A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Patrols along the Grave-Nijmegen highway were being constantly attacked by infiltrating enemy troops. Corporal Earl Old-father, on the lookout for snipers, saw three men in a field the 504th was occupying. “One was bailing water out of his hole, the other two were digging,” Oldfather recalls. “I waved and saw one of them pick up his rifle. They were Jerries who had gotten right into our field and were firing at us from our own foxholes.”

  Farther east, the two vital landing zones between the Groes-beek Heights and the German frontier quickly became battlefields as waves of low-caliber German infantry were thrown against the troopers. Among them were naval and Luftwaffe personnel, communications troops, soldiers on furlough, hospital orderlies, and even recently discharged convalescents. Corporal Frank Ruppe remembers that the first Germans he saw wore a bewildering variety of uniforms and rank insignia. The attack began so suddenly, he recalls, that “we were ambushed practically next to our own outposts.” Units appeared as though from nowhere. In the first few minutes Lieutenant Harold Gensemer captured an overconfident German colonel who boasted that “my men will soon kick you right off this hill.” They almost did.

  Swarming across the German border from the town of Wyler and out of the Reichswald in overwhelming numbers, the Germans burst through the 82nd’s perimeter defenses and quickly overran the zones, capturing supply and ammunition dumps. For a time the fighting was chaotic. The 82nd defenders held their positions as long as they could, then slowly pulled back. All over the area troops were alerted to rush to the scene. Men on the edge of Nijmegen force-marched all the way to the drop zones to give additional support.

  A kind of panic seemed to set in among the Dutch also. Private Pat O’Hagan observed that as his platoon withdrew from the Nijmegen outskirts, the Dutch flags he had seen in profusion on the march into the city were being hurriedly taken down. Private Arthur “Dutch” Schultz,* a Normandy veteran and a Browning automatic gunner for his platoon, noticed that “everyone was nervous, and all I could hear was the chant ‘BAR front and center.’” Everywhere he looked he saw Germans. “They were all around us and determined to rush us off our zones.” It was clear to everyone that until German armor and seasoned reinforcements arrived, the enemy units, estimated at being close to two battalions, had been sent on a suicide mission: to wipe out the 82nd at any cost and hold the drop zones—the division’s lifeline for reinforcements and supplies. If the Germans succeeded they might annihilate the second lift even as it landed.

  At this time, General Gavin believed that the scheduled lift had already left England. There was no way of stopping or diverting them in time. Thus, Gavin had barely two hours to clear the areas and he needed every available trooper. Besides those already engaged, the only readily available reserves were two companies of engineers. Immediately Gavin threw them into the battle.

  Bolstered by mortar and artillery fire, the troopers, outnumbered sometimes five to one, fought all through the morning to clear the zones. * Then with fixed bayonets many men went after the Germans down the slopes. It was only at the height of the battle that Gavin learned that the second lift would not arrive until 2 P.M. The woods remained infested with a hodgepodge of German infantry and it was obvious that these enemy forays heralded more concentrated and determined attacks. By juggling his troops from one area to another, Gavin was confident of holding, but he was only too well aware that for the moment the 82nd’s situation was precarious. And now with information that the Son bridge was out and being repaired, he could not expect a British link-up before D plus 2. Impatiently and with growing concern, Gavin waited for the second lift, which would bring him desperately needed artillery, ammunition and men.

  *See Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day, pp. 63, 300.

  *In the wild, chaotic fighting that ensued over a period of four hours on the zones, one of the most beloved officers in the 82nd, the heavyweight champion of the division, Captain Anthony Stefanich, was killed. “We’ve come a long way together,” he told his men. “Tell the boys to do a good job.” Then he died.

  FROM THE SMOKING RUINS OF ARNHEM to the damaged crossing at Son, in foxholes, forests, alongside dikes, in the rubble of demolished buildings, on tanks and near the approaches of vital bridges, the men of Market-Garden and the Germans they fought heard the low rumble come out of the west. In column after column, darkening the sky, the planes and gliders of the second lift were approaching. The steady, mounting drone of motors caused a buoyant renewal of vigor and hope in the Anglo-Americans and the Dutch people. For most Germans, the sound was like a forerunner of doom. Combatants and civilians alike stared skyward, waiting. The time was a little before 2 P.M. Monday, September 18th.

  The armada was gigantic, dwarfing even the spectacle of the day before. On the seventeenth, flights had followed two distinct northern and southern paths. Now, bad weather and the hope of effecting greater protection from the Luftwaffe had caused the entire second lift to be routed along the northern path to Holland. Condensed into one immense column covering mile after mile of sky, almost four thousand aircraft were layered at altitudes from 1,000 to 2,500 feet.

  Flying wing tip to wing tip, 1,336 American C-47’s and 340 British Stirling bombers made up the bulk of the sky train. Some of the planes carried troops. Others towed a staggering number of gliders—1,205 Horsas, Wacos and mammoth Hamilcars. Positioned at the rear of the 100-mile-long convoy, 252 four-engined Liberator bombers were ferrying cargo. Protecting the formations above and on the flanks, 867 fighters—ranging from squadrons of British Spitfires and rocket-firing Typhoons to American Thunderbolts and Lightnings—flew escort. In all, at time of takeoff, the second lift carried 6,674 airborne troops, 681 vehicles plus loaded trailers, 60 artillery pieces with ammunition and nearly 600 tons of supplies, including two bulldozers.*

  Wreathed by flak bursts, the huge armada made landfall over the Dutch coast at Schouwen Island, then headed inland due east to a traffic-control point south of the town of s’Hertogenbosch. There, with fighters leading the way, the column split into three sections. With timed precision, executing difficult and dangerous maneuvers, the American contingents swung south and east for the zones of the 101st and 82nd as British formations headed due north for Arnhem.

  As on the previous day, there were problems, although they were somewhat diminished. Confusion, abortions and fatal mishaps struck the glider fleets in particular. Long before the second lift reached the drop zones, 54 gliders were downed by structural or human error. Some 26 machines aborted over England and the Channel; two were seen to disintegrate during flight, and 26 more were prematurely released on the 80-mile flight over enemy territory, landing far from their zones in Belgium and Holland and behind the German frontier. In one bizarre incident a distraught trooper rushed to the cockpit and yanked the release lever separating the glider from its tow plane. But troop casualties over-all were low. The greatest loss, as on the previous day, was in precious cargo. Once again Urquhart’s men seemed plagued by fate—more than half of the lost cargo gliders were bound for Arnhem.

  Fate had ruled the Luftwaffe too. At 10 A.M., with no sign of the expected Allied fleet, German air commanders pulled back more than half the 190-plane force to their bases, while the remainder patrolled the skies over northern and southern Holland. Half of these squadrons were caught in the wrong sector or were being refueled as the second lift came in. As a result, fewer than a hundred Messerschmitts and FW-190’s rushed to battle in the Arnhem and Eindhoven areas. Not a single enemy plane was able to penetrate the massive Allied fighter screen protecting the troop carrier columns. After the mission Allied pilots claimed 29 Messerschmitts destroyed against a loss of only five American fighters.

  Intense ground fire began to envelop the air fleet as it neared the landing zones. Approaching the 101st’s drop areas north of Son, slow-moving glider trains encountered low ground haze and rain, cloaking them to some extent from German gunners. But sustained and deadly flak fire from the Best region ripped into the oncoming column
s. One glider, probably carrying ammunition, caught a full antiaircraft burst, exploded, and completely disappeared. Releasing their gliders, four tow planes were hit, one after the other. Two immediately caught fire; one crashed, the other made a safe landing. Three gliders riddled with bullets crash-landed on the zones with their occupants miraculously untouched. In all, of the 450 gliders destined for General Taylor’s 101st, 428 reached the zones with 2,656 troopers, their vehicles and trailers.

  Fifteen miles to the north, General Gavin’s second lift was threatened by the battles still raging on the drop zones as the gliders began to come in. Losses to the 82nd were higher than in the 101st area. Planes and gliders ran into a hail of antiaircraft fire. Although less accurate than on the day before, German gunners managed to shoot down six tow planes as they turned steeply away after releasing their gliders. The wing of one was blasted off, three others crashed in flames, another came down in Germany. The desperate fire fight for possession of the zones forced many gliders to land elsewhere. Some came down three to five miles from their targets; others ended up in Germany; still more decided to put down fast on their assigned landing zones. Pitted by shells and mortar, crisscrossed by machine-gun fire, each zone was a no man’s land. Coming in quickly to hard landings, many gliders smashed undercarriages or nosed over completely. Yet the pilots’ drastic maneuvers worked. Troops and cargo alike sustained surprisingly few casualties. Not a man was reported hurt in landing accidents, and only forty-five men were killed or wounded by enemy fire in flight or on the zones. Of 454 gliders, 385 arrived in the 82nd’s area, bringing 1,782 artillerymen, 177 jeeps and 60 guns. Initially, more than a hundred paratroopers were thought to have been lost, but later more than half the number made their way to the 82nd’s lines after distant landings. The grimly determined glider pilots sustained the heaviest casualties; fifty-four were killed or listed as missing.

  Although the Germans failed to seriously impede the arrival of the second lift, they scored heavily against the bomber resupply missions arriving after the troop-carrier and glider trains. By the time the first of the 252 huge four-engined B-24 Liberators approached the 101st and 82nd zones, antiaircraft gunners had found the range. Swooping down ahead of the supply planes, fighters attempted to neutralize the flak guns. But, just as German batteries had done when Horrocks’ tanks began their break-out on the seventeenth, so now the enemy forces held their fire until the fighters passed over. Then, suddenly they opened up. Within minutes, some 21 escort planes were shot down.

  Following the fighters, bomber formations came in at altitudes varying from 800 to 50 feet. Fire and haze over the zones hid the identifying smoke and ground markers, so that even experienced dropmasters aboard the planes could not locate the proper fields. From the bays of the B-24S, each carrying approximately two tons of cargo, supplies began to fall haphazardly, scattering over a wide area. Racing back and forth throughout their drop zones, 82nd troopers managed to recover 80 percent of their supplies, almost in the faces of the Germans. The 101st was not so fortunate. Many of their equipment bundles landed almost directly among the Germans in the Best area. Less than 50 percent of their resupply was recovered. For General Taylor’s men in the lower part of the corridor, the loss was serious, since more than a hundred tons of cargo intended for them consisted of gasoline, ammunition and food. So devastating was the German assault that about 130 bombers were damaged by ground fire, seven were shot down, and four others crash-landed. The day that had begun with so much hope for the beleaguered Americans along the corridor was rapidly becoming a grim fight for survival.

  Lieutenant Pat Glover of Brigadier Shan Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade was out of the plane and falling toward the drop zone south of the Ede-Arnhem road. He felt the jerk as his chute opened, and instinctively reached across and patted the zippered canvas bag attached to the harness over his left shoulder. Inside the bag, Myrtle the parachick squawked and Glover was reassured. Just as he had planned it back in England, Myrtle was making her first combat jump.

  As Glover looked down it seemed to him that the entire heath below was on fire. He could see shells and mortars bursting all over the landing zone. Smoke and flames billowed up, and some paratroopers, unable to correct their descent, were landing in the inferno. Off in the distance where gliders were bringing in the remainder of Brigadier Pip Hicks’s Airlanding Brigade, Glover could see wreckage and men running in all directions. Something had gone terribly wrong. According to the briefings, Glover knew that Arnhem was supposed to be lightly held and the drop zones, by now, should certainly be cleared and quiet. There had been no indication before the second lift left from England that anything was wrong. Yet it seemed to Glover that a full-scale battle was going on right beneath him. He wondered if by some mistake they were jumping in the wrong place.

  As he neared the ground the stutter of machine guns and the dull thud of mortar bursts seemed to engulf him. He hit ground, careful to roll onto his right shoulder to protect Myrtle, and quickly shucked off his harness. Nearby, Glover’s batman, Private Joe Scott, had just set down. Glover handed him Myrtle’s bag. “Take good care of her,” he told Scott. Through the haze covering the field, Glover spotted yellow smoke which marked the rendezvous point. “Let’s go,” he yelled to Scott. Weaving and crouching, the two men started out. Everywhere Glover looked there was utter confusion. His heart sank. It was obvious that the situation was going badly.

  As Major J. L. Waddy came down, he too heard the ominous sound of machine-gun fire that seemed to be flaying the area on all sides. “I couldn’t understand it,” he recalls. “We had been given the impression that the Germans were in flight, that there was disorder in their ranks.” Swinging down in his parachute, Waddy found that the drop zone was almost obscured by smoke from raging fires. At the southern end of the field where he landed, Waddy set out for the battalion’s rendezvous area. “Mortars were bursting everywhere, and I saw countless casualties as I went along.” When he neared the assembly point, Waddy was confronted by an irate captain from Battalion headquarters who had jumped into Holland the previous day. “You’re bloody late,” Waddy recalls the man shouting. “Do you realize we’ve been waiting here for four hours?” Agitatedly, the officer immediately began to brief Waddy. “I was shocked as I listened,” Waddy remembers. “It was the first news we had that things weren’t going as well as had been planned. We immediately got organized, and as I looked around, it seemed to me that the whole sky up ahead was a mass of flames.”

  On both landing zones west of the Wolfheze railway station—at Ginkel Heath and Reyers-Camp—paratroopers and glider-borne infantrymen were dropping into what appeared to be a raging battle. From the captured Market-Garden documents the Germans had known the location of the landing areas. And through enemy radar installations in the still-occupied Channel ports such as Dunkirk, they, unlike the British on the ground, could calculate with accuracy the time the second lift was due to arrive. SS units and antiaircraft, hurriedly disengaged in Arnhem, were rushed to the zones. Twenty Luftwaffe fighters, vectored in, continuously strafed the sectors. Ground fighting was equally intense. To clear parts of the heath of the encroaching enemy, the British, as they had during the night and early morning, charged with fixed bayonets.

  Mortar bursts, hitting gliders that had landed the day before, turned them into flaming masses that in turn ignited the heath. Infiltrating enemy units used some gliders as cover for their attacks and the British set the machines on fire themselves, rather than let them fall into enemy hands. Nearly fifty gliders blazed in a vast inferno on one section of the field. Yet Brigadier Pip Hicks’s Airlanding Brigade—minus the half battalion that had been sent into Arnhem—was managing with dogged courage to hold the zones. The paratroop and glider landings, bringing in 2,119 men, were far more successful than the men in the air or on the ground could believe. Even with the battle underway, 90 percent of the lift was landing—and in the right places.

  Flight Sergeant Ronald Bedford, a rear gunner in a
four-engined Stirling, found Monday’s mission far different from the one he had flown on Sunday. Then, the nineteen-year-old Bedford had been frankly bored with the routineness of the flight. Now, as they neared the landing zone, firing was continuous and intense. Spotting an antiaircraft battery mounted on a truck at the edge of the field, Bedford tried desperately to turn his guns on it. He could see his tracers curving down, and then the battery stopped firing. Bedford was exuberant. “I got him!” he shouted. “Listen, I got him!” As the Stirling held steady on its course, Bedford noticed that gliders all around seemed to be breaking away from their tugs prematurely. He could only assume that the heavy fire had caused many glider pilots to release and try to get down as fast as possible. Then he saw the tow rope attached to their own Horsa falling away. Watching the glider swoop down, Bedford was sure it would collide with others before it could land. “The entire scene was chaotic,” he recalls. “The gliders seemed to be going into very steep dives, leveling off, and coasting down, often, it looked, right into each other. I wondered how any of them would make it.”