Bridge Too Far (52 page)

With Barlow’s death, Wolters’ hands were tied.  “The British wondered why a Dutch Navy type should be with them at all,” he remembers.  Gradually he won limited acceptance and although some members of the resistance were put to work, they were too few and their help was too late.  “We hadn’t time any longer to check everybody out to the satisfaction of headquarters,” Wolters says, “and the attitude there was simply: “Who can we trust?”’” The opportunity to effectively organize and collate the underground forces in the Arnhem area had been lost.  * * The British had long been wary of the Dutch underground.  In 1942, Major Herman Giskes, Nazi spy chief in Holland, succeeded in infiltrating Dutch intelligence networks.  Agents sent from England were captured and forced to work for him.  For twenty months, in perhaps the most spectacular counterintelligence operation of World War II, nearly every agent parachuted into Holland was intercepted by the Germans.  As a security check, monitors in England were instructed to listen for deliberate errors in Morse code radio transmissions.  Yet messages from these “double agents” were accepted without question by British intelligence.  It was not until two agents escaped that Giskes’ Operation North Pole came to an end.  Having hoodwinked the Allies for so long, Giskes could not resist boasting of his coup.  In a plain-text message to the British on November 23, 1943, he wired: “To Messrs.  Hunt, Bingham and Co., Successors Ltd., London.  We understand you have been endeavoring for some time to do business in Holland without our assistance.  We regret this … since we have acted for so long as your sole representative in this country.  Nevertheless … should you be thinking of paying us a visit on the Continent on an extensive scale we shall give your emissaries the same attention as we have hitherto.  …”  As a result, although intelligence networks were purged and completely revamped—and although Dutch resistance groups were separate from these covert activities—nevertheless, many British senior officers were warned before Operation Market-Garden against placing too much trust in the underground.

In England, a little before 7 A.m. on the twentieth, Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski learned that his drop zone had been changed.  The Polish Brigade would now land in an area a few miles west of the original site, near the village of Driel.  Sosabowski was stunned by the news his liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Stevens, had brought.  The brigade was already on the airfield and scheduled to leave for Holland in three hours.  Within that time Sosabowski had to completely redesign his attack for an area that had not even been studied.  Days had gone into the planning for the drop near Elden on the southern approaches of the Arnhem bridge.  Now, he was to recall, “I was given the bare bones of a scheme, with only a few hours to develop a plan.”

There was still very little news of Arnhem, but, as Stevens

briefed him on the new plan to ferry his troops across the Rhine from Driel to Heveadorp, it was obvious to Sosabowski that Urquhart’s situation had taken a turn for the worse.  He foresaw countless problems, but he noted that “nobody else seemed unduly alarmed.  All Stevens had learned was that the picture was pretty confusing.” Quickly informing his staff of the new developments, Sosabowski postponed the 10 A.m. takeoff until 1:00 P.m. He would need that time to reorient his troopers and to devise new attack plans, and the three-hour delay might enable Stevens to get more up-to-date information on Arnhem.  Sosabowski doubted that his force could have been flown out at 10 A.m. in any case.  Fog again covered the Midlands, and the forecast was not reassuring.  “That and the paucity of information we received made me most anxious,” Sosabowski recalled.  “I did not think that Urquhart’s operation was going well.  I began to believe that we might be dropping into Holland to reinforce defeat.”

At the Arnhem bridge the massive defiance by the valiant few was nearly over.  At dawn the Germans had renewed their terrifying bombardment.  In the morning light the stark pitted wrecks that had once been houses and office buildings were again subjected to punishing fire.  On each side of the bridge and along the churned, mangled ruins of the Eusebius Buiten Singel, the few strongholds that still remained were being systematically blown apart.  The semicircular defense line that had protected the northern approaches had almost ceased to exist.  Yet, ringed by flames and sheltering behind rubble, small groups of obstinate men continued to fight on, denying the Germans the bridge.

Only the rawest kind of courage had sustained Frost’s men up to now, but it had been fierce enough and constant enough to hold off the Germans for three nights and two days.  The 2nd Battalion and the men from other units who had come by twos and threes to join it (a force that by Frost’s highest estimate never totaled more than six or seven hundred men) had been welded together in their ordeal.  Pride and common purpose had fused them.  Alone they had reached the objective of an entire airborne division—and held out longer than the division was meant to do.  In the desperate, anxious hours, awaiting help that never came, their common frame of mind was perhaps best summed up in the thoughts of Lance Corporal Gordon Spicer, who wrote, “Who’s failing in their job?  Not us!”

But now the time of their endurance had nearly run its course.  Holed up in ruins and slit trenches, struggling to protect themselves and cellars full of wounded, shocked and concussed by nearly unceasing enemy fire, and wearing their filthy blood-stained bandages and impudent manners like badges of honor, the Red Devils knew, finally, that they could no longer hold.

The discovery produced a curious calmness, totally devoid of panic.  It was as if men decided privately that they would fight until they dropped—if only to provoke the Germans more.  Despite their knowledge that the fight was all but over, men invented still new ways to keep it going.  Troopers of mortar platoons fired their last few bombs without tripods or base plates by standing the barrel up and holding it with ropes.  Others, discovering there were no more detonators for the spring-loaded, Piat missile-throwers, tried instead to detonate the bombs with fuses made from boxes of matches.  All about them friends lay dead or dying, and still they found the will to resist and, in doing so, often amused one another.  Men remember an Irish trooper knocked unconscious by a shell burst opening his eyes at last to say, “I’m dead.”  Then, thinking it over, he remarked, “I can’t be.  I’m talking.”

To Colonel John Frost, whose hunting horn had called them to him on the

sunny Sunday that was to be the opening of their

victory march, they would always remain unbeaten.  Yet now, on this dark and tragic Wednesday, he knew there was “practically no possibility for relief.”

The number of men still capable of fighting was, at best, between 150 and 200, concentrated mainly about the damaged headquarters buildings on the western side of the ramp.  Over 300 British and German wounded filled the cellars.  “They were crowded almost on top of each other,” Frost noted, “making it difficult for doctors and orderlies to get around and attend them.”  Soon he would have to make a decision about these casualties.  If the headquarters building was hit again, as it was almost certain to be, Frost told Major Freddie Gough, he “did not see how I can fight it out to the last minute, then go, and have our wounded be roasted.”  Measures would have to be taken to get out casualties before the building was demolished or overrun.  Frost did not know how much time was left.  He still believed he could control the approaches for a time, perhaps even another twenty-four hours, but his perimeter defenses were now so weak that he knew “a determined rush by the enemy could carry them into our midst.”

On Captain Mackay’s side of the ramp, the pulverized schoolhouse

looked, he thought, “like a sieve.”  As Mackay later recalled, “We were

alone.  All the houses on the eastern side had been burned down, except

for one to the south, which was held by the Germans.”  And in the

schoolhouse, horror had piled on horror.  “The men were exhausted and

filthy,” Mackay wrote, “and I was sick to my stomach every time I

looked at them.  Haggard, with bloodshot and red-rimmed eyes, almost

everyone had some sort of dirty field dressing and blood was

everywhere.”  As wounded were carried down the stairway to the cellar,

Mackay noted that “on each landing blood had formed in pools and ran in

small rivulets down the stairs.”  His remaining thirteen men were

huddled “in twos and threes, manning positions that required twice that

number.  The only things that were clean were the men’s weapons.”  In

the shell of the schoolhouse Mackay and his men

fought off three enemy attacks in two hours, leaving around four times their number in enemy dead.

As morning wore on, the fighting continued.  Then, around noon, the man who had so stubbornly defied the Germans was wounded.  As Frost met with Major Douglas Crawley to discuss a fighting patrol to clear the area, he remembers “a tremendous explosion” that lifted him off his feet and threw him face downward several yards away.  A mortar bomb had exploded almost between the two men.  Miraculously both were alive, but shrapnel had torn into Frost’s left ankle and right shinbone and Crawley was hit in both legs and his right arm.  Frost, barely conscious, felt ashamed that he could not “resist the groans that seemed to force themselves out of me, more particularly as Doug never made a sound.”  Wicks, Frost’s batman, helped drag the two officers to cover and stretcher-bearers carried them to the cellar with the other wounded.

In the crowded basement Father Egan tried to orient himself.  In the dim recesses of the chilly room, Lieutenant Bucky Buchanan, the intelligence officer who had earlier helped to rescue Egan, appeared to have propped himself up wearily against the wall.  But Buchanan was dead.  A bomb blast had killed him outright without leaving a mark.  Then, dazed and still in shock, Egan saw Frost being carried in.  “I remember his face,” Egan says.  “He looked dead-tired and dejected.” Other wounded in the cellar saw their battalion commander, too.  To Lieutenant John Blunt, a friend of the dead Buchanan, the sight of the Colonel on a stretcher was a crushing blow.  “We subalterns had always considered him irrepressible,” Blunt wrote.  “It hurt to see him carried in like that.  He had never given in to anything.”

Across the room Private James Sims, who also had a shrapnel wound, remembers somebody anxiously calling out to Frost, “Sir, can we still hold out?”

In England, Major General Sosabowski watched his brigade board the long

lines of troop-carrier Dakotas.  Ever since Sunday

he had felt the tension build as his Poles waited to go.  They had made the trip from their billets to the airfield on Tuesday only to have the operation canceled.  This Wednesday morning, learning of the change in his drop zone, Sosabowski himself had postponed the flight by three hours in order to work out new plans.  Now, a little before 1 P.m., as the heavily laden paratroopers moved toward the planes, the atmosphere of impatience was gone.  The men were on the way at last, and Sosabowski noted “an almost lighthearted attitude among them.”

His frame of mind was far different.  In the few short hours since the switch in plans he had tried to learn everything he could about Urquhart’s situation and the new drop zone.  He had briefed his three-battalion brigade down to platoon level but the information he could give them was sparse.  Sosabowski felt that they were ill-prepared, almost “jumping into the unknown.”

Now, as propellers ticked over, his battalions began to climb aboard the 114 Dakotas that would take them to Holland.  Satisfied with the loading, Sosabowski hoisted himself into the lead plane.  With engines revving, the Dakota moved out, rolled slowly down the runway, turned and made ready for takeoff.  Then it paused.  To Sosabowski’s dismay, the engines were throttled back.  Minutes passed, and his anxiety grew.  He wondered what was delaying takeoff.

Suddenly the door opened and an R.a.f. officer climbed in.  Making his way up the aisle to the General, he informed Sosabowski that control had just received word to halt the takeoff.  The situation was a repeat of Tuesday: the southern fields were open and bomber resupply planes were taking off, but in the Grantham area a heavy overcast was settling in.  Sosabowski was incredulous.  He could hear the curses of his officers and men as the news was relayed.  The flight was canceled for twenty-four hours more—until 1 P.m. Thursday, September 21.

General Gavin’s Glider Infantry Regiment too was grounded once again.  On this day of the vital Waal river assault at Nijmegen, Gavin’s sorely needed 3,400 men, with their guns and equipment, could not get out.

The Driel-Heveadorp ferry was

still in operation.  On this crucial Wednesday, D plus 3, when the Polish Brigade might have been ferried across the Rhine to strengthen Urquhart’s flagging troopers, the weather had struck again at Market-Garden.

Field Marshal Walter Model was finally ready to open his counteroffensive against the British and Americans in Holland.  On this critical Wednesday, September 20, the entire corridor erupted in one German attack after another.

Model, his reinforcements steadily arriving, was certain that his forces were now strong enough to wipe out Montgomery’s attack.  He planned to pinch off the Allied corridor at Son, Veghel and Nijmegen.  The Arnhem bridge, he knew, was almost in his hands.  And Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army—the army that had been forgotten at Antwerp by Montgomery—was now slowly renewing its strength.  Staffs were being newly organized, ammunition and supplies were arriving daily.  Within forty-eight hours, in Army Group B’s war diary, Annex 2342, Model would report Von Zangen’s status to Von Rundstedt in these terms: “The total number of personnel and equipment ferried across the Schelde by the Fifteenth Army totals 82,000 men; 530 guns; 4,600 vehicles; over 4,000 horses and a large amount of valuable material.  …”  * * Although these are the exact figures quoted from Army Group B’s diary, they seem excessive particularly in the number of guns, vehicles and horses.  The evacuation of the Fifteenth Army across the Schelde and around Antwerp was directed by General Eugene Felix Schwalbe.  In 1946 he gave the following estimate: 65,000 men, 225 guns, 750 trucks and wagons and 1,000 horses (see Milton Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 180).  I cannot explain the discrepancy, but Schwalbe’s figures seem much more realistic.