Bridge Too Far (31 page)

Now, too, on the middle route, other men from Lieutenant Colonel Fitch’s 3rd Battalion were suddenly engaged in an unexpected encounter.  Private Frederick Bennett had just passed around some apples to other troopers when a German staff car came speeding down the road.  Bennett opened up with his Sten gun.  The car screeched to a stop and tried to back up.  But it was too late.  Everyone near Bennett began firing and the car came to an abrupt halt, riddled with bullets.  As the troopers cautiously approached, they saw that the driver was hanging halfway out of the car.  The body of a senior German officer had been thrown partly out another door.  To Bennett “he looked like some high-ranking Jerry officer,” as indeed he was.  Major General Kussin, the Arnhem town commander, had disregarded the warning of SS Major Sepp Krafft to avoid the main Utrecht-Arnhem road.  * * Kussin, on Model’s orders issued as the Field Marshal fled east that morning, had informed Hitler’s headquarters of the landings and of Model’s narrow escape.  The Allied assault had caused Hitler hysterical concern.  “If such a mess happens here,” he conjectured, “here I sit with my own Supreme Command—Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop.  Well, then, this is a most worthwhile catch.  That’s obvious.  I would not hesitate to risk two parachute divisions here if with one blow I could get my hands on the whole German command.”

Many men recall that the first serious German opposition began after the first hour of march—around 4:30 P.m. Then two of the three battalions—Dobie’s, on the northern route, and Fitch’s, in the center—were unexpectedly engaged in fierce enemy hit-and-run attacks.  Major Gough’s reconnaissance unit, now commanded by Captain Allsop, was desperately trying to find a way to outflank the German forces and clear a path for Dobie’s 1/ Battalion.  But, according to Allsop, “each movement we made was blunted by an enemy force in front of us.” Trooper William Chandler of the reconnaissance unit remembers that as his C Troop explored the terrain, “German bullets came so close and so thick that they almost stung as they went by.”

As the battalion approached Wolfheze, it was almost completely stopped.

“We halted,” Private Walter Boldock recalls.  “Then we started off

again.  Then we halted and dug in.  Next, we moved on again, changing

direction.  Our progress was dictated by the success of the lead

companies.  Mortar bombs and bullets

harassed us all the way.”  Beside a hedge, Boldock saw a sergeant he knew, lying seriously wounded.  Farther ahead, he came upon the smoldering body of a lieutenant.  He had been hit by a phosphorus bomb.  To another soldier, Private Roy Edwards, “it just seemed we kept making a detour of the countryside and getting into running battles all afternoon.”

The paratroopers were stunned by the ferociousness of the unanticipated enemy attacks.  Private Andrew Milbourne, on the northern route, heard firing in the distance off to the south and was momentarily glad that the 1/ Battalion had been given the assignment to hold the high ground north of Arnhem.  Then, nearing Wolfheze, Milbourne realized that the column had swung south off the main road.  He saw the railway station and, close to it, a tank.  His first reaction was one of elation.  “My God!”  he thought, “Monty was right.  The Second Army’s here already!” Then, as the turret swung slowly around, Milbourne saw that a black cross was painted on the tank.  Suddenly, he seemed to see Germans everywhere.  He dived into a ditch and, raising his head cautiously, began looking for a good spot to position his Vickers machine gun.

Sergeant Reginald Isherwood saw the same tank.  A jeep towing a light artillery piece drove up and started to turn around in order to engage it.  “One of their sergeants yelled, “We’d better fire before they do.  Otherwise we’ve had it,”” Isherwood recalls.  “The gun was swung around like lightning, but as our man yelled “Fire!”  I heard the German commander do the same.  The Jerries must have got their shell off one tenth of a second sooner than us.”  The tank scored a direct hit.  The jeep exploded and the gun crew were killed.

In the mounting confusion and the intense fire from all sides, it was

now clear to Colonel Dobie that the opposition in front of him was

heavier than anyone had expected.  Nor did he believe it was still

possible to occupy the high ground north of Arnhem.  He was unable to

raise Brigadier Lathbury by radio, and his casualties were mounting by

the minute.  Dobie decided to side-slip the

battalion still farther south and attempt to join up with Frost going for the main Arnhem bridge.

The breakdown of communications and subsequent lack of direction was making it impossible for battalion commanders to know with any clarity what was happening now.  In the unfamiliar countryside, with maps that often proved highly inaccurate, companies and platoons were frequently out of touch with one another.  At a crossroads near the stretch of highway where men of Colonel Fitch’s 3rd Battalion had killed General Kussin, the British caught the full brunt of SS Major Krafft’s rocket-propelled mortars and machine guns.  The marching columns broke as men scattered into the woods.  The screeching mortars, exploding in air bursts above their heads, hurled deadly fragments in every direction.

Signalman Stanley Heyes remembers the intense enemy harassment vividly.  He sprinted for some woods and dropped a spare radio transmitter; bending to recover it he was struck in the ankle.  Heyes managed to crawl into the woods.  As he sank down in the underbrush, he realized that the man alongside him was German.  “He was young and as frightened as I was,” Heyes says, “but he used my field dressing on my ankle.  A short time later we both were wounded again by the mortar fire and we just lay there waiting for someone to pick us up.”  Heyes and the young German would remain together until well after dark, when British stretcher-bearers found and evacuated them.

Like the 1/ Battalion, the 3rd too was pinned down.  After two hours on the road, both battalions had covered a bare two and a half miles.  Now, Colonel Fitch reached the same conclusion as Dobie on the upper road; he too would have to find an alternate route to the Arnhem bridge.  Time was precious, and the bridge was still a good four miles away.

In the woods around Wolfheze SS Major Sepp Krafft was convinced he was

surrounded.  He estimated that the British

outnumbered his understrength battalion by twenty to one.  But, although he considered his defense “insane,” he could hardly believe the success of his blocking action.  The rocket-propelled mortars had created havoc among the British, and his men now reported that paratroopers moving along the Utrecht-Arnhem road were halted in some places, and at others appeared to be abandoning the main road entirely.  Krafft still believed that his was the only German unit in the area, and he had no illusions about stopping the British for long.  He was running out of mortar ammunition and suffering heavy casualties, and one of his lieutenants had deserted.  Still, Krafft was ebullient about “the courageous impetuosity of my young lads.”  The ambitious Krafft, who would later write a fulsome self-serving report to Himmler on his Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion’s actions, had no idea that his “young lads” were now being bolstered by the tanks, artillery and armored cars of Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer’s Hohenstaufen Division only a mile or two east of Krafft’s own headquarters.

Major Freddie Gough was totally baffled.  Urquhart’s message summoning him back to Division had carried no hint of what the General had in mind.  When he left the Leopard route of the 1/ Battalion, Gough brought back with him four escort jeeps and troops of his reconnaissance unit.  Now, at Division headquarters, Urquhart’s chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, could not enlighten him either.  The General, Mackenzie said, had gone off in search of Brigadier Lathbury, whose headquarters was following Colonel Frost’s battalion along the southern, Lion route.  Taking his escort, Gough set out once more.  Surely, someplace along the route, he would find either one officer or the other.

General Urquhart’s jeep sped down the Utrecht-Arnhem highway and turned south off the main artery onto a side road that led him to Frost’s Lion route.  Within a few minutes he caught up with the rear elements of the 2nd Battalion.  They were moving single file, along both sides of the road.  Urquhart could hear firing in the distance, but it seemed to him “there was a lack of urgency.  Everyone appeared to be moving slowly.” Driving swiftly along the cobbled road, Urquhart reached Frost’s headquarters company only to discover that Frost was up with the leading units, which had run into German opposition.  “I tried to impart a sense of urgency that I hoped would be conveyed to Frost,” Urquhart writes, “and told them about the ill-fortune of the Recco Squadron.”  Learning that Lathbury had gone up to the middle road to see how the 3rd Battalion was doing, Urquhart retraced his route.  Once again, he and Gough would miss each other by minutes.

Reaching the rear elements of the 3rd Battalion on the Tiger route, the General was told that Lathbury had gone forward.  He followed.  At a crossroads on the Utrecht-Arnhem road, Urquhart found the Brigadier.  The area was under devastating mortar fire.  “Some of these bombs were falling with unsettling accuracy on the crossroads and in the woodland where many of the Third Battalion were under cover,” Urquhart was later to write.  “This was the first real evidence to come my way of the speed and determination of the German reaction.”  * * Major General R.  E. Urquhart, C.b., D.s.o. (with Wilfred Greatorex), Arnhem, p. 40.

Taking cover in a slit trench, Urquhart and Lathbury discussed the situation.  Both officers were worried about the slow progress of the brigade, and now the critical lack of communications was paralyzing their own efforts to command.  Lathbury was completely out of touch with the 1/ Battalion and had only intermittent communication with Frost.  It was apparent that both were able to direct operations only in the area where they physically happened to be.  For the moment, Lathbury’s concern was to get the 3rd Battalion off the crossroads, out of the surrounding woods and on the move again.  Urquhart decided to try to contact Division headquarters on his jeep’s radio.  As he neared the vehicle, he saw it had been struck by a mortar and his signalman was badly wounded.  Although the radio set seemed undamaged, Urquhart could not raise Division.  “I cursed the appalling communications,” Urquhart later wrote.  “Lathbury dissuaded me from attempting to go back to my own headquarters.  The enemy was now thick between us and the landing zones … I decided he was right … and I stayed.  But it was at this point that I realized I was losing control of the situation.”

The men of the 1/ and 3rd battalions were engaging in constant, bitter skirmishes.  Hardened and desperate Waffen SS troopers, inferior in numbers but bolstered by half-tracks, artillery and tanks, were reducing the British advance on the two upper roads to a crawl.  In the confusion, men were separated from their officers and from one another as companies scattered into the woods or fought along side roads and in the back gardens of houses.  The Red Devils had recovered from the initial surprise of the German armored strength and, though taking heavy casualties, individually and in small groups they were striking back tenaciously.  Still, there was little chance that the 1/ and 3rd battalions could reach their Arnhem objectives as planned.  Now everything depended upon Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion, moving steadily along the lower Rhine road, the secondary route that the Germans had largely dismissed.

Although Frost’s battalion had been held up briefly several

times by enemy fire, he had refused to allow his men to scatter or deploy.  His spearheading A Company, commanded by Major Digby Tatham-Warter, pressed forward, leaving stragglers to join the companies coming up behind.  From prisoners taken by the advance parties, Frost learned that an SS company was believed to be covering the western approaches of Arnhem.  Using some captured transport as well as their own jeeps to scout ahead and to the sides, the battalion moved steadily on.  A little after 6 P.m., the first of Frost’s objectives, the railway bridge over the Lower Rhine slightly southeast of Oosterbeek, came into view.  According to plan, Major Victor Dover’s C Company peeled off and headed for the river.  The bridge looked empty and undefended as they approached.  Lieutenant Peter Barry, twenty-one, was ordered to take his platoon across.  “It was quiet when we started out,” Barry recalls.  “As we ran across the fields I noticed that there were dead cattle everywhere.”  Barry’s platoon was within 300 yards of the bridge when he saw “a German run onto the bridge from the other side.  He reached the middle, knelt down, and started doing something.  Immediately, I told one section to open fire and a second section to rush the bridge.  By this time, the German had disappeared.”

Barry recalls that they “got onto the bridge and began racing across at full speed.  Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion and the bridge went up in our faces.”  Captain Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers felt the ground shake under the impact.  “A yellow-orange flame punched up and then black smoke rose over the bridge.  I think the second span from the south bank was blown,” Mackay says.  On the bridge, under cover of smoke bombs, Lieutenant Barry ordered his men off the wreckage and back to the northern bank.  As the platoon began to move, Germans hidden across the river opened fire.  Barry was hit in the leg and arm and two other men were wounded.  Watching the troopers return through the smoke and fire, Mackay, who had been uneasy about the operation from the beginning, remembers thinking, “Well, there goes number one.”

Colonel Frost was more

philosophical.  “I knew one of the three bridges was gone, but it was the least important.  I didn’t realize then what a disadvantage it would be.”  It was now 6:30 P.m. and there were two more bridges to go.

It had taken the Hohenstaufen Division engineers five hours to reassemble all the tanks, half-tracks and armored personnel carriers that Harzer had planned to send back to Germany.  Newly decorated Captain Paul Gr@abner, his forty-vehicle reconnaissance battalion ready, now set out from Hoenderloo Barracks, north of Arnhem, and drove quickly south.  Harzer had instructed him to make a sweep of the area between Arnhem and Nijmegen to assess the strength of the Allied airborne troops in that area.  Gr@abner raced swiftly through Arnhem and, by radio, informed Hohenstaufen headquarters that the city seemed almost deserted.  There was no sign of enemy troops.  A little before 7 P.m., Gr@abner’s unit crossed over the great Arnhem highway bridge.  A mile past the southern end, Gr@abner stopped his car to report, “No enemy.  No paratroopers.”  Mile after mile, his light armored cars slowly patrolling both sides of the highway, Gr@abner’s radio messages conveyed the same information.  At Nijmegen itself the news was unchanged.  On orders of Hohenstaufen headquarters, Gr@abner was then instructed to further patrol the outskirts of Nijmegen and then return to headquarters.