Bridge Too Far (19 page)

Now, in the flat, gray Belgian countryside with its coal fields and slag heaps which reminded so many of Wales, the men who would lead the way for General Dempsey’s British Second Army heard of the plan and the promise of Arnhem.  Along side roads, in bivouac areas and in encampments, soldiers gathered around their officers to learn the part they would play in Operation Market-Garden.  When Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur told his officers that the Irish would be leading out, twenty-nine-year-old Major Edward G. Tyler remembers that a “half moan” went up from the assembled officers.  “We figured,” he recalls, “that we deserved a bit of a break after taking the bridge over the Escaut Canal, which we named “Joe’s bridge” after Joe Vandeleur.  But our commanding officer told us that it was a great honor for us to be chosen.”  Despite his desire for a reprieve, Tyler thought so too.  “We were used to one-tank fronts,” he remembers, “and in this case we were trusting to speed and support.  No one seemed worried.”

But Lieutenant Barry Quinan, who had just turned twenty-one, was “filled with trepidation.”  He was going into action for the first time with the lead Guards Armored tank squadron under Captain Mick O’Cock.

Quinan’s infantry would travel on the backs of the tanks,

Russian-style.  To him, “the number of rivers ahead seemed

ominous.  We were not amphibious.”  Yet Quinan felt proud that his men would be “leading the entire British Second Army.”

Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey, also twenty-one, vividly remembers being told that “if the operation was a success the wives and children at home would be relieved from the threat of the Germans’ V-2 rockets.” Mahaffey’s mother lived in London, which by that time was under intense bombardment.  Although he was excited at the prospect of the attack, the single road leading all the way up to Arnhem was, he thought, “an awfully long way to go.”

Captain Roland S. Langton, twenty-three, just returned from five days in a field hospital after receiving shrapnel wounds, learned that he was no longer adjutant of the 2nd Irish Guards Battalion.  Instead, he was assigned as second in command of Captain Mick O’Cock’s breakout squadron.  He was jubilant about the assignment.  The breakout seemed to Langton a straightforward thing.  Garden could not be anything but a success.  It was “obvious to all that the Germans were disorganized and shaken, lacking cohesion, and capable only of fighting in small pockets.”

Not everyone was so confident.  As Lieutenant A. G. C. “Tony” Jones, twenty-one, of the Royal Engineers, listened to the plan, he thought it was “clearly going to be very difficult.”  The bridges were the key to the entire operation and, as one officer remarked, “The drive of the XXX Corps will be like threading seven needles with one piece of cotton and we only have to miss one to be in trouble.”  To veteran Guardsman Tim Smith, twenty-four, the attack was “just another battle.”  On this day his greatest concern was the famed St.  Leger race at Newmarket.  He had a tip that a horse called Tehran, to be ridden by the famous jockey Gordon Richards, was “a sure thing.”  He placed every penny he had on Tehran with a lance corporal at battalion headquarters.  If Market-Garden was the operation that would win the war, this was just the day to win the St.  Leger.  To his amazement, Tehran won.  He was quite sure now that Market-Garden would succeed.

One man was “decidedly uncomfortable.”  Flight Lieutenant Donald Love,

twenty-eight, an R.a.f. fighter-reconnaissance

pilot, felt completely out of place among the officers of the Guards Armored.  He was part of the air liaison team which would call in the rocket-firing Typhoon fighters from the ground when the breakout began.  His lightly armored vehicle (code-named “Winecup”), with its canvas roof and its maze of communications equipment, would be up front close to Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur’s command car.  Love felt naked and defenseless: the only weapons the R.a.f. team possessed were revolvers.  As he listened to Vandeleur talking about “a rolling barrage that would move forward at a speed of 200 yards per minute” and heard the burly Irishman describe Love’s little scout car as an “armored signal tender for direct communication with pilots in the sky,” Love’s concern mounted.  “I got the distinct impression that I would be the one responsible for calling in the “cab rank” of Typhoons overhead.”  The thought was not reassuring.  Love knew very little about the radio setup, and he had never before acted as a ground-to-air tactical officer.  Then, to his acute relief, he learned that an expert, Squadron Leader Max Sutherland, would join him the following day to handle the communications for the initial breakout.  Thereafter, Love would be in charge.  Love began to wonder whether he should have volunteered in the first place.  He had only taken the job “because I thought it might be a nice change of pace.”

A change of a different sort bothered the commander of the Irish

Guards.  During the capture of the bridgehead over the Escaut Canal,

Joe Vandeleur had lost “a close and distinguished friend.”  His

broadcasting van, with its huge trumpetlike loudspeaker on the roof,

had been destroyed by a German shell.  All through training back in

England and in the great advance from Normandy, Joe had used the van to

broadcast to his troops and after each session, being a lover of

classical music, he had always put on a record or two—selections that

didn’t always please the Guardsmen.  The van had been blown to pieces

and shards of the classical records—along with Vandeleur’s favorite

popular tune—had showered down over the countryside.  Joe was saddened

by his loss; not so, his Irish Guardsmen.  They thought the drive to

Arnhem would be arduous enough without having to listen to Joe’s loudspeaker blaring out his current theme song, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”

Meanwhile, in England the paratroopers and glider-borne infantry of the First Allied Airborne Army were even now in marshaling areas, ready for the moment of takeoff.  Over the previous forty-eight hours, using maps, photographs and scale models, officers had briefed and rebriefed their men.  The preparations were immense and meticulous.  At twenty-four air bases (8 British, 16 American), vast fleets of troop-carrying aircraft, tow planes and gliders were checked out, fueled and loaded with equipment ranging from artillery to jeeps.  Some ninety miles north of London, Brigadier General James M. Gavin’s “All-American” 82nd Airborne Division was already shut off from the outside world at a cluster of airfields around Grantham in Lincolnshire.  So were part of General Roy Urquhart’s Red Devils, the British 1/ Airborne Division, and Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski’s Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade.  To the south around Newbury, roughly eighty miles west of London, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor’s Screaming Eagles, the 101/ Airborne Division, were also “sealed in.” In the same area, and stretching as far down as Dorsetshire, was the remainder of Urquhart’s division.  The majority of his units would not move to the airfields until the morning of the seventeenth, but in hamlets, villages and bivouac areas close to the departure points, they too made ready.  Everywhere now, the airborne forces of Market-Garden waited out the time until takeoff and the historic invasion of Holland from the sky.

Some men felt more concern at being sealed in than about the mission

itself.  At an airfield near the village of Ramsbury, the security

precautions made Corporal Hansford Vest, of the 101/ Division’s 502nd

Regiment, distinctly uneasy.  Aircraft and gliders “were parked for

miles all over the countryside and there were guards everywhere.”  He

noted that the airfield was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with

“British guards on the outside and our own guards on the inside.”  Vest

had the “feeling that our

freedom was gone.”  Private James Allardyce of the 508th Regiment, in his crowded tent city, tried to ignore the barbed wire and guards.  He checked and rechecked his equipment “until it was almost worn out.” Allardyce could not shake off the feeling that “we were like condemned men waiting to be led off.”

Other men worried principally about their chances of going on the mission.  So many previous operations had been canceled that one new recruit, nineteen-year-old Private Melvin Isenekev, of the 506th Regiment (he had arrived from the States on June 6, the day the 101/ had jumped into Normandy), still didn’t believe they would go when they reached the marshaling area.  Isenekev felt he had trained “long and hard for this and I didn’t want to be held back.”  Yet he almost was.  Trying to light a makeshift oil burner used for heating water, he threw a lighted match into an oil drum.  When nothing happened, Isenekev “put my head over it to look in and it exploded.”  Temporarily blinded, he instantly thought, “Now I’ve done it.  They won’t let me go.”  However within a few minutes his eyes stopped burning and he could see again.  But he believes he was the only member of the 101/ jumping into Holland with no eyebrows.

First Sergeant Daniel Zapalski, twenty-four, of the 502nd, “sweated out the jump; hoping the chute was packed right; hoping the field was soft; and hoping I didn’t land in a tree.”  He was eager to go.  Although he had not fully recovered from a Normandy leg wound, Zapalski believed his injury “was not serious enough to keep me from doing my normal duty.”  His battalion commander, the popular Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Cole, disagreed.  He had turned down Zapalski’s pleas.  Undeterred, Zapalski had bypassed Cole and obtained a written release certifying his combat readiness from the regimental surgeon.  Though Zapalski and Cole had fought together in Normandy, the sergeant now got a “typical Cole chewing out.  He called me “a fatheaded Polack, impractical, burdensome and unreasonable.”” But he let Zapalski go.

Captain Raymond S. Hall, the 502nd’s regimental chaplain, had a

somewhat similar problem.  He was “most anxious to return

to action and to be with my men.”  But he too had been wounded in Normandy.  Now the doctors would not let him jump.  He was finally told that he could go in by glider.  The chaplain was horrified.  A veteran paratrooper, he considered gliders distinctly unsafe.

Fear of death or of failure to perform well disturbed others.  Captain LeGrand Johnson, twenty-two-year-old company commander, remembering “the horrors and narrow escapes” during the 101/’s night airborne attack preceding the Normandy invasion, was fatalistically “resigned.” He was convinced that he would not return from this mission.  Still, the young officer “fully intended to raise as much hell as I could.” Johnson was not sure he liked the idea of a daylight drop.  It might produce more casualties.  On the other hand, this time “we would be able to see the enemy.”  To hide his nervousness, Johnson made bets with his fellow troopers on who would get the first Dutch beer.  One of Johnson’s staff sergeants, Charles Dohun, was “almost numb” with worry.  He did “not know how to compare this daylight jump with Normandy or what to expect.”  Within forty-eight hours, his numbness forgotten, Staff Sergeant Dohun would heroically save the life of the fatalistic Captain Johnson.

Technical Sergeant Marshall Copas, twenty-two, had perhaps more reason than most for anxiety.  He was one of the “pathfinders” who would jump first to mark the drop zones for the 101/.  In the Normandy drop, Copas recalled, “we had forty-five minutes before the main body of troopers began jumping—now we had only twelve minutes.”  Copas and his friend Sergeant John Rudolph Brandt, twenty-nine, had one concern in common:

both would have felt better “had General Patton’s Third Army been on the ground below us, rather than the British.  We had never fought with the Tommies before.”

In the Grantham area, Private John Garzia, a veteran of three combat jumps with the 82nd Airborne Division, was stunned.  To him, Market-Garden “was sheer insanity.”  He thought “Ike had transferred to the German side.”

Now that Operation Market-Garden was actually on, Lieu-

tenant Colonel Louis Mendez, battalion commander of the 82nd’s 508th Regiment, had no hesitation in speaking out on one particular subject.  With the nighttime experiences of his regiment in Normandy still painfully clear in his mind, Colonel Mendez delivered a scathing warning to the pilots who would carry his battalion into action the next day.  “Gentlemen,” Mendez said coldly, “my officers know this map of Holland and the drop zones by heart and we’re ready to go.  When I brought my battalion to the briefing prior to Normandy, I had the finest combat-ready force of its size that will ever be known.  By the time I gathered them together in Normandy, half were gone.  I charge you: put us down in Holland or put us down in hell, but put us all down together in one place.”

Private First Class John Allen, twenty-four, a three-jump veteran and still recovering from wounds sustained in Normandy, was philosophical about the operation: “They never got me in a night jump,” he solemnly told his buddies, “so now they’ll be able to see me and get off a good shot.”  Staff Sergeant Russell O’ationeal, with three night combat jumps behind him, was convinced that his “Irish luck was about to run out.”  When he heard the 82nd was to jump in daylight, he composed a letter he never sent—“You can hang a gold star in your window tonight, Mother.  The Germans have a good chance to hit us before we even land.” To lighten the atmosphere—though in doing so he may have made it worse—Private Philip H. Nadler, of the 504th Regiment, spread a few rumors.  The one he liked best was that a large German camp of SS men were bivouacked on one of the 82nd drop zones.

Nadler had not been overly impressed by the briefing of the platoon.  One of the 504th’s objectives was the bridge at Grave.  Gathering the men around him, the briefing lieutenant threw back the cover on a sandtable model and said, “Men, this is your destination.”  He rested a pointer on the bridge which bore the single word “Grave.”  Nadler was the first to comment.  “Yeah, we know that, Lieutenant,” he said, “but what country are we droppin’ on?”

Major Edward Wellems, of the 504th’s 2nd Battalion, thought

the name of the bridge was rather ominous, too, despite the fact that the officers who briefed his group suddenly began to change the pronunciation, referring to it as the “gravey bridge.”