Colonel Vandervoort, watching the tanks, saw the 88 begin to fire. “It was pretty spectacular,” he recalls. “The 88 was sandbagged into the side of the highway about one hundred yards from the north end of the bridge. One tank and the 88 exchanged about four rounds apiece with the tank spitting 30-caliber tracers all the while. In the gathering dusk it was quite a show.” Then Robinson’s gunner, Guardsman Leslie Johnson, got the 88 with another shot. Germans with grenades, rifles and machine guns clung to the girders of the bridge, Robinson remembers. The tank machine guns began “to knock them off like ninepins.” And Johnson, answering the heavy enemy artillery fire, “pumped shells through his gun as fast as the loader could run them through.” In a hail of fire Robinson’s troop rattled forward, now approaching the halfway mark on the highway bridge.
In the twilight, billowing smoke clogged the distant Waal highway bridge. At his forward position near Lent, General Heinz Harmel stared through his binoculars. Guns were banging all around him, and troops were moving back through the village to take up new positions. Harmel’s worst fear had now been realized. The Americans, against all expectations, had succeeded in making a bold, successful crossing of the Waal. In Nijmegen itself the optimism of Captain Karl Euling had proved unfounded. The last message received from him had been terse: Euling said he was encircled with only sixty men left. Now Harmel knew beyond doubt that the bridges were lost. He did not know whether the railroad bridge had been destroyed, but if he was to demolish the highway bridge, it must be done immediately.
“Everything seemed to pass through my mind all at once,” he recalled. “What must be done first? What is the most urgent, most important action to take? It all came down to the bridges.” He had not contacted Bittrich “beforehand to warn him that I might have to demolish the highway crossing. I presumed that it was Bittrich who had ordered the bridges readied for demolition.” So, Harmel reasoned, in spite of Model’s order, “if Bittrich had been in my shoes, he would have blown the main bridge. In my opinion, Model’s order was now automatically canceled anyway.” At any moment he expected tanks to appear on the highway bridge.
Standing next to the engineer by the detonator box, Harmel scanned the crossing. At first he could detect no movement. Then suddenly he saw “a single tank reach the center, then a second behind and to its right.” To the engineer he said, “Get ready.” Two more tanks appeared in view, and Harmel waited for the line to reach the exact middle before giving the order. He shouted, “Let it blow!” The engineer jammed the plunger down. Nothing happened. The British tanks continued to advance. Harmel yelled, “Again!” Once more the engineer slammed down the detonator handle, but again the huge explosions that Harmel had expected failed to occur. “I was waiting to see the bridge collapse and the tanks plunge into the river,” he recalled. “Instead, they moved forward relentlessly, getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer.” He yelled to his anxious staff, “My God, they’ll be here in two minutes!”
Rapping out orders to his officers, Harmel told them “to block the roads between Elst and Lent with every available antitank gun and artillery piece because if we don’t, they’ll roll straight through to Arnhem.” Then, to his dismay he learned that the railroad bridge was also still standing. Hurrying to a radio unit in one of the nearby command posts, he contacted his advance headquarters and spoke with his operations officer. “Stolley,” Harmel said, “tell Bittrich. They’re over the Waal.”**
Sergeant Peter Robinson’s four tanks pressed on across the bridge. A second 88 had stopped firing, and Robinson “reckoned we had put it out of operation, too.” Looming ahead was a roadblock of heavy concrete cubes with a gap of approximately ten feet in the middle. Robinson saw Sergeant Pacey’s tank make it through and stop on the far side. Then Robinson got past and, as Pacey covered the three tanks, took the lead once more. Robinson remembers that “visibility was terrible. I was shouting like hell, trying to direct the gunner, the driver, and inform headquarters all at the same time. The noise was unbelievable, with all sorts of fire clanging off the girders.” Three to four hundred yards ahead on the right, alongside the roadbed, Robinson saw another 88. He shouted to the gunner: “Traverse right 400 yards and fire.” Guardsman Johnson blew the gun to pieces. As infantry around it began to run, Johnson opened up with his machine gun. “It was a massacre,” he recalled. “I didn’t even have to bother looking through the periscope. There were so many of them that I just pulled the trigger.” He could feel the tank “bumping over the bodies lying in the road.”
From the turret Robinson saw that his three tanks were still coming on unharmed. He radioed to them to “close up and get a move on!” The troop was now nearing the northern end of the bridge. Within seconds a self-propelled gun began to fire. “There were two big bangs in front of us,” Robinson recalls. “My tin hat was blown off, but I wasn’t hit.” Johnson fired off three or four shells. The gun and a nearby house “burst into flame and the whole area was lit up like day.” Before he realized it, Robinson’s tanks were across the bridge.
He ordered the gunners to cease fire, and as the dust cleared, he caught sight of some figures in the ditch. At first he thought they were German. Then “from the shape of their helmets I knew they were Yanks. Suddenly there were Americans swarming all over the tank, hugging and kissing me, even kissing the tank.” Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, his clothes still damp and blood-soaked from the shrapnel wound he had received during the Waal crossing, grinned up at Johnson. “You guys are the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in years,” he said. The huge, multi-spanned Nijmegen crossing, together with its approaches almost a half mile long, had fallen intact. Of the Market-Garden bridges, the last but one was now in Allied hands. The time was 7:15 P.M., September 20. Arnhem lay only eleven miles away.
Lieutenant Tony Jones of the Royal Engineers—a man whom General Horrocks was later to describe as “the bravest of the brave”—had followed Robinson’s troop across the bridge. Searching carefully for demolitions, Jones worked so intently that he was unaware that Germans, still on the girders, were shooting at him. In fact, he recalls, “I don’t ever remember seeing any.” Near the roadblock in the center of the bridge he found “six or eight wires coming over the railing and lying on the footpath.” Jones promptly cut the wires. Nearby he found a dozen Teller mines neatly stacked in a slit trench. He reasoned that “they were presumably to be used to close the ten-foot gap in the roadblock, but the Germans hadn’t had the time to do it.” Jones removed the detonators and threw them into the river. At the bridge’s northern end he found the main explosive charges in one of the piers. He was “staggered by the preparations for the German demolition job.” The tin demolition boxes, painted green to match the color of the bridge, “were manufactured precisely to fit the girders they were attached to. Each had a matching serial number, and altogether they were packed with about five hundred pounds of TNT.” The explosives were designed to be fired electrically and the detonators were still in place and attached to the wires Jones had just cut on the bridge. He could not understand why the Germans had not destroyed the bridge unless the sudden smashing Anglo-American drive had given them no time. With the detonators now removed and all wires cut, the bridge was safe for vehicles and tanks.
But the British armored task force that the Americans had expected would move out immediately for Arnhem did not appear.
The link-up with the British 1st Airborne at the farthest end of the corridor weighed heavily on the minds of the Americans. Paratroopers themselves, they felt a strong kinship with the men still fighting up ahead. Cook’s battalion had suffered brutally in crossing the Waal. He had lost more than half of his two companies—134 men had been killed, wounded or were missing—but the mission to capture the Nijmegen bridges from both ends and open the road north had been accomplished. Now, Cook’s officers quickly pushed their units out into a perimeter defense about the northern end of the highway bridge and waited, expecting to see tanks race past them to relieve the British pa
ratroopers up ahead. But there was no further movement over the bridge. Cook could not understand what was happening. He had expected the tanks to “go like hell” toward Arnhem before light failed.
Captain Carl Kappel, commander of H Company, whose friend Colonel John Frost was “somewhere up there,” was on edge. His men had also found and cut wires on the northern end. He was certain that the bridge was safe. As he and Lieutenant La Riviere continued to watch the empty bridge, Kappel said impatiently, “Perhaps we should take a patrol and lead them over by the hand.”
Second Lieutenant Ernest Murphy of Cook’s battalion ran up to Sergeant Peter Robinson, whose troops had crossed the bridge, and reported to him that “we’ve cleared the area ahead for about a quarter of a mile. Now it’s up to you guys to carry on the attack to Arnhem.” Robinson wanted to go, but he had been told to “hold the road and the end of the bridge at all costs.” He had no orders to move out.
Colonel Tucker, the 504th regimental commander, was fuming at the British delay. Tucker had supposed that a special task force would make a dash up the road the moment the bridge was taken and cleared of demolitions. The time to do it, he believed, “was right then, before the Germans could recover their balance.” As he later wrote, “We had killed ourselves crossing the Waal to grab the north end of the bridge. We just stood there, seething, as the British settled in for the night, failing to take advantage of the situation. We couldn’t understand it. It simply wasn’t the way we did things in the American army—especially if it had been our guys hanging by their fingernails eleven miles away. We’d have been going, rolling without stop. That’s what Georgie Patton would have done, whether it was daylight or dark.”
Lieutenant A. D. Demetras overheard Tucker arguing with a major from the Guards Armored Division. “I think a most incredible decision was being made right there on the spot,” he recalls. From inside a small bungalow being used as a command post, Demetras heard Tucker say angrily, “Your boys are hurting up there at Arnhem. You’d better go. It’s only eleven miles.” The major “told the Colonel that British armor could not proceed until infantry came up,” Demetras recalls. “They were fighting the war by the book,” Colonel Tucker said. “They had ‘harbored’ for the night. As usual, they stopped for tea.”
Although his men were at less than half strength and almost out of ammunition, Tucker thought of sending the 82nd troopers north toward Arnhem on their own. Yet, he knew that General Gavin would never have approved his action. The 82nd, strung out along its section of the corridor, could not afford the manpower. But Gavin’s sympathies were with his men: the British should have driven ahead. As he was later to put it, “there was no better soldier than the Corps commander, General Browning. Still, he was a theorist. Had Ridgway been in command at that moment, we would have been ordered up the road in spite of all our difficulties, to save the men at Arnhem.”*
Despite their apparent casualness, the British officers—Browning, Horrocks, Dempsey and Adair—were well aware of the urgency of moving on. Yet, the problems were immense. Horrocks’ corps was short of gasoline and ammunition. He saw indications that his columns might be pinched off south of Nijmegen at any moment. Fighting was still going on in the center of the city, and Major General G. I. Thomas’ 43rd Wessex Division, far back in the column, had not even reached the bridge at Grave, eight miles to the south. Cautious and methodical, Thomas had not been able to keep pace with the British columns. The Germans had cut the road at several points and Thomas’ men had battled fiercely to resecure it and drive back attacks. Although worried by the viciousness of the German attacks that were now pressing on both sides of the narrow corridor running to Nijmegen, General Browning believed that Thomas could have moved faster. Horrocks was not so sure. Concerned by the massive traffic jams along the road, he told General Gavin, “Jim, never try to supply a corps up just one road.”
Terrain—the difficulty Montgomery had foreseen and Model had counted on—greatly influenced the tactical considerations involved in moving on from the Nijmegen bridge. It was clear to General Adair, commanding the Guards Armored Division, that the tanks had reached the worst part of the Market-Garden corridor. The dead-straight high-dike road ahead between Nijmegen and Arnhem looked like an “island.” “When I saw that island my heart sank,” Adair later recalled. “You can’t imagine anything more unsuitable for tanks: steep banks with ditches on each side that could be easily covered by German guns.” In spite of his misgivings Adair knew they would “have to have a shot at it,” but he had virtually no infantry and “to get along that road was obviously first a job for infantry.” Horrocks had reached the same conclusion. The tanks would have to wait until infantry could move up and pass through the Guards Armored columns. It would be almost eighteen hours before a tank attack toward Arnhem could begin.
Yet the Corps commander, like the Americans, had held out hope for a quick move up the corridor. Immediately upon the capture of the Nijmegen crossing, believing that the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was still in British hands, General Browning had informed Urquhart that tanks were across. At two minutes to midnight, still optimistic about an early start, Browning sent the following message:
202358 … intention Guards Armored Division … at first light to go all-out for bridges at Arnhem …
Some forty-five minutes later, learning of the delay in bringing up infantry, Browning sent Urquhart a third message:
210045 … tomorrow attack 1st Airborne Division will be first priority but do not expect another advance possibly before 1200 hours.
In Arnhem the “first priority” was far too late. The men of Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion had already been enveloped by their tragic fate. Three hours before Sergeant Robinson’s troop had rattled across the great Nijmegen span, the first three tanks under Major Hans Peter Knaust’s command had at last bludgeoned their way onto the Arnhem bridge.
*“‘The Lord is with Thee’ was too long,” Cook says, “so I kept repeating, ‘Hail Mary’ (one stroke), ‘Full of Grace’ (second stroke).” Captain Keep tried to remember his crewing days at Princeton but he found himself nervously counting “7-6-7-7-7-8-9.”
*According to Charles B. MacDonald, in The Siegfried Line Campaign, p. 181, the Germans on the bridge had a formidable array of armament which included 34 machine guns, two 20 mm. antiaircraft guns and one 88 mm. dual-purpose gun.
*It has been said that an American flag was raised on the north end of the railroad bridge and, in the smoke and confusion, British tankers thought it was flying on the far end of the highway bridge—signaling the American seizure of that end. The story may be true, but in scores of interviews I have not found a single participant who confirmed it. I have walked over the entire area and it seems inconceivable that anyone looking across the highway bridge could mistake a flag flying a mile to the west as the terminus of this crossing.
*This is the first account of the German attempt to destroy the Nijmegen highway bridge. General Harmel had never before given an interview to anyone on the subject. The failure of the demolition charge remains a mystery to this day. Many Dutch believe that the main crossing was saved by a young underground worker, Jan van Hoof, who had been sent into Nijmegen on the nineteenth by the 82nd’s Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie Bestebreurtje, as a guide to the paratroopers. Van Hoof is thought to have succeeded in penetrating the German lines and to have reached the bridge, where he cut cables leading to the explosives. He may well have done so. In 1949 a Dutch commission investigating the story was satisfied that Van Hoof had cut some lines, but could not confirm that these alone actually saved the bridge. The charges and transmission lines were on the Lent side of the Waal and Van Hoof’s detractors maintain that it would have been impossible for him to have reached them without being detected. The controversy still rages. Although the evidence is against him, personally I would like to believe that the young Dutchman, who was shot by the Germans for his role in the underground during the battle, was indeed responsible.
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*Says General Gavin, “I cannot tell you the anger and bitterness of my men. I found Tucker at dawn so irate that he was almost unable to speak. There is no soldier in the world that I admire more than the British, but British infantry leaders somehow did not understand the camaraderie of airborne troops. To our men there was only one objective: to save their brother paratroopers in Arnhem. It was tragic. I knew Tucker wanted to go, but I could never have allowed it. I had my hands full. Besides, Tucker and my other line officers did not appreciate some of the problems that the British had at that moment.”
IN THE AFTERNOON, as the first wave of Major Cook’s paratroopers began to cross the Waal, Captain Eric Mackay gave the order to evacuate the Arnhem schoolhouse his men had held for more than sixty hours—since evening on September 17. From seventy yards away a Tiger tank fired shell after shell into the southern face of the building. “The house was burning now,” Mackay remembers, “and I heard my little stock of explosives, which we had left upstairs, blow up.” Of the thirteen men still able to move about, each was down to just one clip of ammunition. Hobbling about the cellar, Mackay decided that his troopers would break out, fighting to the end.
He had no intention of leaving his wounded behind. With Lieutenant Dennis Simpson leading the way, Mackay and two men acted as rear guard as the paratroopers brought their casualties up from the cellar. While Simpson covered them, the injured were moved into a side garden. “Then just as Simpson moved toward the next house a mortar bombardment began and I heard him shout, ‘Six more wounded.’ I knew,” Mackay recalls, “that we would be massacred—or the wounded would, at any rate—if we tried to escape with them. I yelled to Simpson to surrender.”
A Bridge Too Far Page 44