Bridge Too Far (36 page)

On the other side of Eusebius Buiten Singel, the winding, grass-stripped boulevard close by the bridge, Coenraad Hulleman, a labor mediator staying with his [email protected], Truid van der Sande, and her parents in their villa, had been up all night listening to the firing and explosions around the schoolhouse a street away, where Captain Mackay’s men were fighting off the Germans.  Because of the intensity of the battle, the Van der Sandes and Hulleman had taken refuge in a small, windowless cellar beneath the central portion of the house.

Now, at dawn, Hulleman and his future father-in-law stole cautiously

upstairs to a second-floor room overlooking the boulevard.  There, they

stared down in amazement.  A dead German lay in the middle of a patch

of marigolds in the landscaped street, and all through the grass plots

they saw Germans in one-man slit trenches.  Glancing along the

boulevard to his right, Hulleman

saw several German armored vehicles parked beside a high brick wall, drawn up and waiting.  Even as the two men watched, a new battle broke out.  Machine guns on the tanks suddenly fired into the towers of the nearby Walburg Church, and Hulleman saw a fine red dust spew out.  He could only assume that paratroopers were in lookout positions in the church.  Almost immediately the tank fire was answered, and the Germans in slit trenches began to machine-gun the houses on the opposite side of the street.  One of them was a costume shop and in its windows were knights in armor.  As Hulleman looked on, the bullets shattered the show window and toppled the knights.  Moved to tears, Hulleman turned away.  He hoped the sight was not prophetic.

A few blocks north, in a house near the concert hall, Willem Onck was awakened shortly after dawn by the sound of troop movements in the street.  Someone hammered on his door and a German voice ordered Onck and his family to stay inside and to draw the blinds.  Onck did not immediately obey.  Running to the front window, he saw Germans with machine guns at every corner of the street.  In front of the Musis Sacrum was an 88 mm.  battery, and to Onck’s utter amazement, German soldiers were sitting next to it on the auditorium’s chairs which they had carried into the street.  Watching them chatting casually with one another, Onck thought they looked as if they were only waiting for the concert to begin.

The most frustrated and angry civilians in the area were the members of the Dutch underground.  Several of them had contacted the British almost immediately at the bridge, but their help had been politely refused.  Earlier, Arnhem’s underground chief, Pieter Kruyff, had sent Toon van Daalen and Gijsbert Numan to Oosterbeek to establish contact with the British.  They too had found that their assistance was not needed.  Numan remembers warning the troopers of snipers in the area and advising them to avoid main roads.  “One of them told me their orders were to proceed to the bridge only, and they would follow their indicated routes,” Numan says.  “I got the impression that they were in dread of provocateurs and simply did not trust us.”

Now, at dawn, Johannus Penseel held a meeting in his cellar with his resistance workers.  Penseel planned to take over a local radio station and broadcast a proclamation that the city was free.  A telephone call from Numan changed his mind.  “It goes badly,” Numan reported.  “The situation is critical, and I think everything is already lost.” Penseel was stunned.  “What do you mean?”  he asked.  Numan was now near St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital.  The British were finding it impossible to get through the German lines and march to the bridge, he said.  Penseel immediately telephoned Pieter Kruyff, who advised the group to hold back any planned activities—“a temporary nonintervention,” as Henri Knap, who attended the meeting, recalls.  But the long-term hopes of the resistance workers were crushed.  “We were prepared to do anything,” Penseel recalls, “even sacrifice our lives if necessary.  Instead, we sat useless and unwanted.  It was now increasingly clear that the British neither trusted us nor intended to use us.”

Ironically, in these early hours of Monday, September 18, when neither SHAEF, Montgomery nor any Market-Garden commander had a clear picture of the situation, members of the Dutch underground passed a report through secret telephone lines to the 82nd Airborne’s Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie Bestebreurtje, that the British were being overwhelmed by panzer divisions at Arnhem.  In the 82nd’s message logs, the notation appears: “Dutch report Germans winning over British at Arnhem.”  In the absence of any direct communications from the Arnhem battle area, this message was actually the first indication that the Allied High Command received of the crisis that was overtaking the 1/ British Airborne Division.

At the ferry landing stage in the little village of Driel, seven miles southwest of the Arnhem bridge, Pieter, the ferryman, prepared for his first trip of the day across the Lower Rhine.  The early-morning commuters, who worked in the towns and villages on the northern side of the river, huddled together in small groups, chilled by the morning mist.  Pieter took no part in the talk of his passengers about the fighting going on west of Arnhem and in the city itself.  His concern was with the operation of the ferry and the daily schedules he must maintain, as he had done for years.

A few cars, and farm carts filled with produce for stores and markets to the north, were loaded first.  Then men and women pushing bicycles came aboard.  At exactly 7 A.m. Pieter swung out into the river, the ferry running smoothly along its cable.  The trip took only a few minutes.  Edging up to the ramp below the village of Heveadorp on the northern bank, passengers and vehicles disembarked.  Above them, the Westerbouwing, a hundred-foot-high hill, dominated the countryside.  On the northern bank, most commuters set off on roads leading east to Oosterbeek, whose tenth-century church tower rose above groves of oaks and lupine-covered moors.  Beyond was Arnhem.

Other passengers waited to cross back to Driel.  There, once again,

Pieter took on northbound travelers.  One of them was young Cora

Baltussen.  Only two weeks earlier, on September 5, which would always

be remembered by the Dutch as Mad Tuesday, she had watched the Germans’

frantic retreat.  In Driel, the conquerors had not returned.  For the

first time in months,

Cora had felt free.  Now, once again, she was apprehensive.  The joy of the news of the paratroop landings the day before had been diminished by rumors of the intense fighting in Arnhem.  Still, Cora could not believe the Germans would ever defeat the powerful Allied forces that had come to liberate her country.

At the Heveadorp landing on the north side of the river, Cora pushed her bicycle off the ferry and pedaled to Oosterbeek and the local baker’s shop.  She had given her meager hoard of sugar rations to the pastry shop for a special occasion.  On this Monday, September 18, the Baltussen preserves factory was observing its seventy-fifth year in business and Cora’s mother was celebrating her sixty-second birthday.  For the first time in months all of the family would be together.  Cora had come to Oosterbeek early to pick up the birthday cake, which would mark both the company’s anniversary and Mrs.  Baltussen’s birthday.

Friends had tried to dissuade Cora from making the trip.  Cora refused to listen.  “What can possibly happen?”  she had asked one friend.  “The British are in Oosterbeek and Arnhem.  The war is almost over.”

Her trip was uneventful.  In these early hours Oosterbeek seemed peaceful.  There were British troops in the streets, the shops were open, and a holiday mood prevailed.  For the moment, although gunfire could be heard only a few miles away, Oosterbeek was tranquil, not yet touched by the battle.  Although her order was ready, the baker was amazed that she had come.  “The war is all but over,” she told him.  With her parcels, she cycled back to Heveadorp and waited until Pieter brought the ferry in again.  On the southern bank she returned to the somnolent peace of little Driel, where, as usual, absolutely nothing was happening.

On the British landing and drop zones, the officer with perhaps the least glamorous job of all was going about it with his usual capability.  All through the night the men of Brigadier Philip “Pip” Hicks’s 1/ Airlanding Brigade had staved off a series of vicious enemy attacks, as the motley groups under Von Tettau’s command harassed the brigade.  Hicks’s men were dug in around the perimeters to hold the zones for the expected 10 A.m. drop of Brigadier Shan Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade, and the resupply missions that would follow.  The zones under Hicks’s protection were also the supply dumps for the British airborne.

Neither Hicks nor his men had managed more than an hour or two of sleep.  The Germans, attacking from the woods, had set the forest on fire in some areas in the hope of burning out the British defenders.  The Red Devils promptly responded.  Slipping behind the enemy, they charged with fixed bayonets and forced the Germans into their own fire.  Signalman Graham Marples remembers the bitter nighttime battles vividly.  He and a few others came upon a platoon of dead British troopers who had been overrun and completely wiped out.  “No one said anything,” Marples remembers.  “We just fixed bayonets and went right on into the woods.  We came out, but the Jerries didn’t.”  Private Robert Edwards, who had seen action in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, recalls that “I had managed to come through all those actions more or less unscathed, but in one day in Holland I had been in more fire fights than all else put together.”

The unending skirmishes had taken their toll.  Several times

during the night Hicks had called upon Lieutenant Colonel W. F. K.  “Sheriff” Thompson for artillery support to force back the persistent enemy attacks.  His real fear was that German armor, which he now knew was holding up the battalions going for the bridge, would break through his meager defenses and drive him off the landing and drop zones.  “I went through some of the worst few hours I have ever spent in my life,” Hicks recalls.  “Two things were clear: although we did not know it at the time we had landed virtually on top of two panzer divisions—which weren’t supposed to be there—and the Germans had reacted with extraordinary speed.”  Under attack from Von Tettau’s groups from the west and Harzer’s armor from the east, Hicks’s lightly armed paratroopers had no option but to hold until relieved, or until reinforcements and supplies were safely down.

Colonel Charles Mackenzie, General Urquhart’s chief of staff, had spent the night on the Renkum Heath landing zone, about three miles away from Hicks’s command post.  The intense fighting had caused Division to move out of the woods and back onto the field.  There the headquarters staff took shelter in gliders for the rest of the night.  Mackenzie was concerned about the absence of any word from Urquhart.  “For more than nine hours, we had heard nothing whatsoever from the General,” he recalls.  “I assumed that he was with Lathbury’s 1/ Brigade, but communications were out and we had heard nothing from either officer.  I knew that a decision would soon have to be made about the command of the division.  There always existed the possibility that Urquhart had been captured or killed.”

Early Monday, still without news, Mackenzie decided to confer with two

senior staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Loder-Symonds and

Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Preston.  Mackenzie informed them of

Urquhart’s conversation with him prior to takeoff in England: the

succession of command, in case anything happened to Urquhart, should be

Lathbury, Hicks, then Hackett.  Now, with Lathbury missing as well,

Mackenzie felt that Briga-

dier Hicks should be contacted.  The other officers agreed.  Immediately they drove to Hicks’s headquarters.  There, in a house close by the Heelsum-Arnhem road, Mackenzie told Hicks what he knew.  “We had a scanty report that Frost had taken the bridge, but that the First and Third battalions were caught up in street fighting and had not as yet been able to reinforce him,” Mackenzie remembers.

The best course of action now, Mackenzie believed, was for Hicks to release one of his Airlanding battalions and send it to the bridge.  It could be reinforced later by elements of Hackett’s 4th Paratroop Brigade when it arrived later in the morning.  At the same time, Hicks was asked to take command of the division immediately.

Hicks seemed stunned.  His forces were already understrength and he did not have a full battalion to send to the bridge.  Yet it appeared the British battle plan was faltering.  If Frost failed to get help immediately, the bridge might be lost; and if the landing areas were overrun, Hackett’s 4th Brigade could be destroyed before it was even assembled.

Additionally, there seemed to be a tacit acknowledgment that Hicks was being asked to assume command of a division already in the process of disintegration through a total breakdown of communications and the absence of the commanding officer.  Reluctantly, Hicks released half of one battalion—all he could spare—for defense of the bridge.  * Obviously, that decision was most urgent.  The bridge had to be held.  Then, as Mackenzie remembers, “We finally convinced Hicks that he must take command of the division.”  * He ordered half of the South Staffords to start off for Arnhem.  The other half of this battalion would not arrive until the second lift, when, supplementing the advance of Hackett’s 11th Battalion, these units would also move out.

Few men had ever been asked to accept battleground responsibility for

an entire division under such a complexity of circumstances.  Hicks

quickly discovered how critically the communications breakdown was

affecting all operations.  The few messages from Frost at the bridge

were being received via Lieutenant

Colonel Sheriff Thompson, commanding the Airlanding Light Regiment artillery.  From an observation post in the steeple of the Oosterbeek Laag church, two and one-half miles from the bridge, Thompson had established a radio link with Major D. S. Munford’s artillery command post at Brigade headquarters in a waterworks building near the bridge.  The Thompson-Munford link afforded the only dependable radio communications at Hicks’s disposal.