A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  In the cellar of the shattered Hartenstein, Urquhart was waiting. Mackenzie gave the Airborne commander the official view: “Help is on the way. We should hang on.” Urquhart, Mackenzie remembers, “listened impassively, neither disheartened nor gladdened by the news.” The unspoken question for both men remained the same: How much longer must they hold? At this time, in the first hours of Sunday, September 24, after eight days of battle, Urquhart’s estimated strength was down to fewer than 2,500 men. And for all of them there was only one question: When will Monty’s forces arrive? They had thought about it in the loneliness of trenches, gunpits and outposts, in the wrecks of houses and shops, and in the hospitals and dressing stations, where anxious uncomplaining men lay wounded on pallets, mattresses and bare floors.

  With infantry on the south bank of the river, the paratroopers did not doubt that the Second Army would eventually cross. They wondered only if any of them would be alive to see the relief for which they had waited so long. In these last tragic hours annihilation was their constant fear, and to allay this dread, men tried to raise one another’s morale by any means they could. Jokes made the rounds. Wounded men, still holding at their posts, disregarded their injuries, and examples of extraordinary daring were becoming commonplace. Above all, Urquhart’s men were proud. They shared a spirit in those days that was stronger, they said later, than they would ever know again.

  From his kit Lance Bombardier James Jones of an artillery troop took out the single nonmilitary item he had brought along—the flute he had used as a boy. “I just wanted to play it again,” he remembers. “It was raining mortar bombs for three or four days straight and I was frightened to death. I got out the flute and began to play.” Nearby, Lieutenant James Woods, the gun-position officer, had an idea. With Jones leading, Lieutenant Woods and two other gunners climbed out of their trenches and began to march around the gun positions. As they proceeded single file, Lieutenant Woods began to sing. Behind him the two troopers removed their helmets and drummed on them with sticks. Battered men heard the strains of “British Grenadiers” and “Scotland the Brave” filtering softly through the area. Faintly at first, other men began to sing and then, with Woods “going at the top of his voice,” the artillery positions erupted in song.

  In the Schoonoord Hotel on the Utrecht-Arnhem road, approximately midway along the eastern side of the perimeter, Dutch volunteers and British medics cared for hundreds of wounded under the watchful eyes of German guards. Hendrika van der Vlist wrote in her diary:

  Sunday, September 24. This is the day of the Lord. War rages outside. The building is shaking. That is why the doctors cannot operate or fix casts. We cannot wash the wounded because nobody can venture out to find water under these conditions. The army chaplain scribbles in his notebook. I ask him what time the service will be held.

  Padre G. A. Pare finished his notes. With Hendrika he made the rounds of all the rooms in the hotel. The shelling seemed “particularly noisy,” he recalls, “and I could hardly hear my own voice above the battle outside.” Yet, “looking into the faces of men stretched out all over the floor,” Chaplain Pare “felt inspired to fight the noise outside with God’s peace inside.” Quoting from St. Matthew, Pare said, “ ‘Take no thought for the morrow. What ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or where withal ye shall be clothed.’ ” Then he, like the men in the artillery positions, began to sing. As he began “Abide With Me,” men just listened. Then they began to hum and sing softly themselves. Against the thunderous barrage outside the Schoonoord, hundreds of wounded and dying men took up the words, “ ‘When other helpers fail and comforts flee, God of the helpless, O abide with me.’ ”

  Across the street from the church in lower Oosterbeek, Kate ter Horst left her five children and the eleven other civilians sheltering in the ten-by-six-foot cellar of her house and made her way past the wounded on the upper floor. The fourteen-room, 200-year-old house, a former vicarage, was totally unrecognizable. The windows were gone and “every foot of space in the main hall, dining room, study, garden room, bedrooms, corridors, kitchen, boiler room and attic was crowded with wounded,” Mrs. ter Horst recalls. They lay, too, in the garage and even under the stairs. In all, more than three hundred injured men crowded the house and grounds, and others were being brought in by the minute. Outdoors on this Sunday morning Kate ter Horst saw that a haze hung over the battlefield. “The sky is yellow,” she wrote, “and there are dark clouds hanging down like wet rags. The earth has been torn open.” On the grounds she saw “the dead, our dead, wet through from rain, and stiff. Lying on their faces, just as they were yesterday and the day before—the man with the tousled beard and the one with the black face and many, many others.” Eventually, fifty-seven men would be buried in the garden, “one of them a mere boy,” Mrs. ter Horst wrote, “who died inside the house for lack of space.” The lone doctor among the medical teams in the house, Captain Randall Martin, had told Mrs. ter Horst that the boy “had simply banged his head against a radiator until he was gone.”

  Picking her way gingerly about the rooms, Kate ter Horst thought of her husband, Jan, who had left on Tuesday night by bicycle to scout the area and bring back information about German positions to an artillery officer. The perimeter had been formed while he was gone and, in the heavy fighting, Jan was unable to get back home. They would not see each other for two more weeks. Working with Dr. Martin and the orderlies ever since Wednesday, Mrs. ter Horst had hardly slept. Going from room to room, she prayed with the wounded and read to them from the 91st Psalm, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”

  Now, all this morning, snipers, infiltrating into the perimeter during the night, were firing “shamelessly into a house from which never a shot was fired,” she wrote. “Bullets whizzed through rooms and corridors crowded with helpless people.” Carrying a stretcher past a window, two orderlies were shot. Then, what everyone feared most might happen occurred: Dr. Martin was wounded. “It’s only my ankle,” he told Mrs. ter Horst. “In the afternoon I’ll go hopping around again.”

  Outside the sniping gave way to shelling. The thunder and crash of mortar bursts “defies description,” Kate ter Horst recorded. To Private Michael Growe, “the lady seemed terribly calm and unflustered.” Growe, already wounded in the thigh from shrapnel, was now hit again in the left foot by a shell burst. Hastily medics moved Growe and other newly injured men away from a line of French windows.

  Corporal Daniel Morgans, hit in the head and right knee as he was holding a position near the Oosterbeek church, was carried to the Ter Horst house just as a German tank came up the road. As an orderly was explaining to Morgans that “they were practically out of dressings and had no anesthetics or food, and only a little water,” the tank sent a shell crashing against the house. In an upstairs room, Private Walter Boldock, with bullet wounds in the side and back, stared in horror as the tank “ground and wheeled. I could hear the gibberish chatter of machine guns and then a shell tore through the wall above my back. Plaster and debris began falling everywhere and many of the wounded were killed.” Downstairs Bombardier E. C. Bolden, a medical orderly, was in a white-hot rage. Grabbing a Red Cross flag, he rushed out of the house and straight for the tank. Corporal Morgans heard him clearly. “What the hell are you doing?” Bolden screamed at the German tank commander. “This house is clearly marked with a Red Cross flag. Get the hell away from here!” As the anxious wounded listened, they heard the sound of the tank backing off. Bolden returned to the house, “almost as angry,” Morgans remembers, “as when he left. We asked him what happened.” Bolden replied tersely: “The German apologized but he also got the hell out.”

  Although the house was not shelled again, there was no letup in the fire about them. Kate ter Horst wrote: “All around these men are dying. Must they breathe their last in such a hurricane? Oh, God! Give us a moment’s silence. Give us quiet, if only for a short moment, so that they at least can die. Grant them a moment’s holy
silence while they pass on to Eternity.”

  All about the perimeter, tanks crashed through defenses as weary, groggy troopers reached the limits of exhaustion. There were horrors everywhere—particularly from flamethrowers. In one incident of SS brutality, a jeep carrying wounded under a Red Cross flag was stopped by four Germans. One of the medics tried to explain that he was carrying wounded to a casualty station. The Germans turned a flamethrower on him, then walked away. But throughout the battle, both at the Arnhem bridge and in the perimeter, there were singular examples of chivalry.

  On Brigadier Hackett’s eastern perimeter defenses a German officer drove up to the British positions under a white flag and asked to see the commander. Hackett met him and learned that the Germans “were about to attack, first laying down mortar and artillery fire on my forward positions.” As the Germans knew that one of the casualty stations was in the line of attack, Hackett was requested to move his forward positions back 600 yards. “We do not want to put down a barrage that will hit the wounded,” the German explained. Hackett knew he could not comply. “If the line had been moved back the distance demanded by the Germans,” General Urquhart later wrote, “it would have put Divisional headquarters 200 yards behind the German lines.” Despite his inability to move, Hackett noted that when the attack finally came the barrage was carefully laid down to the south of the casualty station.

  At the Tafelberg, another doctor, Major Guy Rigby-Jones, who had been operating on a billiard table in the game room of the hotel, lost all his equipment when an 88 shell came through the roof of the building. He had not been able to operate since Thursday, although one of the field ambulance teams had set up a theater in the Petersburg Hotel. “We had 1,200 to 1,300 casualties and neither the nursing facilities nor the staff to properly treat them,” he remembers. “All we had was morphia to kill the pain. Our main problem was food and water. We had already drained the central heating system to get water, but now, having ceased operating, I became more or less a quartermaster, trying to feed the wounded.” One of them, Major John Waddy of the 156th Battalion, shot in the groin by a sniper on Tuesday, had been wounded again. A mortar shell landing on the window sill of a large bay window exploded and a shell fragment embedded itself in Waddy’s left foot. Then the room took a direct hit. Waddy’s right shoulder, face and chin were lacerated by falling bricks and wood splinters. Dr. Graeme Warrack, the division’s chief medical officer, whose headquarters were at the Tafelberg, rushed outside. Waddy hauled himself up to see Warrack standing in the street shouting at the Germans: “You bloody bastards! Can’t anybody recognize a Red Cross?”

  The Van Maanen family—Anje, her brother Paul and her aunt—were working around the clock in the Tafelberg, under direction of Dr. van Maanen. Paul, who was a medical student, remembers that “Sunday was terrible. We seemed to be hit all the time. I remembered that we mustn’t show fear in front of the patients, but I was ready to jump out of the room and scream. I didn’t, because the wounded stayed so calm.” As injured men were carried from one damaged room to another, Paul remembers that “we began to sing. We sang for the British, for the Germans, for ourselves. Then everyone seemed to be doing it and with all the emotion people would stop because they were crying, but they would start up again.”

  For young Anje van Maanen, the romantic dream of liberation by the bright stalwart young men who had dropped from the skies was ending in despair. Many Dutch civilians brought to the Tafelberg had died of their wounds; two, Anje noted in her diary, were “lovely girls and good skaters, as old as I a???, just seventeen. Now I will never see them again.” To Anje the hotel now seemed to be constantly hit by shells. In the cellar she began to cry. “I am afraid to die,” she wrote. “The explosions are enormous and every shell kills. How can God allow this hell?”

  By 9:30 A.M. on Sunday morning Dr. Warrack decided to do something about the hell. The nine casualty stations and hospitals in the area were so jammed with wounded from both sides that he began to feel that “the battle could no longer continue in this fashion.” Medical teams “were working under impossible conditions, some without surgical instruments.” And under the intensified German attacks, casualties were steadily mounting—among them now the courageous Brigadier Shan Hackett, who suffered severe leg and stomach wounds from a mortar-shell burst shortly before 8 A.M.

  Warrack had determined on a plan which needed General Urquhart’s consent, and he set out for the Hartenstein. “I told the General,” Warrack says, “that despite Red Cross flags, all the hospitals were being shelled. One had taken six hits and was set afire, forcing us to quickly evacuate a hundred fifty injured.” The wounded, he said, were being “badly knocked about, and the time had come to make some sort of arrangement with the Germans.” As it was quite impossible to evacuate wounded across the Rhine, Warrack believed that many lives would be saved “if casualties were handed over to the Germans for treatment in their hospitals in Arnhem.”

  Urquhart, Warrack recalls, “seemed resigned.” He agreed to the plan. But under no circumstances, he warned Warrack, “must the enemy be allowed to think that this was the beginning of a crack in the formation’s position.” Warrack was to make clear to the Germans that the step was being taken solely on humane grounds. Negotiations could take place, Urquhart said, “on condition that the Germans understand you are a doctor representing your patients, not an official emissary from the division.” Warrack was permitted to ask for a truce period during the afternoon so that the battlefield could be cleared of wounded before “both sides got on with the fight.”

  Warrack hurried off to find Lieutenant Commander Arnnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer, and Dr. Gerritt van Maanen, both of whom he asked to help in the negotiations. Because Wolters, who would act as interpreter, was in the Dutch military and “might run a great risk going to a German headquarters,” Warrack gave him the pseudonym “Johnson.” The three men quickly headed for the Schoonoord Hotel to contact the German division medical officer.

  By coincidence, that officer, twenty-nine-year-old Major Egon Skalka, claims he had reached the same conclusion as Warrack. As Skalka recalls that Sunday morning, he felt “something had to be done not only for our wounded but the British in der Hexen-kessel. In the Schoonoord Hotel “casualties lay everywhere—even on the floor.” According to Skalka, he had come to see “the British chief medical officer to suggest a battlefield clearing” before Warrack arrived. Whoever first had the idea, they did meet. Warrack’s impression of the young German doctor was that “he was effeminate in appearance, but sympathetic and apparently quite anxious to ingratiate himself with the British—just in case.” Confronting the slender, dapper officer, handsome in his finely cut uniform, Warrack, with “Johnson” interpreting, made his proposal. As they talked, Skalka studied Warrack, “a tall, lanky, dark-haired fellow, phlegmatic like all Englishmen. He seemed terribly tired but otherwise not in bad shape.” Skalka was prepared to agree to the evacuation plan, but, he told Warrack, “first we will have to go to my headquarters to make sure there are no objections from my General.” Skalka refused to take Dr. van Maanen with them. In a captured British jeep, Skalka, Warrack and “Johnson” set out for Arnhem with Skalka driving. Skalka recalls that he “drove very fast, zigzagging back and forth. I did not want Warrack to orient himself and he would have had a tough time of it the way I drove. We went very fast, part of the time under fire, and twisted and turned into the city.”

  To Wolters, the short drive into Arnhem was “sad and miserable.” Wreckage lay everywhere. Houses were still smoking or in ruins. Some of the roads they followed, chewed up by tank tracks and cratered by shellfire, “looked like plowed fields.” Wrecked guns, overturned jeeps, charred armored vehicles and “the crumpled bodies of the dead” lay like a trail all the way into Arnhem. Skalka had not blindfolded the two men, nor did Wolters feel he made any attempt to conceal the route he took. It struck him that the elegant SS medical officer seemed “eager for us to see the German strength.” Throu
gh the still-smoking, debris-strewn streets of Arnhem, Skalka drove northeast and pulled up outside Lieutenant Colonel Harzer’s headquarters, the high school on Hezelbergherweg.

  Although the arrival of Warrack and Wolters created surprise among the staff officers, Harzer, alerted by phone, was waiting for them. Skalka, leaving the two officers in an outer room, reported to his commander. Harzer was angry. “I was amazed,” he says, “that Skalka had not blindfolded them. Now they knew the exact location of my headquarters.” Skalka had laughed. “The way I drove I would be very surprised if they could find their way anywhere,” he assured Harzer.

  The two Germans sat down with the British emissaries. “The medical officer proposed that his British wounded be evacuated from the perimeter since they no longer had the room or supplies to care for them,” Harzer says. “It meant calling a truce for a couple of hours. I told him I was sorry our countries were fighting. Why should we fight, after all? I agreed to his proposal.”

  Wolters—“a Canadian soldier named Johnson,” as Warrack introduced him—remembers the conference in a completely different context. “At first the German SS colonel refused to even consider a truce,” he says. “There were several other staff officers in the room, including the acting chief of staff, Captain Schwarz, who finally turned to Harzer and said that the whole matter would have to be taken up with the General.” The Germans left the room. “As we waited,” Wolters says, “we were offered sandwiches and brandy. Warrack warned me not to drink on an empty stomach. Whatever kind of filling was in the sandwiches was covered with sliced onions.”

  As the Germans reentered the room, “everyone snapped to attention and there was much ‘Heil Hitlering.’ ” General Bittrich, hatless, in his long black leather coat, came in. “He stayed only a moment,” Wolters remembers. Studying the two men, Bittrich said, “Ich bedauere sehr diesen Krieg zwischen unseren Vater-Iändern” (I regret this war between our two nations). The General listened quietly to Warrack’s evacuation plan and gave his consent. “I agreed,” Bittrich says, “because a man cannot—provided, of course, that he has such feelings to start with—lose all humanity, even during the most bitter fight.” Then Bittrich handed Warrack a bottle of brandy. “This is for your General,” he told Warrack, and he withdrew.