Elements of Colonel William E. Ekman’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment were also on the move from DZ N less than an hour after landing, and enjoyed arguably the easiest ride in securing its objectives. The town of Groesbeek just north of the DZ was rapidly secured as planned with the assistance of the Dutch Resistance, and a two-Battalion perimeter was established along the southern edge of the Groesbeek Heights overlooking the town and the road and railway line running north to Nijmegen.64 British intelligence reports had indicated that German armoured units were stationed in the nearby Reichswald Forest, just inside the German border to the east of the landing area. A company-sized patrol established that the reports were erroneous and simultaneously obtained more accurate information from Dutch civilians. The news doubtless came as a relief to the lightly armed paratroopers, whose only anti-tank weapons at that point consisted of Gammon bombs, Bazooka rocket launchers, the 700 anti-tank mines Gavin had insisted his paratroopers carry for the jump, and six glider-borne 57mm guns belonging to Battery A, 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion.65 Ekman also despatched patrols to the three crossings on the Maas-Waal Canal to assist the 504th Regiment, one of which was instrumental in finally securing the Molenhoek bridge. Another patrol came close to securing an additional bridge carrying the Nijmegen-Eindhoven railway line over the River Maas near Mook, south-west of the landing area but was foiled by a German demolition party. All the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s immediate objectives had been accomplished by 20:00.66 The 82nd Airborne Division’s support elements that landed on DZ/LZ N were equally swift in accomplishing their immediate post-drop tasks. Companies B and D from Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin A. Bedell’s 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion protected elements of Division HQ on the move from the DZ, and subsequently provided security for the Division Command Post after its establishment at 17:15, while Company C moved west to contact the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment on the Maas-Waal Canal. Lieutenant-Colonel Wilbur Griffiths’ 376th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion gathered up and assembled ten of its twelve 75mm Pack Howitzers, each of which had been dropped broken down into seven parts; it is unclear what became of the other two guns and they were presumably dropped wide. The Battalion then moved 1,000 yards to a pre-selected firing position within the Division perimeter. Griffiths broke an ankle on landing but resorted to a commandeered Dutch wheelbarrow as makeshift transport around the Battalion gun position. He was so engaged when Gavin called in while checking the status of his units, and jocularly reported his guns’ readiness in person. The guns fired their first fire mission in support of the 505th Regiment at 18:00, just four-and-a-half hours after jumping.67 Finally, the eight 57mm anti-tank guns belonging to the misleadingly named Battery A, 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion were parcelled out, with two guns apiece being assigned to each of the Division’s Parachute Infantry Regiments. The remaining pair of guns was kept back as a reserve in the vicinity of Gavin’s Division Command Post.68
Although saddled with the ‘most difficult regimental mission of all’, the immediate post-drop phase began relatively smoothly for Colonel Roy Lindquist’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment.69 The misdropped 3rd Battalion swiftly rallied with the remainder of the Regiment on DZ T, and all three Battalions moved off for their objectives only twenty minutes or so behind schedule. Lieutenant-Colonel Otho E. Holmes’ 2nd Battalion moved west from the DZ toward Hatert, leaving Company D to defend the DZ for use the following day. A Platoon despatched to assist the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment in seizing the nearby bridge was unsuccessful but by nightfall the remainder of the 2nd Battalion had accomplished its initial mission by establishing a blocking position astride the Nijmegen-Mook road. Lieutenant-Colonel Louis Mendez and the 3rd Battalion moved north to secure the highest point of the Groesbeek Heights around Berg-en-Dal, and established an east-facing defensive perimeter covering the villages of Wyler and Beek at the base of the Heights. Mendez was also tasked to secure Beek but this was stymied by the onset of darkness and the task was postponed until the following day.70
The northern sector of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s perimeter, linking the 2nd and 3rd Battalions to the west and east respectively, was assigned to Lieutenant-Colonel Shields Warren’s 1st Battalion. Warren’s initial objective, an area of high ground overlooking the southern Nijmegen suburb of De Ploeg, lay three miles or so north of the DZ and approximately the same distance from the bridges across the River Waal on the north side of the city. Two pre-arranged patrols from Captain Jonathan E. Adams’ Company A were on the move toward the objective within thirty minutes of landing, and the remainder of Company A led the 1st Battalion advance within the hour. The move to and occupation of the initial objective was relatively uneventful, with the capture of a handful of German labour troops being the only sign of enemy activity, but it was also accompanied by a noticeable degree of straggling and discarding of equipment and ammunition. Captain Adams subsequently observed that his Company was ‘not in the best training shape’ and that he was one of the few men still carrying an anti-tank mine when Company A reached the objective. Adams also noted a widespread and unwarranted assumption that the operation would continue in the same easy manner it had begun, which he attributed to a lack of time to fully train and assimilate the large number of replacements posted in to make up losses incurred in Normandy. The Battalion Executive Officer, Captain Benjamin F. Delamater, noted that the same problem across the entire 1st Battalion and particularly the heavily laden 81mm Mortar Platoon, which was obliged to drop out briefly en masse, although they caught up by the time the Battalion reached the objective; Delamater put it down to moving too fast during the post-jump ‘let down’ period.71
Be that as it may, the 1st Battalion was digging in on its objectives within three hours of leaving the DZ and was joined there by Lieutenant-Colonel Lindquist, accompanied by his personal radio operator and two Dutch military interpreters attached to his HQ for the operation. His appearance appears to have been connected to Gavin’s verbal pre-jump instructions to despatch a force to secure the Nijmegen bridges ‘without delay after landing’.72 Although Gavin had specified the 1st Battalion for the mission Lindquist had also provisionally warned off the 3rd Battalion, too, as a contingency measure, but the underlying problem was Lindquist’s understanding of Gavin’s verbal instructions, which Lindquist took to mean he was free to put off moving on the bridges until all his Regimental tasks had been fully accomplished. Consequently, Lindquist instructed Warren to concentrate on digging in on the De Ploeg objective and tying in his flanks with the 2nd and 3rd Battalions while being ‘prepared to go into Nijmegen later’.73 Gavin, however, was looking for a more urgent and literal interpretation of his instructions.74 In the event Lindquist modified his intentions slightly after several members of the Dutch Resistance turned up at the 1st Battalion’s location and reported that the Germans had abandoned Nijmegen leaving the Waal bridges held by an eighteen-strong party of German troops.75 Lindquist therefore authorised Warren to despatch an ‘aggressive patrol’ into Nijmegen to check the veracity of the Dutch reports, with instructions to secure the south end of the road bridge if possible. The patrol, commanded by a Lieutenant Robert J. Weaver and consisting of a Platoon from Company C reinforced with the Battalion Intelligence Section and two .30 Machine Gun Squads, was to approach the bridge from the east, presumably using the circuitous route Gavin had drawn up in England to minimise the possibility of becoming disoriented in Nijmegen’s streets. Whatever the provenance of its route, Weaver’s patrol moved off at 18:30.76 However, while Weaver and his men were making their preparations Gavin had become aware that Lindquist had not yet moved on the Nijmegen bridges in strength and radioed him ‘to delay not a second longer and get the bridge as quickly as possible with Warren’s battalion’.77 With Gavin’s intent finally made absolutely explicit, Lindquist called a conference at 18:00 to formulate a plan with Warren and Captains Jonathan E. Adams and Woodrow W. Millsaps, commanding Companies A and B respectively. Reinfor
ced with two .30 Machine Gun Squads and two 81mm mortars, Adams and Millsaps were to advance into Nijmegen and approach the road bridge from the south-east to avoid the possibility of clashing with Weaver’s earlier patrol, assisted by a member of the Dutch Resistance; the latter was to guide the paratroopers via the Resistance HQ for the latest intelligence on what was reported to be the control post for demolition charges rigged on the bridge.78 Matters where then delayed by Dutch reports of a large German force lurking in the woods to the rear of the 1st Battalion’s position. The report proved to be erroneous but it took the patrol despatched to verify its accuracy until after dark to confirm the fact.79
There was one other unit ensconced in the 82nd Airborne Division’s area of responsibility. Lieutenant-General Browning had landed at 14:00 on LZ N with his Advanced Airborne Corps HQ in twenty-nine Horsa gliders stripped as we have seen from the 1st Airborne Division’s already limited allotment. After exiting his Horsa and running across the LZ to the Reichswald in order to be the first British officer to urinate on German soil, Browning supervised the unloading of his personal Jeep and specifically mounted a hand-sewn Pegasus pennant on the vehicle’s front bumper. With these weighty matters attended to the Advanced Corps HQ was established at the southern edge base of the Groesbeek Heights, and radio contact was rapidly established with Gavin’s nearby Division HQ, by the simple expedient of handing the Americans a radio set to replace their own, all of which had been damaged on landing.80 A telephone line was also run out to the 82nd Airborne Division HQ, but the first officer allotted the task, Lieutenant Fuller Gee from the Royal Corps of Signals, lost both legs when his collapsible Welbike ran over a German mine; he died later in the evening. The task was completed by Lieutenant Nick Carter, attached to Browning’s HQ from the 101st Airborne Division.81
The superfluous nature of Browning’s presence in Holland soon became apparent. No contact could be made with the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem, and contact with British 2nd Army HQ and the main Airborne Corps HQ at Moor Park was of limited utility because Browning’s end lacked the trained cipher operators necessary to handle secure transmissions. As Browning himself acknowledged in a post-operation report ‘Corps Signals in the field and at Airborne Base were totally inadequate in personnel and equipment and training.’ Much of the problem lay in the fact that 1st Airborne Corps HQ overall was only a training and administrative entity with little to no operational function or experience.82 Browning must have been only too aware of these limitations and the fact that his move to Holland would effectively remove him from the means to exercise effective command, and in that light it is difficult to interpret Browning’s actions as anything other than placing his career ambitions ahead of the success of Operation MARKET.
By nightfall on 17 September and thus within six hours of landing, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had seized the bulk of their initial objectives. A total of eleven bridges had been secured intact across five of the watercourses on the GARDEN line of advance, spanning the River Dommel, the Zuid Willems Canal, the River Aa, the River Maas and the Maas-Waal Canal. Of the remaining two watercourses, both ends of the bridge site over the Wilhelmina Canal near Son had been secured while efforts were ongoing to seize another crossing near Best, and a move to secure the Nijmegen road bridge across the River Waal was underway, having been delayed by the need to meet Browning’s edict placing the seizure of the Groesbeek Heights above securing the river crossings. This was a highly creditable performance by any standard, and was in no small part due to painstaking preparation, aggression and speed displayed by the units involved. The 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was perhaps the fastest off the mark, with elements on the move from the DZ within twenty minutes of the jump, but numerous other units were on the move well within an hour after landing. It is unclear if all the seized bridges were rigged for demolition like the ones across the Maas-Waal Canal at Molenhoek, Malden and Hatert and the Wilhelmina Canal near Son, although it is logical to assume that they were. Consequently, while the US paratroopers thus created their own good fortune to an extent, their success was also in large part down to a combination of surprise and sheer good luck.
This is in no way a criticism of the troops involved, but merely an inescapable consequence of the limitations of the technique employed. Specifically, no matter how well prepared, motivated and swift the parachute troops may have been, it was not generally possible to deliver large numbers of them in daylight sufficiently close to their objectives to permit them to overcome an alert and prepared enemy before the latter could detonate pre-placed demolition charges. The truth of this is clear from events on 17 September when, despite being delivered accurately in a compact landing pattern a mile and one-and-a-half miles respectively from their objectives, the 506th and 504th Parachute Infantry Regiments were still unable to prevent the Germans demolishing their target bridges at Son, Hatert and Malden. What was required was a highly trained and dedicated glider force capable of delivering troops very close to, or even directly onto, spot targets such as bridges. This was not a deficiency specific to the operation in Holland, for such a capability would also have been highly beneficial in Normandy; the la Barquette locks, bridges over the River Merderet and causeway exits from the UTAH landing beaches and the strongpoints guarding their seaward ends were tailor-made targets for such a capability.
However, US airborne doctrine relied overwhelmingly upon parachute insertion as its primary means of delivery, with gliders, their pilots and dedicated passengers being relegated to a subsidiary and subordinate role. USAAF regulations defined US glider pilots as merely the aerial equivalent of truck drivers with no combat role save in ‘exceptional circumstances’,83 while US Glider Infantry soldiers were considered very much second-class Airborne citizens, being denied the hazard pay, special insignia and uniform items enjoyed by their Parachute Infantry colleagues until at least July 1944.84 More importantly, US glider pilots were not trained in the requisite techniques or to the necessary standard to perform such missions, and the US Army arguably did not attain a capability akin to that provided by the British Glider Pilot Regiment until the advent of the troop-carrying helicopter. The irony was that the British had exactly this capability but chose not to use it for no discernible reason. As we have seen, Operation COMET envisaged a pre-dawn glider coup-de-main to seize the Arnhem road bridge but this was dropped from the MARKET plan and Urquhart was unable to persuade Hollinghurst’s RAF planners to reinstate it, even with the support of the commander of the Glider Pilot Regiment.85 It is interesting to speculate how Operation MARKET might have proceeded had specialist glider capability been more readily available and/or properly utilised.
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The bulk of the 1st Airborne Division’s first lift was slated to remain on or near the Wolfheze landing area until the arrival of the Division’s second lift, which was scheduled to arrive during the morning of Monday 18 September. As a result, the Divisional units were either tasked to carry out their primary missions in the interim or posted to defend designated sectors of the Divisional perimeter. After securing the drop and landing zones for the main landings and capturing sixteen assorted Germans and a staff car, the 21st Independent Parachute Company dug in without incident around its post-drop RV at the Reijers-Camp Farm for example, covering the northern section of DZ S.86 The 1st Airlanding Light Regiment RA’s Nos. 1 and 3 Batteries were dug in on the eastern side of the landing area ready to provide fire support by 16:30 and when no missions had been received by 18:00 the Regimental commander, Lieutenant-Colonel William ‘Sheriff’ Thompson, was heard to complain that his men may as well have come in with the second lift. In the event, the Regiment’s first shoot was carried out by Lieutenant Keith Halliday and No. 1 Battery against German troops in the vicinity of the Hotel Wolfheze, just east of LZ Z, at dusk. In the meantime Lieutenant Frank Moore from No. 3 Battery took a patrol to investigate reports of brand-new German 105mm guns stored in the vicinity of the Wolfheze mental asylum. The g
uns were there as reported but Lieutenant Moore decided to leave well alone when one of the pieces proved to be booby-trapped.87 The guns were subsequently destroyed in place by Captain Roger Binyon and No. 1 Platoon from the 9th Field Company RE on the morning of 19 September.88
Not all the Divisional units were so passively engaged. Major John Winchester’s 9th Field Company RE lost one officer to enemy fire before it had fully assembled at its post-landing RV; Lieutenant Jerry Wise was hit in both legs, the left arm and face by a German machine-gun located in the woods east of LZ Z but nonetheless managed to reach the RV under his own steam. After regrouping and despatching a number of small detachments to accompany other units as previously arranged, the Company moved off to secure the Hotel Wolfheze, which was earmarked to serve as Company HQ. Captain Roger Binyon’s No. 1 Platoon led off at 15:10 accompanied by Lieutenant Roy Timmins and part of No. 2 Platoon, followed by Company HQ and part of No. 3 Platoon twenty minutes later. The HQ group covered only 600 yards before being held up by German machine-gun fire, and after Lieutenant James Steel disappeared without trace after going forward to investigate on a motorcycle, the group pulled back slightly and dug in around a track junction 500 yards east of the Company RV.
Captain Binyon had meanwhile run into problems of his own at the Hotel Wolfheze. Lieutenant Timmins was killed and Sapper Peter Greig seriously wounded in the stomach while performing a flanking attack on the hotel at around 18:00, and Lance-Corporal William Takle was subsequently wounded in turn while trying to assist Greig. Both men died of their wounds the following day.89 In the meantime a party of six Germans, possibly attempting to outflank Binyon’s party, ran into the southern edge of the Company HQ perimeter at around 19:00. Major Winchester’s men killed three, claimed three more wounded and captured an MG42; Captain Binyon was ordered to withdraw his party to the Company HQ position around thirty minutes later.90 Given the timings, the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment’s first shoot may have been intended to cover Captain Binyon’s withdrawal.
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