A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  *In the safety of his prison cell after the war, Rauter admitted to Dutch interrogators that “at the time I was very nervous…. I had to paralyze the resistance.” Rauter was found guilty by a Dutch court on January 12, 1949, of a wide range of offenses, including “persecution of the Jews, deportation of inhabitants for slave labor, pillage, confiscation of property, illegal arrests, detentions … and the killings of innocent civilians as reprisals for offenses … against the occupying authorities.” He was executed on March 25, 1949.

  *After the war, some British newspapers charged that it was because Lindemans pinpointed Arnhem as the main airborne objective that the panzer divisions were waiting. Obviously this is not so. Bittrich’s corps reached its positions before Eisenhower and Montgomery met on September 10 and decided on Market-Garden. Neither could Lindemans have known anything about the Arnhem attack or the massive dimensions of the operation. Again, Allied decisions on dates, placement of drop zones, etc. were made long after Lindemans left Brussels to cross the German lines. A second often-repeated story is that Lindemans was taken to Colonel General Kurt Student’s headquarters at Vught for questioning, and it has been suggested that the airborne expert correctly evaluated the report and gave the alert. Student flatly denies this allegation. “It is a large fat lie,” he told me. “I never met Lindemans. Indeed, I first heard of the whole affair in a prison camp after the war.” Student adds, “The truth is, nobody in the German command knew anything about the attack until it happened.” Shortly after Market-Garden, suspicion fell on Lindemans and he was arrested by the Dutch. King Kong, the great Lothario, lived up to his reputation to the very end. In July, 1946, forty-eight hours before his trial, Lindemans, in a prison hospital, was found unconscious with a prison nurse nearby. Both of them, in a bizarre “love pact,” had taken overdoses of sleeping pills. Lindemans died, the girl survived.

  OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN was now less than forty-eight hours away. In his office Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, listened to SHAEF’s intelligence chief, British Major General Kenneth W. Strong, disclose his latest news with growing alarm. Beyond doubt, Strong said, there was German armor in the Market-Garden area.

  For days, Strong and his staff had been sifting and assessing every intelligence report in an effort to determine the whereabouts of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions. Since the first week in September there had been no contact with the units. Both were badly cut up, but it was considered unlikely that they had been completely destroyed. One theory held that the units might have been ordered back into Germany. Now Dutch underground messages told a different story. The lost divisions had been spotted.

  The 9th and, presumably, the 10th SS Panzer divisions were in Holland, Strong reported to Smith, “in all probability to be refitted with tanks.” Exactly what remained of the units or their fighting capability no one could say, but there was no longer any doubt about their location, Strong reported. They were definitely in the vicinity of Arnhem.

  Deeply concerned about Market-Garden and, in his own words, “alarmed over the possibility of failure,” Smith immediately conferred with the Supreme Commander. The British 1st Airborne Division, due to land at Arnhem, “could not hold out against two armored divisions,” Smith told Eisenhower. To be sure, there was a question—a big question—about the strength of the units, but to be on the safe side Smith thought that Market-Garden should be reinforced. He believed two airborne divisions would be required in the Arnhem area. (Presumably, Smith had in mind as the additional unit the veteran British 6th Airborne Division, commanded by Major General Richard Gale, which had been used successfully during the Normandy invasion, but was not included in Market-Garden.) Otherwise, Smith told Eisenhower, the plan must be revised. “My feeling,” he later said, “was that if we could not drop the equivalent of another division in the area, then we should shift one of the American airborne divisions, which were to form the ‘carpet’ further north, to reinforce the British.”

  Eisenhower considered the problem and its risks. On the basis of this intelligence report and almost on the eve of the attack, he was being urged to override Monty’s plan—one that Eisenhower himself had approved. It meant challenging Montgomery’s generalship and upsetting an already delicate command situation. As Supreme Commander, he had another option open: Market-Garden could be canceled; but the only grounds for such a decision would be this single piece of intelligence. Eisenhower had obviously to assume that Montgomery was the best judge of enemy strength before him and that he would plan accordingly. As Eisenhower explained to Smith, “I cannot tell Monty how to dispose of his troops,” nor could he “call off the operation, since I have already given Monty the green light.” If changes were to be made, Montgomery would have to make them. Still, Eisenhower was prepared to let Smith “fly to 21st Army Group headquarters and argue it out with Montgomery.”

  Bedell Smith set out immediately for Brussels. He found Montgomery confident and enthusiastic. Smith explained his fears about the panzer units in the Arnhem area and strongly suggested that the plan might need revision. Montgomery “ridiculed the idea. Monty felt the greatest opposition would come more from terrain difficulties than from the Germans. All would go well, he kept repeating, if we at SHAEF would help him surmount his logistical difficulties. He was not worried about the German armor. He thought Market-Garden would go all right as set.” The conference was fruitless. “At least I tried to stop him,” Smith said, “but I got nowhere. Montgomery simply waved my objections airily aside.”*

  Even as Montgomery and Smith conferred, across the Channel startling evidence reached British I Airborne Corps headquarters. Earlier in the day, fighters of the R.A.F.’s specially equipped photo-reconnaissance squadron returning from The Hague had made a low-level sweep over the Arnhem area. Now, in his office, intelligence officer Major Brian Urquhart took up a magnifying glass and examined five oblique-angle pictures—an “end of the run” strip from one of the fighters. Hundreds of aerial photographs of the Market-Garden area had been taken and evaluated in the previous seventy-two hours, but only these five shots showed what Urquhart had long feared—the unmistakable presence of German armor. “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Urquhart later recalled. “There, in the photos, I could clearly see tanks—if not on the very Arnhem landing and drop zones, then certainly close to them.”

  Major Urquhart rushed to General Browning’s office with the photographic confirmation. Browning saw him immediately. Placing the pictures on the desk before Browning, Urquhart said, “Take a look at these.” The General studied them one by one. Although Urquhart no longer remembers the exact wording, to the best of his recollection, Browning said, “I wouldn’t trouble myself about these if I were you.” Then, referring to the tanks in the photos, he continued, “They’re probably not serviceable at any rate.” Urquhart was stunned. Helplessly he pointed out that the armor, “whether serviceable or not, were still tanks and they had guns.” Looking back, Urquhart feels that “perhaps because of information I knew nothing about, General Browning was not prepared to accept my evaluation of the photos. My feeling remained the same—that everyone was so gung-ho to go that nothing could stop them.”

  Urquhart was unaware that some members of Browning’s staff considered the young intelligence officer almost too zealous. The show was about to begin, and most officers were anxious and eager to get on with it. Urquhart’s pessimistic warnings irritated them. As one senior staff officer put it, “His views were colored by nervous exhaustion. He was inclined to be a bit hysterical, no doubt brought on by overwork.”

  Shortly after his meeting with Browning, Urquhart was visited by the corps medical officer. “I was told,” Urquhart recalls, “that I was exhausted—who wasn’t?—and that perhaps I should take a rest and go on leave. I was out. I had become such a pain around headquarters that on the very eve of the attack I was being removed from the scene. I was told to go home. There was nothing I could say. Although I d
isagreed with the plan and feared the worst, still, this was going to be the big show and, curiously, I did not want to be left behind.”

  *I have based this entire section on information supplied to me by General S. L. A. Marshall, Chief Historian for the European Theatre of Operations during World War II, who kindly allowed me to see his various monographs on Market-Garden and also his 1945 interview with General Bedell Smith on the meeting with Eisenhower and later Montgomery.

  BY NOON ON SATURDAY, September 16, the German proclamation was plastered on bulletin boards all over Arnhem.

  By order of the Security Police, the following is announced:

  During the night an attack with explosives was made on the railroad viaduct at Schaapsdrift.

  The population is called upon to cooperate in tracing the culprits of this attack.

  If they have not been found before 12 o’clock noon on Sunday, September 17, 1944, a number of hostages will be shot.

  I appeal to the cooperation of all of you in order that needless victims be spared.

  The acting Burgomaster,

  LIERA

  In a cellar, leading members of the Arnhem underground met in an emergency meeting. The sabotage of the railroad viaduct had been badly botched. Henri Knap, the Arnhem intelligence chief, had not been happy about the mission from its inception. He felt that, “at best, we are all rank amateurs when it comes to sabotage.” In his view, “it is far better to concentrate on feeding intelligence to the Allies and to leave demolition jobs to men who know what they are doing.” The chief of the Arnhem underground, thirty-eight-year-old Pieter Kruyff, asked for the others’ opinions. Nicolaas Tjalling de Bode voted that the members give themselves up. Knap remembers thinking “this was a very steep price to pay—the lives of the hostages, innocent people—for a small hole in a bridge.” Gijsbert Jan Numan was conscience-stricken. He had been involved along with Harry Montfroy, Albert Deuss, Toon van Daalen and others in procuring the materials for the explosives and in planning the sabotage, and no one wanted innocent men to suffer. Yet what was to be done? Kruyff heard everyone out, then he made his decision. “The organization must stay intact even though innocent people may be shot,” he decreed. Looking around at the assembled leaders, as Nicolaas de Bode remembers, Kruyff told them, “No one will give himself up to the Germans. That’s my order.” Henri Knap had a feeling of dread. He knew that if the Germans followed their usual procedure, ten or twelve leading citizens—doctors, lawyers and teachers among them—would be publicly executed in an Arnhem square at noon on Sunday.

  ALL DOWN THE ALLIED LINE of command the evaluation of intelligence on the panzers in the Arnhem area was magnificently bungled. SHAEF’s Intelligence Summary No. 26 issued on September 16, the eve of Market-Garden—containing the ominous warning that had caused General Bedell Smith’s alarm—was disregarded. In part, it read, “9th SS Panzer Division, and presumably the 10th, has been reported withdrawing to the Arnhem area in Holland; there, they will probably collect new tanks from a depot reported in the area of Cleves.”

  The information, already discredited by Montgomery at his meeting with Smith, was now discounted by General Dempsey’s British Second Army headquarters—the same headquarters that had originally noted the presence in Holland of “battered panzer formations” on September 10. In the most serious blunder of all, Dempsey’s intelligence staff, on September 14, described the Germans in the Market-Garden area as “weak, demoralized and likely to collapse entirely if confronted with a large airborne attack.” Now, in a complete reversal of their original position, they dismissed the presence of the panzers, because Dempsey’s staff officers were unable to spot enemy armor on any reconnaissance photos.

  At First Allied Airborne Army headquarters, General Brere-ton’s chief intelligence officer, British Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Tasker, was not prepared to accept SHAEF’s report either. Reviewing all the information available, he decided there was no direct evidence that the Arnhem area contained “much more than the considerable flak defenses already known to exist.”

  Everyone, it seemed, accepted the optimistic outlook of Montgomery’s headquarters. As the British I Airborne Corps’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers, “21st Army Group headquarters was the principal source of our intelligence, and we took what they gave us to be true.” General Urquhart, commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, put it another way. “Nothing,” he said, “was allowed to mar the optimism prevailing across the Channel.”

  Yet, besides SHAEF’s report on the “missing” panzers, there was other evidence of German buildup, again almost cursorily noted. At the front, ahead of General Horrocks’ XXX Corps Garden forces, it was plain that an increasing number of German units were moving into the line. Now the strategic error at Antwerp ten days before was beginning to build and threaten the grand design of Operation Market-Garden. The German troops filling out General Student’s front were none other than units of the splintered divisions that had escaped across the mouth of the Schelde—the battered men of Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, the army the Allies had practically written off. Intelligence officers did note that, though the Germans had increased in number, the new units in the line were “believed to be in no fit state to resist any determined advance.” Any British Tommy along the Belgium-Dutch frontier could have told them otherwise.*

  The cobblestone streets of the dingy mining town of Leopolds-burg in northern Belgium, barely ten miles from the front, were choked with jeeps and scout cars. All roads seemed to lead to a cinema opposite the railway station—and never before had the nondescript theater held such an audience. Officers of Lieutenant General Horrocks’ XXX Corps—the Garden forces that would drive north through Holland to link up with the paratroopers-crowded the street and milled around the entrance as their credentials were inspected by red-capped military police. It was a colorful, exuberant group and it reminded Brigadier Hubert Essame, commanding officer of the 214th Brigade, 43rd Wessex Infantry Division, of “an army assembly at a point-to-point race or a demonstration on Salisbury Plain in time of peace.” He was fascinated by the colorful dress of the commanders. There was a striking variety of headgear. No one had a steel helmet, but berets of many colors bore the proud badges of famous regiments, among them the Irish, Grenadier, Coldstream, Scotch, Welsh and Royal Horse Guards, the Royal Army Service Corps and Royal Artillery. There was a regal casualness about everyone’s attire. Essame noted that most commanders were dressed in “sniper’s smocks, parachutists’ jackets and jeep coats over brightly colored slacks, corduroys, riding britches or even jodhpurs.” Instead of ties many sported ascots or “scarves of various colors.”*

  The renowned Lieutenant Colonel J.O.E. (“Joe”) Vandeleur, the solidly built, ruddy-faced, six-foot commander of the Irish Guards Armored Group, personified the kind of devil-may-care elegance of the Guards’ officers. The forty-one-year-old Vandeleur was wearing his usual combat garb: black beret, a multicolored camouflaged parachutist’s jacket, and corduroy trousers above high rubber boots. Additionally, Vandeleur wore, as always, a .45 Colt automatic strapped to his hip and, tucked into his jacket, what had become a symbol for his tankers, a flamboyant emerald-green scarf. The fastidious General “Boy” Browning, back in England, would have winced. Even Horrocks had once dryly admonished Vandeleur. “If the Germans ever get you, Joe,” he said, “they’ll think they’ve captured a peasant.” But on this September 16 even Horrocks lacked the usual elegance of the impeccably dressed British staff officer. Instead of a shirt he wore a ribbed polo sweater and, over his battle dress, a sleeveless leather jerkin reminiscent of a British yeoman’s dress.

  As the popular Horrocks made his way down the aisle of the crowded theater he was greeted on all sides. The meeting he had called had sparked high excitement. Men were eager to get going again. From the Seine to Antwerp, Horrocks’ tanks had often averaged fifty miles in a single day, but ever since the disastrous three-day halt on September 4 to “refit, refuel and rest,” the goi
ng had been rough. With the British momentum gone, the enemy had quickly recovered. In the two vital weeks since, the British advance had been reduced to a crawl. It had taken four days for the Guards Armored Division—led by Joe Vandeleur’s Irish Guards Group—to advance ten miles and capture the vital bridge over the Meuse-Escaut Canal near Neerpelt, from which the attack into Holland would begin the next day. Horrocks had no illusions about the German opposition, but he was confident that his forces could break through the enemy crust.

  At precisely 11 A.M. Horrocks stepped onto the stage. All those assembled knew that the British offensive was about to be renewed, but so great was the security surrounding Montgomery’s plan that only a few general officers present knew the details. With D Day for Operation Market-Garden barely twenty-four hours away, the Field Marshal’s commanders now learned of the attack for the first time.

  Attached to the cinema screen was a huge map of Holland. Colored tape snaked north along a single highway, crossing the great river obstacles and passing through the towns of Valkens-waard, Eindhoven, Veghel, Uden, Nijmegen and thence to Arnhem, a distance of some sixty-four miles. From there the tape continued for another thirty-odd miles to the Zuider Zee. Horrocks took a long pointer and began the briefing. “This is a tale you will tell your grandchildren,” he told his audience. Then he paused and, much to the delight of the assembled officers, added: “And mightily bored they’ll be.”