A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Help, he knew, was coming. On the nineteenth, Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski’s Polish Brigade would arrive in the third lift. Horrocks’ tanks should also be arriving and were, indeed, already late. How close were they to Arnhem and could they arrive in time to relieve and balance the situation? “In spite of everything,” Hicks recalls, “I believed Frost would hold the northern end of the bridge until Monty’s tanks got to it. The bridge was still our objective, after all, and my decisions and actions were centered solely on seizing and holding that objective.” Balancing all the factors, Hicks felt he must stick to the original plan, and so did Brigadier Hackett at this time.

  The original task of Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade was to occupy the high ground north of Arnhem to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the bridge. But at the time that plan was conceived it was thought that enemy strength would prove negligible and, at worst, manageable. In fact, enemy reaction had been so fast, concentrated and effective that Hicks could not assess the true situation. Bittrich’s corps held the north of Arnhem; his troops had bottled up Frost at the bridge and successfully prevented Dobie and Fitch’s battalions from relieving them. The advance of these two units was now virtually sheared off. In the built-up areas around St. Elisabeth’s Hospital barely a mile or so from the bridge, the battalions were stopped in their tracks. The South Staffordshires, already en route to help, and the 11th Battalion from Hackett’s brigade were faring no better. “We now came to the wide-open, exposed riverside stretch of road in front of St. Elisabeth’s Hospital, and then everything suddenly let loose,” remembers Private Robert C. Edwards of the South Staffordshires. “We must have looked like targets in a shooting gallery. All Jerry had to do was line up his guns and mortars on this one gap—about a quarter of a mile wide—and fire. He couldn’t miss.” Edwards saw Captain Edward Weiss, second in command of his company, running tirelessly up and down the column “totally ignoring all the metal flying about him, his voice growing ever hoarser as he yelled out ‘On, on, on, D Company, on.’”

  Weiss seemed to be everywhere. Men were falling all around. If troopers halted or hesitated, Weiss was “immediately beside them urging them on. You just couldn’t crawl and watch him stand upright. You had to follow his lead through that hell of fire.” Edwards threw some smoke bombs to try to hide their advance and “then put my head down and ran like a hare.” He stumbled over “heaps of dead, slithered in pools of blood, until I reached the partial shelter afforded by houses and buildings on the far side of the road.” There he discovered that Captain Weiss had been hit as he ran across. “Major Phillips had been badly wounded. No one seemed to have much idea of what was going on or what we should do next.” As for D Company, when a count was made, “only 20 percent remained, and quite obviously we couldn’t continue against such overwhelming German strength. Hopefully we waited for the dawn.”

  It was as if a solid wall had been built between the division and Frost’s pitiful few at the bridge.

  In exchange for his 11th Battalion, Hackett had been given the 7th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB’s). They had guarded the drop zones since landing on the seventeenth. Now they moved out with Hackett’s 10th and 156th battalions via Wolfheze northwest of Oosterbeek. In that area the KOSB’s would guard Johannahoeve Farm, a landing zone where transport and artillery of the Polish Brigade were due to arrive by glider in the third lift.

  After the initial fighting on the zones, Hackett’s brigade moved off without incident, and by nightfall the KOSB’s had taken up positions around Johannahoeve Farm. There, suddenly, the battalions ran into heavy German opposition from strongly held machine-gun positions. A pitched battle began. In the growing darkness, commands went out to hold positions and then attempt to rout the enemy at dawn. It was vitally important to secure the area. Sosabowski’s paratroopers were scheduled to land on the nineteenth on the southern side of the Arnhem bridge, in the polder land that Urquhart and the R.A.F. had deemed unsuitable—because of antiaircraft considerations—for the large-scale initial landings. By the time the Poles were to arrive, it had been expected that the bridge would be in British hands. If it was not, the Poles had been assigned to take it. At Browning’s rear Corps headquarters in England, where no one was aware of the compounding setbacks developing at Arnhem, the Polish drop was still scheduled to take place as planned. If Frost could hold out and the Polish drop was successful, there was still a chance even now that Market-Garden could succeed.

  Everywhere men were still struggling toward the bridge. On the lower road that Frost had taken on what now seemed to many a long-ago day, Private Andrew Milbourne and a small group of stragglers from other battalions passed stealthily near the ruins of the railway bridge that Frost’s men had tried to capture on their march to the prime objective. In fields to his left, Milbourne saw white mounds gleaming in the darkness. “They were dozens of dead bodies, and the Dutch were moving quietly around the area, covering our comrades with white sheets,” he recalls. Up ahead, fires reddened the sky and an occasional flash of guns outlined the great bridge. All afternoon the little band had been held up by superior German forces. Now, once more, they were pinned down. As they took refuge in a boathouse on the edge of the river, Milbourne began to despair of ever reaching the bridge. A lone signalman in the group began to work his radio set and, as the men gathered around, he suddenly picked up the BBC from London. Milbourne listened as the clear, precise voice of the announcer recounted the day’s happenings on the western front. “British troops in Holland,” he reported, “are meeting only slight opposition.” In the gloomy boathouse someone laughed derisively. “Bloody liar,” Milbourne said.

  Now, as the courageous men of the 1st British Airborne Division fought for their very existence, two of His Majesty’s brigadiers chose to have a heated argument over which of them should command the division. The dispute was triggered by a smolderingly angry Brigadier Shan Hackett who, by evening of the eighteenth, saw the situation as not only disquieting but “grossly untidy.” The enemy seemed to have the upper hand everywhere. British battalions were scattered and fighting uncohesively, without knowledge of one another’s whereabouts. Lacking communications, pinned down in built-up areas, many units came upon one another quite by chance. It appeared to Hackett that there was no over-all command or coordination of effort. Late in the evening, still smarting over the startling announcement by Mackenzie concerning the command of the division, the temperamental Hackett drove to the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek to have it out with Hicks. “He arrived about midnight,” Hicks recalls. “I was in the operations room, and from the very beginning it was perfectly clear that, as he was senior in grade to me, he was less than happy that I had been given command. He was young, with firm ideas and rather argumentative.”

  Initially, Hackett’s displeasure focused on the fact that Hicks had detached the nth Battalion from him. He demanded to know what orders it had been given and who was in command of the sector. “He thought,” recalls Hicks, “that the situation was too fluid, and obviously disagreed with the decisions I had made.” Patiently the older Hicks explained that because of strong German resistance, the present battle situation had been totally unforeseen. Each battalion, therefore, was now fighting individually to reach the bridge and, although instructed to follow specific routes, battalions had been warned that due to the unusual conditions some overlapping might occur. Two or more units might well find themselves forced into the same vicinity. Hackett brusquely commented that “the command setup was clearly unsatisfactory.”

  Hicks agreed, but the object, he told Hackett, “was to help Frost at the bridge in whatever way we can and as fast as possible.” While agreeing that Frost had to be reinforced quickly, Hackett sarcastically suggested that this might be done in a “more coordinated manner with more drive and cohesion.” There was much to be said for Hackett’s argument: a coordinated drive might indeed succeed in breaking through the German ring and reaching Frost; but, lacking comm
unications and kept off balance by constant German attacks, Hicks had had little time to organize such an all-out attack.

  The two men then turned to the role that Hackett’s brigade would play the next day. In Hicks’s view, Hackett should not attempt to occupy the high ground north of Arnhem. “I felt he could aid Frost better by driving into Arnhem and helping to hold the northern end of the bridge.” Hackett objected strongly. He wanted a definite objective, and he appeared to know what it should be. He would take the high ground east of Johannahoeve first, he announced, and then “see what I can do to assist the operations in Arnhem.” In the quiet, understated but bitter verbal fencing, Hackett insisted that he be given a time schedule so that he could relate “my actions to everyone else.” He wanted “a sensible plan.” Otherwise, Hackett said, he would be compelled “to raise the question of command of the division.”

  Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Preston, the headquarters administrative officer, was present at what Hicks has since tactfully called “our discussion.” Preston remembers that Hicks, “his face tightly drawn,” turned to him and said, “Brigadier Hackett thinks he ought to be in command of the division.” Hackett protested the choice of words. Preston, sensing that the conversation was becoming overly tense, immediately left the room and sent the duty officer, Gordon Grieve, in search of the chief of staff, Colonel Mackenzie.

  In a room upstairs Mackenzie was resting, unable to sleep. “I had been there about half an hour when Gordon Grieve came in. He told me that I should come downstairs immediately, that the two Brigadiers, Hicks and Hackett, ‘were having a flaming row.’ I was already dressed. On the way down I tried to think quickly. I knew what the row was about and that it might be necessary for me to take decisive action. I had no intention of going into the operations room and exchanging pleasantries. I felt at this point that General Urquhart’s orders were being questioned and I intended to back Hicks in everything.”

  As Mackenzie entered the room the conversation between the two brigadiers abruptly ceased. “Both men had begun to compose themselves,” recalls Mackenzie, “and it was immediately clear that the worst was over.” Hicks, glancing up at Mackenzie, was almost casual. “Oh, hello, Charles,” Mackenzie remembers him saying, “Brigadier Hackett and I have had a bit of a row, but it is all right now.” Hicks was certain that “things had settled back to normal. I was rather firm with Hackett and when he left I knew he would follow my orders.” However much he may have appeared to accept Hicks’s new role, Hackett’s view was largely unchanged. “I intended to take orders from Pip if they made sense,” he remembers. “What I was told to do was far from that. Therefore, I was inclined to assert my position as senior brigadier of the two and issue the sort of orders for my brigade’s operation which did make sense.”*

  Under any other circumstances, the confrontation between the brigadiers would have been merely an historical footnote. Two courageous, dedicated men, under intense strain and with identical aims, lost their tempers for a moment. In the balance sheet of Market-Garden when the plan was in such jeopardy and every soldier was needed if a coordinated effort to seize the Arnhem bridge was to succeed, cooperation among commanders and cohesion in the ranks were vital. Particularly so, since the fate of the First Allied Airborne Army had taken yet another turn: throughout the Market-Garden area, Field Marshal Von Rundstedt’s promised reinforcements were arriving from all over the western front in a steady, unceasing flow.

  Nicolaas de Bode, the highly skilled technician who had made the first secret telephone connection for the underground between north and south Holland, had remained in his room all day. On instructions from the regional resistance chief Pieter Kruyff, De Bode sat by a small side window which looked out on the Vel-per Weg, the wide street leading from the eastern side of Arnhem to Zutphen in the north. Although he had not strayed from his post, calls had reached him from outlying areas to the west and had deeply disturbed him. In the Wolfheze and Oosterbeek areas, underground members reported trouble. The excited talk of liberation had stopped. For some hours now, all he had heard was that the situation was worsening. De Bode was asked to keep a constant watch for any sign of heavy German movement from the north and east. So far he had seen nothing. His messages, phoned to underground headquarters hourly, contained the same terse information. “The road is empty,” he had reported again and again.

  In the late evening, some twenty minutes before his next call, he heard “the sound of armored cars running on rubber tires and the clanking of armor.” Wearily he walked to the window, and gazed up the Velper Weg. The road seemed empty as before. Then in the distance, visible in the fiery glow that hung over the city, he saw two massive tanks coming into view. Moving side by side along the wide street, they were heading straight down the road leading into the old part of the city. As De Bode watched wide-eyed, besides the tanks he saw trucks “carrying clean-looking soldiers, sitting straight up on the seats with their rifles in front of them. Then, more tanks and more soldiers in rows on trucks.” Promptly he called Kruyff and said, “It looks like an entire German army complete with tanks and other weapons is heading straight into Arnhem.”

  The man who had warned London on September 14 about the presence of Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps, Henri Knap, Arnhem’s underground intelligence chief, was now receiving a steady stream of reports of German reinforcements from his network. Knap abandoned caution. He telephoned British headquarters at the Hartenstein directly and spoke to a duty officer. Without preamble Knap told him that “a column of tanks, among them some Tigers, is moving into Arnhem and some are heading toward Oosterbeek.” The officer politely asked Knap to hold on. A few minutes later he came back on the line. Thanking Knap, he explained that “the Captain is doubtful about the report. After all, he’s heard a lot of fairy tales.” But the skepticism at British headquarters quickly disappeared when Pieter Kruyff confirmed through Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, of the Royal Dutch Navy, acting as an intelligence liaison officer for the division, that at least “fifty tanks are heading into Arnhem from the northeast.”

  The stench of battle permeated the inner city. On the bridge, wreckage jutted high above the concrete shoulders and littered streets along the Rhine. Heavy smoke smeared buildings and yards with a greasy film. All along the waterfront hundreds of fires burned unattended, and men remember that the ground shook constantly from the concussion of heavy explosives as the Germans, in the final hours of this second day of battle, battered British strongholds along the northern ramp in the bitter contest for possession of Montgomery’s prime objective.

  Around midnight Lieutenant Colonel John Frost left his headquarters on the western side of the ramp and made his way around the perimeter, checking his men. Although the battle had continued almost without letup since Gräbner’s armored attack during the morning, morale was still high. Frost was proud of his tired, dirty troopers. All day long they had doggedly repelled attack after attack. Not a single German or vehicle had reached the north end of the bridge.

  During the afternoon the Germans had changed their tactics. With phosphorous ammunition, they attempted to burn the British out of their strong points. A long-barreled 150 mm. gun hurled 100-pound shells directly against Frost’s headquarters building, forcing the men to the cellar. Then British mortars got the range and scored a direct hit, killing the gun crew. As the troopers cheered and hooted derisively, other Germans rushed out under fire and towed the gun away. Houses around the perimeter were burning fiercely, but the British held out in them until the very last minute before moving to other positions. Damage was awesome. Burning trucks and vehicles, wrecked halftracks and smoking piles of debris cluttered every street. Sergeant Robert H. Jones remembers the sight as “a Sargasso sea of blazing collapsed buildings, half-tracks, trucks and jeeps.” The battle had become an endurance contest, one that Frost knew his men could not win without help.

  Cellars and basements were filled with wounded. One of the battalion chaplains, the Reverend Father Bernard Ega
n, and the battalion medical officer, Captain James Logan—who had been friends since the North African campaign—tended the casualties from a rapidly dwindling stock of medical supplies. There was almost no morphia left and even field dressings were almost gone. The men had set out for the bridge with only enough light rations for forty-eight hours. Now, these were almost exhausted, and the Germans had cut off the water. Forced to scrounge for food, the troopers were existing on apples and a few pears stored in the cellars and basements of the houses they occupied. Private G. W. Jukes remembers his sergeant telling the men, “You don’t need water if you eat lots of apples.” Jukes had a vision of “being eventually relieved, standing back-to-back defiantly in bloodstained bandages, surrounded by dead Germans, spent cartridge cases and apple cores.”

  Hour after hour Frost waited vainly for Dobie’s or Fitch’s relieving battalions to break through the German ring and reach the bridge. Although sounds of battle came from the direction of western Arnhem, there was no sign of large-scale troop movements. All through the day Frost had expected some further word from Horrocks’ XXX Corps. Nothing had been heard from them since the single strong radio signal picked up during the morning. Stragglers from the 3rd Battalion who had managed to get through to Frost brought news that Horrocks’ tanks were still far down the corridor. Some had even heard from Dutch underground sources that the column had not reached Nijmegen as yet. Worried and uncertain, Frost decided to keep this information to himself. He had already begun to believe that the men of his proud 2nd Battalion, which he had commanded since its inception, would be alone far longer than he believed it possible to hold.