Bridge Too Far (34 page)

Meanwhile, as the remainder of Warren’s force approached a park that led toward the bridge, they came suddenly under intense machine-gun and armored-car fire.  Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje, the Dutch officer assigned to the 82nd, remembers that “guns suddenly opened up on us, and I could see the flashes of fire from the muzzles.  They seemed to be all around us.”  Before he could raise his carbine to fire, Bestebreurtje was hit in the left hand and elbow and the right index finger.  * To Corporal James R. Blue, the eerie battle raging in the blacked-out streets was like a nightmare.  “Right away we were engaged in hand-to-hand combat,” Blue remembers.  He was moving through the streets with Private First Class Ray Johnson, both armed with M-1 rifles with fixed bayonets, when they came face to face with SS troops.  As Johnson tried to get one of the Germans with his bayonet, Blue went after an officer with a trench knife.  “Our orders were not to fire.  If we came to close combat we were to use knives and bayonets.  But,” Blue recalls, “that trench knife seemed mighty short, so I used my Tommy gun.  That closed that chapter, but almost immediately a self-propelled gun began to fire in our direction and we moved up to the park and tied in with other * Several days later, Bestebreurtje was told by doctors that the finger must be amputated.  “I told them absolutely not,” Bestebreurtje says.  “It was my finger and I was not going to have it amputated.  Besides, it would have ruined my piano playing.”  He still has the finger.

platoons.”  Private James Allardyce remembers hearing a call for medics up front, but “bullets were whistling down the street and there was so much confusion in the darkness that men did not know where others were.  We set up a perimeter defense around a modern brick schoolhouse.  Out front we heard German voices and the moaning and cries of the wounded.  We couldn’t make it to the bridge.  Finally it came through to us that the Jerries had stopped us.”

As indeed they had.  Captain Paul [email protected]’s Reconnaissance Battalion, which had missed Frost at the Arnhem bridge, had arrived in Nijmegen well in advance of the late-starting Americans.

By midnight on this first day of the mightiest airborne assault in history, British and American paratroops were on, or fighting toward, their major objectives.  Through long hours of march and savage encounters with an unexpectedly strong and tenacious enemy, they had gained most of the objectives that the planners had expected them to take swiftly and with ease.  From the gallant men of Colonel John Frost’s 2nd Battalion clinging to the north end of the Arnhem bridge, all along the corridor south to where Colonel Robert Sink’s 101/ troopers struggled to repair the bridge at Son, the mood was one of fierce determination; they must hold open the highway along which the British Second Army tanks and infantry would drive.  On this midnight, troopers did not doubt that relief was on the way or that reinforcements and supplies, scheduled to arrive on the eighteenth, would further bolster their position.  Despite heavy casualties, confusion, and communications setbacks, the men of the airborne army were completely optimistic.  All in all, it had not been a bad Sunday outing.

There was a red glow in the sky over Arnhem as the speeding car bringing Major General Heinz Harmel back from Berlin neared the city.  Apprehensive and tired after the long trip, Harmel arrived at the Frundsberg Division headquarters in Ruurlo, only to find that his command post was now situated in Velp, approximately three miles northeast of Arnhem.  There, he found his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Paetsch, looking exhausted.  “Thank God you’re back!”  Paetsch said.  Quickly he briefed Harmel on the day’s events and on the orders received from General Bittrich.  “I was dumfounded,” Harmel recalls.  “Everything seemed confused and uncertain.  I was very tired, yet the gravity of the situation was such that I called Bittrich and told him I was coming to see him.”

Bittrich had not slept either.  As Harmel was shown in, Bittrich began

immediately to outline the situation.  Angry and frustrated, he bent

over his maps.  “British paratroopers have landed here, west of

Arnhem,” he told Harmel.  “We have no idea of their actual strength or

intentions.”  Pointing to Nijmegen and Eindhoven, the corps commander

said, “American airborne forces have secured lodgments in these two

areas.  Simultaneously, Montgomery’s forces have attacked north from

the Meuse-Escaut Canal.  My belief is that the object is to split our

forces.  In my opinion, the objectives are the bridges.  Once these are

secured, Montgomery can drive directly up to the center of Holland and

from there, into the Ruhr.”  Bittrich waved his hands.  “Model

disagrees.  He still believes further airborne forces will be

dropped north of the Rhine, east and west of Arnhem and march toward the Ruhr.”

Harzer’s Hohenstaufen Division, Bittrich went on to explain, had been ordered to mop up the British west and north of Arnhem.  The armed forces commander in the Netherlands, General Christiansen, had been directed to send in his forces—a mixture of defense and training battalions—under command of Lieutenant General Hans von Tettau.  Their mission was to aid the Hohenstaufen Division on the flanks in an effort to overrun the British landing and drop zones.

The Frundsberg Division, Bittrich continued, was charged with all activities to the east of Arnhem and south to Nijmegen.  Stabbing the map with his finger, Bittrich told Harmel, “The Nijmegen bridge must be held at all costs.  Additionally the Arnhem bridge and the area all the way south to Nijmegen is your responsibility.”  Bittrich paused and paced the room.  “Your problems,” he told Harmel, “have been made more difficult.  Harzer failed to leave armored units at the north end of the Arnhem bridge.  The British are now there.”

As he listened, Harmel realized with growing alarm that with the Arnhem bridge in British hands, there was no way to get his armor quickly across the Rhine and down to Nijmegen.  Nor was there another bridge crossing over the river east of the Arnhem bridge.  His entire division would have to be taken over the Rhine at a ferry landing in the village of Pannerden, some eight miles southeast of Arnhem.  Bittrich, anticipating the problem, had already ordered the ferry operations to begin.  It would be a slow, tedious, roundabout way of reaching Nijmegen, and to ferry the division’s trucks, armor and men would take all of Harmel’s resources.

As he left Bittrich’s headquarters, Harmel asked his commander, “Why not destroy the Nijmegen bridge before it’s too late?”  Bittrich’s tone was ironic.  “Model has flatly refused to consider the idea.  We may need it to counterattack.”  Harmel stared in amazement.  “With what?” he asked.

In the dark, Harmel set out once again, heading for Pannerden.  His units were already on the move toward the ferry crossing and the roads were choked with troops and vehicles.  In Pannerden itself, Harmel saw the reason for the chaotic conditions he had witnessed on the road.  Vehicles congested the streets in one gigantic traffic jam.  At the river’s edge, makeshift ferries composed of rubber rafts were slowly floating trucks across the river.  From his chief of staff, Harmel learned that one battalion had reached the far shore and was already en route to Nijmegen.  Some trucks and smaller vehicles were also across.  But as yet, heavier armored equipment had not even been loaded.  In Paetsch’s opinion, Harmel’s Frundsberg units might not be in action in the Arnhem-Nijmegen area until September 24 if the slow, cumbersome ferrying could not be speeded up.

Harmel knew there was only one solution to the problem.  He would have to retake the Arnhem bridge and open the highway route to Nijmegen.  As this first day of Market-Garden, September 17, ended all the German frustrations now focused on a single obstinate man—Colonel John Frost at the Arnhem bridge.

A Bridge Too Far

Part Four 293-323 THE SIEGE

Early morning mist rising from the Rhine swirled around the Arnhem bridge and the silent darkened houses surrounding it.  A short distance from the northern ramp, the Eusebius Buiten Singel—a long, landscaped boulevard bordering the historic inner city—stretched back toward the outlying areas north and east and ended at the Musis Sacrum, Arnhem’s popular concert hall.  On this Monday, September 18, in the thin, indistinct light, the ancient capital of Gelderland appeared deserted.  Nothing moved in the streets, gardens, squares or parks.

From their positions around the northern end of the bridge, Colonel Frost’s men could begin to see for the first time the whole sprawl of the city with its houses and municipal buildings: the Court of Justice, Provincial Government House, State Archives buildings, the town hall, general post office and the railroad station less than a mile to the northwest.  Nearer, the Church of St.  Eusebius, with its 305-foot-high steeple, dominated the city.  Few of Frost’s men, looking warily out from shattered windows and freshly dug foxholes in a perimeter composed of eighteen houses, realized that the great church now had a sinister significance.  German snipers had moved into the tower during the night.  Carefully concealed, they, like the British, waited tensely for full light.

The battle for the bridge had raged all night.  A midnight lull had

been short-lived.  When the fighting broke out again, it almost

seemed that each man was engaged in individual contest.  Twice during the night Frost’s men had tried to rush the southern end of the bridge, only to be beaten back.  Lieutenant John Grayburn, leading both charges, had been badly wounded in the face, but stayed on the bridge and oversaw the evacuation of all his men to safety.  * Later, truckloads of German infantry tried to ram their way across the bridge, only to be met by the concentrated fire of the British troopers.  With flamethrowers, Frost’s men had set the vehicles on fire.  Panzer Grenadiers were burned alive in the inferno and fell screaming to the Rhine one hundred feet below.  The acrid smell of burning rubber and thick black smoke eddying up from the debris hampered rescue parties from both sides searching for their wounded among the bodies littering the bridge.  Lance Corporal Harold Back, in one such party, was helping to carry wounded into the basement of one of the houses held by Frost’s men.  In the darkness of the cellar, he saw what he thought were a few candles burning.  Injured troopers were laid out all over the floor and suddenly Back realized that what he saw were tiny fragments glowing on the bodies of some of the wounded.  Hit by splinters from phosphorous shells, the men were glowing in the dark.  * Grayburn was killed in the battle for Arnhem.  On Septemher 20 he stood in full view of an enemy tank and directed the withdrawal of his men to a main defense perimeter.  For supreme courage, leadership and devotion to duty during the entire engagement, he was posthumously awarded Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross.

Inexplicably, in these first moments of daylight, the battle halted again.  It was almost as though both sides were drawing a deep breath.  Across the road from Frost’s battalion headquarters, on a side street under the ramp itself, Captain Eric Mackay made a quiet reconnaissance of the houses that his little force of engineers and small groups of men from other units now controlled.  During a vicious nighttime battle, Mackay had managed to hang on to two of the four houses in the area and set up a command post in one of them, a brick schoolhouse.

The Germans, counter-attacking, had crept through the landscaped

grounds to toss hand grenades into the houses.  Infiltrating the

buildings, the Germans

fought a deadly, almost silent hand-to-hand battle with the British.  Ranging through the cellars and from room to room, Mackay’s men drove back swarms of the enemy with bayonets and knives.  Then, taking a small group of men, Mackay went out into the bushes after the retreating Germans.  Again, with bayonets and grenades, the British routed the enemy.  Mackay was hit in the legs by shrapnel and a bullet punctured his helmet, grazing his scalp.

Now, checking his troopers, Mackay discovered casualties similar to his own.  Adding to his problems, the supply situation was not good.  There were six Bren guns, ammunition, grenades and some explosives.  But Mackay had no antitank weapons, little food and no medical supplies except morphia and field dressings.  Additionally, the Germans had cut off the water.  Now, all that was available was what the men still had in their canteens.

Terrible as the nighttime fighting had been, Mackay maintained a fierce determination.  “We were doing well and our casualties were comparatively light,” he recalls.  “Besides, now with the coming of daylight, we could see what we were doing and we were ready.”  Still, Mackay, like Frost, had few illusions.  In this most deadly kind of fighting—street by street, house by house and room by room—he knew it was only a question of time before the British garrison at the bridge was overwhelmed.  The Germans obviously hoped to crush Frost’s small force, by sheer weight of numbers, within a matter of hours.  Against such powerful and concentrated attacks, all that could save the courageous defenders at the bridge was the arrival of XXX Corps or the remaining battalions of the 1/ Parachute Brigade still fighting their way into the city.

It had been a night of unceasing horror for the SS soldiers who fought

near the bridge.  Colonel Harzer, apparently satisfied that he had

halted Urquhart’s battalions, had underestimated both the number and

the caliber of the men who had reached the northern

end.  Harzer did not even bother to order his few self-propelled guns to be brought up as support.  Instead, squad after squad of SS were thrown against the British positions in the buildings around the ramp.  These tough units met a foe most of them remember as the fiercest soldiers they had ever encountered.

SS Squad Leader Alfred Ringsdorf, twenty-one, an experienced soldier who had fought in Russia, was on a freight train heading toward Arnhem where, he was told, his group was to be refitted.  There was utter confusion at the Arnhem station when Ringsdorf and his men arrived.  Troops from a hodgepodge of units were milling about, being lined up and marched off.  Ringsdorf’s unit was told to report immediately to a command post in the city.  There, a major attached them to a company of the 21/ Panzer Grenadier Regiment.  The squad had arrived without arms, but by late Sunday afternoon they were outfitted with machine guns, carbines, hand grenades and a few [email protected]  * Questioning the limited amount of ammunition, they were told that supplies were en route.  “At this time,” says Ringsdorf, “I had no idea where we were going to fight, where the battle was, and I had never been in Arnhem before.”  * A German version of the American recoilless antitank bazooka capable of firing a 20-pound projectile with extreme accuracy.