A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  AT FOG-COVERED BASES near Grantham, England, the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade was waiting to take off. Zero hour for the drop had been scheduled for 10 A.M., but weather had forced a five-hour postponement. The brigade was now due to come in at 3 P.M. Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski, the Poles’ fiercely independent, mercurial commander, had kept his men by their planes during the wait. It seemed to the fifty-two-year-old Sosabowski that England was fogged in every morning. If the weather cleared more quickly than expected, orders might change and Sosabowski intended to be ready to go on short notice. He felt that every hour mattered now. Urquhart, Sosabowski believed, was in trouble.

  Apart from instinct, there was no specific reason for Sosabowski’s feeling. But the Market-Garden concept had not appealed to him from the outset. He was certain that the drop zones were too far from the bridge to effect surprise. Further, no one in England appeared to know what was happening in Arnhem, and Sosabowski had been alarmed to discover at headquarters that communications with the 1st British Airborne Division had broken down. All that was known was that the north end of the Arnhem bridge was in British hands. Since there had been no change in the plan, Sosabowski’s men, dropping to the south near the village of Elden, would take the other end.

  But the General was worried about the lack of information. He could not be sure that Urquhart’s men were still on the bridge. Liaison officers from Browning’s rear headquarters, on whom Sosabowski was dependent for news, seemed to know little about what was actually happening. He had thought of going to First Allied Airborne Army Headquarters at Ascot to talk directly with General Lewis Brereton, the commanding officer. Protocol dictated otherwise. His troops were under General Browning’s command, and Sosabowski was reluctant to bypass military channels. Any alterations in the plan should come only from Browning, and none had been received. Yet, Sosabowski felt that something had gone wrong. If the British were holding only the north end of the bridge, the enemy had to be in strength to the south and the Poles might well have the fight of their lives. Sosabowskfs transport and artillery, due to leave in forty-six gliders from the southern Down Ampney and Torrant Rushton bases, were still scheduled for a midday takeoff. Since that part of the plan remained unchanged, Sosabowski tried to convince himself that all would go well.

  Lieutenant Albert Smaczny was equally uneasy. He was to lead his company across the Arnhem bridge and occupy some buildings in the eastern part of the city. If the bridge had not been captured, he wondered how he would put his men across the Rhine. Smaczny had been assured that the crossing would be in British hands, but ever since his escape from the Germans in 1939 (his sixteen-year-old brother had been shot by the Gestapo in reprisal) Smaczny had schooled himself “to expect the unexpected.”

  Hour after hour the Poles waited, while the fog in the Midlands persisted. Corporal Wladijslaw Korob “was beginning to get nervous. I wanted to go,” he remembers. “Standing around the airdrome wasn’t my idea of the best way to kill Germans.” Looking at the assemblage of planes on the field, Lieutenant Stefan Kaczmarek felt “a joy that almost hurt.” He, too, was getting tired of standing around idle. The operation, he told his men, “is the second-best alternative to liberating Warsaw. If we succeed, we’ll walk into Germany right through the kitchen.”

  But the Poles were to be disappointed. At noon Sosabowski received fresh orders. Although planes were operating from the southern fields, in the Midlands the bases remained weathered in. The jump was canceled for the day. “It’s no good, General,” the chief liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Stevens, told the protesting Sosabowski. “We can’t get you out.” The assault was postponed until the following morning, Wednesday, September 20. “We’ll try it then at 10 A.M.,” he was told. There was no time to transfer troop loads to bases in the south. To Sosabowski’s chagrin, he learned that his glider supply lift had already left and was on the way to Holland. The General fumed with impatience. Each hour that passed meant greater enemy resistance, and the following day might bring an infinitely harder fight—unless his nagging fears were completely unjustified.

  They were not. Sosabowski’s glider supply lift with men, artillery and transport was heading for near annihilation. The third air lift would be a disaster.

  Low-scudding clouds blanketed the southern route all the way across the Channel. The third lift, heading for the 101st, 82nd and British drop zones, encountered trouble right from the beginning. Clear weather had been predicted by afternoon. Instead, conditions were deteriorating even as the formations took to the air. Squadrons of fighters, caught in cloud and unable to see ground targets, were forced to turn back. In zero visibility, unable to see their tow planes, many gliders cut loose to make emergency landings in England or in the Channel and whole serials were forced to abort and return to base.

  Of the 655 troop carriers and 431 gliders that did take off, little more than half reached the drop and landing zones, although most of the plane-glider combinations carrying troops were able to land safely back in England or elsewhere. But over the Continent intense enemy ground fire and Luftwaffe attacks, combined with the poor weather, caused the loss of some 112 gliders and 40 transports. Only 1,341 out of 2,310 troops and only 40 out of 68 artillery pieces bound for the 101st Airborne Division got through. So hard-pressed were General Taylor’s men that the 40 guns went into action almost as soon as they landed.

  General Gavin’s 82nd Airborne fared even worse. At this time, when every trooper was needed for the attack on the critical Nijmegen bridges, Gavin’s 325th Glider Infantry Regiment did not arrive at all. Like the Polish paratroops, the 325th’s planes and gliders, also based in the Grantham area, were unable to leave the ground. Worse, out of 265 tons of stores and ammunition destined for the 82nd, only about 40 tons were recovered.

  In the British sector, where Urquhart was expecting not only the Poles but a full-cargo resupply mission, tragedy struck. The supply dropping zones had been overrun by the enemy, and although intensive efforts were made to divert the 163-plane mission to a new area south of the Hartenstein Hotel, the effort failed. Desperately short of everything, particularly ammunition, Urquhart’s men saw the formations approach through a blizzard of antiaircraft fire. Then enemy fighters appeared, firing on the formations and strafing the new supply dropping zones.

  At about 4 P.M., the Reverend G. A. Pare, chaplain of the Glider Pilot Regiment, heard the cry, “Third lift coming!” Suddenly, the chaplain remembers, “there was the most awful crescendo of sound and the very air vibrated to a tremendous barrage of guns. All we could do was gaze in stupefaction at our friends going to inevitable death.”

  Pare watched “in agony, for these bombers, used to flying at 15,000 feet at night, were coming in at 1,500 feet in daylight. We saw more than one machine blazing, yet carrying on its course until every container was dropped. It now became obvious to us that we had terrible opposition. A signal had been sent asking that supplies be dropped near our headquarters, but hardly anything did.”

  Without fighter escort and doggedly holding course, the unwavering formations released supplies on the old dropping zones. Men on the ground tried desperately to attract attention by firing flares, igniting smoke bombs, waving parachutes and even setting parts of the heath on fire—and as they did they were strafed by diving enemy Messerschmitts.

  Many soldiers recall one British Dakota, its starboard wing on fire, coming in over the drop zone now held by the Germans. Sergeant Victor Miller, one of the glider pilots who had landed in the first lift on Sunday, was “sick at heart to see flames envelop almost the whole of the lower half of the fuselage.” Watching for the crew to bail out, Miller found himself muttering, “Jump! Jump!” As the plane flew low, Miller saw the dispatcher standing in the door, pushing out containers. Mesmerized, he watched the flaming Dakota turn and make another run in, and through the smoke he saw more containers tumbling out. Sergeant Douglas Atwell, another glider pilot, remembers that men climbed out of their trenches staring silently at
the sky. “We were dead tired, and we had little to eat or drink, but I couldn’t think of anything but that plane at the moment. It was as if it was the only one in the sky. Men were just riveted where they stood—and all the time that dispatcher kept on pushing out bundles.” The pilot held his burning plane steady, making a second slow pass. Major George Powell “was awestruck that he would do this. I couldn’t take my eyes off the craft. Suddenly it wasn’t a plane any more, just a big orange ball of fire.” As the burning plane plunged to the ground, its pilot, thirty-one-year-old Flight Lieutenant David Lord, still at the controls, Miller saw beyond the trees “only an oily column of smoke to mark the resting place of a brave crew who died that we might have the chance to live.”

  But Sergeant Miller was wrong. One member of the crew of the ill-fated Dakota did survive. Flying Officer Henry Arthur King, the navigator on that flight, remembers that just a few minutes before 4 P.M. as the plane was approaching the drop zone, flak set the starboard engine afire. Over the intercom Lord said, “Everyone O.K.? How far to the drop zone, Harry?” King called back, “Three minutes’ flying time.” The plane was listing heavily to the right and King saw that they were losing altitude rapidly. Flames had begun to spread along the wing toward the main fuel tank. “They need the stuff down there,” he heard Lord say. “We’ll go in and bail out afterwards. Everyone get your chutes on.”

  King spotted the drop zone and informed Lord. “O.K., Harry, I can see it,” the pilot said. “Go back and give them a hand with the baskets.” King made his way back to the open door. Flak had hit the rollers used to move the heavy supply bundles, and the dispatcher, Corporal Philip Nixon, and three soldiers from the Royal Army Service Corps were already manhandling eight heavy panniers of ammunition to the door. The men had taken off their parachutes in order to tug the baskets forward. Together the five men had pushed out six baskets when the red light, indicating that the plane was now off the drop zone, came on. King went on the intercom. “Dave,” he called to Lord, “we’ve got two left.” Lord put the plane in a tight left turn. “We’ll come round again,” he answered. “Hang on.”

  King saw they were then at about 500 feet and Lord “was handling that ship like a fighter plane. I was trying to help the R.A.S.C. boys get their chutes back on. The green light flashed and we pushed out our bundles. The next thing I remember is Lord shouting, ‘Bail out! Bail out! For God’s sake, bail out! ’ There was a tremendous explosion and I found myself hurtling through the air. I don’t remember pulling the ripcord but I must have done it instinctively. I landed flat and hard on my back. I remember looking at my watch and seeing it was only nine minutes since we took the flak. My uniform was badly scorched and I couldn’t find my shoes.”

  Nearly an hour later, King stumbled across a company of the 10th Battalion. Someone gave him tea and a bar of chocolate. “That’s all we’ve got,” the trooper told him. King stared at him. “What do you mean, that’s all you’ve got? We just dropped supplies to you.” The soldier shook his head. “You dropped our tins of sardines all right, but the Jerries got them. We got nothing.” King was speechless. He thought of Flight Lieutenant Lord, and the crew and men who had shed their chutes in a desperate effort to get precious ammunition bundles out to the anxious troops below. Of all these men, only King was alive. And now he had just learned that the sacrifice of his crew had been for nothing.*

  Planes crash-landed throughout the area, mainly around Wageningen and Renkum. Some ended up on the southern side of the Rhine. Sergeant Walter Simpson remembers hearing his pilot shout over the intercom, “My God, we’ve been hit!” Looking out, Simpson saw that the port engine was on fire. He heard the engines being throttled back and then the plane went into a dive. The frightened Simpson remembers that the plane “dragged its tail across the north bank of the river, lifted slightly, then catapulted across the water and came down on the southern side.”

  On impact Simpson was hurtled forward and thrown to one side of the fuselage. The wireless operator, Sergeant Runsdale, crashed into him and lay huddled across Simpson’s body. The interior of the plane was a shambles, fuel was burning, and Simpson could hear the crackling of flames. As he tried to ease his legs from under the wireless operator, Runsdale screamed and fainted. His back was broken. Simpson staggered up and carried the sergeant out through the escape hatch. Four crew members, dazed and in shock, were already there. Simpson went back for the others still inside. He found the bombardier unconscious. “His shoe had been blown off, part of his heel was missing and both arms were broken,” he recalls. Simpson picked up this man, too, and carried him out. Although the plane was now burning fiercely, Simpson went back a third time for the engineer, whose leg was broken. He, too, was brought to safety.

  In the village of Driel, young Cora Baltussen, her sister Reat and their brother Albert saw Simpson’s plane come down. The three immediately set out for the site of the crash. “It was horrible,” Cora recalls. “There were eight men and some of them were terribly injured. We dragged them away from the burning plane just as it exploded. I knew that the Germans would be looking for the crew. I told the pilot, Flight Officer Jeffrey Liggens, who was unharmed, that we’d have to hide him out while we took the injured men to the small surgery in the village. We hid him and two others in a nearby brickworks and told them we’d return at dark.” That evening Cora assisted the lone physician in the village, a woman, Dr. Sanderbobrorg, as she amputated the bombardier’s foot. The war had finally reached both Cora and little Driel.

  In all, out of 100 bombers and 63 Dakotas, 97 were damaged and 13 were shot down—and, in spite of the heroism of pilots and crews, Urquhart’s stricken division had not been bolstered. Of 390 tons of stores and ammunition dropped, nearly all fell into German hands. Only an estimated 21 tons was retrieved.

  Worse problems were to engulf the Polish transport and artillery lift. Before leaving England in the Polish lift, Sergeant Pilot Kenneth Travis-Davison, copilot of a Horsa glider, was struck by the almost complete absence of information relating to conditions at their destination. Routes were laid out on maps, and the drop zones for the Poles’ artillery and transport were marked; but, says Travis-Davison, “we were told that the situation was unknown.” The only landing instruction was that “gliders should land on the area marked by purple smoke.” In Travis-Davison’s opinion, “the briefing was ludicrous.”

  Yet, despite the inadequacy of information, R.A.F. planes correctly located the drop zone near Johannahoeve Farm and 31 out of 46 gliders reached the zone. As they came in, the air erupted with fire. A squadron of Messerschmitts hit many of the machines, riddling the thin canvas-and-plywood hulls, puncturing the gas tanks of jeeps and setting some afire. Antiaircraft bursts caught others. Those that made it to the ground landed in the midst of a battlefield. Troopers of Hackett’s 4th Brigade, struggling to disengage from an enemy that threatened to overrun them, were unable to reach the high ground and the drop zone beyond in time to protect the area. As the British and Germans fought fiercely, the Poles landed directly in the middle of the cataclysmic battle. In the terror and confusion the Poles were fired on from both sides. Gliders, many already on fire, crash-landed on the field or plowed into nearby trees. Polish artillerymen, caught in the crossfire and unable to tell friend from foe, fired back at both the Germans and British. Then, hastily unloading the usable jeeps and artillery, the dazed men ran a gauntlet of fire as they left the landing zone. Surprisingly, ground casualties were light, but many of the men, bewildered and shocked, were taken prisoner. Most of the jeeps and supplies were destroyed and of eight desperately needed six-pounder antitank guns, only three came through undamaged. General Stanislaw Sosabowski’s fears were more than justified. And the ordeal of the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade was only just beginning.

  Some forty miles south along the highway, General Maxwell Taylor’s 101st troopers were now fighting hard to keep the corridor open. But the German Fifteenth Army’s fierce defense at Best was draining Taylor’s forces. More a
nd more men were being caught up in the bitter engagement that one division intelligence officer wryly termed “a minor error in estimate.” Pressure was building all along Taylor’s 15-mile sector, which the Screaming Eagles had newly named “Hell’s Highway.” It was now obvious that the enemy’s intent was to cut off Horrocks’ tank spearhead, using Best as the base.

  The jammed columns of vehicles massing the highway were easy targets for artillery fire. Bulldozers and tanks roamed constantly up and down the road, pushing wreckage out of the convoys to keep the columns rolling. Since Sunday, Best, the minor secondary objective, had grown to such proportions that it threatened to overpower all other action along Taylor’s stretch of road. Now, the 101st commander was determined to crush the enemy at Best completely.

  Early Tuesday afternoon, with the support of British tanks, Taylor threw almost the entire 502nd Regiment against Von Zangen’s men at Best. The mammoth attack caught the enemy by surprise. Bolstered by the recently arrived 327th Glider Infantry Regiment and by British armor on the highway, the 2nd and 3rd battalions relentlessly swept the forested areas east of Best. Caught in a giant ring and forced back toward the Wilhelmina Canal, the Germans suddenly broke. With the commitment of fresh forces, the battle that had continued without letup for close to forty-six hours was suddenly over in two. Taylor’s men had achieved the first major victory of Market-Garden. More than three hundred of the enemy were killed and over a thousand captured, along with fifteen 88 mm. artillery pieces. “By late afternoon,” reads the official history, “as hundreds of Germans gave up, the word went out to send all Military Police available.” Lieutenant Edward Wierzbowski, the platoon leader who had come closest to seizing the Best bridge before it was blown, brought in his own prisoners after having first been captured himself. Out of grenades and ammunition, with his casualties all about him—only three men of his valiant platoon had not been wounded—Wierzbowski had finally surrendered. Now, dead tired and begrimed, Wierzbowski and his men, including some of the wounded, disarmed the doctors and orderlies in the German field hospital to which the men had been taken and marched back to Division, bringing their prisoners with them.