A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Others knew the difficulty of carrying out Model’s commands. Lieutenant Colonel Harzer, commander of the Hohenstaufen Division, had run out of men. All his forces were fully engaged. No additional reinforcements had arrived, and the size of the second lift posed grave doubts as to the ability of his soldiers to halt and contain the enemy. Like Bittrich, Harzer was convinced that “the Allies had dropped no more than an airborne spearhead. I was sure that more would follow and then they would drive for the Reich.” With limited armor, Harzer did not know whether he could stop the enemy. He had, however, succeeded in making one place secure—the grounds of his own headquarters. There, with cynical disregard for the rights of prisoners, he had ordered several hundred British troopers to be held under guard in wire enclosures. “I was quite sure,” he was to recall, “that the R.A.F. would not bomb their own troops.”

  Harzer, a self-professed Anglophile (“I had a real weakness for the English”), had once studied as an exchange student in Great Britain. He enjoyed sauntering among the prisoners trying to engage in conversation to practice his English and, hopefully, to elicit information. He was struck by the British morale. “They were contemptuous and self-assured, as only veteran soldiers can be,” he recalled. The caliber of his prisoners convinced Harzer that the battle was far from won. To keep Urquhart’s forces off balance and to prevent any kind of cohesive attack, he ordered his Hohenstaufen Division on the evening of the eighteenth “to attack unceasingly at whatever cost throughout the night.”

  The commander of the Frundsberg Division, General Harmel, was “too busy to worry about what might happen next. I had my hands full fighting the Lower Rhine.” Charged with the capture of the Arnhem bridge and the defense of the Waal crossing and the area in between, Harmel’s problems were far more acute than Harzer’s. The move of his division by ferry across the river was proceeding at a snail’s pace. Troops, equipment and tanks were loaded on makeshift rubber or log rafts. Roads leading down to the water’s edge had become quagmires. Tanks and vehicles had slid off rafts, and some had even been swept away. Worse, because of constant strafing by Allied planes, nearly all ferrying and convoying operations had to take place during darkness. In twenty-four hours Harmel’s engineers had succeeded in moving only two battalions with their vehicles and equipment into the Arnhem-Nijmegen area. To speed up operations, truck shuttles carrying troops ran back and forth between the south bank landing stage and Nijmegen. But the movement was far too slow. To be sure, Harmel’s men were now in the center of Nijmegen and on the southern side of the highway bridge, but he doubted that they could stop a determined attack by the Anglo-Americans. Although he had been ordered not to destroy it, Harmel was prepared for the eventuality. His engineers had already laid charges and set up detonating apparatus in a roadside bunker near the village of Lent on the northern bank. He hoped Bittrich would approve the blowing of the highway and railroad bridges if they could not be held. But if he did not, Harmel’s decision was already made. If British tanks broke through and started across, he would defy his superiors and destroy the bridges.

  *In the compilation of plane figures there are some discrepancies. American sources give a total of 3,807 aircraft; British figures list 4,000. The count used above comes from General Browning’s after-action Corps report, indicating that the difference in figures seems to lie in the number of fighter planes. According to U.S. sources, 674 England-based fighters flew escort for the second lift, but not included in that number were 193 Belgium-based planes, which brings the over-all total of fighters to 867. By far the best account of the air action in Market-Garden, particularly as it pertains to the troop carriers, is the official U.S.A.F. Historical Division’s Study No. 97, by Dr. John C. Warren, entitled Airborne Operations in World War II, European Theater.”

  *The story is probably apocryphal but the Dutch like to tell it. According to Mrs. Ter Horst of Oosterbeek, when the British troopers and their equipment, including an antitank gun, boarded the Driel ferry, Pieter was faced with a dilemma: whether or not to charge them for the trip. By the time they reached the northern bank, Pieter had decided to give them the ride free.

  *Although numerous witnesses confirm the story, I have withheld the officer’s name. There is still doubt that he shot himself. He was both popular and brave. He may, indeed, have used his pistol, or he may have been killed by a sniper.

  THE PROSPEROUS VILLAGE OF OOSTERBEEK seemed infused with a strange mixture of gaiety and uneasiness. Like an island in the middle of the battle, the village was assaulted by the noise of fighting on three sides. From the drop zones to the west came the nearly constant thunder of guns. To the northwest the chattering of machine guns and the steady cough of mortars could be clearly heard in the flower-lined streets, and to the east, two and a half miles away in Arnhem, black smoke hung over the horizon, a somber backdrop to the unceasing timpani of heavy artillery.

  The bombing and strafing preceding the troop and glider landings on the previous day had produced casualties among the villagers and some damage to shops and houses, as had infiltrating snipers and ill-directed mortar bursts, but the war had not so far made serious inroads into Oosterbeek. The neat resort hotels, landscaped villas and tree-lined streets were still largely untouched. Yet it was becoming obvious with every hour that the fighting was coming closer. Here and there, concussion from distant explosions splintered panes of glass with startling suddenness. Charred particles of paper, cloth and wood, carried like confetti by the wind, rained down into the streets, and the air was acrid with the smell of cordite.

  On Sunday Oosterbeek had been filled with troops as the British arrived almost on the heels of a frantic German departure. No one had slept during the night. A nervous excitement, heightened by the low whine of jeeps, the clatter of Bren gun carriers and the tramp of marching men, made rest impossible. Throughout most of the eighteenth the movement had continued. The villagers, joyous and yet apprehensive, had decked the streets and houses with Dutch flags and plied their liberators with food, fruit and drink as the British Tommies hurried through. To almost everyone the war seemed all but over. Now, subtly, the atmosphere was changing. Some British units were apparently firmly established in the village, and Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson’s artillery spotters occupied the tower of the tenth-century Dutch Reformed church near the Rhine in lower Oosterbeek, but troop movement had noticeably slowed. By late afternoon most thoroughfares were disquietingly empty, and the Dutch noted that antitank and Bren gun positions were now sited at strategic points on the main road. Seeing them, villagers had a sense of foreboding.

  As he walked through Oosterbeek trying to discover exactly what was happening, Jan Voskuil recalls seeing a British officer ordering civilians to take in their flags. “This is war,” he heard the officer tell one villager, “and you are in the middle of it.” Throughout his walk, Voskuil noted that the mood of the people was changing. From Jaap Koning, a local baker, Voskuil learned that many Dutch were pessimistic. There were rumors, Koning said, that “things are not going well.” Apprehension was replacing the heady sense of liberation. “The British,” Koning said, “are being pushed back everywhere.” Voskuil was profoundly concerned. Koning was always well informed, and although his was the first bad news Voskuil had heard, it confirmed his own fears. As each hour passed, Voskuil thought that the canopy of shells screaming over the town toward Arnhem was growing heavier. Remembering anew the terrible destruction of the Normandy villages, Voskuil could not rid himself of an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.

  A second tradesman, baker Dirk van Beek, was as depressed as Koning and Voskuil. The news he had heard on his delivery rounds had dampened his first excited reaction to the Allied drop. “What if the war comes here—what will we do?” he asked his wife, Riek. But he already knew the answer: he would remain in Oosterbeek and keep on baking. “People have to eat,” he told Riek. “Anyway, where would we go if we left the shop?” Absorbing himself in work, Van Beek tried to reassure himself that everythi
ng would work out for the best. He had received his monthly allotment of wheat and yeast a few days earlier. Now, determined to stay and to keep his shop open, he remembered that an old baker had once told him of a method of making bread that required less than half the usual amount of yeast. He decided to stretch his supplies to the limit. He would continue to bake until everything was gone.

  At the Tafelberg, Schoonoord and Vreewijk Hotels it was obvious that the battle had taken a serious turn: the airy, comfortable resorts were being turned into casualty stations. At the Schoonoord British medics and Dutch civilians began a full-scale house cleaning to make ready to receive the wounded. Jan Eijkelhoflf, of the underground, saw that the Germans, in their hasty departure, had left the hotel “looking like a pig pen. Food was all over the place. Tables had been overturned, plates broken, clothing and equipment were scattered around. Papers and rubbish littered every room.” From surrounding houses extra mattresses were brought in and placed on the ground floor. Rows of beds were set up in the main reception rooms and stretchers were placed along the glassed-in veranda. Every room, including the cellars, would be needed by nightfall, the Dutch were told. Eijkelhoff learned that St. Elisabeth’s Hospital in Arnhem was already filled to capacity. Yet the British medics with whom he worked remained optimistic. “Don’t worry,” one of them told him, “Monty will be here soon.”

  At the Tafelberg Hotel, where Dr. Gerrit van Maanen was setting up a hospital, seventeen-year-old Anje van Maanen, who had come to help her father, noted the startling change in other volunteers. “We are afraid,” she wrote in her diary, “but we don’t know why. We have a queer feeling that weeks have passed between yesterday and today.” As at the Schoonoord, there were rumors at the Tafelberg that Montgomery’s forces were on the way. On the lookout for their quick arrival, Anje wrote, “We stare constantly out of the upstairs windows. The shooting is stronger. There are lights and fires, but the great army is not here yet.”

  A few blocks away, the ornate twelve-room Hartenstein Hotel, sited amid its parklike surroundings, wore a gaunt, deserted look. In Daliesque disarray, tables and chairs were scattered across the fine green lawn and among them, the result of a sharp fire fight the day before, lay the crumpled bodies of several Germans.

  As he cycled up to the building, twenty-seven-year-old William Giebing was sickened by the appearance of the once elegant hotel. A few months after he took possession of the building, leasing it from the town of Oosterbeek in 1942, the Germans had moved into the village and requisitioned the hotel. From that time on, Giebing and his wife, Truus, were relegated to the position of servants. The Germans allowed them to clean the Hartenstein and to oversee the cuisine, but the management of the hotel was in German hands. Finally, on September 6, Giebing was summarily ordered to leave, but his wife and two maids were allowed to return each day to keep the place clean.

  On the seventeenth, “crazy with joy at the landings,” Giebing jumped on a bicycle and set out for the Hartenstein from Wester-bouwing, where his father-in-law, Johan van Kalkschoten, operated the hilltop restaurant overlooking the Heveadorp-Driel ferry. He was just in time to see the last of the Germans departing. Running into the building, he felt for the first time that “the hotel was finally mine.” But the air of desertion was unnerving. In the dining room two long tables covered with white damask tablecloths were set for twenty. There were soup bowls, silver, napkins and wine glasses and, in the center of each table, a large tureen of vermicelli soup. Touching it, Giebing found it still warm. In silver servers on the sideboard was the main course: fried sole.

  Giebing wandered from room to room looking at the rich, gold-covered damask walls, the ornate plaster angels and garlands, the bridal suite where gold stars speckled the sky-blue ceiling. The Germans, he was relieved to find, had not looted the hotel. Not a spoon was missing and the refrigerators were still full of food. Making the rounds, Giebing heard voices coming from the veranda. Rushing out he found several British soldiers drinking his sherry. Eight empty bottles lay on the floor. Unaccountably, after all the days of occupation, Giebing lost his temper. The Germans had, at least, left his beloved hotel clean. “So this is the first thing you do,” he yelled at the troopers. “Break open my cellar and steal my sherry.” The British were embarrassed and apologetic, and Giebing was mollified, but once again he was told he could not remain. However, the British assured him that his property would be respected.

  Now, a day later, hoping that the British had passed through and left his hotel, Giebing returned. His heart sank as he approached the building. Jeeps were parked in the rear of the building and, behind the wire netting of the tennis courts, he saw German prisoners. Slit trenches and gun positions had been dug in around the perimeter of the grounds and staff officers seemed to be everywhere. Disheartened, Giebing returned to Wester-bouwing. In the afternoon his wife visited the Hartenstein and explained who she was. “I was treated very politely,” she recalls, “but we were not permitted to move back. The British, like the Germans, had requisitioned the hotel.” There was one consolation, she thought: the war would soon be over and then the Giebings could truly operate what they considered the best hotel in Oosterbeek. The courteous English officers with whom she talked did not inform her that the Hartenstein, as of 5 P.M. on September 18, was now the headquarters of the 1st British Airborne Division.

  In the strange mixture of anxiety and joy that permeated Oosterbeek, one incident terrified many of the inhabitants more than the thought of the encroaching battle. During the day prisoners had been released from the Arnhem jail. Many were resistance fighters, but others were dangerous convicts. In their striped prison garb, they flooded out of Arnhem, and more than fifty ended up in Oosterbeek. “They added a final touch of madness,” recalls Jan ter Horst, a former Dutch army artillery captain, a lawyer and a leading member of the Oosterbeek resistance. “We rounded the convicts up and put them temporarily in the concert hall. But the question was, what to do with them? They seemed harmless enough at the moment, but many of these felons had been imprisoned for years. We feared the worst—especially for our women folk—when they finally realized that they were free.”

  Talking with the convicts Ter Horst found that they wanted only to get out of the immediate combat zone. The sole route across the Rhine was by the Heveadorp-Driel ferry. Pieter, the ferryman, flatly refused to cooperate. He did not want fifty convicts running loose on the southern bank. Further, the ferry was now moored on the north side and Pieter wanted it to remain there. After several hours of testy negotiations, Ter Horst was finally able to get Pieter to take the prisoners across. “We were glad to see them go,” he remembers. “The women were more scared of the convicts than they had been of the Germans.” Prudently Ter Horst insisted that the ferry be returned to the northern bank, where it could be used by the British.

  As a former army officer, Ter Horst was puzzled as to why the Heveadorp-Driel ferry had not been immediately seized by the British. When the troopers entered Oosterbeek he had questioned them about the ferry. To his amazement, he discovered they knew nothing about it. A former artilleryman, he was astounded that the British had not occupied nearby Westerbouwing, the only high ground overlooking the Rhine. Whoever held these heights with artillery controlled the ferry. Further, the choice of the Hartenstein as British headquarters disturbed him. Surely, he thought, the restaurant and its buildings on the heights at Westerbouwing were a far preferable site. “Hold the ferry and Westerbouwing,” he urged several British staff officers. They were polite, but uninterested. One officer told Ter Horst, “We don’t intend to stay here. With the bridge in our hands and the arrival of Horrocks’ tanks, we don’t need the ferry.” Ter Horst hoped the man was right. If the Germans reached Westerbouwing, less than two miles away, their guns not only could command the ferry but could totally demolish British headquarters at the Hartenstein. The British now knew about the ferry and they had been briefed about Westerbouwing. There was little else Ter Horst could do. The former Dutch offi
cer had, in fact, pointed out one of the most crucial oversights in the entire operation—the failure of the British to realize the strategic importance of the ferry and the Westerbouwing heights. Had General Urquhart stayed at his headquarters and in control of the battle the situation might have been rectified in time.*

  Brigadier Hicks, commanding the division in Urquhart’s absence, was facing almost hourly the bewildering problem of orienting himself to the complex, constantly shifting moves of the hard-pressed airborne unit. With the breakdown of radio communications between headquarters and the battalions, there was little precise information about what was happening, nor could Hicks gauge the strength and potential of the enemy forces opposing him. What scant news reached him was brought by spent, dirt-streaked messengers, who risked their lives to bring him information, which was often hopelessly out of date by the time they arrived at headquarters, or by the various members of the Dutch underground, whose reports were often disregarded or viewed as suspect. Hicks found himself depending strongly on one slender channel of communication—the tenuous Thompson-to-Munford artillery radio link existing between Oosterbeek and Frost’s forces at the bridge.

  Mauled and battered, the 2nd Battalion and the valiant stragglers who had reached it were still holding, but Frost’s situation had been desperate for hours and was deteriorating rapidly. “We were getting constant messages from the bridge asking for relief and ammunition,” Hicks recalled. “Enemy pressure and the steadily increasing strength of German armor was building everywhere, and there was absolutely no contact with Urquhart, Lath-bury, Dobie or Fitch. We could not raise Browning at Corps headquarters to explain the gravity of the situation, and we were desperate for help.” From prisoner interrogations Hicks now knew that the troopers were up against battle-hardened SS men of the 9th Hohenstaufen and 10th Frundsberg divisions. No one had been able to tell him how strong these units were or to estimate the number of tanks that were being thrown against him. Worse, Hicks did not know whether the original preattack plan could withstand the present German pressure. If the enemy was heavily reinforced the entire mission might founder.