A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Some men seemed to have overcome even the paralyzing fear that the brute force of enemy armored attacks instilled. With few antitank guns, troopers were helpless against tanks and self-propelled guns that roamed the perimeter, pulverizing position after position. Yet, somehow the foot soldiers were fighting back. Even 60-ton Tigers were destroyed—often by men who had never before fired an antitank gun. Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who had eagerly looked forward to Arnhem as an escape from the “nightmare” of his camp in England and the mole which had invaded his mattress, now faced a far more dreadful nightmare with outward calm. He and another paratrooper, Private Nobby Clarke, had become friendly with a glider pilot in an adjoining slit trench. During a lull in the mortaring, the pilot called over to Nunn, “I don’t know whether you know it, old lad, but there’s a whopping great tank out in front to our right. One of the Tiger family.” Clarke looked at Nunn. “What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Go drill holes in it?”

  Cautiously Nunn looked over the edge of the trench. The tank was “enormous.” Nearby in the bushes an antitank gun was concealed, but its crew had been killed, and no one in Nunn’s group knew how to load or fire the weapon. Nunn and the glider pilot decided to crawl to it. As the men climbed out they were spotted and the tank’s gun began firing. “We dug grooves in the soil with our noses, we were that low,” Nunn recalls. “Our little woods began to look like a logging camp as trees came down all around us.” The two men reached the gun just as the Tiger “began to give us personal attention with its machine gun.” The pilot sighted down the barrel of the gun and shouted happily. “Our gun was pointed directly at the tank. If we’d known how to do it, we couldn’t have aimed it better.” Looking at Nunn, the glider pilot said, “I hope this thing works.” He pulled the trigger. In the heavy explosion that followed, both men were thrown on their backs. “When our ears stopped ringing, I heard other men around us begin to laugh and cheer,” Nunn says. As he stared disbelievingly, he saw the Tiger engulfed in flames, its ammunition exploding. Turning to Nunn, the glider pilot solemnly shook hands. “Our game, I think,” he said.

  Many men remember Major Robert Cain of the 2nd South Staffordshires as the real expert against tanks and self-propelled guns. It seemed to Cain that he and his men had been pursued and threatened by Tigers ever since they had arrived. Now, with his small force positioned at the church in lower Oosterbeek, in houses and gardens across the road, and in a laundry owned by a family named Van Dolderen, Cain was determined to knock out every piece of armor he saw. Searching for the best site from which to operate, Cain picked the Van Dolderen house. The laundry owner was unwilling to leave. Surveying the back garden, Cain said, “Well, be that as it may, I’m going to dig in out there. I’m using your place for my ammo dump.”

  Cain was using the bazookalike antitank weapon known as a Piat to hunt down armor. On Friday, as the street battles grew in intensity, Cain’s eardrums burst from his constant firing. Stuffing pieces of field dressing into his ears he continued lobbing bombs.

  Suddenly someone called out to Cain that two tanks were coming up the road. At the corner of a building, Cain loaded the Piat and aimed it. Staff Sergeant Richard Long, a glider pilot, looked on aghast. “He was the bravest man I’ve ever seen,” Long says. “He was only about a hundred yards away when he started to fire.” The tank fired back before Cain could reload, and the shell hit the building in back of him. In the thick swirl of dust and debris, Cain fired again and then again. He saw the crew of the first tank bail out, spraying the street with machine-gun bullets. Immediately around Cain, paratroopers opened up with Bren guns and, Cain remembers, “the Germans were just cut off their feet.” Reloading again, he fired, and Sergeant Long saw “a tremendous flash. The bomb had gone off inside the Piat. Major Cain threw his hands in the air and fell backward. When we got to him, his face was black. His first words were, ‘I think I’m blind.’ ” Staff Sergeant Walton Ashworth, one of the Bren-gunners who had shot up the German tank crew, stared stonily as Cain was taken away. “All I could think was ‘that poor bloody bastard.’ ”

  Within half an hour Cain’s sight had returned, but his face was imbedded with bits of metal. He refused morphia and, deciding that he “wasn’t wounded enough to stay where he was,” went back to the battle—as Captain W. A. Taylor described it, “to add to his bag of enemy tanks.” By Friday afternoon, the thirty-five-year-old Cain had a bagful. Since landing on the eighteenth he had put out of action or driven off a total of six tanks, plus a number of self-propelled guns.

  Ferocious men throughout the airhead were making heroic stands, unmindful of their own safety. By dusk on Friday Corporal Leonard Formoy, one of the survivors of Colonel Fitch’s 3rd Battalion, who had made the desperate march to reach Frost’s men at the Arnhem bridge, occupied a position on the western outskirts not far from Division headquarters at the Hartenstein. “We were being hit from practically all sides,” Formoy remembers. Suddenly a Tiger tank, coming from the direction of Arnhem, rumbled toward the cluster of men around Formoy. In the twilight Formoy saw the turret swivel. Sergeant “Cab” Calloway picked up a Piat and rushed forward. “You’re going where I’m going!” Formoy heard him yell. Approximately fifty yards away from the tank, Calloway fired. The bomb exploded against the tracks and the tank stopped, but Calloway was killed at almost the same moment by its guns. “It was an act of desperation,” Formoy remembers. “He was just ripped in half, but he saved our lives.”

  Private James Jones remembers an unknown major who asked Jones and three others to go with him outside the perimeter on a search for guns and ammunition. The small party came suddenly upon some Germans in a machine-gun nest. Leaping up, the major fired, yelling, “There’s some more of those bastards who won’t live!” As the Germans opened up, the group scattered and Jones was trapped behind a disabled jeep. “I said a prayer, waited for another burst from the gun, and got back to the lines,” Jones recalls. He never saw the major again.

  Senior officers, often unaware of the impression they made, set examples their men would never forget. Brigadier Pip Hicks refused to wear a helmet throughout the battle. Trooper William Chandler, one of Major Freddie Gough’s Reconnaissance Squadron men whose group had been cut off on the northern, Leopard route on Sunday and had been moved back to a crossroads at Oosterbeek, remembers Hicks’s red beret standing out among groups of helmeted men. “Hey, Brigadier,” someone called out, “put your bloody helmet on.” Hicks just smiled and waved. “I wasn’t trying to be debonair,” Hicks explains. “I just couldn’t stand the damn thing bouncing around on my head.” His activities might have had something to do with that. Some men recall Hicks’s frequent daily trips to Urquhart’s headquarters. He started each journey at a jog and ended up sprinting a step ahead of German shellfire. “I felt fully my age when I finished those mad dashes,” Hicks confesses.

  Brigadier Shan Hackett, who had brought his battered 10th and 156th battalions back to the Oosterbeek area after their brave but futile attempt to break through the German defenses to the north and east and get to Arnhem, visited his men constantly, offering them quiet words of praise. Major George Powell was commanding two platoons of the 156th in perimeter positions to the north. “We were short on food, ammunition and water,” Powell remembers, “and we had few medical supplies.” On Friday Hackett suddenly appeared at Powell’s command post, where, says Powell, “we were literally poking right into the enemy’s lines.” Hackett explained that he had not had time to visit Powell until now, “but you’ve been holding so well, George, I wasn’t worried about you.” Powell was pleased. “The only real mistake I’ve made so far, sir,” he said, “is putting the headquarters in a chicken run. We’re all alive with fleas.” To Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson, chief clerk of the 4th Brigade, Hackett earned respect because “he shared with us as though he had no rank. If we ate, he did, and if we went hungry, so did he. He didn’t seem to have a mess kit. On Friday he sat down with us and ate a little piece of food with his finger
s.” Pearson went to find a knife and fork. On the way back he was wounded in the heel; but, he says, “I thought the Brigadier rather deserved something better than the way he was living among us.”

  And Signalman Kenneth Pearce, attached to Command Artillery Signals at Division headquarters, will always remember the man who came to his aid. Pearce was in charge of the heavy storage batteries, called “Dags”—each weighing approximately twenty-five pounds and encased in a wooden box with cast-iron handles—that powered the signal sets. In the late evening Pearce was struggling to move a fresh Dag from the deep trench in which they were stored. Above him, he heard someone say, “Here, let me help you.” Pearce directed the man to grab one handle and pull up the set. Together the two dragged the cumbersome box to the command-post trench. “There’s one more,” Pearce said. “Let’s go get it.” The men made the second trip and, back at the command post, Pearce jumped into the trench as the other man hoisted the boxes down to him. As they walked away Pearce suddenly noticed that the man wore red staff officer’s tabs. Stopping dead, he stammered, “Thank you very much, sir.” General Urquhart nodded. “That’s all right, son,” he said.

  Step by terrible step the crisis was mounting; nothing went right on this day, which General Horrocks was to call “Black Friday.” Weather conditions in both England and Holland again grounded Allied planes, preventing resupply missions. In answer to Urquhart’s plea for fighter strikes, the R.A.F. replied: “… After most careful examination regret owing to storm unable to accept …” And, at this moment, when Horrocks needed every man, tank and ton of supplies to retain Montgomery’s bridgehead over the Rhine and break through to the Red Devils, Field Marshal Model’s counteroffensive finally succeeded in cutting the corridor. Thirty minutes after receiving Mackenzie’s message that Urquhart might be overrun in twenty-four hours, General Horrocks received another message: in the 101st Airborne’s sector, powerful German armored forces had cut the corridor north of Veghel.

  Model could hardly have chosen a more vital spot or timed his attack better. British infantry forces of the XII and VIII Corps, advancing on either side of the highway, had only now reached Son, barely five miles into the 101st’s area. Fighting against stiff resistance, they had made agonizingly slow progress. The 101st’s commander, General Taylor, had expected the British to reach his sector of “Hell’s Highway” long before. After more than five days of continuous fighting without support, Taylor’s hard-pressed troopers were thinly spread and vulnerable. Along some stretches the highway was unguarded except by the British armor and infantry moving along it on the way north. Elsewhere, the “front” was literally the sides of the road. Field Marshal Model had chosen to counterattack at Veghel for a particular reason: throughout the entire length of the Market-Garden corridor the Veghel area contained the greatest cluster of bridges—no fewer than four, of which one was a major canal crossing. With one stroke Model hoped to strangle the Allied lifeline. He almost did. He might have succeeded, but for the Dutch underground.

  During the night and early morning, in villages and hamlets east of Veghel, the Dutch spotted the German buildup; they promptly phoned liaison officers with the 101st. The warning came not a moment too soon. Massed German armor almost overwhelmed Taylor’s men. Twice in four hours, in a wild melee that ranged over a five-mile stretch of the corridor, German tanks tried to push through to the bridges. Desperately, Taylor’s men, aided by British artillery and armor on the road, threw back the attacks. But four miles to the north, at Uden, the Germans succeeded in cutting the corridor. Now, with the battle still raging and the forces in the rear cut off and isolated, Horrocks was forced to make a fateful decision: he would have to send armored units—urgently needed in his efforts to reach Urquhart—back south down the corridor to help General Taylor, whose need was now even more urgent. The 32nd Guards Brigade was sent rushing south to support the 101st in reopening the highway. The gallant 101st would hang on to the bridges, but even with the help of the Guards, not a man, tank or supply vehicle would move north along the corridor for the next twenty-four hours. Model’s counteroffensive, though unsuccessful for the moment, had still paid enormous dividends. In the end, the battle for the corridor would decide the fate of Arnhem.

  By 4 P.M. on Friday, September 22, in the Nijmegen-Arnhem area—six and one-half hours after they had first been pinned down by German tanks and artillery—British infantrymen finally bludgeoned their way through Oosterhout. The village was in flames, and SS prisoners were being rounded up. The relief route west of the “island” highway, the low-lying secondary roads used by the enterprising Household Cavalry in their race to Driel at dawn, was now believed to be free or, at worst, only lightly held by the enemy. The 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, supported by a squadron of Dragoon Guards’ tanks and carrying the precious two amphibious vehicles loaded with supplies, was ready to slam through whatever opposition remained and dash for the Rhine. Lieutenant Colonel George Taylor, commanding the force, was so eager to get to Urquhart that he “felt a mad desire to sweep my infantry onto the tanks with my hands and get moving.”

  In a small wood north of Oosterhout, his loaded vehicles waited to move out. Suddenly, off in the distance, Taylor spotted two Tiger tanks. Quietly he warned Lieutenant David Wilcox, his intelligence officer, “Don’t say anything. I don’t want anyone to know about those tanks. We can’t stop now.” Taylor waved the relief column up the road. “If we had waited five minutes more,” he says, “I knew the route would have been closed again.”

  At full speed—his infantry mounted on tanks, carriers and trucks—Taylor’s column rolled through Dutch hamlets and villages. Everywhere they were met by surprised, cheering villagers, but there was no slowdown. Taylor’s only concern was to get to the Rhine. “I felt a sense of great urgency,” he says. “Any time lost would give the enemy an opportunity to move up a blocking force.” The convoy met no opposition, and for Taylor, “it was an exhilarating feeling as the light faded rapidly and the head of the column reached Driel.” They had covered the ten-mile journey in just thirty minutes. At 5:30 P.M. the first tanks of the Dragoon Guards reached the Rhine and, skirting northeast along its banks, moved into the outskirts of the village. Taylor heard an explosion and guessed immediately what it was: on the cautious Sosabow-ski’s defense perimeter, one of the tanks had run over a Polish mine.

  It was dark when Taylor reached Sosabowski’s headquarters. The information he had about Urquhart’s division was vague. “I had no idea where they were in Arnhem or if they still held one end of the bridge.” But Taylor planned to send his infantry and tanks immediately toward the southern end. He knew the DUKWs must get “across as soon as possible and if the bridge was still held it would be obviously quicker to drive them across than to float them over.” At Sosabowski’s headquarters, Taylor was astonished to find Colonel Charles Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers. Quickly they dissuaded him from heading out for the Arnhem bridge. Nothing had been heard from Frost, Mackenzie explained, since Wednesday night and it was presumed at headquarters that “it was all over at the bridge.”

  Reluctantly Taylor gave up his plan and ordered out a reconnaissance group to scout along the riverbank for a site from which the DUKWs might be launched. Sosabowski’s engineers were not optimistic; the awkward amphibious vehicles would prove cumbersome to manhandle across ditches and banks down to the river, especially in the dark. A short while later Taylor’s reconnaissance group confirmed the Poles’ opinion. The river could be approached, they thought, only by one narrow ditch-lined road. In spite of the serious obstacles, Taylor’s men believed they could get the DUKWs down to the Rhine. Colonel Mackenzie, still unable to continue on to Nijmegen, would oversee the launching. The DUKWs would cross the river at 2 A.M. on Saturday, the twenty-third. First priority, however, was to get men into the bridgehead: Sosabowski’s Poles had to be ferried over in the little string of rubber boats.

  At 9 P.M. on Friday night that operation began. Silently crouching a
long the riverbank, the Polish soldiers waited. On both sides of the river engineers, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Myers, stood ready to pull the hawser attaching the rubber dinghies back and forth. In just four boats—two 2-man and two 1-man dinghies—only six men could cross the 400-yard-wide Rhine at a time. Supplementing the craft were several wooden rafts that the Polish engineers had constructed to carry small supplies and stores. On Sosabowski’s order the first six men got into the boats and moved out. Within a few minutes the men were across. Behind them came a string of rafts. As fast as men landed on the northern bank the boats and rafts were hauled back. “It was a slow, laborious process,” Sosabowski noted, “but so far the Germans seemed to suspect nothing.”

  Then, from a point to the west of the landing site across the river a light shot up into the sky, and almost immediately the whole area was brilliantly lit by a magnesium parachute flare. Instantly Spandau machine guns began raking the river, “stirring up small waves and making the water boil with hot steel,” Sosabowski recalls. Simultaneously, mortar shells began to fall among the waiting Poles. Within minutes two rubber boats were riddled, their occupants heaved into the river. On the southern bank, men scattered, firing at the parachute flare. In the wild melee, Sosabowski halted the operation. Men moved back and took up new positions, trying to avoid the bursting mortar shells. The moment the flare dimmed and burned out, they ran to the boats and rafts, climbed in, and the crossings began again. Another flare burst in the sky. In this cruel game of hide-and-seek the Poles, suffering terrible casualties, continued to cross the river all night in the remaining boats. At the schoolhouse in Driel which had been temporarily turned into a casualty station, Cora Baltussen tended the injured as they were brought in. “We can’t get across,” a Pole told her. “It’s a slaughter up there—and we can’t even fire back.”