The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  * * *

  The boats were late arriving on Wednesday, delaying the river assault in Nijmegen until midafternoon. After yet another postponement and more mumbled excuses about the traffic on Hell’s Highway, Gavin wheeled on Horrocks. “For God’s sake, try!” he snapped. “It is the least you can do.” Twenty minutes before the attack was to begin, three British trucks pulled up behind a riverside power plant a kilometer west of town. Rather than the expected thirty-three boats, there were twenty-six—shellfire had wrecked a fourth truck—and frail vessels they were. Nineteen feet long, with plywood bottoms and green canvas sides pegged to the gunwales, the boats were “of a type more suitable for the quieter rivers of England” than for traversing the true Rhine, as a Guardsman conceded. Some carried only two paddles rather than the required eight. “Flimsy, flat-bottomed little things,” Captain Henry B. Keep later wrote his mother, “smaller than Daddy’s tin ducking boat.”

  As a Royal Engineer major gave rudimentary instructions behind a dike—“Head them upriver as much as possible,” he advised with a shrug—paratroopers from the 3rd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry wolfed down pork chops ladled from a large pot, or dragged on a last cigarette. Typhoons clawed the far shore, followed by a fifteen-minute barrage from a hundred artillery tubes. Two dozen British Sherman tanks lurched into view to pop away, first with high-explosive shells and then with white phosphorus to build a milky smoke screen. At 3:02 P.M., a whistle trilled. Four hundred grunting men hoisted the boats onto their shoulders—each vessel weighed six hundred pounds—and staggered across the dike to the steep, muddy lip of the river Waal.

  Instantly German fire from three directions diced the river with steel, “like a school of mackerel on the feed,” in one soldier’s description. Boats bogged in the river mud or capsized in the shallows as men leaped aboard. Others spun in circles or swept downstream with drowning men clinging to the gunwales. From the rail bridge alone, almost three dozen German machine guns cackled, punctuated by a pair of 20mm guns. Hissing bullets skipped like hot stones across the water and through the canvas hulls; troopers plugged the leaking holes with caps, gloves, and handkerchiefs. A direct hit from a mortar round flipped a dozen men into the Waal. An engineer shot through the head tumbled overboard with his feet still wedged beneath a seat so that the torso served as a second rudder, swinging the boat round and round until comrades smeared with blood and brains could finally heave his corpse into the river. “The man next to me had the middle part of his head blown away, so that his skull dropped on what was left of his lower face,” Chaplain Delbert Kuehl recalled. In the same boat, the battalion commander, Major Julian A. Cook, murmured “Hail, Mary, full of grace” over and over as he paddled. “Thy will be done,” the chaplain added.

  “It was a horrible, horrible sight,” a British tank commander later recalled. “Boats were literally being blown out of the water.” The three British generals—Browning, Horrocks, and Adair—watched transfixed through field glasses from the top floor of the power plant. A stiff breeze shredded the smoke screen, giving German gunners on the rail bridge and on the opposite embankment a clear view of their targets. Tracers braided and rebraided. The roar of gunfire and ripping canvas carried on the water, and more men pitched over, to be rolled to the center of the boats where steam rose from their leaking wounds. Paddlers without paddles gouged at the boiling Waal with rifle butts, helmets, and entrenching tools in an ecstasy of flailing. “My God,” said Horrocks, “look at ’em.”

  Half made the far shore, tumbling from the cockleshell flotilla to lie gasping and retching in the muddy lee of the north bank. Thirteen surviving boats started back: ballasted with dead men, riddled with holes, and paddled by exhausted U.S. Army engineers. Eleven boats would survive a second passage; four more crossings then ferried over the balance of the 3rd Battalion, followed by 1st Battalion and Colonel Tucker. German prisoners were impressed as galley slaves to paddle on the final circuits in what became known as the “Waal Regatta.”

  Those vomiting on their knees along the shore soon rose with murder in their eyes. “God help anyone in front of us,” one trooper said. With squad rushes they bounded forward in a spree of what one sergeant called “jack-in-the-box shooting,” killing fifty Germans near the river before loping six hundred yards to the dike road to kill more with grenades and bayonets. One company slaughtered the enemy garrison at Hof van Holland, a decrepit old Dutch fort, after swimming the moat and scaling the earthworks or storming over a narrow wooden bridge. Other troopers shook themselves out into a skirmish line and stalked toward the bridge, firing from the hip. Captain Keep described his men as “driven to a fever pitch [and] lifted out of themselves—fanatics rendered crazy by rage and lust for killing.… I have never witnessed this human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. The men were beside themselves.”

  Sensing that the day had turned and pressed by British tanks bulling north through Nijmegen, SS troops sidled onto the rail bridge, only to be raked with Browning Automatic Rifle fire and two captured German machine guns: Tucker’s men had seized the northern ramp, waving yellow recognition flags to ward off British fire across the river. German engineers who had been repairing the bridge superstructure were shot dead in their safety harnesses; for days, they would dangle from high in the girders “like a group of gargoyles,” Captain Keep told his mother. Other enemy troops dove into the river, pursued by gunfire, or were killed trying to surrender. “Old German men grab our M1s and beg for mercy,” a corporal recalled. “They were shot pointblank.” A German lieutenant colonel told his diary, “The Americans behaved as they always do, throwing our wounded from the bridge into the Waal, and shooting the few prisoners.” Two hundred and sixty-seven enemy bodies would be counted on just the rail bridge.

  Paratroopers darting through river grass along the Waal also reached the northern approach to the road bridge at dusk, just as Grenadier Guards tanks in Nijmegen broke past Charlemagne’s Valkhof and onto the span, spitting fire. German 88mm rounds tore the air, “ripping and screaming like great Roman candle balls of light,” an American commander reported. Shells gouged two British tanks, but one skidded sideways through an enemy roadblock on the far ramp and blew away a pair of roadside antitank guns. Fleeing SS troops hied into the gloaming through gooseberry brakes. British engineers combing the girders for explosives found dynamite and detonators lashed to a catwalk eighty feet above the river.

  “The most gallant attack ever carried out during the whole of the last war,” as Horrocks would call it, was over. The cost included two hundred paratroopers from Tucker’s regiment. Model’s order to “blow up the road bridge at Nijmegen” came too late. The 10th SS Panzer radioed the bad news: “They’re over the Waal.”

  Montgomery monitored the battle through liaison officers and radio reports. He had neither visited the battlefield during MARKET GARDEN nor seen his field commanders; he was having his portrait painted, again, and seemed entranced by the experience, boasting that the likeness would “create a tremendous sensation at next year’s Academy.” Yet at 10:50 P.M. on Wednesday he felt confident enough of the view from Brussels to cable Eisenhower:

  Things are going to work out alright.… The British airborne division at Arnhem has been having a bad time but their situation should be eased now that we can advance northwards from Nijmegen to their support. There is a sporting chance that we should capture the bridge at Arnhem.

  In a subsequent message to Brooke, he added, “I regard general situation on rivers as now very satisfactory.” This assessment was nothing less than hallucinatory. Despite the valor at Nijmegen, any “sporting chance” to take the Arnhem bridge had passed. Things in Holland were not going to work out, even if the high command did not yet know it. As a XXX Corps account later acknowledged, “In front, on the flanks, and in the rear, all was not well.”

  * * *

  Gavin knew. Even before his first trooper splashed into the Waal, he had been summoned from the power plant in Nijme
gen by a frantic call from his chief of staff near Groesbeek: “General, you’d better get the hell back here or you won’t have any division left.” Racing to his command post, where he was surprised to find a begrimed Ridgway newly arrived after his Eindhoven ordeal, Gavin learned that German paratroopers had overrun Beek in the north and part of Mook in the south, threatening not only Hell’s Highway but that priceless Dutch anomaly, the high ground overlooking Nijmegen. Only darkness, Coldstream tanks, and Gavin’s pluck saved the day—in one perilous instance he squirmed on his belly across a macadam road beneath enemy grazing fire. Counterattacks at first light on Thursday retook Beek, secured Mook, and slapped the Germans back to the east.

  But troubles in the Anglo-American rear had only begun. A panzer attack at Son on Wednesday would have broken through but for ten pugnacious British tanks. Allied intelligence had presumed the enemy incapable of shifting substantial forces to counter MARKET GARDEN; in the event, another 85,000 Germans flooded the battlefield in barely a week. Two additional British corps assigned to safeguard the Allied flanks—XII in the west and VIII in the east—plodded across boggy heathland, averaging just three miles a day against fitful resistance. As of Friday, September 22, the former had yet to reach Best and the latter was stalled southeast of Eindhoven.

  That same morning, Hell’s Highway was cut for the first time, despite Dutch warnings of enemies massing both east and west between Veghel and Uden. For more than a day—“the blackest moment of my life,” Horrocks confessed—panzers blocked the road, severing the supply lifeline to three Allied divisions now north of the Maas. No sooner had British tanks and U.S. paratroopers reopened the route on Saturday afternoon than the Germans struck again six miles north of Son, in fighting so vicious that American gunners fired over open sights at four hundred yards. This time Hell’s Highway would be closed for two days, long enough for the enemy to destroy fifty vehicles and seed the roadway with mines.

  The new bridgehead over the Waal failed to uncork the advance to Arnhem, as Montgomery had hoped. After a thirty-five-hour delay at Nijmegen to capture the bridges, the XXX Corps vanguard sat for another eighteen hours. Enemy raids and congestion on Hell’s Highway played hob: reinforcements from the British 43rd Division took three days to travel sixty miles in reaching the Irish Guards and the 82nd Airborne. Tommies had been delayed while helping GIs at Mook and in clearing Nijmegen, and some supplies promised by SHAEF failed to appear. Gavin also concluded that after five years of war British veterans were excessively cautious, nurturing what he called “Why die now?” sentiments. He found Colonel Tucker in a farmhouse near the rail bridge seething at the delay. “What in the hell are they doing?” Tucker demanded, gnawing his cigar. “Why in the hell don’t they get on to Arnhem?”

  At 1:30 P.M. on Thursday, September 21, the Irish Guards at last edged forward on a road elevated six feet above the fens, carrying a captured German map that showed enemy guns tucked behind a tree line at Ressen, three miles north of Nijmegen. The map proved accurate: eleven panzers, two 88mm batteries, two infantry battalions, and various other highwaymen waited in ambush. In a reprise of the advance from Bourg-Léopold, the stately British procession abruptly burst into flames, with three Shermans burning and the trailing column “piled up … head to tail in silhouette.” Misbehaving radios kept Typhoons from attacking, the jammed traffic on Hell’s Highway held the artillery too far south, and a British officer eyeing “these sad flat lands” of dikes, ditches, and fruit trees declared, “We’re not going to get a yard up this bloody road.”

  More than a yard they got, yet not much more. In terrain as hostile to armored spearheads as the Norman bocage, the Guards reached Elst—halfway to Arnhem—in three days. “But farther they could not go,” a regimental history lamented. Before the week ended, Guards officers with shotguns were roaming the countryside in search of plover and pheasant, determined to make the most of their misery.

  * * *

  The British survivors at Arnhem were now pinched within a three-mile perimeter in leafy Oosterbeek, just west of town above the water meadows of the Neder Rijn. General Urquhart’s command post filled the handsome, big-windowed Hartenstein Hotel, handsome no more. Corpses lay stacked like wood in the garden, and even the hotel radiators had been drained to slake the thirst of the wounded. Slit trenches snaked among the laurels and beneath the beech trees. Captured Germans squatted on tennis courts used as prison cages. “In the evening I would go to my trench and smoke a pipe,” a paratrooper later wrote. “I used to watch an apple tree which grew nearby, and had red apples on it, and then I watched the stars come up.” Not far from here, the poet Philip Sidney had lain mortally wounded after the battle of Zutphen in September 1586. That gentle Sidney had watched the same stars, the same moon climbing the sky with sad steps, brought some comfort.

  Between mortar barrages—called “hate” by the British—German loudspeakers played “In the Mood” or broadcast surrender appeals. Tommies answered with maledictory catcalls and Bren-gun fire; snipers notched their rifle butts for every coal-scuttle helmet knocked awry. Each day the weight of metal grew heavier in what the enemy came to call the Hexenkessel, the witches’ cauldron. German flamethrower teams and fifteen factory-new King Tiger II tanks joined in brawling “from room to room, from the ground floor up, from garden to garden, and from tree to tree,” as an SS captain described it. A Dutch woman observed, “You have no idea how much people scream in such circumstances.” XXX Corps artillery near Nijmegen ranged the enemy with admirable accuracy and kept the 9th SS Panzer at bay. That too brought some comfort.

  Of nearly 9,000 British soldiers inserted north of the Neder Rijn, about 3,600 could still fight, but they had dwindling means. Of 1,500 tons of supplies dropped since September 18, less than 200 tons had been recovered by Urquhart’s men, and 66 transport planes—among 629 sorties flown—had been shot down. The cellars and stout-walled houses in Oosterbeek brimmed with wounded men, sick men, dying men, and men newly dead. A gallant Dutch woman, Kate ter Horst, glided among them to read King David’s Ninety-first Psalm by flashlight: “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.” Urquhart radioed an appeal to Browning on Thursday evening: “Our casualties heavy. Resources stretched to utmost. Relief within twenty-four hours vital.”

  Relief came, though far too little and much too late. Reinforcement by General Sosabowski’s Polish airborne brigade had twice been postponed by bad weather, and the demise of Frost’s battalion prompted a new scheme to have the Poles jump on September 21 near Driel, just across the river from Urquhart’s bridgehead, rather than parachuting near the now forsaken bridge. More foul weather over the Continent forced many befuddled pilots to turn back—one lost soul ended up in Ireland—and Sosabowski found himself in Driel with only two-thirds of his command, some one thousand men, and no means of crossing two hundred yards of river; a ferry supposedly waiting for him had been cut loose and then sunk to keep it out of German hands. Enemy soldiers further reinforced the north bank, overrunning a single British platoon on the Westerbouwing heights and narrowing Urquhart’s river frontage to seven hundred yards.

  A night passed, then another. A few Poles slipped into the British camp by dinghy or raft, but a subsequent attempt to storm across provoked sheets of plunging fire—“hell on the river,” Sosabowski called it. A battalion from the Dorsetshire Regiment, vanguard of the 43rd Division, also took a try on the night of September 24, after trucks carrying assault boats—many without paddles, again—were late, got lost, or suffered ambush. An hour into the crossing, unbearable machine-gun fire and grenade volleys ended the foray, with more than three hundred of the four hundred waterborne Dorsets soon dead or captured. “Gallant, but quite useless,” one British officer concluded. A Polish correspondent waiting at the Hartenstein that Sunday wrote, “Everything would seem to point to our situation having become tragic.”

  When the end came, it came quickly. In the gloomy XXX Corps command post at Malden on
Monday morning, September 25, Browning and Horrocks agreed to cut their losses and extract the 1st Airborne Division from Arnhem that night, under a plan improbably code-named BERLIN. “Never was darkness more eagerly awaited,” a clerk in the Hartenstein cellar scribbled in the division diary. Urquhart had studied the surreptitious British withdrawal from Gallipoli in 1915, and on his orders forward trenches thinned out as men slipped toward the river, boots wrapped in rags, faces blackened with ashes and mud, their path marked by white tape. Orderlies trundled the lightly injured in wheelbarrows and on handcarts; medical truces had already remanded twelve hundred wounded into German hands, and many more would be left behind in the care of chaplains and medical officers.

  “The night was made for clandestine exits,” Urquhart later remarked. Wind and heavy rain tossed the birches in the bottoms and the chestnuts on the Westerbouwing bluffs. XXX Corps artillery pounded the perimeter to further muffle the sounds of flight. Burning houses glowed red and weird. Holding hands in a queue 150 yards long, the men shuffled through the mud flats in groups of fourteen to match the capacity of thirty-seven storm boats crewed by Canadian and British engineers. A sergeant shared out the Benzedrine, and officers put a match to their last secrets. Gunners tossed their sights and breechblocks into the water. Boat by boat they slipped across the obsidian Neder Rijn in the rain, until the bows bumped against a groyne on the far shore where a voice called from the darkness, “All right. Let’s be having you.” In a barn south of Driel plates of hot stew were ladled out, along with tumblers of Cointreau and mugs of tea laced with rum. Forty trucks and ambulances shuttled the escapees to Nijmegen.