Quickly Mackenzie briefed the anxious Urquhart on the events that had occurred during his absence and gave him the situation—as Division knew it—at the moment. The picture was appalling. Bitterly, Urquhart saw that his proud division was being scattered and cut to ribbons. He thought of all the setbacks that had dogged his Market forces: the distance from the drop zones to the bridge; the near-total breakdown of communications; the weather delay of Hackett’s 4th Brigade plus the loss of precious resupply cargo; and the slow progress of Horrocks’ tanks. Urquhart was stunned to learn that XXX Corps was not reported to have reached even Nijmegen as yet. The command dispute between Hackett and Hicks was upsetting, particularly as it stemmed from Urquhart’s and Lathbury’s own unforeseeable absence in the crucial hours when precise direction was required in the battle. Above all, Urquhart rued the incredible overoptimism of the initial planning stages that had failed to give due importance to the presence of Bittrich’s Panzer Corps.
All these factors, one compounding another, had brought the division close to catastrophe. Only superb discipline and unbelievable courage were holding the battered Red Devils together. Urquhart was determined to somehow instill new hope, to coordinate the efforts of his men down even to company level. In doing so, he knew that he must demand more of his weary and wounded men than any airborne commander ever had demanded. He had no choices. With the steady inflow of German reinforcements, the dedicated, soft-spoken Scotsman saw that unless he acted immediately “my division would be utterly destroyed.” Even now, it might be too late to save his beloved command from annihilation.
A look at the map told its own desperate story. Quite simply, there was no front line. Now that all his troopers but the Polish Brigade had arrived, the main dropping zones to the west had been abandoned and, apart from resupply areas, the lines around them held by Hicks’s men had been shortened and pulled in. Hackett was going for the high ground northeast of Wolfheze and Johannahoeve Farm, he saw. The 11th Battalion and the South Staffordshires were fighting near St. Elisabeth’s Hospital. There was no news of the progress of the 1st and 3rd battalions on the lower Rhine road. Yet Frost, Urquhart learned with pride, still held at the bridge. Everywhere on the situation map red arrows indicated newly reported concentrations of enemy tanks and troops; some actually appeared to be positioned behind the British units. Urquhart did not know if there was time enough remaining to reorganize and coordinate the advance of his dwindling forces and send them toward the bridge in one last desperate drive. Ignorant for now of the cruel damage done to the 1st and 3rd battalions, Urquhart believed there might still be a chance.
“The thing that hit me was this,” he remembers. “Who was running the battle in the town? Who was coordinating it? Lathbury was wounded and no longer there. No one had been nominated to make a plan.” As he began to work on the problem Brigadier Hicks arrived. He was extremely happy to see Urquhart and to return the division to his care. “I told him,” Urquhart says, “that we would have to get somebody into town immediately. A senior officer, to coordinate Lea and McCardie’s attack. I realized that they had been only a few hundred yards away from me, and it would have been better if I had remained in town to direct. Now, I sent Colonel Hilary Barlow, Hicks’s deputy. He was the man for the job. I told him to get into town and tie up the loose ends. I explained exactly where Lea and McCardie were and sent him off with a jeep and wireless set and ordered him to produce a properly coordinated attack.”
Barlow never reached the battalions. Somewhere en route he was killed. “He simply vanished,” Urquhart recalls, and the body was never found.
The arrival of the Poles in the third lift was of almost equal urgency. They would now land directly on a prepared enemy on the southern approaches of the bridge, as Frost knew only too well; and by now, Urquhart reasoned, the Germans were obviously reinforced by armor. The drop could be a slaughter. In an effort to stop them and even though communications were uncertain—no one knew whether messages were getting through—Urquhart sent a warning message and requested a new drop zone. At rear Corps headquarters the signal was never received. But it was irrelevant. In yet another setback, fog covered many of the airfields in England where the planes and gliders of the vital third lift were readying to go.
The corridor through which Horrocks’ tanks had to drive was open once again. At Son, forty-six miles south of Arnhem, engineers watched the first British armor thud across the temporary Bailey bridge they had erected. The Guards Armored Division was once more on its way, the drive now led by the Grenadiers. Now, at 6:45 A.M. on September 19, the Garden forces were behind schedule by thirty-six hours.
No one in this sector of the corridor could guess as yet what that time loss would mean in the final reckoning—and worse was to come. The great Waal bridge at Nijmegen, thirty-five miles north, was still in German hands. If it was not taken intact and soon, airborne commanders feared the Germans would blow it up.
That fear gave urgency to the armored drive. To General Gavin, General Browning, the Corps commander, and to Horrocks, the Nijmegen bridge was now the most critical piece in the plan. As yet the commanders did not know the true plight of the 1st British Airborne Division. German propaganda broadcasts had boasted that General Urquhart was dead* and his division smashed, but there had been no news at all from Division itself. In the tank columns men believed that Market-Garden was going well. So did General Taylor’s Screaming Eagles. “To the individual 101st trooper, the sound of the tanks, the sight of their guns was both an assurance and a promise,” General S. L. A. Marshall was later to write—“an assurance that there was a plan and a promise that the plan might work.”
As the tanks rumbled by, the watching troopers of General Taylor’s 101st took just pride in their own achievements. Against unexpectedly strong resistance they had taken and held the fifteen-mile stretch of road from Eindhoven up to Veghel. Along the route men waved and cheered as armored cars of the Household Cavalry, the tanks of the Grenadiers and the mighty mass of XXX Corps swept by. In minutes the column moved from Son to Veghel. Then, with the kind of dash that Montgomery had envisioned for the entire drive, the armored spearhead, flanked by cheering, flag-waving Dutch crowds, sped on, reaching its first destination at Grave at 8:30 A.M. There, the tanks linked up with Gavin’s 82nd. “I knew we had reached them,” recalls Corporal William Chennell, who was in one of the lead armored cars, “because the Americans, taking no chances, halted us with warning fire.”
Moving quickly on, the first tanks reached the Nijmegen suburbs at midday. Now two thirds of the vital Market-Garden corridor had been traversed. The single road, jammed with vehicles, could have been severed at any time had it not been for the vigilant, tenacious paratroopers who had fought and died to keep it open. If Montgomery’s bold strategy was to succeed, the corridor was the lifeline which alone could sustain it. Men felt the heady excitement of success. According to official pronouncements, including those from Eisenhower’s headquarters, everything was going according to plan. There was not even a hint of the dire predicament that was slowly engulfing the men at Arnhem.
Yet, General Frederick Browning was uneasy. During the afternoon of the eighteenth he met with General Gavin. The Corps commander had received no news from Arnhem. Other than scant Dutch underground information, Browning’s communications men had not received a single situation report. Despite official announcements that the operation was proceeding satisfactorily, messages relayed to Browning from his own rear headquarters and from General Dempsey’s Second Army had roused in him a gnawing concern. Browning could not rid himself of the feeling that Urquhart might be in grievous trouble.
Two reports in particular fed his anxiety. German strength and reaction in Arnhem had unquestionably proved heavier and faster than the planners had ever anticipated. And R.A.F. photo-reconnaissance information indicated that only the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was held by the British. But even now, Browning was unaware that two panzer divisions were in Urquhart’s sector. Di
sturbed by the lack of communications and nagged by his suspicions, Browning warned Gavin that the “Nijmegen bridge must be taken today. At the latest, tomorrow.” From the moment he had first learned of Market-Garden, the bridge at Arnhem had worried Browning. Montgomery had confidently expected Hor-rocks to reach it within forty-eight hours. At the time, Browning’s view was that Urquhart’s paratroopers could hold for four days. Now, on D plus two—one day short of Browning’s estimate of the division’s ability to function alone—although unaware of the grave condition of the 1st British Airborne Division, Browning told Gavin, “we must get to Arnhem as quickly as possible.”*
Immediately after the link-up in the 82nd’s sector, Browning called a conference. The Guards’ lead armored cars were sent back to pick up the XXX Corps commander, General Horrocks, and the commander of the Guards Armored Division, General Allan Adair. With Browning, the two officers drove to a site northeast of Nijmegen, overlooking the river. From there Corporal William Chennell, whose vehicle had picked up one of the two officers, stood with the little group observing the bridge. “To my amazement,” Chennell remembers, “we could see German troops and vehicles moving back and forth across it, apparently completely unconcerned. Not a shot was fired, yet we were hardly more than a few hundred yards away.”
Back at Browning’s headquarters, Horrocks and Adair learned for the first time of the fierce German opposition in the 82nd’s area. “I was surprised to discover upon arrival that we did not have the Nijmegen bridge,” Adair says. “I assumed it would be in airborne hands by the time we reached it and we’d simply sweep on through.” Gavin’s troopers, the generals now learned, had been so hard-pressed to hold the airhead that companies had been recalled from Nijmegen to protect the landing zones from massed enemy assaults. Elements of the 508th Battalion had been unable to make any headway against the strong SS units holding the bridge approaches. The only way to take the bridge quickly, Browning believed, was by a combined tank and infantry assault. “We’re going to have to winkle these Germans out with more than airborne troops,” Browning told Adair.
The Nijmegen bridge was the last crucial link in the Market-Garden plan. With the time limit that Browning had placed on the British paratroopers’ ability to hold out about to expire, the pace of the operation must be accelerated. Eleven miles of corridor remained to be forced open. The Nijmegen bridge, Browning stressed, had to be captured in record time.
Major General Heinz Harmel, the Frundsberg Division commander, was irritable and more than a little frustrated. Despite constant pressure from General Bittrich, he had still been unable to bludgeon Frost and his men from the Arnhem bridge. “I was beginning to feel damn foolish,” Harmel recalls.
By now he knew that the paratroopers were nearing the end of their supplies and ammunition. Also their casualties, if his own were an example, were extremely high. “I had determined to bring tanks and artillery fire to bear and level every single building they held,” Harmel says, “but in view of the fight they were putting up, I felt I should first ask for their surrender.” Harmel ordered his staff to arrange for a temporary truce. They were to pick a British prisoner of war to go to Frost with Harmel’s ultimatum. The soldier selected was a newly captured engineer, twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Stanley Halliwell, one of Captain Mackay’s sappers.
Halliwell was told to enter the British perimeter under a flag of truce. There he was to tell Frost that a German officer would arrive to confer with him about surrender terms. If Frost agreed, Halliwell would once more return to the bridge to stand unarmed with Frost until the German officer joined them. “As a P.O.W. I was supposed to return to the Jerries as soon as I delivered the message and got the Colonel’s answer and I didn’t like that part of the business at all,” Halliwell says. The Germans brought Halliwell close to the British perimeter, where, carrying the truce flag, he crossed into the British-held sector and arrived at Frost’s headquarters. Nervously, Halliwell explained the situation to Frost. The Germans, he said, believed it pointless for the fight to continue. The British were surrounded with no hope of relief. They had no choice but to die or surrender. Questioning Halliwell, Frost learned that “the enemy seemed to be most disheartened at their own losses.” His own spirits lifted momentarily at the news, and he remembers thinking that “if only more ammunition would arrive, we would soon have our SS opponents in the bag.” As to the German request for negotiations, Frost’s answer to Halliwell was explicit. “Tell them to go to hell,” he said.
Halliwell was in full agreement. As a P.O.W. he was expected to return, but he did not relish the idea of repeating the Colonel’s exact words and, he pointed out to Frost, it might prove difficult to return through the lines. “It is up to you to make that decision,” Frost said. Halliwell had already done so. “If it’s all the same with you, Colonel,” he told Frost, “I’ll stay. Jerry will get the message sooner or later.”
On the far side of the ramp Captain Eric Mackay had just received a similar invitation, but he chose to misinterpret it. “I looked out and saw a Jerry standing with a not-very-white hanky tied to a rifle. He shouted ‘Surrender! ’ I promptly assumed that they wanted to surrender, but perhaps they meant us.” In the now nearly demolished schoolhouse in which his small force was holding out, Mackay, still thinking the German was making a surrender offer, thought the whole idea impractical. “We only had two rooms,” he says. “We would have been a bit cramped with prisoners.”
Waving his arms at the German, Mackay shouted, “Get the hell out of here. We’re taking no prisoners.” The medical orderly, Pinky White, joined Mackay at the window. “Raus!” he shouted. “Beat it!” Amid a series of hoots and catcalls, other troopers took up the cry. “Bugger off! Go back and fight it out, you bastard.” The German seemed to get the point. As Mackay recalls, he turned around and walked quickly back to his own building, “still waving his dirty hanky.”
Harmel’s attempt to seek a surrender from the spirited, beleaguered men on the bridge had failed. The battle began again in all its fury.
*The same point is made in several monographs written by the eminent Dutch military historian, Lieutenant Colonel Theodor A. Boeree. “Had Urquhart been there,” he writes, “he might well have abandoned the defense of the bridge, recalled Frost’s battalion, if possible, concentrated his six original batallions and the three of the 4th Parachute Brigade that had just landed, and established a firm bridgehead somewhere else on the northern side of Lower Rhine … with the high ground at Westerbouwing … as the center of the bridgehead. There they could have awaited the arrival of the British Second Army.”
*I believe the row was far more heated than related above, but understandably Hicks and Hackett, good friends, are reluctant to discuss the matter in greater detail. There are at least four different versions of what transpired, and none of them may be entirely accurate. My reconstruction is based on interviews with Hackett, Hicks and Mackenzie, and on accounts in Urquhart’s Arnhem, pp. 77-90, and Hibbert’s The Battle of Arnhem, pp. 101-3.
*After the war Gough learned that General Horrocks had been thinking about a similar idea. Remembering how a fast reconnaissance unit had gone ahead of the British column and linked up with the 101st, he thought that a similar fast patrol might well take its chances and reach the Arnhem bridge. “Colonel Vincent Dun-kerly was alerted to lead the group,” Gough says, “and, like me, he admitted that he spent the entire day peeing in his knickers at the thought.”
*Throughout most of the Arnhem battle, the hospital was used by both British and German doctors and medics to care for their wounded. Seccombe, as a German prisoner, was moved to the small Dutch town of Enschede, about five miles from the German border. During his stay there, both legs were amputated. He was liberated in April, 1945.
*Deane-Drummond was captured on Friday, September 22, shortly after he left the house near the Arnhem bridge. In an old villa near Velp, used as a P.O.W. compound, he discovered a wall cupboard in which to hide. In these cramped confines, h
e remained for thirteen days, rationing himself to a few sips of water and a small amount of bread. On October 5 he escaped, contacted the Dutch underground and on the night of October 22, was taken to the 1st Airborne Casualty Clearing Station at Nijmegen. One of the three men with him in Arnhem, Deane-Drummond’s batman, Lance Corporal Arthur Turner, was also captured and taken to the Velp house. Eventually he was shipped to a P.O.W. camp in Germany and was liberated in April, 1945. Deane-Drummond’s own story is told most effectively in his own book, Return Ticket.
*Milbourne was later captured in the cellar of the Ter Horst house in Oosterbeek. He lost his left eye and both hands were amputated by a German surgeon in Apeldoorn. He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
*According to Bittrich the Germans learned from P.O.W.’s that Urquhart was either dead or missing and also, he claims, “we were monitoring radio messages and listening to phone calls.”
*Many British accounts of Arnhem, including Chester Wilmot’s excellent Struggle for Europe, imply that Browning knew more about Urquhart’s situation at this time than he actually did. A careful check of the scattered and inconclusive information passed on to Corps headquarters shows that the first direct message from the Arnhem sector reached Browning at 8:25 A.M. on the nineteenth. Two others arrived during the course of the day and dealt with the bridge, troop locations and a request for air support. Although many messages giving the true picture had been sent, they had not been received, and these three gave no indication that Urquhart’s division was being methodically destroyed. In some quarters, Montgomery and Browning have been unjustly criticized for not taking more immediate and positive steps. At this time they knew virtually nothing of Urquhart’s critical problems.
A Bridge Too Far Page 37