Bridge Too Far (38 page)

In the maelstrom of firing, Antoon, his wife Anna, their son Jan, and daughter Hermina were sheltering in the kitchen at the rear of the house.  Glancing through a window, Derksen was amazed to see three British officers vault over the fence into his back garden and head for the kitchen door.  Quickly, he let them in.

Unable to communicate—he didn’t speak English and no one in Urquhart’s party knew Dutch—Antoon, gesturing, tried to warn the Britishers that the area was surrounded.  “There were Germans in the street,” he later recalled, “and at the back, in the direction the officers had been going.  At the end of the row of gardens there were Germans in position at the corner.”

Derksen hastily ushered his visitors up a narrow staircase to a landing and from there into a bedroom.  In the ceiling was a pull-down door with steps leading to the attic.  Cautiously looking out the bedroom window the three men saw the reason for Derksen’s wild pantomime.  Only a few feet below them, in positions all along the street, were German troops.  “We were so close to them,” Urquhart remembers, “we could hear them talking.”

Urquhart was unable to guess whether the Germans had spotted his group as they entered the rear of the house, or whether they might burst in at any moment.  In spite of Derksen’s warning that the area was surrounded, he pondered the twin risks of continuing through the chain of back gardens or making a dash down the front street, using hand grenades to clear the way.  He was ready to take any chance to return to his command.  His officers, fearful for him, were not.  At the moment, the odds were simply too great.  It was far better, they argued, to wait until British troops overran the sector than for the commanding general to risk capture or possible death.

The advice, Urquhart knew, was sound, and he did not want to

compel his officers to take risks that might prove suicidal.  Yet, “my long absence from Division headquarters was all I could think about, and anything seemed better to me than to stay out of the battle in this way.”

The familiar creaking clack of caterpillar treads forced Urquhart to stay put.  From the window the three officers saw a German self-propelled gun come slowly down the street.  Directly outside the Derksen house, it came to a halt.  The top of the armored vehicle was almost level with the bedroom window, and the crew, dismounting, now sat talking and smoking directly below.  Obviously, they were not moving on and at any moment the Britishers expected them to enter the house.

Quickly Captain Taylor pulled down the attic steps and the three officers hurriedly climbed up.  Crouched down and looking about him, the six-foot Urquhart saw that the attic was little more than a crawl space.  He felt “idiotic, ridiculous, as ineffectual in the battle as a spectator.”

The house was now silent.  Antoon Derksen, as a loyal Dutchman, had sheltered the British.  Now, fearing possible reprisal if Urquhart was found, he prudently evacuated his family to a neighboring house.  In the nearly airless attic, and without food or water, Urquhart and his officers could only wait anxiously, hoping either for the Germans to pull back or for British troops to arrive.  On this Monday, September 18, with Market-Garden only a day old, the Germans had almost brought the Arnhem battle to a halt and, compounding all the errors and miscalculations of the operation, Urquhart, the one man who might have brought cohesion to the British attack, was isolated in an attic, trapped within the German lines.

It had been a long, tedious mission for Captain Paul [email protected] and his

9th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion.  Allied paratroopers had not

landed in the eleven-mile stretch between Arnhem and Nijmegen.  Of

that, [email protected] was quite certain.  But

enemy units were in Nijmegen.  Immediately after a few of [email protected]’s vehicles had crossed the great Waal river bridge, there had been a short, brisk small-arms encounter.  In the darkness, the enemy had seemed to show no great inclination to continue the fight against his armored vehicles, and [email protected] had reported to headquarters that the Allies seemed to have little strength in the city as yet.

Now, his scouting mission completed, [email protected] ordered a few self-propelled guns from his forty-vehicle unit to guard the southern approaches to the Nijmegen bridge.  With the rest of the patrol, he headed back north to Arnhem.  He had seen neither paratroopers nor any enemy activity when crossing the Arnhem bridge the night before.  However, from radio messages, he had learned that some British troops were on one side of the bridge.  Harzer’s headquarters had merely called them “advance units.”  [email protected] halted once more, this time at the town of Elst, approximately midway between Arnhem and Nijmegen.  There again, to be within striking distance of either highway bridge, he left off part of his column.  With the remaining twenty-two vehicles, he sped back toward the Arnhem bridge to clear it of whatever small enemy units were there.  Against paratroopers armed with only rifles or machine guns, [email protected] expected little difficulty.  His powerful armored units would simply smash through the lightly held British defenses and knock them out.

At precisely 9:30 A.m., Corporal Don Lumb, from his rooftop position near the bridge, yelled out excitedly, “Tanks!  It’s XXX Corps!”  At Battalion headquarters nearby, Colonel John Frost heard his own spotter call out.  Like Corporal Lumb, Frost felt a moment’s heady exhilaration.  “I remember thinking that we would have the honor of welcoming XXX Corps into Arnhem all by ourselves,” he recalls.  Other men were equally cheered.  On the opposite side of the northern approach, the men under the ramp near Captain Eric Mackay’s command post could already hear the sound of heavy vehicles reverberating on the bridge above.

Sergeant Charles Storey pounded up the stairs to Corporal Lumb’s lookout.  Peering toward the smoke still rising from the southern approach, Storey saw the column Lumb had spotted.  His reaction was immediate.  Racing back downstairs, the pre-Dunkirk veteran shouted, “They’re Germans!  Armored cars on the bridge!”

At top speed, the vanguard of Captain Paul [email protected]’s assault force came on across the bridge.  With extraordinary skill, German drivers, swerving left and right, not only avoided the smoldering wreckage cluttering the bridge, but drove straight through a mine field—a string of platelike Teller mines that the British had laid during the night.  Only one of [email protected]’s five lead vehicles touched off a mine—and only superficially damaged, kept on coming.  On his side of the ramp, Captain Mackay stared with amazement as the first of the squat camouflaged cars, machine guns firing constantly, barreled off the ramp, smashed through the British perimeter defenses, and kept on going straight toward the center of Arnhem.  Almost immediately, Mackay saw another go past.  “We had no antitank guns on our side,” Mackay says, “and I just watched helplessly as three more armored cars sped right past us and took off up the avenue.”

[email protected]’s daring plan to smash across the bridge by force and speed was underway.  Out of the sight of the British, on the southern approach to the bridge, he had lined up his column.  Now, half-tracks, more armored cars, personnel carriers and even a few truckloads of infantry, firing from behind heavy sacks of grain, began to advance.  Crouching behind the half-tracks were other German soldiers, firing steadily.

The sudden surprise breakthrough of [email protected]’s lead vehicles had stunned the British.  They recovered quickly.  Antitank guns from Frost’s side of the bridge began to get the range.  From the entire northern area a lethal fire enveloped the German column.  From parapets, rooftops, windows and slit trenches, troopers opened fire with every weapon available, from machine guns to hand grenades.  Sapper Ronald Emery, on Mackay’s side of the ramp, shot the driver and codriver of the first half-track to cross.

As the second came into view, Emery shot its drivers, too.  The half-track came to a dead halt just off the ramp, whereupon the remainder of its crew of six, abandoning the vehicle, were shot one by one.

Relentlessly, [email protected]’s column pressed on.  Two more half-tracks nosed across the bridge.  Suddenly, chaos overtook the German assault.  The driver of the third half-track was wounded.  Panicked, he threw his vehicle into reverse, colliding with the half-track behind.  The two vehicles, now inextricably tangled, slewed across the road, one bursting into flames.  Doggedly the Germans coming up behind tried to force a passage.  Accelerating their vehicles, frantic to gain the northern side, they rammed into one another and into the growing piles of debris tossed up by shells and mortar bursts.  Out of control, some half-tracks hit the edge of the ramp with such force that they toppled over the edge and down into the streets below.  Supporting German infantrymen following the half-tracks were mercilessly cut down.  Unable to advance beyond the center of the bridge, the survivors raced back to the southern side.  A storm of fire ricocheted against the girders of the bridge.  Now, too, shells from Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson’s artillery, situated in Oosterbeek, and called in by Major Dennis Munford from the attic of Brigade headquarters near Frost’s own building, screamed into [email protected]’s stricken vehicles.  Through all the din came the yelling of the now-exuberant British paratroopers as they shouted the war cry, “Whoa Mohammed,” which the Red Devils had first used in the dry hills of North Africa in 1942.  * * In that campaign, paratroopers noted that the Arabs, shouting messages to one another, seemed to begin each communication with these two words.  In Arnhem, the war cry was to take on special meaning.  It enabled paratroopers on both sides of the northern ramp to determine who was friend or foe in the various buildings and positions, since the Germans seemed unable to pronounce the words.  According to Hilary St.  George Saunders in By Air to Battle, the war cry “seemed to rouse the men to their highest endeavours.”

The fierceness of the raging battle stunned the Dutch in the area.

Lambert Schaap, who lived with his family on the Rijnkade—the street

running east and west of the bridge—hurried his wife and nine children

off to a shelter.  Schaap himself remained in his

house until a hail of bullets came through the windows, pitting walls and smashing furniture.  Under this intense barrage Schaap fled.  To Police Sergeant Joannes van Kuijk, the battle seemed endless.  “The firing was furious,” he recalls, “and one building after another seemed to be hit or burning.  Telephone calls from colleagues and friends were constant, asking for information about what was happening.  We were having a hard time of it in our building, and neighboring premises were catching fire.  The houses on Eusebius Buiten Singel were also alight.”

On that wide boulevard near the northern approach, Coenraad Hulleman, in his [email protected]’s house only a few doors away from Captain Mackay’s command post, now stayed with the rest of the Van der Sande family in their basement shelter.  “There was a funny sound overriding all the other noise and someone said it was raining,” Hulleman remembers.  “I went up to the first floor, looked out, and saw that it was fire.  Soldiers were running in every direction, and the entire block seemed to be in flames.  The battle moved right up the boulevard, and suddenly it was our turn.  Bullets smacked into the house, smashing windows, and upstairs we heard musical notes as the piano was hit.  Then, amazingly, a sound like someone typing in Mr.  Van der Sande’s office.  The bullets were simply chewing up the typewriter.”  Hulleman’s [email protected], Truid, who had followed him up, saw that shots were hitting the tower of the massive Church of St.  Eusibius.  As she watched in amazement the gold hands of the huge clock on the church spun crazily as though, Truid remembers, “time was racing by.”

To the bridge fighters, time had lost all meaning.  The shock, speed and ferocity of the battle caused many men to think that the fight had gone on for many hours.  Actually, [email protected]’s attack had lasted less than two.  Of the armored vehicles that Colonel Harzer had jealously guarded from General Harmel, twelve lay wrecked or burning on the northern side.  The remainder disengaged from the carnage and moved back to Elst, minus their commander.  In the bitter no-quarter fighting, Captain Paul [email protected] had been killed.

Now the British, in pride and triumph, began to assess the damage.  Medics and stretcher-bearers, braving the unrelenting sniper fire, moved through the smoke and litter, carrying the wounded of both sides to shelter.  The Red Devils on the bridge had repulsed and survived the horror of an armored attack and, almost as though they were being congratulated on their success, 2nd Battalion signalmen suddenly picked up a strong clear message from XXX Corps.  The grimy, weary troopers imagined that their ordeal was all but over.  Now, beyond any doubt, Horrocks’ tanks must be a scant few hours away.

From airfields behind the German border, swarms of fighters took to the air.  To amass and fuel the planes, the nearly depleted Luftwaffe had mounted an all-out effort.  Now, after a frantic, sleepless night, during which fighters had been rushed in from all over Germany, some 190 planes gathered over Holland between 9 and 10 A.m. Their mission was to destroy the second lift of Market.  Unlike the skeptical Field Marshal Model, the Luftwaffe generals believed the captured Market-Garden plans to be authentic.  They saw a glittering opportunity to achieve a major success.  From the plans, German air commanders knew the routes, landing zones and drop times of the Monday lift.  Squadrons of German fighters patrolling the Dutch coast across the known Allied flight paths and drop zones waited to pounce on the airborne columns, due to begin their drops at 10 A.m. Zero hour passed with no sign of the Allied air fleet.  The short-range fighters were ordered to land, refuel and take off again.  But the sky remained empty.  None of the anticipated targets materialized.  Baffled and dismayed, the Luftwaffe high command could only wonder what had happened.

What had happened was simple.  Unlike Holland, where the weather was

clear, Britain was covered by fog.  On the bases, British and American

airborne troops, ready to go, waited impatiently by their planes and

gliders.  On this crucial morning, when