Bridge Too Far (33 page)

From Berlin to the western front, the German high command was stunned by the sudden Allied attack.  Only in Arnhem, where the British 1/ Airborne Division had dropped almost on top of General Bittrich’s two panzer divisions, was the reaction both fierce and quick.  Elsewhere, baffled and confused commanders tried to determine whether the startling events of September 17 were indeed the opening phase of an invasion of the Reich.  A ground attack by the British out of Belgium had been anticipated.  All available reserves, including General Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, so worn down that men had little else but the rifles they carried, had been thrown into defense positions to hold against that threat.  Trenches had been dug and strategic positions built in an all-out effort to force the British to fight for every foot of ground.

No one had foreseen that airborne forces would be used simultaneously

with the British land advance.  were these airborne attacks the prelude

to an invasion of Holland by sea, as Berlin feared?  In the hours of

darkness, while staff officers tried to analyze the situation, reports

of additional airborne attacks further confused the picture.  American

paratroopers, their strength unknown and their units still

unidentified, were in the Eindhoven-Nijmegen area; and the British 1/

Airborne Division had clearly landed around Arnhem.  But now new

messages told of para-

troopers in the vicinity of Utrecht, and a totally bewildering report claimed that airborne forces had landed in Warsaw, Poland.  * * The R.a.f. did drop dummy paratroops over a wide area around Utrecht, diverting some German troops for days.  No troops were dropped on Warsaw and the report may have been garbled in transmission or, more simply, may have been the result of unfounded rumor.

At Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s headquarters in Koblenz, the general reaction was one of astonishment.  * The crusty, aristocratic Von Rundstedt was not so much surprised at the nature of the attack as by the man who, he reasoned, must be directing it—Montgomery.  Initially, Von Rundstedt doubted that these sudden and apparently combined land-and-air operations were the opening of Eisenhower’s offensive to invade the Reich.  The Field Marshal had long been certain that Patton and the American Third Army driving toward the Saar posed the real danger.  To combat that threat, Von Rundstedt had committed his best troops to repulse Patton’s racing tanks.  Now Germany’s most renowned soldier was caught temporarily off balance.  Never had he expected Eisenhower’s main offensive to be led by Montgomery, whom he had always considered “overly cautious, habit-ridden and systematic.”

“When we first informed Von Rundstedt’s headquarters of the airborne attack,” Colonel Hans von Tempelhof, Model’s operations chief, told me, “OB West seemed hardly perturbed.  In fact the reaction was almost callously normal.  It quickly changed.”

He was astounded by the boldness of Montgomery’s move.  The messages

pouring in from Model’s headquarters carried a note of hysteria

attesting all the more to the surprise and gravity of the attack: “We

must reckon with more airborne landings being made at night … the

enemy obviously believes his attack to be of major importance and the

British have achieved considerable initial success against Student and

pushed forward to Valkenswaard … the position here is particularly

critical … the lack of fast, strong reserves is increasing our

difficulties … the general situation of Army Group B, stretched as it

is to the limits, is critical … we require, as fast as possible,

panzers, artillery, heavy mobile antitank weapons, antiaircraft units,

and it is

absolutely essential that we have fighters in the sky day and night

…”

Model ended with these words: “… the main concentration of the Allies is on the northern wing of our front.”  It was one of the few times Von Rundstedt had ever respected the opinion of the officer he had caustically referred to as having the makings of a good sergeant major.  In that fragment of his message, Model had stripped away Von Rundstedt’s last doubts about who was responsible for the startling developments.  The “northern wing” of Army Group B was Montgomery.

During the night hours it was impossible to estimate the strength of the Allied airborne forces in Holland, but Von Rundstedt was convinced that further landings could be expected.  It would now be necessary not only to plug gaps all along the German front but to find reserves for Model’s Army Group B at the same time.  Once again, Von Rundstedt was forced to gamble.  Messages went out from his headquarters transferring units from their positions facing the Americans at Aachen.  The moves were risky but essential.  These units would have to travel north immediately, and their commitment in the line might take forty-eight hours at minimum.  Von Rundstedt issued further orders to defense areas along Germany’s northwest frontier, calling for all available armor and antiaircraft units to proceed to the quiet backwater of Holland where, the Field Marshal was now convinced, imminent danger to the Third Reich lay.  Even as he worked steadily on through the night to shore up his defenses, Germany’s Iron Knight pondered the strangeness of the situation.  He was still amazed that the officer in charge of this great Allied offensive was Montgomery.

It was late evening when the staff car carrying General Wilhelm

Bittrich from his headquarters at Doetinchem arrived in the darkened

streets of Arnhem.  Bittrich was determined to see for himself what was

happening.  As he reconnoitered through the

city, fires were still burning and debris littered the streets—the effect of the morning’s bombing.  Dead soldiers and smoldering vehicles in many areas attested, as Bittrich was later to say, to “the turbulent fighting that had taken place.”  Yet, he had no clear picture of what was happening.  Returning to his own headquarters, Bittrich learned from reports received from two women telephone operators in the Arnhem Post headquarters—whom he was later to decorate with the Iron Cross—that the great highway bridge had been taken by British paratroopers.  Bittrich was infuriated.  His specific order to Harzer to hold the bridge had not been carried out.  Now it was crucial that the Nijmegen bridge over the Waal river be secured before the Americans in the south could seize it.  Bittrich’s only chance of success was to crush the Allied assault along the corridor and squeeze the British to a standstill in the Arnhem area.  The paratroopers now on the north end of the Arnhem bridge and the scattered battalions struggling to reach them must be totally destroyed.

The top-secret Market-Garden plan that had fallen into Colonel General Kurt Student’s possession finally reached Field Marshal Model at his new headquarters.  He had abandoned the gardener’s cottage on the Doetinchem castle grounds and moved about five miles southeast near the small village of Terborg.  It had taken Student the best part of ten hours to locate the Field Marshal and transmit the document by radio.  Arriving in three parts and now decoded, Market-Garden lay revealed.

Model and his staff studied it intently.  Before them was Montgomery’s entire plan: the names of the airborne divisions employed, the successive air and resupply lifts ranging over a three-day period, the exact location of the landing and drop zones, the crucial bridge objectives—even the flight routes of the aircraft involved.  Model, as Harzer was later to learn from the Field Marshal himself, called the plan “fantastic.”  It was so fantastic that in these critical hours Model refused to believe it.

The plans were too pat, too detailed for credibility.  Model suggested to his staff that the very preciseness of the document argued against its authenticity.  He stressed again his own firm conviction that the landings west of Arnhem were the spearhead of a large-scale airborne attack toward the Ruhr, via Bocholt and M‘unster, some forty miles east.  Additional airborne landings should be expected, he warned, and once assembled would undoubtedly swerve north and then east.  Model’s reasoning was not without validity.  As he told his staff, “If we are to believe these plans and are to assume that the Arnhem bridge is the true objective, why were not troops dropped directly on the bridge?  Here, they arrive on vast open areas suitable for assembly, and moreover, eight miles to the west.”

Model did not inform General Bittrich of the document.  “I never realized until after the war,” says Bittrich, “that the Market-Garden plans had fallen into our hands.  I have no idea why Model did not tell me.  In any case, the plans would simply have confirmed my own opinion that the important thing to do was prevent the link-up between the airborne troops and the British Second Army—and for that, they certainly needed the bridges.”  * One officer under Bittrich’s command did learn of the document.  Lieutenant Colonel Harzer seemed to be the only officer outside the Field Marshal’s staff with whom Model talked about the plan.  Harzer recalls that “Model was always prepared for the worst, so he did not discount it entirely.  As he told me, he had no intention of being caught by the short hairs.”  Only time would tell the Germans whether the document was, in fact, genuine.  Although the temperamental, erratic Field Marshal was not fully prepared to accept the evidence before him, most of his staff were impressed.  With the Market-Garden plan in their hands, Model’s headquarters alerted all antiaircraft units already on the move of the drops that the plan said would take place a few hours later.  * OB West was not informed of the captured Market-Garden plans either; nor is there any mention in Model’s reports to Von Rundstedt of the documents.  For some reason Model thought so little of the plans that he did not pass them on to higher headquarters.

One assumption, at least, was laid to rest.  Lieutenant Gustav

Sedelhauser, the general-headquarters administrative officer, recalls

that on the basis of the captured documents, Model was now of the

opinion that he and his Oosterbeek headquarters had not been the

objective of the airborne

assault after all.

At the precise time that Lieutenant Colonel John Frost secured the northern end of the Arnhem bridge, a cautious approach to another prime objective eleven miles away was only just beginning.  The five-span highway bridge over the Waal river at Nijmegen in the 82nd Airborne’s central sector of the corridor was the last crossing over which the tanks of General Horrocks’ XXX Corps would pass on their drive to Arnhem.

With spectacular success, Brigadier General James M. Gavin’s 504th paratroopers had grabbed the crucial Grave bridge eight miles southwest of Nijmegen; and, at about 7:30 P.m., units of the 504th and 505th regiments secured a crossing over the Maas-Waal Canal at the village of Heumen, less than five miles due east of Grave.  Gavin’s hope of capturing all three canal crossings and a railroad bridge was in vain.

The bridges were blown or severely damaged by the Germans before the

82nd could grab them.  Yet, within six hours of landing, Gavin’s

troopers had forged a route over which the British ground forces would

travel.  Additionally, patrols of the 505th Regiment probing the area

between the 82nd’s drop zones near the Groesbeek Heights and the

Reichswald encountered only light resistance; and, by nightfall, other

troopers of the 508th Regiment had secured a 3-astb-mile stretch of

woods along the Holland-German border north of the Groesbeek

drop zone and running to the southeastern outskirts of Nijmegen.  Now, with three of the 82nd’s four key objectives in hand, everything depended upon the capture of the 1,960-foot-long road bridge at Nijmegen.

Although General Browning had directed Gavin not to go for the Nijmegen crossing until the high ground around Groesbeek was secured, Gavin was confident that all the 82nd’s objectives could be taken on this first day.  Evaluating the situation some twenty-four hours before the jump, Gavin had called in the 508th’s commander, Colonel Roy E. Lindquist, and directed him to send one battalion racing for the bridge.  In the surprise and confusion of the airborne landings, Gavin reasoned, the gamble was well worth taking.  “I cautioned Lindquist about the dangers of getting caught in streets,” Gavin remembers, “and pointed out that the way to get the bridge was to approach from east of the city without going through built-up areas.”  Whether by misunderstanding or a desire to clean up his initial assignments, Lindquist’s own recollection was that he was not to commit his troopers in an assault on the bridge until the regiment’s other objectives had been achieved.  To the 1/ Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Shields Warren, Jr., Lindquist assigned the task of holding protective positions along the Groesbeek-Nijmegen highway about a mile and a quarter southeast of the city.  Warren was to defend the area and link up with the regiment’s remaining two battalions to the west and east.  Only when these missions were accomplished, Warren recalled, was he to prepare to go into Nijmegen.  Thus, instead of driving for the bridge from the flat farming areas to the east, Warren’s battalion found itself squarely in the center of those very built-up areas Gavin had sought to avoid.

It was nightfall before Warren achieved his other objectives.  Now with

precious time lost, lead companies began to move slowly through the

quiet, almost deserted streets of Nijmegen.  The main objective was to

reach the traffic circle leading to the southern approaches of the

bridge.  There was a diversionary target as well.  The Dutch

underground reported that the detonat-

mechanism for destroying the great crossing was situated in the main post-office building.  This vital information reached Warren’s units only after they had begun moving toward the bridge.  A platoon was hurriedly sent to the post office, where, after subduing the German guards, engineers cut wires and blew up what they believed to be the detonating controls.  Whether this apparatus was, in fact, actually hooked up to explosives on the bridge, no one would ever know for certain, but now, at least, electrical circuits and switchboards were destroyed.  When the platoon attempted to withdraw to rejoin the main force they found that the enemy had closed in behind them.  They were cut off and for the next three days would be forced to hold out in the post office until help arrived.