Bridge Too Far (53 page)

Model was now so confident of Von Zangen’s ability to take over that within seventy-two hours he planned to completely reorganize his own command structure.  Von Zangen would command all Army Group B forces west of the Allied corridor; General Student’s First Parachute Army, now being systematically reinforced, would be assigned the eastern side.  The moment had come for Model to begin his offensive with sharp probing attacks.

At the Son bridge on the morning of the twentieth, panzer forces, striking into the 101/’s area, almost succeeded in taking the bridge.  Only quick action by General Taylor’s men and British tanks held off the attack.  Simultaneously, as Horrocks’ columns sped toward Nijmegen, the entire stretch of Taylor’s sector came under pressure.

At 11 A.m. in General Gavin’s area, German troops, preceded by a heavy bombardment, advanced out of the Reichswald and attacked the 82nd’s eastern flank.  Within a few hours a full-scale drive was in progress in the Mook area, threatening the Heumen bridge.  Rushing to the scene from Nijmegen, where his men were preparing to assault the Waal, Gavin saw that “the only bridge we owned that would take armor” was in serious jeopardy.  “It was essential to the survival of the British and Americans crowded into Nijmegen,” he recalls.  His problem was acute; every available 82nd unit was already committed.  Hurriedly Gavin asked for help from the Coldstream Guards.  Then, with Gavin personally leading the counterattack, a bitter, unrelenting battle began that was to last all day.  Shifting his forces back and forth like chess men, Gavin held out and eventually forced the Germans to withdraw.  He had always feared attack from the Reichswald.  Now Gavin and the Corps commander, General Browning, knew that a new and more terrible phase of the fighting had begun.  Among the prisoners taken were men from General Mendl’s tough II Parachute Corps.  Model’s intention was now obvious: key bridges were to be grabbed, the corridor was to be squeezed and Horrocks’ columns crushed.

For his part, Model was convinced that the Allies would never cross at Nijmegen and drive the last eleven miles to Arnhem.  Within the week, he confidently told General Bittrich, he expected the battle to be over.  Bittrich was less assured.  He would feel happier, he told Model, if the Nijmegen bridges were destroyed.  Model looked at him and angrily shouted, “No!”

Major General Heinz Harmel was annoyed by the attitude of his superior, General Wilhelm Bittrich.  The II SS Panzer Corps commander had adopted too far-sighted a view of the battle, Harmel felt.  Bittrich “seemed to have closed his mind completely to the ferrying problems at Pannerden.” Those problems had hampered Harmel from the beginning, yet it appeared to him that Bittrich never remained long enough at the site “to see for himself the almost impossible task of getting twenty tanks across the river—and three of them were Royal Tigers.”  It had taken Harmel’s engineers nearly three days to build a ferry capable of carrying an estimated 40-ton load across the Rhine.  Although Harmel believed the operation could now be accelerated, only three platoons of tanks (twelve Panthers) had so far reached the vicinity of Nijmegen.  The remainder, including his Tiger tanks, were fighting at the Arnhem bridge under the veteran eastern front commander, Major Hans Peter Knaust.

The thirty-eight-year-old Knaust had lost a leg in battle near Moscow in 1941.  As Harmel recalls, “he stomped about with a wooden one and, although he was always in pain, he never once complained.”  Yet, Knaust too was the target for much of Harmel’s displeasure.

To reinforce the Frundsberg Division, the “Knaust Kampfgruppe” had been rushed to Holland with thirty-five tanks, five armored personnel carriers and one self-propelled gun.  But Knaust’s veterans were of low caliber.  Almost all of them had been badly wounded at one time or another; in Harmel’s view they were “close to being invalids.”  Under normal conditions the men would not have been in active service.

Additionally, Knaust’s replacements were young, and many had had only

eight weeks’ training.  The Arnhem bridge battle had gone on so long

that Harmel was now fearful of the situation at Nijmegen.  In case the

British broke through, he would need Knaust’s tanks to hold the bridge

and defense positions between Nijmegen and Arnhem.  More armored

reinforcements were on the way, including fifteen to twenty Tiger tanks

and another twenty Panthers.  But Harmel had no idea when they would

arrive or whether the Arnhem

bridge would be open to speed their drive south.  Even after its capture, Harmel envisioned a full day to clear the wreckage and get vehicles moving.

To oversee all operations, Harmel had set up an advance command post near the village of Doornenburg, two miles west of Pannerden and six miles northeast of Nijmegen.  From there he drove west to roughly the mid-point of the Nijmegen-Arnhem highway to study the terrain, automatically fixing in his mind defense positions that might be used if a breakthrough occurred.  His reconnaissance produced one clear impression: it seemed impossible for either British or German tanks to leave the highway.  Only light vehicles could travel the thinly surfaced, brick-paved, secondary roads.  His own tanks, moving to Nijmegen after crossing at Pannerden, had bogged down on just such roads, their weight crumbling the pavement.  The main Nijmegen-Arnhem highway was, in places, a dike road, nine to twelve feet above soft polder on either side.  Tanks moving along these high stretches would be completely exposed, silhouetted against the sky.  Well-sited artillery could easily pick them off.  At the moment, Harmel had almost no artillery covering the highway; thus it was imperative that Knaust’s tanks and guns get across the Rhine and in position before a British breakthrough could occur at Nijmegen.

Returning to his headquarters at Doornenburg, Harmel heard the latest reports from his chief of staff, Colonel Paetsch.  There was good news from Arnhem: more prisoners were being taken, and the fighting at the bridge was beginning to break up.  Knaust now believed he might have the crossing by late afternoon.  Fighting continued in Nijmegen, but Captain Karl Heinz Euling, although taking heavy casualties, was containing all efforts to seize the railway and road bridges there.  The Americans and British had been stopped at both approaches.  In the center of the city British forces had been held up too, but that situation was more precarious.

Euling’s report reflected an optimism that Harmel did not share.

Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, British armor would surely

overrun the German line.  Lighting a cigar, Harmel

told Paetsch that he “expected the full weight of the Anglo-American attack to be thrown at the highway bridge within forty-eight hours.” If Knaust’s tanks and artillerymen secured the Arnhem bridge quickly, they might halt the British armored drive.  Should the panzers be slow in forcing the little band of British from the Arnhem bridge and clearing it of wreckage, Harmel knew that, against all orders, he must blow the Nijmegen highway bridge.

For all his careful consideration, he did not envision a most preposterous scheme: that the American paratroopers might try to ford the river in a major amphibious assault.

Waiting paratroopers crowded the area not far from the crossing site, one mile downstream from the Nijmegen railway bridge.  Throughout Tuesday night and well into Wednesday morning, as the Anglo-American forces under Lieutenant Colonel Goulburn and Lieutenant Colonel Vandervoort continued the battle for the railroad and highway bridges to the east, American and British soldiers labored to widen the area leading to the river bank so that the tanks and heavy artillery of the Guards Armored Division could take up firing positions to support the assault.  Typhoons were scheduled to fly low over the northern bank thirty minutes before H Hour, spraying the entire area with rocket and machine-gun fire.  On the ground, tanks and artillery would pound the site for another fifteen minutes.  Then, under a smoke screen laid down by tanks, the first wave of men led by twenty-seven-year-old Major Julian Cook were to set out in one of the most daring river crossings ever made.

The plan was as thorough as commanders working throughout the night could make it.  But the boats in which Cook’s troopers would cross the 100-yard-wide river had not arrived.  H Hour, originally set for 1 P.m., was postponed until 3 P.m.

In small groups the Americans waited as Cook paced up and down.  “Where are the damned boats?”  he wondered.  Ever since he had been told by General Gavin and the 504th regimental commander, Colonel Tucker, that his 3rd Battalion would make the Waal assault crossing, Cook had been “shocked and dumfounded.”  It seemed to the young West Pointer that “we were being asked to make an Omaha beach landing all by ourselves.” Many of his men had never even been in a small boat.

Cook was not the only one anxiously awaiting the arrival of the boats.  Before noon General Frederick Browning had received the first clear indication of the seriousness of Urquhart’s situation.  Received via British Second Army communications, the Phantom message read in part:

(201105) … senior formation still in vicinity north end of main bridge but not in touch and unable resupply … Arnhem entirely in enemy hands.  Request all possible steps expedite relief.  Fighting intense and opposition extremely strong.  Position not too good.

Browning was deeply disturbed.  Every hour now mattered and the quick seizure of the Nijmegen bridges was vital to the survival of Urquhart’s men.  The relief of the Arnhem defenders was, at this moment, almost solely up to Cook and the 3rd Battalion—a fact of which Cook was unaware.

In any event, the boats were not at hand, and no one even knew what

they were like.  All through the night General Horrocks and his staff

had been trying to speed their arrival.  Far back in the engineering

convoys three trucks carrying the craft had been inching their way up

the jam-packed road.  Back in Eindhoven they had been held up by a

fierce Luftwaffe bombing attack.  The whole center of the city was

devastated.  Scores of supply trucks had been destroyed and an entire

ammunition convoy had been ignited, adding to the carnage.  Now, at the

Waal crossing less

than one hour before H hour, there was still no sign of the trucks and the vital boats.

The assault site lay to the east of the massive PGEM electrical power plant, and originally it was believed that the crossing could be made from the plant itself.  There, at the river’s edge, a small inlet afforded protection for the loading, unobserved by the Germans.  Colonel Tucker had rejected the site; it was too close to the enemy-held railway bridge.  As the troopers emerged from the dock area, the Germans could sweep each assault wave with machine-gun fire.  Here, too, at the mouth of the inlet, the 8- to 10-mile-an-hour current swirled stronger.  Shifting farther west, Tucker planned to have the men rush the boats at double time down to the river’s edge, launch them and paddle across.  That, too, worried Cook.  From the little he had learned, each craft weighed about 200 pounds; when they were loaded with the men’s equipment and ammunition, that figure would probably double.

Once launched, each boat would carry thirteen paratroopers and a crew of three engineers to row the men across.  The operation would be continuous.  In wave after wave the assault craft were to cross back and forth until the whole of Cook’s battalion and part of another, under Captain John Harrison, were across.  Major Edward G. Tyler of the Irish Guards, whose tanks were to give fire support, was appalled by the whole concept.  “It put the fear of God in me,” Tyler recalls.  He asked the cigar-chewing Colonel Tucker if his men had ever practiced this kind of operation before.  “No,” Tucker replied laconically.  “They’re getting on-the-job training.”

From the ninth floor of the power plant, Cook and Lieutenant Colonel

Giles Vandeleur, commanding the Irish Guards’ 2nd Battalion, observed

the north shore through binoculars.  Directly across from where they

stood, flat ground ran inland from the river’s edge for 200 to 800

yards.  Cook’s men would have to cross this unprotected stretch after

they landed.  Beyond the level shore, a sloping dike embankment rose

some 15 to 20 feet high,

and topping it was a 20-foot-wide road running west to east.  A squat building, called Fort Hof Van Holland, stood about 800 yards beyond the road.  Cook and Vandeleur could clearly see enemy troops in position along the top of the embankment, and they were almost sure that observation and artillery posts were positioned inside the fort.  “Somebody,” Cook remembers thinking, “has come up with a real nightmare.”  Yet, effective H-Hour air and artillery support could soften the German resistance and enable the troopers to command the northern bank quickly.  Cook was counting heavily on that support.

Vandeleur thought the crossing might prove “ghastly, with heavy casualties.”  But he intended his tanks to support the Americans to the utmost.  He planned to use about thirty Sherman tanks—two squadrons under command of Major Edward G. Tyler and Major Desmond FitzGerald.  At 2:30 P.m., the tanks were to move toward the river and mount the embankment, “track-to-track,” their 75 mm.  guns lined up to pound the far shore.  This British bombardment would be reinforced by the 82nd’s mortar and artillery fire.  In all, 100 guns would batter the northern bank.

Cook’s men, who had not seen the actual assault area as yet, had taken the briefing in their stride.  But the width of the river shocked everyone.  “At first when we were briefed, we thought they were joking,” recalls Second Lieutenant John Holabird.  “It all sounded too fantastic.”  Sergeant Theodore Finkbeiner, scheduled for the first wave, was sure that “our chances were pretty good because of the smoke screen.”  But Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, commander of I Company, believed the plan was nothing short of a suicide mission.

So did the 504th’s Protestant chaplain, Captain Delbert Kuehl.  Normally Kuehl would not have gone in with assault troops.  Now he requested permission to be with Cook’s men.  “It was the hardest decision I ever made,” he recalls, “because I was going on my own volition.  The plan seemed absolutely impossible, and I felt if ever the men needed me, it would be on this operation.”