Signalman Stanley Heyes remembers the intense enemy harassment vividly. He sprinted for some woods and dropped a spare radio transmitter; bending to recover it he was struck in the ankle. Heyes managed to crawl into the woods. As he sank down in the underbrush, he realized that the man alongside him was German. “He was young and as frightened as I was,” Heyes says, “but he used my field dressing on my ankle. A short time later we both were wounded again by the mortar fire and we just lay there waiting for someone to pick us up.” Heyes and the young German would remain together until well after dark, when British stretcher-bearers found and evacuated them.
Like the 1st Battalion, the 3rd too was pinned down. After two hours on the road, both battalions had covered a bare two and a half miles. Now, Colonel Fitch reached the same conclusion as Dobie on the upper road; he too would have to find an alternate route to the Arnhem bridge. Time was precious, and the bridge was still a good four miles away.
In the woods around Wolfheze SS Major Sepp Krafft was convinced he was surrounded. He estimated that the British outnumbered his understrength battalion by twenty to one. But, although he considered his defense “insane,” he could hardly believe the success of his blocking action. The rocket-propelled mortars had created havoc among the British, and his men now reported that paratroopers moving along the Utrecht-Arnhem road were halted in some places, and at others appeared to be abandoning the main road entirely. Krafft still believed that his was the only German unit in the area, and he had no illusions about stopping the British for long. He was running out of mortar ammunition and suffering heavy casualties, and one of his lieutenants had deserted. Still, Krafft was ebullient about “the courageous impetuosity of my young lads.” The ambitious Krafft, who would later write a fulsome self-serving report to Himmler on his Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion’s actions, had no idea that his “young lads” were now being bolstered by the tanks, artillery and armored cars of Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer’s Hohenstaufen Division only a mile or two east of Krafft’s own headquarters.
Major Freddie Gough was totally baffled. Urquhart’s message summoning him back to Division had carried no hint of what the General had in mind. When he left the Leopard route of the 1st Battalion, Gough brought back with him four escort jeeps and troops of his reconnaissance unit. Now, at Division headquarters, Urquhart’s chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, could not enlighten him either. The General, Mackenzie said, had gone off in search of Brigadier Lathbury, whose headquarters was following Colonel Frost’s battalion along the southern, Lion route. Taking his escort, Gough set out once more. Surely, someplace along the route, he would find either one officer or the other.
*Some accounts of the Arnhem battle claim that Gough’s unit could not operate because so many of his vehicles failed to arrive by glider. “The failure, if it can be called that,” Gough says, “was not due to a lack of jeeps, but to the fact that no one had warned us that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions were in the area.”
*Kussin, on Model’s orders issued as the Field Marshal fled east that morning, had informed Hitler’s headquarters of the landings and of Model’s narrow escape. The Allied assault had caused Hitler hysterical concern. “If such a mess happens here,” he conjectured, “here I sit with my own Supreme Command—Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop. Well, then, this is a most worthwhile catch. That’s obvious. I would not hesitate to risk two parachute divisions here if with one blow I could get my hands on the whole German command.”
GENERAL URQUHART’S JEEP sped down the Utrecht-Arnhem highway and turned south off the main artery onto a side road that led him to Frost’s Lion route. Within a few minutes he caught up with the rear elements of the 2nd Battalion. They were moving single file, along both sides of the road. Urquhart could hear firing in the distance, but it seemed to him “there was a lack of urgency. Everyone appeared to be moving slowly.” Driving swiftly along the cobbled road, Urquhart reached Frost’s headquarters company only to discover that Frost was up with the leading units, which had run into German opposition. “I tried to impart a sense of urgency that I hoped would be conveyed to Frost,” Urquhart writes, “and told them about the ill-fortune of the Recco Squadron.” Learning that Lathbury had gone up to the middle road to see how the 3rd Battalion was doing, Urquhart retraced his route. Once again, he and Gough would miss each other by minutes.
Reaching the rear elements of the 3rd Battalion on the Tiger route, the General was told that Lathbury had gone forward. He followed. At a crossroads on the Utrecht-Arnhem road, Urquhart found the Brigadier. The area was under devastating mortar fire. “Some of these bombs were falling with unsettling accuracy on the crossroads and in the woodland where many of the Third Battalion were under cover,” Urquhart was later to write. “This was the first real evidence to come my way of the speed and determination of the German reaction.”*
Taking cover in a slit trench, Urquhart and Lathbury discussed the situation. Both officers were worried about the slow progress of the brigade, and now the critical lack of communications was paralyzing their own efforts to command. Lathbury was completely out of touch with the 1st Battalion and had only intermittent communication with Frost. It was apparent that both were able to direct operations only in the area where they physically happened to be. For the moment, Lathbury’s concern was to get the 3rd Battalion off the crossroads, out of the surrounding woods and on the move again. Urquhart decided to try to contact Division headquarters on his jeep’s radio. As he neared the vehicle, he saw it had been struck by a mortar and his signalman was badly wounded. Although the radio set seemed undamaged, Urquhart could not raise Division. “I cursed the appalling communications,” Urquhart later wrote. “Lathbury dissuaded me from attempting to go back to my own headquarters. The enemy was now thick between us and the landing zones … I decided he was right … and I stayed. But it was at this point that I realized I was losing control of the situation.”
The men of the 1st and 3rd battalions were engaging in constant, bitter skirmishes. Hardened and desperate Waffen SS troopers, inferior in numbers but bolstered by half-tracks, artillery and tanks, were reducing the British advance on the two upper roads to a crawl. In the confusion, men were separated from their officers and from one another as companies scattered into the woods or fought along side roads and in the back gardens of houses. The Red Devils had recovered from the initial surprise of the German armored strength and, though taking heavy casualties, individually and in small groups they were striking back tenaciously. Still, there was little chance that the 1st and 3rd battalions could reach their Arnhem objectives as planned. Now everything depended upon Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion, moving steadily along the lower Rhine road, the secondary route that the Germans had largely dismissed.
Although Frost’s battalion had been held up briefly several times by enemy fire, he had refused to allow his men to scatter or deploy. His spearheading A Company, commanded by Major Digby Tatham-Warter, pressed forward, leaving stragglers to join the companies coming up behind. From prisoners taken by the advance parties, Frost learned that an SS company was believed to be covering the western approaches of Arnhem. Using some captured transport as well as their own jeeps to scout ahead and to the sides, the battalion moved steadily on. A little after 6 P.M., the first of Frost’s objectives, the railway bridge over the Lower Rhine slightly southeast of Oosterbeek, came into view. According to plan, Major Victor Dover’s C Company peeled off and headed for the river. The bridge looked empty and undefended as they approached. Lieutenant Peter Barry, twenty-one, was ordered to take his platoon across. “It was quiet when we started out,” Barry recalls. “As we ran across the fields I noticed that there were dead cattle everywhere.” Barry’s platoon was within 300 yards of the bridge when he saw “a German run onto the bridge from the other side. He reached the middle, knelt down, and started doing something. Immediately, I told one section to open fire and a second section to rush the bridge. By this time, the German had disappeared.�
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Barry recalls that they “got onto the bridge and began racing across at full speed. Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion and the bridge went up in our faces.” Captain Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers felt the ground shake under the impact. “A yellow-orange flame punched up and then black smoke rose over the bridge. I think the second span from the south bank was blown,” Mackay says. On the bridge, under cover of smoke bombs, Lieutenant Barry ordered his men off the wreckage and back to the northern bank. As the platoon began to move, Germans hidden across the river opened fire. Barry was hit in the leg and arm and two other men were wounded. Watching the troopers return through the smoke and fire, Mackay, who had been uneasy about the operation from the beginning, remembers thinking, “Well, there goes number one.” Colonel Frost was more philosophical. “I knew one of the three bridges was gone, but it was the least important. I didn’t realize then what a disadvantage it would be.” It was now 6:30 P.M. and there were two more bridges to go.
*Major General R. E. Urquhart, C.B., D.S.O. (with Wilfred Greatorex), Arnhem, p. 40.
IT HAD TAKEN THE Hohenstaufen Division engineers five hours to reassemble all the tanks, half-tracks and armored personnel carriers that Harzer had planned to send back to Germany. Newly decorated Captain Paul Gräbner, his forty-vehicle reconnaissance battalion ready, now set out from Hoenderloo Barracks, north of Arnhem, and drove quickly south. Harzer had instructed him to make a sweep of the area between Arnhem and Nijmegen to assess the strength of the Allied airborne troops in that area. Gräbner raced swiftly through Arnhem and, by radio, informed Hohenstaufen headquarters that the city seemed almost deserted. There was no sign of enemy troops. A little before 7 P.M., Gräb-ner’s unit crossed over the great Arnhem highway bridge. A mile past the southern end, Gräbner stopped his car to report, “No enemy. No paratroopers.” Mile after mile, his light armored cars slowly patrolling both sides of the highway, Gräbner’s radio messages conveyed the same information. At Nijmegen itself the news was unchanged. On orders of Hohenstaufen headquarters, Gräbner was then instructed to further patrol the outskirts of Nijmegen and then return to headquarters.
Gräbner’s unit and the forward elements of Frost’s 2nd Battalion had missed each other by approximately an hour. Even as Gräbner had driven out of Arnhem, Frost’s men were in the city itself and were stealthily approaching their remaining objectives. Inexplicably, despite General Bittrich’s explicit instructions, Harzer had completely failed to safeguard the Arnhem bridge.
IT WAS GROWING DARK as Colonel Frost quickened the battalion’s pace toward the next objective, the pontoon crossing less than a mile west of the Arnhem bridge. Major Digby Tatham-Warter’s A Company, still in the lead, was again momentarily held up on the high ground at the western outskirts of Arnhem. Enemy armored cars and machine guns had forced the company off the road and into the back gardens of nearby houses. Coming up behind, Frost found ten Germans guarded by a lone A Company man and, as he was later to write, surmised that “Digby’s back-garden maneuver had been completely successful and that the company had rushed on again.” Frost returned to the battalion. In the dusk, bursts of fire sporadically swept the road but as the men moved along, they passed damaged vehicles and a number of dead and wounded Germans—clear evidence, Frost thought, of “Digby’s quite satisfactory progress.”
Moving rapidly through the streets of Arnhem, the battalion reached the pontoon bridge and halted, faced with their second setback. The center section of the bridge had been removed and it was useless. As Captain Mackay stood looking at the dismantled crossing, he decided that “it was typical of the whole cocked-up operation. My one thought was, ‘Now we’ve got to get that other bloody bridge.’ ” He stared off in the distance. Barely a mile away, the great concrete-and-steel span was silhouetted against the last light.
On the 3rd Battalion’s Tiger route, moving haltingly toward Arnhem, General Urquhart knew with certainty that he was stranded. In the growing darkness, with enemy forays constantly harassing the march, there was no possibility of his returning to Division headquarters. His mood was bleak. “I wished with every step that I knew what was going on elsewhere.” Just before nightfall, Urquhart learned that the 3rd’s leading companies had reached the outskirts of Oosterbeek “near someplace called the Hartenstein Hotel…. We were making little progress,” Urquhart was later to write, “and Lathbury, after a discussion with Fitch, the battalion commander, called a halt.”
In a large house set well back from the road, Urquhart and Lathbury prepared to spend the night. The owner of the house, a tall, middle-aged Dutchman, brushed aside the General’s apologies for inconveniencing him and his wife, and gave the two officers a downstairs front room overlooking the main road. Urquhart was restless and unable to relax. “I kept checking to see if any contact had been made with either Gough or Frost, but there was nothing from my headquarters or from anyone else.”
The great bridge loomed ahead. The concrete ramps alone were immense complexes unto themselves with roads running beneath them and along the river bank from west to east. On either side the rooftops of houses and factory buildings came up to the level of the ramps. In the twilight, the massive approaches and the high-arched girders spanning the Rhine looked awesome and intimidating. Here finally was the main objective—the pivot of Montgomery’s audacious plan—and to reach it Frost’s men had fought on the march for nearly seven hours.
Now, as lead elements of the 2nd Battalion neared the bridge, Lieutenant Robin Vlasto, in command of one of A Company’s platoons, was amazed by “its incredible great height.” Vlasto noted “pillboxes at each end, and even in the general air of desertion, they looked threatening.” In darkness A Company quietly took up positions beneath the huge supports at the northern end. From above them came the slow rumble of traffic.
Captain Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers, approaching the bridge through a mosaic of streets, reached a small square leading to the ramp. He remembers that “the quietness as we went through the streets was oppressive, and all around us there seemed to be soft movement. Men were beginning to feel the strain, and I wanted to get that bridge as quickly as we could.” Suddenly the darkness was ripped by German fire from a side street. One of the engineers’ explosives trolleys went up in flames, and the men were clearly illuminated. Instantly, Mackay ordered his men with their equipment across the square. They dashed over, defying the German fire. Within a few minutes, without losing a man, they were at the bridge. Studying the terrain below the northern ramp, Mackay saw four houses on the east side. “One of them was a school and it was on the corner of a crossroads,” he remembers. “I thought that whoever held these houses held the bridge.” Mackay promptly ordered his engineers into the school.
Shortly after 8 P.M., Colonel Frost and the battalion headquarters arrived. Frost had sent Major Douglas Crawley’s B Company to the high ground above the nearby railway embankment with antitank guns to protect the battalion’s left flank, freeing A Company to dash for the bridge.* C Company, under Major Dover, was instructed to follow the forward elements into the city and seize the German commandant’s headquarters. Now, at the bridge, Frost was unable to raise either company by radio. Quickly he dispatched messengers to determine their whereabouts.
Deciding not to wait, Frost ordered A Company platoons onto the bridge. As the men began to move across, the Germans came to life. Troopers were raked with fire from the pillbox at the northern end and by a lone armored car on the southern end of the bridge itself. A platoon, aided by Eric Mackay’s sappers carrying flamethrowers, began to move through the top floors of houses whose roofs and attics were at eye level with the ramp. Simultaneously, Lieutenant Vlasto’s platoon worked its way through basements and cellars, going from house to house until it reached Mackay’s locations. In position, they attacked the pillbox. As the flamethrowers went into action, Frost recalls that “all hell seemed to be let loose. The sky lit up, and there was the noise of machine-gun fire, a succession of explosions,
the crackling of burning ammunition and the thump of a cannon. A wooden building nearby was wreathed in flames, and there were screams of agony and fear.”* Now, too, Frost could hear the crash of Vlasto’s Piat* bombs smashing into the pillbox. Suddenly, the brief savage battle was over. The guns in the pillbox fell silent and through the fires, Frost saw German soldiers staggering toward his men. A Company had successfully cleared the north end of the bridge and it was theirs. But now, hampering fires and exploding ammunition made it suicidal to risk a second rush to grab the southern side. Only half an hour earlier, Frost could have succeeded.* But now, on the south bank, a group of SS Panzer Grenadiers had taken up positions.
Frost attempted to contact Major Crawley once more. He wanted to locate boats or barges in which Crawley’s company could cross the river and attack the Germans on the southern side. Again, radio communications were out. Worse, messengers could not even find the company; and, they reported, there were no boats to be seen. As for C Company, the patrol sent out to contact them were pinned down and heavily engaged near the German commandant’s headquarters.
Grimly Frost’s men looked across the Arnhem bridge. How strong were the Germans holding the southern end? Even now, A Company believed there was a chance of seizing the southern end by a surprise attack across the river, if only the men and boats could be found.
But that opportunity had passed. In one of the great ironies of the Arnhem battle, the Lower Rhine could have been crossed within the first hour of landing. Exactly seven miles west, at the village of Heveadorp—through which Frost’s battalion had marched en route to their objectives—a large cable ferry, capable of carrying automobiles and passengers, had operated back and forth all day on its normal passage across the Lower Rhine between Heveadorp on the north bank and Driel on the south. Frost knew nothing about the ferry. Nor was it ever listed as one of Urquhart’s objectives. In the meticulous planning of Market-Garden an important key to the taking of the Arnhem bridge—the ferry at Driel—had been totally overlooked.*
A Bridge Too Far Page 25