A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Shrapnel ripped through the little fleet. The boat carrying half of First Lieutenant James Megellas’ platoon sank without a trace. There were no survivors. First Lieutenant Allen McLain saw two craft blown apart and troopers thrown into the water. Around Captain T. Moffatt Burriss’ boat fire was coming down “like a hailstorm,” and finally the engineer steering the boat said, “Take the rudder. I’m hit.” His wrist was shattered. As Burriss leaned over to help, the engineer was hit again, this time in the head. Shell fragments caught Burriss in the side. As the engineer fell overboard, his foot caught the gunwale, causing his body to act like a rudder and swinging the boat around. Burriss had to heave the dead man into the water. By then two more troopers sitting in front had also been killed.

  Under a brisk wind the smoke screen had been blown to tatters. Now German gunners raked each boat individually. Sergeant Clark Fuller saw that some men, in their haste to get across quickly, and desperately trying to avoid the fire, “rowed against each other, causing their boats to swing around in circles.” The Germans picked them off easily. Fuller was “so scared that he felt paralyzed.” Halfway across, Private Leonard G. Tremble was suddenly slammed into the bottom of the boat. His craft had taken a direct hit. Wounded in the face, shoulder, right arm and left leg, Tremble was sure he was bleeding to death. Taking water, the boat swung crazily in circles, then drifted slowly back to the southern shore, everyone in it dead but Tremble.

  In the command post Vandeleur saw that “huge gaps had begun to appear in the smoke screen.” His tankers had fired smoke shells for more than ten minutes, but now the Guardsmen were running low on every kind of ammunition. “The Germans had switched ammunition and were beginning to use big stuff, and I remember almost trying to will the Americans to go faster. It was obvious that these young paratroopers were inexperienced in handling assault boats, which are not the easiest things to maneuver. They were zigzagging all over the water.”

  Then the first wave reached the northern bank. Men struggled out of the boats, guns firing, and started across the exposed flat land. Sergeant Clark Fuller, who a few minutes before had been paralyzed with fear, was so happy to be alive that he felt “exhilarated. My fear had been replaced by a surge of recklessness. I felt I could lick the whole German army.” Vandeleur, watching the landing, “saw one or two boats hit the beach, followed immediately by three or four others. Nobody paused. Men got out and began running toward the embankment. My God, what a courageous sight it was! They just moved steadily across that open ground. I never saw a single man lie down until he was hit. I didn’t think more than half the fleet made it across.” Then, to Vandeleur’s amazement, “the boats turned around and started back for the second wave.” Turning to Horrocks, General Browning said, “I have never seen a more gallant action.”

  As Julian Cook’s assault craft neared the beach he jumped out and pulled the boat, eager to get ashore. Suddenly to his right he saw a bubbling commotion in the gray water. “It looked like a large air bubble, steadily approaching the bank,” he remembers. “I thought I was seeing things when the top of a helmet broke the surface and continued on moving. Then a face appeared under the helmet. It was the little machine-gunner, Private Joseph Jedlicka. He had bandoliers of 30-caliber machine-gun bullets draped around his shoulders and a box in either hand.” Jedlicka had fallen overboard in eight feet of water and, holding his breath, had calmly walked across the river bottom until he emerged.

  Medics were already working on the beach and as First Lieutenant Tom MacLeod prepared to return across the Waal for another boatload of troopers, he saw that rifles had been stuck in the ground next to the fallen.

  Shortly after 4 P.M., General Heinz Harmel received an alarming message at his headquarters in Doornenburg. It was reported that “a white smoke screen has been thrown across the river opposite Fort Hof Van Holland.” Harmel, with some of his staff, rushed by car to the village of Lent, on the northern bank of the Waal, a mile from the Nijmegen highway bridge. The smoke could mean only one thing: the Anglo-Americans were trying to cross the Waal by boat. Still, Harmel could not believe his own analysis. The width of the river, the forces manning the northern bank, Euling’s optimistic report of the morning, and his own estimate of the British and American forces in Nijmegen—all argued against the operation. But Harmel decided to see for himself. He remembers that “I had no intention of being arrested and shot by Berlin for letting the bridges fall into enemy hands—no matter how Model felt about it.”

  Major Julian Cook knew his losses were appalling, but he had no time to assess them now. His companies had landed everywhere along the exposed stretch of beach. Units were inextricably mixed up and, for the time, without organization. The Germans were flaying the beach with machine-gun fire, yet his stubborn troopers refused to be pinned down. Individually and in twos and threes they headed for the embankment. “It was either stay and get riddled or move,” Cook remembers. Struggling forward, the men, armed with machine guns, grenades and fixed bayonets, charged the embankment and viciously dug the Germans out. Sergeant Theodore Finkbeiner believes he was one of the first to reach the high dike roadway. “I stuck my head over the top, and stared right into the muzzle of a machine gun,” he recalls. He ducked, but “the muzzle blast blew my helmet off.” Finkbeiner tossed a grenade into the German emplacement, heard the explosion and the sound of men screaming. Then he quickly hoisted himself up onto the embankment road and headed for the next machine-gun nest.

  Captain Moffatt Burriss had no time to think about the shrapnel wound in his side. When he landed he was “so happy to be alive that I vomited.” He ran straight for the dike, yelling to his men to get “one machine gun firing on the left flank, another on the right.” They did. Burriss saw several houses back of the dike. Kicking the door of one open, he surprised “several Germans who had been sleeping, apparently unaware of what was happening.” Reaching quickly for a hand grenade, Burriss pulled the pin, threw it into the room and slammed the door.

  In the smoke, noise and confusion, some men in the first wave did not remember how they got off the beach. Corporal Jack Bommer, a communications man laden down with equipment, simply ran forward. He “had only one thing in mind: to survive if possible.” He knew he had to get to the embankment and wait for further instructions. On reaching the crest he saw “dead bodies everywhere, and Germans—some no more than fifteen years old, others in their sixties—who a few minutes before had been slaughtering us in the boats were now begging for mercy, trying to surrender.” Men were too shocked by their ordeal and too angry at the death of friends to take many prisoners. Bommer recalls that some Germans “were shot out of hand at point-blank range.”

  Sickened and exhausted by the crossing, their dead and wounded lying on the beach, the men of the first wave subdued the German defenders on the dike road in less than thirty minutes. Not all the enemy positions had been overrun, but now troopers hunched down in former German machine-gun nests to protect the arrival of succeeding waves. Two more craft were lost in the second crossing. And, still under heavy shellfire, exhausted engineers in the eleven remaining craft made five more trips to bring all the Americans across the bloodstained Waal. Speed was all that mattered now. Cook’s men had to grab the northern ends of the crossings before the Germans fully realized what was happening—and before they blew the bridges.

  By now the embankment defense line had been overrun, and the Germans were pulling back to secondary positions. Cook’s troopers gave them no quarter. Captain Henry Keep comments that “what remained of the battalion seemed driven to fever pitch and, rendered crazy by rage, men temporarily forgot the meaning of fear. I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. It was an awe-inspiring sight but not a pretty one.”

  Individually and in small groups, men who had sat helpless in the boats as friends died all around them took on four and five times their number with grenades, submachine guns and bayonets. With brutal efficiency they dug the Germans out
and, without stopping to rest or regroup, continued their rampaging assault. They fought through fields, orchards and houses back of the embankment under the fire of machine guns and antiaircraft batteries hammering at them from Fort Hof Van Holland directly ahead. As some groups headed due east along the sunken dike road for the bridges, others stormed the fort, almost oblivious to the German guns. Some troopers, laden with grenades, swam the moat surrounding the fortress and began climbing the walls. Sergeant Leroy Richmond, swimming underwater, took the enemy soldier guarding the causeway by surprise, then waved his men across. According to First Lieutenant Virgil F. Carmichael, troopers “somehow climbed to the top of the fort, then others below tossed up hand grenades which were promptly dropped into the turret portholes, one after the other.” The German defenders quickly surrendered.

  Meanwhile, units from two companies—Captain Burriss’ I Company and Captain Kappel’s H Company—were sprinting for the bridges. At the railroad bridge, H Company found the German defense so fierce that it looked as though the American attack might stall.* Then the continuing pressure from the British and American forces at the southern end and in Nijmegen itself caused the enemy suddenly to crack. To Kappel’s amazement the Germans began to retreat across the bridge “in wholesale numbers”—right into the American guns. From his tank near the PGEM factory, Lieutenant John Gorman “could see what looked like hundreds of Germans, confused and panic-stricken, running across the bridge right toward the Americans.” On the northern bank First Lieutenant Richard La Riviere and Lieutenant E. J. Sims also saw them coming. In disbelief, they watched as the Germans abandoned their guns and hurried toward the northern exit. “They were coming across in a mass,” recalls La Riviere, “and we let them come—two thirds of the way.” Then the Americans opened fire.

  A hail of bullets ripped into the defenders. Germans fell everywhere—some into the girders under the bridge; others to the water below. More than 260 lay dead, many were wounded, and scores more were taken prisoner before the firing ceased. Within two hours of the Waal river assault, the first of the bridges had fallen. Major Edward G. Tyler of the Irish Guards saw “someone waving. I had been concentrating so long on that railroad bridge that, for me, it was the only one in existence. I got on the wireless and radioed Battalion, ‘They’re on the bridge! They’ve got the bridge!’” The time was 5 P.M. Captain Tony Heywood of the Grenadier Guards received Major Tyler’s message and found it “utterly confusing.” Which bridge did the message refer to? The Grenadiers under Lieutenant Colonel Goulburn were still fighting alongside Colonel Vandervoort’s troopers near the Valkhof, where Euling’s SS forces continued to deny them the highway bridge. If the message meant that the highway bridge had been taken, Heywood remembers, “I couldn’t figure how they had gotten across.”

  The railroad bridge was intact and physically in Anglo-American hands, but Germans—either prepared to fight to the last or too frightened to leave their positions—were still on it. The Americans had made a quick search for demolition charges at the northern end. Although they had found nothing, there was still a chance that the bridge was wired and ready to be destroyed. Captain Kappel now radioed Major Cook, urging him to get British tanks across as quickly is possible. With these as support, he and Captain Burriss of I Company believed, they could grab the big prize, the Nijmegen highway bridge, slightly less than a mile east. Then, recalls Kappel, Colonel Tucker arrived. The request, Tucker said, “had been relayed, but the Germans might blow both bridges at any moment.” Without hesitation Cook’s troopers pushed on for the highway bridge.

  General Harmel could not make out what was happening. Binoculars to his eyes, he stood on the roof of a bunker near the village of Lent. From this position on the northern bank of the Waal barely a mile from the main Nijmegen highway bridge, he could see smoke and haze off to his right and hear the crash of battle. But no one seemed to know exactly what was taking place, except that an attempt had been made to cross the river near the railroad bridge. He could see the highway bridge quite clearly; there was nothing on it. Then, as Harmel recalls, “the wounded started to arrive, and I began to get conflicting reports.” Americans, he learned, had crossed the river, “but everything was exaggerated. I could not tell if they had come across in ten boats or a hundred.” His mind “working furiously trying to decide what to do next,” Harmel checked with his engineers. “I was informed that both bridges were ready to go,” he remembers. “The local commander was instructed to destroy the railroad bridge. The detonator for the highway bridge was hidden in a garden near the bunker at Lent, and a man was stationed there awaiting orders to press the plunger.” Then Harmel received his first clear report: only a few boats had crossed the river, and the battle was still in progress. Looking through his binoculars again, he saw that the highway bridge was still clear and free of movement. Although his “instinct was to get this troublesome bridge weighing on my shoulders destroyed, I had no intention of doing anything until I was absolutely sure that it was lost.” If he was forced to blow the highway bridge, Harmel decided, he would make sure that “it was crowded with British tanks and let them go up in the blast, too.”

  In Huner Park and in the Valkhof close by the southern approaches to the highway bridge, Captain Karl Euling’s SS Panzer Grenadiers were fighting for their lives. The Anglo-American attack by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Goulburn’s Grenadier Guards and Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 82nd’s 505th Regiment was methodical and relentless. Vandervoort’s mortars and artillery pounded the German defense line as his men sprinted from house to house. Closing the gap between themselves and Euling’s steadily shrinking defenses, Goulburn’s tanks moved up the converging streets, driving the Germans before them, their 17-pounders and machine guns blasting.

  The Germans fought back hard. “It was the heaviest volume of fire I ever encountered,” recalls Sergeant Spencer Wurst, then a nineteen-year-old veteran who had been with the 82nd since North Africa. “I had the feeling I could reach up and grab bullets with each hand.” From his vantage point on the ledge of a house some twenty-five yards from the Valkhof, Wurst could look down into the German positions. “There were foxholes all over the park,” he remembers, “and all the action seemed to be centered from these and from a medieval tower. I watched our men break out from right and left and charge right up to the traffic circle. We were so anxious to get that bridge that I saw some men crawl over to the foxholes and literally drag the Germans out.” Wurst’s own rifle barrel was so hot that cosmoline began to ooze from the wood stock.

  As the murderous fire fight continued Wurst was astounded to see Colonel Vandervoort “stroll across the street, smoking a cigarette. He stopped in front of the house I was in, looked up and said, ‘Sergeant, I think you better go see if you can get that tank moving.’” Vandervoort pointed to the entrance to the park where a British tank was sitting, its turret closed. Clambering off the roof, Wurst ran to the tank and rapped on its side with his helmet. The turret opened. “Colonel wants you to move it,” Wurst said. “Come on. I’ll show you where to fire.” Advancing beside the tank in full view of the Germans, Wurst pointed out targets. As the intense fire coming from Vandervoort’s men and Goulburn’s tanks increased, the enemy defense ring began to collapse. The formidable line of antitank guns that had stopped each previous attack was obliterated. Finally only four self-propelled guns dug into the center of the traffic circle remained firing. Then, a little after 4 P.M., in an all-out tank and infantry assault, these too were overrun. As Vandervoort’s troopers charged with bayonets and grenades, Goulburn lined his tanks up four abreast and sent them charging into the park. In panic the Germans broke. As they retreated, some tried to take cover in the girders of the bridge; others, farther away, raced through the American and British fire toward the medieval fort. As the Germans passed, scores of troopers lobbed grenades into their midst. The assault was over. “They had given us a real tough time,” Wurst says. “We watched them charging right past us
, up over the road leading onto the bridge and some went off to the east. We felt pretty good.”

  General Allan Adair, commander of the Guards Armored Division, directing operations in a nearby building, remembers “gritting my teeth, dreading the sound of an explosion that would tell me the Germans had blown the bridge.” He heard nothing. The approaches to the great Waal bridge lay open, the span itself apparently intact.

  Sergeant Peter Robinson’s troop of four tanks had been waiting for just this moment. Now they moved out for the bridge.* The twenty-nine-year-old Dunkirk veteran had been alerted a few hours earlier by his squadron leader, Major John Trotter, “to stand ready to go for the bridge.” Germans were still on the crossing, and Trotter now warned Robinson, “We don’t know what to expect when you cross, but the bridge has to be taken. Don’t stop for anything.” Shaking hands with the sergeant, Trotter added jokingly, “Don’t worry. I know where your wife lives and if anything happens, I’ll let her know.” Robinson was not amused. “You’re bloody cheerful, aren’t you, sir?” he asked Trotter. Climbing onto his tank, Robinson led off for the bridge.

  The troop of four tanks came into Huner Park by the right of the roundabout. To Robinson it appeared that “the whole town was burning. Buildings to my left and right were on fire.” Wreathed in smoke, the great crossing looked “damned big.” As Robinson’s tank rumbled forward he reported constantly by radio to division headquarters. “Everyone else had been ordered off the air,” he recalls. Clanking onto the approaches, Robinson remembers, “We came under heavy fire. There was an explosion. One of the idler wheels carrying the track on one side of the tank had been hit.” The tank was still running, although “the wireless was dead and I had lost touch with headquarters.” Shouting to his driver to reverse, Robinson backed his tank to the side of the road. Quickly the sergeant jumped out, ran to the tank behind him and told its commander, Sergeant Billingham, to get out. Billingham began to argue. Robinson shouted that he was giving “a direct order. Get out of that tank damned quick and follow along in mine.” The third tank in line, commanded by Sergeant Charles W. Pacey, had pulled out and was leading the way onto the bridge. Jumping aboard Billingham’s tank, Robinson ordered the others to follow. As the four tanks advanced, Robinson recalls, they came under fire from a “big 88 parked on the other side of the river, near some burning houses and from what appeared to be a self-propelled gun in the far distance.”