Bridge Too Far (45 page)

The man who had warned London on September 14 about the presence of Bittrich’s II SS Panzer Corps, Henri Knap, Arnhem’s underground intelligence chief, was now receiving a steady stream of reports of German reinforcements from his network.  Knap abandoned caution.  He telephoned British headquarters at the Hartenstein directly and spoke to a duty officer.  Without preamble Knap told him that “a column of tanks, among them some Tigers, is moving into Arnhem and some are heading toward Oosterbeek.”  The officer politely asked Knap to hold on.  A few minutes later he came back on the line.  Thanking Knap, he explained that “the Captain is doubtful about the report.  After all, he’s heard a lot of fairy tales.”  But the skepticism at British headquarters quickly disappeared when Pieter Kruyff confirmed through Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, of the Royal Dutch Navy, acting as an intelligence liaison officer for the division, that at least “fifty tanks are heading into Arnhem from the northeast.”

The stench of battle permeated the inner city.  On the bridge, wreckage jutted high above the concrete shoulders and littered streets along the Rhine.  Heavy smoke smeared buildings and yards with a greasy film.

All along the waterfront hundreds of fires burned unattended, and men

remember that the ground shook constantly from the concussion of heavy

explosives as the Germans, in the final hours of this second day of

battle, battered

British strongholds along the northern ramp in the bitter contest for possession of Montgomery’s prime objective.

Around midnight Lieutenant Colonel John Frost left his headquarters on the western side of the ramp and made his way around the perimeter, checking his men.  Although the battle had continued almost without letup since [email protected]’s armored attack during the morning, morale was still high.  Frost was proud of his tired, dirty troopers.  All day long they had doggedly repelled attack after attack.  Not a single German or vehicle had reached the north end of the bridge.

During the afternoon the Germans had changed their tactics.  With phosphorous ammunition, they attempted to burn the British out of their strong points.  A long-barreled 150 mm.  gun hurled 100-pound shells directly against Frost’s headquarters building, forcing the men to the cellar.  Then British mortars got the range and scored a direct hit, killing the gun crew.  As the troopers cheered and hooted derisively, other Germans rushed out under fire and towed the gun away.  Houses around the perimeter were burning fiercely, but the British held out in them until the very last minute before moving to other positions.  Damage was awesome.  Burning trucks and vehicles, wrecked half-tracks and smoking piles of debris cluttered every street.  Sergeant Robert H.  Jones remembers the sight as “a Sargasso sea of blazing collapsed buildings, half-tracks, trucks and jeeps.”  The battle had become an endurance contest, one that Frost knew his men could not win without help.

Cellars and basements were filled with wounded.  One of the battalion

chaplains, the Reverend Father Bernard Egan, and the battalion medical

officer, Captain James Logan—who had been friends since the North

African campaign—tended the casualties from a rapidly dwindling stock

of medical supplies.  There was almost no morphia left and even field

dressings were almost gone.  The men had set out for the bridge with

only enough light rations for forty-eight hours.  Now, these were

almost exhausted, and the Germans had cut off the water.  Forced to

scrounge for food, the troopers were existing on apples and a few pears

stored in the

cellars and basements of the houses they occupied.  Private G. W. Jukes remembers his sergeant telling the men, “You don’t need water if you eat lots of apples.”  Jukes had a vision of “being eventually relieved, standing back-to-back defiantly in blood-stained bandages, surrounded by dead Germans, spent cartridge cases and apple cores.”

Hour after hour Frost waited vainly for Dobie’s or Fitch’s relieving battalions to break through the German ring and reach the bridge.  Although sounds of battle came from the direction of western Arnhem, there was no sign of large-scale troop movements.  All through the day Frost had expected some further word from Horrocks’ XXX Corps.  Nothing had been heard from them since the single strong radio signal picked up during the morning.  Stragglers from the 3rd Battalion who had managed to get through to Frost brought news that Horrocks’ tanks were still far down the corridor.  Some had even heard from Dutch underground sources that the column had not reached Nijmegen as yet.  Worried and uncertain, Frost decided to keep this information to himself.  He had already begun to believe that the men of his proud 2nd Battalion, which he had commanded since its inception, would be alone far longer than he believed it possible to hold.

In the last hours of Monday, Frost’s hopes hinged on the third lift and

the expected arrival of Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski’s 1/ Polish

Parachute Brigade.  “They were to drop south of the bridge,” Frost

later wrote, “and I dreaded the reception they would have … but it

was important that they find a handful of friends to meet them.”  To

prepare for the Poles’ arrival, Frost organized a “mobile storming

party.”  Using two of Major Freddie Gough’s armored reconnaissance

jeeps and a Bren-gun carrier, Frost hoped to rush across the bridge

and, in the surprise and confusion of the assault, open a passage and

bring the Poles through.  Major Gough, who was to lead the group, was

“thoroughly miserable and quite unenthusiastic about the idea.”  He had

celebrated his forty-third birthday on September 16.  If

Frost’s plan was carried out, Gough felt quite certain he would not see his forty-fourth.  * * After the war Gough learned that General Horrocks had been thinking about a similar idea.  Remembering how a fast reconnaissance unit had gone ahead of the British column and linked up with the 101/, he thought that a similar fast patrol might well take its chances and reach the Arnhem bridge.  “Colonel Vincent Dunkerly was alerted to lead the group,” Gough says, “and, like me, he admitted that he spent the entire day peeing in his knickers at the thought.”

The Poles were not expected to land before 10 A.m., on the nineteenth.  Now, making his rounds of men in slit trenches, machine-gun emplacements, basements and cellars, Frost warned them to save precious ammunition.  They were to fire only at close quarters, to make every shot count.  Signalman James Haysom was sighting his rifle on a German when the Colonel’s order was passed along.  “Stand still, you sod,” Haysom shouted.  “These bullets cost money.”

While Frost knew that reducing the rate of fire would help the enemy improve his positions, he also believed that the Germans would be misled into thinking the British had lost heart as well as numbers.  This attitude, Frost was certain, would cost the Germans dearly.

On the opposite side of the ramp, the little band of men with Captain Eric Mackay was already proving Frost’s theory.

In the scarred and pitted schoolhouse under the ramp, Mackay had compressed his small force into two rooms and posted a handful of men in the hall outside to ward off any enemy attempt at infiltration.  Mackay had barely positioned his men when the Germans launched a murderous machine-gun and mortar attack.  Lance Corporal Arthur Hendy remembers the firing was so intense that bullets “whizzed through the shattered windows, chopped up the floorboards and we dodged as many flying splinters as we did actual bullets.”

As men ducked for cover, Mackay discovered that the Germans had brought

up a flamethrower, and within minutes a demolished half-track near the

school was set afire.  Then, Mackay recalls, “the Germans set fire to

the house to our north and it burned

merrily, sending down showers of sparks on our wooden roof which promptly caught fire.”  In the pandemonium, men sprinted for the roof, where for over three hours, using fire extinguishers from the school and their own camouflage smocks, they worked frantically to extinguish the flames.  To Lance Corporal Hendy the stench was “like burning cheese and burning flesh.  The whole area was lit up.  The heat in the attic was intense and all the time the Germans were sniping away at us.  Finally the fire was put out.”

As the exhausted troopers collected once again in the two rooms, Mackay ordered his soldiers to bind their feet with their smocks and shirts.  “The stone floors were thick with glass, plaster and metal fragments and the stairs were slippery with blood.  Everything scrunched under our feet and made a terrific racket.”  As Mackay was about to go to the cellar to check on his wounded, he remembers “a blinding flash and a terrific explosion.  The next thing I knew, someone was slapping my face.”  During the fire the Germans had brought up antitank [email protected] in an effort to demolish the little force once and for all.  With dazed disbelief Mackay saw that the entire southwest corner of the school and part of the still-smoldering roof had been blown away.  Worse, the classrooms now resembled a charnel house with dead and wounded everywhere.  “Only a few minutes later,” Mackay recalls, “someone came over and said he thought we were surrounded.  I looked out one of the windows.  Down below was a mass of Germans.  Funnily enough, they weren’t doing anything, just standing around on the grass.  They were on all sides of us except the west.  They must have thought the [email protected] had finished us off, because we had stopped firing.”

Making his way carefully around the bodies on the floor, Mackay ordered

his men to take up grenades.  “When I yell “Fire!”  open up with

everything you have,” he said.  Back at the southeast window, Mackay

gave the order.  “The boys dropped grenades on the heads below and we

instantly followed up with all we had left: six Brens and fourteen Sten

guns, firing at maximum rate.”  In the din, paratroopers stood

silhouetted in the windows, firing

their machine guns from the hip and yelling their war cry, “Whoa Mohammed.”  Within minutes the counterattack was over.  As Mackay recalls, “when I looked out again, all I could see below was a carpet of gray.  We must have wiped out between thirty and fifty Germans.”

Now his men went about collecting the dead and wounded.  One man was dying with fifteen bullets in the chest.  Five other men were critically injured and almost all the troopers had sustained burns trying to save the blazing roof.  Mackay had also been hit again by shrapnel and he discovered that his foot was pinned to his boot.  Neither Mackay nor Sapper Pinky White, the acting medical orderly, could remove the metal and Mackay laced his boot tighter to keep the swelling down.  Out of fifty men, Mackay now had only twenty-one in good shape; four were dead, and twenty-five wounded.  Although he had no food and only a little water, he had collected a plentiful supply of morphia and was able to ease the pains of the injured.  “Almost everybody was suffering from shock and fatigue,” he remembers, “but we had gotten ourselves another temporary breathing space.  I just didn’t think things looked too bright, but we’d heard the BBC and they told us that everything was going according to plan.  I got on the wireless to the Colonel, gave in our strength return and said we were all happy and holding our own.”

As Lance Corporal Hendy tried to catch a few minutes’ sleep he heard a church bell off in the distance.  At first he thought that it was ringing to announce the approach of Horrocks’ tanks, but the sound was not measured and consistent.  Hendy realized that bullets or shell fragments must be hitting the bell.  He thought of the men around Colonel Frost’s headquarters on the other side of the ramp and wondered if they were holding safe.  He heard the bell again and felt himself shivering.  He could not rid himself of an eerie, doomed feeling.

The help that Frost so urgently needed was agonizingly close—barely more than a mile away.  Four battalions spread between St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital and the Rhine were desperately trying to reach him.  Lieutenant Colonel J. A. C. Fitch’s 3rd Battalion had been attempting to force its way along the Lion route—the Rhine river road that Frost had used in reaching the bridge two days before.  In darkness, without communications, Fitch was unaware that three other battalions were also on the move—Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie’s 1/, Lieutenant Colonel G.  H. Lea’s 11th, and Lieutenant Colonel W. D. H. McCardie’s and South Staffordshires; Dobie’s men were separated from him by only a few hundred yards.

At 4 A.m. on Tuesday, September 19, the 11th Battalion and the 2nd South Staffs began to move through the heavily built-up area between St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital and the Arnhem Town Museum.  South of them, on the Lion route, where Fitch had already encountered devastating opposition, the 1/ Battalion was now attempting to push its way through.  Initially the three battalions, coordinating their movements, gained ground.  Then, with dawn, their cover disappeared.  German opposition, uneven throughout the night, was suddenly fiercely concentrated.  The advance ground to a halt as the battalions found themselves in a tight net, trapped on three sides by an enemy who seemed almost to have waited for them to arrive at a preplanned position.  And the Germans were prepared for a massacre.

Forward elements were hit and stopped in their tracks by German tanks

and half-tracks blocking the streets ahead.  From the windows of houses

on the high escarpment of the railway marshaling yards to the north,

waiting machine-gun crews opened up.  And from the brickworks across

the Rhine multibarreled flak guns, firing horizontally, ripped into

Dobie’s battalion and flayed Fitch’s men as they tried to move along

the lower Rhine road.  Fitch’s battalion, already badly mauled in the

fight-

since landing two days before, was now so cut to pieces by the unremitting flak fire that it could no longer exist as an effective unit.  Men broke in confusion.  They could go neither forward nor back.  With virtually no protection on the open road, they were methodically mowed down.  “It was painfully obvious,” says Captain Ernest Seccombe, “that the Jerries had much more ammunition than we did.  We tried to move in spurts, from cover to cover.  I had just begun one dash when I was caught in a murderous crossfire.  I fell like a sack of potatoes.  I couldn’t even crawl.”  Seccombe, who had been hit in both legs, watched helplessly as two Germans approached him.  The British captain, who spoke fluent German, asked them to look at his legs.  They bent down and examined his wounds.  Then one of the Germans straightened up.  “I’m sorry, Herr Hauptmann,” he told Seccombe.  “I’m afraid for you the war is over.”  The Germans called their own medics and Seccombe was taken to St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital.  * * Throughout most of the Arnhem battle, the hospital was used by both British and German doctors and medics to care for their wounded.  Seccombe, as a German prisoner, was moved to the small Dutch town of Enschede, about five miles from the German border.  During his stay there, both legs were amputated.  He was liberated in April, 1945.