Bridge Too Far (68 page)

As the last convoy left Oosterbeek, Warrack thanked the SS medical officer for his help.  “Skalka looked me in the eye and said, “Can I have that in writing?”’” Warrack ignored the remark.  At 5 P.m. the battle began again as though it had never stopped.

At Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes’s gun position near the Dolderen

laundry, “all hell broke loose again.  The Jerries threw

everything at us.”  After the relative quiet during the evacuation of the wounded, Parkes felt a sense of relief.  “Everything had returned to normal, and I could orient to that.  I was back in business again.” Germans, taking advantage of the temporary truce, had infiltrated many areas.  Men heard screaming and firing from all directions as Germans and British chased one another through streets and gardens.  From his trench Parkes saw a tank coming across a cabbage patch toward battery headquarters.  Two artillerymen sprinted for a 6-pounder on the road.  As the troopers began to fire, Parkes looked up in amazement as cabbages began to sail over his trench.  “The force of the gun was sucking up the cabbages, pulling them right out of the ground and hurling them through the air.  Then there was a tremendous bang and we saw a shell hit the tank.”

Major Robert Cain heard someone yell, “Tigers!”  and he raced for the small antitank gun set up alongside a building in his block.  A gunner ran up the street to help him.  Together the two men rolled the gun into position.  “Fire!”  Cain shouted.  He saw that the shell had hit the tank, disabling it.  “Let’s have another go to be sure,” he yelled.  The gunner looked at Cain and shook his head.  “Can’t, sir,” he said.

“She’s finished.  The recoil mechanism’s gone.”

Inside the Ter Horst house the noise was so loud that everyone was numbed and deafened.  Suddenly Kate ter Horst felt “a tremendous shock.

There was a thunder of bricks.  Timbers cracked and there were stifled

cries from all sides.”  The force of the explosion had jammed the

cellar door.  In the choking dust that swirled through the little room,

she heard “men working with spades and tools … sawing and the

breaking of timbers … footsteps crunching through bricks and mortar

… and heavy things dragged back and forth.”  The cellar door was

broken open and fresh air poured in.  Upstairs Kate saw that part of

the corridor and the garden room were open to the outdoors and a

section of one wall had been blown in.  Men lay everywhere, tossed

about by the explosion.  Dr.  Martin had been hit again and was unable

to get about at all.  A soldier who had been brought in

several days earlier suffering from shell shock roamed through the carnage in the house.  Staring at Kate ter Horst, he said, “I think I’ve seen you someplace before.”  Gently she led him to the cellar and found room for him on the stone floor.  Almost immediately he fell asleep.  Wakening later, he moved over to Mrs.  ter Horst.  “We can be taken at any moment now,” he said quietly.  He went to sleep again.  Leaning tiredly against a wall, her five children beside her, Kate waited, as “the ghastly hours stretched slowly.”

In a trench not far from Major Cain’s position, Sergeant Alf Roullier saw another tank appear in the street.  He and a gunner dashed to the only antitank gun that seemed to be left in the artillery troop he was with.  The two men reached the gun just as the tank turned toward them.  They fired and saw a flash as the tank was hit.  At that moment a machine gun opened up.  The gunner with Roullier gasped and sagged against him.  As Roullier turned to ease the man down, a bullet tore into his left hand.  It began to shake uncontrollably and Roullier assumed the bullet had hit a nerve.  Easing the gunner over his back, Roullier made it to his trench.  “I’ll go get help,” he told the bloodstained trooper.  At the Ter Horst house Roullier stopped, unwilling to go in.  He heard men screaming and babbling, begging for water, crying out the names of relatives.  “Oh, God!”  Roullier said.  “What have I come here for?”  Bombardier E. C. Bolden appeared at that moment.  “Blimey, mate,” Bolden said, looking at Roullier’s shaking hand, “you been out typewriting?”  Roullier explained that he had come for help for the wounded gunner.  “All right,” Bolden said, bandaging Roullier’s hand, “I’ll get there.”  Returning to his position, Roullier passed the Ter Horst garden and stopped, staring in horror.  He had never seen so many dead in one place before.  Some had smocks over their faces but others were uncovered and “their eyes stared off in all directions.”  There were piles of dead, so many that a man could not step between them.

At the trench Roullier waited until Bolden arrived with two

stretcher-bearers.  “Don’t worry,” Bolden told Roullier.  He raised his

thumb.  “Everything will be O.k.”  Roullier didn’t think so.  Back in

England, the thirty-one-year-old trooper had pleaded to

go on the mission.  His age was against it, and although Roullier was an artilleryman, he had become acting mess sergeant.  But he had won out, and finally had been allowed to go.  Now, staring at the tired, thirsty, hungry troopers around him, he remembers that “something clicked in my mind.  I just forgot the battle.  I was obsessed with getting us something to eat.”  He does not know how long he crawled through torn-up gardens and half-demolished houses in the area, ransacking shelves and searching cellars for bits and pieces of food.  Someplace he found an undamaged galvanized tub.  Into it he threw everything he found—a few withered carrots, some onions, a bag of potatoes, salt and some bouillon cubes.  Near the house he found a chicken coop.  Only one bird was still alive.  Roullier took it along.

On the stone floor of a ruined house he built a circle of bricks to hold the tub.  Tearing strips of wallpaper off walls and using pieces of wood, he built a fire.  He does not remember the battle still raging in the streets as he made one more trip outside to find water—but he staggered back with the tub partly filled.  He killed and plucked the chicken, and dropped it into the tub.  Just at dusk when he decided the stew was finished he pulled a pair of curtains off a window frame to wrap the hot handles of the pot and, with the help of another trooper, set out for the trenches.  For the first time in hours he was aware of mortars coming in.  The two men moved at intervals, stopping at each near burst, then going on again.  At the artillery position, Roullier yelled out, “Come and get it!”  Amazed, bleary troopers appeared in cautious groups with battered ration cans and mess kits.  Dazedly mumbling their thanks, they dipped into the hot tub and disappeared into the growing darkness.  In ten minutes the stew was gone.  Peering into the bottom of the tub, Alf Roullier could just make out a few small chunks of potatoes.  He picked them out and, for the first time that day, ate some food.  He had never felt happier.

On the grounds of the Hartenstein Hotel in a five-man trench, Sergeant Leonard Overton, the glider pilot, stared out into the growing dusk.

The four men who shared his trench had disappeared.  Suddenly Overton

saw dark shapes approaching.  “It’s

only us,” someone said quietly.  As the four soldiers dropped into the trench, Overton saw that they carried a gas cape bundled together.  Carefully the men opened the cape and, holding a can at one edge, emptied almost a pint of rain water into the container.  One man produced a cube of tea and began to stir the liquid.  Overton looked on, dazed.  “We had had nothing to eat or drink that day and only two hard biscuits which we had shared on Saturday,” he says.  Then, to Overton’s surprise, the troopers offered the tin can to him.  He took a sip and passed it on.  “Many happy returns,” each man told him softly.  Overton had forgotten that Sunday, September 24, was his twenty-third birthday.

In the Schoonoord the critical cases and the walking wounded were gone, but shell-shocked men still lingered in the big hotel.  As Chaplain Pare walked through a half-deserted room, he heard a thin shaking voice somewhere in the echoing building singing “Just a song at twilight.” Climbing to an upstairs room, Pare knelt beside a badly shocked young trooper.  “Padre,” the boy said, “will you tuck me in?  I get so frightened with all the noise.”  Pare had no blanket but he pretended to cover the trooper.  “That feels fine, Padre.  I feel very well now.  Will you do me one more favor?”  Pare nodded.  “Say the Lord’s Prayer with me.”  Pare did.  He soothed back the young man’s hair.  “Now close your eyes,” Pare told him.  “Sleep well.  God bless you.”  The trooper smiled.  “Good night, Padre.  God bless you.”  Two hours later a medic came for Pare.  “You know that lad you said the prayers with?”  Pare asked, “What’s wrong?”  The medic shook his head.  “He died just now.  He said to tell you he couldn’t stand the noise outside.”

As evening set in, Colonel R. Payton-Reid in the KOSB’S area of the perimeter was not unhappy to see “the twenty-fourth grow to its melancholy close.  The high hopes of early support by the ground forces was a subject now, by mutual consent, taboo.”

Late Sunday night Lieutenant Neville Hay, the Phantom Net operator, was called into General Urquhart’s room in the cellar of the Hartenstein.

“He handed me a long message,” Hay says, “and told me when I had

finished encoding it to return it to him.  I remember him saying that

perhaps by that time he wouldn’t have

to send it.”  Hay was stunned as he read the message.  “What it really meant was that they had to come and get us or we would be wiped out.” Hay encoded the signal and returned it to Urquhart.  “I hoped he wouldn’t have to send it, either,” Hay says.  As sent out, the message read:

Urquhart to Browning.  Must warn you unless physical contact is made with us early 25 Sept.  consider it unlikely we can hold out long enough.  All ranks now exhausted.  Lack of rations, water, ammunition and weapons with high officer casualty rate.  Even slight enemy offensive action may cause complete disintegration.  If this happens all will be ordered to break toward bridgehead if anything rather than surrender.  Any movement at present in face of enemy impossible.  Have attempted our best and will do so as long as possible.  * * Several versions of this message have appeared in other accounts of the battle.  The one above is the original.  Lieutenant Neville Hay retained his timed Phantom message logs and made them available to me.  I am extremely grateful for his cooperation.

Over two consecutive nights, attempts to move men and supplies into Urquhart’s lodgment had failed.  Yet the stubborn XXX Corps commander, General Horrocks, refused to abandon the effort.  If the bridgehead was to be saved and the relief of Urquhart’s men effected, it must take place this Sunday night.  Once again the weather was unfavorable; no help could be expected from England-based planes flying supply or support missions.  But troops were now in strength in the Driel-Nijmegen area, and Horrocks—achieving the near-impossible by driving his entire corps up the narrow, one-tank-wide corridor to his spear-point on the Rhine—was obsessed by the 400 yards of river that separated him from the airborne forces.  Success was tantalizingly close.  He ordered General Thomas’ 43rd Wessex to make one last push: with the remaining Poles, troops of Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tilly’s 4th Dorsets would assault the river and try to cross into the bridgehead beginning at 10 P.m.

Tilly’s move would be a first step in a wider plan.  “If things

went well,” Horrocks later wrote, “I hoped to side-slip the 43rd Division across the Rhine farther to the west and carry out a left hook against the German force attacking the airborne perimeter.”  The alternative was withdrawal.  On this eighth day of Market-Garden, Horrocks obstinately refused to face that choice.  Others, however, were now seriously planning how it might be done.

According to his chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, the First Airborne Corps commander, General Browning, now spoke “quite openly about withdrawing.”  While the 43rd Wessex was moving up to Driel the decision had been in the balance, but “as soon as they became stuck, Browning became convinced we would have to get Urquhart’s men out.” The British Second Army commander, General Miles C. Dempsey, had reached the same conclusion.  He had not met with Horrocks since the beginning of the attack.  Now, as time ran out, Dempsey ordered Horrocks to a meeting down the corridor at St.  Oedenrode.  In line of command, Dempsey, on authority from Montgomery, would have the last word.  The agonizing decision would be forced on them by one man—Field Marshal Model.

As Horrocks drove south to St.  Oedenrode, Lieutenant Colonel Tilly of the 4th Dorsets prepared for the night’s river crossing.  His battalion was rushing up to the assembly area in Driel, and assault craft, now that the corridor was open again, were on the way.  Tilly’s instructions were clear.  Briefed personally by his brigade commander, Brigadier Ben Walton, Tilly was told to “broaden the base of the perimeter.”  The crossing was to be made at the old ferry site, about a mile west of Oosterbeek.  Once across, the Dorsets were “to hang on until reinforced.”  They would travel light, carrying only enough food and ammunition to last three or four days.  As the thirty-five-year-old Tilly saw it, his men “were a task force leading the way for the whole of Dempsey’s Second Army.”  He was acutely conscious of the urgent necessity of reaching Urquhart’s men quickly.  From all he had learned, the division was dying by the hour.

On Sunday Tilly had climbed to the spire of a damaged Driel church

three times to observe the area where his troops would

land on the Rhine’s northern bank.  As the afternoon wore on, at his orchard headquarters south of Driel, he impatiently awaited the full arrival of his battalion from the village of Homoet, a few miles southwest of Driel, and the assault boats being brought up from the corridor.

Shortly after 6 P.m. Brigadier Ben Walton sent for Tilly.  At Walton’s headquarters in a house south of Driel, Tilly expected the brigade commander to review once more the details of the night’s operation.  Instead, Walton told him there had been a change in plan.  Word had been received, Walton said, that “the whole operation—the large-scale crossing—was off.”  Tilly’s battalion would still cross, but for a different purpose.  Tilly listened with increasing dismay.  His men were to hold the base of the perimeter while Urquhart’s 1/ Airborne Division was withdrawn!  He was to take as few men as possible—“only enough to do the job”; approximately 400 infantry and 20 officers.  Tilly did not need to go; he could detail his second in command, Major James Grafton, to take his place.  Although Tilly replied that he would “think about it,” he had already decided to lead his men over.  As he left Walton’s headquarters, Tilly felt that his men were being sacrificed.  Walton had said nothing about getting them back.  Yet he knew that Walton too was helpless to alter the situation.  What puzzled him was what had happened; why had the plan been changed?