In the audience, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis D. Renfro, liaison officer from the 101st Airborne Division and one of the few Americans present, was impressed by the Corps commander’s enthusiasm and confidence. He talked for an hour, Curtis recorded, “with only an occasional reference to notes.”
Step by step Horrocks explained the complexities of Market-Garden. The airborne army would go in first, he said. Its objectives: to capture the bridges in front of XXX Corps. Horrocks would give the word for the attack to begin. Depending on the weather, zero hour for the ground forces was expected to be 2 P.M. At that moment 350 guns would open fire and lay down a massive artillery barrage that would last thirty-five minutes. Then, at 2:35 P.M., led by waves of rocket-firing Typhoons, XXX Corps tanks would break out of their bridgehead and “blast down the main road.” The Guards Armored Division would have the honor of leading the attack. They would be followed by the 43rd Wessex and 50th Northumberland divisions, and then by the 8th Armored Brigade and the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade.
There was to be “no pause, no stop,” Horrocks emphasized. The Guards Armored was “to keep going like hell” all the way to Arnhem. The breakout from the bridgehead, Horrocks believed, would be “almost immediate.” He expected the first Guards tanks to be in Eindhoven within two or three hours. If the enemy reacted fast enough to blow all the bridges before the airborne troops could secure them, then the 43rd Wessex Infantry Division engineers, coming up behind, would rush forward with men and bridging equipment. This massive engineering operation, should it be required, Horrocks explained, could involve 9,000 engineers and some 2,277 vehicles already in the Leopoldsburg area. The entire XXX Corps armored column was to be fed up the main road with the vehicles two abreast, thirty-five vehicles per mile. Traffic would be one way, and Horrocks expected “to pass 20,000 vehicles over the highway to Arnhem in sixty hours.”
General Allan Adair, the forty-six-year-old commander of the famed Guards Armored Division, listening to Horrocks, thought Market-Garden was a bold plan, but he also believed “it might be tricky.” He expected the worst moment to be the breakout from the Meuse-Escaut Canal bridgehead. Once through that, although he fully expected German resistance, he thought the going would “not be difficult.” Besides, he had every faith in the unit that would lead off the attack—Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur’s Irish Guards Group.
Joe Vandeleur, as he learned that his tanks would spearhead the breakout, remembers thinking to himself, “Oh, Christ! Not us again.” Vandeleur was proud that his veteran unit had been chosen, yet he knew his troops were tired and his units under-strength. Since the breakout from Normandy he had received very few replacements in either men or tanks; furthermore, “they weren’t allowing a hell of a lot of time for planning.” But then he thought, how much time do you really need to plan for a straight bash through the German lines? Next to him, his cousin, thirty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur, who commanded the 2nd Battalion under Joe, was “struck with horror at the plan to blast through the German resistance on a one-tank front.” To him, it was not proper armored warfare. But he recalls “swallowing whatever misgivings I had and succumbing to a strange, tense excitement, like being at the pole at the start of a horse race.”
To three men in the theater, the announcement produced deep personal feelings. The senior officers of the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade had led their men in battle all the way from Normandy. First they had fought alongside the Canadians; then, after the fall of Brussels, they were transferred to the British Second Army. Now they would be coming home. Much as they looked forward to the liberation of Holland, the commander, Colonel Albert “Steve” de Ruyter van Steveninck; his second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Pahud de Mortanges; and the chief of staff, Major Jonkheer Jan Beelaerts van Blokland, had grave misgivings about the manner in which it was to be accomplished. Steveninck considered the entire plan risky. Mortanges’ impression was that the British were more offhand about what lay ahead than the facts justified. As he put it, “It was made to seem quite elementary. First, we’ll take this bridge; then that one and hop this river…. The terrain ahead with its rivers, marshes, dikes and lowlands, was extremely difficult—as the British well knew from our many presentations.” The thirty-three-year-old chief of staff, Beelaerts van Blokland, could not help thinking of past military history. “We seemed to be violating Napoleon’s maxim about never fighting unless you are at least 75 percent sure of success. Then, the other 25 percent can be left to chance. The British were reversing the process; we were leaving 75 percent to chance. We had only forty-eight hours to get to Arnhem, and if the slightest thing went wrong—a bridge blown, stiffer German resistance than anticipated—we’d be off schedule.” Blokland had a private worry, too. His parents lived in the village of Oosterbeek, just two and a half miles from the Arnhem bridge.
One of the few officers below the rank of brigade major who heard the briefing was twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant John Gorman of the Irish Guards. He was stimulated by the whole affair and thought Horrocks was “at his finest.” The Corps commander, Gorman later recalled, “called into play all his wit and humor, interspersing the more dramatic or technical points with humorous little asides. He really was quite a showman.” Gorman was particularly pleased with Operation Garden because “the Guards were to lead out and obviously their role would be tremendously dramatic.”
When the meeting had ended and commanders headed out to brief their troops, young Gorman felt his first “private doubts about the chances of success.” Lingering in front of a map, he remembers thinking that Market-Garden was “a feasible operation—but only just feasible.” There were simply “too many bridges.” Nor was he enthusiastic about the terrain itself. He thought it was poor tank country and advancing on “a one-tank front, we would be very vulnerable.” But the promise of support from rocket-firing Typhoons was reassuring. So was another promise of sorts. Gorman remembered the day, months before, when he had received the Military Cross for bravery from Montgomery himself.* At the investiture, Monty had said, “If I were a betting man I should say it would be an even bet that the war will be over by Christmas.” And Horrocks, Gorman recalls, had “told us that this attack could end the war.” The only alternative Gorman could find to “going north seemed to be a long dreary winter camped on or near the Escaut Canal.” Monty’s plan, he believed, “had just the right amount of dash and daring to work. If there was a chance to win the war by Christmas, then I was for pushing on.”
Now, in the flat, gray Belgian countryside with its coal fields and slag heaps which reminded so many of Wales, the men who would lead the way for General Dempsey’s British Second Army heard of the plan and the promise of Arnhem. Along side roads, in bivouac areas and in encampments, soldiers gathered around their officers to learn the part they would play in Operation Market-Garden. When Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur told his officers that the Irish would be leading out, twenty-nine-year-old Major Edward G. Tyler remembers that a “half moan” went up from the assembled officers. “We figured,” he recalls, “that we deserved a bit of a break after taking the bridge over the Escaut Canal, which we named ‘Joe’s bridge’ after Joe Vandeleur. But our commanding officer told us that it was a great honor for us to be chosen.” Despite his desire for a reprieve, Tyler thought so too. “We were used to one-tank fronts,” he remembers, “and in this case we were trusting to speed and support. No one seemed worried.”
But Lieutenant Barry Quinan, who had just turned twenty-one, was “filled with trepidation.” He was going into action for the first time with the lead Guards Armored tank squadron under Captain Mick O’Cock. Quinan’s infantry would travel on the backs of the tanks, Russian-style. To him, “the number of rivers ahead seemed ominous. We were not amphibious.” Yet Quinan felt proud that his men would be “leading the entire British Second Army.”
Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey, also twenty-one, vividly remembers being told that “if the operation was a success the wives and
children at home would be relieved from the threat of the Germans’ V-2 rockets.” Mahaffey’s mother lived in London, which by that time was under intense bombardment. Although he was excited at the prospect of the attack, the single road leading all the way up to Arnhem was, he thought, “an awfully long way to go.”
Captain Roland S. Langton, twenty-three, just returned from five days in a field hospital after receiving shrapnel wounds, learned that he was no longer adjutant of the 2nd Irish Guards Battalion. Instead, he was assigned as second in command of Captain Mick O’Cock’s breakout squadron. He was jubilant about the assignment. The breakout seemed to Langton a straightforward thing. Garden could not be anything but a success. It was “obvious to all that the Germans were disorganized and shaken, lacking cohesion, and capable only of fighting in small pockets.”
Not everyone was so confident. As Lieutenant A. G. C. “Tony” Jones, twenty-one, of the Royal Engineers, listened to the plan, he thought it was “clearly going to be very difficult.” The bridges were the key to the entire operation and, as one officer remarked, “The drive of the XXX Corps will be like threading seven needles with one piece of cotton and we only have to miss one to be in trouble.” To veteran Guardsman Tim Smith, twenty-four, the attack was “just another battle.” On this day his greatest concern was the famed St. Leger race at Newmarket. He had a tip that a horse called Tehran, to be ridden by the famous jockey Gordon Richards, was “a sure thing.” He placed every penny he had on Tehran with a lance corporal at battalion headquarters. If Market-Garden was the operation that would win the war, this was just the day to win the St. Leger. To his amazement, Tehran won. He was quite sure now that Market-Garden would succeed.
One man was “decidedly uncomfortable.” Flight Lieutenant Donald Love, twenty-eight, an R.A.F. fighter-reconnaissance pilot, felt completely out of place among the officers of the Guards Armored. He was part of the air liaison team which would call in the rocket-firing Typhoon fighters from the ground when the breakout began. His lightly armored vehicle (code-named “Winecup”), with its canvas roof and its maze of communications equipment, would be up front close to Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur’s command car. Love felt naked and defenseless: the only weapons the R.A.F. team possessed were revolvers. As he listened to Vandeleur talking about “a rolling barrage that would move forward at a speed of 200 yards per minute” and heard the burly Irishman describe Love’s little scout car as an “armored signal tender for direct communication with pilots in the sky,” Love’s concern mounted. “I got the distinct impression that I would be the one responsible for calling in the ‘cab rank’ of Typhoons overhead.” The thought was not reassuring. Love knew very little about the radio setup, and he had never before acted as a ground-to-air tactical officer. Then, to his acute relief, he learned that an expert, Squadron Leader Max Sutherland, would join him the following day to handle the communications for the initial breakout. Thereafter, Love would be in charge. Love began to wonder whether he should have volunteered in the first place. He had only taken the job “because I thought it might be a nice change of pace.”
A change of a different sort bothered the commander of the Irish Guards. During the capture of the bridgehead over the Escaut Canal, Joe Vandeleur had lost “a close and distinguished friend.” His broadcasting van, with its huge trumpetlike loudspeaker on the roof, had been destroyed by a German shell. All through training back in England and in the great advance from Normandy, Joe had used the van to broadcast to his troops and after each session, being a lover of classical music, he had always put on a record or two—selections that didn’t always please the Guardsmen. The van had been blown to pieces and shards of the classical records—along with Vandeleur’s favorite popular tune-had showered down over the countryside. Joe was saddened by his loss; not so, his Irish Guardsmen. They thought the drive to Arnhem would be arduous enough without having to listen to Joe’s loudspeaker blaring out his current theme song, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”
Meanwhile, in England the paratroopers and glider-borne infantry of the First Allied Airborne Army were even now in marshaling areas, ready for the moment of takeoff. Over the previous forty-eight hours, using maps, photographs and scale models, officers had briefed and rebriefed their men. The preparations were immense and meticulous. At twenty-four air bases (8 British, 16 American), vast fleets of troop-carrying aircraft, tow planes and gliders were checked out, fueled and loaded with equipment ranging from artillery to jeeps. Some ninety miles north of London, Brigadier General James M. Gavin’s “All-American” 82nd Airborne Division was already shut off from the outside world at a cluster of airfields around Grantham in Lincolnshire. So were part of General Roy Urquhart’s Red Devils, the British 1st Airborne Division, and Major General Stanislaw Sosa-bowski’s Polish 1st Parachute Brigade. To the south around Newbury, roughly eighty miles west of London, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor’s Screaming Eagles, the 101st Airborne Division, were also “sealed in.” In the same area, and stretching as far down as Dorsetshire, was the remainder of Urquhart’s division. The majority of his units would not move to the airfields until the morning of the seventeenth, but in hamlets, villages and bivouac areas close to the departure points, they too made ready. Everywhere now, the airborne forces of Market-Garden waited out the time until takeoff and the historic invasion of Holland from the sky.
Some men felt more concern at being sealed in than about the mission itself. At an airfield near the village of Ramsbury, the security precautions made Corporal Hansford Vest, of the 101st Division’s 502nd Regiment, distinctly uneasy. Aircraft and gliders “were parked for miles all over the countryside and there were guards everywhere.” He noted that the airfield was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with “British guards on the outside and our own guards on the inside.” Vest had the “feeling that our freedom was gone.” Private James Allardyce of the 508th Regiment, in his crowded tent city, tried to ignore the barbed wire and guards. He checked and rechecked his equipment “until it was almost worn out.” Allardyce could not shake off the feeling that “we were like condemned men waiting to be led off.”
Other men worried principally about their chances of going on the mission. So many previous operations had been canceled that one new recruit, nineteen-year-old Private Melvin Isenekev, of the 506th Regiment (he had arrived from the States on June 6, the day the 101st had jumped into Normandy), still didn’t believe they would go when they reached the marshaling area. Isenekev felt he had trained “long and hard for this and I didn’t want to be held back.” Yet he almost was. Trying to light a makeshift oil burner used for heating water, he threw a lighted match into an oil drum. When nothing happened, Isenekev “put my head over it to look in and it exploded.” Temporarily blinded, he instantly thought, “Now I’ve done it. They won’t let me go.” However within a few minutes his eyes stopped burning and he could see again. But he believes he was the only member of the 101st jumping into Holland with no eyebrows.
First Sergeant Daniel Zapalski, twenty-four, of the 502nd, “sweated out the jump; hoping the chute was packed right; hoping the field was soft; and hoping I didn’t land in a tree.” He was eager to go. Although he had not fully recovered from a Normandy leg wound, Zapalski believed his injury “was not serious enough to keep me from doing my normal duty.” His battalion commander, the popular Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Cole, disagreed. He had turned down Zapalski’s pleas. Undeterred, Zapalski had bypassed Cole and obtained a written release certifying his combat readiness from the regimental surgeon. Though Zapalski and Cole had fought together in Normandy, the sergeant now got a “typical Cole chewing out. He called me ‘a fatheaded Polack, impractical, burdensome and unreasonable.’”But he let Zapalski go.
Captain Raymond S. Hall, the 502nd’s regimental chaplain, had a somewhat similar problem. He was “most anxious to return to action and to be with my men.” But he too had been wounded in Normandy. Now the doctors would not let him jump. He was finally told that he could go in b
y glider. The chaplain was horrified. A veteran paratrooper, he considered gliders distinctly unsafe.
Fear of death or of failure to perform well disturbed others. Captain LeGrand Johnson, twenty-two-year-old company commander, remembering “the horrors and narrow escapes” during the 101st’s night airborne attack preceding the Normandy invasion, was fatalistically “resigned.” He was convinced that he would not return from this mission. Still, the young officer “fully intended to raise as much hell as I could.” Johnson was not sure he liked the idea of a daylight drop. It might produce more casualties. On the other hand, this time “we would be able to see the enemy.” To hide his nervousness, Johnson made bets with his fellow troopers on who would get the first Dutch beer. One of Johnson’s staff sergeants, Charles Dohun, was “almost numb” with worry. He did “not know how to compare this daylight jump with Normandy or what to expect.” Within forty-eight hours, his numbness forgotten, Staff Sergeant Dohun would heroically save the life of the fatalistic Captain Johnson.
Technical Sergeant Marshall Copas, twenty-two, had perhaps more reason than most for anxiety. He was one of the “pathfinders” who would jump first to mark the drop zones for the 101st. In the Normandy drop, Copas recalled, “we had forty-five minutes before the main body of troopers began jumping—now we had only twelve minutes.” Copas and his friend Sergeant John Rudolph Brandt, twenty-nine, had one concern in common: both would have felt better “had General Patton’s Third Army been on the ground below us, rather than the British. We had never fought with the Tommies before.”
In the Grantham area, Private John Garzia, a veteran of three combat jumps with the 82nd Airborne Division, was stunned. To him, Market-Garden “was sheer insanity.” He thought “Ike had transferred to the German side.”
A Bridge Too Far Page 15
