Bridge Too Far (63 page)

taken out, a German medical orderly examined Henri.  “He is in a coma,” he told Mrs.  Voskuil.  “He is grazed along the stomach and his eyes are discolored and swollen, but he will be all right.”  Mutely she nodded her head.

On the floor Major Warr, his shoulder bones protruding through the skin from the explosion, shouted, cursed and then fell unconscious again.  Leaning over, Mrs.  Voskuil moistened her handkerchief and wiped the blood from his lips.  A short distance away Colonel Smyth mumbled something.  A German guard turned, questioningly, toward Mrs.  Voskuil.  “He wants a doctor,” she said softly.  The soldier left the cellar and returned a few minutes later with a German doctor.  Examining Smyth, the physician said, “Tell the officer I am sorry to have to hurt him but I must look at his wound.  Tell him to grit his teeth.”  As he began pulling away the clothing, Smyth fainted.

At daylight the civilians were ordered to leave.  Two SS men carried Mrs.  Voskuil and Henri out into the street, and a Dutch Red Cross worker directed them to the cellar of a dentist, Dr.  Phillip Clous.  Voskuil’s parents-in-law did not go.  They preferred to take their chances at home.  In the Clous house, the dentist warmly welcomed the family.  “Don’t worry,” he told Voskuil.  “It’s going to be all right.  The British will win.”  Voskuil, standing beside his wounded wife and child, his mind still filled with the night’s horrors, stared at the man.  “No,” he said quietly, “they will not.”

Though they were unwilling to recognize that their endurance had nearly run its course, many paratroopers knew that they could not hold on alone much longer.  Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson was tired “of being pushed around by the Germans.”  On the northern edge of the perimeter, he and his men had been chased by tanks, pinned down in woods and forced to fight off the Germans with bayonets.  Finally, on Thursday night, as the perimeter tightened, Pearson’s group was ordered to pull back.  He was told to cover the withdrawal with a smoke grenade.  Nearby he heard a lone Bren gun firing.  Scrambling through underbrush he discovered a corporal hidden in a deep hollow in the woods.  “Get out,” Pearson told him.  “I’m the last one here.”

The corporal shook his head.  “Not me, sergeant,” he said.  “I’m staying.  I won’t let those bastards by.”  As Pearson made his way back he could hear the Bren-gunner firing.  He thought the situation was hopeless.  He began to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to surrender.

In a slit trench near the tennis courts at the Hartenstein—where the earth was now crisscrossed with foxholes that the German prisoners had been allowed to dig for their own protection—Glider Pilot Victor Miller stared at the body of another pilot, who lay sprawled a few yards away.  Firing had been so intense that men had not been able to remove the dead.  Miller saw that since the last mortaring the body was half buried by leaves and shattered branches.  He kept staring at the corpse, wondering if anyone would come to pick it up.  He was frightened that the features of his dead friend would change, and he was certain there was a “strong smell of death.”  He felt sick.  He remembers thinking wildly that “if something isn’t done soon, we’ll all be corpses.  The shells will eliminate us one by one, until this will be only a park of the dead.”

Other men felt they were being exhorted to keep up courage without access to the facts.  Private William O’Brien, near the church in lower Oosterbeek, remembers that “every night an officer came around and told us to hang on, the Second Army would arrive the next day.  There was a helluva lot of apathy.  Everyone was asking what the hell they were there forand where the hell was the goddam army.  We’d had it.” Sergeant Edward Mitchell, a glider pilot, in a position opposite the church, remembers one man locked himself in a nearby shed.  “He would let no one near.  Every now and again he’d shout, “Come on, you bastards,” and empty a magazine all around the shed.”  For hours, the lone trooper alternately shouted and fired, then lapsed into periods of silence.  As Mitchell and others debated how to get him out, there was another sharp burst of fire and then silence.  Reaching the shed, they found the paratrooper dead.

Here and there shell-shocked, concussed, battle-fatigued men roamed the

Hartenstein area, finally oblivious to the battle.  Medic Taffy Brace,

who on Tuesday had tended the mangled

body of his friend, Andy Milbourne, was encountering these tragic, pathetic men as he treated the wounded.  By now Brace had run out of morphia, and he was using paper bandages.  He could not bring himself to reveal that he had no medication.  “What would you be wanting morphia for?”  he asked one critically wounded trooper.  “Morphia’s for people who are really hurt.  You’re doing fine.”

As Brace bandaged the man, he was aware of a strange hooting sound behind him.  Turning he saw a totally naked paratrooper, pumping his arms up and down and “sounding like a locomotive.”  As Brace caught his eye, the soldier began to curse.  “Blast this fireman,” the trooper said, “he was never any good.”  In one house near the perimeter Brace, arriving with a casualty, heard a man softly singing “The White Cliffs of Dover.”  Thinking the trooper was soothing the other injured, Brace smiled at him and nodded encouragement.  The soldier lunged at Brace and tried to choke him.  “I’ll kill you,” he yelled.  “What do you know about Dover?”  Brace loosened the fingers at his throat.  “It’s all right,” he said gently, “I’ve been there.”  The man stepped back.  “Oh,” he said, “that’s all right then.”  Minutes later he began to sing again.  Others remember a shell-shocked trooper who walked among them at night.  Bending over the huddled forms of men trying to sleep he would shake them roughly awake, stare into their eyes and ask them all the same question: “Have you got faith?”

Despite those pitiable, shocked and desperate men whose faith was gone,

hundreds of others were bolstered by the actions of eccentric,

undaunted soldiers who seemed utterly fearless and who refused to give

in to wounds or hardships.  Major Dickie Lonsdale, commander of the

“Lonsdale Force,” holding positions about the church in lower

Oosterbeek, seemed to be everywhere.  “His was a figure that would

inspire terror,” recalls Sergeant Dudley Pearson.  “He had one arm in a

bloodstained sling, an equally bloody wrapping around his head and a

giant bandage on

one leg.”  Hobbling about exhorting his men, Lonsdale led attack after attack.

Sergeant Major Harry Callaghan, who had added extra touches to his uniform—he had found a tall black hat in a hearse and wore it everywhere, explaining to the men that he had been named “the Airborne representative to Hitler’s funeral”—remembers the awesome-looking Lonsdale deliver a ringing, defiant speech to men in the church.  Officers and noncoms had rounded up troopers and sent them to the ancient ruined building.  “The roof was gone,” Callaghan remembers, “and each new explosion sent plaster cascading down.”  As soldiers leaned listlessly against walls and broken pews—smoking, lounging, half-asleep—Lonsdale climbed into the pulpit.  Men stared upward at the fierce-looking, bloodstained figure.  “We’ve fought the Germans in North Africa, Sicily and Italy,” Callaghan remembers Lonsdale saying.  “They weren’t good enough for us then!  They’re bloody well not good enough for us now!”  Captain Michael Corrie of the Glider Pilot Regiment had been struck as he entered the church “by the weariness I saw.  But Lonsdale’s speech was stirring.  I felt stuuned by his words, and proud.  The men went in looking beaten, but as they came out, they had new spirit.  You could read it on their faces.”

Some men seemed to have overcome even the paralyzing fear that the brute force of enemy armored attacks instilled.  With few antitank guns, troopers were helpless against tanks and self-propelled guns that roamed the perimeter, pulverizing position after position.  Yet, somehow the foot soldiers were fighting back.  Even 60-ton Tigers were destroyed—often by men who had never before fired an antitank gun.  Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who had eagerly looked forward to Arnhem as an escape from the “nightmare” of his camp in England and the mole which had invaded his mattress, now faced a far more dreadful nightmare with outward calm.  He and another paratrooper, Private Nobby Clarke, had become friendly with a glider pilot in an adjoining slit trench.

During a lull in the mortaring, the pilot called over to Nunn, “I don’t

know whether you know it, old lad, but there’s a

whopping great tank out in front to our right.  One of the Tiger family.”  Clarke looked at Nunn.  “What are we supposed to do?”  he asked.  “Go drill holes in it?”

Cautiously Nunn looked over the edge of the trench.  The tank was “enormous.”  Nearby in the bushes an antitank gun was concealed, but its crew had been killed, and no one in Nunn’s group knew how to load or fire the weapon.  Nunn and the glider pilot decided to crawl to it.  As the men climbed out they were spotted and the tank’s gun began firing.  “We dug grooves in the soil with our noses, we were that low,” Nunn recalls.  “Our little woods began to look like a logging camp as trees came down all around us.”  The two men reached the gun just as the Tiger “began to give us personal attention with its machine gun.” The pilot sighted down the barrel of the gun and shouted happily.  “Our gun was pointed directly at the tank.  If we’d known how to do it, we couldn’t have aimed it better.”  Looking at Nunn, the glider pilot said, “I hope this thing works.”  He pulled the trigger.  In the heavy explosion that followed, both men were thrown on their backs.  “When our ears stopped ringing, I heard other men around us begin to laugh and cheer,” Nunn says.  As he stared disbelievingly, he saw the Tiger engulfed in flames, its ammunition exploding.  Turning to Nunn, the glider pilot solemnly shook hands.  “Our game, I think,” he said.

Many men remember Major Robert Cain of the 2nd South Staffordshires as the real expert against tanks and self-propelled guns.  It seemed to Cain that he and his men had been pursued and threatened by Tigers ever since they had arrived.  Now, with his small force positioned at the church in lower Oosterbeek, in houses and gardens across the road, and in a laundry owned by a family named Van Dolderen, Cain was determined to knock out every piece of armor he saw.  Searching for the best site from which to operate, Cain picked the Van Dolderen house.  The laundry owner was unwilling to leave.  Surveying the back garden, Cain said, “Well, be that as it may, I’m going to dig in out there.  I’m using your place for my ammo dump.”

Cain was using the bazookalike antitank weapon known as a

Piat to hunt down armor.  On Friday, as the street battles grew in intensity, Cain’s eardrums burst from his constant firing.  Stuffing pieces of field dressing into his ears he continued lobbing bombs.

Suddenly someone called out to Cain that two tanks were coming up the road.  At the corner of a building, Cain loaded the Piat and aimed it.  Staff Sergeant Richard Long, a glider pilot, looked on aghast.  “He was the bravest man I’ve ever seen,” Long says.  “He was only about a hundred yards away when he started to fire.”  The tank fired back before Cain could reload, and the shell hit the building in back of him.  In the thick swirl of dust and debris, Cain fired again and then again.  He saw the crew of the first tank bail out, spraying the street with machine-gun bullets.  Immediately around Cain, paratroopers opened up with Bren guns and, Cain remembers, “the Germans were just cut off their feet.”  Reloading again, he fired, and Sergeant Long saw “a tremendous flash.  The bomb had gone off inside the Piat.  Major Cain threw his hands in the air and fell backward.  When we got to him, his face was black.  His first words were, “I think I’m blind.”” Staff Sergeant Walton Ashworth, one of the Bren-gunners who had shot up the German tank crew, stared stonily as Cain was taken away.  “All I could think was “that poor bloody bastard.””

Within half an hour Cain’s sight had returned, but his face was imbedded with bits of metal.  He refused morphia and, deciding that he “wasn’t wounded enough to stay where he was,” went back to the battle—as Captain W. A. Taylor described it, “to add to his bag of enemy tanks.”  By Friday afternoon, the thirty-five-year-old Cain had a bagful.  Since landing on the eighteenth he had put out of action or driven off a total of six tanks, plus a number of self-propelled guns.

Ferocious men throughout the airhead were making heroic stands, unmindful of their own safety.  By dusk on Friday Corporal Leonard Formoy, one of the survivors of Colonel Fitch’s 3rd Battalion, who had made the desperate march to reach Frost’s men at the Arnhem bridge, occupied a position on the western outskirts not far from Division headquarters at the Hartenstein.

“We were being hit from practically all sides,” Formoy remembers.  Suddenly a Tiger tank, coming from the direction of Arnhem, rumbled toward the cluster of men around Formoy.  In the twilight Formoy saw the turret swivel.  Sergeant “Cab” Calloway picked up a Piat and rushed forward.  “You’re going where I’m going!”  Formoy heard him yell.  Approximately fifty yards away from the tank, Calloway fired.  The bomb exploded against the tracks and the tank stopped, but Calloway was killed at almost the same moment by its guns.  “It was an act of desperation,” Formoy remembers.  “He was just ripped in half, but he saved our lives.”

Private James Jones remembers an unknown major who asked Jones and three others to go with him outside the perimeter on a search for guns and ammunition.  The small party came suddenly upon some Germans in a machine-gun nest.  Leaping up, the major fired, yelling, “There’s some more of those bastards who won’t live!”  As the Germans opened up, the group scattered and Jones was trapped behind a disabled jeep.  “I said a prayer, waited for another burst from the gun, and got back to the lines,” Jones recalls.  He never saw the major again.

Senior officers, often unaware of the impression they made, set examples their men would never forget.  Brigadier Pip Hicks refused to wear a helmet throughout the battle.  Trooper William Chandler, one of Major Freddie Gough’s Reconnaissance Squadron men whose group had been cut off on the northern, Leopard route on Sunday and had been moved back to a crossroads at Oosterbeek, remembers Hicks’s red beret standing out among groups of helmeted men.  “Hey, Brigadier,” someone called out, “put your bloody helmet on.”  Hicks just smiled and waved.  “I wasn’t trying to be debonair,” Hicks explains.  “I just couldn’t stand the damn thing bouncing around on my head.”  His activities might have had something to do with that.  Some men recall Hicks’s frequent daily trips to Urquhart’s headquarters.  He started each journey at a jog and ended up sprinting a step ahead of German shellfire.  “I felt fully my age when I finished those mad dashes,” Hicks confesses.