Bridge Too Far (30 page)

defeated is to strike hard within the first twenty-four hours,” he told

Von Rundstedt.  Model asked for anti-aircraft units, self-propelled

guns, tanks and infantry; and he wanted them on the move to Arnhem by

nightfall.  Von Rund-

stedt told him that such reinforcements as were available would be on the way.  Turning to Bittrich, Model said triumphantly, “Now, we’ll get reinforcements!”  Model had decided to operate from Doetinchem; but, although he was apparently recovered from the shock of his hasty departure from Oosterbeek, this time he was taking no chances of being caught unawares.  He refused accommodations at the castle; he would direct the battle from the gardener’s cottage on the grounds.

Bittrich’s early foresight was already having its effect.  Sections of Harzer’s Hohenstaufen Division were heading swiftly toward the battle zone.  Harmel’s Frundsberg Division—Harmel himself was expected back from Germany during the night—were on the move, too.  Bittrich had ordered Harzer to set up his headquarters in a high school in the northern Arnhem suburbs overlooking the city, and that transfer was underway.  But Harzer was chafing with impatience.  The armored vehicles that had been scheduled to leave for Germany in the early afternoon were still being refitted with tracks and guns.  Harzer had already moved the units closest to the British landing and drop zones into blocking positions at points west of Arnhem.  For the moment, he had only a few armored cars, several self-propelled guns, a few tanks and some infantry.  Still, Harzer hoped that by employing hit-and-run tactics he could halt and confuse British troops until the bulk of his division was again battle-ready.

Curiously, Harzer did not even know that Major Sepp Krafft’s SS Panzer Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion was in the area and, at the moment, the only unit in the path of the British airborne forces.  Harzer concentrated his own strength on the two major highways running into Arnhem: the Ede-Arnhem road and the Utrecht-Arnhem road.  Certain that the paratroopers must use these main arteries, he placed his units in a semicircular screen across the two highways.  By oversight, or perhaps because he lacked sufficient forces at the moment, Harzer failed to position any groups along a quiet secondary road running parallel to the northern bank of the Rhine.  It was the single unprotected route the British could take to the Arnhem bridge.

11

In their camouflage battle smocks and distinctive crash helmets, laden with weapons and ammunition, the men of Brigadier Lathbury’s 1/ Parachute Brigade were on the way to Arnhem.  Interspersed among the columns of marching troopers were jeeps pulling artillery pieces and four-wheeled carts loaded with guns and stores.  As General Roy Urquhart watched them pass, he remembered a compliment paid him some months before by General Horrocks.  “Your men are killers,” Horrocks had said admiringly.  At the time, Urquhart had considered the remark an overstatement.  On this Sunday, he was not so sure.  As the 1/ Brigade had moved off, Urquhart had felt a surge of pride.

The plan called for the three battalions of Lathbury’s brigade to converge on Arnhem, each from a different direction.  Lieutenant Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion was given the prime objective:

marching along a secondary road running close to the north bank of the Rhine, Frost’s men were to capture the main highway bridge.  En route, they were to take the railway and pontoon bridges west of the great highway crossing.  The 3rd Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel J. A. C.

Fitch, would move along the Utrecht-Arnhem road and approach the bridge

from the north, reinforcing Frost.  Once these two battalions had been

successfully launched, Lieutenant Colonel D. Dobie’s 1/ Battalion was

to advance along the main Ede-Arnhem highway—the most northerly

route—and occupy the high ground north of the city.  Lathbury had

given each route a code name.  Dobie’s, farthest north, was designated

“Leopard”; Fitch’s, in the middle,

was “Tiger”; and Frost’s, the most crucial route, was “Lion.”  Speeding ahead of the entire brigade, the jeeps of Major Freddie Gough’s reconnaissance squadron were expected to reach the bridge, seize it in a coup de main, and hold until Frost arrived.

So far, Urquhart thought, the initial phase was going well.  He was not unduly alarmed by the breakdown of communications within the division at this time.  He had experienced temporary signals disruption often in the North African desert campaigns.  Since he could not raise Brigadier Hicks’s 1/ Airlanding Brigade, whose job it was to hold the landing and drop zones for the air lifts on the following two days, Urquhart drove to Hicks’s headquarters.  The Airlanding Brigade, he learned, was in position, and Hicks was for the moment away directing the disposition of his battalions.  However, at Hicks’s headquarters, Urquhart received news that one vital part of the plan to take the Arnhem bridge had gone wrong.  He was told—erroneously—that most of Major Freddie Gough’s reconnaissance vehicles had been lost in glider crashes; no one at Hicks’s headquarters knew where Gough had gone.  Without waiting for Hicks to return, Urquhart drove back to his own headquarters.  He had to find Gough quickly and devise some alternative plan, but his greatest concern now was to warn Lathbury and, in particular, Frost, that the 2nd Battalion was on its own.  Frost would have to take the main Arnhem bridge without the aid of Gough’s planned surprise attack.

At Division, further bad news awaited Urquhart.  “Not only was there no word of Gough,” Urquhart recalls, “but apart from some short-range radio signals, headquarters communications had completely failed.  The 1/ Parachute Brigade and, indeed, the outside world, could not be contacted.”  Colonel Charles Mackenzie, Urquhart’s chief of staff, watched the General pace up and down, “restive and anxious for news.”

Urquhart ordered his signals officer, Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, to

investigate the “communications foul-up, see what had happened to the

radio equipment and then set it right.”  Messengers were also sent out

in search of Gough.  As time passed without any new information, the

worried Urquhart decided to wait no longer.  Normally, he

would have directed the battle from Division headquarters; but now, as each moment passed without communications, he was beginning to feel that this battle was anything but normal.  Turning to Mackenzie, he said, “I think I’ll go and have a look myself, Charles.”  Mackenzie did not try to stop him.  “At the time,” Mackenzie recalls, “since we were getting practically no information, it didn’t seem a particularly bad thing to do.”  Taking only his driver and a signalman in his jeep, Urquhart set out after Lathbury.  The time was 4:30 P.m.

Moving along the northern, Leopard route—the Ede-Arnhem road—Major Freddie Gough of the 1/ Airlanding reconnaissance unit was making good time.  Although the vehicles of A troop had failed to arrive, Gough had started off from the landing zone with the rest of the squadrons at 3:30 P.m. He was confident that he had sufficient jeeps for the coup de main attempt on the bridge.  “In fact,” he remembered, “I left several jeeps behind on the landing zone in reserve.  We had more than enough to get to Arnhem.”  Gough had even detached twelve men from his unit to make their way south to join the 2nd Battalion, moving on the Lion route to the bridge.  He was unaware that the loss of A troop’s jeeps had raised a flurry of rumors and misinformation.  * * Some accounts of the Arnhem battle claim that Gough’s unit could not operate because so many of his vehicles failed to arrive by glider.  “The failure, if it can be called that,” Gough says, “was not due to a lack of jeeps, but to the fact that no one had warned us that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions were in the area.”

From the beginning, Gough had had reservations about his recco unit’s role in the Arnhem plan.  Instead of a coup de main, Gough had urged that a screen of reconnaissance jeeps be sent ahead of each of the three battalions.  “In that way,” he says, “we would have quickly discovered the best and easiest way to reach the bridge.”  Failing that, he had asked that a troop of light tanks be brought in by glider to escort the coup de main force.  Both requests had been turned down.  Yet Gough had remained optimistic.  “I wasn’t the least bit concerned.

There were supposed to

be only a few old, gray Germans in Arnhem and some ancient tanks and guns.  I expected it to be a pushover.”

Now, as they moved swiftly along Leopard, the lead jeeps of the unit were suddenly ambushed by German armored cars and 20 mm.  guns.  Gough’s second in command, Captain David Allsop, happened to note the time.  It was exactly 4 P.m. Gough pulled out to drive to the head of the column and investigate.  “Just as I was on the point of going forward, I got a message saying that Urquhart wanted to see me immediately.  I didn’t know what the hell to do,” Gough says.  “I was under Lathbury, and I thought I should at least tell him I was going, but I had no idea where he was.  The unit was now in a heavy fire fight and pinned down in defensive positions near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Wolfheze.  I reckoned they would be all right for a time, so I turned around and headed back to Division headquarters on the landing zone.  That was at 4:30.”

At the precise moment that General Urquhart set out to find Lathbury, Gough was speeding back to Division to report to Urquhart.

All along the three strategic lines of march, the men of the 1/ Parachute Brigade were encountering jubilant, hysterical throngs of Dutch.  Many civilians from farms and outlying hamlets had followed the paratroopers from the time they left the landing zones, and as the crowds grew, the welcome seemed almost to overwhelm the march itself.  Captain Eric Mackay, traveling the southernmost, Lion route with Colonel Frost’s 2nd Battalion, was disturbed by the holiday atmosphere.

“We were hampered by Dutch civilians,” he says.  “Waving, cheering and

clapping their hands, they offered us apples, pears, something to

drink.  But they interfered with our progress and filled me with dread

that they would give our positions away.”  Lieutenant Robin Vlasto

remembers that “the first part of our march was in the nature of a

victory parade, and the civilians were quite delirious with joy.  It

all seemed so unbelievable that we almost expected to see Horrocks’ XXX Corps tanks coming out of Arnhem to meet us.  People lined the road and great trays of beer, milk and fruit were offered.  We had the greatest difficulty forcing the men to keep alive to the possibility of a German attack.”

Young Anje van Maanen, whose father was a doctor in Oosterbeek, recalls receiving an exuberant call from the Tromp family in Heelsum, just south of the British landing zone on Renkum Heath.  “We are free.  Free!”  the Tromps told her.  “The Tommies dropped behind our house and they are on their way to Oosterbeek.  They are so nice!  We are smoking Players and eating chocolate.”  Anje put the phone down, “crazy with joy.  We all jumped and danced around.  This is it!  An invasion!  Lovely!”  Seventeen-year-old Anje could hardly wait for her father to come home.  Dr.  van Maanen was delivering a baby at a patient’s home, and Anje thought it “very annoying, particularly now, because the husband of the woman was a Dutch Nazi.”  Mrs.  Ida Clous, the wife of an Oosterbeek dentist and a friend of the Van Maanens, also heard that the airborne troops were on their way.  She worked feverishly, hunting through boxes and sewing scraps to find every bit of orange cloth she possessed.  When the British got to Oosterbeek, she intended to rush outside with her three small children and greet the deliverers with small handmade orange flags.

Jan Voskuil, hiding out in the home of his wife’s parents in Oosterbeek, was torn between his own desire to head up the Utrecht road to greet the paratroopers and the need to prevent his father-in-law from coming with him.  The elder man was adamant.  “I’m seventy-eight years old and I’ve never been in a war before and I want to see it.” Voskuil’s father-in-law was finally persuaded to stay in the garden and Voskuil, joining streams of other civilians heading out to meet the British, was turned back by a policeman on the outskirts of Oosterbeek.  “It’s too dangerous,” the officer told the crowds.  “Go back.”

Voskuil walked slowly home.  There he ran into the same German soldier

who had asked for shelter when the bombing had begun during

the morning.  Now the soldier was in full uniform, with camouflage jacket, helmet and rifle.  He offered Voskuil some chocolates and cigarettes.  “I am going away now,” he said.  “The Tommies will come.” Voskuil smiled.  “Now, you will go back to Germany,” he said.  The soldier studied Voskuil for several seconds.  Then he shook his head slowly.  “No, sir,” he told Voskuil.  “We will fight.”  The Dutchman watched the German walk away.  “It begins now,” Voskuil thought, “but what can I do?”  Impatiently he paced the yard.  There was nothing to do but wait.

Unhampered by police restraints or warnings to stay indoors, Dutch farmers and their families lined each route of march in throngs.  Sergeant Major Harry Callaghan, on the middle, Tiger route, remembers a farm woman breaking through the crowds and running toward him with a pitcher of milk.  He thanked her and the woman smiled and said, “Good, Tommy.  Good.”  But, like Eric Mackay on the lower road, Callaghan, a Dunkirk veteran, was bothered by the number of civilians surrounding the troops.  “They ran along beside us wearing armbands, aprons, and little pieces of ribbon, all orange,” he remembers.  “Children, with little snippets of orange cloth pinned to their skirts or blouses, skipped along, shrieking with delight.  Most of the men were reaching in their packs to hand them chocolate.  It was such a different atmosphere that the men were behaving as if they were on an exercise.  I began to be concerned about snipers.”

As Callaghan had feared, the victory parade came to a sudden halt.  “It all happened so quickly,” he says.  “One moment we were marching steadily toward Arnhem; the next, we were scattered in the ditches.  Snipers had opened fire, and three dead airborne soldiers lay across the road.”  The veteran sergeant major wasted no time.  He had spotted a burst of flame from trees about fifty yards ahead.  As the Dutch scattered, Callaghan took a party of twelve men forward.  He stopped short of one tree and looked up.  Something flashed.  Raising his Sten gun, he fired directly into the tree.  A Schmeisser automatic pistol clattered to the ground and, as Callaghan sighted up along the trunk of the tree, he saw a German dangling limply from a rope.