Bridge Too Far (49 page)

Some forty miles south along the highway, General Maxwell Taylor’s 101/ troopers were now fighting hard to keep the corridor open.  But the German Fifteenth Army’s fierce defense at Best was draining Taylor’s forces.  More and more men were being caught up in the bitter engagement that one division intelligence officer wryly termed “a minor error in estimate.”  Pressure was building all along Taylor’s 15-mile sector, which the Screaming Eagles had newly named “Hell’s Highway.” It was now obvious that the enemy’s intent was to cut off Horrocks’ tank spearhead, using Best as the base.

The jammed columns of vehicles massing the highway were easy targets for artillery fire.  Bulldozers and tanks roamed constantly up and down the road, pushing wreckage out of the convoys to keep the columns rolling.  Since Sunday, Best, the minor secondary objective, had grown to such proportions that it threatened to overpower all other action along Taylor’s stretch of road.  Now, the 101/ commander was determined to crush the enemy at Best completely.

Early Tuesday afternoon, with the support of British tanks, Taylor threw almost the entire 502nd Regiment against Von Zangen’s men at Best.  The mammoth attack caught the enemy by surprise.  Bolstered by the recently arrived 327th Glider Infantry Regiment and by British armor on the highway, the 2nd and 3rd battalions relentlessly swept the forested areas east of Best.

Caught in a giant ring and forced back toward the Wilhelmina Canal, the Germans suddenly broke.  With the commitment of fresh forces, the battle that had continued without letup for close to forty-six hours was suddenly over in two.  Taylor’s men had achieved the first major victory of Market-Garden.  More than three hundred of the enemy were killed and over a thousand captured, along with fifteen 88 mm.  artillery pieces.  “By late afternoon,” reads the official history, “as hundreds of Germans gave up, the word went out to send all Military Police available.”  Lieutenant Edward Wierzbowski, the platoon leader who had come closest to seizing the Best bridge before it was blown, brought in his own prisoners after having first been captured himself.  Out of grenades and ammunition, with his casualties all about him—only three men of his valiant platoon had not been wounded—Wierzbowski had finally surrendered.  Now, dead tired and begrimed, Wierzbowski and his men, including some of the wounded, disarmed the doctors and orderlies in the German field hospital to which the men had been taken and marched back to Division, bringing their prisoners with them.

Successful as the engagement had been, General Taylor’s difficulties were far from over.  Even as the battle at Best ended, German armor struck out for the newly installed bridge at Son in yet another attempt to sever the corridor.  Taylor himself, leading his headquarters troops—his only available reinforcements—rushed to the scene.  With bazooka fire and a single antitank gun, a German Panther tank was knocked out almost as it reached the bridge.  Similarly, several other tanks were quickly dispatched.  The German attack collapsed, and traffic continued to move.  But the vigilance of the Screaming Eagles could not be relaxed.  “Our situation,” Taylor later noted, “reminded me of the early American West, where small garrisons had to contend with sudden Indian attacks at any point along great stretches of vital railroad.”

The Germans’ hard, fast, hit-and-run tactics were taking their toll.

Almost 300 men of the 101/ had been killed or wounded or were missing

in ground actions.  Men in slit trenches holding positions on either

side of the highway or in the fields around

Best were in constant danger of being overrun from the flanks, and each night brought its own particular fear.  In darkness, with the Germans infiltrating the 101/’s perimeter, no one knew whether the man in the next foxhole would be alive by the following morning.  In the confusion and surprise of these sharp enemy actions men suddenly disappeared, and when the fire fights were over their friends searched for them among the dead and wounded on the battle ground and at aid stations and field hospitals.

As the Best battle ended and the long lines of prisoners were being herded back to Division, thirty-one-year-old Staff Sergeant Charles Dohun set out to find his officer, Captain LeGrand Johnson.  Back in England prior to the jump, Dohun had been almost “numb with worry.” The twenty-two-year-old Johnson had felt much the same.  He was “resigned to never coming back.”  The morning of the nineteenth Johnson had thrown his company into an attack near Best.  “It was that or be slaughtered,” he recalls.  In the fierce battle, which Johnson remembers as “the worst I have ever seen or heard,” he was shot in the left shoulder.  With his company reduced from 180 to 38 and surrounded in a field of burning haystacks, Johnson held off the Germans until relieving companies, driving back the enemy, could reach and evacuate the survivors.  As Johnson was being helped back to an aid station he was shot once again, this time through the head.  At the battalion aid station his body was placed among other fatally wounded men in what the medics called the “dead pile.”  There, after a long search, Sergeant Dohun found him.  Kneeling down, Dohun was convinced there was a flicker of life.

Picking up the inert officer, Dohun laid Johnson and four other casualties from his company in a jeep and set out for the field hospital at Son.  Cut off by Germans, Dohun drove the jeep into the woods and hid.  When the German patrol moved on, he set out again.

Arriving at the hospital, he found long lines of casualties waiting for

treatment.  Dohun, certain that Johnson might die at any minute, passed

down the lines of wounded until he came to a surgeon who was checking

the casualties to determine who was in

need of immediate aid.  “Major,” Dohun told the doctor, “my captain needs attention right away.”  The major shook his head.  “I’m sorry, sergeant,” he told Dohun.  “We’ll get to him.  He’ll have to wait his turn.”  Dohun tried again.  “Major, he’ll die if you don’t look at him quick.”  The doctor was firm.  “We’ve got a lot of injured men here,” he said.  “Your captain will be attended to as soon as we can get to him.”  Dohun pulled out his .45 and cocked the trigger.  “It’s not soon enough,” he said calmly.  “Major, I’ll kill you right where you stand if you don’t look at him right now.”  Astonished, the surgeon stared at Dohun.  “Bring him in,” he said.

In the operating theater Dohun stood by, his .45 in hand as the doctor and a medical team worked on Johnson.  As the sergeant watched, Johnson was given a blood transfusion, his wounds cleaned and a bullet was removed from his skull and another from his left shoulder.  When the operation was completed and Johnson was bandaged, Dohun moved.  Stepping up to the doctor, he handed over his .45.  “O.k.,” he said, “thanks.  Now you can turn me in.”

Dohun was sent back to the 2nd Battalion of the 502nd.  There, he was brought before the commanding officer.  Dohun snapped to attention.  He was asked if he was aware of exactly what he had done and that his action constituted a court-martial offense.  Dohun replied, “Yes, sir, I do.”  Pacing up and down, the commander suddenly stopped.  “Sergeant,” he said, “I’m placing you under arrest”—he paused and looked at his watch—“for exactly one minute.”  The two men waited in silence.  Then the officer looked at Dohun.  “Dismissed,” he said.  “Now get back to your unit.”  Dohun saluted smartly.  “Yes, sir,” he said, and left.  * * I am indebted to Mrs.  Johnson for this story.  She first learned of it from the adjutant of the 502nd, Captain Hugh Roberts.  Although Captain Roberts did not mention the commanding officer’s name, I must assume that it was Lieutenant Colonel Steve Chappuis of the 2nd Battalion.  Captain Johnson remembers only that he “woke up in England six weeks later—blind, deaf, dumb, forty pounds lighter andwitha big plate in my head.”  Except for partial blindness, he recovered.  Sergeant Dohun, in his correspondence and interview for this book, made little mention of the role he played in saving Captain Johnson’s life.  But he acknowledges that it happened.  “I don’t know to this day,” he wrote, “if I would have shot that medic or not.”

Now, in General Gavin’s sector of the corridor, as Horrocks’ tanks rolled forward toward Nijmegen, the quick capture of the city’s crossings assumed critical importance.  On the seventeenth the Germans had had only a few soldiers guarding the approaches to the Waal river bridge.  By afternoon of the nineteenth Gavin estimated that he was opposed by more than five hundred SS Grenadiers, well-positioned and supported by artillery and armor.  The main body of the Guards Armored Division was still en route to the city.  Only the spearhead of the British column—elements of the 1/ Battalion of the Grenadier Guards under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edward H. Goulburn—was available for an attack and Gavin’s 82nd troopers in their ten-mile stretch of corridor were widely dispersed by their efforts to fight off a constantly encroaching enemy.  Since Gavin’s Glider Infantry Regiment, based in the fogbound Midlands of England, had been unable to take off, he could afford to release only one battalion for a combined attack with the British spearhead tanks.  Gavin chose the 2nd Battalion of the 505th under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort.  There was a chance that the attack, based on speed and surprise, might succeed.  If anyone could help effect it, Gavin believed it was the reserved, soft-spoken Vandervoort.  * Still, the operation carried heavy risks.  Gavin thought the British appeared to underestimate the German strength, as indeed they did.  The Grenadier Guards’ after-action report noted that “It was thought that a display in the shape of tanks would probably cause the enemy to withdraw.”  * In Normandy, Vandervoort had fought for forty days with a broken ankle.  See The Longest Day, pp.  143, 181.

At 3:30 P.m. the combined attack began.  The force quickly penetrated

the center of the city without encountering serious opposition.  There,

approximately forty British tanks and armored vehicles split into two

columns, with American troops riding on the tanks and following behind

them.  On top of lead tanks and in

reconnaissance cars were twelve specially chosen Dutch underground scouts guiding the way—among them a twenty-two-year-old university student named Jan van Hoof, whose later actions would become a subject of sharp dispute.  “I was reluctant to use him,” recalls the 82nd’s Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje.  “He seemed highly excited, but another underground member vouched for his record.  He went in with a British scout car and that was the last I ever saw of him.”  As the force divided, one column headed for the railroad bridge and the second, with Goulburn and Vandervoort, approached the main highway crossing over the Waal.

At both objectives the Germans were waiting in strength.  Staff Sergeant Paul Nunan remembers that as his platoon approached an underpass near the railroad bridge, “we began receiving sniper fire.  With a thousand places for snipers to hide, it was hard to tell where fire was coming from.”  Men dived for cover and slowly began to pull back.  British armor fared no better.  As tanks began to roll toward the bridge, 88’s, firing down the street at almost point-blank range, knocked them out.  A wide street, the Kraijenhoff Laan, led to a triangular park west of the crossing.  There, in buildings facing the park on three sides, the paratroopers regrouped for another attack.  But again the Germans held them off.  Snipers on roofs and machine guns firing from a railroad overpass kept the men pinned down.

Some troopers remember Lieutenant Russ Parker, a cigar clenched in his

teeth, moving into the open and spraying the rooftops to keep snipers’

heads down.  A call went out for tanks, and Nunan remembers that “at

that instant the entire park seemed filled with tracer slugs coming

from a fast-firing automatic weapon sited to our left across the

street.”  Nunan turned to Herbert Buffalo Boy, a Sioux Indian and a

veteran 82nd trooper.  “I think they’re sending a German tank,” he

said.  Buffalo Boy grinned.  “Well, if they’ve got infantry with them,

it could get to be a very tough day,” he told Nunan.  The German tank

did not materialize, but a 20 mm.  antiaircraft gun opened up.  With

grenades, machine guns and bazookas, the troopers fought on

until word was passed for forward platoons to pull back and consolidate for the night.  As men moved out, the Germans set buildings along the river’s edge on fire, making it impossible for Vandervoort’s men to infiltrate, overrun artillery positions and clear out pockets of resistance.  The railroad bridge attack had ground to a halt.

Under cover of heavy American artillery fire, the second column had made for Huner Park, the ornamental gardens leading to the approaches of the highway bridge.  Here, in a traffic circle, all roads leading to the bridge converged and an ancient ruin with a sixteen-sided chapel—the Valkhof—once the palace of Charlemagne and later rebuilt by Barbarossa, commanded the area.  In this citadel the enemy was concentrated.  It almost seemed to Colonel Goulburn that “the Boche had some sort of an idea of what we were trying to do.”  As indeed they had.

Captain Karl Heinz Euling’s battalion of SS Panzer Grenadiers was one of the first units to cross the Rhine at Pannerden.  Acting on General Harmel’s orders to protect the bridge at all costs, Euling had ringed the Huner Park area with self-propelled guns and had positioned men in the chapel of the old ruin.  As British tanks rattled around the corners of the streets leading to the park, they came under Euling’s guns.  Meeting a punishing artillery barrage, the tanks pulled back.  Colonel Vandervoort immediately took to the street, and getting a mortar crew into action with covering fire, he moved one company forward.  As the company’s lead platoon, under First Lieutenant James J. Coyle, sprinted for a row of attached houses facing the park, they came under small-arms and mortar fire.  Lieutenant William J. Meddaugh, second in command, saw that this was “observed fire.  The guns and snipers were being directed by radio.  British tanks covered our front as Lieutenant Coyle moved into a block of buildings overlooking the entire enemy position.  Other platoons were stopped, unable to move, and the situation looked rotten.”