A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  In the distance guns began to bark and black smoke boiled up into the sky. Far down the line Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey knew that something had gone wrong. Abruptly the column halted. There was confusion as to what had happened, and voices on the radio became distorted and jumbled as the battle was joined. “There seemed to be a great deal of shouting,” Giles Vandeleur remembers, “and I told Joe I had better go forward and see what the hell was happening.” The commander of the Irish Guards agreed. “Let me know as quickly as you can,” he told Giles.

  Captain Langton was already on his way forward. Inching by the standing armor Langton came to a bend in the road. Ahead he saw that all four lead tanks, including Samuelson’s, had been knocked out and some were ablaze. The shells were coming from a self-propelled gun in the woods to the left, near Elst. Langton ordered his driver to pull into a yard of a house near the bend. A few minutes later Giles Vandeleur joined him. Immediately machine-gun fire forced the men to take cover. Vandeleur was unable to get back to his armored car and report to his cousin Joe. Each time he called out to his driver, Corporal Goldman, to back up the vehicle—a Humber with a top hatch and a door at the side—“Goldman would lift the lid and the Germans would pour a burst of fire over his head, causing him to slam it shut again.” Finally, exasperated, Giles crawled back along a ditch to Joe’s command car.

  Joe Vandeleur was already rapping out orders. Over the radio he called for artillery support; then, seeing the Typhoons overhead, he ordered Love to call them in. In the R.A.F. car Sutherland picked up the microphone. “This is Winecup … Winecup …” he said. “Come in please.” The Typhoons continued to circle overhead. Desperate, Sutherland called again. “This is Winecup … Winecup … Come in.” There was no response. Sutherland and Love stared at each other. “The set was dead,” Love says. “We were getting no signal whatsoever. The Typhoons were milling around above us and, on the ground, shelling was going on. It was the most hopeless, frustrating thing I have ever lived through, watching them up there and not being able to do a damn thing about it.” Love knew the pilots of the slowly wheeling Typhoons “had instructions not to attack anything on speculation.” By now Giles Vandeleur had reached his cousin. “Joe,” he said, “if we send any more tanks up along this road it’s going to be a bloody murder.” Together the two men set out for Captain Langton’s position.

  Now the infantry of the Irish Guards were off their tanks and moving up into orchards on both sides of the road. Langton had taken over one of the tanks. Unable to find cover or move off the road, he was maneuvering backward and forward, trying to fire at the self-propelled gun in the woods. Each time he fired a round, “the gun responded with five of its own.”

  The infantry captain, whose troops were also after the same target but were now huddling in a ditch, was livid with rage. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled at Langton. The young officer stayed calm. “I’m trying to knock out a gun so we can get to Arnhem,” he said.

  As the Vandeleurs appeared, Langton, unsuccessful in his attempts to knock out the gun, climbed out to meet them. “It was a mess up there,” Joe Vandeleur remembers. “We tried everything. There was no way to move the tanks off the road and down the steep sides of that damn dike. The only artillery support I could get was from one field battery, and it was too slow registering on its targets.” His lone infantry company was pinned down and he was unable to call in the Typhoons. “Surely we can get support somewhere,” Langton said. Vandeleur slowly shook his head, “I’m afraid not.” Langton persisted. “We could get there,” he pleaded. “We can go if we get support.” Vandeleur shook his head again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You stay where you are until you get further orders.”

  To Vandeleur it was clear that the attack could not be resumed until the infantry of Major General G. I. Thomas’ 43rd Wessex Division could reach the Irish Guards. Until then, Vandeleur’s tanks were stranded alone on the high exposed road. A single self-propelled gun trained on the elevated highway had effectively stopped the entire relief column almost exactly six miles from Arnhem.

  Farther back in the line of tanks, opposite a greenhouse near Elst, whose windows had miraculously remained almost wholly intact, Lieutenant John Gorman stared angrily up the road. Ever since the column had been halted at Valkenswaard far down the corridor, Gorman had felt driven to move faster. “We had come all the way from Normandy, taken Brussels, fought halfway through Holland and crossed the Nijmegen bridge,” he said. “Arnhem and those paratroopers were just up ahead and, almost within sight of that last bloody bridge, we were stopped. I never felt such morbid despair.”

  Part Five

  DER HEXENKESSEL

  [The Witches’ Cauldron]

  MONTY’S TANKS ARE ON THE WAY!” All along the shrunken Oosterbeek perimeter—from slit trenches, houses now turned into strong points, crossroads positions, and in woods and fields—grimy, ashen-faced men cheered and passed the news along. To them, it seemed the long, isolated ordeal was coming to its end. General Urquhart’s Rhine bridgehead had become a fingertip-shaped spot on the map. Now in an area barely two miles long, one and a half miles wide at its center, and one mile along its base on the Rhine, the Red Devils were surrounded and were being attacked and slowly annihilated from three sides. Water, medical supplies, food and ammunition were lacking or dwindling away. As a division the British 1st Airborne had virtually ceased to exist. Now men were once again heartened by the hope of relief. Now, too, a storm of fire roared overhead as British medium and heavy guns eleven miles south across the Rhine lashed the Germans only a few hundred yards from Urquhart’s front lines.

  By signal, General Browning had promised Urquhart that the batteries of XXX Corps’s 64th Medium Regiment would be in range by Thursday and regiment artillery officers had asked for targets in order of priority. Without regard for their own safety, Urquhart’s steely veterans had quickly complied. In good radio contact for the first time, via the 64th’s communications net, the Red Devils savagely called down artillery fire almost on top of their own positions. The accuracy of the fire was heartening, its effect on the Germans unnerving. Again and again British guns broke up heavy tank attacks that threatened to swamp the bearded, tattered paratroopers.

  Even with this welcome relief, Urquhart knew that a massed coordinated German attack could wipe out his minuscule force. Yet now the men believed there was a modicum of hope—a chance to snatch victory at the eleventh hour. On this Thursday, the outlook was slightly brighter. Urquhart had limited communications and a link by way of the 64th’s artillery support. The Nijmegen bridge was safe and open; the tanks of the Guards Armored were on the way; and, if the weather held, 1,500 fresh paratroopers of General Sosabowski’s Polish 1st Brigade would land by late afternoon. If the Poles could be ferried quickly across the Rhine between Driel and Heveadorp, the bleak picture could well change.

  Yet, if Urquhart was to hold, supplies were as urgent as the arrival of Sosabowski’s men. On the previous day, out of a total of 300 tons, R.A.F. bombers had delivered only 41 to the Hartenstein zone. Until antitank guns and artillery arrived in number, close-in air support was critically important. Lacking ground-to-air communications—the special American ultra-high-frequency equipment, rushed to the British only hours before takeoff on D Day, the seventeenth, had been set to the wrong wavelength and was useless—division officers were forced to acknowledge that the R.A.F. seemed unprepared to abandon caution and make the kind of daring forays the airborne men knew to be essential and were prepared to risk. Urquhart had sent a continual stream of messages to Browning, urging fighters and fighter-bombers to attack “targets of opportunity” without regard to the Red Devils’ own positions. It was the airborne way of operating; it was not the R.A.F.’s. Even at this critical stage, pilots insisted that enemy targets be pinpointed with near-cartographic accuracy—an utter impossibility for the beleagured paratroopers pinned down in their diminishing airhead. Not a single low-level air attack had been made, yet
every road, field and woods around the perimeter and spreading east to Arnhem held enemy vehicles or positions.

  Lacking the air strikes they so desperately urged, hemmed into the perimeter, suffering almost constant mortar bombardment and, in places, fighting hand-to-hand, the Red Devils placed their hopes on the Guards’ columns, which they believed were rolling toward them. Urquhart was less optimistic. Outnumbered at least four to one, pounded by artillery and tanks, and with steadily mounting casualties, Urquhart knew that only a mammoth, all-out effort could save his fragmented division. Keenly aware that the Germans could steam-roller his pathetically small force, the dogged, courageous Scot kept his own lonely counsel even as he told his staff, “We must hold the bridgehead at all costs.”

  The perimeter defenses were now divided into two commands. Brigadier Pip Hicks held the western side; Brigadier Shan Hackett was to the east. Hicks’s western arm was manned by soldiers from the Glider Pilot Regiment, Royal Engineers, remnants of the Border Regiment, some Poles and a polyglot collection of other troopers from various units. To the east were the survivors of Hackett’s 10th and 156th battalions, more glider pilots and the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment, R.A. Curving up from these prime defenses the northern shoulders (close to the Wolfheze railroad line) were held by men of Major Boy Wilson’s 21st Independent Parachute Company—the pathfinders who had led the way—and by Lieutenant Colonel R. Payton-Reid’s 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Along the southern base, stretching roughly from east of the medieval church in lower Oosterbeek to the heights at Westerbouwing on the west, Hackett commanded additional elements of the Border Regiment and a miscellaneous group composed of the remains of the South Staffordshires, the 1st, 3rd and 11th battalions and a variety of service troops under the twice-wounded Major Dickie Lonsdale—the “Lonsdale Force.” In the heart of that area was Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson’s main force, the hard-pressed artillerymen whose batteries sought continually to serve the tight defense line and whose precious supply of ammunition was dwindling fast.*

  On neat after-action report maps, each unit has its carefully inked-in place; but survivors would recall years later that there was really no perimeter, no front line, no distinction between units, no fighting as integrated groups. There were only shocked, bandaged, bloodstained men, running to fill gaps wherever and whenever they occurred. As Brigadier Hicks visited his exhausted men, tenaciously defending their sectors of the bridgehead, he knew “it was the beginning of the end, and I think we were all aware of it, although we tried to keep a reasonable face.”

  Unaware that Frost’s gallant stand at the bridge had ended—although Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson suspected it had when his artillery radio link with Major Dennis Munford abruptly closed down—Urquhart could only place his hope in the Guards tanks’ reaching the remnants of the 2nd Battalion in time.* That single bridge spanning the Rhine—the Reich’s last natural defense line—had been the principal objective all along, Montgomery’s springboard to a quick ending of the war. Without it, the 1st Airborne’s predicament and, in particular, the suffering of Frost’s brave men, would be for nothing. As Urquhart had told Frost and Gough, there was nothing more that he could do for them. Their help must come from the speed and armored strength of XXX Corps.

  For Urquhart now the immediate priority was to get Sosabowski’s Poles across the river and into the perimeter as quickly as they landed. The cable ferry was particularly suited to the operation. Urquhart’s engineers had signaled Corps headquarters that it was “a class-24 type and capable of carrying three tanks.” Although Urquhart was worried about the heights of Westerbouwing and the possibility of German artillery controlling the ferry crossing from there, as yet no enemy troops had reached the area. With so few men to hold the perimeter, only a single platoon of the 1st Borderers had been detached to defend the position. In fact, the heights were unguarded by either side. Major Charles Osborne’s D Company of the Border Regiment had been given the assignment soon after landing on Sunday but, Osborne says, “we never did hold Westerbouwing. I was sent on a reconnaissance patrol to lay out battalion positions. However, by the time I’d done this and returned to headquarters, plans had changed.” By Thursday, Osborne’s men “were moved rather piecemeal into a position near the Hartenstein Hotel.” No one was on the vital heights.

  On Wednesday engineers had sent reconnaissance patrols down to the Rhine to report back on the ferry, the depth, condition of the banks and speed of the current. Sapper Tom Hicks thought the survey was to “aid the Second Army when it tried bridging the river.” Along with three other sappers and a Dutch guide, Hicks had crossed the Rhine on the ferry. Pieter, he saw, “operated it with a cable that the old man wound in by hand and it seemed that the current helped work it across.” Tying a grenade to a length of parachute rigging and knotting the cord every foot along its length, Hicks took soundings and measured the current. On Wednesday night, after the Poles’ drop zone had been changed to Driel, another patrol was sent to the ferry site. “It was a volunteer job,” recalls Private Robert Edwards of the South Staffordshires. “We were to go down to the river at Heveadorp, find the ferry and stay there to protect it.”

  In darkness a sergeant, a corporal, six privates and four glider pilots set out. “Mortar bombs and shells were falling heavily as we plunged into the thickly wooded country between us and Heveadorp,” says Edwards. Several times the group was fired on, and a glider pilot was wounded. Reaching the riverbank at the site marked on their maps, the patrol found no sign of the ferry. It had completely disappeared. Although the possibility remained that the craft was moored on the southern bank, the patrol had been told they would find it on their own side. Immediately the men spread out, searching along a quarter-mile strip on either side of the ferry’s northern landing stage. The hunt was fruitless. Pieter’s ferry could not be found. As Edwards remembers, the sergeant in charge of the patrol reached the conclusion that the boat had either been sunk or simply never existed. At first light the men gave up the search and began their dangerous journey back.

  Only minutes later heavy machine-gun fire wounded three more of the patrol and the group was pulled back to the river. There the sergeant decided the men would have a better chance of getting back by splitting up. Edwards left with the corporal and two of the glider pilots. After “minor encounters and brushes with the Germans,” his group reached the church in lower Oosterbeek just as a mortar burst landed. Edwards was thrown to the ground, both legs filled with “tiny pieces of shrapnel and my boots full of blood.” In the house next to the church an orderly dressed his wounds and told the injured private to take a rest. “He didn’t say where, though,” Edwards recalls, “and every inch of space in the house was packed with badly wounded. The stench of wounds and death was something awful.” He decided to leave and head for company headquarters, located in a laundry, “in order to find somebody to make my report to. I told an officer about the ferry and then I got into a weapons’ pit with a glider pilot. I don’t know if the others made it back or what happened to the men who got to the church with me.”

  Sometime later General Urquhart, still ignorant of Frost’s fate, signaled Browning:

  Enemy attacking main bridge in strength. Situation critical for slender force. Enemy attacking east from Heelsum and west from Arnhem. Situation serious but am forming close perimeter around Hartenstein with remainder of division. Relief essential both areas earliest possible. Still maintain control ferry point at Heveadorp.

  Even as the message was being sent via the 64th Medium Regiment’s communications net, Division headquarters learned that the ferry had not been found. Urquhart’s officers believed the Germans had sunk it. But Pieter’s ferry was still afloat. Presumably artillery fire had cut its moorings. Far too late to be of use, it was eventually found by Dutch civilians near the demolished railroad bridge about a mile away, washed up but still intact. “If we had been able to search a few hundred yards closer to Oosterbeek, we would have found it,” Edwar
ds says.

  As Urquhart returned to his headquarters on Thursday morning after an inspection of the Hartenstein defenses, he heard the crushing news. With the Poles’ drop only hours away, his only quick way of reinforcing the perimeter with Sosabowski’s men was gone.*

  Looking down from a window in the lead Dakota, as the long columns of planes carrying the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade headed for the drop zone at Driel, Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski “learned the real truth, and what I had suspected all along.” From Eindhoven, where the formations turned north, he saw “hundreds of vehicles below in chaotic traffic jams all along the corridor.” Smoke churned up from the road. At various points along the highway enemy shells were landing, trucks and vehicles were ablaze, and “everywhere wreckage was piled up on the sides.” Yet, somehow, the convoys were still moving. Then, beyond Nijmegen, movement stopped. Through low clouds off to his right, Sosabowski could see the “island” road and the clogged, halted tanks on it. Enemy fire was falling on the head of the column. Moments later, as the planes banked toward Driel, the Arnhem bridge loomed into view. Tanks were crossing over it, driving north to south, and Sosabowski realized they were German. Shocked and stunned, he knew now that the British had lost the bridge.

  On Wednesday night, agitated by the lack of information regarding Urquhart’s situation, and “as I had visions of being court-martialed by my own government,” Sosabowski had thrown caution to the winds. He demanded to see General Brereton, the First Allied Airborne Army commander. To Colonel George Stevens, the liaison officer with the Polish Brigade, Sosabowski had emotionally insisted that unless he was “given Urquhart’s exact situation around Arnhem, the Polish Parachute Brigade will not take off.” Startled, Stevens had rushed off to First Allied Airborne headquarters with Sosabowski’s ultimatum. At 7 A.M. on Thursday morning, he returned with news from Brereton. There was confusion, Stevens admitted, but the attack was going as planned; the drop zone at Driel had not been changed and “the Heveadorp ferry was in British hands.” Sosabowski was mollified. Now, looking down on the panorama of battle, he realized he “knew more than Brereton.” Enraged as he saw what was obviously German armor about Oosterbeek and ahead a hail of antiaircraft fire coming up to greet his men, Sosabowski believed his brigade was “being sacrificed in a complete British disaster.” Moments later he was out the door, falling through weaving curtains of antiaircraft fire. The time, the precise fifty-year-old general noted, was exactly 5:08 P.M.