The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  The first British pathfinders jumped at 12:40 P.M., followed twenty minutes later by gliders landing every nine seconds—“plowing up dirt like a ship in a heavy sea,” in one GI’s image. Then, from an altitude of six hundred feet, the parachutists spilled out, so many that astonished witnesses below thought they were snowflakes or flak bursts, and within eighty minutes those twenty thousand Allied cutthroats were deep behind enemy lines. Aircraft losses were modest: sixty-eight planes, including fighters and bombers lost to flak. Gleeful children near Arnhem sang “Jingle Bells” in Dutch to parachutists wriggling from their silks.

  That this welcoming chorus congregated several miles west of town underscored one of two tactical complications beclouding the sunny first hours of MARKET. Airborne doctrine held that drop and landing zones should be as close to the mission objective as possible, preferably within five miles; these instead lay seven to eight miles from the Arnhem road bridge. Accusatory fingers subsequently would be pointed either at Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the 1st Airborne Division, a novice parachutist who was said to lack the requisite experience and credibility to insist on closer drops, or, more plausibly, at air commanders who refused to fly closer because of possible enemy flak and because of congestion in the airspace between Arnhem and Nijmegen.

  The second complication was evident just by counting noses: barely half of the 3.5-division force designated for MARKET was on the ground, and no more troops would arrive until the following day or later. General Brereton’s troop carrier commanders had insisted that only a single mission fly on Sunday; a second sortie would ostensibly exhaust air and ground crews and leave insufficient time to service and reload the planes (although double missions over the same distance had been flown from Italy in DRAGOON the previous month). Pleas by airborne commanders and by an emissary from Montgomery to Brereton’s headquarters failed to reverse the decision, despite an analysis that showed transporting the entire combat force at a deliberate rate could take up to four days. Particularly for the British, the combination of too few men with too far to travel would soon prove fateful, even as paratroopers from the 1st Airborne Division collected their kit and hurried east in search of a bridge to seize.

  * * *

  The day went well enough for the Yanks in the south. Almost seven thousand men from the 101st Airborne spilled across the polders between Veghel and Best, where red flags and billowing orange smoke denoted battalion assembly areas. Dutchmen capered through the fields, shaking hands with their liberators and offering sandwiches, pitchers of milk, and bicycles, for which receipts were issued. Stray Germans here and there were captured or killed in a hundred sharp spasms of violence; under a fruit tree near a captured jam factory, where GIs discovered shelves of preserved apples, pears, and plums, the poet-paratrooper Louis Simpson found a mattress “with a German officer stretched on it. He had been laid there to die in all possible comfort.”

  Nine road and rail bridges stood in the division sector, but only at Son, four miles north of Eindhoven, did one span cause immediate grief. At a crossing over the Wilhelmina Canal, a bazooka team from the 506th Parachute Infantry knocked out an 88mm gun with a single round, and a sergeant with a tommy gun mowed down six fleeing crewmen. Troopers pressed to within thirty yards of the canal bank, only to see the bridge abruptly levitate from its piers and vanish in a smoky roar. Hardly had the debris stopped raining than GIs swam to the south bank or crossed in rowboats. Using ropes, scavenged doors, and barn wood, engineers threw a narrow catwalk across the stone stubs of the now naked piers, and a thousand men tiptoed to the far bank as an inky evening settled over the battlefield. The 506th was supposed to sprint south and seize Eindhoven and its bridges by eight P.M., welcoming Horrocks’s Guardsmen from Bourg-Léopold, but the delay at Son meant that any rendezvous would have to await first light on Monday.

  Twenty miles north, 7,300 troops from the 82nd Airborne had also arrived intact in a confetti of green, orange, blue, red, and chartreuse parachutes. All but one of 482 planes and two of 50 gliders reached the target zones below Nijmegen. Among the few jump casualties was the 82nd commander, James Gavin, who fractured two vertebrae in a hard landing between Groesbeek and Mook. Allowing himself little more than a grimace, Gavin shed his parachute, picked up an M-1 rifle, and in less than an hour had set up his command post in a leafy thicket just west of Groesbeek.

  With the ascension of Matthew Ridgway to command the XVIII Airborne Corps, Gavin had taken over the 82nd in mid-August. At thirty-seven he would be not only the youngest major general in the U.S. Army during World War II, but also the youngest division commander since the Civil War. That achievement was all the more remarkable given his start in life. Gavin was an orphan (he later concluded that his mother had been an immigrant Irish nun in Brooklyn); adopted as a toddler, he was raised among Pennsylvania’s anthracite collieries by a woman who invoked the Holy Family as she beat him with a hairbrush, a broomstick, or a cat-o’-nine-tails specially made in a harness shop. Sometimes she waited until the child was asleep to launch her assault.

  After eight years of grammar school, Gavin soaped miners’ beards for a barber, delivered boots for a shoemaker, and ran a filling station for an oil company. On his seventeenth birthday he fled to New York and joined the Army. Stationed in Panama, he read and studied diligently enough to win admission to West Point. He lied about his age to avoid disclosing that he had enlisted as a minor. A perpetual student he remained, even now subscribing to The New Yorker, Time, Reader’s Digest, and the Book-of-the-Month Club. In a loose-leaf notebook titled “Generalship,” organized by virtues such as “enterprise” and “intelligence,” he copied a phrase he attributed to Voltaire: “That calm courage in the midst of tumult, that serenity of a soul in danger, which is the greatest gift of nature for command.” Gavin called it “the courage of two o’clock in the morning.” Ridgway had recently praised his young subordinate’s “self-possession regardless of the pressure in and out of battle, loyalty, initiative, zeal, sound judgment, and common sense.… He adds great charm of manner.”

  Though Gavin casually referred to war as “the scuffle,” he was realistic about human limits. After combat jumps into Sicily, Salerno, and Normandy, he had come to believe that “courage for every man is like a bank account” that must not be overdrawn. MARKET would require another judicious withdrawal. “It looks very rough,” he had written in his diary on Thursday about the impending attack. “If I get through this one I will be very lucky.”

  Eleven bridges could be found in the 82nd sector, and enemy demolitionists blew those at Malden, Mook, and Hatert as paratroopers closed in. But the rivet-skinned, nine-arch span over the Maas at Grave still stood when soldiers from the 504th Parachute Infantry rushed the southern ramp, gutting a concrete flak tower with bazooka rounds through the firing ports, then shooting up two truckloads of absconding Germans and swinging a captured 20mm gun onto the remaining defenders. Shouts, explosions, bullets pinging off the girders—the battle din ebbed at last and a brilliant bouquet of green flares signaled that the hour was won. Engineers snipped detonation wires and ripped out boxes of dynamite painted to resemble bridge steel. In Grave the Dutch sang “Tipperary” as the Germans skulked off, and a message flew up the division chain of command: “Bridge number eleven is ours.”

  Bridge eleven and all its sisters were worthless if the Germans seized one of the few bits of elevated terrain in Holland, and this beyond all else preoccupied Gavin. Groesbeek Ridge, an unprepossessing eminence three hundred feet high and five miles long southeast of Nijmegen, dominated the Maas, the Waal, and the Maas–Waal Canal; General Browning’s orders to the 82nd specified that “the capture and retention of the high ground between Nijmegen and Groesbeek is imperative in order to accomplish the division’s task.” With eight 75mm howitzers banging away an hour after the jump—each had arrived in seven pieces, by parachute—Gavin spent the afternoon shoring up strongpoints along the ridge and squinting across the nearby German border for signs
of an enemy counterattack. Nijmegen and its two grand bridges would have to wait until these approaches were secure.

  Near the 82nd command post, a Dutch commando captain stepped into a farmhouse outside Groesbeek to use the telephone. After ringing friends in the north, he emerged to tell Gavin, “Fine. Everything is going as planned, and the British have landed at Arnhem.”

  * * *

  So too had the Germans, and with this convergence the heartache began in earnest. Field Marshal Model had been sipping a preluncheon glass of Moselle in his headquarters at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek when a staff officer rushed in with news of British glider landings barely two miles away. “Right. Everyone out,” Model said. “They’re after me and this headquarters.” Hurrying down the steps, papers and underwear spilling from his attaché case, he leaped into a staff car and raced to the II SS Panzer Corps headquarters, eighteen miles to the east. By midafternoon he was organizing German counterblows at Arnhem, Nijmegen, and points south. “Imagine!” Model exclaimed. “They almost got me.”

  They did get the Arnhem commandant, General Friedrich Kussin, who wandered across town in his Citroën to investigate the commotion only to blunder into a fusillade of British rifle and Sten-gun fire that flattened his tires and killed both his driver and batman. Shot in the chest and throat, Kussin flopped from the car to the pavement, quite dead, a revolver in his gloved right hand and an unfinished cigarette in his left, his mouth agape in a rictus of astonishment. Vengeful Dutchmen ripped the rank badges from his collar.

  Not much else went right for General Urquhart or his division. Six thousand German troops had bivouacked around greater Arnhem—double the anticipated number; they were mostly grenadiers from the two SS panzer divisions as well as “ear and stomach battalions” composed of soldiers with maladies afflicting those organs. Others hurried into battle aboard farm carts, wood-burning trucks, and even fire engines. Within ninety minutes of the British landings, about four hundred SS soldiers had blocked two of the western approaches to town, forcing the Tommies into a garden-by-garden gunfight on their long tramp toward the bridge.

  Ignoring warnings of danger ahead, Urquhart—a strapping, amiable Scot, with combat experience in Africa and Italy—wandered too far forward and found himself first under machine-gun fire and then cut off from the rest of his command in a confused warren of Dutch alleys. Darting through kitchens and across terraces, he and two other officers finally hid in the attic at 14 Zwarteweg, without food, water, or a toilet, as SS troops sniffed through the streets below and positioned an antitank gun near the front door. For forty hours, until the Germans retrenched to the east, the 1st Airborne Division headquarters would be without its commander. Urquhart acknowledged feeling “idiotic, ridiculous, [and] as ineffectual in the battle as a spectator.”

  A single British parachute battalion won through. Following a southern route through gorse and birch stands near the Neder Rijn, Lieutenant Colonel John D. Frost’s 2nd Battalion had woven proffered marigolds into their helmet nets and captured a few German soldiers said to have been “snogging with their Dutch girlfriends.” Radios proved so erratic that bugle calls were used instead, and the southern span of Arnhem’s rail bridge blew up in the faces of the platoon sent to secure it. But at eight P.M. Tommies reached the northern piers of the intact road bridge, and Frost’s men soon burrowed into buildings along the riverbank. Several dozen paratroopers wrapped their hobnail boots in curtain strips to deaden their footfalls, then crept onto the span only to be smacked back by cackling machine guns. British return fire with an antitank gun and a flamethrower ignited paintwork on the girders. A German attempt to rush 10th SS Panzer troops across the bridge from the south ended with enemy trucks blazing on the ramp and charred bodies smoldering in the roadbed.

  A brutal deadlock had begun. Of nearly 6,000 British paratroopers, only 740 would reach the bridge, enough to revoke German possession of the span but too few to assert a British claim. Relief battalions pushing from the west found the streets ever more perilous, not least from German snipers lashed to tree branches with rope stays. Flames danced all night from the burning bridge and from wooden houses set ablaze by gunfights along the embankments. From his makeshift command post a block from the river, Frost—an Africa veteran who optimistically had shipped his golf clubs and hunting gun overland to Holland—peered south through the lurid orange glow, hoping that a new day might reveal Horrocks’s tanks lining the far shore.

  * * *

  That would not happen.

  At precisely two P.M. that Sunday, seventeen Allied artillery regiments had begun a lacerating barrage, as Horrocks and his coterie looked north and rubbed their hands in gleeful anticipation atop the factory roof near Bourg-Léopold. Shells gnawed at fields and pine thickets for a thousand yards on either side of the Eindhoven road, and every five minutes another eight Typhoons swooped in with rocket fire to savage any lurking ambushers.

  At 2:35 P.M., the Irish Guards lieutenant commanding the lead tank ordered, “Driver, advance!” Like a circus parade the column surged forth, nose to tail, gears grinding, every chassis groaning beneath ammunition crates, rations for six days, and enough jerrican fuel to travel another 250 miles after gas tanks ran dry. The artillery barrage now rolled forward, barely three hundred yards ahead of the armored vanguard; brown dust and blue exhaust masked the bursting shells. Across the Dutch border they rumbled at eight miles per hour. “Advance going well,” an officer reported by radio. “Leading squadron has got through.”

  No sooner had the hand-rubbers on the roof congratulated one another than scarlet tongues of German fire licked along the column. Within two minutes, nine Irish Guards tanks had been disemboweled with antitank guns and hand-held Panzerfausts—“a nasty gap of a half a mile littered with burning hulks,” as one witness described the scene. Infantrymen hitchhiking on the armored decks dove into roadside ditches, and crews scrambled from their hatches except for a few poor souls who burned down to their tanker boots. An armored bulldozer lurched forward to push the pyres from the concrete roadbed, and Typhoons pirouetted in for another two hundred sorties, rocketing enemy positions real and imaginary.

  The German defenders soon were identified as two battalions from the 9th SS Panzer Division—“a complete surprise,” British intelligence acknowledged—plus two battalions from the 6th Parachute Regiment. “Our intelligence spent the day in a state of indignant surprise,” the Irish Guards war diary recorded. “One German regiment after another appeared which had no right to be there.” The consequent “ugly mood” inspired one Irish sergeant to force several prisoners onto his tank at gunpoint to identify hidden enemy emplacements. Even so, another artillery barrage was needed at six P.M. before the Irish Guards staggered into little Valkenswaard to harbor for the night on the central square, now laved in orange light from burning houses. A few dozen scruffy prisoners sat in a cage tucked beneath the municipal bandstand.

  For seven miles from the Dutch border to Valkenswaard, double- and triple-banked British vehicles jammed the road, annoyed by occasional enemy mortar rounds. In few spots was this narrow aisle into occupied Holland wider than thirty feet, and the Guards Armored Division now knew vividly what a terrain study had concluded a week earlier: “Cross-country movement in the area varies from impracticable to impossible.… All canals and rivers present obstacles, accentuated by the thousands of dikes and shallow drainage ditches.” Eindhoven still lay six miles ahead—the 101st Airborne’s failure to reach the city by eight P.M. had not mattered—and Arnhem seemed a world away. Despite the quick destruction of those first nine tanks, losses were light: only fifteen dead in the entire Guards Armored Division. Yet the XXX Corps drive stopped cold for twelve hours, and little consideration was given to preserving at least an illusion of momentum, perhaps by letting the fresh Grenadier Guards pass through their battered Irish brethren. Horrocks had urged speed, but there was no speed.

  “Things are going very well indeed,” Brereton’s headquarters told SHAEF. �
��We have had very few losses.” Eisenhower’s operations chief phoned with “congratulations on the successful outcome of the operation,” the First Allied Airborne Army chief of staff noted in his diary. “Everyone at SHAEF was delighted.”

  Everyone at SHAEF was deluded: MARKET GARDEN had been lost on the very first day through failure to seize the bridges at Arnhem and Nijmegen, and the failure was compounded by the ponderous overland advance. A titanic, often heroic battle remained to play out, with particular fates by the tens of thousands in the balance. But the margin for victory, always razor thin, now was irretrievably gone.

  * * *

  Eindhoven was home to the Philips electronics company, founded in 1891 by a cousin of Karl Marx’s. In addition to making lightbulbs, the firm had expanded to vacuum tubes, radios, X-ray equipment, and, in 1939, the electric razor. Still, with no apologies to Paris, Eindhoven thought of itself as the Lichtstad, the city of light. For the past four years, nearly all exports had gone to Germany at Berlin’s insistence. But the firm proved deft at sheltering Jews by insisting they were irreplaceable specialists, and several hundred Jewish workers would survive the war.

  Now this company town of thatched roofs, clipped lawns, and neat privet hedges was set free. Troopers from the 101st Airborne nudged into Eindhoven from the north early on Monday, September 18, routing a few score Germans and finding all bridges intact. Jubilation burst from every doorway and unshuttered window, a din of tin whistles, toy drums, and singing citizens draped in orange, the Dutch national color. Thousands danced in gyrating circles, offering their liberators apples and gin. “The air seemed to reek with hate for the Germans,” an American officer observed.

  Not until dusk did XXX Corps arrive from the south, having taken the entire day to crawl six miles. Following a sluggish start from Valkenswaard, the Guards Armored Division encountered more troublesome ambuscades, now stiffened with Panther tanks. Fog at Belgian airfields and other aggravations grounded the Typhoons, and attempts to detour east or west were impeded by frail bridges. “Every time the advance seemed to be progressing,” the Grenadier Guards reported, “a canal or stream would intervene with a bridge that invariably broke after a couple tanks had crossed.” Pushing at last through orange-bedecked Eindhoven, the Guardsmen halted for the night below Son while engineers finished laying a Bailey bridge over that toppled Wilhelmina Canal highway span. Off again they rolled at dawn on Tuesday, down the tree-lined road known already as Hell’s Highway, through St.-Oedenrode and Veghel toward Grave, an iron thread snaking through one needle’s eye after another, now more than thirty-three hours behind schedule.