Bridge Too Far (55 page)

Sergeant Leroy Richmond, swimming underwater, took the enemy soldier guarding the causeway by surprise, then waved his men across.  According to First Lieutenant Virgil F. Carmichael, troopers “somehow climbed to the top of the fort, then others below tossed up hand grenades which were promptly dropped into the turret portholes, one after the other.”  The German defenders quickly surrendered.

Meanwhile, units from two companies—Captain Burriss’ I Company and Captain Kappel’s H Company—were sprinting for the bridges.  At the railroad bridge, H Company found the German defense so fierce that it looked as though the American attack might stall.  * Then the continuing pressure from the British and American forces at the southern end and in Nijmegen itself caused the enemy suddenly to crack.  To Kappel’s amazement the Germans began to retreat across the bridge “in wholesale numbers”—right into the American guns.  From his tank near the PGEM factory, Lieutenant John Gorman “could see what looked like hundreds of Germans, confused and panic-stricken, running across the bridge right toward the Americans.”  On the northern bank First Lieutenant Richard La Riviere and Lieutenant E. J. Sims also saw them coming.  In disbelief, they watched as the Germans abandoned their guns and hurried toward the northern exit.  “They were coming across in a mass,” recalls La Riviere, “and we let them come—two thirds of the way.”  Then the Americans opened fire.  * According to Charles B.  MacDonald, in The Siegfried Line Campaign, p. 181, the Germans on the bridge had a formidable array of armament which included 34 machine guns, two 20 mm.  antiaircraft guns and one 88 mm.  dual-purpose gun.

A hail of bullets ripped into the defenders.  Germans fell everywhere—some into the girders under the bridge; others to the water below.  More than 260 lay dead, many were wounded, and scores more were taken prisoner before the firing ceased.  Within two hours of the Waal river assault, the first of the bridges had fallen.  Major Edward G.

Tyler of the Irish Guards saw “someone waving.  I had been

concentrating so long on that railroad bridge that, for me, it was the

only one in existence.  I got on the wireless

and radioed Battalion, “They’re on the bridge!  They’ve got the bridge!”” The time was 5 P.m. Captain Tony Heywood of the Grenadier Guards received Major Tyler’s message and found it “utterly confusing.” Which bridge did the message refer to?  The Grenadiers under Lieutenant Colonel Goulburn were still fighting alongside Colonel Vandervoort’s troopers near the Valkhof, where Euling’s SS forces continued to deny them the highway bridge.  If the message meant that the highway bridge had been taken, Heywood remembers, “I couldn’t figure how they had gotten across.”

The railroad bridge was intact and physically in Anglo-American hands, but Germans—either prepared to fight to the last or too frightened to leave their positions—were still on it.  The Americans had made a quick search for demolition charges at the northern end.  Although they had found nothing, there was still a chance that the bridge was wired and ready to be destroyed.  Captain Kappel now radioed Major Cook, urging him to get British tanks across as quickly is possible.  With these as support, he and Captain Burriss of I Company believed, they could grab the big prize, the Nijmegen highway bridge, slightly less than a mile east.  Then, recalls Kappel, Colonel Tucker arrived.  The request, Tucker said, “had been relayed, but the Germans might blow both bridges at any moment.”  Without hesitation Cook’s troopers pushed on for the highway bridge.

General Harmel could not make out what was happening.  Binoculars to his eyes, he stood on the roof of a bunker near the village of Lent.

From this position on the northern bank of the Waal barely a mile from

the main Nijmegen highway bridge, he could see smoke and haze off to

his right and hear the crash of battle.  But no one seemed to know

exactly what was taking place, except that an attempt had been made to

cross the river near the railroad bridge.  He could see the highway

bridge quite clearly; there was nothing on it.  Then, as Harmel

recalls, “the wounded

started to arrive, and I began to get conflicting reports.”  Americans, he learned, had crossed the river, “but everything was exaggerated.  I could not tell if they had come across in ten boats or a hundred.”  His mind “working furiously trying to decide what to do next,” Harmel checked with his engineers.  “I was informed that both bridges were ready to go,” he remembers.  “The local commander was instructed to destroy the railroad bridge.  The detonator for the highway bridge was hidden in a garden near the bunker at Lent, and a man was stationed there awaiting orders to press the plunger.”  Then Harmel received his first clear report: only a few boats had crossed the river, and the battle was still in progress.  Looking through his binoculars again, he saw that the highway bridge was still clear and free of movement.  Although his “instinct was to get this troublesome bridge weighing on my shoulders destroyed, I had no intention of doing anything until I was absolutely sure that it was lost.”  If he was forced to blow the highway bridge, Harmel decided, he would make sure that “it was crowded with British tanks and let them go up in the blast, too.”

In Huner Park and in the Valkhof close by the southern approaches to the highway bridge, Captain Karl Euling’s SS Panzer Grenadiers were fighting for their lives.  The Anglo-American attack by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Goulburn’s Grenadier Guards and Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 82nd’s 505th Regiment was methodical and relentless.  Vandervoort’s mortars and artillery pounded the German defense line as his men sprinted from house to house.  Closing the gap between themselves and Euling’s steadily shrinking defenses, Goulburn’s tanks moved up the converging streets, driving the Germans before them, their 17-pounders and machine guns blasting.

The Germans fought back hard.  “It was the heaviest volume of fire I

ever encountered,” recalls Sergeant Spencer Wurst, then a

nineteen-year-old veteran who had been with the 82nd since North Africa.  “I had the feeling I could reach up and grab bullets with each hand.”  From his vantage point on the ledge of a house some twenty-five yards from the Valkhof, Wurst could look down into the German positions.  “There were foxholes all over the park,” he remembers, “and all the action seemed to be centered from these and from a medieval tower.  I watched our men break out from right and left and charge right up to the traffic circle.  We were so anxious to get that bridge that I saw some men crawl over to the foxholes and literally drag the Germans out.”  Wurst’s own rifle barrel was so hot that cosmoline began to ooze from the wood stock.

As the murderous fire fight continued Wurst was astounded to see Colonel Vandervoort “stroll across the street, smoking a cigarette.  He stopped in front of the house I was in, looked up and said, “Sergeant, I think you better go see if you can get that tank moving.”” Vandervoort pointed to the entrance to the park where a British tank was sitting, its turret closed.  Clambering off the roof, Wurst ran to the tank and rapped on its side with his helmet.  The turret opened.

“Colonel wants you to move it,” Wurst said.  “Come on.  I’ll show you

where to fire.”  Advancing beside the tank in full view of the Germans,

Wurst pointed out targets.  As the intense fire coming from

Vandervoort’s men and Goulburn’s tanks increased, the enemy defense

ring began to collapse.  The formidable line of antitank guns that had

stopped each previous attack was obliterated.  Finally only four

self-propelled guns dug into the center of the traffic circle remained

firing.  Then, a little after 4 P.m., in an all-out tank and infantry

assault, these too were overrun.  As Vandervoort’s troopers charged

with bayonets and grenades, Goulburn lined his tanks up four abreast

and sent them charging into the park.  In panic the Germans broke.  As

they retreated, some tried to take cover in the girders of the bridge;

others, farther away, raced through the American and British fire

toward the medieval fort.  As the Germans passed, scores of troopers

lobbed grenades into their midst.  The assault was over.  “They had

given us a real tough time,” Wurst says.  “We watched

them charging right past us, up over the road leading onto the bridge and some went off to the east.  We felt pretty good.”

General Allan Adair, commander of the Guards Armored Division, directing operations in a nearby building, remembers “gritting my teeth, dreading the sound of an explosion that would tell me the Germans had blown the bridge.”  He heard nothing.  The approaches to the great Waal bridge lay open, the span itself apparently intact.

Sergeant Peter Robinson’s troop of four tanks had been waiting for just this moment.  Now they moved out for the bridge.  * The twenty-nine-year-old Dunkirk veteran had been alerted a few hours earlier by his squadron leader, Major John Trotter, “to stand ready to go for the bridge.”  Germans were still on the crossing, and Trotter now warned Robinson, “We don’t know what to expect when you cross, but the bridge has to be taken.  Don’t stop for anything.”  Shaking hands with the sergeant, Trotter added jokingly, “Don’t worry.  I know where your wife lives and if anything happens, I’ll let her know.”  Robinson was not amused.  “You’re bloody cheerful, aren’t you, sir?”  he asked Trotter.  Climbing onto his tank, Robinson led off for the bridge.  * It has been said that an American flag was raised on the north end of the railroad bridge and, in the smoke and confusion, British tankers thought it was flying on the far end of the highway bridge—signaling the American seizure of that end.  The story may be true, but in scores of interviews I have not found a single participant who confirmed it.  I have walked over the entire area and it seems inconceivable that anyone looking across the highway bridge could mistake a flag flying a mile to the west as the terminus of this crossing.

The troop of four tanks came into Huner Park by the right of the roundabout.  To Robinson it appeared that “the whole town was burning.

Buildings to my left and right were on fire.”  Wreathed in smoke, the

great crossing looked “damned big.”  As Robinson’s tank rumbled forward

he reported constantly by radio to division headquarters.  “Everyone

else had been ordered off the air,” he recalls.  Clanking onto the

approaches, Robinson remembers, “We came under heavy fire.  There was

an explosion.  One of the idler wheels carrying the track on one side

of the tank had been hit.”  The tank was still running, although “the

wireless was dead and I had lost touch with headquarters.”  Shouting to

his

driver to reverse, Robinson backed his tank to the side of the road.  Quickly the sergeant jumped out, ran to the tank behind him and told its commander, Sergeant Billingham, to get out.  Billingham began to argue.  Robinson shouted that he was giving “a direct order.  Get out of that tank damned quick and follow along in mine.”  The third tank in line, commanded by Sergeant Charles W. Pacey, had pulled out and was leading the way onto the bridge.  Jumping aboard Billingham’s tank, Robinson ordered the others to follow.  As the four tanks advanced, Robinson recalls, they came under fire from a “big 88 parked on the other side of the river, near some burning houses and from what appeared to be a self-propelled gun in the far distance.”

Colonel Vandervoort, watching the tanks, saw the 88 begin to fire.  “It was pretty spectacular,” he recalls.  “The 88 was sandbagged into the side of the highway about one hundred yards from the north end of the bridge.  One tank and the 88 exchanged about four rounds apiece with the tank spitting 30-caliber tracers all the while.  In the gathering dusk it was quite a show.”  Then Robinson’s gunner, Guardsman Leslie Johnson, got the 88 with another shot.  Germans with grenades, rifles and machine guns clung to the girders of the bridge, Robinson remembers.  The tank machine guns began “to knock them off like ninepins.”  And Johnson, answering the heavy enemy artillery fire, “pumped shells through his gun as fast as the loader could run them through.”  In a hail of fire Robinson’s troop rattled forward, now approaching the halfway mark on the highway bridge.

In the twilight, billowing smoke clogged the distant Waal highway bridge.  At his forward position near Lent, General Heinz Harmel stared through his binoculars.  Guns were banging all around him, and troops were moving back through the village to take up new positions.

Harmel’s worst fear had now been realized.  The Americans, against all

expectations, had succeeded in making a bold, successful crossing of

the Waal.  In Nijmegen

itself the optimism of Captain Karl Euling had proved unfounded.  The last message received from him had been terse: Euling said he was encircled with only sixty men left.  Now Harmel knew beyond doubt that the bridges were lost.  He did not know whether the railroad bridge had been destroyed, but if he was to demolish the highway bridge, it must be done immediately.

“Everything seemed to pass through my mind all at once,” he recalled.  “What must be done first?  What is the most urgent, most important action to take?  It all came down to the bridges.”  He had not contacted Bittrich “beforehand to warn him that I might have to demolish the highway crossing.  I presumed that it was Bittrich who had ordered the bridges readied for demolition.”  So, Harmel reasoned, in spite of Model’s order, “if Bittrich had been in my shoes, he would have blown the main bridge.  In my opinion, Model’s order was now automatically canceled anyway.”  At any moment he expected tanks to appear on the highway bridge.

Standing next to the engineer by the detonator box, Harmel scanned the crossing.  At first he could detect no movement.  Then suddenly he saw “a single tank reach the center, then a second behind and to its right.”  To the engineer he said, “Get ready.”  Two more tanks appeared in view, and Harmel waited for the line to reach the exact middle before giving the order.  He shouted, “Let it blow!”  The engineer jammed the plunger down.  Nothing happened.  The British tanks continued to advance.  Harmel yelled, “Again!”  Once more the engineer slammed down the detonator handle, but again the huge explosions that Harmel had expected failed to occur.  “I was waiting to see the bridge collapse and the tanks plunge into the river,” he recalled.  “Instead, they moved forward relentlessly, getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer.”  He yelled to his anxious staff, “My God, they’ll be here in two minutes!”