A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  From the ground, Staff Sergeant James Jones saw a P-47 aflame at about 1,500 feet. He expected the pilot to bail out but the plane came down, skidded across the drop zone and broke apart. The tail snapped off, the motor rolled away, and the cockpit came to rest on the field. Jones was sure the pilot was dead but, as he watched, the canopy slid back and “a little tow-headed guy with no hat on and a .45 under his arm ran toward us.” Jones remembers asking, “Man, why in the devil didn’t you jump?” The pilot grinned. “Hell, I was afraid to,” he told Jones.

  Just after landing and assembling his gear, Staff Sergeant Russell O’Neal watched a P-51 fighter dive and strafe a hidden German position near his field. After the plane had made two passes over the machine-gun nest, it was hit; but the pilot was able to circle and make a safe belly landing. According to O’Neal, “this guy jumped out and ran up to me, shouting, ‘Give me a gun, quick! I know right where that Kraut s.o.b. is and I’m gonna get him.’ “As O’Neal stared after him, the pilot grabbed a gun and raced off toward the woods.

  Within eighteen minutes, 4,511 men of the 82nd’s 505th and 508th regiments, along with engineers and seventy tons of equipment, were down on or near their drop zones straddling the town of Groesbeek on the eastern side of the wooded heights. As the men assembled, cleared the zones and struck out for objectives, special pathfinder teams marked the areas for the artillery drop, the 82nd’s glider force, and the British Corps headquarters. So far, General Gavin’s calculated risk was succeeding. Yet, although radio contact between the regiments was established almost immediately, it was still too early for Gavin, who had jumped with the 505th, to learn what was occurring eight miles west, where the 504th Regiment had dropped north of Overasselt. Nor did he know whether the special assault against the Grave bridge was proceeding according to plan.

  Like the rest of the division’s planes, the 137 C-47’s carrying Colonel Reuben H. Tucker’s 504th Regiment ran into spasmodic antiaircraft fire as they neared the Overasselt drop zone. As in the other areas, pilots held their courses, and at 1:15 P.M., some 2,016 men began to jump. Eleven planes swung slightly west and headed for a small drop site near the vital nine-span, 1,500-foot-long bridge over the Maas river near Grave. These C-47’s carried Company E of Major Edward Wellems’ 2nd Battalion to the most crucial of the 82nd’s immediate objectives. Their job was to rush the bridges from the western approach; the remainder of Wellems’ battalion would strike out from Overasselt and head for the eastern side. If the Grave bridge was not taken quickly and intact, the tight Market-Garden schedule could not be maintained. Loss of the bridge might mean failure for the entire operation.

  As E Company’s planes headed for the western assault site, platoon leader Lieutenant John S. Thompson could clearly see the Maas river, the town of Grave, the mass jump of the 504th to his right near Overasselt and then, coming up, the ditch-lined fields where the company was to drop. As Thompson watched, other men from the company were already out of their planes and falling toward the Grave bridge zone; but in the lieutenant’s C-47 the green light had not yet flashed on. When it did, Thompson saw that they were directly over some buildings. He waited for a few seconds, saw fields beyond and jumped with his platoon. By a fortuitous error, he and his men came down only some five or six hundred yards from the southwestern edge of the bridge.

  Thompson could hear erratic firing from the direction of Grave itself, but around the bridge everything seemed quiet. He did not know whether he should wait until the remainder of the company came up or attack with the sixteen men in his platoon. “Since this was our primary mission, I decided to attack,” Thompson says. Sending Corporal Hugh H. Perry back to the company commander, Thompson gave him a laconic message to deliver: “We are proceeding toward the bridge.”

  Firing from the town and nearby buildings was now more intense, and Thompson led the platoon to cover in nearby drainage ditches. Working their way toward the bridge, men waded in water up to their necks. They began to receive fire from a flak tower close to the bridge and Thompson noticed enemy soldiers with bags in their arms running to and from a building near the crossing. He thought it must be a maintenance or power plant. Fearful that the Germans were carrying demolition charges to the bridge in preparation for destroying it, Thompson quickly deployed his men, encircled the building and opened fire. “We raked the area with machine guns, overran the power plant, found four dead Germans and one wounded,” Thompson recalls. “Apparently they had been carrying their personal equipment and blankets.” Suddenly, two trucks came racing down the highway from Grave, heading toward the bridge. One of Thompson’s men killed a driver whose truck careened off the road as its load of German soldiers scrambled to get out. The second vehicle stopped immediately and the soldiers in it jumped to the ground. Thompson’s men opened up, but the Germans showed no desire to fight. Without returning fire, they ran away.

  Fire was still coming from the flak tower, but by now it was passing over the heads of the platoon. “The gunners were unable to depress the 20 mm. flak gun sufficiently to get us,” Thompson remembers. The platoon’s bazooka man, Private Robert McGraw, crawled forward and, at a range of about seventy-five yards, fired three rounds, two of them into the top of the tower, and the gun ceased firing.

  Although a twin 20 mm. gun in a tower across the river near the far end of the bridge was firing, Thompson and his men nonetheless destroyed electrical equipment and cables that they suspected were hooked up to demolitions. The platoon then set up a roadblock and placed land mines across the highway at the southwestern approach to the bridge. In the flak tower they had knocked out, they found the gunner dead but his 20 mm. weapon undamaged. Thompson’s men promptly began firing it at the flak tower across the river. The platoon, he knew, would soon be reinforced by the rest of E Company coming up behind and, shortly after, by Major Wellems’ battalion even now rushing from Overasselt to grab the northeastern end of the bridge. But, as far as Lieutenant Thompson was concerned, the prime objective was already taken.*

  By now, the remaining battalions of Tucker’s 504th Regiment were moving eastward, like spokes on a wheel, for the three road crossings and the railroad bridge over the Maas-Waal Canal. Rushing toward the bridge also were units of the 505th and 508th regiments, bent on seizing the crossings from the opposite ends. Not all these objectives were essential to the Market-Garden advance. In the surprise of the assault and the ensuing confusion, Gavin hoped to seize them all; but one, in addition to the all-important Grave bridge, would suffice.

  To keep the enemy off balance, defend his positions, protect General Browning’s Corps headquarters and aid his paratroopers as they moved on their objectives, Gavin was depending heavily on his howitzers; and now the guns of the 376th Parachute Field Artillery were coming in. Small artillery units had been dropped in previous operations, but they had been badly scattered and slow to assemble and fire. The unit of 544 men now approaching was hand-picked, every soldier a veteran paratrooper. Among the forty-eight planes carrying the battalion was the artillery—twelve 75 mm. howitzers, each broken down into seven pieces. The howitzers would be dropped first, followed by some 700 rounds of ammunition. Lining up, the C-47’s came in and, in quick succession, the guns rolled out. Ammunition and men followed, all making a near-perfect landing.

  One accident caused scarcely a pause. Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur Griffith, commanding the 376th, broke his ankle on the jump but his men quickly liberated a Dutch wheelbarrow in which to carry him. “I shall never forget the Colonel being trundled from place to place,” Major Augustin Hart recalls, “and barking out orders for everybody to get assembled at top speed.” When the job was complete, Griffith was wheeled over to General Gavin. There he reported: “Guns in position, sir, and ready to fire on call.” In just over an hour, in the most successful drop of its kind ever made, the entire battalion was assembled and ten of its howitzers were already firing.

  Fourteen minutes after the 82nd’s field artillery landed, Waco gliders carrying an airbo
rne antitank battalion, engineers, elements of Division headquarters, guns, ammunition, trailers and jeeps began to come in. Of the original fifty gliders leaving England, all but four reached Holland. Not all, however, touched down on their landing zone. Some gliders ended up a mile or two away. One, copiloted by Captain Anthony Jedrziewski, cut loose late from its tug and Jedrziewski saw with horror that “we were heading straight for Germany on a one-glider invasion.” The pilot made a 180-degree turn and began to look for a place to land. As they came in, Jedrziewski remembers, “we lost one wing on a haystack, the other on a fence and ended up with the glider nose in the ground. Seeing earth up to my knees, I wasn’t sure if my feet were still a part of me. Then, we heard the unwelcome sound of an 88 and, in nothing flat, we had the jeep out and were racing back toward our own area.”

  They were luckier than Captain John Connelly, whose pilot was killed during the approach. Connelly, who had never flown a glider before, took the controls and landed the Waco just inside the German border, six to seven miles away, near the town of Wyler. Only Connelly and one other man escaped capture. They were to hide out until darkness and finally reached their units by midmorning of September 18.

  Yet, in all, the 82nd Airborne had successfully brought in 7,467 paratroopers and glider-borne men. The last elements to touch down in the area were 35 Horsas and Wacos carrying General Frederick Browning’s Corps headquarters. Three gliders had been lost en route to the drop zone, two before reaching the Continent; the third, south of Vught, had crash-landed in the vicinity of General Student’s headquarters. Browning’s headquarters landed almost on the German frontier. “There was little flak, if any, and almost no enemy opposition,” Browning’s chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers. “We set down about a hundred yards west of the Reichswald Forest and my glider was roughly fifty yards away from Browning’s.”

  Colonel George S. Chatterton, commanding the Glider Pilot Regiment, was at the controls of Browning’s Horsa. After clipping off a front wheel on an electric cable, Chatterton slid into a cabbage patch. “We got out,” Chatterton recalls, “and Browning, looking around, said, ‘By God, we’re here, George!’ “Nearby, Brigadier Walch saw Browning run across the landing zone toward the Reichswald. When he returned a few minutes later, he explained to Walch, “I wanted to be the first British officer to pee in Germany.”

  While Browning’s jeep was being unloaded, a few German shells exploded nearby. Colonel Chatterton promptly threw himself into the closest ditch. “I shall never forget Browning standing above me, looking like some sort of explorer, and asking, ‘George, whatever in the world are you doing down there?’ “Chatterton was frank. “I’m bloody well hiding, sir,” he said. “Well, you can bloody well stop hiding,” Browning told him. “It’s time we were going.” From a pocket in his tunic, Browning took out a parcel wrapped in tissue paper. Handing it to Chatterton, he said, “Put it on my jeep.” Chatterton unfolded the tissue and saw that it contained a pennant bearing a light-blue Pegasus against a maroon background, the insignia of the British Airborne.* With the pennant fluttering from the jeep’s fender, the commander of the Market forces drove away.

  At Renkum Heath west of Arnhem, Lieutenant Neville Hay, the highly trained specialist in charge of the fact-gathering liaison unit “Phantom,” was totally baffled. His team of experts had assembled their radio set with its special antenna and expected immediate contact with General Browning’s Corps headquarters. Hay’s first priority on landing was to get through to Corps and give his position. Earlier, he had learned that Division communications had broken down. While he might have anticipated that problems would arise among the less experienced Royal Signal Corps operators, he was not prepared to believe that the difficulties he was having stemmed from his own men. “We were set up on the landing zone and, although it was screened by pine woods, we had got through in considerably worse country than this,” he remembers. “We kept trying and getting absolutely nothing.” Until he could discover where the trouble lay, there was no way of informing General Browning of the progress of General Urquhart’s division or of relaying Browning’s orders to the British 1st Airborne. Ironically, the Dutch telephone system was in full operation, including a special network owned and operated by the PGEM power station authorities at Nijmegen and connected with the entire province. Had he known, all Hay had to do, with the aid of the Dutch resistance, was to pick up a telephone.

  Fifteen miles away there was already anxiety at General Browning’s headquarters, now set up on the edge of the Groes-beek ridge. Both of the 82nd Airborne’s large communication sets had been damaged on landing. Browning’s had come through safely, and one of these was allocated to the 82nd, insuring immediate communication with General Gavin. The Corps communications section had also made radio contact with General Dempsey’s British 2nd Army and Airborne Corps rear headquarters in England and Browning had radio contact with the 101st. But the signal section was unable to raise Urquhart’s division. Brigadier Walch believes that Corps signals was to blame. “Before the operation was planned, we asked for a proper headquarters signals section,” he says. “We were frightfully cognizant that our sets were inadequate and our headquarters signals staff weak and inexperienced.” While Browning could direct and influence the movements of the 82nd, the 101st and Horrocks’ XXX Corps, at this vital junction the all-important battle at Arnhem was beyond his control. As Walch says, “We had absolutely no idea what was happening in Arnhem.”

  A kind of creeping paralysis was already beginning to affect Montgomery’s plan. But at this early stage no one knew it. Throughout the entire Market-Garden area, some 20,000 Allied soldiers were in Holland, heading out to secure the bridges and hold open the corridor for the massive Garden units whose lead tanks were expected to link up with 101st paratroopers by nightfall.

  *The 82nd’s after-action report and that of the 504th commander, Colonel Tucker, state the bridge was “taken” at 2:30 P.M. But Major Wellems’ account states that because the bridge was still under harassing fire, the first men to actually cross from the northeastern end went over at 3:35 P.M. Still, the E Company platoon under Lieutenant Thompson held the bridge and prevented its demolition from 1:45 P.M. until it was described as “secure” at 5 P.M.

  *Some accounts have stated that Browning’s pennant was made by his wife, the novelist Daphne du Maurier. “I am sorry,” she writes, “to disappoint the myth-makers … but anyone who has seen my attempts to thread a needle would know this was beyond me. It is a delightful thought, however, and would have greatly amused my husband.” Actually, the pennant was made by Hobson & Sons Ltd., London, under the supervision of Miss Claire Miller, who also, at Browning’s direction, hand-sewed tiny compasses into 500 shirt collars and belts just prior to Market-Garden.

  FROM THE FLAT ROOF of a large factory near the Meuse-Escaut Canal, General Brian Horrocks, commander of the British XXX Corps, watched the last of the huge airborne glider formations pass over his waiting tanks. He had been on the roof since 11 A.M., and as he put it, “I had plenty of time to think.” The sight of the vast armada was “comforting, but I was under no illusion that this was going to be an easy battle,” Horrocks remembers. Meticulously, he had covered every possible contingency, even to ordering his men to take as much food, gas and ammunition as they could carry, “since we were likely to be out in the blue on our own.” There was one worry the General could not eliminate, but he had not discussed it with anyone—he did not like a Sunday attack. “No assault or attack in which I had taken part during the war which started on a Sunday had ever been completely successful.” Bringing up his binoculars, he studied the white ribbon of road stretching away north toward Valkenswaard and Eindhoven. Satisfied that the airborne assault had now begun, Horrocks gave the order for the Garden forces to attack. At precisely 2:15 P.M., with a thunderous roar, some 350 guns opened fire.

  The bombardment was devastating. Ton after ton of explosives flayed the enemy positions up ahead. The hurricane of fire,
ranging five miles in depth and concentrated over a one-mile front, caused the earth to shake beneath the tanks of the Irish Guards as they lumbered up to the start line. Behind the lead squadrons, hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles began to move slowly out of their parking positions, ready to fall into line as the first tanks moved off. And up above, a “cab rank” of rocket-firing Typhoon fighters circled endlessly, waiting on call for the commander of the Irish Guards Group, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur, to direct them to targets up ahead. At 2:35 P.M., standing in the turret of the lead tank of No. 3 Squadron, Lieutenant Keith Heathcote shouted into his microphone, “Driver, advance!”

  Slowly the tanks rumbled out of the bridgehead and moved up the road at eight miles an hour. Now, the curtain of artillery fire lifted to creep ahead of the armor at exactly the same speed. Tankers could see shells bursting barely one hundred yards in front of them. As the squadrons moved forward, engulfed in the dust of the barrage, men could not tell at times whether the tanks were safely back of their own fire.

  Behind the lead squadrons came the scout cars of Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur and his cousin Giles. Standing in his car, Vandeleur could see, both in front of and behind him, infantry riding on the tanks, each tank marked with yellow streamers to identify it to the Typhoons above. “The din was unimaginable,” Vandeleur remembers, “but everything was going according to plan.” By now, the lead tanks had burst out of the bridgehead and were across the Dutch frontier. Captain “Mick” O’Cock, commanding No. 3 Squadron, radioed back, “Advance going well. Leading squadron has got through.” Then, in seconds, the picture changed. As Vandeleur recalls, “The Germans really began to paste us.”