A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  The most hazardous part of the journey was on the Schelde’s northern bank. There, under the constant threat of Allied air attack, Von Zangen’s forces had to follow a single main road, running east from Walcheren Island, across the Beveland peninsula and into Holland. Part of the escape route, at the narrow neck joining the mainland, was only a few miles from Antwerp and British lines on the Albert Canal. Inexplicably the British even now made no serious effort to attack north, spring the trap, and cut the base of the isthmus. The escape route remained open. Although hammered by incessant Allied air attacks Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army would eventually reach Holland—at a most crucial moment for Montgomery’s Market-Garden operation.

  While the Fifteenth Army had been extricated more by calculated design than by luck, now the opposite occurred: fate, the unexpected and unpredictable, took a hand. Some eighty miles away the battered armored units of Lieutenant General Wilhelm Bittrich’s elite, veteran II SS Panzer Corps reached bivouac areas in the vicinity of Arnhem. As directed by Field Marshal Model on September 4, Bittrich had slowly disengaged the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions for “refitting and rehabilitation.” Model had chosen the Arnhem area. The two reduced, but still tough, divisions were fanned out to the north, east and south of the town. Bittrich assigned the 9th SS to a huge rectangular sector north and northeast of Arnhem, where most of the division’s men and vehicles were on high ground and conveniently hidden in a densely wooded national park. The 10th was encamped in a semicircle to the northeast, east and southeast. Thus, camouflaged and hidden in nearby woods, villages and towns—Beek-bergen, Apeldoorn, Zutphen, Ruurlo and Doetinchem—both divisions were within striking distance of Arnhem; some units were within a mile or two of the suburbs. As Bittrich was later to recall, “there was no particular significance in Model choosing the Arnhem vicinity—except that it was a peaceful sector where nothing was happening.”

  The possibility that this remote backwater might have any strategic value to the Allies was obviously discounted. On the morning of September 11, a small group of Model’s staff officers was dispatched in search of a new site for Army Group B’s headquarters—in Arnhem.

  One of Model’s aides, his general headquarters administration and transportation officer, thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant Gustav Sedelhauser, later remembered that “we visited the 9th and 10th SS division headquarters at Beekbergen and Ruurlo and General Bittrich’s command post at Doetinchem. Then we inspected Arnhem itself. It had everything we wanted: a fine road net and excellent accommodations. But it was not until we drove west to the outlying district of Oosterbeek that we found what we were looking for.” In the wealthy, residential village just two and a half miles from the center of Arnhem was a group of hotels, among them the gracious, white Hartenstein, with its broad expanse of crescent-shaped lawn, stretching back into parklike surroundings where deer roamed undisturbed, and the smaller, two-story, tree-shaded Tafelberg with its glassed-in veranda and paneled rooms. Impressed by the facilities and, as Sedelhauser recalled, “especially the accommodations,” the group promptly recommended Oosterbeek to the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans Krebs, as “perfect for Army Group B’s headquarters.” Model approved the decision. Part of the staff, he decided, would live at the Hartenstein, while he would occupy the more secluded, less ostentatious Tafelberg. Lieutenant Sedelhauser was delighted. Since his tenure the headquarters had never remained anywhere for more than a few days, and now Sedelhauser “was looking forward to some peace and a chance to get my laundry done.” By September 15, Model directed, Army Group B’s headquarters was to be fully operational in Oosterbeek—approximately three miles from the broad expanse of heaths and pastureland where the British 1st Airborne Division was due to land on September 17.

  Part Two

  THE PLAN

  IN THE EARLY EVENING of September 10, within hours of General Browning’s meeting with Field Marshal Montgomery, Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton held the first basic planning conference on Operation Market. At his Sunninghill Park headquarters near the fashionable Ascot racecourse thirty-five miles from London, twenty-seven senior officers crowded into Brereton’s large map-lined office. After General Browning briefed the group on Montgomery’s plan, Brereton told them that, because there was so little time, “major decisions arrived at now must stand—and these have to be made immediately.”

  The task was monumental, and there were few guidelines. Never before had there been an attempt to send a mammoth airborne force, complete with vehicles, artillery and equipment, capable of fighting on its own, deep behind enemy front lines. In comparison with Market, previous airborne attacks had been small; yet months had gone into their planning. Now, to prepare for the greatest paratroop and glider-borne infantry operation ever conceived, Brereton and his planners had barely seven days.

  Brereton’s greatest concern was not the deadline, but the possibility that this operation, like its predecessors, might be canceled. His long-idle airborne troops were impatient for action, and a serious morale problem had developed as a consequence. For weeks his elite, highly trained divisions had stood down while ground forces on the Continent swept victoriously across France and Belgium. There was a widespread feeling that victory was so near that the war might end before the First Allied Airborne Army got into battle.

  The General harbored no doubts about the ability of his staff to meet the tight, one-week Market schedule. There had been so many “dry runs” in developing previous airborne schemes that his headquarters and division staffs had reached a stage of highspeed efficiency. Additionally, much of the planning that had gone into Comet and other canceled operations could be readily adapted to Market. In preparing for the aborted Comet mission, for example, the British 1st Airborne Division and the Polish Brigade, charged with that operation, had made a thorough study of the Arnhem area. Still, most of the Market concept meant vastly expanded planning—and all of it was time-consuming.

  General Brereton was outwardly confident and calm, but members of his staff noted that he smoked one cigarette after another. On his desk was a framed quotation which the General often pointed out to his staff. It read: “Where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense, as that 10,000 men descending from the clouds, might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?” It had been written in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin.

  Brereton was fascinated by the vision of the eighteenth-century statesman and scientist. “Even after a hundred sixty years,” he had told his staff, “the idea remains the same.” But Franklin would have been bewildered by the complexities and size of Operation Market. To invade Holland from the sky, Brereton planned to land almost 35,000 men—nearly twice the number of paratroops and glider-borne infantry used in the invasion of Normandy.

  To “grab the bridges with thunderclap surprise,” as Brereton put it, and hold open the narrow, one-highway advance corridor for the British Garden ground forces—from their attack line near the Dutch-Belgian border to Arnhem sixty-four miles north—three and one half airborne divisions were to be used. Two would be American. Almost directly ahead of General Horrocks’ XXX Corps tanks, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division was to capture canal and river crossings over a fifteen-mile stretch between Eindhoven and Veghel. North of them, Brigadier General James M. Gavin’s veteran 82nd Division was charged with the area between Grave and the city of Nijmegen, approximately a ten-mile stretch. They were to seize crossings over the great Maas and Waal rivers, in particular the huge multispan bridge at Nijmegen, which, with its approaches, was almost a half-mile long. The single most important objective of Operation Market-Garden was Arnhem and its vital crossing over the 400-yard-wide Lower Rhine. The great concrete-and-steel, three-span highway bridge, together with its concrete ramps, was almost 2,000 feet long. Its capture was assigned to the British and Poles—Major General Robert “Roy” E. Urquhart’s 1st Airborne Division and, un
der his command, Major General Stanislaw Sosa-bowski’s Polish 1st Parachute Brigade. Arnhem, lying farthest away from the Garden forces, was the prize. Without the Rhine crossing, Montgomery’s bold stroke to liberate Holland, outflank the Siegfried Line and springboard into Germany’s industrial Ruhr would fail.

  To carry the huge force to targets three hundred miles away, an intricate air plan had to be designed. Three distinct operations were required: transportation, protection and resupply. No fewer than twenty-four different airfields would be needed for takeoff. Brereton planned to use every operable glider in his command—an immense fleet of more than 2,500. Besides hauling heavy equipment such as jeeps and artillery, the gliders were to ferry more than a third of the 35,000-man force; the rest would drop by parachute. All the craft had to be checked out, loading space allotted, heavy equipment and cargo stowed, and troop complements prepared.

  Gliders posed only a single problem in the air planning. Transports to carry paratroops and tow planes to pull the gliders must be diverted from their normal task of supplying the advancing armies and grounded in order to be readied for Market. The crews of bomber squadrons had to be alerted and briefed for missions in the Market-Garden area prior to, and during, the attack. Swarms of fighter squadrons from all over England—more than 1,500 planes—would be needed to escort the airborne force. Intricate aerial traffic patterns were of prime importance. Routes between England and Holland had to be laid out to avoid heavy enemy antiaircraft fire and the equally dangerous possibility of air collision. Air-sea rescue operations, resupply missions, even a dummy parachute drop in another area of Holland to deceive the enemy, were also planned. In all, it was estimated that almost 5,000 aircraft of all types would be involved in Market. To develop plans and ready this vast air armada would take a minimum of seventy-two hours.

  The most pressing question of the conference, in Brereton’s opinion, was whether the operation should be undertaken by day or by night. Previous major airborne operations had taken place in moonlight. But semidarkness had led to confusion in finding landing zones, lack of troop concentration and unnecessary casualties. The General decreed that the huge airborne assault would take place in broad daylight. It was an unprecedented decision. In the history of airborne operations, a daylight drop of such proportions had never before been made.

  Brereton had other reasons than the desire to avoid confusion. The week scheduled for Operation Market was a no-moon period and night landings on a large scale were therefore impossible. Apart from that, Brereton chose a daylight attack because, for the first time in the war, it was feasible. Allied fighters held such overwhelming superiority over the battlefields that now interference from the Luftwaffe was practically nonexistent. But the Germans did have night fighters. In a night drop, against columns of slow-moving troop-carrying planes and gliders, they might prove devastatingly effective. German antiaircraft strength was another consideration: flak maps of the approaches to the Market drop areas were dotted with antiaircraft positions. The charts, based on photo-reconnaissance flights and the experience of bomber crews flying over Holland en route to Germany, looked formidable—particularly so because gliders were without protective armor, except in the cockpits, and C-47 troop-carriers and tow planes had no self-sealing gas tanks. Nevertheless, Brereton believed that enemy antiaircraft positions could be neutralized by concentrated bomber and fighter attacks preceding and during the assault. In any event, most antiaircraft was radar-directed, and therefore was as effective after dark as it was during the day. Either way, losses were to be expected. Still, unless bad weather and high winds intervened, the airborne force, by attacking in daylight, could be dropped with almost pinpoint accuracy on the landing zones, thus guaranteeing a quick concentration of troops in the corridor. “The advantages,” Brereton told his commanders, “far outweigh the risks.”

  Brereton made his final announcement. To command the giant operation he appointed his deputy, the fastidious forty-seven-year-old Lieutenant General Frederick “Boy” Browning, head of the British I Airborne Corps. It was an excellent choice, though disappointing to Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the other corps in the airborne army—the XVIII Airborne Corps. Still, Browning had been slated to command the aborted Operation Comet, which, though smaller and utilizing only British and Polish airborne troops, was similar in concept to Market-Garden. Now, under the enlarged and innovative plan Montgomery had devised, American paratroops would serve under a British airborne commander for the first time.

  To the assembled airborne commanders Browning delivered an optimistic summation. He ended his talk with the kind of picturesque confidence that had always made him a heroic figure to his men. As his chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers, “General Browning was in high spirits, delighted that at last we were going. ‘The object,’ he told us, ‘is to lay a carpet of airborne troops down over which our ground forces can pass.’ He believed this single operation held the key to the duration of the war.”

  Browning’s enthusiasm was catching. As the large meeting broke up, to be replaced by smaller staff conferences which would last throughout the night, few officers were aware that an underlying friction existed between Brereton and Browning. Originally, when the First Allied Airborne Army was formed, British hopes ran high that Browning, Britain’s senior airborne authority and one of the pioneers in the use of paratroops, would be named commander. Because of the preponderance of American troops and equipment within the newly organized army, the coveted post went to an American, General Brereton.

  In rank, Browning was six months Brereton’s senior; and although the American was a distinguished tactical air force officer, he had never before commanded airborne forces. Additionally, there were wide personality differences between the two men. Brereton had been a World War I flyer and had served brilliantly in World War II, first in the Far and Middle East and later as commanding general of the U.S. Ninth Air Force in England. He was tenacious and single-minded, but his zeal to achieve was cloaked by a quiet, stolid demeanor. Now Brereton proceeded on the awesome assignment he had been handed with the determination and bulldozing tactics that characterized many of his fellow American career officers.

  Browning, a Grenadier Guards officer, was also a perfectionist, equally determined to prove the worth of paratroops. But he had never commanded an airborne corps before. In contrast to Brereton, “Boy” Browning was a somewhat glamorous figure, elegant and impeccably groomed, with an air of easy assurance often misunderstood for arrogance, not only by Americans but by some of his own commanders. Though he was temperamental and sometimes overly impatient, his reputation as an airborne theorist was legendary among his admirers. Still, he lacked the battle experience of some other officers, such as General Richard Gale of the British 6th Airborne Division and the veteran American commanders, Generals Gavin and Taylor. And, Browning had yet to prove that he possessed the administrative genius of the most experienced of all airborne commanders, General Ridgway.

  Only days before, an incident had occurred that pointed up the differences between Brereton and Browning. On September 3, Browning had protested to Brereton the dangers of trying to launch an airborne assault on just thirty-six hours’ notice. Since D Day on June 6, seventeen airborne operations had been prepared and canceled. In the thirty-three days of Brereton’s command, in his eagerness to get into action, plans had been processed at the rate of almost one a week. None reached the launching stage. Browning, watching the mass production of airborne schemes, was deeply concerned about the haste and the risks being run. When Operation Linnet I—a drop before the British army in Belgium—was canceled on September 2, Brereton quickly found new objectives ahead of the speeding armies and proposed Operation Linnet II, as a substitute attack to take place on the morning of September 4.

  As Brereton later recalled the incident, “Browning was quite agitated about Operation Linnet II in which there was a serious shortage of information, photographs and, in particular, maps. A
s a result, ‘Boy’ claimed his troops could not be briefed properly.” Airborne operations, Browning contended, “should not be attempted on such short notice.” In principle Brereton had agreed, but he had told his deputy that “the disorganization of the enemy demands that chances be taken.” The disagreement between the two men had ended with Browning stiffly stating that he intended to submit his protest in writing. A few hours later his letter had arrived. Because “of our sharp differences of opinion,” Browning wrote, he could no longer “continue as Deputy Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army.” Brereton, unintimidated, had begun at once to consider the problem of Browning’s replacement. He had alerted General Ridgway to “stand by to take over.” The delicate problem was solved when Operation Linnet II was canceled; the following day Brereton had persuaded Browning to withdraw his letter of resignation.

  Now, their differences set aside, both men faced the huge, complex task of preparing Market. Whatever reservations Browning entertained were now secondary to the job ahead.

  There was one decision Brereton could not make at the initial meeting: exactly how the airborne troops comprising the carpet were to be carried to the targets. The airborne commanders could not make detailed plans until this greatest of all problems was solved. The fact was that the airborne army was only as mobile as the planes that would carry it. Apart from gliders, Brereton had no transports of his own. To achieve complete surprise, the ideal plan called for the three and one-half divisions in Market to be delivered to landing zones on the same day at the same hour. But the immense size of the operation ruled out this possibility. There was an acute shortage of both aircraft and gliders; the planes would have to make more than one trip. Other factors also forced a different approach. Each division had separate combat requirements. For example, it was essential that the transport for General Taylor’s 101st Airborne carry more men than equipment when the attack began so that the division could carry out its assigned task of achieving a link-up with the Garden forces within the first few hours. Also, Taylor’s men had to join quickly with the 82nd Airborne on the corridor north of them. There, General Gavin’s troops not only had to secure the formidable bridges across the Maas and the Waal but also hold the Groes-beek ridge to the southeast, terrain which had to be denied the Germans because it dominated the countryside. Gavin’s special assignment also imposed special requirements. Because the 82nd Airborne would have to fight longer than the 101st before the linkup occurred, Gavin needed not only troops but artillery.