Bridge Too Far (13 page)

As Brereton later recalled the incident, “Browning was quite agitated about Operation Linnet II in which there was a serious shortage of information, photographs and, in particular, maps.  As a result, “Boy” claimed his troops could not be briefed properly.”  Airborne operations, Browning contended, “should not be attempted on such short notice.”  In principle Brereton had agreed, but he had told his deputy that “the disorganization of the enemy demands that chances be taken.” The disagreement between the two men had ended with Browning stiffly stating that he intended to submit his protest in writing.  A few hours later his letter had arrived.  Because “of our sharp differences of opinion,” Browning wrote, he could no longer “continue as Deputy Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army.”  Brereton, unintimidated, had begun at once to consider the problem of Browning’s replacement.  He had alerted General Ridgway to “stand by to take over.”  The delicate problem was solved when Operation Linnet II was canceled; the following day Brereton had persuaded Browning to withdraw his letter of resignation.

Now, their differences set aside, both men faced the huge, complex task of preparing Market.  Whatever reservations Browning entertained were now secondary to the job ahead.

There was one decision Brereton could not make at the initial meeting:

exactly how the airborne troops comprising the carpet were to be

carried to the targets.  The airborne commanders could

not make detailed plans until this greatest of all problems was solved.  The fact was that the airborne army was only as mobile as the planes that would carry it.  Apart from gliders, Brereton had no transports of his own.  To achieve complete surprise, the ideal plan called for the three and one-half divisions in Market to be delivered to landing zones on the same day at the same hour.  But the immense size of the operation ruled out this possibility.  There was an acute shortage of both aircraft and gliders; the planes would have to make more than one trip.  Other factors also forced a different approach.  Each division had separate combat requirements.  For example, it was essential that the transport for General Taylor’s 101/ Airborne carry more men than equipment when the attack began so that the division could carry out its assigned task of achieving a link-up with the Garden forces within the first few hours.  Also, Taylor’s men had to join quickly with the 82nd Airborne on the corridor north of them.  There, General Gavin’s troops not only had to secure the formidable bridges across the Maas and the Waal but also hold the Groesbeek ridge to the southeast, terrain which had to be denied the Germans because it dominated the countryside.  Gavin’s special assignment also imposed special requirements.  Because the 82nd Airborne would have to fight longer than the 101/ before the link-up occurred, Gavin needed not only troops but artillery.

Farther north, the problems of the British 1/ Airborne under General

Urquhart were different still.  The British 1/ was to hold the Arnhem

bridge until relieved.  With luck, German reaction would be sluggish

enough so that ground forces could reach the lightly armed British

troopers before any real enemy strength developed.  But until Horrocks’

tanks arrived, Urquhart’s men would have to hang on.  Urquhart could

not dissipate his strength by sending units south to link up with

Gavin.  Lying at the farthest end of the airborne carpet, the British

1/ Airborne would have to hold longer than anyone else.  For this

reason, Urquhart’s force was the largest, his division bolstered by the

addition of Polish paratroops, plus the 52nd Lowland Division,

which was to be flown in as soon as air strips could be located and prepared in the Arnhem area.

On the morning of the eleventh, after a hectic night of assessing and analyzing aircraft availability for the attack, Major General Paul L.  Williams, commander of the U.s. IX Troop Carrier Command, and in charge of all Market air operations, gave his estimate to Brereton.  There was such a shortage of gliders and planes, he reported, that even with an all-out effort, at best only half the troop strength of Browning’s total force could be flown in on D Day.  Essential items such as artillery, jeeps and other heavy cargo scheduled for the gliders could be included only on a strict priority basis.  Brereton urged his air commander to explore the possibility of two D-Day airlifts but the suggestion was found impractical.  “Owing to the reduced hours of daylight and the distances involved, it would not be possible to consider more than one lift per day,” General Williams said.  It was too risky.  There would be no time for maintenance or battle-damage repair, he pointed out, and almost certainly “casualties would result from pilot and crew fatigue.”

Hamstrung by the shortage of aircraft and the time limit, Brereton made some general assessments.  A full day would be required to take aerial-reconnaissance photographs of the Dutch bridges and terrain; two days must go into the preparation and distribution of maps of the areas; intelligence had to be gathered and analyzed; detailed battle plans must be prepared.  The most crucial decision of all: Brereton was forced to tailor the Market plan to suit the existing airlift capability.  He must transport his force in installments, flying the three and one half divisions to their targets over a period of three days.  The risks were great: German reinforcements might reach the Market-Garden area faster than anyone anticipated; antiaircraft fire could intensify; and there was always the possibility of bad weather.  Fog, high winds, a sudden storm—all likely at this time of the year—could cause disaster.

Worse, once on the ground, the paratroopers and glider-borne

infantry, arriving without heavy artillery or tanks, would be highly vulnerable.  General Horrocks’ XXX Corps tank columns, using one narrow highway, could not make the 64-mile dash to Arnhem and beyond unless Brereton’s men seized the bridges and held open the advance route.  Conversely, the airborne army had to be relieved at top speed.  Cut off far behind enemy lines and dependent on supplies by air, the airborne forces could expect German reinforcements to increase with each passing day.  At best the beleaguered troopers might hold out in their “airheads” for only a few days.  If the British armored drive was held up or failed to move fast enough, the airborne troops would inevitably be overrun and destroyed.

More could go wrong.  If General Taylor’s “Screaming Eagles” failed to secure the bridges directly ahead of the British Second Army’s tank spearheads, it would make little difference whether or not the men under General Gavin’s or General Urquhart’s command secured their objectives in Nijmegen and Arnhem.  Their forces would be isolated.

Certain classic airborne risks had to be accepted: divisions might be dropped or landed by gliders in the wrong areas; crossings might be destroyed by the enemy even as the attack began; bad weather could make air resupply impossible; and even if all the bridges were seized, the corridor might be cut at any point.  These were but a few of the imponderables.  The planners were gambling on speed, boldness, accuracy and surprise—all deriving from a precise synchronized land-and-airborne plan that, in its turn, gambled on German disorganization and inadequate strength.  Each link in Market-Garden was interlocked with the next.  If one gave way, disaster might result for all.

In Brereton’s opinion, such risks had to be accepted.  The opportunity

might never arise again.  Additionally, on the basis of the latest

information of enemy strength, from Montgomery’s 21/ Army Group, Allied

Airborne headquarters still felt that Brereton’s forces would meet an

“ill-organized enemy of varying standards.”  It was not expected that

“any mobile force larger than a brigade group [about 3,000 men] with

very few tanks and guns

could be concentrated against the airborne troops before relief by the ground forces.”  It was expected “that the flight and landings would be hazardous, that the capture intact of the bridge objectives was more a matter of surprise and confusion than hard fighting.”  There was nothing here that the planners had not already taken under consideration.  The last words of the intelligence summation seemed almost superfluous—“the advance of the ground forces would be very swift if the airborne operations were successful.”

Major Brian Urquhart was deeply disturbed by the optimism permeating General Browning’s British I Airborne Corps headquarters.  The twenty-five-year-old intelligence chief felt that he was probably the only one on the staff with any doubts about Market-Garden.  Urquhart (no relation to the British 1/ Airborne Division commander, Major General Robert Urquhart) did not believe the optimistic estimates on enemy strength which arrived almost daily from Montgomery’s 21/ Army command.  By the morning of Tuesday, September 12, with D Day only five days away, his doubts about Market-Garden amounted to near-panic.

His feeling had been triggered by a cautious message from General

Dempsey’s British Second Army headquarters.  Quoting a Dutch report,

Dempsey’s intelligence staff warned of an increase in German strength

in the Market-Garden area and spoke of the presence of “battered panzer

formations believed to be in Holland to refit.”  Admittedly, the

information was vague.  Lacking any kind of confirmation, Dempsey’s

report was not included in the latest intelligence summaries of either

Montgomery’s or Eisenhower’s headquarters.  Urquhart could not

understand why.  He had been receiving similar disquieting news from

Dutch liaison officers at Corps headquarters itself.  And, like General

Dempsey’s staff, he believed them.  Adding his own information to that

received from Dempsey’s command, Major Urquhart felt reasonably certain

that elements of at least two panzer divisions were

somewhere in the Arnhem area.  The evidence was thin.  The units were unidentified, with strength unknown, and he could not tell whether they were actually being refitted or merely passing through Arnhem.  Nevertheless, Urquhart, as he later recalled, “was really very shook up.”

Ever since the inception of Operation Comet and its evolution into Market-Garden, Major Urquhart’s fears had been growing.  Repeatedly, he had voiced his objections to the operation to “anybody who would listen on the staff.”  He was “quite frankly horrified by Market-Garden, because its weakness seemed to be the assumption that the Germans would put up no effective resistance.”  Urquhart himself was convinced that the Germans were rapidly recovering and might well have more men and equipment in Holland than anyone realized.  Yet the whole essence of the scheme, as he saw it, “depended on the unbelievable notion that once the bridges were captured, XXX Corps’s tanks could drive up this abominably narrow corridor—which was little more than a causeway, allowing no maneuverability—and then walk into Germany like a bride into a church.  I simply did not believe that the Germans were going to roll over and surrender.”

At planning conferences, Major Urquhart became increasingly alarmed at

what he saw as “the desperate desire on everybody’s part to get the

airborne into action.”  There were constant comparisons between the

current situation and the collapse of the Germans in 1918.  Urquhart

remembers that General Browning, perhaps reflecting Montgomery’s views

and those of “several other British commanders, was thinking about

another great breakthrough.”  It seemed to the worried intelligence

officer that everyone around him thought the war would be over by

winter and “the Arnhem attack might be the airborne’s last chance of

getting into action.”  Urquhart was appalled at the lighthearted

metaphor—“it was described as a “party””—used in reference to

Market-Garden.  And, in particular, he was upset by General Browning’s

statement that the object of the airborne attack was to “lay a carpet

of airborne troops down over which our ground forces can pass.”  He

believed that “that single clich‘e had the

psychological effect of lulling many commanders into a passive and absolutely unimaginative state of mind in which no reaction to German resistance, apart from dogged gallantry, was envisaged.”  He considered the atmosphere at headquarters so unrealistic that, at one of the planning conferences, he asked “whether the “carpet” was to consist of live airborne troops or dead ones.”

“It was absolutely impossible,” he said later, “to get them to face the realities of the situation; their personal longing to get into the campaign before it ended completely blinded them.”  But young Urquhart was convinced that General Dempsey’s warning was accurate.  He believed there was German armor in the vicinity of Arnhem, but he needed to substantiate the report by getting more evidence.  A Spitfire fighter squadron equipped with special cameras for taking oblique pictures was stationed, Urquhart knew, at nearby Benson in Oxfordshire.  The squadron was currently searching out rocket sites along the Dutch coast.

On the afternoon of September 12, Major Urquhart requested low-level R.a.f. reconnaissance sweeps of the Arnhem area.  To avoid detection, enemy tanks would be hidden in forests or beneath camouflaged netting and might well escape high-altitude photographic flights.  Urquhart’s request was acknowledged; low-level missions would be flown over the Arnhem area, and he would get the results as fast as possible.  Photographs of the tanks, if they were there, might prove to all concerned that Major Urquhart’s fears were justified.

There was too little time now for airborne division commanders to check out intelligence reports firsthand.  They were dependent on Corps or First Allied Airborne headquarters for the latest estimates.  From experience, each commander knew that even this information would be several days old by the time he received it.  Still, in the general view, there was little reason to anticipate any powerful enemy resistance.  The risks involved in Market-Garden were, as a result, considered acceptable.