A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Weber watched three Tiger tanks rumble slowly down the Groote Markt, and while machine guns sprayed every window in a block of buildings opposite the northern approaches to the bridge, the tanks “pumped shell after shell into each house, one after the other.” He remembers a corner building where “the roof fell in, the two top stories began to crumble and then, like the skin peeling off a skeleton, the whole front wall fell into the street revealing each floor on which the British were scrambling like mad.” Dust and debris, Weber remembers, “soon made it impossible to see anything more. The din was awful but even so, above it all we could hear the wounded screaming.”

  In relays, tanks smashed houses along the Rhine waterfront and under the bridge itself. Often, as the British darted out, tanks rammed the ruins like bulldozers, completely leveling the sites. At Captain Mackay’s headquarters under the ramp in the nearly destroyed schoolhouse, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth estimated that “high-explosive shells came through the southern face of the building at the rate of one every ten seconds.” It became “rather hot,” he recalls, “and everyone had some sort of wound or other.” Yet the troopers obstinately hung on, evacuating each room in its turn “as ceilings collapsed, cracks appeared in the walls, and rooms became untenable.” In the rubble, making every shot count, the Red Devils, Stainforth recalls proudly, “survived like moles. Jerry just couldn’t dig us out.” But elsewhere men were finding their positions almost unendurable. “The Germans had decided to shell us out of existence,” Private James W. Sims explains. “It seemed impossible for the shelling and mortaring to get any heavier, but it did. Burst after burst, shell after shell rained down, the separate explosions merging into one continuous rolling detonation.” With each salvo Sims repeated a desperate litany, “Hold on! Hold on! It can’t last much longer.” As he crouched alone in his slit trench the thought struck Sims that he was “lying in a freshly dug grave just waiting to be buried alive.” He remembers thinking that “unless XXX Corps hurries, we have had it.”

  Colonel Frost realized that disaster had finally overtaken the 2nd Battalion. The relieving battalions had not broken through, and Frost was sure they were no longer able to come to his aid. The Polish drop had failed to materialize. Ammunition was all but gone. Casualties were now so high that every available cellar was full, and the men had been fighting without letup for over fifty hours. Frost knew they could not endure this punishment much longer. All about his defensive perimeter, houses were in flames, buildings had collapsed, and positions were being over-run. He did not know how much longer he could hold out. His beloved 2nd Battalion was being buried in the ruins of the buildings around him. Yet Frost was not ready to oblige his enemy. Beyond hope, he was determined to deny the Germans the Arnhem bridge to the last.

  He was not alone in his emotions. Their ordeal seemed to affect his men much as it did Frost. Troopers shared their ammunition and took what little they could find from their wounded, preparing for the doom that was engulfing them. There was little evidence of fear. In their exhaustion, hunger and pain, the men seemed to develop a sense of humor about themselves and their situation which grew even as their sacrifice became increasingly apparent.

  Father Egan remembers meeting Frost coming out of a toilet. “The Colonel’s face—tired, grimy, and wearing a stubble of beard—lit up with a smile,” Egan recalls. “‘Father,’ he told me, ‘the window is shattered, there’s a hole in the wall, and the roof’s gone. But it has a chain and it works.’”

  Later, Egan was trying to make his way across one street to visit wounded in the cellars. The area was being heavily mortared and the chaplain was taking cover wherever he could. “Outside, strolling unconcernedly up the street was Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose company had taken the bridge initially,” he recalls. “The major saw me cowering down and walked over. In his hand was an umbrella.” As Egan recalls, Tatham-Warter “opened the umbrella and held it over my head. With mortar shells raining down everywhere, he said, ‘Come along, Padre.’” When Egan showed reluctance, Tatham-Warter reassured him. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve got an umbrella.” Lieutenant Patrick Barnett encountered the redoubtable major soon afterward. Barnett was sprinting across the street to a new defense area Frost had ordered him to hold. Tatham-Warter, returning from escorting Father Egan, was out visiting his men in the shrinking perimeter defenses and holding the umbrella over his head. Barnett was so surprised that he stopped in his tracks. “That thing won’t do you much good,” he told the major. Tatham-Warter looked at him in mock surprise. “Oh, my goodness, Pat,” he said. “What if it rains?”

  During the afternoon, as the bombardment continued, Major Freddie Gough saw Tatham-Warter leading his company, umbrella in hand. Tanks were thundering down the streets firing at everything. “I almost fainted when I saw those huge Mark IV’s firing at us at almost point-blank range,” recalls Gough. Then the tension was suddenly relieved. “There, out in the street leading his men in a bayonet charge against some Germans who had managed to infiltrate, was Tatham-Warter,” Gough recalls. “He had found an old bowler someplace and he was rushing along, twirling that battered umbrella, looking for all the world like Charlie Chaplin.”

  There were other moments of humor equally memorable. As the afternoon wore on, battalion headquarters was heavily bombarded and caught fire. Father Egan went down to the cellar to see the wounded. “Well, Padre,” said Sergeant Jack Spratt, who was regarded as the battalion comic, “they’re throwing everything at us but the kitchen stove.” He had barely said the words when the building suffered another direct hit. “The ceiling fell in, showering us with dirt and plaster. When we picked ourselves up, there right in front of us was a kitchen stove.” Spratt looked at it and shook his head. “I knew the bastards were close,” he said, “but I didn’t believe they could hear us talking.”

  Toward evening it began to rain, and the German attack seemed to intensify. Captain Mackay, on the opposite side of the bridge, contacted Frost. “I told the Colonel I could not hold out another night if the attack continued on the same scale,” Mackay wrote. “He said he could not help me, but I was to hold on at all costs.”

  Mackay could see the Germans were slowly compressing Frost’s force. He saw British troopers scurrying from burning houses along the riverbank toward a couple almost opposite him, which were still standing. “They were beginning to hem us in,” he noted, “and it was obvious that if we didn’t get help soon, they’d winkle us out. I went up to the attic and tuned into the 6 o’clock BBC news. To my utter amazement the newscaster said that British armor had reached the airborne troops.”*

  Almost immediately Mackay heard a cry from the floor below, “Tiger tanks are heading for the bridge.” (It was exactly 7 P.M. German time; 6 P.M. British time.) Two of the huge 60-ton tanks were heading in from the north. On his side of the bridge Frost saw them, too. “They looked incredibly sinister in the half light,” he noted. “Like some prehistoric monsters, as their great guns swung from side to side breathing flame. Their shells burst through the walls. The dust and slowly settling debris following their explosions filled the passages and rooms.”

  One complete side of Mackay’s building was hit. “Some of the shells must have been armor-piercing,” Lieutenant Peter Stain-forth says, “because they went through the school from end to end, knocking a four-foot hole in every room.” Ceilings came down, walls cracked and “the whole structure rocked.” Staring at the two tanks on the ramp, Mackay thought the end had come. “A couple more rounds like that and we’ll be finished,” he said. Still, with the stubborn and fearless resistance that the fighters at the bridge had shown since their arrival, Mackay thought that he might “be able to take a party out and blow them up. But just then the two tanks reversed and pulled back. We were still alive.”

  At Frost’s headquarters, Father Egan had been hit. Caught on a stairway when shells began coming in, he fell two flights to the first floor. When he recovered consciousness, the priest was alone except for one man.
Crawling to him, Egan saw that the trooper was near death. At that moment another barrage hit the building and Egan again lost consciousness. He awoke to find that the room and his clothes were on fire. Desperately he rolled along the floor, beating the flames out with his hands. The injured man he had seen earlier was dead. Now Egan could not use his legs. Slowly, in excruciating pain, he hauled himself toward a window. Someone called his name, and the intelligence officer, Lieutenant Bucky Buchanan, helped him through the window and dropped him into the arms of Sergeant Jack Spratt. In the cellar, where Dr. James Logan was at work, the priest was put on the floor with other wounded. His right leg was broken and his back and hands were peppered with shrapnel splinters. “I was pretty well out of it,” Egan recalls. “I couldn’t do much now but lie there on my stomach.” Nearby, slightly wounded, was the incredible Tatham-Warter, still trying to keep men’s spirits up, and still hanging on to his umbrella.

  Occasionally there was a pause in the terrible pounding, and Captain Mackay believed the Germans were stocking up with more ammunition. As darkness set in during one of these intervals, Mackay issued benzedrine tablets to his tired force, two pills per man. The effect on the exhausted, weary men was unexpected and acute. Some troopers became irritable and argumentative. Others suffered double vision and for a time could not aim straight. Among the shocked and wounded, men became euphoric and some began to hallucinate. Corporal Arthur Hendy remembers being grabbed by one trooper, who pulled him to a window. “Look,” he commanded Hendy in a whisper. “It’s the Second Army. On the far bank. Look. Do you see them?” Sadly, Hendy shook his head. The man became enraged. “They’re right over there,” he shouted, “plain as anything.”

  Mackay wondered if his small force would see out the night. Fatigue and wounds were taking their toll. “I was thinking clearly,” Mackay remembers, “but we had had nothing to eat and no sleep. We were limited to one cup of water daily, and everyone was wounded.” With his ammunition nearly gone, Mackay set his men to making homemade bombs from the small stock of explosives still remaining. He intended to be ready when the German tanks returned. Taking a head count, Mackay now reported to Frost that he had only thirteen men left capable of fighting.

  From his position on the far side of the bridge, as the night of Tuesday, September 19, closed in, Frost saw that the entire city appeared to be burning. The spires of two great churches were flaming fiercely and as Frost watched, “the cross which hung between two lovely towers was silhouetted against the clouds rising far into the sky.” He noted that “the crackle of burning wood and the strange echoes of falling buildings seemed unearthly.” Upstairs, Signalman Stanley Copley, sitting at his radio set, had abandoned sending in Morse code. Now he was broadcasting in the clear. Continually he kept repeating, “This is the 1st Para Brigade calling Second Army…. Come in Second Army…. Come in Second Army.”

  At his headquarters in Oosterbeek’s Hartenstein Hotel, General Urquhart tried desperately to save what remained of his division. Frost was cut off. Every attempt to reach him at the bridge had been mercilessly beaten back. German reinforcements were pouring in. From the west, north and east, Bittrich’s forces were steadily chopping the gallant 1st British Airborne to pieces. Cold, wet, worn out, but still uncomplaining, the Red Devils were trying to hold out—fighting off tanks with rifles and Sten guns. The situation was heartbreaking for Urquhart. Only quick action could save his heroic men. By Wednesday morning, September 20, Urquhart had developed a plan to salvage the remnants of his command and perhaps turn the tide in his favor.

  September 19—“a dark and fateful day,” in Urquhart’s words—had been the turning point. The cohesion and drive that he had hoped to instill had come too late. Everything had failed: the Polish forces had not arrived; the cargo drops had been disastrous; and battalions had been devastated in their attempts to reach Frost. The division was being pushed closer and closer to destruction. The tally of Urquhart’s remaining men told a frightful story. All through the night of the nineteenth, battalion units still in contact with division headquarters reported their strength. Inconclusive and inaccurate as the figures were, they presented a grim accounting: Urquhart’s division was on the verge of disappearing.

  Of Lathbury’s 1st Parachute Brigade, only Frost’s force was fighting as a coordinated unit, but Urquhart had no idea how many men were left in the 2nd Battalion. Fitch’s 3rd Battalion listed some 50 men, and its commander was dead. Dobie’s 1st totaled 116, and Dobie had been wounded and captured. The 11th Battalion’s strength was down to 150, the 2nd South Staffordshires to 100. The commanders of both units, Lea and McCardie, were wounded. In Hackett’s 10th Battalion there were now 250 men, and his 156th reported 270. Although Urquhart’s total division strength was more—the figures did not include other units such as a battalion of the Border Regiment, the 7th KOSB’s engineers, reconnaissance and service troops, glider pilots and others—his attack battalions had almost ceased to exist. The men of these proud units were now dispersed in small groups, dazed, shocked and often leaderless.

  The fighting had been so bloody and so terrible that even battle-hardened veterans had broken. Urquhart and his chief of staff had sensed an atmosphere of panic seeping through headquarters as small groups of stragglers ran across the lawn yelling, “The Germans are coming.” Often, they were young soldiers, “whose self-control had momentarily deserted them,” Urquhart later wrote. “Mackenzie and I had to intervene physically.” But others fought on against formidable odds. Captain L. E. Queripel, wounded in the face and arms, led an attack on a German twin machine-gun nest and killed the crews. As other Germans, throwing grenades, began to close in on Queripel and his party, Queripel hurled the “potato mashers” back. Ordering his men to leave him, the officer covered their retreat, throwing grenades until he was killed.*

  Now, what remained of Urquhart’s shattered and bloodied division was being squeezed and driven back upon itself. All roads seemed to end in the Oosterbeek area, with the main body of troops centered around the Hartenstein in a few square miles running between Heveadorp and Wolfheze on the west, and from Oosterbeek to Johannahoeve Farm on the east. Within that rough corridor, ending on the Rhine at Heveadorp, Urquhart planned to make a stand. By pulling in his troops, he hoped to husband his strength and hang on until Horrocks’ armor reached him.

  All through the night of the nineteenth orders went out for troops to pull back into the Oosterbeek perimeter, and in the early hours of the twentieth, Hackett was told to abandon his planned attack toward the Arnhem bridge with his 10th and 156th battalions and disengage them too. “It was a terrible decision to make,” Urquhart said later. “It meant abandoning the 2nd Battalion at the bridge, but I knew I had no more chance of reaching them than I had of getting to Berlin.” In his view, the only hope “was to consolidate, form a defensive box and try to hold on to a small bridgehead north of the river so that XXX Corps could cross to us.”

  The discovery of the ferry operating between Heveadorp and Driel had been an important factor in Urquhart’s decision. It was vital to his plan for survival; for on it, theoretically, help could arrive from the southern bank. Additionally, at the ferry’s landing stages on either bank, there were ramps that would help the engineers to throw a Bailey bridge across the Rhine. Admittedly the odds were great. But if the Nijmegen bridge could be taken swiftly and if Horrocks moved fast and if Urquhart’s men could hold out long enough in their perimeter for engineers to span the river—a great many if’s—there was still a chance that Montgomery might get his bridgehead across the Rhine and drive for the Ruhr, even though Frost might be overrun at Arnhem.

  All through the nineteenth, messages had been sent from Urquhart’s headquarters requesting a new drop zone for the Poles. Communications, though still erratic, were slightly improved. Lieutenant Neville Hay of the Phantom net was passing some messages to British Second Army headquarters, who in turn relayed them to Browning. At 3 A.M. on the twentieth, Urquhart received a message from Corps aski
ng for the General’s suggestions regarding the Poles’ drop zone. As Urquhart saw it, only one possible area remained. In view of his new plan he requested the 1,500-man brigade be landed near the southern terminal of the ferry in the vicinity of the little village of Driel.

  Abandoning Frost and his men was the most bitter part of the plan. At 8 A.M. on Wednesday, Urquhart had an opportunity to explain the position to Frost and Gough at the bridge. Using the Munford-Thompson radio link, Gough called division headquarters and got through to Urquhart. It was the first contact Gough had had with the General since the seventeenth, when he had been ordered back to Division only to discover that Urquhart was somewhere along the line of march. “My goodness,” Urquhart said, “I thought you were dead.” Gough sketched in the situation at the bridge. “Morale is still high,” he recalls saying, “but we’re short of everything. Despite that, we’ll continue to hold out.” Then, as Urquhart remembers, “Gough asked if they could expect reinforcements.”

  Answering was not easy. “I told him,” Urquhart recalls, “that I was not certain if it was a case of me coming for them or they coming for us. I’m afraid you can only hope for relief from the south.” Frost then came on the line. “It was very cheering to hear the General,” Frost wrote, “but he could not tell me anything really encouraging…. they were obviously having great difficulties themselves.” Urquhart requested that his “personal congratulations on a fine effort be passed on to everyone concerned and I wished them the best of luck.” There was nothing more to be said.

  Twenty minutes later, Urquhart received a message from Lieutenant Neville Hay’s Phantom net. It read:

  200820 (From 2nd Army). Attack at Nijmegen held up by strongpoint south of town. 5 Guards Brigade halfway in town. Bridge intact but held by enemy. Intention attack at 1300 hours today.