Bridge Too Far (51 page)

Mackay could see the Germans were slowly compressing Frost’s force.  He saw British troopers scurrying from burning houses along the riverbank toward a couple almost opposite him, which were still standing.  “They were beginning to hem us in,” he noted, “and it was obvious that if we didn’t get help soon, they’d winkle us out.  I went up to the attic and tuned into the 6 o’clock BBC news.  To my utter amazement the newscaster said that British armor had reached the airborne troops.”  * * Mackay thought the report referred to Arnhem; in fact, it related to the link-up of Horrocks’ tanks with the 82nd Airborne in Nijmegen.

Almost immediately Mackay heard a cry from the floor below, “Tiger tanks are heading for the bridge.”  (it was exactly 7 P.m. German time;

6 P.m. British time.) Two of the huge 60-ton tanks were heading in from the north.  On his side of the bridge Frost saw them, too.  “They looked incredibly sinister in the half light,” he noted.  “Like some prehistoric monsters, as their great guns swung from side to side breathing flame.  Their shells burst through the walls.  The dust and slowly settling debris following their explosions filled the passages and rooms.”

One complete side of Mackay’s building was hit.  “Some of the shells must have been armor-piercing,” Lieutenant Peter Stainforth says, “because they went through the school from end to end, knocking a four-foot hole in every room.”  Ceilings came down, walls cracked and “the whole structure rocked.”  Staring at the two tanks on the ramp, Mackay thought the end had come.  “A couple more rounds like that and we’ll be finished,” he said.  Still, with the stubborn and fearless resistance that the fighters at the bridge had shown since their arrival, Mackay thought that he might “be able to take a party out and blow them up.  But just then the two tanks reversed and pulled back.  We were still alive.”

At Frost’s headquarters, Father Egan had been hit.  Caught on a

stairway when shells began coming in, he fell two flights to the first

floor.  When he recovered consciousness, the priest was alone except

for one man.  Crawling to him, Egan saw that the trooper was near

death.  At that moment another barrage hit the building and Egan again

lost consciousness.  He awoke to find that the room and his clothes

were on fire.  Desperately he rolled along the floor, beating the

flames out with his hands.  The injured man he had seen earlier was

dead.  Now Egan could not use his legs.  Slowly, in excruciating pain,

he hauled himself toward a window.  Someone called his name, and the

intelligence officer, Lieutenant Bucky Buchanan, helped him through the

window and dropped

him into the arms of Sergeant Jack Spratt.  In the cellar, where Dr.  James Logan was at work, the priest was put on the floor with other wounded.  His right leg was broken and his back and hands were peppered with shrapnel splinters.  “I was pretty well out of it,” Egan recalls.  “I couldn’t do much now but lie there on my stomach.”  Nearby, slightly wounded, was the incredible Tatham-Warter, still trying to keep men’s spirits up, and still hanging on to his umbrella.

Occasionally there was a pause in the terrible pounding, and Captain Mackay believed the Germans were stocking up with more ammunition.  As darkness set in during one of these intervals, Mackay issued benzedrine tablets to his tired force, two pills per man.  The effect on the exhausted, weary men was unexpected and acute.  Some troopers became irritable and argumentative.  Others suffered double vision and for a time could not aim straight.  Among the shocked and wounded, men became euphoric and some began to hallucinate.  Corporal Arthur Hendy remembers being grabbed by one trooper, who pulled him to a window.  “Look,” he commanded Hendy in a whisper.  “It’s the Second Army.  On the far bank.  Look.  Do you see them?”  Sadly, Hendy shook his head.  The man became enraged.  “They’re right over there,” he shouted, “plain as anything.”

Mackay wondered if his small force would see out the night.  Fatigue and wounds were taking their toll.  “I was thinking clearly,” Mackay remembers, “but we had had nothing to eat and no sleep.  We were limited to one cup of water daily, and everyone was wounded.”  With his ammunition nearly gone, Mackay set his men to making homemade bombs from the small stock of explosives still remaining.  He intended to be ready when the German tanks returned.  Taking a head count, Mackay now reported to Frost that he had only thirteen men left capable of fighting.

From his position on the far side of the bridge, as the night of

Tuesday, September 19, closed in, Frost saw that the entire city

appeared to be burning.  The spires of two great churches were flaming

fiercely and as Frost watched, “the cross which hung

between two lovely towers was silhouetted against the clouds rising far into the sky.”  He noted that “the crackle of burning wood and the strange echoes of falling buildings seemed unearthly.”  Upstairs, Signalman Stanley Copley, sitting at his radio set, had abandoned sending in Morse code.  Now he was broadcasting in the clear.  Continually he kept repeating, “This is the 1/ Para Brigade calling Second Army.  … Come in Second Army.  … Come in Second Army.”

At his headquarters in Oosterbeek’s Hartenstein Hotel, General Urquhart tried desperately to save what remained of his division.  Frost was cut off.  Every attempt to reach him at the bridge had been mercilessly beaten back.  German reinforcements were pouring in.  From the west, north and east, Bittrich’s forces were steadily chopping the gallant 1/ British Airborne to pieces.  Cold, wet, worn out, but still uncomplaining, the Red Devils were trying to hold out—fighting off tanks with rifles and Sten guns.  The situation was heartbreaking for Urquhart.  Only quick action could save his heroic men.  By Wednesday morning, September 20, Urquhart had developed a plan to salvage the remnants of his command and perhaps turn the tide in his favor.

September 19—“a dark and fateful day,” in Urquhart’s words—had been the turning point.  The cohesion and drive that he had hoped to instill had come too late.  Everything had failed: the Polish forces had not arrived; the cargo drops had been disastrous; and battalions had been devastated in their attempts to reach Frost.  The division was being pushed closer and closer to destruction.  The tally of Urquhart’s remaining men told a frightful story.  All through the night of the nineteenth, battalion units still in contact with division headquarters reported their strength.  Inconclusive and inaccurate as the figures were, they presented a grim accounting: Urquhart’s division was on the verge of disappearing.

Of Lathbury’s 1/ Parachute Brigade, only Frost’s force was

fighting as a coordinated unit, but Urquhart had no idea how many men were left in the 2nd Battalion.  Fitch’s 3rd Battalion listed some 50 men, and its commander was dead.  Dobie’s 1/ totaled 116, and Dobie had been wounded and captured.  The 11th Battalion’s strength was down to 150, the 2nd South Staffordshires to 100.  The commanders of both units, Lea and McCardie, were wounded.  In Hackett’s 10th Battalion there were now 250 men, and his 156th reported 270.  Although Urquhart’s total division strength was more—the figures did not include other units such as a battalion of the Border Regiment, the 7th KOSB’S engineers, reconnaissance and service troops, glider pilots and others—his attack battalions had almost ceased to exist.  The men of these proud units were now dispersed in small groups, dazed, shocked and often leaderless.

The fighting had been so bloody and so terrible that even battle-hardened veterans had broken.  Urquhart and his chief of staff had sensed an atmosphere of panic seeping through headquarters as small groups of stragglers ran across the lawn yelling, “The Germans are coming.”  Often, they were young soldiers, “whose self-control had momentarily deserted them,” Urquhart later wrote.  “Mackenzie and I had to intervene physically.”  But others fought on against formidable odds.  Captain L. E. Queripel, wounded in the face and arms, led an attack on a German twin machine-gun nest and killed the crews.  As other Germans, throwing grenades, began to close in on Queripel and his party, Queripel hurled the “potato mashers” back.  Ordering his men to leave him, the officer covered their retreat, throwing grenades until he was killed.  [Queripel was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.]

Now, what remained of Urquhart’s shattered and bloodied division was

being squeezed and driven back upon itself.  All roads seemed to end in

the Oosterbeek area, with the main body of troops centered around the

Hartenstein in a few square miles running between Heveadorp and

Wolfheze on the west, and from Oosterbeek to Johannahoeve Farm on the

east.  Within that rough corridor, ending on the Rhine at Heveadorp,

Urquhart planned to

make a stand.  By pulling in his troops, he hoped to husband his strength and hang on until Horrocks’ armor reached him.

All through the night of the nineteenth orders went out for troops to pull back into the Oosterbeek perimeter, and in the early hours of the twentieth, Hackett was told to abandon his planned attack toward the Arnhem bridge with his 10th and 156th battalions and disengage them too.  “It was a terrible decision to make,” Urquhart said later.  “It meant abandoning the 2nd Battalion at the bridge, but I knew I had no more chance of reaching them than I had of getting to Berlin.”  In his view, the only hope “was to consolidate, form a defensive box and try to hold on to a small bridgehead north of the river so that XXX Corps could cross to us.”

The discovery of the ferry operating between Heveadorp and Driel had been an important factor in Urquhart’s decision.  It was vital to his plan for survival; for on it, theoretically, help could arrive from the southern bank.  Additionally, at the ferry’s landing stages on either bank, there were ramps that would help the engineers to throw a Bailey bridge across the Rhine.  Admittedly the odds were great.  But if the Nijmegen bridge could be taken swiftly and if Horrocks moved fast and if Urquhart’s men could hold out long enough in their perimeter for engineers to span the river—a great many ifs—there was still a chance that Montgomery might get his bridgehead across the Rhine and drive for the Ruhr, even though Frost might be overrun at Arnhem.

All through the nineteenth, messages had been sent from Urquhart’s headquarters requesting a new drop zone for the Poles.  Communications, though still erratic, were slightly improved.  Lieutenant Neville Hay of the Phantom net was passing some messages to British Second Army headquarters, who in turn relayed them to Browning.  At 3 A.m. on the twentieth, Urquhart received a message from Corps asking for the General’s suggestions regarding the Poles’ drop zone.  As Urquhart saw it, only one possible area remained.  In view of his new plan he requested the 1,500-man brigade be landed near the southern terminal of the ferry in the vicinity of the little village of Driel.

Abandoning Frost and his men was the most bitter part of the plan.  At 8 A.m. on Wednesday, Urquhart had an opportunity to explain the position to Frost and Gough at the bridge.  Using the Munford-Thompson radio link, Gough called division headquarters and got through to Urquhart.  It was the first contact Gough had had with the General since the seventeenth, when he had been ordered back to Division only to discover that Urquhart was somewhere along the line of march.  “My goodness,” Urquhart said, “I thought you were dead.”  Gough sketched in the situation at the bridge.  “Morale is still high,” he recalls saying, “but we’re short of everything.  Despite that, we’ll continue to hold out.”  Then, as Urquhart remembers, “Gough asked if they could expect reinforcements.”

Answering was not easy.  “I told him,” Urquhart recalls, “that I was not certain if it was a case of me coming for them or they coming for us.  I’m afraid you can only hope for relief from the south.”  Frost then came on the line.  “It was very cheering to hear the General,” Frost wrote, “but he could not tell me anything really encouraging.  … they were obviously having great difficulties themselves.” Urquhart requested that his “personal congratulations on a fine effort be passed on to everyone concerned and I wished them the best of luck.” There was nothing more to be said.

Twenty minutes later, Urquhart received a message from Lieutenant Neville Hay’s Phantom net.  It read:

200820 (from 2nd Army).  Attack at Nijmegen held up by strongpoint south of town.  5 Guards Brigade halfway in town.  Bridge intact but held by enemy.  Intention attack at 1300 hours today.

Urquhart immediately told his staff to inform all units.  It was the first good news he had had this day.

Tragically, Urquhart had an outstanding force at his disposal whose contributions, had they been accepted, might well have altered the grim situation of the British 1/ Airborne Division.

The Dutch resistance ranked among the most dedicated and disciplined underground units in all of occupied Europe.  In the 101/ and 82nd sectors Dutchmen were fighting alongside the American paratroopers.  One of the first orders Generals Taylor and Gavin had given on landing was that arms and explosives be issued to the underground groups.  But in Arnhem the British virtually ignored the presence of these spirited, brave civilians.  Armed and poised to give immediate help to Frost at the bridge, the Arnhem groups were largely unheeded, and their assistance was politely rejected.  By a strange series of events only one man had held the power to coordinate and weld the resistance into the British assault, and he was dead.  Lieutenant Colonel Hilary Barlow, the officer Urquhart had sent to coordinate the faltering attacks of the battalions in the western suburbs, was killed before he could put his own mission into full effect.

In the original plan, Barlow was to have assumed the role of Arnhem’s town major and military-government chief once the battle ended.  His assistant and the Dutch representative for the Gelderland province had also been named.  He was Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters of the Dutch Navy.  Prior to Market-Garden, an Anglo-Dutch intelligence committee had given Barlow top-secret lists of Dutch underground personnel who were known to be completely trustworthy.  “From these lists,” recalls Wolters, “Barlow and I were to screen the groups and use them in their various capabilities: intelligence, sabotage, combat and the like.  Barlow was the only other man who knew what our mission really was.  When he disappeared, the plan collapsed.”  At division headquarters, Wolters was thought to be either a civil-affairs or an intelligence officer.  When he produced the secret lists and made recommendations, he was looked on with suspicion.  “Barlow trusted me completely,” Wolters says.  “I regret to say that others at headquarters did not.”