Bridge Too Far (54 page)

Captain Henry Baldwin Keep, who was known as the battalion’s millionaire because he was a member of the Philadelphia Biddle family, considered that “the odds were very much against us.  In eighteen months of almost steady combat we had done everything from parachute jumps to establishing bridgeheads to acting as mountain troops and as regular infantry.  But a river crossing was something else!  It sounded impossible.”

Cook, according to Lieutenant Virgil Carmichael, tried to lighten the atmosphere by announcing that he would imitate George Washington by “standing erect in the boat and, with clenched right fist pushed forward, shout, “Onward, men!  Onward!”” Captain Carl W. Kappel, commander of H Company, who had heard that the Arnhem attack was in trouble, was deeply concerned.  He wanted “to get in the damn boat and get the hell across.”  He had a good friend in the British 1/ Airborne, and he felt if anyone was on the Arnhem bridge it was “Frosty”—Colonel John Frost.

By 2 P.m. there was still no sign of the assault craft, and now it was too late to recall the approaching squadrons of Typhoons.  Back of the jump-off site, hidden behind the river embankment, Cook’s men and Vandeleur’s tanks waited.  At precisely 2:30 P.m. the Typhoon strike began.  Flashing overhead, the planes peeled off and screamed down, one after another, shooting rockets and machine-gun fire at the enemy positions.  Ten minutes later, as Vandeleur’s tanks began taking up positions on the embankment, the three trucks carrying the assault craft arrived.  With only twenty minutes to go, Cook’s men saw, for the first time, the flimsy collapsible green boats.

Each boat was nineteen feet long with a flat, reinforced plywood bottom.  The canvas sides, held in place by wooden pegs, measured thirty inches from floor to gunwales.  Eight paddles, four feet long, were supposed to accompany each boat, but in many there were only two.  Men would have to use their rifle butts to paddle.

Quickly engineers began assembling the boats.  As each was put

together, the paratroopers assigned to the craft loaded their equipment on board and got ready to dash for the bank.  Against the deafening din of the barrage now lashing the far shore, the twenty-six boats were finally assembled.  “Somebody yelled, “Go!”” First Lieutenant Patrick Mulloy recalls, “and everybody grabbed the gunwales and started to lug the boats down to the river.  From the rear, shells screamed over the men’s heads; tank guns barked from the embankment ahead of them, and white smoke, “looking fairly thick” to Mulloy, drifted over the width of the river.  The assault was on.

As the first wave of some 260 men—two companies, H and I, plus headquarters staff and engineers—got to the water the launching immediately began to assume the proportions of a disaster.  Boats put into too-shallow water bogged down in the mud and would not budge.  Struggling and thrashing in the shallows, men carried them to deeper parts, pushed them out and then climbed in.  As some troopers tried to hoist themselves aboard, their boats overturned.  Other boats, overloaded, were caught by the current and began circling out of control.  Some sank under their heavy loads.  Paddles were lost; men fell overboard.  Captain Carl Kappel saw the scene as one “of mass confusion.”  His boat began to founder.  “Private Legacie was in the water and starting to go down,” Kappel remembers.  Diving in after him, Kappel was surprised at the swiftness of the current.  He was able to grab Legacie and pull him to safety “but by the time I got him to the bank I was an old man and worn out.”  Jumping into another boat Kappel started out again.  First Lieutenant Tom MacLeod’s craft was almost awash, and he thought they were sinking.  “Paddles were flaying like mad,” he remembers, and all he could hear above the din was Cook’s voice, from a nearby boat, yelling, “Keep going!  Keep going!”

The Major, a devout Catholic, was also praying out loud.  Lieutenant

Virgil Carmichael noticed that he had developed a kind of cadence with

each line.  “Hail Mary—full of Grace—Hail Mary—full of Grace,” Cook

chanted with every stroke of the

paddle.  * Then, in the midst of the confusion, the Germans opened up.

“”The Lord is with Thee” was too long,” Cook says, “so I kept repeating, “Hail Mary” (one stroke), “Full of Grace” (second stroke).” Captain Keep tried to remember his crewing days at Princeton but he found himself nervously counting “7-from-go-go-go-have-i.”

The fire was so intense and concentrated that it reminded Lieutenant Mulloy of “the worst we ever took at Anzio.  They were blazing away with heavy machine guns and mortars, most of it coming from the embankment and the railroad bridge.  I felt like a sitting duck.” Chaplain Kuehl was sick with horror.  The head of the man sitting next to him was blown off.  Over and over Kuehl kept repeating “Lord, Thy will be done.”

From his command post in the PGEM building, Lieutenant Colonel Vandeleur, along with General Browning and General Horrocks, watched in grim silence.  “It was a horrible, horrible sight,” Vandeleur remembers.  “Boats were literally blown out of the water.  Huge geysers shot up as shells hit and small-arms fire from the northern bank made the river look like a seething cauldron.”  Instinctively men began to crouch in the boats.  Lieutenant Holabird, staring at the fragile canvas sides, felt “totally exposed and defenseless.”  Even his helmet “seemed about as small as a beanie.”

Shrapnel ripped through the little fleet.  The boat carrying half of First Lieutenant James Megellas’ platoon sank without a trace.  There were no survivors.  First Lieutenant Allen McLain saw two craft blown apart and troopers thrown into the water.  Around Captain T. Moffatt Burriss’ boat fire was coming down “like a hailstorm,” and finally the engineer steering the boat said, “Take the rudder.  I’m hit.”  His wrist was shattered.  As Burriss leaned over to help, the engineer was hit again, this time in the head.  Shell fragments caught Burriss in the side.  As the engineer fell overboard, his foot caught the gunwale, causing his body to act like a rudder and swinging the boat around.  Burriss had to heave the dead man into the water.  By then two more troopers sitting in front had also been killed.

Under a brisk wind the smoke screen had been blown to tatters.

Now German gunners raked each boat individually.  Sergeant Clark Fuller saw that some men, in their haste to get across quickly, and desperately trying to avoid the fire, “rowed against each other, causing their boats to swing around in circles.”  The Germans picked them off easily.  Fuller was “so scared that he felt paralyzed.” Halfway across, Private Leonard G. Tremble was suddenly slammed into the bottom of the boat.  His craft had taken a direct hit.  Wounded in the face, shoulder, right arm and left leg, Tremble was sure he was bleeding to death.  Taking water, the boat swung crazily in circles, then drifted slowly back to the southern shore, everyone in it dead but Tremble.

In the command post Vandeleur saw that “huge gaps had begun to appear in the smoke screen.”  His tankers had fired smoke shells for more than ten minutes, but now the Guardsmen were running low on every kind of ammunition.  “The Germans had switched ammunition and were beginning to use big stuff, and I remember almost trying to will the Americans to go faster.  It was obvious that these young paratroopers were inexperienced in handling assault boats, which are not the easiest things to maneuver.  They were zigzagging all over the water.”

Then the first wave reached the northern bank.  Men struggled out of the boats, guns firing, and started across the exposed flat land.  Sergeant Clark Fuller, who a few minutes before had been paralyzed with fear, was so happy to be alive that he felt “exhilarated.  My fear had been replaced by a surge of recklessness.  I felt I could lick the whole German army.”  Vandeleur, watching the landing, “saw one or two boats hit the beach, followed immediately by three or four others.  Nobody paused.  Men got out and began running toward the embankment.  My God, what a courageous sight it was!  They just moved steadily across that open ground.  I never saw a single man lie down until he was hit.  I didn’t think more than half the fleet made it across.” Then, to Vandeleur’s amazement, “the boats turned around and started back for the second wave.”  Turning to Horrocks, General Browning said, “I have never seen a more gallant action.”

As Julian Cook’s assault craft neared the beach he jumped out

and pulled the boat, eager to get ashore.  Suddenly to his right he saw a bubbling commotion in the gray water.  “It looked like a large air bubble, steadily approaching the bank,” he remembers.  “I thought I was seeing things when the top of a helmet broke the surface and continued on moving.  Then a face appeared under the helmet.  It was the little machine-gunner, Private Joseph Jedlicka.  He had bandoliers of 30-caliber machine-gun bullets draped around his shoulders and a box in either hand.”  Jedlicka had fallen overboard in eight feet of water and, holding his breath, had calmly walked across the river bottom until he emerged.

Medics were already working on the beach and as First Lieutenant Tom MacLeod prepared to return across the Waal for another boatload of troopers, he saw that rifles had been stuck in the ground next to the fallen.

Shortly after 4 P.m., General Heinz Harmel received an alarming message at his headquarters in Doornenburg.  It was reported that “a white smoke screen has been thrown across the river opposite Fort Hof Van Holland.”  Harmel, with some of his staff, rushed by car to the village of Lent, on the northern bank of the Waal, a mile from the Nijmegen highway bridge.  The smoke could mean only one thing: the Anglo-Americans were trying to cross the Waal by boat.  Still, Harmel could not believe his own analysis.  The width of the river, the forces manning the northern bank, Euling’s optimistic report of the morning, and his own estimate of the British and American forces in Nijmegen— all argued against the operation.  But Harmel decided to see for himself.  He remembers that “I had no intention of being arrested and shot by Berlin for letting the bridges fall into enemy hands—no matter how Model felt about it.”

Major Julian Cook knew his losses were appalling, but he had no time to assess them now.  His companies had landed everywhere along the exposed stretch of beach.  Units were inextricably mixed up and, for the time, without organization.  The Germans were flaying the beach with machine-gun fire, yet his stubborn troopers refused to be pinned down.  Individually and in twos and threes they headed for the embankment.

“It was either stay and get riddled or move,” Cook remembers.  Struggling forward, the men, armed with machine guns, grenades and fixed bayonets, charged the embankment and viciously dug the Germans out.  Sergeant Theodore Finkbeiner believes he was one of the first to reach the high dike roadway.  “I stuck my head over the top, and stared right into the muzzle of a machine gun,” he recalls.  He ducked, but “the muzzle blast blew my helmet off.”  Finkbeiner tossed a grenade into the German emplacement, heard the explosion and the sound of men screaming.  Then he quickly hoisted himself up onto the embankment road and headed for the next machine-gun nest.

Captain Moffatt Burriss had no time to think about the shrapnel wound in his side.  When he landed he was “so happy to be alive that I vomited.”  He ran straight for the dike, yelling to his men to get “one machine gun firing on the left flank, another on the right.”  They did.  Burriss saw several houses back of the dike.  Kicking the door of one open, he surprised “several Germans who had been sleeping, apparently unaware of what was happening.”  Reaching quickly for a hand grenade, Burriss pulled the pin, threw it into the room and slammed the door.

In the smoke, noise and confusion, some men in the first wave did not

remember how they got off the beach.  Corporal Jack Bommer, a

communications man laden down with equipment, simply ran forward.  He

“had only one thing in mind: to survive if possible.”  He knew he had

to get to the embankment and wait for further instructions.  On

reaching the crest he saw “dead bodies everywhere, and Germans—some no

more than fifteen years old, others in their sixties—who a few minutes

before had been slaughtering us in the boats were now begging for

mercy, trying

to surrender.”  Men were too shocked by their ordeal and too angry at the death of friends to take many prisoners.  Bommer recalls that some Germans “were shot out of hand at point-blank range.”

Sickened and exhausted by the crossing, their dead and wounded lying on the beach, the men of the first wave subdued the German defenders on the dike road in less than thirty minutes.  Not all the enemy positions had been overrun, but now troopers hunched down in former German machine-gun nests to protect the arrival of succeeding waves.  Two more craft were lost in the second crossing.  And, still under heavy shellfire, exhausted engineers in the eleven remaining craft made five more trips to bring all the Americans across the bloodstained Waal.  Speed was all that mattered now.  Cook’s men had to grab the northern ends of the crossings before the Germans fully realized what was happening—and before they blew the bridges.

By now the embankment defense line had been overrun, and the Germans were pulling back to secondary positions.  Cook’s troopers gave them no quarter.  Captain Henry Keep comments that “what remained of the battalion seemed driven to fever pitch and, rendered crazy by rage, men temporarily forgot the meaning of fear.  I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day.  It was an awe-inspiring sight but not a pretty one.”

Individually and in small groups, men who had sat helpless in the boats as friends died all around them took on four and five times their number with grenades, submachine guns and bayonets.  With brutal efficiency they dug the Germans out and, without stopping to rest or regroup, continued their rampaging assault.  They fought through fields, orchards and houses back of the embankment under the fire of machine guns and antiaircraft batteries hammering at them from Fort Hof Van Holland directly ahead.  As some groups headed due east along the sunken dike road for the bridges, others stormed the fort, almost oblivious to the German guns.  Some troopers, laden with grenades, swam the moat surrounding the fortress and began climbing the walls.