A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Ensconced in well-hidden, fortified positions on both sides of the road, German gunners had not only survived the tremendous barrage but had waited until it passed over them. Holding their fire, the Germans let the first few tanks go through. Then, within two minutes three tanks of the lead squadron and six of the next were knocked out of action. Burning and disabled, they littered a half mile of road. “We had just crossed the border when we were ambushed,” Lieutenant Cyril Russell recalls. “Suddenly the tanks in front either slewed across the road or burned where they stood. The awful realization dawned on me that the next one to go was the one I was sitting on. We jumped into the ditches by the roadside.” As Russell went forward to see how the remainder of his platoon was faring, a machine gun opened up; he was hit in the arm and fell back into the ditch. For Russell, the war was over.

  Lance Corporal James Doggart’s tank was hit. “I don’t remember seeing or hearing the explosion,” he says. “I was suddenly flat on my back in a ditch with the tank leaning over me. I had a Bren gun across my chest and next to me was a young lad with his arm nearly severed. Nearby, another of our men was dead. The tank was on fire and I don’t recall seeing any of the crew get out.”

  Lieutenant Barry Quinan, in the last tank of the lead squadron, remembers that his Sherman swung left into a ditch, and Quinan thought the driver was trying to bypass the burning tanks ahead. But the tank had been hit by a shell which killed both the driver and codriver. The Sherman began to burn and Quinan’s gunner, “trying to scramble out of the hatch, half lifted me out of the turret before I realized we were ‘brewing up.’ “As the two men climbed out of the tank, Quinan saw others coming up behind. One after the other, the tanks were hit. “I actually saw the commander of one tank trying to shield his face from a sheet of flame that engulfed the entire machine.”

  The breakout had been stopped before it had really begun and nine disabled tanks now blocked the road. Squadrons coming up could not advance. Even if they could bypass the burning hulks, hidden German gunners would pick them off. To get the advance rolling again, Vandeleur called in the rocket-firing Typhoons and, aided by purple smoke shells fired from the tanks to indicate suspected German positions, the fighters screamed down. “It was the first time I had ever seen Typhoons in action,” Vandeleur recalls, “and I was amazed at the guts of those pilots. They came in, one at a time, head to tail, flying right through our own barrage. One disintegrated right above me. It was incredible—guns firing, the roar of planes, the shouts and curses of the men. In the middle of it all, Division asked how the battle was going. My second in command just held up the microphone and said, ‘Listen.’ “

  As the planes swooped down on their targets, Vandeleur sent forward an armored bulldozer to push the burning tanks off the road. The bedlam of the battle now raged over several miles of highway, stretching back as far as Vandeleur’s own car and the R.A.F. communications tender, which called the Typhoons down on demand. Flight Lieutenant Donald Love, the fighter reconnaissance pilot attached to the communications unit, was now convinced that he should never have volunteered for the job. While Squadron Leader Max Sutherland directed the Typhoons, Love got out to see what was happening. Black smoke billowed up from the road ahead and an antitank gun carrier, almost in front of the communications tender, was afire. As Love watched, a Bren gun carrier came back along the road carrying wounded. One man’s shoulder was blown off, and his clothes were burned and charred. “I was sure we were surrounded,” says Love. “I was horrified and I kept wondering why hadn’t I stayed with the Air Force, where I belonged.”

  The waiting tankers farther back in the halted columns felt, as Captain Roland Langton describes it, “a strange sense of power-lessness. We could go neither forward nor backward.” Langton watched infantry moving up to clean out the woods on either side of the road with two Bren gun carriers out in front. Langton thought the soldiers might be an advance party of the 43rd Infantry Division. “Suddenly I saw both carriers catapulted into the air,” Langton remembers. “They had run over enemy land mines.” When the smoke cleared, Langton saw “bodies in the trees. I don’t know how many, it was impossible to tell. There were pieces of men hanging from every limb.”

  With the Typhoons firing only yards away from them, the British infantry men grimly began to dig out the Germans from their hidden trenches. Lance Corporal Doggart had escaped from the ditch where he landed when his tank was hit. He raced across the road and jumped into an empty enemy slit trench. “At the same moment, two Germans—one a young fellow without a jacket, the other a tough-looking bastard of about thirty—jumped in after me from the opposite direction,” Doggart says. Without hesitating, Doggart kicked the older German in the face. The younger man, immediately cowed, surrendered. Covering both with his rifle, Doggart sent them marching back along the road “with streams of other Germans, all running with their hands behind their heads. Those that were too slow got a fast kick in the backside.”

  From the woods, in ditches, around haystacks and along the roadway, now being slowly cleared of the disabled tanks, came the stutter of Sten guns as the infantry mopped up. The Guardsmen showed no quarter, particularly toward snipers. Men remember that prisoners were made to double-time down the road, and when they slowed they were promptly prodded with bayonets. One prisoner in the now-growing lines tried to break away, but there was more than a company of infantry in the vicinity and several men recall that—in the words of one—“he was dead the second the thought entered his mind.”

  Joe Vandeleur watched the prisoners being marched past his scout car. As one German came along, Vandeleur caught a sudden movement. “The bastard had taken a grenade he’d concealed and lobbed it into one of our gun carriers. It went off with a tremendous explosion and I saw one of my sergeants lying in the road with his leg blown off. The German was cut down on all sides by machine guns.”

  At his command post, General Horrocks received word that the road was gradually being cleared and that the infantry, although suffering heavy casualties, had routed the Germans on the flanks. As he later put it, “The Micks were getting tired of being shot at, and as so often happens with these great fighters, they suddenly lost their tempers.”

  Perhaps no one was more enraged than Captain Eamon Fitzgerald, the 2nd Battalion’s intelligence officer, who interrogated the captured crew of an antitank gun. According to Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur, “Fitzgerald had an interesting way of extracting information. A huge giant of a man, he spoke German well, but with an atrocious accent. His normal custom was to produce his pistol, poke it into the German’s belly and, standing as close as possible, shout questions in the man’s face.” The results, Vandeleur always thought, “were positively splendid. Within a few minutes after interrogating this crew, our tanks were picking off the German camouflaged antitank positions with creditable accuracy and the road was being sufficiently cleared to allow us to continue the advance.”

  Many Irish Guardsmen believe Sergeant Bertie Cowan turned the tide of the battle. Commanding a 17-pounder Sherman, Cowan had spotted a German antitank position and demolished it with a single shot. During the fight, Major Edward G. Tyler, in command of the squadron, was astonished to see that a German was standing on Cowan’s tank directing operations. He saw the tank cross the road and open fire; then, busy himself, Tyler forgot the incident. Later, Tyler learned that Cowan had knocked out three German guns. “When I could take a moment, I went to congratulate him,” Tyler says. “Cowan told me the Jerry on his tank had been a crew chief in the first position he’d overrun who had surrendered.” He had been interrogated by Captain Fitzgerald and then returned to Cowan where he had proven “most cooperative.”

  The Irish Guards were on the way again, but constant fighting continued. The German crust was far tougher than anyone had anticipated. Among the prisoners were men of renowned parachute battalions and—to the complete surprise of the British-veteran infantrymen from the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions: elements of the combat grou
ps General Wilhelm Bittrich had sent to bolster Student’s First Parachute Army. To compound the surprise, some prisoners were discovered to belong to General von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army. As the Irish Guards’ war diary notes, “Our intelligence spent the day in a state of indignant surprise: one German regiment after another appeared which had no right to be there.”

  General Horrocks had expected that his lead tanks would drive the thirteen miles to Eindhoven “within two to three hours.” Precious time had been lost, and the Irish Guards would cover only seven miles, reaching Valkenswaard by nightfall. Market-Garden was already ominously behind schedule.

  In order to be as mobile as possible, General Maxwell D. Taylor’s gliders had brought in mostly jeeps—no artillery. The fact that the British were late in reaching Eindhoven was a blow. Taylor had hoped for the support of the tankers’ guns along the fifteen-mile stretch of corridor the Screaming Eagles must control. Taylor’s Dutch liaison officers discovered the true situation—that the 101st would have to operate independently for longer than planned—almost immediately; with the aid of the resistance, they simply used the telephone to learn what was happening with the British.

  With lightning speed Taylor’s paratroopers took Veghel, the northernmost objective along the corridor, and its four crossings—the rail and highway bridges over the river Aa and the Willems Canal. Heavy fighting would ensue; nevertheless, these four objectives were seized within two hours. Farther south, midway between Veghel and Son, the town of St. Oedenrode and its highway crossing over the Dommel river were captured with relative ease. According to official Dutch telephone log books, Johanna Lathouwers, a loyal operator with the state telephone exchange, heard “an unmistakable American voice came on the Oed 1 (St. Oedenrode) line, at 1425 hours, asking for Valkenswaard, a connection that lasted forty minutes.”*

  The Americans quickly learned that the spearhead of the Garden forces had not as yet even reached Valkenswaard. It now seemed unlikely that Horrocks’ tanks, already delayed, would reach Eindhoven at the southern end of the corridor before nightfall; and that would be too late to help the Americans seize and control their widespread targets. The men of the 101st had achieved spectacular success. Now, they ran into problems.

  The most pressing of Taylor’s objectives was the highway bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal at Son, approximately five miles north of Eindhoven. As a contingency plan in case this main traffic artery was blown, Taylor had decided to seize a bridge over the canal at Best, four miles to the west. Because the bridge was considered secondary, only a single company of the 502nd Regiment was detailed to Best, and it was thought that only a few Germans would be in the area. Taylor’s intelligence was unaware that Colonel General Student’s headquarters lay only ten miles northwest of the 101st drop zones and that recent arrivals of Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army were quartered at nearby Tilburg. Among these forces was Major General Walter Poppe’s battered 59th Infantry Division plus a considerable amount of artillery.

  Almost immediately upon approaching the bridge, H Company radioed that it had run into enemy roadblocks and was meeting strong resistance. The message signaled the beginning of a bloody battle that would last throughout the night and most of the following two days. What had begun as a single-company operation eventually involved more than an entire regiment. But already the heroic men of H Company, though taking heavy casualties, were blunting the first, unexpectedly strong, German blows.

  While H Company was setting out for the bridge at Best, Colonel Robert F. Sink’s 506th Regiment was going for the main highway bridge at Son. There was almost no opposition until troops reached the northern outskirts of the village. Then they were fired on by a German 88 artillery piece. In less than ten minutes, the advance party destroyed the gun emplacement with a bazooka and killed its crew. Fighting through the streets, the Americans were a bare fifty yards from the canal itself when the bridge was blown up, debris falling all around the paratroopers. For Colonel Sink, who was to take Eindhoven and its crossings by 8 P.M., the loss of the bridge was a bitter blow. Reacting quickly and still under fire, three men—Major James LaPrade, Second Lieutenant Millford F. Weller and Sergeant John Dunning—dived into the canal and swam to the far side. Other members of the battalion followed their lead or went across in rowboats. On the southern bank, they subdued the German opposition and set up a bridgehead.

  The central column of the bridge was still intact, and 101st engineers immediately began the construction of a temporary crossing. Help came from an unexpected source. Dutch civilians reported that a considerable amount of black-market lumber was being stored by a contractor in a nearby garage. Within one and a half hours the engineers, utilizing the bridge’s center trestle and the liberated lumber, spanned the canal. As Colonel Sink recalled, “the bridge was unsatisfactory from every point of view, except that it did enable me to put the rest of the regiment across, single file.” Until bridging equipment could be brought up, the Market-Garden corridor at Son was reduced to a single wooden footpath.

  *By Allied clocks it was actually 1525 hours; there was a one-hour difference between German and British times.

  FIELD MARSHAL MODEL was still shaken when he reached General Bittrich’s headquarters at Doetinchem. Normally, it would have taken him no longer than half an hour to cover the distance, but today, because he had made numerous stops along the way to alert area commanders to the airborne assault, the trip had lasted well over an hour. Although the Field Marshal seemed calm, Bittrich remembers “his first words to me were, They almost got me! They were after the headquarters. Imagine! They almost got me!”

  Bittrich immediately brought Model up to date on the latest information received by II SS Panzer Corps. No clear picture of the Allied intent was emerging as yet, but Bittrich told Model his own theory: that the assault was aimed at containing the Fifteenth Army while the British Second Army drove for the Ruhr. That would require the Allies to capture the Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges. Model disagreed completely. The Arnhem bridge was not the objective, he said. These airborne troops would swerve and march northeast for the Ruhr. The situation, Model believed, was still too obscure for any final conclusions. He was puzzled as to why airborne forces had landed in the Nijmegen area. Nevertheless, he approved the measures Bittrich had already taken.

  Bittrich still pressed the subject of the bridges. “Herr Field Marshal, I strongly urge that the bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem be immediately destroyed,” he said. Model looked at him in amazement. “They will not be destroyed,” he told Bittrich firmly. “No matter what the English plan, these bridges can be defended. No. Absolutely not. The bridges are not to be blown.” Then, dismissing the subject, Model said, “I’m looking for a new headquarters, Bittrich.” Before Bittrich could answer, Model said again musingly, “You know, they almost got me.”

  At his headquarters at Vught, Colonel General Kurt Student faced a dilemma: his First Parachute Army had been split in two by the airborne assault. Without telephone communications and now solely dependent on radio, he was unable to direct his divided army. For the moment units were fighting on their own without any cohesive direction. Then, by a momentous and fantastic stroke of luck, an undamaged briefcase found in a downed Waco glider near his headquarters was rushed to him.

  “It was incredible,” Student says. “In the case was the complete enemy attack order for the operation.” Student and his staff officers pored over the captured plans. “They showed us everything—the dropping zones, the corridor, the objectives, even the names of the divisions involved. Everything! Immediately we could see the strategic implications. They had to grab the bridges before we could destroy them. All I could think of was, ‘This is retribution. Retribution! History is repeating itself.’ During our airborne operation in Holland in 1940, one of my officers, against strict orders, had taken into battle papers that detailed our entire attack, and these had fallen into enemy hands. Now the wheel had turned full circle. I knew exactly what I had to do.”*

  Model
, as yet, did not. Student had never felt so frustrated. Because of his communications breakdown, it would be nearly ten hours before he could place the secret of Market-Garden in Model’s possession. The secret was that the Arnhem bridge was of crucial importance. The captured plans clearly showed that it was Montgomery’s route into the Ruhr.

  This was the kind of battle that Model liked best: one that demanded improvisation, daring and, above all, speed. From Bittrich’s headquarters, Model telephoned OB West, Von Rundstedt. With characteristic abruptness, he described the situation and asked for immediate reinforcements. “The only way this airborne assault can be defeated is to strike hard within the first twenty-four hours,” he told Von Rundstedt. Model asked for antiaircraft units, self-propelled guns, tanks and infantry; and he wanted them on the move to Arnhem by nightfall. Von Rundstedt told him that such reinforcements as were available would be on the way. Turning to Bittrich, Model said triumphantly, “Now, we’ll get reinforcements!” Model had decided to operate from Doetinchem; but, although he was apparently recovered from the shock of his hasty departure from Oosterbeek, this time he was taking no chances of being caught unawares. He refused accommodations at the castle; he would direct the battle from the gardener’s cottage on the grounds.

  Bittrich’s early foresight was already having its effect. Sections of Harzer’s Hohenstaufen Division were heading swiftly toward the battle zone. Harmel’s Frundsberg Division—Harmel himself was expected back from Germany during the night—were on the move, too. Bittrich had ordered Harzer to set up his headquarters in a high school in the northern Arnhem suburbs overlooking the city, and that transfer was underway. But Harzer was chafing with impatience. The armored vehicles that had been scheduled to leave for Germany in the early afternoon were still being refitted with tracks and guns. Harzer had already moved the units closest to the British landing and drop zones into blocking positions at points west of Arnhem. For the moment, he had only a few armored cars, several self-propelled guns, a few tanks and some infantry. Still, Harzer hoped that by employing hit-and-run tactics he could halt and confuse British troops until the bulk of his division was again battle-ready.