The 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment’s effort to relieve Lieutenant Wierzbowski had continued at dawn on 18 September. As we have seen, the 3rd Battalion’s Company H had originally been allotted the task of securing the Best bridges but became embroiled with German troops defending a road junction east of the town and when it eventually became apparent that the task required a larger force Lieutenant-Colonel Cole and the rest of the 3rd Battalion were despatched to assist at 18:00 on 17 September. However, a combination of German mortar and artillery fire and the onset of darkness obliged the newcomers to stop for the night a mile east of Best, just north of the Zonsche Forest. Cole ordered a resumption of the advance at first light on 18 September that succeeded in moving south and linking up with the isolated Company H, but German resistance frustrated subsequent attempts to move west on Best or south to the Wilhelmina Canal bridges and obliged the 3rd Battalion to dig in just inside the edge of the Forest; unbeknown to the paratroopers their opponents had been reinforced during the night by additional elements of Generalleutnant Walter Poppe’s 59 Infanterie Division. The reinforcement was part of the effort by Generaloberst Student at 1 Fallschirmjäger Armee to contain and destroy the US landings in the vicinity of Eindhoven as ordered by Heeresgruppe B the previous day. Another entire regiment detrained near Best at 11:45 on 18 September and while the German units were short of ammunition and in many instances lacked heavy weapons, they were nonetheless sufficiently well-armed and equipped to cause significant problems for the lightly armed Airborne troops.29 From the US perspective, the checking of Cole’s advance showed that the task of clearing Best was also too large for a single battalion, and that the action had evolved from attempting to seize additional bridges into the more critical matter of protecting the western edge of the 101st Airborne Division’s landing area for the Division’s second lift, which was scheduled to arrive in the early afternoon of 18 September. The 502nd Regiment’s commander, Colonel John H. Michaelis, therefore handed control of his 1st Battalion holding the bridges in St. Oedenrode to Division HQ in order to concentrate on the developing fight at Best before ordering Lieutenant-Colonel Steve A. Chappuis to move his 2nd Battalion west, establish contact with Cole’s right flank and then pivot left and clear the town from the north-east.
This Lieutenant-Colonel Chappuis duly attempted to do, advancing across newly harvested hay fields with all three of his companies in extended line in the face of mortar, artillery and automatic fire from German troops ensconced behind the Eindhovenseweg Zuid highway to their front. The paratroopers maintained their formation with exemplary courage and discipline, using piles of uncollected hay for concealment:
…each group of two or three men dashing to the next hay pile as it came their turn. It was as if the piles were of concrete. But machine-gun fire cut into them, sometimes setting the hay afire, sometimes wounding or killing the men behind them. That did not stop anyone except the dead and wounded…It was like a problem being worked out on a parade ground. The squad leaders were leading, the platoon leaders urged them on.
Another participant put it more succinctly: ‘We had no artillery and the Krauts had beaucoup of it. We lost a quarter of our men that day.’30 Exemplary courage and discipline could only go so far, and Chappuis was obliged to halt the advance as the casualty toll threatened to render his Battalion combat ineffective, with eight officers and approximately twenty per cent of its men killed or wounded in a matter of minutes.31 With the 2nd Battalion stopped and reorganising, the Germans ranged behind the highway turned their attention to the 3rd Battalion and also began to infiltrate small groups of infantry into the paratrooper’s lines, obliging Cole to call in the P-47s that had strafed Lieutenant Wierzbowski’s embattled platoon by the Wilhelmina Canal. The fighter-bombers’ first pass also hit Cole’s positions, apparently without causing casualties, until the paratroopers deployed fluorescent panels to mark their position. Subsequent passes fell along the line of the highway and beyond as needed, but while this prompted a marked slackening in the weight of German fire, it also brought a grimmer result. Lieutenant-Colonel Cole moved out from the shelter of the trees to obtain a clearer view of the strafing and in the process provided a German rifleman with a clear target; he was shot in the head and killed instantly. Command of the 3rd Battalion devolved to Major John P. Stopka, the Battalion Executive Officer, although he did not learn of the reason for his elevation until later.32
In contrast to all this Lieutenant-Colonel Cassidy’s 1st Battalion 502nd Regiment enjoyed a relatively quiet morning in St. Oedenrode. Heeresgruppe B had also ordered 1 Fallschirmjäger Armee to move on the US force holding the town via Schijndel, but the fight at Best meant Student was only able to spare three infantry companies, a police battalion and Fallschirmjäger Bataillon Ewald drawn from a local training establishment; another bataillon from the same source was directed to Veghel.33 None of these units were in a position to make contact with Cassidy’s Battalion on the morning of 18 September and the only excitement experienced in St. Oedenrode came from what the 1st Battalion later dubbed the ‘Incident of the Seven Jeeps’. At some point during the morning Colonel Harold H. Cartwright, a 1st Allied Airborne Army staff officer who appears to have landed in Holland with 101st Airborne Division HQ, led a party of five Jeeps north to investigate the situation at Veghel escorted by a guide from the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment and two additional Jeeps from the Division Reconnaissance Platoon. All went according to plan until the speeding Jeeps took a wrong turn in the centre of St. Oedenrode, which led the little convoy north through Company C’s lines, ignoring attempts to flag it down and on toward German-occupied Schijndel. Three miles further on, the Germans raked the convoy with mortar and small-arms fire that wounded several men, set the lead Jeep ablaze and forced everyone to seek cover in roadside ditches. The exception was the vehicle carrying Colonel Cartwright, which somehow managed to turn around and race back to St. Oedenrode, where Cartwright sought out Cassidy and requested he mount a rescue effort immediately.
The situation placed Cassidy in something of a quandary. The developing German pressure from the west meant that St. Oedenrode could be attacked at any time so he was reluctant to divert a major part of his strength from his primary mission of holding the Dommel bridges, but on the other hand a request from a higher ranking officer from an Army-level command could not be simply ignored either. Cassidy therefore compromised by handing the matter over to one of his most can-do officers, Lieutenant Joshua A. Mewborn from Company C. Mewborn was already on patrol in the area accompanied by a Private First Class Culverhouse and Privates Duval and Edward Leafty Junior, and Cassidy ordered him to take two additional squads and extricate the stalled convoy from its predicament. Heavy German fire forced the rescuers to seek cover around a thousand yards short of the staff party but Mewborn and his three original companions charged forward to the stalled Jeeps. Culverhouse and Duval succeeded in turning and driving two Jeeps to safety while Mewborn and Leafty laid down covering fire, and the latter then covered two medics attending the wounded before assisting in their evacuation. Their withdrawal was covered in turn by the remainder of the rescue party, which Lieutenant Troy Wall led forward to a point where it could put down suppressive fire on the German positions. All the staff party were escorted back to the safety of St. Oedenrode, with the rescue party suffering two wounded in the process.34
In the event, Colonel Cartwright and his companions were perhaps fortunate in being diverted from reaching the 501st Regiment’s positions at Veghel. As we have seen, Company E from the 2nd Battalion had spent the night fighting off German attacks down the east side of the Zuid Willems Canal to the north of Veghel, which only ceased after daybreak when Lieutenant Gregg was able to mount a counter-attack with his reserve platoon. The Germans then turned their attention to Lieutenant-Colonel Julian Ewell’s 3rd Battalion which was deployed in and around Eerde, a mile or so west of the rest of the Regiment in Veghel. The attackers focussed primarily on a roadblock established near
the railway station to the north of the town by Company I but were repulsed with the loss of forty-three prisoners, reportedly Luftwaffe NCOs; another attack at around midday was similarly handled although the Germans maintained their pressure on the beleaguered paratroopers.35 There was one final matter to be resolved by the 501st Regiment on the morning of D+1. A platoon-strength patrol led by 1st Lieutenant Louis E. Raffety had spent the night near Heeswijk on the east bank of the River Aa, four miles or so north-west of Veghel. Lieutenant-Colonel Kinnard’s 1st Battalion had been misdropped just north of Heeswijk the previous day and a party left behind to gather in supply bundles and tend jump casualties under Captain William G. Burd had been attacked and besieged in a large stone building adjacent to the DZ known as the Kasteel. Raffety’s patrol made it to within 800 yards of the DZ before German resistance obliged a halt for the night, and Colonel Johnson ordered the patrol recalled when daylight revealed Raffety was in danger of being outflanked and cut off. Kinnard was unwilling to let the matter drop however, and the following day he had a routine patrol from Company C led by Staff Sergeant William DeHuff extend its route to include the Kasteel. De Huff reached the DZ without incident and found most of the equipment bundles missing and two abandoned US mortars but no sign of Captain Burd, the clear-up group, Captain Kingston, his medics or the eight jump casualties, apart from a number of bloodied field dressings.36
***
The 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division’s most westerly unit, Colonel Reuben H. Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, spent a relatively quiet morning patrolling around their objectives: the 1,800-foot bridge across the River Maas at Grave and the area between the Maas and the Maas-Waal Canal to the east of the town. There was, however, an uncomfortable encounter for Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, whose Company I was dug in just east of the bridge. In the course of the morning a Military Policeman turned up at Burriss’ Command Post accompanied by two non-English-speaking Dutch telephone engineers and announced: ‘We’re here to repair the cable.’ The cable in question was a thick, black item discovered by one of Burriss’ men the previous day while digging in and mindful of instructions from Regiment to disrupt enemy communications wherever possible, he had ordered it severed. Burriss duly led the trio to the offending foxhole, the bottom of which was covered with ‘frazzled wires spilling out of their casing like multicoloured spaghetti’ and the sight immediately prompted a good deal of agitation between the telephone engineers who began jabbering excitedly in their own language. At this point Captain Burriss was called away to answer a field telephone call from Colonel Tucker who demanded to know what was going on in the Company I area. Puzzled, Burriss replied that things were pretty quiet and when Tucker mentioned the cut telephone cable he immediately owned up to the deed, citing the Colonel’s own instructions about disrupting enemy communications. ‘Yes, but I meant locally. You cut the international telephone cable. The 504th was planning to use it for our own communications,’ replied the exasperated Tucker. The latter’s exasperation was doubtless increased by the fact that General Gavin had explicitly forbidden the destruction of any communication cables bar German field telephone wires in his Field Order No. 11 issued to all the 82nd Airborne Division’s units on 13 September 1944.37 The telephone engineers were still busy splicing wire two days later when Burriss and Company I left for Nijmegen early in the morning of Wednesday 20 September.38
Major Harrison’s 1st Battalion of the 504th Regiment was dispersed in Company packets along the Maas-Waal Canal, holding the intact bridge captured the previous day at Molenhoek and both banks of the two destroyed bridges at Hatert and Malden that had been demolished before they could be secured. The most northerly bridge across the canal, a combined road and rail affair at Honinghutie, was not approached on 17 September even though it was the most direct route from Grave to Nijmegen, presumably because it lay some way from the 82nd Airborne Division’s DZs and because the 504th and 508th Regiments could only realistically be expected to deal with so many objectives at once. As we have seen, Browning’s insistence that Gavin secure the entirety of the Groesbeek Heights in addition to the water crossings in the Divisional area had stretched the 82nd Airborne Division to something approaching breaking point. Consequently, Gavin had designated the Honinghutie bridge, codenamed Bridge 10, a provisional joint objective to be secured by the 504th and 508th Regiments as soon as the situation permitted. Major Harrison’s contribution to the matter consisted of despatching a platoon north at 12:00 to assist the 508th Regiment’s assault on the Honinghutie bridge, which by that time had been secured.39
The 508th Regiment’s effort to secure the Honinghutie bridge began in the early morning of 18 September when Colonel Lindquist ordered his 2nd Battalion to secure the bridge immediately. Major Holmes delegated the task to Lieutenant Lloyd L. Polette’s 1st Platoon from Company F. Approaching the bridge from the south-east at around 06:00 the platoon came within 300 yards of the bridge before the German defenders opened fire. Polette then led a charge that carried the platoon to within 150 yards of their objective but at the cost of twelve killed and wounded. Driven to cover again by the intense German fire, Polette called for reinforcements and 81mm mortar support and set his surviving men to preventing the Germans from moving toward the bridge with small-arms fire; having seen several such attempts Polette surmised that the enemy was attempting to plant demolition charges. Reinforcements arrived at approximately 09:30 in the shape of Lieutenant Thomas Tomlinson’s 2nd Platoon from Company E, but the German fire was still too heavy for the paratroopers to move forward and the stalemate continued for another hour. At that point the Germans detonated their demolition charges, which destroyed the railway bridge while leaving the road bridge standing but severely damaged. In the meantime the attackers were reinforced by a section of 81mm mortars, imaginatively utilising a number of Dutch cattle as pack animals and their fire finally suppressed the defence sufficiently for Polette and Tomlinson to mount another charge. The German defences were cleared and the bridge secured by 12:00. The road bridge proved too badly damaged to use, obliging the relief force to use the more circuitous route over the Molenhoek bridge at the southern end of the Maas-Waal Canal, but Lieutenant Polette was nonetheless awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions.40
The Platoons from the 2nd Battalion were not the only elements of the 508th on the move in the early morning of 18 September. At around daybreak Brigadier-General Gavin visited Colonel Lindquist at his tactical Regimental HQ overlooking the Nijmegen suburb of De Ploeg, in order to clarify reports that the 1st Battalion had patrols on the Nijmegen road bridge.41 The actual situation report Gavin received was grim. ‘My heart sank. They had failed to get the bridge. The situation of the 1st Battalion was confusing. No one knew what had happened to it.’42 Determined to clarify the matter Gavin proceeded into Nijmegen in the 1st Battalion’s wake, running into Captain Bestebreurtje and a group of around six hundred Dutchmen looking for weapons to allow them to fight alongside their liberators on the way. Mindful that the success of MARKET was by no means guaranteed, Gavin warned them of the penalties of fighting in civilian attire and asked for their assistance in preventing the Germans from demolishing the Nijmegen road bridge by cutting wires and interfering with German access to the structure. He then continued to Lieutenant-Colonel Warren’s Command Post near the Keizer Karel Plein, arriving while the German dawn attack was in progress. He noted that the 1st Battalion was spread across a number of streets and buildings while the Germans appeared to be growing steadily stronger. In order to prevent the Battalion being overrun Gavin therefore ordered Warren to ‘withdraw from close proximity to the bridge and reorganize’ before moving off to visit the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment on the southern sector of the Divisional perimeter.43
However, while Warren was breaking contact at the Keizer Karel Plein and Lieutenant Weaver’s patrol was returning from the Keizer Lodewijkplein to the east, the 3rd Battalion 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment was
stepping into the breach. As noted earlier Gavin had specified the seizure of the Nijmegen road bridge be assigned to Warren’s 1st Battalion, but Lindquist had also warned Lieutenant-Colonel Louis Mendez that his 3rd Battalion might be required to provide additional manpower if circumstances required. Anticipating that this would be the case, Mendez had ordered Captain Russell C. Wilde’s Company G to reconnoitre toward the Nijmegen road bridge from the south-east after the Battalion had reorganised, possibly along the circuitous route Gavin had worked out for Lindquist back in England.44 After 1st Lieutenant Howard A. Greenwalt’s 3rd Platoon reached a position overlooking the south-eastern suburbs of Nijmegen without incident, Mendez despatched the remainder of Company G in their wake after dark on 17 September and Captain Wilde set up a defensive perimeter and awaited orders to move on the bridge.45 It is unclear precisely who finally issued the order. According to the Official History it came out of a meeting between Gavin and Lindquist, presumably during the former’s visit to the latter’s tactical HQ in the early morning of 18 September, but the same source also refers to Lieutenant-Colonel Mendez claiming to have launched the action on his own initiative.46 Whoever was responsible, Captain Wilde and Company G left their overnight position to move on the bridge at 07:45.47 Lieutenant Greenwalt’s platoon was assigned the lead and discovered a German hospital shortly after entering the suburbs, possibly the civilian St. Martin’s Hospital, which was swiftly searched for arms and left under guard.48 The precise route the advance followed is unclear but it followed a line toward the Keizer Lodewijkplein traffic roundabout at the southern end of the Nijmegen bridge ramp, and as usual the paratroopers attracted enthusiastic attention from crowds of Dutch civilians, many still in their nightclothes.
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