A Bridge Too Far

by Cornelius Ryan

  Tilly’s move would be a first step in a wider plan. “If things went well,” Horrocks later wrote, “I hoped to side-slip the 43rd Division across the Rhine farther to the west and carry out a left hook against the German force attacking the airborne perimeter.” The alternative was withdrawal. On this eighth day of Market-Garden, Horrocks obstinately refused to face that choice. Others, however, were now seriously planning how it might be done.

  Extract from Lieutenant Hay’s “Phantom”log, showing memorable Urquhart message to Browning.

  According to his chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, the First Airborne Corps commander, General Browning, now spoke “quite openly about withdrawing.” While the 43rd Wessex was moving up to Driel the decision had been in the balance, but “as soon as they became stuck, Browning became convinced we would have to get Urquhart’s men out.” The British Second Army commander, General Miles C. Dempsey, had reached the same conclusion. He had not met with Horrocks since the beginning of the attack. Now, as time ran out, Dempsey ordered Horrocks to a meeting down the corridor at St. Oedenrode. In line of command, Dempsey, on authority from Montgomery, would have the last word. The agonizing decision would be forced on them by one man—Field Marshal Model.

  As Horrocks drove south to St. Oedenrode, Lieutenant Colonel Tilly of the 4th Dorsets prepared for the night’s river crossing. His battalion was rushing up to the assembly area in Driel, and assault craft, now that the corridor was open again, were on the way. Tilly’s instructions were clear. Briefed personally by his brigade commander, Brigadier Ben Walton, Tilly was told to “broaden the base of the perimeter.” The crossing was to be made at the old ferry site, about a mile west of Oosterbeek. Once across, the Dorsets were “to hang on until reinforced.” They would travel light, carrying only enough food and ammunition to last three or four days. As the thirty-five-year-old Tilly saw it, his men “were a task force leading the way for the whole of Demp-sey’s Second Army.” He was acutely conscious of the urgent necessity of reaching Urquhart’s men quickly. From all he had learned, the division was dying by the hour.

  On Sunday Tilly had climbed to the spire of a damaged Driel church three times to observe the area where his troops would land on the Rhine’s northern bank. As the afternoon wore on, at his orchard headquarters south of Driel, he impatiently awaited the full arrival of his battalion from the village of Homoet, a few miles southwest of Driel, and the assault boats being brought up from the corridor.

  Shortly after 6 P.M. Brigadier Ben Walton sent for Tilly. At Walton’s headquarters in a house south of Driel, Tilly expected the brigade commander to review once more the details of the night’s operation. Instead, Walton told him there had been a change in plan. Word had been received, Walton said, that “the whole operation—the large-scale crossing—was off.” Tilly’s battalion would still cross, but for a different purpose. Tilly listened with increasing dismay. His men were to hold the base of the perimeter while Urquhart’s 1st Airborne Division was withdrawn! He was to take as few men as possible—“only enough to do the job”; approximately 400 infantry and 20 officers. Tilly did not need to go; he could detail his second in command, Major James Grafton, to take his place. Although Tilly replied that he would “think about it,” he had already decided to lead his men over. As he left Walton’s headquarters, Tilly felt that his men were being sacrificed. Walton had said nothing about getting them back. Yet he knew that Walton too was helpless to alter the situation. What puzzled him was what had happened; why had the plan been changed?

  The decision to withdraw Urquhart’s force—subject to confirmation by Montgomery, who was not to finally approve the order until 9:30 A.M. Monday, September 25—was reached by General Dempsey at the St. Oedenrode conference with Horrocks and General Browning on Sunday afternoon. After considering his Corps commander’s plan for a full-scale crossing of the Rhine, Dempsey turned it down. Unlike Horrocks, Dempsey did not believe the assault could succeed. “No,” he said to Horrocks. “Get them out.” Turning to Browning, Dempsey asked, “Is that all right with you?” Silent and subdued, Browning nodded. Immediately Dempsey notified General Thomas in Driel. Even as the St. Oedenrode conference was taking place, the Germans, once again, severed the corridor north of Veghel. Cut off, Horrocks used an armored carrier and broke through the German lines to return to his headquarters at Nijmegen. Field Marshal Model’s latest attacks would keep the corridor closed for more than forty hours.

  In Driel, most of Lieutenant Colonel Tilly’s battalion had now arrived. He walked among his troops picking the men he would take. Tapping soldiers on the shoulder, Tilly said, “You go” … “You’re not going.” The real purpose of the assault was secret. He could not tell protesting men why they were being left behind. Tilly “picked those veterans who were absolutely sure—essential—leaving the others behind.”

  The decision was bitter. Looking at the officers and men who, he believed, “were going to certain death,” Tilly called over Major Grafton. “Jimmy,” Grafton remembers Tilly saying, “I’ve got to tell you something, because someone other than me has to know the real purpose of the crossing.” Outlining the change in plan, Tilly added quietly, “I’m afraid we’re being chucked away.”

  Stunned, Grafton stared at Tilly. It was vital, Tilly added, that no one else have the information. “It would be too risky,” he explained.

  Grafton knew what Tilly meant. It would be a terrible blow to morale if the truth was known. As Grafton prepared to leave, Tilly said, “Jimmy, I hope you can swim.” Grafton smiled. “I hope so, too,” he said.

  By 9:30 P.M., as Tilly’s men moved down to the river, there was still no sign of the assault craft. “How the hell do they expect me to cross without boats?” Tilly asked his engineering officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Henniker. Rations for his men had not arrived either. Testy and burdened by his knowledge of the true reason for the mission, Tilly spoke with Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey Coad, commander of the 5th Dorsets. “Nothing’s right,” Tilly told him. “The boats haven’t come and we haven’t been issued rations. If something isn’t done soon, I’m not prepared to go.” Coad ordered his battalion to turn over rations to Tilly’s men.

  For three long hours, in a cold, drizzling rain, Tilly’s force waited for the assault craft. At midnight word arrived that the boats were now in Driel. But only nine had come through. In the darkness, some trucks had taken a wrong turn and driven into enemy lines; two others, skidding off a muddy dike road, had been lost. At the rendezvous point the boats were carried on the shoulders of the infantry for 600 yards through a swampy marsh to the launching point. Stumbling and slithering over the mud of the polder, the men took more than an hour to wrestle the boats to the river. Not until after 2 A.M. on Monday, September 25, was the assembly complete.

  As the men prepared to launch, Tilly handed Major Grafton two messages for General Urquhart: one was a letter from General Browning; the other, a coded message from General Thomas outlining the withdrawal plan. There were two sets of these letters. Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, Urquhart’s engineering officer, had returned from Nijmegen and his meeting with Browning. Now Myers, bearing the same letters, was waiting to cross. “Your job,” Tilly told Grafton, “is to get through to Urquhart with these messages in case the engineering officer doesn’t make it.” The paper containing the withdrawal plan was “absolutely vital,” Tilly stressed.

  At the river it was clear that the Germans were completely prepared for another crossing. Only some fifteen British assault craft—including three DUKWs and the remnants of the little fleet used on the previous night—remained. At the very last minute, because of the boat shortage, it was decided to halt a diversionary crossing scheduled by the Poles to the east of the Dorsets’ launching area—and put Tilly’s men over in five three-boat waves. As the preparations went on, mortar shells exploded on the southern bank, and heavy machine guns, apparently now carefully lined up along both edges of the perimeter base, swept the water. Lieutenant Colonel Tilly st
epped into a boat. The first wave began to cross.

  Although every available British gun on the southern side hammered away, sending a canopy of shells above the Dorsets, the crossing was brutally assaulted. The canvas-and-plywood craft were raked, holed and swept away. Some, like Major Graf-ton’s, caught fire before leaving the south bank. Quickly Grafton set out in another. Halfway over he discovered his was the only remaining boat in the wave. In fifteen minutes, feeling “lucky to be alive,” Grafton was across.

  In the rain and darkness, hemmed in by well-sited machine-gun fire, each of the five waves sustained heavy losses. But the worst enemy by far was the current. Unused to the boats and the unexpected current, which increased in speed after midnight, the helpless Dorsets were swept past the perimeter base and into the hands of the enemy. Scattered for miles, those who survived were quickly cut off and surrounded. Of the 420 officers and men who set out for the perimeter, only 239 reached the northern bank. Lieutenant Colonel Tilly, who upon landing was met by an avalanche of grenades rolled like bowling balls down a hill, was heard leading his men out of the inferno, yelling “Get them with the bayonet!”*

  The Dorsets were unable to link up as an effective unit with Urquhart’s men. Only a few reached the Hartenstein perimeter, among them Major Grafton, who, with the withdrawal plan intact, came in through Major Dickie Lonsdale’s positions near the lower Oosterbeek church. Lieutenant Colonel Myers had already arrived at Urquhart’s headquarters with the documents he was carrying. Neither man knew the contents of Thomas’ coded message, or its cruelly ironic name. When Montgomery had originally pressed Eisenhower for “a powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin … to thus end the war,” his single-thrust suggestion had been turned down. “Operation Market-Garden” had been the compromise. Now the withdrawal plan for Urquhart’s bloodied men had been officially designated. The remnants of the British 1st Airborne Division were to be evacuated under the code name “Operation Berlin.”

  *Some of the war’s finest reporting came out of Arnhem. The ten-man press team attached to the 1st Airborne Division included Major Roy Oliver, a public information officer; censors Flight Lieutenant Billy Williams and Captain Peter Brett; army photographers Sergeants Lewis and Walker; and correspondents Alan Wood, London Daily Express; Stanley Maxted and Guy Byam, BBC; Jack Smythe, Reuter’s, and Marek Swiecicki, a Polish correspondent attached to Sosabowski’s brigade. Although limited by sparse communications to bulletins of only a few hundred words per day, these men, in the finest tradition of war reporting, portrayed the agonies of Urquhart’s men. I have been unable to locate a single correspondent of the original team. Presumably, all are dead.

  *Inexplicably, some official and semiofficial British accounts contend that bad weather prevented aerial activity on Saturday, September 23. Meteorological, Corps and Allied Air Force after-action reports all record Saturday’s weather as fair, with more missions flown than on any day since Tuesday, the nineteenth. In the semiofficial Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot erred in stating that on Saturday “aerial resupply had been thwarted by bad weather.” The phrase altered his chronology of the battle thereafter. Other accounts, using Wilmot as a guide, have compounded the inaccuracies.

  *Skalka’s account that some exchange of messages took place is probably true. Yet the wording of the messages is certainly questionable, especially his answer regarding the Luftwaffe, which was in the air during the week, harassing the British drops. Further, it is a belittlement of forces of his own country. Such a contemptuous assessment of one’s own side to an enemy was certainly uncommon among the SS.

  *Both Lathbury and Hackett became “lance corporals” in the hospital. Sergeant Dave Morris, who gave blood to Hackett before his operation, was cautioned that the Brigadier’s identity was not to be revealed, Lathbury, in the hospital since the nineteenth, got his first news of the division when the Oosterbeek wounded arrived—including the information that Urquhart had been able to rejoin the division and that Frost’s men had held the Arnhem bridge for almost four days. Both brigadiers later escaped from the hospital with the help of the Dutch and hid out. Lathbury eventually joined the irrepressible Major Digby Tatham-Warter, who, dressed in civilian clothes and working with the Dutch underground, “went about quite openly and on one occasion helped to push a German staff car out of a ditch.” With a group of approximately 120 troopers, medics and pilots who had been hidden by the Dutch, and led by a Dutch guide, Lathbury reached American troops south of the Rhine on the evening of October 22. The incredible Tatham-Warter helped about 150 British soldiers to escape. Incidentally, it took the author seven years to discover his whereabouts—then by accident. My British publisher met him in Kenya where he has been living since the end of the war. Tatham-Warter says that he “carried the umbrella in battle more for identification purposes than for anything else, because I was always forgetting the password.”

  *Several versions of this message have appeared in other accounts of the battle. The one above is the original. Lieutenant Neville Hay retained his timed Phantom message logs and made them available to me. I am extremely grateful for his cooperation.

  *One of the bouncing grenades actually hit Tilly’s head and exploded. Incredibly he was only slightly wounded and survived as a prisoner of war until the end of hostilities.

  NOW MARKET-GARDEN, the operation Montgomery hoped would end the war quickly, proceeded inexorably toward its doom. For sixty terrible miles men hung on to bridges and fought for a single road, the corridor. In General Maxwell Taylor’s sector north of Eindhoven, troopers bolstered by British armor and infantry repelled one fierce attack after another while trying to reopen the empty stretch of highway severed at Uden; in General Gavin’s 82nd area the great Waal bridge was under constant bombardment and the enemy continued to press in from the Reichswald in steadily growing strength. Gone was the attitude of a week before, that the war was almost over. Enemy units were being encountered that had long been written off. The Nazi war machine, thought to be reeling and on the verge of collapse in the first week of September, had miraculously produced sixty Tiger tanks, which were delivered to Model on the morning of September 24.* Market-Garden was strangling, and now the principal objective of the plan, the foothold across the Rhine, the springboard to the Ruhr, was to be abandoned. At 6:05 A.M., Monday, September 25, General Urquhart received the order to withdraw.

  In the planning of the Arnhem operation Urquhart had been promised relief within forty-eight hours. General Browning had expected the 1st Airborne Division to hold out alone for no longer than four days at maximum. In an unprecedented feat of arms for an airborne division, outnumbered and outgunned, Urquhart’s men had hung on for more than twice that long. To the courageous Scot, commanding an airborne division for the first time, withdrawal was bitter; yet Urquhart knew it was the only course. By now his strength was fewer than 2,500 men, and he could ask no more of these uncompromising troopers. Galling as it was to know that relieving British forces sat barely one mile away, separated from the division only by the width of the Rhine, Urquhart reluctantly agreed with his superiors’ decision. The time had come to get the valiant men of Arnhem out.

  At the Hartenstein, a weary Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers delivered the two letters—Browning’s and the withdrawal order from General Thomas—to Urquhart. Browning’s congratulatory and encouraging message, written more than twenty-four hours earlier, was outdated. In part it read, “… the army is pouring to your assistance, but … very late in the day,” and “I naturally feel, not so tired and frustrated as you do, but probably almost worse about the whole thing than you do …”

  The withdrawal order—especially coming from Thomas, whose slowness Urquhart, like Browning, could not forgive—was by far the more depressing. The 43rd Wessex was now beginning to feel the weight of increasing German pressure, Thomas’ message said. All hope of developing a major bridgehead across the Rhine must be abandoned; and the withdrawal of the 1st Airborne would take place, by mutual agre
ement between Urquhart and Thomas, at a designated date and time.

  Urquhart pondered his decision. As he listened to the continuing mortar and artillery bombardment outside, he had no doubts about the date and time. If any of his men were to survive, the withdrawal would have to be soon and, obviously, under cover of darkness. At 8:08 A.M. Urquhart contacted General Thomas by radio: “Operation Berlin,” he told him, “must be tonight.”

  Some twenty minutes later Urquhart released the message prepared for Browning that he had given Lieutenant Neville Hay to encode the night before. It was still pertinent, particularly the warning sentence, “Even slight enemy offensive action may cause complete disintegration.” For at this moment Urquhart’s situation was so desperate that he did not know whether his men could hold until darkness. Then the agonized general began to plan the most difficult maneuver of all: the withdrawal. There was only one way out—across the terrible 400 yards of the Rhine to Driel.

  Urquhart’s plan was designed along the lines of another classic British withdrawal—Gallipoli, in 1916. There, after months of fighting, troops had finally been pulled out under deceptive cover. Thinned-out lines cloaking the retreat had continued to fire as the main bulk of the force was safely withdrawn. Urquhart planned a similar maneuver. Along the perimeter small groups of men would keep up a fusillade to deceive the enemy while the larger body of troops slipped away. Gradually units along the northern face of the perimeter would move down along its sides to the river, to be evacuated. Then the last forces, closest to the Rhine, would follow. “In effect,” Urquhart said later, “I planned the withdrawal like the collapse of a paper bag. I wanted small parties stationed at strategic places to give the impression we were still there, all the while pulling downward and along each flank.”