A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Farther north, the problems of the British 1st Airborne under General Urquhart were different still. The British 1st was to hold the Arnhem bridge until relieved. With luck, German reaction would be sluggish enough so that ground forces could reach the lightly armed British troopers before any real enemy strength developed. But until Horrocks’ tanks arrived, Urquhart’s men would have to hang on. Urquhart could not dissipate his strength by sending units south to link up with Gavin. Lying at the farthest end of the airborne carpet, the British 1st Airborne would have to hold longer than anyone else. For this reason, Urquhart’s force was the largest, his division bolstered by the addition of Polish paratroops, plus the 52nd Lowland Division, which was to be flown in as soon as air strips could be located and prepared in the Arnhem area.

  On the morning of the eleventh, after a hectic night of assessing and analyzing aircraft availability for the attack, Major General Paul L. Williams, commander of the U.S. IX Troop Carrier Command, and in charge of all Market air operations, gave his estimate to Brereton. There was such a shortage of gliders and planes, he reported, that even with an all-out effort, at best only half the troop strength of Browning’s total force could be flown in on D Day. Essential items such as artillery, jeeps and other heavy cargo scheduled for the gliders could be included only on a strict priority basis. Brereton urged his air commander to explore the possibility of two D-Day airlifts but the suggestion was found impractical. “Owing to the reduced hours of daylight and the distances involved, it would not be possible to consider more than one lift per day,” General Williams said. It was too risky. There would be no time for maintenance or battle-damage repair, he pointed out, and almost certainly “casualties would result from pilot and crew fatigue.”

  Hamstrung by the shortage of aircraft and the time limit, Brereton made some general assessments. A full day would be required to take aerial-reconnaissance photographs of the Dutch bridges and terrain; two days must go into the preparation and distribution of maps of the areas; intelligence had to be gathered and analyzed; detailed battle plans must be prepared. The most crucial decision of all: Brereton was forced to tailor the Market plan to suit the existing airlift capability. He must transport his force in installments, flying the three and one half divisions to their targets over a period of three days. The risks were great: German reinforcements might reach the Market-Garden area faster than anyone anticipated; antiaircraft fire could intensify; and there was always the possibility of bad weather. Fog, high winds, a sudden storm—all likely at this time of the year—could cause disaster.

  Worse, once on the ground, the paratroopers and glider-borne infantry, arriving without heavy artillery or tanks, would be highly vulnerable. General Horrocks’ XXX Corps tank columns, using one narrow highway, could not make the 64-mile dash to Arnhem and beyond unless Brereton’s men seized the bridges and held open the advance route. Conversely, the airborne army had to be relieved at top speed. Cut off far behind enemy lines and dependent on supplies by air, the airborne forces could expect German reinforcements to increase with each passing day. At best the beleaguered troopers might hold out in their “airheads” for only a few days. If the British armored drive was held up or failed to move fast enough, the airborne troops would inevitably be overrun and destroyed.

  More could go wrong. If General Taylor’s “Screaming Eagles” failed to secure the bridges directly ahead of the British Second Army’s tank spearheads, it would make little difference whether or not the men under General Gavin’s or General Urquhart’s command secured their objectives in Nijmegen and Arnhem. Their forces would be isolated.

  Certain classic airborne risks had to be accepted: divisions might be dropped or landed by gliders in the wrong areas; crossings might be destroyed by the enemy even as the attack began; bad weather could make air resupply impossible; and even if all the bridges were seized, the corridor might be cut at any point. These were but a few of the imponderables. The planners were gambling on speed, boldness, accuracy and surprise—all deriving from a precise synchronized land-and-airborne plan that, in its turn, gambled on German disorganization and inadequate strength. Each link in Market-Garden was interlocked with the next. If one gave way, disaster might result for all.

  In Brereton’s opinion, such risks had to be accepted. The opportunity might never arise again. Additionally, on the basis of the latest information of enemy strength, from Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, Allied Airborne headquarters still felt that Brereton’s forces would meet an “ill-organized enemy of varying standards.” It was not expected that “any mobile force larger than a brigade group [about 3,000 men] with very few tanks and guns could be concentrated against the airborne troops before relief by the ground forces.” It was expected “that the flight and landings would be hazardous, that the capture intact of the bridge objectives was more a matter of surprise and confusion than hard fighting.” There was nothing here that the planners had not already taken under consideration. The last words of the intelligence summation seemed almost superfluous—“the advance of the ground forces would be very swift if the airborne operations were successful.”

  Major Brian Urquhart was deeply disturbed by the optimism permeating General Browning’s British I Airborne Corps headquarters. The twenty-five-year-old intelligence chief felt that he was probably the only one on the staff with any doubts about Market-Garden. Urquhart (no relation to the British 1st Airborne Division commander, Major General Robert Urquhart) did not believe the optimistic estimates on enemy strength which arrived almost daily from Montgomery’s 21st Army command. By the morning of Tuesday, September 12, with D Day only five days away, his doubts about Market-Garden amounted to near-panic.

  His feeling had been triggered by a cautious message from General Dempsey’s British Second Army headquarters. Quoting a Dutch report, Dempsey’s intelligence staff warned of an increase in German strength in the Market-Garden area and spoke of the presence of “battered panzer formations believed to be in Holland to refit.” Admittedly, the information was vague. Lacking any kind of confirmation, Dempsey’s report was not included in the latest intelligence summaries of either Montgomery’s or Eisenhower’s headquarters. Urquhart could not understand why. He had been receiving similar disquieting news from Dutch liaison officers at Corps headquarters itself. And, like General Dempsey’s staff, he believed them. Adding his own information to that received from Dempsey’s command, Major Urquhart felt reasonably certain that elements of at least two panzer divisions were somewhere in the Arnhem area. The evidence was thin. The units were unidentified, with strength unknown, and he could not tell whether they were actually being refitted or merely passing through Arnhem. Nevertheless, Urquhart, as he later recalled, “was really very shook up.”

  Ever since the inception of Operation Comet and its evolution into Market-Garden, Major Urquhart’s fears had been growing. Repeatedly, he had voiced his objections to the operation to “anybody who would listen on the staff.” He was “quite frankly horrified by Market-Garden, because its weakness seemed to be the assumption that the Germans would put up no effective resistance.” Urquhart himself was convinced that the Germans were rapidly recovering and might well have more men and equipment in Holland than anyone realized. Yet the whole essence of the scheme, as he saw it, “depended on the unbelievable notion that once the bridges were captured, XXX Corps’s tanks could drive up this abominably narrow corridor—which was little more than a causeway, allowing no maneuverability—and then walk into Germany like a bride into a church. I simply did not believe that the Germans were going to roll over and surrender.”

  At planning conferences, Major Urquhart became increasingly alarmed at what he saw as “the desperate desire on everybody’s part to get the airborne into action.” There were constant comparisons between the current situation and the collapse of the Germans in 1918. Urquhart remembers that General Browning, perhaps reflecting Montgomery’s views and those of “several other British commanders, was thinking about another
great breakthrough.” It seemed to the worried intelligence officer that everyone around him thought the war would be over by winter and “the Arnhem attack might be the airborne’s last chance of getting into action.” Urquhart was appalled at the lighthearted metaphor—“it was described as a ‘party’”—used in reference to Market-Garden. And, in particular, he was upset by General Browning’s statement that the object of the airborne attack was to “lay a carpet of airborne troops down over which our ground forces can pass.” He believed that “that single cliché had the psychological effect of lulling many commanders into a passive and absolutely unimaginative state of mind in which no reaction to German resistance, apart from dogged gallantry, was envisaged.” He considered the atmosphere at headquarters so unrealistic that, at one of the planning conferences, he asked “whether the ‘carpet’ was to consist of live airborne troops or dead ones.”

  “It was absolutely impossible,” he said later, “to get them to face the realities of the situation; their personal longing to get into the campaign before it ended completely blinded them.” But young Urquhart was convinced that General Dempsey’s warning was accurate. He believed there was German armor in the vicinity of Arnhem, but he needed to substantiate the report by getting more evidence. A Spitfire fighter squadron equipped with special cameras for taking oblique pictures was stationed, Urquhart knew, at nearby Benson in Oxfordshire. The squadron was currently searching out rocket sites along the Dutch coast.

  On the afternoon of September 12, Major Urquhart requested low-level R.A.F. reconnaissance sweeps of the Arnhem area. To avoid detection, enemy tanks would be hidden in forests or beneath camouflaged netting and might well escape high-altitude photographic flights. Urquhart’s request was acknowledged; low-level missions would be flown over the Arnhem area, and he would get the results as fast as possible. Photographs of the tanks, if they were there, might prove to all concerned that Major Urquhart’s fears were justified.

  There was too little time now for airborne division commanders to check out intelligence reports firsthand. They were dependent on Corps or First Allied Airborne headquarters for the latest estimates. From experience, each commander knew that even this information would be several days old by the time he received it. Still, in the general view, there was little reason to anticipate any powerful enemy resistance. The risks involved in Market-Garden were, as a result, considered acceptable.

  Once Generals Brereton and Browning had outlined the plan, determined the objectives and decided on airlift capability, each commander developed his own combat plans. The choice of drop zones and landing sites had priority. From previous operations, veteran airborne commanders knew that the best chance of success depended on how close to their objectives assaulting troops could be dropped. Ideally, they should be landed almost on their targets or within quick marching distance, especially if they were expected to seize a bridge. With the meager ground transport available, the pinpointing of these sites was vital.

  Major General Maxwell D. Taylor was all too aware that his sites must be chosen for maximum effect. While Taylor would have the majority of his Screaming Eagle paratroops on D Day, his engineering units, artillery and most of the 101st transport would not arrive until D plus 1 and 2. Studying the southernmost part of the corridor where the 101st Airborne Division was to hold between Eindhoven and Veghel, Taylor quickly noted that over the fifteen-mile stretch of highway, his troops must capture two major canal crossings and no less than nine highway and railroad bridges. At Veghel, over the river Aa and the Willems Canal, there were four bridges, one a major canal crossing. Five miles south in St. Oedenrode, a bridge over the Lower Dommel had to be seized; four miles from there was the second major canal crossing, over the Wilhelmina Canal near the village of Son, and to the west a bridge near the hamlet of Best. Five miles farther south in Eindhoven, four bridges over the Upper Dommel had to be taken.

  After studying the flat terrain between Eindhoven and Veghel, with its veining waterways, dikes, ditches and tree-lined roads, Taylor decided to pinpoint his major landing site almost in the center of his assault area, by the edge of a forest barely one and one half miles from Son and roughly equidistant between Eindhoven and Veghel. He would land two of his regiments, the 502nd and the 506th, on this zone. The 502nd was charged with objectives in St. Oedenrode and Best; the 506th with those in Son and Eindhoven. The third regiment, the 501st, was to land in two areas north and west of Veghel, within a few hundred yards of the vital four bridges. It was a formidable assignment for his men to accomplish on D Day without their back-up auxiliary units, but Taylor believed that “with luck, we can make it.”

  The task of the 82nd Airborne was more intricate. Its ten-mile sector was wider than that of the 101st. In this central segment of the corridor, the huge, nine-span, 1,500-foot-long bridge over the Maas river at Grave and at least one of four smaller railroad and highway crossings over the Maas-Waal Canal must be seized. The great bridge over the Waal river at Nijmegen, almost in the center of this city of 90,000, was also a prime objective. None of these could be called “secured” unless the Groesbeek Heights, dominating the area two miles southwest of Nijmegen, were held. Also, to the east was the great belt of forest along the German border—the Reichswald—where the Germans might assemble for attack. When General Gavin explained to his headquarters’ officers what was expected of them, his chief of staff, Colonel Robert H. Wienecke, protested, “We’ll need two divisions to do all that.” Gavin was terse. “There it is, and we’re going to do it with one.”

  Remembering the 82nd Airborne’s attacks in Sicily and Italy, when his troops were scattered sometimes as far as thirty-five miles from their drop zone (the standard division joke was that “we always use blind pilots”), Gavin was determined to land his men this time almost on their targets. In order of priority, he decided that his objectives were: first, the Groesbeek Heights; second, the bridge at Grave; third, the crossings on the Maas-Waal Canal; and fourth, the Waal bridge at Nijmegen. “Because of probable quick enemy reaction,” Gavin later recalled, “I decided to drop the largest part of my paratroops between the Groesbeek Heights and the Reichswald” He chose two landing zones in the Groesbeek vicinity less than a mile and a half from the ridge itself and three to four miles southwest of Nijmegen. There, his 508th and 505th regiments, plus the headquarters staff, would land. The third regiment, the 504th, was to drop on the western side of the Groesbeek Heights in the triangle between the Maas river and the Maas-Waal Canal, a mile from the eastern end of the Grave bridge and two miles west of the Maas-Waal Canal bridges. To insure the capture of the vital Grave bridge, which might be prepared for demolition, an additional phase of his plan was developed in which a company of the 504th was to be dropped a half mile from the western end of the bridge. Before the enemy could retaliate, the 504th would rush the bridge from both ends.

  Obviously, the great Nijmegen bridge was the most important of all his objectives and crucial to the entire Market-Garden operation. Yet Gavin was well aware that, without holding the other objectives, the Waal river crossing by itself would be useless. General Browning agreed with him. If the first bridges were not taken or if the enemy held the Groesbeek Heights, the corridor for the Garden forces would never be opened. Therefore, Browning specifically directed, Gavin was not to attempt an attack on the Nijmegen bridge until the primary objectives were secured.

  Although he was concerned about the wide dispersal of his troops, Gavin was satisfied with the plan. One aspect bothered him, as it had bothered Taylor. His entire division would not be organically complete until supporting units arrived on D plus 1 and 2, and he wondered how his men—who knew nothing about Market-Garden as yet—would react. Still, in the experienced 82nd, morale was high as always; many of his men had made three combat jumps already. “Jumping Jim” Gavin, at thirty-seven the youngest brigadier general in the U.S. Army, had no doubts that his “fugitives from the law of averages,” as they called themselves, would do their job.

&
nbsp; The most difficult and dangerous assignment, by far, had been given to a modest, reticent career officer, Major General Robert “Roy” Urquhart, forty-two-year-old commander of the British 1st Airborne Division and the attached Polish Brigade.

  Unlike General Browning and his American colleagues, Urquhart, a highly professional soldier who had fought with great distinction in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, had no airborne warfare experience. He would be commanding an airborne division in battle for the first time. Browning had chosen him because he was “hot from battle,” but Urquhart had been surprised at his appointment. He had always considered airborne units “tightly knit organizations, closed family affairs and quite exclusive.” Yet Urquhart had confidence in his ability to lead the elite unit. Once the force was on the ground the basic fighting rules remained the same, and he viewed his airborne division as “very highly trained infantry troops.”

  Despite his long combat experience, Urquhart was bothered about one thing: he had never parachuted or been in a glider. “I was even prone to airsickness,” he was later to remark. On taking command in January, 1944, nine months before, Urquhart had suggested to General Browning that perhaps, as the new division commander, he ought to have some parachute training. Browning, who impressed Urquhart as a “lithe, immaculately turned-out man who gave the appearance of a restless hawk,” answered that Urquhart’s job was to get his division ready for an invasion of the Continent. Looking over the six-foot, 200-pound Scotsman, Browning added, “Leave the parachuting to younger chaps. Not only are you too large, but you’re getting on.”*