Bridge Too Far (46 page)

By chance one of Fitch’s officers discovered the presence of Dobie’s forces on the lower road, and the men of the 1/ Battalion, despite their own heavy casualties, hurried forward, toward the pitiable remnants of Fitch’s group.  Dobie was now hell bent on reaching the bridge, but the odds were enormous.  As he moved up into the intense fire and leapfrogged over Fitch’s men, Dobie himself was wounded and captured (he later succeeded in making his escape); by the end of the day it was estimated that only forty men of his battalion remained.  Private Walter Boldock was one of them.  “We kept trying to make it, but it was a disaster.  We were constantly mortared, and German tanks whirled right up to us.  I tried to get one with my Bren gun and then we seemed to be going backwards.  I passed a broken water main.  A dead civilian in blue overalls lay in the gutter, the water lapping gently around his body.  As we left the outskirts of Arnhem, I knew somehow we wouldn’t be going back.”

Fitch’s men, attempting to follow Dobie’s battalion, were shredded once again.  The march had lost all meaning; after-action reports indicate the total confusion within the battalion at this point.  “Progress was satisfactory until we reached the area of the dismantled pontoon bridge,” reads the 3rd Battalion’s report.  “Then casualties from the 1/ Battalion began passing through us.  Heavy machine guns, 20 mm.  and intense mortar fire began … casualties were being suffered at an ever-increasing rate, and the wounded were being rushed back in small groups every minute.”

With his force in danger of total destruction, Fitch ordered his men back to the Rhine Pavilion, a large restaurant-building complex on the bank of the river, where the remnants of the battalion could regroup and take up positions.  “Every officer and man must make his way back as best he can,” Fitch told his troopers.  “The whole area seems covered by fire, and the only hope of getting out safely is individually.”  Private Robert Edwards remembers a sergeant “whose boots were squelching blood from his wounds, telling us to get out and make our way back to the first organized unit we came to.”  Colonel Fitch did not reach the Rhine Pavilion.  On the deadly road back, he was killed by mortar fire.

By an odd set of circumstances, two men who should never have been there actually made their way into Arnhem.  Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, the second in command of Division signals, had become so alarmed over the breakdown of communications that, with his batman-driver, Lance Corporal Arthur Turner, he had gone forward to discover the trouble.  Deane-Drummond and Turner had been on the road since early Monday.  First they had located Dobie’s battalion, where they had learned that Frost was on the bridge and Dobie was preparing an attack to get through to him.  Setting off on the river road, Deane-Drummond caught up with elements of the 3rd Battalion struggling toward Arnhem and traveled with them.  Heavy fire engulfed the group and in the fighting that ensued Deane-Drummond found himself leading the remnants of a company whose officer had been killed.

Under constant small-arms fire and so surrounded that Deane-Drummond remembers the Germans were tossing stick grenades at the men, he led the group along the road to some houses near a small inlet.  Ahead, he could see the bridge.  “The last couple of hundred yards to the houses I had decided on, the men were literally dropping like flies,” he recalls.  “We were down to about twenty men, and I realized the rest of the battalion was now far to the rear and not likely to reach us.” Dividing the men into three parties, Deane-Drummond decided to wait until darkness, move down to the river, swim across it, then try to recross and join Division to the west.  In a small corner house with the Germans all around, he settled down to wait.  A banging began on the front door.  Deane-Drummond and the three men with him raced to the back of the house and locked themselves in a small lavatory.  From the poise from outside the little room, it was clear that the Germans were busy converting the house into a strong point.  Deane-Drummond was trapped.  He and the others would remain in the tiny room for the better part of three more days.  * * Deane-Drummond was captured on Friday, September 22, shortly after he left the house near the Arnhem bridge.  In an old villa near Velp, used as a P.o.w. compound, he discovered a wall cupboard in which to hide.  In these cramped confines, he remained for thirteen days, rationing himself to a few sips of water and a small amount of bread.  On October 5 he escaped, contacted the Dutch underground and on the night of October 22, was taken to the 1/ Airborne Casualty Clearing Station at Nijmegen.  One of the three men with him in Arnhem, Deane-Drummond’s batman, Lance Corporal Arthur Turner, was also captured and taken to the velp house.  Eventually he was shipped to a P.o.w. camp in Germany and was liberated in April, 1945.  Deane-Drummond’s own story is told most effectively in his own book, Return Ticket.

Meanwhile, the 11th Battalion and the South Staffordshires, after several hours of relentless street fighting, had also come to a standstill.  Counterattacking German tanks hammered the battalions, forcing them to pull slowly back.

Private Maurice Faulkner remembers that elements of the battalions reached the museum with heavy casualties, only to encounter the tanks.

“I saw one man jump out of a window on top of a tank and try to put a

grenade in,” Faulkner recalls.  “He was killed by a sniper, but I think

he was probably trapped anyway, and he may have figured that was the

only way out.”  Private

William O’Brien says that the situation was “suddenly chaotic.  Nobody knew what to do.  The Germans had brought up those Nebelwerfer mortar throwers and we were scared out of our minds at the screaming sound.  It began to seem to me that the generals had gotten us into something they had no business doing.  I kept wondering where the hell was the goddam Second Army.”

Private Andrew Milbourne, near the church at Oosterbeek, heard the call go out for machine-gunners.  Milbourne stepped forward and was told to take his gun and a crew to the juncture of the road near St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital to help cover and protect the two battalions as they disengaged.  Putting his Vickers machine gun in a jeep, Melbourne set off with three others.  Milbourne positioned his gun in the garden of a house at the crossroads.  Almost immediately he seemed to be engulfed in his own private battle.  Mortar bursts and shells appeared to be aimed directly at him.  As troopers began to fall back around him, Milbourne sent a constant arc of bullets out in front of them.  He remembers hearing a rushing sound, like wind, and then a flash.  Seconds later he knew that something was wrong with his eyes and hands.

He remembers someone saying, “Lord, he’s copped it.”

Private Thomas Pritchard heard the voice and ran to where men were now standing over Milbourne.  “He was lying over the twisted Vickers with both hands hanging by a thread of skin and an eye out of its socket.  We started yelling for a medic.”  Not far away Milbourne’s best friend, Corporal Terry “Taffy” Brace of the 16th Field Ambulance, heard someone shout.  Leaving a shrapnel case he had treated, Brace sprinted forward.

“Quick,” a man called out to him, “the Vickers has caught it.”  As he

ran, Brace remembers, he could hear an almost steady sound of

machine-gun fire, and shells and mortars seemed to be dropping

everywhere.  Approaching a cluster of men, he pushed his way through

and, to his horror, saw Milbourne lying on the ground.  Working

frantically, Brace wrapped Milbourne’s arms and put a dressing just

below the injured man’s cheekbone to cushion his

left eye.  Brace remembers talking constantly as he worked.  “It’s just a scratch, Andy,” he kept saying.  “It’s just a scratch.”  Picking up his friend, Brace carried Milbourne to a nearby dressing station where a Dutch doctor immediately set to work.  Then he went back to battle.  * * Milbourne was later captured in the cellar of the Ter Horst house in Oosterbeek.  He lost his left eye and both hands were amputated by a German surgeon in Apeldoorn.  He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

Brace passed what seemed to be hundreds of men lying in the fields and along the road.  “I stopped at every one,” he recalls.  “The only thing I could do for most of them was take off their smocks and cover their faces.”  Brace treated one injured sergeant as best he could and then as he prepared to set out again, the man reached out to him.  “I’m not going to make it,” he told Brace.  “Please hold my hand.”  Brace sat down and cupped the sergeant’s hand in both of his.  He thought of Milbourne, his best friend, and of the many men who had come streaming back through the lines this day.  A few minutes later, Brace felt a slight pull.  Looking down, he saw that the sergeant was dead.

By now the British were in confusion, without antitank guns, out of Piat ammunition and suffering heavy casualties.  The attack had become a shambles.  The two battalions could not drive beyond the built-up areas around St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital.  But in that maze of streets one action was both positive and successful.  The attack had overrun a terrace house at Zwarteweg 14, the building from which General Roy Urquhart had been unable to escape.

“We heard the wheeze of the self-propelled gun outside and the rattle of its track,” Urquhart later wrote.  “It was moving off.”  Antoon Derksen then appeared and “announced excitedly that the British were at the end of the road.  We ran down the street and I thanked God we had made contact again.”

Urquhart, learning from an officer of the South Staffordshires that his headquarters was now in a hotel called the Hartenstein in Oosterbeek, commandeered a jeep and, driving at full speed through a constant hail of sniper fire, at last reached Division.

The time was 7:25 A.m. He had been absent and lacking control of the battle in its most crucial period, for almost thirty-nine hours.

At the Hartenstein, one of the first men to see Urquhart was Chaplain G. A. Pare.  “The news had not been so good,” he recalls.  “The General had been reported a prisoner and there was no sign of the Second Army.” As Pare came down the steps of the hotel “who should be ascending but the General.  Several of us saw him, but nobody said a word.  We just stared—completely taken aback.”  Dirty and with “two days’ beard on my face I must have been something to see,” Urquhart says.  At that moment Colonel Charles Mackenzie, the chief of staff, came rushing out.  Staring at Urquhart, Mackenzie told him, “We had assumed, sir, that you had gone for good.”

Quickly Mackenzie briefed the anxious Urquhart on the events that had occurred during his absence and gave him the situation—as Division knew it—at the moment.  The picture was appalling.  Bitterly, Urquhart saw that his proud division was being scattered and cut to ribbons.  He thought of all the setbacks that had dogged his Market forces: the distance from the drop zones to the bridge; the near-total breakdown of communications; the weather delay of Hackett’s 4th Brigade plus the loss of precious resupply cargo; and the slow progress of Horrocks’ tanks.  Urquhart was stunned to learn that XXX Corps was not reported to have reached even Nijmegen as yet.  The command dispute between Hackett and Hicks was upsetting, particularly as it stemmed from Urquhart’s and Lathbury’s own unforeseeable absence in the crucial hours when precise direction was required in the battle.  Above all, Urquhart rued the incredible overoptimism of the initial planning stages that had failed to give due importance to the presence of Bittrich’s Panzer Corps.

All these factors, one compounding another, had brought the division

close to catastrophe.  Only superb discipline and unbelievable courage

were holding the battered Red Devils together.  Urquhart was determined

to somehow instill new hope, to coordinate the efforts of his men down

even to company level.  In doing

so, he knew that he must demand more of his weary and wounded men than any airborne commander ever had demanded.  He had no choices.  With the steady inflow of German reinforcements, the dedicated, soft-spoken Scotsman saw that unless he acted immediately “my division would be utterly destroyed.”  Even now, it might be too late to save his beloved command from annihilation.

A look at the map told its own desperate story.  Quite simply, there was no front line.  Now that all his troopers but the Polish Brigade had arrived, the main dropping zones to the West had been abandoned and, apart from resupply areas, the lines around them held by Hicks’s men had been shortened and pulled in.  Hackett was going for the high ground northeast of Wolfheze and Johannahoeve Farm, he saw.  The 11th Battalion and the South Staffordshires were fighting near St.  Elisabeth’s Hospital.  There was no news of the progress of the 1/ and 3rd battalions on the lower Rhine road.  Yet Frost, Urquhart learned with pride, still held at the bridge.  Everywhere on the situation map red arrows indicated newly reported concentrations of enemy tanks and troops; some actually appeared to be positioned behind the British units.  Urquhart did not know if there was time enough remaining to reorganize and coordinate the advance of his dwindling forces and send them toward the bridge in one last desperate drive.  Ignorant for now of the cruel damage done to the 1/ and 3rd battalions, Urquhart believed there might still be a chance.

“The thing that hit me was this,” he remembers.  “Who was running the

battle in the town?  Who was coordinating it?  Lathbury was wounded and

no longer there.  No one had been nominated to make a plan.”  As he

began to work on the problem Brigadier Hicks arrived.  He was extremely

happy to see Urquhart and to return the division to his care.  “I told

him,” Urquhart says, “that we would have to get somebody into town

immediately.  A senior officer, to coordinate Lea and McCardie’s

attack.  I realized that they had been only a few hundred yards away

from me, and it would have been better if I had remained in town to

direct.  Now, I sent Colonel Hilary Barlow, Hicks’s deputy.  He was

the

man for the job.  I told him to get into town and tie up the loose ends.  I explained exactly where Lea and McCardie were and sent him off with a jeep and wireless set and ordered him to produce a properly coordinated attack.”