A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Others were not so lucky. By the time Gunner Charles Pavey got down to the river, the embarkation area was also under machine-gun fire. As the men huddled on the bank a man came swimming toward the place where Pavey lay. Ignoring the bullets peppering the shore he hauled himself out of the water and, gasping for breath, said, “Thank God, I’m over.” Pavey heard someone say, “Bloody fool. You’re still on the same side.”

  Sergeant Alf Roullier, who had managed to cook and serve a stew on Sunday, now attempted to swim the river. As he floundered in the water a boat drew alongside and someone grabbed his collar. He heard a man shout, “It’s O.K., mate. Keep going. Keep going.” Roullier was totally disoriented. He believed he was drowning. Then he heard the same voice say, “Bloody good, old boy,” and a Canadian engineer lifted him into the boat. “Where the hell am I?” the dazed Roullier mumbled. The Canadian grinned. “You’re almost home,” he said.

  It was nearing daybreak when Signalman James Cockrill, still at his set under the veranda of the Hartenstein, heard a fierce whisper. “Come on, Chick,” a voice said, “let’s go.” As the men headed for the river, there was a sudden sharp burst of noise. Cockrill felt a tug on his neck and shoulders. His Sten gun, slung over his back, had been split wide open by shrapnel. Nearing the bank, Cockrill’s group came across a few glider pilots standing in the bushes. “Don’t go until we tell you,” one of the pilots said. “The Germans have got a gun fixed on this area, a Spandau firing about waist high.” Coached by the pilots, the men sprinted forward one at a time. When Cockrill’s turn came he crouched down and began to run. Seconds later he fell over a pile of bodies. “There must have been twenty or thirty,” he remembers. “I heard men shouting for their mothers and others begging us not to leave them there. We couldn’t stop.” At the river’s edge a flare exploded and machine guns began to chatter. Cockrill heard someone shout for those who could to swim. He went into the chilly water, striking out past panic-stricken men who appeared to be floundering all about him.

  Suddenly Cockrill heard a voice say, “All right, buddy, don’t worry. I’ve got you.” A Canadian hauled him into a boat and seconds later Cockrill heard the boat ground on shore. “I nearly cried when I found I was back where I started,” he says. The boat had gone on in to pick up wounded. As men all around helped with the loading, the craft started off again and Cockrill remembers a rush as men climbed in from all sides. Although their boat was weighted down and under fire, the Canadians made it to the far shore. After hours under the veranda and his nightmarish trip across the water, Cockrill was dazed. “The next thing I knew I was in a barn and someone gave me a cigarette.” Then Cockrill remembered one thing. Frantically he searched his pockets and brought out his single piece of ammunition: the .303 dummy bullet with his cypher code inside.

  Shortly before 2 A.M. what remained of the 1st Airborne’s ammunition was blown up. Sheriff Thompson’s gunners fired the last remaining shells and artillerymen removed the breech blocks. Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes and the remainder of his crew were told to pull back. Parkes was surprised. He had not thought about the withdrawal. He had expected to stay until his post was overrun by the Germans. He was even more amazed when he reached the river. The area was jammed with hundreds of men and someone said that all the boats had been sunk. A man near Parkes took a deep breath. “It looks like we swim,” he said. Parkes stared at the river. “It was very wide. In full flood the current looked to be about nine knots. I didn’t think I could make it. I saw men jumping in fully dressed and being swept downstream. Others made it across only to be shot scrambling out of the water. I saw one chap paddle across on a plank, still carrying his pack. If he could do it, I could.”

  Parkes stripped to his shorts, throwing away everything including his gold pocket watch. In the swift current his shorts slipped down and Parkes kicked them off. He made it over and, hiding by bushes and in ditches, eventually reached a small deserted farm cottage. Parkes went in to find some clothing. Emerging a few minutes later, he encountered a private from the Dorsets, who directed him to a collection point, where he was given a mug of hot tea and some cigarettes. It took the exhausted Parkes some time to understand why everyone was staring at him. He was dressed in a man’s colored sports shirt and wore a pair of ladies’ linen bloomers tied at the knee.

  Private Alfred Dullforce of the 10th Battalion swam to the south bank nude but still carrying a .38. To his embarrassment two women were standing with the soldiers on the bank. Dull-force “felt like diving straight back into the water.” One of the women called to him and held out a skirt. “She didn’t bat an eyelash at my nakedness,” he remembers. “She told me not to worry, because they were there to help the men coming across.” In a multicolored skirt that reached to his knees and wearing a pair of clogs, Dullforce was taken to a British truck driving the survivors back to Nijmegen.

  By now the Germans were flaying the embarkation area and mortar shells were screaming in. As Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters ran behind a line of men for a boat, there was an explosion among the group. “I was absolutely unharmed,” Wolters recalls. “But around me lay eight dead men and one severely wounded.” He gave the man a shot of morphia and carried him to the boat. In the already overloaded craft there was no place for Wolters. He waded into the water and, hanging onto the side of the boat, was pulled across the river. He staggered onto the southern bank and collapsed.

  As dawn came, the evacuation fleet had been almost destroyed, yet the Canadian and British engineers, braving mortar, artillery and heavy machine-gun fire, continued to ferry the men across in the boats that remained. Private Arthur Shearwood of the nth Battalion found Canadian engineers loading some wounded into a small boat. One of the Canadians motioned for Shearwood to get aboard. The outboard motor could not be restarted, and the Canadians asked all soldiers still carrying rifles to start paddling. Shearwood tapped the man in front of him. “Let’s go,” he said. “Start paddling.” The man looked at Shearwood without expression. “I can’t,” he said, pointing to his bandaged shoulder. “I’ve lost an arm.”

  Major Robert Cain had put all his men across by dawn. With Sergeant Major “Robbo” Robinson, he waited on the bank so he could follow, but no more boats appeared to be heading in. In a group of other men someone pointed to a slightly holed assault craft bobbing on the water and a trooper swam out to bring it back. Using rifle butts, Cain and Robinson began rowing, while troopers who still had helmets bailed. On the south bank a military policeman directed them to a barn. Inside, one of the first men Cain recognized was Brigadier Hicks. The brigadier came over quickly. “Well,” he said, “here’s one officer, at least, who’s shaved.” Cain grinned tiredly. “I was well brought up, sir,” he said.

  On the perimeter’s edge scores of men still huddled in the rain under German fire. Although one or two boats attempted to cross under cover of a smoke screen, it was now, in daylight, impossible for the evacuation to continue. Some men who tried to swim for it were caught by the swift current or by machine-gun fire. Others made it. Still others, so badly wounded they could do nothing, sat helplessly in the pounding rain or set out north—back to the hospitals in the perimeter. Many decided to hide out and wait until darkness again before trying to reach the opposite shore. Eventually scores succeeded in making their escape this way.

  On the southern bank and in Driel, exhausted, grimy men searched for their units—or what remained of them. Sergeant Stanley Sullivan of the pathfinders, who had printed his defiant message on the school blackboard, remembers someone asking, “Where’s the 1st Battalion?” A corporal immediately stood up. “This is it, sir,” he said. Beside him a handful of bedraggled men pulled themselves painfully erect. Gunner Robert Christie roamed through crowds of men searching for troopers of his battery. No one looked familiar. Christie suddenly felt tears sting his eyes. He had no idea whether anyone but him was left from Number 2 Battery.

  On the road to Driel, General Urquhart came to General Thomas’ headquarters. Ref
using to go in, he waited outside in the rain as his aide arranged for transportation. It was not necessary. As Urquhart stood outside, a jeep arrived from General Browning’s headquarters and an officer escorted Urquhart back to Corps. He and his group were taken to a house on the southern outskirts of Nijmegen. “Browning’s aide, Major Harry Cator, showed us into a room and suggested we take off our wet clothes,” Urquhart says. The proud Scot refused. “Perversely, I wanted Browning to see us as we were—as we had been.” After a long wait Browning appeared, “as immaculate as ever.” He looked, Urquhart thought, as if “he had just come off parade, rather than from his bed in the middle of a battle.” To the Corps commander Urquhart said simply, “I’m sorry things did not turn out as well as I had hoped.” Browning, offering Urquhart a drink, replied, “You did all you could.” Later, in the bedroom that he had been given, Urquhart found that the sleep he had yearned for so long was impossible. “There were too many things,” he said, “on my mind and my conscience.”

  There was indeed much to think about. The 1st Airborne Division had been sacrificed and slaughtered. Of Urquhart’s original 10,005-man force only 2,163 troopers, along with 160 Poles and 75 Dorsets, came back across the Rhine. After nine days, the division had approximately 1,200 dead and 6,642 missing, wounded or captured. The Germans, it later turned out, had suffered brutally, too: 3,300 casualties, including 1,100 dead.

  The Arnhem adventure was over and with it Market-Garden. There was little left to do now but pull back and consolidate. The war would go on until May, 1945. “Thus ended in failure the greatest airborne operation of the war,” one American historian later wrote. “Although Montgomery asserted that it had been 90 percent successful, his statement was merely a consoling figure of speech. All objectives save Arnhem had been won, but without Arnhem the rest were as nothing. In return for so much courage and sacrifice, the Allies had won a 50-mile salient—leading nowhere.”*

  Perhaps because so few were expected to escape, there was not enough transport for the exhausted survivors. Many men, having endured so much else, now had to march back to Nijmegen. On the road Captain Roland Langton of the Irish Guards stood in the cold rain watching the 1st Airborne come back. As tired, filthy men stumbled along, Langton stepped back. He knew his squadron had done its best to drive up the elevated highway from Nijmegen to Arnhem, yet he felt uneasy, “almost embarrassed to speak to them.” As one of the men drew abreast of another Guardsman standing silently beside the road, the trooper shouted, “Where the hell have you been, mate?” The Guardsman answered quietly, “We’ve been fighting for five months.” Corporal William Chennell of the Guards heard one of the airborne men say, “Oh? Did you have a nice drive up?”

  As the men streamed back one officer, who had stood in the rain for hours, searched every face. Captain Eric Mackay, whose little band of stragglers had held out so gallantly in the school-house near the Arnhem bridge, had escaped and reached Nijmegen. Now he looked for members of his squadron. Most of them had not made it to the Arnhem bridge; but Mackay, with stubborn hope, looked for them in the airborne lines coming out of Oosterbeek. “The worst thing of all was their faces,” he says of the troopers. “They all looked unbelievably drawn and tired. Here and there you could pick out a veteran—a face with an unmistakable I-don’t-give-a-damn look, as if he could never be beaten.” All that night and into the dawn Mackay stayed by the road. “I didn’t see one face I knew. As I continued to watch I hated everyone. I hated whoever was responsible for this and I hated the army for its indecision and I thought of the waste of life and of a fine division dumped down the drain. And for what?” It was full light when Mackay went back to Nijmegen. There he began to check collecting points and billets, determined to find his men. Of the 200 engineers in his squadron, five, including Mackay, had come back.

  On the other side of the river remained the soldiers and civilians whose jobs and injuries demanded that they be left behind. Small bands of men too late to make the trip stayed too, crouched down in the now-unmanned trenches and gun pits. For these survivors there was no longer any hope. In the blackened perimeter they awaited their fate.

  Medic Taffy Brace had brought the last of his walking wounded down to the river, only to find the banks now empty. Huddling with them, Brace saw a captain coming forward. “What are we going to do?” the officer asked Brace. “There won’t be any more boats.” Brace looked at the injured men. “I guess we’ll have to stay then,” he said. “I can’t leave them.” The captain shook hands. “Good luck,” he told them all. “I’m going to try to swim across.” Brace last saw the officer wading out into the water. “Good luck yourself,” Brace called. “Goodbye.”

  For Major Guy Rigby-Jones, a physician at the Tafelberg, “the division’s leaving was a bitter pill to swallow,” but he carried on his work. With teams of medics Rigby-Jones scoured the houses in the area of the hotel, bringing in wounded men. Often hand-carrying the casualties to collection points, the medics loaded them into German trucks, ambulances and jeeps and then climbed on themselves, heading into captivity.

  Padre Pare had slept the whole night through at the Schoonoord. He awoke with a start, sure that something was terribly wrong. Then he realized that it was unnaturally quiet. Hurrying out into a room, he saw a medic standing at a window, in full view of anyone outside. As Pare came up the medic turned around. “The division’s gone,” he said. Pare, who had not been told about the evacuation, stared at him. “You’re mad, man.” The medic shook his head. “Look for yourself, sir. We really are prisoners now. Our chaps have had to retreat.” Pare couldn’t believe it. “Sir,” the medic said, “you’ll have to break the news to the patients. I haven’t got the nerve to tell them.” Pare made the rounds of the hotel. “Everyone tried to take it in good heart,” he recalls, “but we were all in a fit of deep depression.” Then in the large room where most of the wounded still sheltered a soldier sat down at a piano and began to play a medley of popular songs. Men started to sing and Pare found himself joining in.

  “It was queer after the hell of the last few days,” Pare says. “The Germans could not understand it, but it was easy enough to explain. The suspense, the sense of being left behind produced a tremendous reaction. There was nothing left to do but sing.” Later as Hendrika van der Vlist and other Dutch civilians prepared to leave to help the wounded in German hospitals, Pare waved goodbye regretfully. “They had suffered with us, gone hungry and thirsty, and yet they had no thought for themselves.” As the last ambulances disappeared, Pare and the medical staff loaded their meager belongings onto a German truck. “The Germans helped us,” he recalls. “There was a curious lack of animosity. None of us had anything to say.” As the truck drove off, Pare stared moodily at the blackened wreckage of the Schoonoord, “where absolute miracles had been worked.” He was “firmly convinced that it was only a matter of a day or two, possibly this coming night, before the Second Army crossed the Rhine and took the area back again.”

  Across the street from the church, Kate ter Horst had said goodbye to the wounded, all now prisoners. Pulling a hand cart and accompanied by her five children, she set out to walk to Apeldoorn. A short distance away she stopped and looked back at the ancient vicarage that had been her home. “A ray of sunshine strikes a bright yellow parachute hanging from the roof,” she wrote. “Bright yellow … A greeting from the Airborne … Farewell, friends … God bless you.”

  Young Anje van Maanen, also on the road to Apeldoorn, kept looking for her father as the Red Cross cars and ambulances passed, bringing the wounded from the Tafelberg. With her aunt and her brother, Anje stared at the familiar faces she had come to know throughout the week. Then, as a truck passed by, Anje saw her father, riding in it. She screamed to him and began to run. The truck stopped and Dr. van Maanen climbed down to greet his family. Hugging them all, he said, “We have never been so poor and never so rich. We have lost our village, our home and our possessions. But we have each other and we are alive.” As Dr. van Maanen got back
on the truck to care for the wounded, he arranged for the family to meet in Apeldoorn. As they walked among hundreds of other refugees, Anje turned to look back. “The sky was colored scarlet,” she wrote, “like the blood of the airborne who gave their lives for us. We four all are alive, but at the end of this hopeless war week the battle has made an impression on my soul. Glory to all our dear, brave Tommies and to all the people who gave their lives to help and save others.”

  In Driel, Cora Baltussen awoke to a strange silence. It was midmorning Tuesday, September 26. Painfully stiff from her wounds and puzzled by the silence, Cora limped outside. Smoke billowed up from the center of the town and from Oosterbeek across the river. But the sounds of battle were gone. Getting her bicycle, Cora pedaled slowly toward town. The streets were deserted; the troops had gone. In the distance she saw the last vehicles in a convoy heading south for Nijmegen. Near one of Driel’s ruined churches only a few soldiers lingered by some jeeps. Suddenly Cora realized that the British and Poles were withdrawing. The fight was over; the Germans would soon return. As she walked over to the small group of soldiers, the bell in the damaged church steeple began to toll. Cora looked up. Sitting in the belfry was an airborne trooper, a bandage around his head. “What happened?” Cora called out. “It’s all over,” the trooper shouted. “All over. We pulled out. We’re the last lot.” Cora stared up at him. “Why are you ringing the bell?” The trooper kicked at it once more. The sound echoed over the thousand-year-old Dutch village of Driel and died away. The trooper looked down at Cora. “It seemed like the right thing to do,” he said.

  *“The tanks arrived in the early hours of the morning,” notes General Harmel in Annex No. 6 of his war diary, September 24th, adding that “II Panzer Corps headquarters allocated the bulk of this detachment, 45 tiger tanks, to the 10th SS Frundsberg Division.”