Bridge Too Far (3 page)

Others shared his concern—especially the underground high command meeting secretly in The Hague.  To them, tensely watching the situation, Holland seemed on the threshold of freedom.  Allied tanks could easily slice through the country all the way from the Belgian border to the Zuider Zee.  The underground was certain that the “gateway”—through Holland, across the Rhine and into Germany—was wide open.

The resistance leaders knew the Germans had virtually no fighting forces capable of stopping a determined Allied drive.  They were almost scornful of the one weak and undermanned division composed of old men guarding coastal defenses (they had been sitting in concrete bunkers since 1940 without firing a shot), and of a number of other low-grade troops, whose combat capabilities were extremely doubtful, among them Dutch SS, scratch garrison troops, convalescents and the medically unfit—these last grouped into units aptly known as “stomach” and “ear” battalions, because most of the men suffered from ulcers or were hard of hearing.

To the Dutch the Allied move seemed obvious, invasion immi-

nent.  But its success depended on the speed of British forces driving from the south, and about this the underground high command was puzzled: they were unable to determine the precise extent of the Allied advance.

Checking on the validity of Prime Minister Gerbrandy’s statement that Allied troops had already crossed the frontier was no simple matter.  Holland was small—only about two thirds the size of Ireland—but it had a dense population of more than nine million, and as a result the Germans had difficulty controlling subversive activity.  There were underground cells in every town and village.  Still, transmitting information was hazardous.  The principal, and most dangerous, method was the telephone.  In an emergency, using complicated circuitry, secret lines and coded information, resistance leaders could call all over the country.  Thus, on this occasion, underground officials knew within minutes that Gerbrandy’s announcement was premature: British troops had not crossed the border.

Other Radio Orange broadcasts further compounded the confusion.  Twice in a little more than twelve hours (at 11:45 P.m. on September 4 and again on the morning of September 5) the Dutch Service of the BBC announced that the fortress city of Breda, seven miles from the Dutch-Belgian border, had been liberated.  The news spread rapidly.  Illegal, secretly printed newspapers promptly prepared liberation editions featuring the “fall of Breda.”  But the Arnhem regional resistance chief, thirty-eight-year-old Pieter Kruyff, whose group was one of the nation’s most highly skilled and disciplined, seriously doubted the Radio Orange bulletin.  He had his communications expert Johannes Steinfort, a young telephone-company instrument maker, check the report.  Quickly tying in to a secret circuit connecting him with the underground in Breda, Steinfort became one of the first to learn the bitter truth: the city was still in German hands.  No one had seen Allied troops, either American or British.

Because of the spate of rumors, many resistance groups hurriedly met to discuss what should be done.  Although Prince Bernhard and SHAEF (supreme Headquarters Allied Expedi- nary Forces) had cautioned against a general uprising, some underground members had run out of patience.  The time had come, they believed, to directly confront the enemy and thus aid the advancing Allies.  It was obvious that the Germans feared a general revolt.  In the retreating columns, the underground noted, sentries were now sitting on the fenders of vehicles with rifles and submachine guns at the ready.  Undeterred, many resistance men were eager to fight.

In the village of Ede, a few miles northwest of Oosterbeek, twenty-five-year-old Menno “Tony” de Nooy tried to persuade the leader of his group, Bill Wildeboer, to attack.  It had long been planned, Tony argued, that the group should take over Ede in the event of an Allied invasion.  The barracks at Ede, which had been used to train German marines, were now practically empty.  De Nooy wanted to occupy the buildings.  The older Wildeboer, a former sergeant major in the Dutch Army, disagreed.  “I don’t trust this situation,” he told them.  “The time is not yet ripe.  We must wait.”

Not all resistance movements were held in check.  In Rotterdam, underground members occupied the offices of the water-supply company.  Just over the Dutch-Belgian border in the village of Axel, the town hall with its ancient ramparts was seized and hundreds of German soldiers surrendered to the civilian fighters.  In many towns Dutch Nazi officials were captured as they tried to bolt.  West of Arnhem, in the village of Wolfheze, noted principally for its hospital for the mentally ill, the district police commissioner was seized in his car.  He was locked up temporarily in the nearest available quarters, the asylum, for delivery to the British “when they arrived.”

These were the exceptions.  In general, underground units remained

calm.  Yet, everywhere they took advantage of the confusion to prepare

for the arrival of Allied forces.  In Arnhem, Charles [email protected],

forty-two, descendant of an old French family and active in an

intelligence unit, was much too busy to bother about rumors.  He sat,

hour after hour, by the windows of an office in the neighborhood of the

Arnhem bridge and, with a

number of assistants, watched German units heading east and northeast along the Zevenaar and Zutphen roads toward Germany.  It was [email protected]’s job to estimate the number of troops and, where possible, to identify the units.  The vital information he noted down was sent to Amsterdam by courier and from there via a secret network to London.

In suburban Oosterbeek, young Jan Eijkelhoff, threading his way unobtrusively through the crowds, cycled all over the area, delivering forged food ration cards to Dutchmen hiding out from the Germans.  And the leader of one group in Arnhem, fifty-seven-year-old Johannus Penseel, called “the Old One,” reacted in the kind of wily manner that had made him a legend among his men.  He decided the moment had come to move his arsenal of weapons.  Openly, with German troops all about, he and a few hand-picked assistants calmly drove up in a baker’s van to the Municipal Hospital, where the weapons were hidden.  Quickly wrapping the arms in brown paper they transported the entire cache to Penseel’s home, whose basement windows conveniently overlooked the main square.  Penseel and his coleader, Toon van Daalen, thought it was a perfect position from which to open fire on the Germans when the time came.  They were determined to live up to the name of their militant subdivision—Landelyke Knokploegen (“Strong-arm Boys”).

Everywhere men and women of the vast underground army poised for battle; and in southern towns and villages, people who believed that parts of Holland were already free ran out of their homes to welcome the liberators.  There was a kind of madness in the air, thought Carmelite Father Tiburtius Noordermeer as he observed the joyful crowds in the village of Oss, southeast of Nijmegen.  He saw people slapping one another on the back in a congratulatory mood.  Comparing the demoralized Germans on the roads with the jubilant Dutch spectators, he noted “wild fear on the one hand and crazy, unlimited, joy on the other.”  “Nobody,” the stolid Dutch priest recalled, “acted normally.”

Many grew more anxious as time passed.  In the drugstore on the main

street in Oosterbeek, Karel de Wit was worried.  He told

his wife and chief pharmacist, Johanna, that he couldn’t understand why Allied planes had not attacked the German traffic.  Frans Schulte, a retired Dutch major, thought the general enthusiasm was premature.  Although his brother and sister-in-law were overjoyed at what appeared to be a German debacle, Schulte was not convinced.  “Things may get worse,” he warned.  “The Germans are far from beaten.  If the Allies try to cross the Rhine, believe me, we may see a major battle.”

Hitler’s crucial measures were already underway.  On September 4 at the [email protected]’s headquarters deep in the forest of [email protected], Rastenburg, East Prussia, sixty-nine-year-old Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt prepared to leave for the western front.  He had not expected a new command.

Called abruptly out of enforced retirement, Von Rundstedt had been ordered to Rastenburg four days before.  On July 2, two months earlier, Hitler had fired him as Commander in Chief West (or, as it was known in German military terms, OB West—Oberbefehlshaber West) while Von Rundstedt, who had never lost a battle, was trying to cope with the aftermath of Germany’s greatest crisis of the war, the Allied invasion of Normandy.

The [email protected] and Germany’s most distinguished soldier had never agreed on how best to meet that threat.  Before the invasion, appealing for reinforcements, Von Rundstedt had bluntly informed Hitler’s headquarters (Okw—Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) [Armed Forces High Command] that the Western Allies, superior in men, equipment and planes, could “land anywhere they want to.”  Not so, Hitler declared.

The Atlantic Wall, the partly completed coastal

fortifications which, Hitler boasted, ran almost three thousand miles from Kirkenes (on the Norwegian-Finnish frontier) to the Pyrenees (on the Franco-Spanish border) would make “this front impregnable against any enemy.”  Von Rundstedt knew only too well that the fortifications were more propaganda than fact.  He summed up the Atlantic Wall in one word: “Humbug.”

The legendary Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, renowned for his victories in the North African deserts in the first years of the war and sent by Hitler to command Army Group B under Von Rundstedt, was equally appalled by the [email protected]’s confidence.  To Rommel, the coastal defenses were a “figment of Hitler’s Wolkenkuck-kucksheim [cloud cuckoo land].” The aristocratic, tradition-bound Von Rundstedt and the younger, ambitious Rommel found themselves, probably for the first time, in agreement.  On another point, however, they clashed.  With the crushing defeat of his Afrika Korps by Britain’s Montgomery at El Alamein in 1942 always in his mind, and well aware of what the Allied invasion would be like, Rommel believed that the invaders must be stopped on the beaches.  Von Rundstedt icily disagreed with his junior—whom he sarcastically referred to as the “Marschall Bubi” (“Marshal Laddie”);

Allied troops should be wiped out after they landed, he contended.  Hitler backed Rommel.  On D Day, despite Rommel’s brilliant improvisations, Allied troops breached the “impregnable” wall within hours.

In the terrible days that followed, overwhelmed by the Allies, who enjoyed almost total air supremacy over the Normandy battlefield, and shackled by Hitler’s “no withdrawal” orders (“Every man shall fight and fall where he stands”), Von Rundstedt’s straining lines cracked everywhere.  Desperately he plugged the gaps, but hard as his men fought and counterattacked, the outcome was never seriously in doubt.  Von Rundstedt could neither “drive the invaders into the sea” nor “annihilate them” (the words were Hitler’s).

On the night of July 1, at the height of the Normandy battle, Hitler’s chief of staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, called Von Rundstedt and plaintively asked, “What shall we do?”  Character- istically blunt, Von Rundstedt snapped, “End the war, you fools.  What else can you do?” Hitler’s comment on hearing the remark was mild.  “The old man has lost his nerve and can’t master the situation any longer.  He’ll have to go.”  Twenty-four hours later, in a polite handwritten note, Hitler informed Von Rundstedt that, “in consideration of your health and of the increased exertions to be expected in the near future,” he was relieved of command.

Von Rundstedt, the senior and most dependable field marshal in the Wehrmacht, was incredulous.  For the five years of war his military genius had served the Third Reich well.  In 1939, when Hitler cold-bloodedly attacked Poland, thereby igniting the conflict that eventually engulfed the world, Von Rundstedt had clearly demonstrated the German formula for conquest—Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”)—when his Panzer spearheads reached the outskirts of Warsaw in less than a week.  One year later, when Hitler turned west and with devastating speed overwhelmed most of western Europe, Von Rundstedt was in charge of an entire Panzer army.  And in 1941 he was in the forefront again when Hitler attacked Russia.  Now, outraged at the jeopardy to his career and reputation, Von Rundstedt told his chief of staff, Major General Gunther Blumentritt, that he had been “dismissed in disgrace by an amateur strategist.”  That “Bohemian corporal,” he fumed, had used “my age and ill health as an excuse to relieve me in order to have a scapegoat.”  Given a free hand, Von Rundstedt had planned a slow withdrawal to the German frontier, during which, as he outlined his plans to Blumentritt, he would have “exacted a terrible price for every foot of ground given up.”  But, as he had said to his staff many times, because of the constant “tutelage from above,” about the only authority he had as OB West was “to change the guard in front of the gate.”  * * “Von Rundstedt was hurt by the implication in Hitler’s letter that he had “requested” relief,” the late General Blumentritt told me in an interview.  “Some of us at Headquarters actually thought he had, but this was not so.  Von Rundstedt denied that he had ever asked to be relieved—or that he had ever thought of doing so.  He was extremely angry—so angry in fact that he swore he would never again take a command under Hitler.  I knew he did not mean it for, to Von Rundstedt, military obedience was unconditional and absolute.”

From the moment of his recall and his arrival at the end of

August at the Rastenburg Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”), as it was named by Hitler, Von Rundstedt, at the [email protected]’s invitation, attended the daily briefing conference.  Hitler, according to the Deputy Chief of Operations General Walter Warlimont, greeted his senior field marshal warmly, treating him with “unwonted diffidence and respect.”  Warlimont also noted that throughout the long sessions Von Rundstedt simply sat “motionless and monosyllabic.”  * The precise, practical field marshal had nothing to say.  He was appalled by the situation.  * Warlimont, Inside Hitler’s Headquarters, 1939-45, p. 477.

The briefings clearly showed that in the east the Red Army now held a front more than 1,400 miles long, from Finland in the north to the Vistula in Poland, and from there to the Carpathian Mountains in Rumania and Yugoslavia.  In fact, Russian armor had reached the borders of East Prussia, barely a hundred miles from the [email protected]’s headquarters.