones.  As gliders cast off, their tugs made climbing turns to free air space for the combinations coming up behind.  These intricate maneuvers and the heavy traffic were causing problems of their own.  Sergeant Pilot Bryan Tomblin remembers chaotic congestion over the landing zones.  “There were gliders, tugs, ropes and all sorts of things in the sky,” he recalls.  “You had to be on the lookout all the time.”

Staff Sergeant Victor Miller, piloting a Horsa, recalls coming in over

the Lower Rhine and finding it “unbelievably calm.”  Beyond, he

suddenly spotted his landing zone, with its “triangular-shaped woods

and little farm nestling in the far corner.”  Seconds later, Miller

heard the voice of his Stirling tug’s navigator.  “O.k. Number 2. When

you’re ready.”  Miller acknowledged.  “Good luck, Number 2,” the

navigator told him.  Miller immediately cast

off.  His tug disappeared, the tow rope flapping in its wake.  It would be dropped, Miller knew, “on the enemy as a parting gift before the Stirling turned onto its homeward course.”

The glider’s air speed fell off and the field loomed nearer.  Miller called for half-flaps and his copilot, Sergeant Tom Hollingsworth, instantly pushed a lever.  For a moment the glider bucked, “as the great flaps descending from underneath each wing braked against our speed.”  The landing zone, Miller estimated, was now less than a mile away.  “I reminded Tom to look out for gliders on his side.  One slid across and above us less than fifty yards away,” and, to Miller’s amazement, “swung in on the same course.  Another glider seemed to be drifting into us from starboard.  I don’t think the pilot even saw us, he was so intent on getting down in the field.”  To avoid collision, Miller deliberately dived under the incoming glider.  “A great black shape flashed over our cockpit, too close for my liking.  I was concentrating so hard to set down in one piece that I never wondered if the enemy was firing at us—not that we could have done much about it.”

Miller continued his descent with “tree tops leaping toward our floor boards and past the wings.  As the ground rushed up, another glider came alongside.  I pulled back on the wheel, leveled, we hit once, bounced about three feet, and came down to stay.  Tom had slammed on the brakes and we careened across the plowed field.  Then the wheels sank into soft soil and we ground to a halt fifty yards short of a heavy-looking line of trees.”  In the silence, after the continuous deafening roar of the slip stream, Miller heard the distant crackle of small-arms fire, “but my one thought was to get out of the glider before another crashed or landed on us.  I was the last man out.  I didn’t even pause, but jumped straight through the ramp door and hit the ground of Holland, four feet below, rather hard.”

The glider in which Signalman Graham Marples was riding circled and

came back over its landing zone because of the congestion.  “But, by

then, we had run out of wind,” Marples remembers.  “I saw trees coming

through the glider floor.  They just ripped the floor to pieces, and

the next thing I knew, we

nosed over and came down.  I could hear everything breaking, like dry twigs snapping.  We landed squarely on our nose but no one was hurt except for a few scratches and bruises.”  Later, the pilot told Marples he had pulled up to avoid collision with another glider.

Many gliders, having surmounted all the problems of the long trip, touched down to disaster.  Staff Sergeant George Davis stood near his empty Horsa and watched other gliders come in.  One of the first to land, Davis had brought in thirty-two men of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade.  He saw two gliders “almost side by side bump across the landing zone and into the trees.  The wings of both were sheared off.”  Seconds later, another Horsa rumbled in.  Its speed was such that Davis knew it would never be able to stop in time.  The glider plowed into the trees.  No one got out.  With his copilot, Staff Sergeant Williams, Davis ran to the glider and looked into the plexiglass-covered cockpit.  Everyone inside was dead.  A 75 mm.  howitzer had broken from its chain mooring, crushing the gun crew and decapitating the pilot and copilot.

Lieutenant Michael Dauncey had just landed his glider—carrying a jeep, trailer and six gunners from an artillery battery—when he saw a huge eight-ton Hamilcar touch down.  “The field was soft,” he recalls, “and I saw the nose of the Hamilcar digging up earth in front of it.” Weight and ground speed drove it deeper until the huge tail rose up in the air and the Hamilcar flipped over on its back.  Dauncey knew “it was useless to try to dig them out.  A Horsa’s flat on top but a Hamilcar’s got a hump where the pilots sit, and we knew the pilots were finished.”

Making his approach in another Hamilcar, Staff Sergeant Gordon Jenks

saw the same crash and immediately deduced that the ground ahead was

too soft.  Instantly, he decided against landing in the field.  “I

reckoned if we went into a dive right then,” he remembers, “we would

have enough speed for me to hold her off the deck until we had cleared

the fence and got safely into the next field.”  Jenks pushed the

control column forward, dived, then leveled out a few feet above the

ground.  Easing the huge aircraft

gently over the fence, Jenks “put her down in the far field as lightly as a feather.”

All over the landing zones now the tails of gliders were being unbolted and swung back, and artillery pieces, equipment, stores, jeeps and trailers were being unloaded.  The men in Lance Corporal Henry Brook’s glider, like many others, found that the unloading maneuver was fine in theory but more difficult in practice.  “There were eight pins with a protective wire holding the glider tail on,” Brook explained.  “Back in England in practice exercises, you could always get the tail off and jeep and trailer out in two minutes flat.  In action, it was different.  We cut the wire and got the pins out but the tail wouldn’t budge.” Brook and the other troopers finally chopped it off.  Lance Bombardier J. W. Crook was similarly frustrated, but a nearby jeep came to the aid of his men and, with its hawser, yanked off the tail.

All over the two zones men were beginning to salvage cargo from wrecked gliders.  The crash of two giant Hamilcars was a serious loss.  They contained a pair of 17-pound artillery pieces plus three-ton trucks and ammunition trailers.  But all of the fifteen 75 mm.  pack howitzers of the 1/ Airlanding Light Regiment artillery arrived safely.

Most men who came in by glider recall a strange, almost eerie silence immediately after landing.  Then, from the assembly point, men heard the skirl of bagpipes playing “Blue Bonnets.”  At about the same time, soldiers on the edge of Renkum Heath saw Dutch civilians wandering aimlessly through the woods or hiding in fright.  Lieutenant Neville Hay of the Phantom unit remembers that “it was a sobering sight.  Some were in white hospital gowns and seemed to be herded along by attendants.  Men and women capered about, waving, laughing and jabbering.  They were obviously quite mad.”  Glider Pilot Victor Miller was startled by voices in the woods.  Then, “groups of weird white-clothed men and women filed past.”  It was only later that the troopers learned the strangely behaved civilians were inmates from the bombed Wolfheze Psychiatric Institute.

General Urquhart had landed at Renkum Heath.  He too was struck by the stillness.  “It was,” he recalls, “incredibly quiet.  Unreal.”  While his chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, set up the division’s tactical headquarters at the edge of the woods, Urquhart headed for the parachute dropping zones, four hundred yards away.  It was nearly time for Brigadier Lathbury’s 1/ Parachute Brigade to arrive.  From the distance came the drone of approaching aircraft.  The bustle and activity all over the glider zones paused as men looked up to see the long lines and C-47’s.  Small-arms and antiaircraft fire during the paratroop drop was as limited and spasmodic as during the glider landings.  At exactly 1:53 P.m., and for the next fifteen minutes, the sky was filled with brilliant-colored parachutes as the 1/ Brigade began jumping.  Some 650 parapacks with bright-yellow, red and brown chutes—carrying guns, ammunition and equipment—fell rapidly through the streams of troopers.  Other supply chutes, pushed out of the planes before the men jumped, floated down with a variety of cargo, including miniature foldable motorcycles.  Many already overburdened paratroopers also jumped with large kitbags.  In theory, these were to be lowered by a cord just before the men touched ground.  Scores of the packs broke away from troopers and smashed on the zones.  Several contained precious radio sets.