Bridge Too Far (37 page)

Equally critical, Division had no communications with General Browning’s Corps headquarters near Nijmegen, or with the special “Phantom Net” sets at Montgomery’s headquarters.  Of the few vital messages that did reach England, most were sent over a BBC set, which had been specially flown in for British war correspondents.  Its signal was weak and distorted.  A high-powered German station and the British set were operating on the same frequency.  Ironically, Division could pick up signals from rear Corps headquarters back in England, but were unable to transmit messages back.  What sparse communications did get through via the BBC set were picked up at Browning’s rear Corps headquarters at Moor Park and then relayed to the Continent.  The transmission took hours and when the messages arrived they were outdated and often virtually meaningless.

Frustrated and worried, Hicks had three immediate concerns: the weather over England; the inability to confirm the planned arrival time of the second lift; and his lack of a means of informing anyone of the true situation in the Arnhem area.  Additionally he could not warn Hackett of the perilous hold the British had on the landing areas where the 4th Brigade would expect to drop in cleared and protected zones.

Less crucial, but nonetheless troublesome, was the forthcoming encounter with Brigadier Shan Hackett.  The volatile Hackett, Mackenzie told Hicks, would be informed of Urquhart’s decision regarding the chain of command the moment he landed.  “I knew Hackett’s temperament,” Mackenzie recalls, “and I was not looking forward to the meeting.  But telling him was my job and I was following General Urquhart’s orders.  I could no longer take the chance that something had not happened to both the General and Lathbury.”

At least Hicks was relieved of that delicate confrontation.  The new division commander had enough on his mind.  “The situation was more than just confusing,” he remembers.  “It was a bloody mess.”

In the western suburbs of Arnhem, the once tidy parks and clean-swept streets were scarred and pitted by the battle as the British 1/ and 3rd battalions struggled to reach the bridge.  Glass, debris and the broken boughs of copper beech trees littered the cobblestone streets.  Rhododendron bushes and thick borders of bronze, orange and yellow marigolds lay torn and crushed, and vegetable gardens in back of the neat Dutch houses were in ruins.  The snouts of British antitank guns protruded from the shattered windows of shops and stores, while German half-tracks, deliberately backed into houses and concealed by their rubble, menaced the streets.  Black smoke spewed up from burning British and German vehicles and constant showers of debris rained down as shells slammed into strong points.  The crumpled bodies of the wounded and dead lay everywhere.  Many soldiers remember seeing Dutch men and women, wearing white helmets and overalls emblazoned with red crosses, dashing heedlessly through the fire from both sides, to drag the injured and dying to shelter.

This strange, deadly battle now devastating the outskirts of the city barely two miles from the Arnhem bridge seemed to have no plan or strategy.  Like all street fighting, it had become one massive, fierce, man-to-man encounter in a checkerboard of streets.

The Red Devils were cold, unshaven, dirty and hungry.  The fighting had been too constant to allow men more than an occasional “brew-up” of tea.  Ammunition was running short and casualties were mounting; some companies had lost as much as 50 percent of their strength.  Sleep had been impossible, except in brief snatches.  Many men, weary and on the move for hours, had lost all sense of time.  Few knew exactly where they were or how far away the bridge still was, but they were grimly determined to get there.  Years later, men like Private Henry Bennett of Colonel Fitch’s 3rd Battalion, on the middle, Tiger route, would remember that throughout the constant skirmishes, sniping and mortar fire, one command was constant: “Move!  Move!  Move!”

Yet to General Urquhart, now absent from Division headquarters for nearly sixteen hours and without radio contact, the progress of the attack was agonizingly slow.  Since 3 A.m., when he had been roused at the villa where he had spent a restless few hours, Urquhart, along with Brigadier Lathbury, had been on the road continuously with the 3rd Battalion.  “Sharp encounters, brief bursts of fire, kept bringing the entire column to a stop,” Urquhart says.  The psychological effectiveness of German snipers disturbed the General.  He had anticipated that some of his men who had not been in action before would be “a bit bullet-shy initially,” but would rally quickly.  Instead, along some streets, sniper fire alone was slowing up the progress of the entire battalion.  Yet, rather than interfere with Fitch’s command, Urquhart remained silent.  “As a divisional commander mixed up in a battalion encounter … I was in the worst possible position to intervene, but all the time I was conscious of each precious second that was being wasted.”  German snipers were dealt with effectively, but Urquhart was appalled at the time it took to dig them out.

So was Regimental Sergeant Major John C. Lord.  Like the General, Lord

was chafing at the delay.  “German resistance was fierce and

continuous, but at least a large part of our delay was caused by the

Dutch as well.  They were out in the streets early, waving, smiling,

offering us ersatz coffee.  Some of them had even

draped Union Jacks over their hedges.  There they were, right in the midst of the fighting, and they didn’t even seem to realize it was going on.  They, with all their good intentions, were holding us up as much as the Germans.”

Suddenly the intensive sniper fire was replaced by something far more serious: the piercing crack of the enemy’s 88 mm.  artillery and self-propelled guns.  At this point the forward units of Fitch’s battalion were close by the massive St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital, less than two miles northwest of the Arnhem bridge.  The hospital lay almost at the confluence of the two main highways leading into Arnhem, along which the 1/ and 3rd battalions were attempting to march to the bridge.  Here, elements of the Hohenstaufen Division’s armor had been positioned throughout the night.  Both Colonel Dobie’s 1/ Battalion on the Ede-Arnhem road and Fitch’s 3rd Battalion on the Utrecht road must pass on either side of the junction to get to the bridge.  Dobie’s battalion was the first to feel the force of Colonel Harzer’s fanatical SS units.

From a horseshoe-shaped perimeter covering the northern and western approaches of the city, the Germans had forced Dobie’s men off the upper road and into cover in the surrounding built-up areas.  SS men, hidden on the rooftops, and snipers in attics had allowed forward units to pass unhindered before opening up with a murderous fire on troops coming up behind.  In the confusion of the surprise attack, companies and platoons were dispersed in all directions.

Now, employing the same tactics, the Germans were concentrating on Fitch’s 3rd Battalion.  And, in a situation that could have disastrous consequences, four critical officers—the commanders of the 1/ and 3rd battalions, the officer in charge of the 1/ Parachute Brigade and the commander of the 1/ British Airborne Division—all found themselves bottled up in the same small, heavily populated area.  Ironically, as in the case of Model and his commanders at Oosterbeek, General Urquhart and Brigadier Lathbury were surrounded by an enemy oblivious to their presence.

Trapped by fire from ahead and behind, the British columns scattered.  Some men headed for buildings along the Rhine, more took to the nearby woods and others—among them, Urquhart and Lathbury—ran for safety into narrow streets of identical brick houses.

Urquhart and his group had just reached a three-story house in a block of buildings near the main Utrecht-Arnhem road when the Germans shelled the building.  The British were uninjured, but German armor, Urquhart was later to note, “moved through the streets with almost casual immunity.”  As one tank rumbled down the street, its commander standing in the open hatch looking for targets, Major Peter Waddy leaned out of an upper-floor window of a house next to Urquhart’s and expertly dropped a plastic explosive into the open turret, blowing the tank to pieces.  * Other men, following Waddy’s example, demolished two more tanks.  But, although the British fought fiercely, the lightly armed troopers were no match for the German armor.  * A short time later, reconnoitering the British positions, Waddy was killed by a mortar blast.

Urquhart’s own predicament was increasing by the minute.  He was desperately anxious to get back to Division headquarters and gain control of the battle.  Caught up in the fighting, he believed his only means of escape was to take to the streets and, in the confusion, try to get through the German positions.  His officers, fearful for his safety, disagreed, but Urquhart was adamant.  The intense fighting was, as he saw it, still only “company-size action” and, as the buildings the British occupied were not yet surrounded, he felt the group should get out quickly before German strength increased and the ring tightened.

During the hasty conference amid the noise of the battle, Urquhart and

his officers were dumfounded to see a British Bren gun carrier clatter

down the street, as though unaware of the German fire, and pull up

outside the building.  A Canadian lieutenant, Leo Heaps, who in

Urquhart’s words “seemed to have a charmed existence,” leaped out of

the driver’s seat and raced for the building.  Behind Heaps was Charles

“Frenchie” [email protected],

of the Dutch resistance, who was acting as Heaps’s guide.  The carrier was loaded with supplies and ammunition which Heaps hoped to deliver to Colonel Frost on the bridge.  With German armor everywhere, the small vehicle and its two occupants had miraculously survived enemy fire and en route had, by chance, discovered Urquhart’s whereabouts.  Now, for the first time in hours, Urquhart learned from Heaps what was happening.  “The news was far from encouraging,” Urquhart later recalled.  “Communications were still out.  Frost was on the northern end of the bridge under heavy attack, but holding, and I was reported missing or captured.”  After listening to Heaps, Urquhart told Lathbury that it was now imperative “before we’re completely bottled up to take a chance and break out.”

Turning to Heaps, Urquhart told the Canadian that if he reached Division headquarters after completing his mission at the bridge, he was to urge Mackenzie to “organize as much help as he could for Frost’s battalion.”  At all costs, including his own safety, Urquhart was determined that Frost must get the supplies and men needed to hold until Horrocks’ tanks reached Arnhem.

As Heaps and [email protected] left, Urquhart and Lathbury set about making their escape.  The street outside was now being swept constantly by enemy fire and buildings were crumpling under the pounding of shells.  Urquhart noted “a growing pile of dead around the houses we occupied,” and concluded that any exit via the street would be impossible.  The commanders, along with others, decided to leave from the rear of the building, where, under covering fire and smoke bombs, they might be able to get away.  Then, taking advantage of plantings in the back gardens of the row houses, Urquhart and Lathbury hoped eventually to reach a quiet area and make their way back to headquarters.

The route was nightmarish.  While paratroopers laid down a heavy smoke

screen, Urquhart’s group dashed out the back door, sprinted through a

vegetable garden and climbed a fence separating the house from its

neighbor.  As they paused for a moment near the next enclosure,

Lathbury’s Sten gun went off accidentally, barely missing the General’s

right foot.  As Urquhart was

later to write, “I chided Lathbury about soldiers who could not keep their Stens under control.  It was bad enough for a division commander to be jinking about … and it would have been too ironic for words to be laid low by a bullet fired by one of my own brigadiers.”

Climbing fence after fence, and once a ten-foot-high brick wall, the men moved down the entire block of houses until, finally, they reached an intersecting cobbled street.  Then, confused and weary, they made a drastic miscalculation.  Instead of veering left, which might have given them a margin of safety, they turned right toward St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital, directly into the German fire.

Running ahead of Urquhart and Lathbury were two other officers, Captain William Taylor of the Brigade’s headquarters staff and Captain James Cleminson of the 3rd Battalion.  One of them called out suddenly but neither Urquhart nor Lathbury understood his words.  Before Taylor and Cleminson could head them off, the two senior officers came upon a maze of intersecting streets where, it seemed to Urquhart, “a German machine gun was firing down each one.”  As the four men attempted to run past one of these narrow crossings, Lathbury was hit.

Quickly the others dragged him off the street and into a house.  There, Urquhart saw that a bullet had entered the Brigadier’s lower back and he appeared to be temporarily paralyzed.  “All of us knew,” Urquhart recalls, “that he could travel no farther.”  Lathbury urged the General to leave immediately without him.  “You’ll only get cut off if you stay, sir,” he told Urquhart.  As they talked, Urquhart saw a German soldier appear at the window.  He raised his automatic and fired at point-blank range.  The bloodied mass of the German’s face disappeared.

Now, with the Germans so near, there was no longer any question that

Urquhart must leave quickly.  Before going, he talked with the

middle-aged couple who owned the house and spoke some English.  They

promised to get Lathbury to St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital as soon as there

was a lull in the fighting.  In order to save the owners from German

reprisal, Urquhart and his party hid Lathbury in a cellar

beneath a stairway until he could be removed to the hospital.  Then, Urquhart remembers, “we left by the back door and into yet another maze of tiny, fenced gardens.”  The three men did not get far, but Urquhart’s life may well have been saved by the prompt action of fifty-five-year-old Antoon Derksen, owner of a terrace house at Zwarteweg 14.