Bridge Too Far (18 page)

At First Allied Airborne Army headquarters, General Brereton’s chief

intelligence officer, British Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Tasker, was

not prepared to accept SHAEF’S report either.  Reviewing all the

information available, he decided there was no direct evidence that the

Arnhem area contained “much

more than the considerable flak defenses already known to exist.”

Everyone, it seemed, accepted the optimistic outlook of Montgomery’s headquarters.  As the British I Airborne Corps’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers, “21/ Army Group headquarters was the principal source of our intelligence, and we took what they gave us to be true.”  General Urquhart, commander of the British 1/ Airborne Division, put it another way.  “Nothing,” he said, “was allowed to mar the optimism prevailing across the Channel.”

Yet, besides SHAEF’S report on the “missing” panzers, there was other evidence of German buildup, again almost cursorily noted.  At the front, ahead of General Horrocks’ XXX Corps Garden forces, it was plain that an increasing number of German units were moving into the line.  Now the strategic error at Antwerp ten days before was beginning to build and threaten the grand design of Operation Market-Garden.  The German troops filling out General Student’s front were none other than units of the splintered divisions that had escaped across the mouth of the Schelde—the battered men of Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, the army the Allies had practically written off.  Intelligence officers did note that, though the Germans had increased in number, the new units in the line were “believed to be in no fit state to resist any determined advance.”  Any British Tommy along the Belgium-Dutch frontier could have told them otherwise.  * * British Major General Hubert Essame (retired) in his excellent book The Battle for Germany (people.  13), writes: “In misappreciation of the actual situation at the end of August and the first half of September, Allied intelligence staffs sank to a level only reached by Brigadier John Charteris, Haig’s Chief Intelligence Officer at the time of the Passchendaele Battles in 1917.” At that time the wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George alleged that Charteris “selected only those figures and facts which suited his fancy and then issued hopeful reports accordingly.”  At various times during the 1917 Flanders campaign Charteris reported the enemy as “cracking,” “mangled,” “with few reserves,” and even “on the run.”  In the dreadful battles that ensued around Passchendaele between July 31 and November 12, casualties, according to the official British history, totaled a staggering 244,897.

The cobblestone streets of the dingy mining town of Leopoldsburg in

northern Belgium, barely ten miles from the front, were

choked with jeeps and scout cars.  All roads seemed to lead to a cinema opposite the railway station—and never before had the nondescript theater held such an audience.  Officers of Lieutenant General Horrocks’ XXX Corps—the Garden forces that would drive north through Holland to link up with the paratroopers—crowded the street and milled around the entrance as their credentials were inspected by red-capped military police.  It was a colorful, exuberant group and it reminded Brigadier Hubert Essame, commanding officer of the 214th Brigade, 43rd Wessex Infantry Division, of “an army assembly at a point-to-point race or a demonstration on Salisbury Plain in time of peace.”  He was fascinated by the colorful dress of the commanders.  There was a striking variety of headgear.  No one had a steel helmet, but berets of many colors bore the proud badges of famous regiments, among them the Irish, Grenadier, Coldstream, Scotch, Welsh and Royal Horse Guards, the Royal Army Service Corps and Royal Artillery.  There was a regal casualness about everyone’s attire.  Essame noted that most commanders were dressed in “sniper’s smocks, parachutists’ jackets and jeep coats over brightly colored slacks, corduroys, riding britches or even jodhpurs.”  Instead of ties many sported ascots or “scarves of various colors.”  * * In his history of The 43rd Wessex Division at War (people.  115), Essame writes: “Sartorial disciplinarians of the future” might remember “that when the morale of the British Army was as high as at any time in its history, officers wore the clothing they found most suitable to the conditions under which they had to live and fight.”

The renowned Lieutenant Colonel J.o.e. (“Joe”) Vandeleur, the solidly

built, ruddy-faced, six-foot commander of the Irish Guards Armored

Group, personified the kind of devil-may-care elegance of the Guards’

officers.  The forty-one-year-old Vandeleur was wearing his usual

combat garb: black beret, a multi-colored camouflaged parachutist’s

jacket, and corduroy trousers above high rubber boots.  Additionally,

Vandeleur wore, as always, a .45 Colt automatic strapped to his hip

and, tucked into his jacket, what had become a symbol for his tankers,

a flamboyant emerald-green scarf.  The fastidious General “Boy”

Browning, back in England, would have winced.  Even Horrocks had

once dryly admonished Vandeleur.  “If the Germans ever get you, Joe,” he said, “they’ll think they’ve captured a peasant.”  But on this September 16 even Horrocks lacked the usual elegance of the impeccably dressed British staff officer.  Instead of a shirt he wore a ribbed polo sweater and, over his battle dress, a sleeveless leather jerkin reminiscent of a British yeoman’s dress.

As the popular Horrocks made his way down the aisle of the crowded theater he was greeted on all sides.  The meeting he had called had sparked high excitement.  Men were eager to get going again.  From the Seine to Antwerp, Horrocks’ tanks had often averaged fifty miles in a single day, but ever since the disastrous three-day halt on September 4 to “refit, refuel and rest,” the going had been rough.  With the British momentum gone, the enemy had quickly recovered.  In the two vital weeks since, the British advance had been reduced to a crawl.  It had taken four days for the Guards Armored Division—led by Joe Vandeleur’s Irish Guards Group—to advance ten miles and capture the vital bridge over the Meuse-Escaut Canal near Neerpelt, from which the attack into Holland would begin the next day.  Horrocks had no illusions about the German opposition, but he was confident that his forces could break through the enemy crust.

At precisely 11 A.m. Horrocks stepped onto the stage.  All those assembled knew that the British offensive was about to be renewed, but so great was the security surrounding Montgomery’s plan that only a few general officers present knew the details.  With D Day for Operation Market-Garden barely twenty-four hours away, the Field Marshal’s commanders now learned of the attack for the first time.

Attached to the cinema screen was a huge map of Holland.  Colored tape snaked north along a single highway, crossing the great river obstacles and passing through the towns of Valkenswaard, Eindhoven, Veghel, Uden, Nijmegen and thence to Arnhem, a distance of some sixty-four miles.  From there the tape continued for another thirty-odd miles to the Zuider Zee.  Horrocks took a long pointer and began the briefing.

“This is a tale

you will tell your grandchildren,” he told his audience.  Then he paused and, much to the delight of the assembled officers, added: “And mightily bored they’ll be.”

In the audience, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis D. Renfro, liaison officer from the 101/ Airborne Division and one of the few Americans present, was impressed by the Corps commander’s enthusiasm and confidence.  He talked for an hour, Curtis recorded, “with only an occasional reference to notes.”

Step by step Horrocks explained the complexities of Market-Garden.  The airborne army would go in first, he said.  Its objectives: to capture the bridges in front of XXX Corps.  Horrocks would give the word for the attack to begin.  Depending on the weather, zero hour for the ground forces was expected to be 2 P.m. At that moment 350 guns would open fire and lay down a massive artillery barrage that would last thirty-five minutes.  Then, at 2:35 P.m., led by waves of rocket-firing Typhoons, XXX Corps tanks would break out of their bridgehead and “blast down the main road.”  The Guards Armored Division would have the honor of leading the attack.  They would be followed by the 43rd Wessex and 50th Northumberland divisions, and then by the 8th Armored Brigade and the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade.

There was to be “no pause, no stop,” Horrocks emphasized.  The Guards Armored was “to keep going like hell” all the way to Arnhem.  The breakout from the bridgehead, Horrocks believed, would be “almost immediate.”  He expected the first Guards tanks to be in Eindhoven within two or three hours.  If the enemy reacted fast enough to blow all the bridges before the airborne troops could secure them, then the 43rd Wessex Infantry Division engineers, coming up behind, would rush forward with men and bridging equipment.  This massive engineering operation, should it be required, Horrocks explained, could involve 9,000 engineers and some 2,277 vehicles already in the Leopoldsburg area.  The entire XXX Corps armored column was to be fed up the main road with the vehicles two abreast, thirty-five vehicles per mile.  Traffic would be one way, and Horrocks expected “to pass 20,000 vehicles over the highway to Arnhem in sixty hours.”

General Allan Adair, the forty-six-year-old commander of the famed Guards Armored Division, listening to Horrocks, thought Market-Garden was a bold plan, but he also believed “it might be tricky.”  He expected the worst moment to be the breakout from the Meuse-Escaut Canal bridgehead.  Once through that, although he fully expected German resistance, he thought the going would “not be difficult.”  Besides, he had every faith in the unit that would lead off the attack—Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur’s Irish Guards Group.

Joe Vandeleur, as he learned that his tanks would spearhead the breakout, remembers thinking to himself, “Oh, Christ!  Not us again.” Vandeleur was proud that his veteran unit had been chosen, yet he knew his troops were tired and his units understrength.  Since the breakout from Normandy he had received very few replacements in either men or tanks; furthermore, “they weren’t allowing a hell of a lot of time for planning.”  But then he thought, how much time do you really need to plan for a straight bash through the German lines?  Next to him, his cousin, thirty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur, who commanded the 2nd Battalion under Joe, was “struck with horror at the plan to blast through the German resistance on a one-tank front.”  To him, it was not proper armored warfare.  But he recalls “swallowing whatever misgivings I had and succumbing to a strange, tense excitement, like being at the pole at the start of a horse race.”

To three men in the theater, the announcement produced deep personal feelings.  The senior officers of the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade had led their men in battle all the way from Normandy.  First they had fought alongside the Canadians; then, after the fall of Brussels, they were transferred to the British Second Army.  Now they would be coming home.  Much as they looked forward to the liberation of Holland, the commander, Colonel Albert “Steve” de Ruyter van Steveninck; his second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Pahud de Mortanges; and the chief of staff, Major Jonkheer Jan Beelaerts van Blokland, had grave misgivings about the manner in which it was to be accomplished.

Steveninck considered the entire plan risky.  Mortanges’ impression was that the British were more offhand about what lay ahead than the facts justified.  As he put it, “It was made to seem quite elementary.  First, we’ll take this bridge; then that one and hop this river.  …  The terrain ahead with its rivers, marshes, dikes and lowlands, was extremely difficult—as the British well knew from our many presentations.”  The thirty-three-year-old chief of staff, Beelaerts van Blokland, could not help thinking of past military history.  “We seemed to be violating Napoleon’s maxim about never fighting unless you are at least 75 percent sure of success.  Then, the other 25 percent can be left to chance.  The British were reversing the process; we were leaving 75 percent to chance.  We had only forty-eight hours to get to Arnhem, and if the slightest thing went wrong—a bridge blown, stiffer German resistance than anticipated—we’d be off schedule.”  Blokland had a private worry, too.  His parents lived in the village of Oosterbeek, just two and a half miles from the Arnhem bridge.

One of the few officers below the rank of brigade major who heard the briefing was twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant John Gorman of the Irish Guards.  He was stimulated by the whole affair and thought Horrocks was “at his finest.”  The Corps commander, Gorman later recalled, “called into play all his wit and humor, interspersing the more dramatic or technical points with humorous little asides.  He really was quite a showman.”  Gorman was particularly pleased with Operation Garden because “the Guards were to lead out and obviously their role would be tremendously dramatic.”

When the meeting had ended and commanders headed out to brief their troops, young Gorman felt his first “private doubts about the chances of success.”  Lingering in front of a map, he remembers thinking that Market-Garden was “a feasible operation—but only just feasible.”

There were simply “too many bridges.”  Nor was he enthusiastic about

the terrain itself.  He thought it was poor tank country and advancing

on “a one-tank front, we would be very vulnerable.”  But the promise of

support from rocket-firing Typhoons was reassuring.  So was another

promise of sorts.  Gorman remembered the day, months before, when he had received the Military Cross for bravery from Montgomery himself.  * At the investiture, Monty had said, “If I were a betting man I should say it would be an even bet that the war will be over by Christmas.” And Horrocks, Gorman recalls, had “told us that this attack could end the war.”  The only alternative Gorman could find to “going north seemed to be a long dreary winter camped on or near the Escaut Canal.” Monty’s plan, he believed, “had just the right amount of dash and daring to work.  If there was a chance to win the war by Christmas, then I was for pushing on.  * Gorman won his Military Cross during the fighting at Caen, Normandy.  Leading a trio of Sherman tanks, he was suddenly confronted by four German tanks, one a 60-ton Tiger.  His men dispatched the German armor and Gorman rammed the huge Tiger tank, destroyed its gun and killed its crew as they tried to escape.