A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Successful as the engagement had been, General Taylor’s difficulties were far from over. Even as the battle at Best ended, German armor struck out for the newly installed bridge at Son in yet another attempt to sever the corridor. Taylor himself, leading his headquarters troops—his only available reinforcements—rushed to the scene. With bazooka fire and a single antitank gun, a German Panther tank was knocked out almost as it reached the bridge. Similarly, several other tanks were quickly dispatched. The German attack collapsed, and traffic continued to move. But the vigilance of the Screaming Eagles could not be relaxed. “Our situation,” Taylor later noted, “reminded me of the early American West, where small garrisons had to contend with sudden Indian attacks at any point along great stretches of vital railroad.”

  The Germans’ hard, fast, hit-and-run tactics were taking their toll. Almost 300 men of the 101st had been killed or wounded or were missing in ground actions. Men in slit trenches holding positions on either side of the highway or in the fields around Best were in constant danger of being overrun from the flanks, and each night brought its own particular fear. In darkness, with the Germans infiltrating the 101st’s perimeter, no one knew whether the man in the next foxhole would be alive by the following morning. In the confusion and surprise of these sharp enemy actions men suddenly disappeared, and when the fire fights were over their friends searched for them among the dead and wounded on the battle ground and at aid stations and field hospitals.

  As the Best battle ended and the long lines of prisoners were being herded back to Division, thirty-one-year-old Staff Sergeant Charles Dohun set out to find his officer, Captain LeGrand Johnson. Back in England prior to the jump, Dohun had been almost “numb with worry.” The twenty-two-year-old Johnson had felt much the same. He was “resigned to never coming back.” The morning of the nineteenth Johnson had thrown his company into an attack near Best. “It was that or be slaughtered,” he recalls. In the fierce battle, which Johnson remembers as “the worst I have ever seen or heard,” he was shot in the left shoulder. With his company reduced from 180 to 38 and surrounded in a field of burning haystacks, Johnson held off the Germans until relieving companies, driving back the enemy, could reach and evacuate the survivors. As Johnson was being helped back to an aid station he was shot once again, this time through the head. At the battalion aid station his body was placed among other fatally wounded men in what the medics called the “dead pile.” There, after a long search, Sergeant Dohun found him. Kneeling down, Dohun was convinced there was a flicker of life.

  Picking up the inert officer, Dohun laid Johnson and four other casualties from his company in a jeep and set out for the field hospital at Son. Cut off by Germans, Dohun drove the jeep into the woods and hid. When the German patrol moved on, he set out again. Arriving at the hospital, he found long lines of casualties waiting for treatment. Dohun, certain that Johnson might die at any minute, passed down the lines of wounded until he came to a surgeon who was checking the casualties to determine who was in need of immediate aid. “Major,” Dohun told the doctor, “my captain needs attention right away.” The major shook his head. “I’m sorry, sergeant,” he told Dohun. “We’ll get to him. He’ll have to wait his turn.” Dohun tried again. “Major, he’ll die if you don’t look at him quick.” The doctor was firm. “We’ve got a lot of injured men here,” he said. “Your captain will be attended to as soon as we can get to him.” Dohun pulled out his .45 and cocked the trigger. “It’s not soon enough,” he said calmly. “Major, I’ll kill you right where you stand if you don’t look at him right now.” Astonished, the surgeon stared at Dohun. “Bring him in,” he said.

  In the operating theater Dohun stood by, his .45 in hand as the doctor and a medical team worked on Johnson. As the sergeant watched, Johnson was given a blood transfusion, his wounds cleaned and a bullet was removed from his skull and another from his left shoulder. When the operation was completed and Johnson was bandaged, Dohun moved. Stepping up to the doctor, he handed over his .45. “O.K.,” he said, “thanks. Now you can turn me in.”

  Dohun was sent back to the 2nd Battalion of the 502nd. There, he was brought before the commanding officer. Dohun snapped to attention. He was asked if he was aware of exactly what he had done and that his action constituted a court-martial offense. Dohun replied, “Yes, sir, I do.” Pacing up and down, the commander suddenly stopped. “Sergeant,” he said, “I’m placing you under arrest”—he paused and looked at his watch—“for exactly one minute.” The two men waited in silence. Then the officer looked at Dohun. “Dismissed,” he said. “Now get back to your unit.” Dohun saluted smartly. “Yes, sir,” he said, and left.*

  Now, in General Gavin’s sector of the corridor, as Horrocks’ tanks rolled forward toward Nijmegen, the quick capture of the city’s crossings assumed critical importance. On the seventeenth the Germans had had only a few soldiers guarding the approaches to the Waal river bridge. By afternoon of the nineteenth Gavin estimated that he was opposed by more than five hundred SS Grenadiers, well-positioned and supported by artillery and armor. The main body of the Guards Armored Division was still en route to the city. Only the spearhead of the British column—elements of the 1st Battalion of the Grenadier Guards under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edward H. Goulburn—was available for an attack and Gavin’s 82nd troopers in their ten-mile stretch of corridor were widely dispersed by their efforts to fight off a constantly encroaching enemy. Since Gavin’s Glider Infantry Regiment, based in the fogbound Midlands of England, had been unable to take off, he could afford to release only one battalion for a combined attack with the British spearhead tanks. Gavin chose the 2nd Battalion of the 505th under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort. There was a chance that the attack, based on speed and surprise, might succeed. If anyone could help effect it, Gavin believed it was the reserved, soft-spoken Vandervoort.* Still, the operation carried heavy risks. Gavin thought the British appeared to underestimate the German strength, as indeed they did. The Grenadier Guards’ after-action report noted that “It was thought that a display in the shape of tanks would probably cause the enemy to withdraw.”

  At 3:30 P.M. the combined attack began. The force quickly penetrated the center of the city without encountering serious opposition. There, approximately forty British tanks and armored vehicles split into two columns, with American troops riding on the tanks and following behind them. On top of lead tanks and in reconnaissance cars were twelve specially chosen Dutch underground scouts guiding the way—among them a twenty-two-year-old university student named Jan van Hoof, whose later actions would become a subject of sharp dispute. “I was reluctant to use him,” recalls the 82nd’s Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje. “He seemed highly excited, but another underground member vouched for his record. He went in with a British scout car and that was the last I ever saw of him.” As the force divided, one column headed for the railroad bridge and the second, with Goulburn and Vandervoort, approached the main highway crossing over the Waal.

  At both objectives the Germans were waiting in strength. Staff Sergeant Paul Nunan remembers that as his platoon approached an underpass near the railroad bridge, “we began receiving sniper fire. With a thousand places for snipers to hide, it was hard to tell where fire was coming from.” Men dived for cover and slowly began to pull back. British armor fared no better. As tanks began to roll toward the bridge, 88’s, firing down the street at almost point-blank range, knocked them out. A wide street, the Kraijen-hoff Laan, led to a triangular park west of the crossing. There, in buildings facing the park on three sides, the paratroopers regrouped for another attack. But again the Germans held them off. Snipers on roofs and machine guns firing from a railroad overpass kept the men pinned down.

  Some troopers remember Lieutenant Russ Parker, a cigar clenched in his teeth, moving into the open and spraying the rooftops to keep snipers’ heads down. A call went out for tanks, and Nunan remembers that “at that instant the entire park seemed filled with
tracer slugs coming from a fast-firing automatic weapon sited to our left across the street.” Nunan turned to Herbert Buffalo Boy, a Sioux Indian and a veteran 82nd trooper. “I think they’re sending a German tank,” he said. Buffalo Boy grinned. “Well, if they’ve got infantry with them, it could get to be a very tough day,” he told Nunan. The German tank did not materialize, but a 20 mm. antiaircraft gun opened up. With grenades, machine guns and bazookas, the troopers fought on until word was passed for forward platoons to pull back and consolidate for the night. As men moved out, the Germans set buildings along the river’s edge on fire, making it impossible for Vandervoort’s men to infiltrate, overrun artillery positions and clear out pockets of resistance. The railroad bridge attack had ground to a halt.

  Under cover of heavy American artillery fire, the second column had made for Huner Park, the ornamental gardens leading to the approaches of the highway bridge. Here, in a traffic circle, all roads leading to the bridge converged and an ancient ruin with a sixteen-sided chapel—the Valkhof—once the palace of Charlemagne and later rebuilt by Barbarossa, commanded the area. In this citadel the enemy was concentrated. It almost seemed to Colonel Goulburn that “the Boche had some sort of an idea of what we were trying to do.” As indeed they had.

  Captain Karl Heinz Euling’s battalion of SS Panzer Grenadiers was one of the first units to cross the Rhine at Pannerden. Acting on General Harmel’s orders to protect the bridge at all costs, Euling had ringed the Huner Park area with self-propelled guns and had positioned men in the chapel of the old ruin. As British tanks rattled around the corners of the streets leading to the park, they came under Euling’s guns. Meeting a punishing artillery barrage, the tanks pulled back. Colonel Vandervoort immediately took to the street, and getting a mortar crew into action with covering fire, he moved one company forward. As the company’s lead platoon, under First Lieutenant James J. Coyle, sprinted for a row of attached houses facing the park, they came under small-arms and mortar fire. Lieutenant William J. Meddaugh, second in command, saw that this was “observed fire. The guns and snipers were being directed by radio. British tanks covered our front as Lieutenant Coyle moved into a block of buildings overlooking the entire enemy position. Other platoons were stopped, unable to move, and the situation looked rotten.”

  Covered by British smoke bombs Meddaugh succeeded in bringing the rest of the company forward, and the commander, Lieutenant J. J. Smith, consolidated his men in houses around Coyle. As Meddaugh recalls, “Coyle’s platoon now had a perfect view of the enemy, but as we started to move tanks up, some high-velocity guns opened up that had not done any firing as yet. Two tanks were knocked out, and the others retired.” As Coyle’s men replied with machine guns, they immediately drew antitank gun fire from across the streets. When darkness closed in, Euling’s SS men attempted to infiltrate the American positions. One group got to within a few feet of Coyle’s platoon before they were spotted and a fierce fire fight broke out. Coyle’s men suffered casualties, and three of the Germans were killed before the attack was driven back. Later, Euling sent medics to pick up his wounded, and Coyle’s paratroopers waited until the injured Germans were evacuated before resuming the fight. In the middle of the action, Private First Class John Keller heard a low pounding noise. Going to a window, he was amazed to see a Dutchman on a stepladder calmly replacing the shingles on the house next door as though nothing was happening.

  In late evening, with small-arms fire continuing, any further attempt to advance was postponed until daylight. The Anglo-American assault had been abruptly stopped barely 400 yards from the Waal river bridge—the last water obstacle on the road to Arnhem.

  To the Allied commanders it was now clear that the Germans were in complete control of the bridges. Browning, worried that the crossings might be destroyed at any moment, called another conference late on the nineteenth. A way must be found to cross the 400-yard-wide Waal river. General Gavin had devised a plan which he had mentioned to Browning at the time of the link-up. Then the Corps commander had turned down the scheme. At this second conference Gavin proposed it again. “There’s only one way to take this bridge,” he told the assembled officers. “We’ve got to get it simultaneously—from both ends.” Gavin urged that “any boats in Horrocks’ engineering columns should be rushed forward immediately, because we’re going to need them.” The British looked at him in bewilderment. What the 82nd commander had in mind was an assault crossing of the river—by paratroops.

  Gavin went on to explain. In nearly three days of fighting, his casualties were high—upwards of 200 dead and nearly 700 injured. Several hundred more men were cut off or scattered and were listed as missing. His losses, Gavin reasoned, would grow progressively worse if blunt head-on attacks continued. What was needed was a means of capturing the bridge quickly and cheaply. Gavin’s plan was to throw a force in boats across the river a mile downstream while the attack continued for possession of the southern approaches. Under a barrage of tank fire the troopers were to storm the enemy defenses on the northern side before the Germans fully realized what was happening.

  Yet total surprise was out of the question. The river was too wide to enable boatloads of men to escape detection, and the bank on the far side was so exposed that troopers, once across the river, would have to negotiate 200 yards of flat ground. Beyond was an embankment from which German gunners could fire down upon the invading paratroopers. That defense position would have to be overrun too. Although heavy casualties could be expected initially, in Gavin’s opinion they would still be less than if the assault were continued against the southern approaches alone. “The attempt has to be made,” he told Browning, “if Market-Garden is to succeed.”

  Colonel George S. Chatterton, commander of the British Glider Pilot Regiment, remembers that, besides Browning and Horrocks, commanders of the Irish, Scots, and Grenadier Guards were present at the conference. So was cigar-chewing Colonel Reuben Tucker, commander of the 82nd’s 504th Regiment, whose men Gavin had picked to make the river assault if his plan won approval. Although intent on Gavin’s words, Chatterton could not help noting the differences in the men assembled. “One brigadier wore suede shoes and sat on a shooting stick,” he recalls. “Three Guards’ commanders had on rather worn corduroy trousers, chukka boots and old school scarves.” Chatterton thought “they seemed relaxed, as though they were discussing an exercise, and I couldn’t help contrast them to the Americans present, especially Colonel Tucker, who was wearing a helmet that almost covered his face. His pistol was in a holster under his left arm, and he had a knife strapped to his thigh.” To Chatterton’s great amusement, “Tucker occasionally removed his cigar long enough to spit and every time he did faint looks of surprise flickered over the faces of the Guards’ officers.”

  But the daring of Gavin’s plan provided the real surprise. “I knew it sounded outlandish,” Gavin recalls, “but speed was essential. There was no time even for a reconnaissance. As I continued to talk, Tucker was the only man in the room who seemed unfazed. He had made the landing at Anzio and knew what to expect. To him the crossing was like the kind of exercise the 504th had practiced at Fort Bragg.” Still, for paratroopers, it was unorthodox and Browning’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, recalls that the Corps commander was “by now filled with admiration at the daring of the idea.” This time Browning gave his approval.

  The immediate problem was to find boats. Checking with his engineers, Horrocks learned they carried some twenty-eight small canvas and plywood craft. These would be rushed to Nijmegen during the night. If the planning could be completed in time, Gavin’s miniature Normandy-like amphibious assault of the Waal would take place at 1 P.M. the next day, on the twentieth. Never before had paratroopers attempted such a combat operation. But Gavin’s plan seemed to offer the best hope of grabbing the Nijmegen bridge intact; and then, as everyone still believed, another quick dash up the corridor would unite them with the men at Arnhem.

  In the grassy expanse of the Eusebius Buit
en Singel, General Heinz Harmel personally directed the opening of the bombardment against Frost’s men at the bridge. His attempt to persuade Frost to surrender had failed. Now, to the assembled tank and artillery commanders his instructions were specific: they were to level every building held by the paratroopers. “Since the British won’t come out of their holes, we’ll blast them out,” Harmel said. He told gunners to “aim right under the gables and shoot meter by meter, floor by floor, until each house collapses.” Harmel was determined that the siege would end, and since everything else had failed this was the only course. “By the time we’re finished,” Harmel added, “there’ll be nothing left but a pile of bricks.” Lying flat on the ground between two artillery pieces, Harmel trained his binoculars on the British strongholds and directed the fire. As the opening salvos zeroed in he stood up, satisfied, and handed over to his officers. “I would have liked to stay,” he recalls. “It was a new experience in fighting for me. But with the Anglo-Americans attacking the bridges at Nijmegen I had to rush down there.” As Harmel left, his gunners, with methodical, scythelike precision, began the job of reducing Frost’s remaining positions to rubble.

  Of the eighteen buildings that the 2nd Battalion had initially occupied, Frost’s men now held only about ten. While tanks hit positions from the east and west, artillery slammed shells into those facing north. The barrage was merciless. “It was the best, most effective fire I have ever seen,” remembers SS Grenadier Private Horst Weber. “Starting from the rooftops, buildings collapsed like doll houses. I did not see how anyone could live through this inferno. I felt truly sorry for the British.”