As Sosabowski had feared, the Poles jumped into a holocaust. As before, the Germans were waiting. They had tracked and timed the formations from Dunkirk on and now, with far more reinforcements than before, the area bristled with antiaircraft guns. As the transports approached, twenty-five Messerschmitts suddenly appeared and, diving out of the clouds, raked the approaching planes.
As he fell through the air Sosabowski saw one Dakota, both engines flaming, fall toward the ground. Corporal Alexander Kochalski saw another go down. Only a dozen paratroopers escaped before it crashed and burned. First Lieutenant Stefan Kaczmarek prayed as he hung below his chute. He saw so many tracer bullets that “every gun on the ground seemed to be aimed at me.” Corporal Wladijslaw Korob, his parachute full of holes, landed alongside a fellow Pole who had been decapitated.
In the Oosterbeek perimeter the Polish drop, barely two and one-half miles away, caused a momentary halt in the battle. Every German gun seemed to be concentrating on the swaying, defenseless men. “It was as if all the enemy guns lifted together and let fly simultaneously,” Gunner Robert Christie noted. The reprieve from the constant shelling was too precious to waste: men quickly took the opportunity to move jeeps and equipment, dig new gun pits, bring up spare ammunition, rearrange camouflage nets and toss empty shell cases out of crowded slit trenches.
Six miles away on the elevated “island” road, Captain Roland Langton, whose lead tank squadron had been halted en route to Arnhem some six hours previously, watched the drop in agony. It was the most horrible sight he had ever seen. German planes dived at the defenseless Polish transports, “blasting them out of the air.” Parachutists tried to get out of burning aircraft, “some of which had nosed over and were diving to the ground.” Bodies of men “tumbled through the air, inert forms drifting slowly down, dead before they hit the ground.” Langton was close to tears. “Where the hell is the air support?” he wondered. “We were told in the afternoon we couldn’t have any for our attack toward Arnhem, because all available air effort had to go for the Poles. Where was it now? The weather? Nonsense. The Germans flew; why couldn’t we?” Langton had never felt so frustrated. With all his heart, he knew that with air support his tanks “could have got through to those poor bastards at Arnhem.” In anxiety and desperation he suddenly found himself violently sick.
Though they were shocked by the savagery of the combined air and antiaircraft assault, most of the Polish Brigade miraculously made the drop zone. Even as they landed, flak and high-explosive mortar shells—fired from tanks and antiaircraft guns along the Nijmegen-Arnhem elevated highway and by batteries north of Driel—burst among them, and Sosabowski saw that even machine guns seemed to be ranged in on the entire area. Hammered in the air and caught in a deadly crossfire on the ground, the men now had to fight their way off the drop zones. Sosabowski landed near a canal. As he ran for cover he came across the body of one trooper. “He lay on the grass, stretched out as if on a cross,” Sosabowski later wrote. “A bullet or piece of shrapnel had neatly sliced off the top of his head. I wondered how many more of my men would I see like this before the battle was over and whether their sacrifice would be worthwhile.”*
Aghast at the fierce German reception, the entire population of Driel was engulfed by the paratroop drop. Polish troopers came down all about the hamlet, landing in orchards, irrigation canals, on the top of the dikes, on the polder and in the village itself. Some men fell into the Rhine and, unable to shed their parachutes, were swept away and drowned. Disregarding the shell and machine-gun fire all about them, the Dutch ran to help the ill-fated Poles. Among them, as a member of a Red Cross team, was Cora Baltussen.
The landing, centered on drop zones less than two miles south of Driel, had come as a complete surprise to the villagers. No pathfinders had been used, and the Dutch underground was ignorant of the plan. Riding a bicycle with wooden tires, Cora Baltussen headed south on a narrow dike road toward a place known as Honingsveld, where many of the paratroopers appeared to have landed. Shocked and terrified, she did not see how anyone could have lived through the German fire. She expected enormous numbers of casualties. To her surprise, Cora saw men, under attack, forming up and running in groups toward the safety of dike embankments. She could hardly believe so many were still alive but “at last,” she thought, “the Tommies have arrived in Driel.”
She had not spoken English in years, but Cora was the only inhabitant of Driel familiar with the language. While her services as a trained Red Cross nurse would be required, Cora also hoped to act as an interpreter. Hurrying forward, she saw men waving wildly at her, obviously “warning me to get off the road because of the fire.” But in her “excitement and foolishness,” Cora was unaware of the fusillade of enemy steel storming all about her. Shouting “Hello Tommies” to the first group she encountered, she was nonplused by their reply. These men spoke another language—not English. For a moment she listened. A number of Poles, impressed into the German Army, had been stationed in Driel some years before. Almost immediately she recognized the language as Polish. This puzzled her still more.
After years of living under enemy occupation, Cora was wary. Hiding in the Baltussen factory at this moment were several British troopers and the crew of a downed plane. The Poles seemed equally suspicious, as they eyed her carefully. They spoke no Dutch, but some men ventured guarded questions in broken English or German. Where, they asked, had she come from? How many people were in Driel? Were there any Germans in the village? Where was Baarskamp farm? The mention of Baarskamp brought a torrent of words in both German and English from Cora. The farm lay slightly east of the village and, although Cora was not a member of the tiny underground force in Driel, she had heard her brother, Josephus, an active member, refer to the owner of the farm as a Dutch Nazi. She knew there were some German troops around Baarskamp, along the Rhine dike road, and manning antiaircraft gun sites in the brickworks along the riverbank. “Don’t go there,” she pleaded. “German troops are all about the place.” The Poles seemed unconvinced. “They were not sure whether to trust me or not,” Cora recalls. “I did not know what to do. Yet I was desperately afraid these men would set out for Baarskamp and into some sort of a trap.” Among the group around her was General Sosabowski. “As he wore no distinctive markings and looked like all the others,” Cora remembers, “it was not until the next day that I learned that the short, wiry little man was the general.” Sosabowski, she remembers, was calmly eating an apple. He was intensely interested in her information about Baarskamp farm; by sheer accident it had been chosen as the main rendezvous point for his brigade. Although Cora thought that no one in the group believed her, Sosabowski’s officers now immediately sent off runners to inform other groups about Baarskamp. The compact little man with the apple now asked, “Where is the ferry site?”
One of the officers produced a map, and Cora pointed out the location. “But,” she informed them, “it is not running.” The people of Driel had not seen the tender since Wednesday. They had learned from Pieter that the cable had been cut, and they presumed that the ferry had been destroyed.
Sosabowski listened with dismay. On landing, he had sent out a reconnaissance patrol to locate the site. Now his fear had been confirmed. “I still waited for the patrol’s report,” he recalled, “but this young woman’s information seemed accurate. I thanked her warmly.”* A formidable task now lay before him. To send help quickly to Urquhart’s beleaguered men in the perimeter, Sosabowski would have to put his force across the 400-yard-wide Rhine by boat or raft—and in darkness. He did not know whether Urquhart’s engineers had found boats, or where he might find enough himself. His radiomen, Sosabowski learned, were unable to raise British 1st Airborne headquarters. He was ignorant of any new plans that might have been formulated.
Now, as Cora and her team set out to help the wounded, Sosabowski watched his men move up under the cover of smoke bombs, overrunning what little opposition there was in the area. So far, the only major resistance his brigade
had encountered came from artillery shells and mortars. As yet no armor had appeared. The soft polder seemed inadequate for tanks. Perplexed and grim, Sosabowski set up brigade headquarters in a farmhouse and waited for news from Urquhart. His mood was not improved when he learned that of his 1,500-man brigade, 500 troops had failed to arrive. Bad weather had forced the planes carrying almost one entire battalion to abort and return to their bases in England. In casualties, his remaining force had already paid a cruel price: although he did not have the exact figures, by nightfall only about 750 men had been assembled, among them scores of wounded.
At 9 P.M. news arrived, rather dramatically, from Urquhart. Unable to raise Sosabowski by radio, the Polish liaison officer at Urquhart’s headquarters, Captain Zwolanski, swam across the Rhine. “I was working on a map,” Sosabowski remembered, “and suddenly this incredible figure, dripping with water and covered with mud, clad in undershorts and camouflaged netting, came in.”
Zwolanski told the General that Uruquhart “wanted us to cross that night and he would have rafts ready to ferry us over.” Sosabowski immediately ordered some of his men up to the river line to wait. They remained there most of the night, but the rafts did not come. “At 3 A.M.,” says Sosabowski, “I knew the scheme, for some reason, had failed. I pulled my men back into a defensive perimeter.” By dawn he expected “German infantry attacks and heavy artillery fire.” Any chance of getting across the Rhine “under cover of darkness this night was gone.”
At the Hartenstein Hotel across the river, Urquhart had earlier sent an urgent message to Browning. It read:
(212144) No knowledge of elements of division in Arnhem for 24 hours. Balance of division in very tight perimeter. Heavy mortaring and machine-gun fire followed by local attacks. Main nuisance self-propelled guns. Our casualties heavy. Resources stretched to utmost. Relief within 24 hours vital.
At his small post in Brussels, near Montgomery’s 21st Army Group headquarters, Prince Bernhard, Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces, followed each harrowing new development with anguish. Holland, which might have been liberated with ease in the first days of September, was being turned into a vast battlefield. Bernhard blamed no one. American and British fighting men were giving their lives to rid the Netherlands of a cruel oppressor. Still, Bernhard had rapidly become disenchanted with Montgomery and his staff. By Friday, September 22, when Bernhard learned that the Guards Armored tanks had been stopped at Elst and the Poles dropped near Driel rather than on the southern side of the Arnhem bridge, the thirty-three-year-old Prince lost his temper. “Why?” he angrily demanded of his chief of staff, Major General “Pete” Doorman. “Why wouldn’t the British listen to us? Why?”
Senior Dutch military advisers had been excluded from the planning for Market-Garden; their counsel might have been invaluable. “For example,” Bernhard recalls, “if we had known in time about the choice of drop zones and the distance between them and the Arnhem bridge, my people would certainly have said something.” Because of “Montgomery’s vast experience,” Bernhard and his staff “had questioned nothing and accepted everything.” But, from the moment Dutch generals learned of the route that Horrocks’ XXX Corps columns proposed to take, they had anxiously tried to dissuade anyone who would listen, warning of the dangers of using exposed dike roads. “In our military staff colleges,” Bernhard says, “we had run countless studies on the problem. We knew tanks simply could not operate along these roads without infantry.” Again and again Dutch officers had told Montgomery’s staff that the Market-Garden schedule could not be maintained unless infantry accompanied the tanks. General Doorman described how he had “personally held trials with armor in that precise area before the war.”
The British, Bernhard says, “were simply not impressed by our negative attitude.” Although everyone was “exceptionally polite, the British preferred to do their own planning, and our views were turned down. The prevailing attitude was, ‘Don’t worry, old boy, we’ll get this thing cracking.’” Even now, Bernhard noted, “everything was being blamed on the weather. The general impression among my staff was that the British considered us a bunch of idiots for daring to question their military tactics.” With the exception of a few senior officers, Bernhard knew that he was “not particularly loved at Montgomery’s headquarters, because I was saying things that now unfortunately were turning out to be true—and the average Englishman doesn’t like being told by a bloody foreigner that he’s wrong.”*
From his Brussels headquarters Bernhard had kept the sixty-four-year-old Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government in exile in London fully informed of events. “They could not have influenced British military decisions either,” Bernhard says. “It would have done no good for the Queen or our government to take the matter up with Churchill. He would never have interfered with a military operation in the field. Monty’s reputation was too big. There wasn’t anything we could really do.”
Queen Wilhelmina followed the battle anxiously. Like her son-in-law, she had expected a quick liberation of the Netherlands. Now, if Market-Garden failed, the royal family feared “the terrible reprisals the Germans would exact from our people. The Queen expected no sympathy from the Germans, whom she hated with a passion.”
In the early progress of the operation, Bernhard had informed Wilhelmina that “soon we will be overrunning some of the royal castles and estates.” The Queen replied, “Burn them all.” Startled, Bernhard stammered, “I beg your pardon?” Wilhelmina said, “I will never again set foot in a place where the Germans have been sitting in my chairs, in my rooms. Never!” Bernhard attempted to mollify her. “Mother, you are exaggerating things a bit. After all, they are quite useful buildings. We can steam them out, use DDT.” The Queen was adamant. “Burn the palaces down,” she commanded. “I will never set foot in one of them.” The Prince refused. “The Queen was angry because I occupied the palace with my staff (without destroying it) and not asking her first. She didn’t talk to me for weeks, except on official matters.”
Now Bernhard and his staff could only “wait and hope. We were bitter and frustrated at the turn of events. It had never entered our minds that costly mistakes could be made at the top.” The fate of Holland itself made Bernhard even more apprehensive. “If the British were driven back at Arnhem, I knew the repercussions against the Dutch people in the winter ahead would be frightful.”
*The consolidation of the southeastern end of the perimeter owed much to the quick thinking of Colonel Sheriff Thompson who, in the confusion of battle when men retreating from Arnhem on September 19 found themselves leaderless, quickly organized them in defense of the last piece of high ground before his gun positions. These forces, together with others who had earlier become separated from their units—some 150 glider pilots and his own artillery men, about 800 in all—were known as the “Thompson Force.” Subsequently augmented, they were placed under the command of Major Lonsdale. They withdrew late on September 20 and were deployed by Thompson about his gun positions. Owing to command changes and the general situation, some confusion has continued to exist regarding these events, but immediately before Thompson was wounded on September 21 all infantry in the gun area came under the command of what was later to be known as the “Lonsdale Force.” The glider pilots remained under the command of the 1st Airlanding Brigade.
*Munford destroyed his wireless set shortly after dawn on Thursday as the Germans began rounding up the few men still attempting to hang on. “Enemy tanks and infantry were right up to the bridge,” Munford recalls. “I helped carry some more wounded to a collecting point and then I bashed in the set. There was nothing more that Colonel Thompson could do for us and everybody who could wanted to get back to the division at Oosterbeek.” Munford was captured on the outskirts of Arnhem as he tried to reach the British lines.
*The true account of the ferry appears here for the first time. Even official histories state that it was sunk. Other versions imply that, to prevent its use, the Germans either destroyed the f
erry with artillery fire or moved it to another location under their control. There is no reference in any German war diary, log, or after-action report to sustain these conjectures. Interviewing German officers—such as Bittrich, Harzer, Harmel and Krafft—I found that none of them could recall ordering any such action. Assuming that the Germans wanted to seize the ferry, I believe they would have encountered the same difficulties in locating it that Edwards reported. In any case, no German officer remembers ordering the cable cut in order to prevent the British from using it.
*Stanislaw Sosabowski, Freely 1 Served, p. 124.
*Some accounts claim that Cora was a member of the underground and was sent to inform Sosabowski that the ferry was in German hands. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Cora. “I was never a member of the resistance, though my brothers were involved. The British did not trust the underground and certainly we in Driel knew nothing about the drop until the Poles were right on us.”
*Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey of the Irish Guards remembers that an officer of the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade came to the Guards’ mess for dinner shortly after the tanks were stopped at Elst. Looking around the table, the Dutch officer said, “You would have faiJed the examination.” He explained that one of the problems in the Dutch Staff College examination dealt solely with the correct way to attack Arnhem from Nijmegen. There were two choices: a) attack up the main road; or b) drive up it for 1-2 miles, turn left, effect a crossing of the Rhine and come around in a flanking movement. “Those who chose to go straight up the road failed the examination,” the officer said. “Those who turned left and then moved up to the river, passed.”
A Bridge Too Far Page 47