Bridge Too Far (47 page)

Barlow never reached the battalions.  Somewhere en route he was killed.  “He simply vanished,” Urquhart recalls, and the body was never found.

The arrival of the Poles in the third lift was of almost equal urgency.  They would now land directly on a prepared enemy on the southern approaches of the bridge, as Frost knew only too well; and by now, Urquhart reasoned, the Germans were obviously reinforced by armor.  The drop could be a slaughter.  In an effort to stop them and even though communications were uncertain—no one knew whether messages were getting through—Urquhart sent a warning message and requested a new drop zone.  At rear Corps headquarters the signal was never received.  But it was irrelevant.  In yet another setback, fog covered many of the airfields in England where the planes and gliders of the vital third lift were readying to go.

The corridor through which Horrocks’ tanks had to drive was open once again.  At Son, forty-six miles south of Arnhem, engineers watched the first British armor thud across the temporary Bailey bridge they had erected.  The Guards Armored Division was once more on its way, the drive now led by the Grenadiers.  Now, at 6:45 A.m. on September 19, the Garden forces were behind schedule by thirty-six hours.

No one in this sector of the corridor could guess as yet what that time loss would mean in the final reckoning—and worse was to come.  The great Waal bridge at Nijmegen, thirty-five miles north, was still in German hands.  If it was not taken intact and soon, airborne commanders feared the Germans would blow it up.

That fear gave urgency to the armored drive.  To General Gavin, General

Browning, the Corps commander, and to Horrocks, the Nijmegen bridge was

now the most critical piece in the

plan.  As yet the commanders did not know the true plight of the 1/ British Airborne Division.  German propaganda broadcasts had boasted that General Urquhart was dead * and his division smashed, but there had been no news at all from Division itself.  In the tank columns men believed that Market-Garden was going well.  So did General Taylor’s Screaming Eagles.  “To the individual 101/ trooper, the sound of the tanks, the sight of their guns was both an assurance and a promise,” General S. L. A. Marshall was later to write—“an assurance that there was a plan and a promise that the plan might work.”  * According to Bittrich the Germans learned from P.o.w.’s that Urquhart was either dead or missing and also, he claims, “we were monitoring radio messages and listening to phone calls.”

As the tanks rumbled by, the watching troopers of General Taylor’s 101/ took just pride in their own achievements.  Against unexpectedly strong resistance they had taken and held the fifteen-mile stretch of road from Eindhoven up to Veghel.  Along the route men waved and cheered as armored cars of the Household Cavalry, the tanks of the Grenadiers and the mighty mass of XXX Corps swept by.  In minutes the column moved from Son to Veghel.  Then, with the kind of dash that Montgomery had envisioned for the entire drive, the armored spearhead, flanked by cheering, flag-waving Dutch crowds, sped on, reaching its first destination at Grave at 8:30 A.m. There, the tanks linked up with Gavin’s 82nd.  “I knew we had reached them,” recalls Corporal William Chennell, who was in one of the lead armored cars, “because the Americans, taking no chances, halted us with warning fire.”

Moving quickly on, the first tanks reached the Nijmegen suburbs at

midday.  Now two thirds of the vital Market-Garden corridor had been

traversed.  The single road, jammed with vehicles, could have been

severed at any time had it not been for the vigilant, tenacious

paratroopers who had fought and died to keep it open.  If Montgomery’s

bold strategy was to succeed, the corridor was the lifeline which alone

could sustain it.  Men felt the heady excitement of success.  According

to official pronounce-

ts, including those from Eisenhower’s headquarters, everything was going according to plan.  There was not even a hint of the dire predicament that was slowly engulfing the men at Arnhem.

Yet, General Frederick Browning was uneasy.  During the afternoon of the eighteenth he met with General Gavin.  The Corps commander had received no news from Arnhem.  Other than scant Dutch underground information, Browning’s communications men had not received a single situation report.  Despite official announcements that the operation was proceeding satisfactorily, messages relayed to Browning from his own rear headquarters and from General Dempsey’s Second Army had roused in him a gnawing concern.  Browning could not rid himself of the feeling that Urquhart might be in grievous trouble.

Two reports in particular fed his anxiety.  German strength and reaction in Arnhem had unquestionably proved heavier and faster than the planners had ever anticipated.  And R.a.f. photo-reconnaissance information indicated that only the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was held by the British.  But even now, Browning was unaware that two panzer divisions were in Urquhart’s sector.  Disturbed by the lack of communications and nagged by his suspicions, Browning warned Gavin that the “Nijmegen bridge must be taken today.  At the latest, tomorrow.” From the moment he had first learned of Market-Garden, the bridge at Arnhem had worried Browning.  Montgomery had confidently expected Horrocks to reach it within forty-eight hours.  At the time, Browning’s view was that Urquhart’s paratroopers could hold for four days.  Now, on D plus two—one day short of Browning’s estimate of the division’s ability to function alone—although unaware of the grave condition of the 1/ British Airborne Division, Browning told Gavin, “we must get to Arnhem as quickly as possible.”  * * Many British accounts of Arnhem, including Chester Wilmot’s excellent Struggle for Europe, imply that Browning knew more about Urquhart’s situation at this time than he actually did.  A careful check of the scattered and inconclusive information passed on to Corps headquarters shows that the first direct message from the Arnhem sector reached Browning at 8:25 A.m. on the nineteenth.  Two others arrived during the course of the day and dealt with the bridge, troop locations and a request for air support.  Although many messages giving the true picture had been sent, they had not been received, and these three gave no indication that Urquhart’s division was being methodically destroyed.  In some quarters, Montgomery and Browning have been unjustly criticized for not taking more immediate and positive steps.  At this time they knew virtually nothing of Urquhart’s critical problems.

Immediately after the link-up in the 82nd’s sector, Browning called a conference.  The Guards’ lead armored cars were sent back to pick up the XXX Corps commander, General Horrocks, and the commander of the Guards Armored Division, General Allan Adair.  With Browning, the two officers drove to a site northeast of Nijmegen, overlooking the river.  From there Corporal William Chennell, whose vehicle had picked up one of the two officers, stood with the little group observing the bridge.  “To my amazement,” Chennell remembers, “we could see German troops and vehicles moving back and forth across it, apparently completely unconcerned.  Not a shot was fired, yet we were hardly more than a few hundred yards away.”

Back at Browning’s headquarters, Horrocks and Adair learned for the first time of the fierce German opposition in the 82nd’s area.  “I was surprised to discover upon arrival that we did not have the Nijmegen bridge,” Adair says.  “I assumed it would be in airborne hands by the time we reached it and we’d simply sweep on through.”  Gavin’s troopers, the generals now learned, had been so hard-pressed to hold the airhead that companies had been recalled from Nijmegen to protect the landing zones from massed enemy assaults.  Elements of the 508th Battalion had been unable to make any headway against the strong SS units holding the bridge approaches.  The only way to take the bridge quickly, Browning believed, was by a combined tank and infantry assault.  “We’re going to have to winkle these Germans out with more than airborne troops,” Browning told Adair.

The Nijmegen bridge was the last crucial link in the Market-Garden plan.  With the time limit that Browning had placed on the British paratroopers’ ability to hold out about to expire, the pace of the operation must be accelerated.  Eleven miles of corridor remained to be forced open.  The Nijmegen bridge, Browning stressed, had to be captured in record time.

Major General Heinz Harmel, the Frundsberg Division commander, was irritable and more than a little frustrated.  Despite constant pressure from General Bittrich, he had still been unable to bludgeon Frost and his men from the Arnhem bridge.  “I was beginning to feel damn foolish,” Harmel recalls.

By now he knew that the paratroopers were nearing the end of their supplies and ammunition.  Also their casualties, if his own were an example, were extremely high.  “I had determined to bring tanks and artillery fire to bear and level every single building they held,” Harmel says, “but in view of the fight they were putting up, I felt I should first ask for their surrender.”  Harmel ordered his staff to arrange for a temporary truce.  They were to pick a British prisoner of war to go to Frost with Harmel’s ultimatum.  The soldier selected was a newly captured engineer, twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Stanley Halliwell, one of Captain Mackay’s sappers.

Halliwell was told to enter the British perimeter under a flag of

truce.  There he was to tell Frost that a German officer would arrive

to confer with him about surrender terms.  If Frost agreed, Halliwell

would once more return to the bridge to stand unarmed with Frost until

the German officer joined them.  “As a P.o.w. I was supposed to return

to the Jerries as soon as I delivered the message and got the Colonel’s

answer and I didn’t like that part of the business at all,” Halliwell

says.  The Germans brought Halliwell close to the British perimeter,

where, carrying the truce flag, he crossed into the British-held sector

and arrived at Frost’s headquarters.  Nervously, Halliwell explained

the situation to Frost.  The Germans, he said, believed it pointless

for the fight to continue.  The British were surrounded with no hope of

relief.  They had no choice but to die or surrender.  Questioning

Halliwell, Frost learned that “the enemy seemed to be most disheartened

at their own losses.”  His own spirits lifted momentarily at the news,

and he remembers thinking that “if only more

ammunition would arrive, we would soon have our SS opponents in the bag.”  As to the German request for negotiations, Frost’s answer to Halliwell was explicit.  “Tell them to go to hell,” he said.

Halliwell was in full agreement.  As a P.o.w. he was expected to return, but he did not relish the idea of repeating the Colonel’s exact words and, he pointed out to Frost, it might prove difficult to return through the lines.  “It is up to you to make that decision,” Frost said.  Halliwell had already done so.  “If it’s all the same with you, Colonel,” he told Frost, “I’ll stay.  Jerry will get the message sooner or later.”

On the far side of the ramp Captain Eric Mackay had just received a similar invitation, but he chose to misinterpret it.  “I looked out and saw a Jerry standing with a not-very-white hanky tied to a rifle.  He shouted “Surrender!”  I promptly assumed that they wanted to surrender, but perhaps they meant us.”  In the now nearly demolished schoolhouse in which his small force was holding out, Mackay, still thinking the German was making a surrender offer, thought the whole idea impractical.  “We only had two rooms,” he says.  “We would have been a bit cramped with prisoners.”

Waving his arms at the German, Mackay shouted, “Get the hell out of here.  We’re taking no prisoners.”  The medical orderly, Pinky White, joined Mackay at the window.  “Raus!”  he shouted.  “Beat it!”  Amid a series of hoots and catcalls, other troopers took up the cry.  “Bugger off!  Go back and fight it out, you bastard.”  The German seemed to get the point.  As Mackay recalls, he turned around and walked quickly back to his own building, “still waving his dirty hanky.”

Harmel’s attempt to seek a surrender from the spirited, beleaguered men on the bridge had failed.  The battle began again in all its fury.

At fog-covered bases near Grantham, England, the 1/ Polish Parachute Brigade was waiting to take off.  Zero hour for the drop had been scheduled for 10 A.m., but weather had forced a five-hour postponement.  The brigade was now due to come in at 3 P.m. Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski, the Poles’ fiercely independent, mercurial commander, had kept his men by their planes during the wait.  It seemed to the fifty-two-year-old Sosabowski that England was fogged in every morning.  If the weather cleared more quickly than expected, orders might change and Sosabowski intended to be ready to go on short notice.  He felt that every hour mattered now.  Urquhart, Sosabowski believed, was in trouble.

Apart from instinct, there was no specific reason for Sosabowski’s feeling.  But the Market-Garden concept had not appealed to him from the outset.  He was certain that the drop zones were too far from the bridge to effect surprise.  Further, no one in England appeared to know what was happening in Arnhem, and Sosabowski had been alarmed to discover at headquarters that communications with the 1/ British Airborne Division had broken down.  All that was known was that the north end of the Arnhem bridge was in British hands.  Since there had been no change in the plan, Sosabowski’s men, dropping to the south near the village of Elden, would take the other end.

But the General was worried about the lack of information.  He could

not be sure that Urquhart’s men were still on the bridge.  Liaison

officers from Browning’s rear headquarters, on whom Sosabowski was

dependent for news, seemed to know little about

what was actually happening.  He had thought of going to First Allied Airborne Army Headquarters at Ascot to talk directly with General Lewis Brereton, the commanding officer.  Protocol dictated otherwise.  His troops were under General Browning’s command, and Sosabowski was reluctant to bypass military channels.  Any alterations in the plan should come only from Browning, and none had been received.  Yet, Sosabowski felt that something had gone wrong.  If the British were holding only the north end of the bridge, the enemy had to be in strength to the south and the Poles might well have the fight of their lives.  Sosabowski’s transport and artillery, due to leave in forty-six gliders from the southern Down Ampney and Torrant Rushton bases, were still scheduled for a midday takeoff.  Since that part of the plan remained unchanged, Sosabowski tried to convince himself that all would go well.