Bridge Too Far (59 page)

On neat after-action report maps, each unit has its carefully inked-in place; but survivors would recall years later that there was really no perimeter, no front line, no distinction between units, no fighting as integrated groups.  There were only shocked, bandaged, bloodstained men, running to fill gaps wherever and whenever they occurred.  As Brigadier Hicks visited his exhausted men, tenaciously defending their sectors of the bridgehead, he knew “it was the beginning of the end, and I think we were all aware of it, although we tried to keep a reasonable face.”

Unaware that Frost’s gallant stand at the bridge had ended—although Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson suspected it had when his artillery radio link with Major Dennis Munford abruptly closed down—Urquhart could only place his hope in the Guards tanks’ reaching the remnants of the 2nd Battalion in time.  * That single bridge spanning the Rhine— the Reich’s last natural defense line—had been the principal objective all along, Montgomery’s springboard to a quick ending of the war.  Without it, the 1/ Airborne’s predicament and, in particular, the suffering of Frost’s brave men, would be for nothing.  As Urquhart had told Frost and Gough, there was nothing more that he could do for them.  Their help must come from the speed and armored strength of XXX Corps.

Munford destroyed his wireless set shortly after dawn on Thursday as the Germans began rounding up the few men still attempting to hang on.  “Enemy tanks and infantry were right up to the bridge,” Munford recalls.  “I helped carry some more wounded to a collecting point and then I bashed in the set.  There was nothing more that Colonel Thompson could do for us and everybody who could wanted to get back to the division at Oosterbeek.”  Munford was captured on the outskirts of Arnhem as he tried to reach the British lines.

For Urquhart now the immediate priority was to get Sosabowski’s Poles

across the river and into the perimeter as quickly as

they landed.  The cable ferry was particularly suited to the operation.  Urquhart’s engineers had signaled Corps headquarters that it was “a class-24 type and capable of carrying three tanks.”  Although Urquhart was worried about the heights of Westerbouwing and the possibility of German artillery controlling the ferry crossing from there, as yet no enemy troops had reached the area.  With so few men to hold the perimeter, only a single platoon of the 1/ Borderers had been detached to defend the position.  In fact, the heights were unguarded by either side.  Major Charles Osborne’s D Company of the Border Regiment had been given the assignment soon after landing on Sunday but, Osborne says, “we never did hold Westerbouwing.  I was sent on a reconnaissance patrol to lay out battalion positions.  However, by the time I’d done this and returned to headquarters, plans had changed.”  By Thursday, Osborne’s men “were moved rather piecemeal into a position near the Hartenstein Hotel.”  No one was on the vital heights.

On Wednesday engineers had sent reconnaissance patrols down to the Rhine to report back on the ferry, the depth, condition of the banks and speed of the current.  Sapper Tom Hicks thought the survey was to “aid the Second Army when it tried bridging the river.”  Along with three other sappers and a Dutch guide, Hicks had crossed the Rhine on the ferry.  Pieter, he saw, “operated it with a cable that the old man wound in by hand and it seemed that the current helped work it across.” Tying a grenade to a length of parachute rigging and knotting the cord every foot along its length, Hicks took soundings and measured the current.  On Wednesday night, after the Poles’ drop zone had been changed to Driel, another patrol was sent to the ferry site.  “It was a volunteer job,” recalls Private Robert Edwards of the South Staffordshires.  “We were to go down to the river at Heveadorp, find the ferry and stay there to protect it.”

In darkness a Sergeant, a corporal, six privates and four glider pilots

set out.  “Mortar bombs and shells were falling heavily as we plunged

into the thickly wooded country between us and Heveadorp,” says

Edwards.  Several times the group was fired on,

and a glider pilot was wounded.  Reaching the riverbank at the site marked on their maps, the patrol found no sign of the ferry.  It had completely disappeared.  Although the possibility remained that the craft was moored on the southern bank, the patrol had been told they would find it on their own side.  Immediately the men spread out, searching along a quarter-mile strip on either side of the ferry’s northern landing stage.  The hunt was fruitless.  Pieter’s ferry could not be found.  As Edwards remembers, the sergeant in charge of the patrol reached the conclusion that the boat had either been sunk or simply never existed.  At first light the men gave up the search and began their dangerous journey back.

Only minutes later heavy machine-gun fire wounded three more of the patrol and the group was pulled back to the river.  There the sergeant decided the men would have a better chance of getting back by splitting up.  Edwards left with the corporal and two of the glider pilots.  After “minor encounters and brushes with the Germans,” his group reached the church in lower Oosterbeek just as a mortar burst landed.  Edwards was thrown to the ground, both legs filled with “tiny pieces of shrapnel and my boots full of blood.”  In the house next to the church an orderly dressed his wounds and told the injured private to take a rest.  “He didn’t say where, though,” Edwards recalls, “and every inch of space in the house was packed with badly wounded.  The stench of wounds and death was something awful.”  He decided to leave and head for company headquarters, located in a laundry, “in order to find somebody to make my report to.  I told an officer about the ferry and then I got into a weapons pit with a glider pilot.  I don’t know if the others made it back or what happened to the men who got to the church with me.”

Sometime later General Urquhart, still ignorant of Frost’s fate, signaled Browning:

Enemy attacking main bridge in strength.  Situation critical for slender force.  Enemy attacking east from Heelsum and west from Arnhem.

Situation serious but am forming close perimeter around Hartenstein with remainder of division.  Relief essential both areas earliest possible.  Still maintain control ferry point at Heveadorp.

Even as the message was being sent via the 64th Medium Regiment’s communications net, Division headquarters learned that the ferry had not been found.  Urquhart’s officers believed the Germans had sunk it.  But Pieter’s ferry was still afloat.  Presumably artillery fire had cut its moorings.  Far too late to be of use, it was eventually found by Dutch civilians near the demolished railroad bridge about a mile away, washed up but still intact.  “If we had been able to search a few hundred yards closer to Oosterbeek, we would have found it,” Edwards says.

As Urquhart returned to his headquarters on Thursday morning after an inspection of the Hartenstein defenses, he heard the crushing news.  With the Poles’ drop only hours away, his only quick way of reinforcing the perimeter with Sosabowski’s men was gone.  * * The true account of the ferry appears here for the first time.  Even official histories state that it was sunk.  Other versions imply that, to prevent its use, the Germans either destroyed the ferry with artillery fire or moved it to another location under their control.  There is no reference in any German war diary, log, or after-action report to sustain these conjectures.  Interviewing German officers—such as Bittrich, Harzer, Harmel and Krafft—I found that none of them could recall ordering any such action.  Assuming that the Germans wanted to seize the ferry, I believe they would have encountered the same difficulties in locating it that Edwards reported.  In any case, no German officer remembers ordering the cable cut in order to prevent the British from using it.

Looking down from a window in the lead Dakota, as the long columns of planes carrying the Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade headed for the drop zone at Driel, Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski “learned the real truth, and what I had suspected all along.”  From Eindhoven, where the formations turned north, he saw “hundreds of vehicles below in chaotic traffic jams all along the corridor.”  Smoke churned up from the road.

At various points along the highway enemy shells were landing, trucks

and vehicles were ablaze, and “everywhere wreckage was piled up on

the

sides.”  Yet, somehow, the convoys were still moving.  Then, beyond Nijmegen, movement stopped.  Through low clouds off to his right, Sosabowski could see the “island” road and the clogged, halted tanks on it.  Enemy fire was falling on the head of the column.  Moments later, as the planes banked toward Driel, the Arnhem bridge loomed into view.  Tanks were crossing over it, driving north to south, and Sosabowski realized they were German.  Shocked and stunned, he knew now that the British had lost the bridge.

On Wednesday night, agitated by the lack of information regarding Urquhart’s situation, and “as I had visions of being court-martialed by my own government,” Sosabowski had thrown caution to the winds.  He demanded to see General Brereton, the First Allied Airborne Army commander.  To Colonel George Stevens, the liaison officer with the Polish Brigade, Sosabowski had emotionally insisted that unless he was “given Urquhart’s exact situation around Arnhem, the Polish Parachute Brigade will not take off.”  Startled, Stevens had rushed off to First Allied Airborne headquarters with Sosabowski’s ultimatum.  At 7 A.m. on Thursday morning, he returned with news from Brereton.  There was confusion, Stevens admitted, but the attack was going as planned; the drop zone at Driel had not been changed and “the Heveadorp ferry was in British hands.”  Sosabowski was mollified.  Now, looking down on the panorama of battle, he realized he “knew more than Brereton.”  Enraged as he saw what was obviously German armor about Oosterbeek and ahead a hail of antiaircraft fire coming up to greet his men, Sosabowski believed his brigade was “being sacrificed in a complete British disaster.”  Moments later he was out the door, falling through weaving curtains of antiaircraft fire.  The time, the precise fifty-year-old general noted, was exactly 5:08 P.m.

As Sosabowski had feared, the Poles jumped into a holocaust.  As

before, the Germans were waiting.  They had tracked and timed the

formations from Dunkirk on and now, with far more reinforcements than

before, the area bristled with antiaircraft guns.  As the transports

approached, twenty-five Messerschmitts

suddenly appeared and, diving out of the clouds, raked the approaching planes.

As he fell through the air Sosabowski saw one Dakota, both engines flaming, fall toward the ground.  Corporal Alexander Kochalski saw another go down.  Only a dozen paratroopers escaped before it crashed and burned.  First Lieutenant Stefan Kaczmarek prayed as he hung below his chute.  He saw so many tracer bullets that “every gun on the ground seemed to be aimed at me.”  Corporal Wladijslaw Korob, his parachute full of holes, landed alongside a fellow Pole who had been decapitated.

In the Oosterbeek perimeter the Polish drop, barely two and one-half miles away, caused a momentary halt in the battle.  Every German gun seemed to be concentrating on the swaying, defenseless men.  “It was as if all the enemy guns lifted together and let fly simultaneously,” Gunner Robert Christie noted.  The reprieve from the constant shelling was too precious to waste: men quickly took the opportunity to move jeeps and equipment, dig new gun pits, bring up spare ammunition, rearrange camouflage nets and toss empty shell cases out of crowded slit trenches.

Six miles away on the elevated “island” road, Captain Roland Langton, whose lead tank squadron had been halted en route to Arnhem some six hours previously, watched the drop in agony.  It was the most horrible sight he had ever seen.  German planes dived at the defenseless Polish transports, “blasting them out of the air.”  Parachutists tried to get out of burning aircraft, “some of which had nosed over and were diving to the ground.”  Bodies of men “tumbled through the air, inert forms drifting slowly down, dead before they hit the ground.”  Langton was close to tears.  “Where the hell is the air support?”  he wondered.  “We were told in the afternoon we couldn’t have any for our attack toward Arnhem, because all available air effort had to go for the Poles.  Where was it now?  The weather?  Nonsense.  The Germans flew; why couldn’t we?”  Langton had never felt so frustrated.  With all his heart, he knew that with air support his tanks “could have got through to those poor bastards at Arnhem.”  In anxiety and desperation he suddenly found himself violently sick.

Though they were shocked by the savagery of the combined air and antiaircraft assault, most of the Polish Brigade miraculously made the drop zone.  Even as they landed, flak and high-explosive mortar shells—fired from tanks and antiaircraft guns along the Nijmegen-Arnhem elevated highway and by batteries north of Driel—burst among them, and Sosabowski saw that even machine guns seemed to be ranged in on the entire area.  Hammered in the air and caught in a deadly crossfire on the ground, the men now had to fight their way off the drop zones.  Sosabowski landed near a canal.  As he ran for cover he came across the body of one trooper.  “He lay on the grass, stretched out as if on a cross,” Sosabowski later wrote.  “A bullet or piece of shrapnel had neatly sliced off the top of his head.  I wondered how many more of my men would I see like this before the battle was over and whether their sacrifice would be worthwhile.”  * * Stanislaw Sosabowski, Freely I Served, p. 124.

Aghast at the fierce German reception, the entire population of Driel was engulfed by the paratroop drop.  Polish troopers came down all about the hamlet, landing in orchards, irrigation canals, on the top of the dikes, on the polder and in the village itself.  Some men fell into the Rhine and, unable to shed their parachutes, were swept away and drowned.  Disregarding the shell and machine-gun fire all about them, the Dutch ran to help the ill-fated Poles.  Among them, as a member of a Red Cross team, was Cora Baltussen.

The landing, centered on drop zones less than two miles south of Driel,

had come as a complete surprise to the villagers.  No pathfinders had