A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Like Essame, others were angered by the sluggish progress of the attack. Lieutenant Colonel George Taylor, commanding the 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry,* could not understand “what was holding everything up.” He knew the Garden forces were already three days behind schedule in reaching the 1st Airborne. He was uncomfortably aware that higher command headquarters was worried, too. On Thursday he had met General Horrocks, the Corps commander, who had asked him, “George, what would you do?” Without hesitation, Taylor had suggested rushing a special task force to the Rhine on Thursday night carrying 2½-ton amphibious vehicles (DUKWs) filled with supplies. “My idea was a shot in the dark,” Taylor recalls. “Horrocks looked slightly startled and, as people do sometimes when they consider a suggestion impractical, he quickly changed the conversation.”

  Taylor now waited impatiently for orders to move his battalion across the Waal river. It was not until midday Friday that a major, a staff officer from XXX Corps, arrived to tell him that his battalion would be given two DUKWs loaded with supplies and ammunition to take up to Driel. Additionally, Taylor would have a squadron of tanks of the Dragoon Guards. “The situation at Arnhem is desperate,” the major said. “The DUKWs must be moved across the river tonight.” Looking at the heavily laden DUKWs that arrived in the assembly area at 3:00 P.M. on Friday afternoon, Taylor wondered if they carried enough supplies. “Surely,” he remarked to his intelligence officer, Lieutenant David Wilcox, “we’ve got to get more than this across to them.”

  Even as the infantry was moving out of the Nijmegen bridgehead, Colonel Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers had reached Sosabowski and the Poles at Driel. Their crossing of the Rhine had been surprisingly uneventful. “Only a few shots were fired at us,” Mackenzie says, “and they went over our heads.” On the southern side a full-scale battle was in progress and the Poles were hard pressed, holding off enemy infantry attacks from the direction of Elst and Arnhem. For some time Mackenzie and Myers had waited on the Rhine’s southern bank for the Poles. “They had been told by radio to watch out for us,” Mackenzie says. “But there was quite a battle going on, and Sosabowski had his hands full.” Finally, riding bicycles, they were escorted to Sosabowski’s headquarters.

  Mackenzie was heartened to discover the Household Cavalry units. But his hopes of reaching General Browning at Nijmegen quickly were dashed. To Lord Wrottesley and Lieutenant Arthur Young, the failure of Hopkinson’s third troop of reconnaissance vehicles to reach Driel meant that the Germans had closed in behind them; nor had the attack of the 43rd Wessex yet broken through. Mackenzie and Myers would have to wait until a route was opened.

  Wrottesley recalls that “Mackenzie immediately asked to use my radio to contact Corps headquarters.” He began to relay a long message via Wrottesley’s squadron commander for Horrocks and Browning. Urquhart’s chief of staff made no effort to encode his signal. Standing beside him, Wrottesley heard Mackenzie “in the clear” say, “ ‘We are short of food, ammunition and medical supplies. We cannot hold out for more than twenty-four hours. All we can do is wait and pray.’ ” For the first time Wrottesley realized “that Urquhart’s division must be in a very bad way.”

  Mackenzie and Myers then conferred with Sosabowski about the urgency of getting the Poles across. “Even a few men now can make a difference,” Mackenzie told him. Sosabowski agreed, but asked where the boats and rafts were to come from. Hopefully DUKWs, which had been requested, would arrive by night. Meanwhile, Myers thought, several two-man rubber dinghies, which the airborne had, could be used. Linked by hawser they could be pulled back and forth across the river. Sosabowski was “delighted with the idea.” It would be painfully slow, he said, but “if unopposed, perhaps two hundred men might be shipped across during the night.” By radio, Myers quickly contacted the Hartenstein to make arrangements for the dinghies. The pathetic and desperate operation, it was decided, would begin at nightfall.

  In the bridgehead across the river, Urquhart’s men continued to fight with extraordinary courage and resolution. Yet, at places about the perimeter, even the most resolute were voicing worry about relief. Here and there a looming sense of isolation was growing, infecting the Dutch as well.

  Douw van der Krap, a former Dutch naval officer, had earlier been placed in command of a twenty-five-man Dutch underground unit which was to fight alongside the British. The group had been organized at the instigation of Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer at Urquhart’s headquarters. Jan Eijkelhoff, who had helped make ready the Schoonoord Hotel for casualties on Monday, was charged with finding German weapons for the group. The British could give each man only five rounds of ammunition—if weapons could be found. Driving as far as Wolfheze, Eijkelhoff found only three or four rifles. At first the newly appointed commander of the unit, Van der Krap, was elated at the idea, but his hopes dimmed. His men would be instantly executed if captured while fighting with the paratroopers. “Without relief and supplies for themselves, it was obvious the British couldn’t last,” Van der Krap recalls. “They couldn’t arm us and they couldn’t feed us and I decided to disband the group.” Van der Krap, however, remained with the paratroopers. “I wanted to fight,” he says, “but I didn’t think we had a chance.”

  Young Anje van Maanen, who had been so excited by the paratroopers’ arrival and the daily expectation of seeing “Monty’s tanks,” was now terrified by the continuous shelling and constantly changing battle lines. “The noise and the hell go on,” she wrote in her diary. “I can’t bear it any longer. I’m so scared and I can’t think of anything but shells and death.” Anje’s father, Dr. Gerritt van Maanen, working alongside British doctors at the Tafelberg Hotel, brought news to his family whenever he could, but to Anje the battle had assumed unrealistic proportions. “I don’t understand,” she wrote. “One side of a street is British, the other German, and people kill each other from both sides. There are house, floor and room fights.” On Friday, Anje wrote, “the British say Monty will be here at any moment. I don’t believe that. Monty can go to hell! He will never come.”

  In the Schoonoord Hotel, where British and German wounded crowded the wide veranda and lay in the reception rooms, passageways and bedrooms, Hendrika van der Vlist could hardly believe it was Friday. The hospital was constantly changing hands. On Wednesday the hotel had been taken by the Germans, on Thursday by the British; and by Friday morning it had been recaptured by the Germans. Control of the Schoonoord was less important than the need to prevent it being fired on. A large Red Cross flag flew on the roof, and numerous smaller ones were spotted around the grounds, but the dust and flying debris often obscured the pennants. Orderlies, nurses and doctors worked on, seemingly oblivious to anything but the constant flow of wounded men.

  Hendrika had slept in her clothes for only a few hours each night, getting up to assist doctors and orderlies as fresh casualties were carried in. Fluent in English and German, she had originally noted a pessimism among the Germans in contrast to the patient cheerfulness of the British. Now many of the severely wounded Red Devils seemed stoically prepared to accept their fate. As she brought one trooper the minuscule portion of soup and a biscuit that constituted the only meal the hospital could provide, he pointed to a newly arrived casualty. “Give it to him,” he told Hendrika. Pulling down the man’s blanket, she saw he wore a German uniform. “German, eh?” the trooper asked. Hendrika nodded. “Give him the food anyway,” the Britisher said, “I ate yesterday.” Hendrika stared at him. “Why is there a war on, really?” she asked. Tiredly, he shook his head. In her diary she put down her private fears: “Has our village become one of the bloodiest battlefields? What is holding up the main army? It cannot go on like this any longer.”

  In Dr. Onderwater’s cellar, where the Voskuil family was sheltering along with some twenty others, both Dutch and British, Mrs. Voskuil noticed for the first time that the floor was slippery with blood. During the night two wounded officers, Major Peter Warr and Lieutenant Colonel Ken
Smyth, had been brought in by British troopers. Both men were seriously wounded, Warr in the thigh and Smyth in the stomach. Shortly after the injured men were laid on the floor, the Germans burst in. One of them threw a grenade. Lance Corporal George Wyllie of Colonel Smyth’s 10th Battalion remembers “a flash of light and then a deafening explosion.” Mrs. Voskuil, sitting behind Major Warr, felt “red hot pain” in her legs. In the now-dark cellar she heard someone shouting, “Kill them! Kill them!” She felt a man’s body fall heavily across her. It was Private Albert Willingham, who had apparently jumped in front of Mrs. Voskuil to protect her. Corporal Wyllie saw a gaping wound open in Willingham’s back. He remembers the woman sitting on a chair with a child beside her, the dead paratrooper across her lap. The child seemed covered with blood. “My God!” Wyllie thought as he lost consciousness, “we’ve killed a child.” Suddenly the fierce battle was over. Someone shone a torch. “Do you still live?” Mrs. Voskuil called out to her husband. Then she reached for her son, Henri. The child did not respond to her cries. She was sure he was dead. “Suddenly I didn’t care what happened,” she says. “It just didn’t matter any more.”

  She saw that soldiers and civilians alike were terribly wounded and screaming. In front of her, Major Warr’s tunic was “bloody and gaping open.” Everyone was shouting or sobbing. “Silence,” Mrs. Voskuil yelled in English. “Silence!” The heavy burden across her body was pulled away and then she saw Wyllie nearby. “The English boy got up, shaking visibly. He had his rifle butt on the floor and the bayonet, almost level with my eyes, jerked back and forth as he tried to steady himself. Low animal-like sounds—almost like a dog or a wolf—were coming from him.”

  Corporal Wyllie’s head began to clear. Someone had now lit a candle in the cellar, and a German officer gave him a sip of brandy. Wyllie noticed the bottle bore a Red Cross insignia, and underneath the words, “His Majesty’s Forces.” As he was led out Wyllie looked back at the lady “whose child was dead.” He wanted to say something to her but “couldn’t find the words.”*

  The German officer asked Mrs. Voskuil to tell the British “they have fought gallantly and behaved like gentlemen, but now they must surrender. Tell them it is over.” As the paratroopers were taken out, a German medical orderly examined Henri. “He is in a coma,” he told Mrs. Voskuil. “He is grazed along the stomach and his eyes are discolored and swollen, but he will be all right.” Mutely she nodded her head.

  On the floor Major Warr, his shoulder bones protruding through the skin from the explosion, shouted, cursed and then fell unconscious again. Leaning over, Mrs. Voskuil moistened her handkerchief and wiped the blood from his lips. A short distance away Colonel Smyth mumbled something. A German guard turned, questioningly, toward Mrs. Voskuil. “He wants a doctor,” she said softly. The soldier left the cellar and returned a few minutes later with a German doctor. Examining Smyth, the physician said, “Tell the officer I am sorry to have to hurt him but I must look at his wound. Tell him to grit his teeth.” As he began pulling away the clothing, Smyth fainted.

  At daylight the civilians were ordered to leave. Two SS men carried Mrs. Voskuil and Henri out into the street, and a Dutch Red Cross worker directed them to the cellar of a dentist, Dr. Phillip Clous. Voskuil’s parents-in-law did not go. They preferred to take their chances at home. In the Clous house, the dentist warmly welcomed the family. “Don’t worry,” he told Voskuil. “It’s going to be all right. The British will win.” Voskuil, standing beside his wounded wife and child, his mind still filled with the night’s horrors, stared at the man. “No,” he said quietly, “they will not.”

  Though they were unwilling to recognize that their endurance had nearly run its course, many paratroopers knew that they could not hold on alone much longer. Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson was tired “of being pushed around by the Germans.” On the northern edge of the perimeter, he and his men had been chased by tanks, pinned down in woods and forced to fight off the Germans with bayonets. Finally, on Thursday night, as the perimeter tightened, Pearson’s group was ordered to pull back. He was told to cover the withdrawal with a smoke grenade. Nearby he heard a lone Bren gun firing. Scrambling through underbrush he discovered a corporal hidden in a deep hollow in the woods. “Get out,” Pearson told him. “I’m the last one here.” The corporal shook his head. “Not me, sergeant,” he said. “I’m staying. I won’t let those bastards by.” As Pearson made his way back he could hear the Bren-gunner firing. He thought the situation was hopeless. He began to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to surrender.

  In a slit trench near the tennis courts at the Hartenstein—where the earth was now crisscrossed with foxholes that the German prisoners had been allowed to dig for their own protection—Glider Pilot Victor Miller stared at the body of another pilot, who lay sprawled a few yards away. Firing had been so intense that men had not been able to remove the dead. Miller saw that since the last mortaring the body was half buried by leaves and shattered branches. He kept staring at the corpse, wondering if anyone would come to pick it up. He was frightened that the features of his dead friend would change, and he was certain there was a “strong smell of death.” He felt sick. He remembers thinking wildly that “if something isn’t done soon, we’ll all be corpses. The shells will eliminate us one by one, until this will be only a park of the dead.”

  Other men felt they were being exhorted to keep up courage without access to the facts. Private William O’Brien, near the church in lower Oosterbeek, remembers that “every night an officer came around and told us to hang on, the Second Army would arrive the next day. There was a helluva lot of apathy. Everyone was asking what the hell they were there for and where the hell was the goddam army. We’d had it.” Sergeant Edward Mitchell, a glider pilot, in a position opposite the church, remembers one man locked himself in a nearby shed. “He would let no one near. Every now and again he’d shout, ‘Come on, you bastards,’ and empty a magazine all around the shed.” For hours, the lone trooper alternately shouted and fired, then lapsed into periods of silence. As Mitchell and others debated how to get him out, there was another sharp burst of fire and then silence. Reaching the shed, they found the paratrooper dead.

  Here and there shell-shocked, concussed, battle-fatigued men roamed the Hartenstein area, finally oblivious to the battle. Medic Taffy Brace, who on Tuesday had tended the mangled body of his friend, Andy Milbourne, was encountering these tragic, pathetic men as he treated the wounded. By now Brace had run out of morphia, and he was using paper bandages. He could not bring himself to reveal that he had no medication. “What would you be wanting morphia for?” he asked one critically wounded trooper. “Morphia’s for people who are really hurt. You’re doing fine.”

  As Brace bandaged the man, he was aware of a strange hooting sound behind him. Turning he saw a totally naked paratrooper, pumping his arms up and down and “sounding like a locomotive.” As Brace caught his eye, the soldier began to curse. “Blast this fireman,” the trooper said, “he was never any good.” In one house near the perimeter Brace, arriving with a casualty, heard a man softly singing “The White Cliffs of Dover.” Thinking the trooper was soothing the other injured, Brace smiled at him and nodded encouragement. The soldier lunged at Brace and tried to choke him. “I’ll kill you,” he yelled. “What do you know about Dover?” Brace loosened the fingers at his throat. “It’s all right,” he said gently, “I’ve been there.” The man stepped back. “Oh,” he said, “that’s all right then.” Minutes later he began to sing again. Others remember a shell-shocked trooper who walked among them at night. Bending over the huddled forms of men trying to sleep he would shake them roughly awake, stare into their eyes and ask them all the same question: “Have you got faith?”

  Despite those pitiable, shocked and desperate men whose faith was gone, hundreds of others were bolstered by the actions of eccentric, undaunted soldiers who seemed utterly fearless and who refused to give in to wounds or hardships. Major Dickie Lonsdale, commander of the “Lonsdale Force
,” holding positions about the church in lower Oosterbeek, seemed to be everywhere. “His was a figure that would inspire terror,” recalls Sergeant Dudley Pearson. “He had one arm in a bloodstained sling, an equally bloody wrapping around his head and a giant bandage on one leg.” Hobbling about exhorting his men, Lonsdale led attack after attack.

  Sergeant Major Harry Callaghan, who had added extra touches to his uniform—he had found a tall black hat in a hearse and wore it everywhere, explaining to the men that he had been named “the Airborne representative to Hitler’s funeral”—remembers the awesome-looking Lonsdale deliver a ringing, defiant speech to men in the church. Officers and noncoms had rounded up troopers and sent them to the ancient ruined building. “The roof was gone,” Callaghan remembers, “and each new explosion sent plaster cascading down.” As soldiers leaned listlessly against walls and broken pews—smoking, lounging, half-asleep—Lonsdale climbed into the pulpit. Men stared upward at the fierce-looking, bloodstained figure. “We’ve fought the Germans in North Africa, Sicily and Italy,” Callaghan remembers Lonsdale saying. “They weren’t good enough for us then! They’re bloody well not good enough for us now!” Captain Michael Corrie of the Glider Pilot Regiment had been struck as he entered the church “by the weariness I saw. But Lonsdale’s speech was stirring. I felt stunned by his words, and proud. The men went in looking beaten, but as they came out, they had new spirit. You could read it on their faces.”