A Bridge Too Far

by Martin Bowman

  Their stay at Oosterbroek’s abode was brief due to German patrols combing the area for escapees and on the following morning they were driven crosscountry on motorcycles, coming to a stop after about an hour’s journey next to a chicken coup in the middle of an empty field. Inside were four men of the Dutch Resistance, along with two captive members of the Dutch SS. The RAF had been dropping arms and supplies to the Resistance and amongst this arsenal was a Bren gun which was placed on the table before the Airborne men. Unfortunately the Dutchmen had no idea how to strip and maintain the gun and so Banwell, who had been an instructor during his long military career, was only too happy to demonstrate the dismantlement and reassembly drill of the gun within the expected two minutes. The Resistance men were very impressed and asked Banwell if he could postpone his plans of escape to remain with them to give instruction in the use of British weapons. He agreed and said farewell to Lieutenant Heaps and Staff Sergeant Kettley, who departed on 1 October.

  In all, by the end of September, in an area swarming with German troops, there were about 500 airborne soldiers and airmen hiding in the woods and houses round Arnhem, Ede and Apeldoorn, being looked after by the people of Gelderland. This was no ordered operation, although the Dutch Resistance played a major role. It was the spontaneous reaction of very many brave men and women, who, with their families, risked certain death if they were caught harbouring Allied soldiers and airmen.

  When Bob Scrivener limped out of the first aid post at Arnhem and joined a long parade of prisoners, he had mixed feelings. ‘Firstly, that I had got away so lightly and a strange feeling that it wasn’t me at all; it was a dream and I was watching this drama being enacted from the outside. Some rather edgy Germans with nasty looking guns soon brought me back to reality. They had managed to gather together some lorries to carry the walking wounded and the prospect of getting a lift brought a sudden worsening of my war wound; in fact it got so bad I could scarcely walk. The ploy worked and we scrambled aboard and were carted to a huge shed in a town called Apeldoorn some miles north of Arnhem. There we were sorted into other ranks and officers; the other ranks marched off to a Stalag somewhere and the officers locked into cattle trucks and taken off on a tour of Germany that ended in Oflag 79 at Brunswick. When it comes to being a prisoner of war, it’s the other ranks that come off best. They are allowed to promise not to escape and therefore the supervision much more relaxed. Indeed, many of them were sent on farms, where their food rations were supplemented. Not so the officers. We were forbidden to give any promises of good behaviour and were expected to take every opportunity to escape that offered itself. We, therefore, were much more closely guarded and never given the chance to relieve the boredom by working outside. For some, who had been prisoners for a long time, as long as five years in some cases, it became just too much and they slowly mentally declined. When they were eventually released they were afraid of freedom and took a long, long time to recover. Some never did.’

  ‘Market-Garden’ Timeline

  Tuesday 26 September (D+9) 0550 The deception plan works and by first light the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division, 1,741 men - just 16 from Frost’s 2nd Parachute Battalion (of approximately 350 that had reached the Bridge, of this number 210 were wounded, many of whom had fought on to the end, in spite of their wounds and approximately 100 were taken prisoner unwounded), 32 from the 3rd Battalion, 422 of the Glider Pilot Regiment, plus 72 men from the 4th Dorsets and 160 Poles, are ferried to the south bank. Around 100 men are killed making the crossing; many who could not be ferried across in boats and decided to swim were swept away and drowned. All the doctors, chaplains and medical orderlies stayed behind with the wounded and passed into captivity. With the end of ‘Berlin’ it is the end of the battle of Arnhem.

  It was by no means certain on the morning of the 26th that another troop carrier effort might not yet be called for. The project in view was an air landing of 52 Division near Grave. During the first six days of ‘Market’, plans to fly in that unit had been in abeyance for lack of a suitable field. On the 20th the divisional commander had proposed to Browning that one of his brigades be brought in by glider. Browning graciously declined the offer, partly because of ignorance as to the plight of 1 Airborne Division, but also no doubt because such an operation would have been risky and difficult to improvise. The tragedy was that a field existed on which infantry could have been landed with ease and safety, but in spite of extensive aerial reconnaissance nobody in authority knew of it. Not until 21 September did Airborne Corps discover a good grass fighter strip at Oud Keent only 2¼ miles west of Grave. Permission to use the strip was requested that night through Second Army but was not granted until the morning of the 23rd. Browning’s HQ then called for a mission to fly in an airfield control unit, the British air supply organization known as AFDAG (Airborne Forward Delivery Airfield Group) and an anti-aircraft battery as soon as possible, obviously in preparation for bigger landings to follow. Meanwhile fences and other obstacles had been removed and a strip 100 yards wide and 1,400 yards long had been marked out. Bad weather made it impossible to send the mission on the 24th and unsafe to do so on the 25th, but on the latter day a pathfinder team, equipped to operate a rudimentary control tower was flown in to the airstrip and plans were laid to deliver the requested units and the 878th Engineer Battalion at noon on the 26th. The heavy equipment of the engineers and the Bofors guns of the artillerymen were to go in twelve Horsas and ten Hamilcars, towed by Stirlings of 38 Group. Most of the engineers and the control unit would be flown from Boreham and Chipping Ongar by four glider serials of the 61st and 437th Groups towing a total of 157 Wacos. The gliders would land in fields east of the airstrip. The anti-aircraft battery and AFDAG were to be landed on the Grave strip by one 30-plane serial, followed by five 36-plane serials, all contributed by units of the 52nd Wing.

  Weather over England was passable all day, but in the morning predictions of rain and low ceilings over Holland led Brereton to order about 0800 that the operation be postponed 24 hours. By mid-morning prospects of improvement led him to decide that the air landing serials could go in that day, two hours later than previously planned. The gliders would have to wait. At 1115 the first aircraft was in the air, but the last did not set out until after 1400. It was necessary to have an average interval of at least half an hour between serials, because the dispersal area at the strip would hold only 70 aircraft and once that number was down no more could be accommodated until some had unloaded and departed. The trip along the southern route to Hechtel and up the highway was an easy one through clear air with broken clouds well overhead. There was occasional slight ground fire when planes flew too near the edge of the salient, but only one aircraft was damaged.

  Close cover from England to the landing strip and back was furnished by twenty Spitfire squadrons and three Mustang squadrons of ADGB, which flew a total of 271 sorties without seeing action. The 8th Air Force sent eight fighter groups, one at the head of the troop carrier column, three in relays over the landing area, two on area patrol in the Arnhem area, one on area patrol around Nijmegen and one to the east to watch a perimeter from Maastricht through Venlo to Arnhem. Most of their 326 sorties were uneventful, but at 1600 when the Grave strip was already crammed with troop carrier craft and more serials were approaching it, the 479th Fighter Group flying area patrol near Haltern, about 50 miles east of Nijmegen, intercepted over 40 German fighters. The pilots claimed to have destroyed 28 enemy planes while losing only one and that probably to flak. Another group, vectored to the scene before the fight ended, claimed to have shot down four more. No raiders got through to strike at the troop carriers.

  Of 209 aircraft taking off on the mission to Grave, all reached the zone and landed on it safely between 1350 and 1740. The improvised control tower worked well and teams of British and American glider pilots did yeoman service in the unloading of the 882 troops and 379 tons of cargo aboard the planes. This was the closest the Allies came in World War II to airlanding in an ai
rhead. The operation was successful, but it should be noted that the approach was over friendly territory and that the nearest enemy troops were several miles away.

  Airborne Army’s plans for use of the Grave strip were crushed on the 27th. At 0450 in the morning Second Army informed them that Luftwaffe strength in the area had been built up to such a point that no more troop carrier missions to the strip could be allowed and that evening, orders came that the field was to be taken over by 83 Group as an advance fighter base. The group moved in next day. These actions were taken without consulting Airborne Corps or determining whether an additional strip might not be laid out, as in fact it quite easily could have been. If fear of the Luftwaffe dictated the closing of Grave to IX TCC, the Luftwaffe was being much overrated. From the logistical point of view it was absurd to have supplies flown in to Brussels, reloaded onto trucks and carried at a snail’s pace over 100 miles of congested roads to Nijmegen when they could just as well have been landed directly at Grave.

  The effect was that the glider mission set up to carry the 878th Engineers was cancelled, the fly-in of 52 Division was never made and AFDAG was dispersed to do odd jobs for Second Army. Instead of having up to 800 tons of supplies a day airlanded at Grave the troops in the salient were short of supplies for many weeks. Instead of being relieved, as they might have been, by the 52nd Division and prepared for future missions, the 82nd and 101st Divisions were held in the line until late November on the pretext that they could not be spared. As for IX TCC, it was removed from airborne missions and training and turned for the time being into an aerial trucking service for the ground forces. As an ironic anticlimax it was allowed to send two insignificant supply missions to Grave on the 29th and 30th. In the first, five planes landed with 20 troops and 16 tons of supplies. In the second, three soldiers and 56 tons of supplies were airlanded from 22 planes.

  Under pressure from General Arnold, who had been much dissatisfied with glider recovery from Normandy, Brereton made a strenuous effort to retrieve as many as possible of the gliders used in ‘Market’. He secured the services of Company ‘A’ of the 876th Aviation Engineer Battalion to construct temporary strips near Son (on LZ ‘W’) and near Grave from which gliders could be towed after being made flyable. Those flyable gliders were to be taken to Denain/Prouvy near Valenciennes on the northern border of France for final repairs which would restore them to operational status. After that they were to be redistributed to the troop carrier units.

  Between 25 September and 1 October three repair teams of about 150 men apiece were flown to the Continent to repair the gliders at Son. On 20 October one of these teams and two others arrived at Grave to begin repairing the gliders in that area. That same day the 61st Group began flying repaired gliders from Son to Denain/Prouvy where another team, which had moved there on the 19th, set to work to make the patched-up Wacos operational.

  Logistical support of the repair teams, especially those at Son and Grave, involved great difficulties. Practically all supplies and equipment for the repairmen had to be flown from England. At first cargoes had to be landed at Brussels and delivered by truck over roads heavily congested with traffic for the front. Later landings were made at Eindhoven. By 8 October 202 flights had already been made to the Continent on behalf of the troop carrier repair effort and hundreds more flights were made after that.

  Also, the task of glider repair was greatly impeded by enemy action, vandalism and bad weather. The British gliders beyond the Rhine were of course in German hands. The landing zones of the 82nd and 101st Division were for several weeks within two or three miles of the front. During these early operations the glider mechanics came under small arms fire and even took some prisoners. The Grave area was still under artillery fire in December. While the battle was raging around the drop zones the gliders could not be protected and until late October the gliders around Grave had to be guarded by Dutchmen, whose orders were cheerfully ignored by the Allied soldiery. Consequently, by the time repair work began everything removable had been taken from the gliders and even their fabric had been ripped off in great chunks for foxhole covers.

  The autumn rains turned the fiat, boggy fields of the Netherlands into quagmires. At Son steel matting had to be placed under the gliders to keep them from sinking into the mud and planes assigned to tow out the Wacos stuck fast and had to be hauled out by a crane. By mid-November the Son strip was almost entirely under water and had to be closed. Thereafter all gliders from Son had to be picked up by aircraft in flight. A particularly severe setback to the programme was an October gale which wrecked 115 gliders that had been more or less completely repaired.

  Because of these difficulties in the forward areas orders were issued in November for the removal of all flyable gliders from Son, Grave and Denain/Prouvy to troop carrier bases near Chartres and on the 22nd, 111 repaired gliders were flown to those fields. On 28 December, most of the work being completed, the glider repair teams were removed, leaving only small clean-up detachments. The final total of gliders recovered was 281. Rickety and badly weathered, they were regarded with suspicion by the troop carrier units and were not much used. Although 90 fuselages and 373 tons of metal were also salvaged, these results hardly justify the use of 900 skilled men for three months, nor the effort needed to support them in a remote and exposed position.

  First Allied Airborne Army dispatched 4,852 troop-carrying aircraft successfully to their destinations, of which 1,293 delivered paratroops, 2,277 gliders and 1,282-resupply. Altogether 164 aircraft and 132 gliders were lost. USAAF IX Troop Carrier Command suffered 454 casualties, RAF 38 and 46 Groups a further 294 casualties. 39,620 troops were delivered by air to their targets (21,074 by parachute and 18,546 by glider) with 4,595 tons of stores. However, only 7.4 per cent of the stores intended for 1st British Airborne actually reached it. A further 6,172 aircraft sorties were flown in support of ‘Market-Garden’; more than half of them by 8th Air Force, for the loss of 125 aircraft. 2nd TAF flew only 534 of these sorties and 9th Air Force 209 sorties. Browning complained that 2nd Tactical Air Force had turned down 46 out of 95 requests for air support from 1st Airborne Corps HQ, chiefly on grounds of poor target identification. The Allied air forces claimed 160 enemy aircraft shot down and rescued 205 men from the North Sea during the operation.

  At Arnhem, 10,300 men of 1st British Airborne Division and 1st Polish Parachute Brigade landed from the air. 2,587 men escaped across the Rhine in Operation ‘Berlin’ (1,741 of 1st British Airborne, 422 of the Glider Pilot Regiment, 160 Poles and 75 from the Dorsetshire Regiment) and 240 more returned later with the aid of the PAN. About 1,600 wounded were left behind in the Oosterbeek pocket, together with 204 medical officers and chaplains who volunteered to stay. The Germans claimed 6,450 prisoners taken, wounded or not and 1st British Airborne therefore lost about 1,300 killed. The highest proportionate losses were suffered by the Glider Pilot Regiment and Major Gough’s Reconnaissance Squadron, each with more than one in five men killed. Three out of nine battalion commanders of 1st Airborne Division were killed; four more were wounded and taken prisoner, together with. two out of three brigade commanders. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded for actions at Arnhem, four of them posthumous. 1st Polish Parachute Brigade suffered 378 casualties. Brigadier Gerald Lathbury with 142 men escaped to safety in October and Brigadier Hackett the following February.

  The two American airborne divisions lost 3,664 men together: 1,432 from 82nd Airborne, 2,110 from 101st Airborne and 122 glider pilots. One American battalion commander was killed, another was badly wounded, a regimental commander was also wounded and two posthumous Medals of Honor were awarded. The total .losses for 1st Airborne Corps was 6,858 men. Second British Army’s casualties for ‘Market-Garden’ are estimated to have been 5,354 including 1,480 for XXX Corps, giving a total of 16,805 Allied casualties. Generalfeldmarschall Model estimated Army Group B casualties’ in ‘Market - Garden’ at 3,300, but other calculations place them as high as 2,000 dead and 6,000 wounded.

&
nbsp; After their defence of the Nijmegen bridgehead 83 Group fulfilled a comprehensive programme of railway interdiction - the cutting of tracks, the destruction of rolling stock and marshalling yards and the general harrying of all movement on railways. No. 2 Group aided by the United States 9th Air Force was especially concerned with the main bridges across the Ijssel at Zutphen, Deventer and Zwolle and also with the flying bomb and rocket sites in Western Holland. 85 Group, comprising the night fighter squadrons, established itself at a new base at Antwerp and then handed over to the Americans the responsibility of protecting their own area at night. Between the action fought at Arnhem and the next main move of the Army, Coningham’s Second Tactical Air Force continued to bear hard upon an enemy fully aware of the threat caused by the Allied troops left in the Nijmegen bridgehead. Desperate attempts were made by the Luftwaffe to destroy the vital bridge. In these, use was made of ‘pick-a-back’ aircraft (Bf 109s mounted on Ju 88s). The heaviest blow was struck on the night of 26 September and during the following day. The attacks were however, completely frustrated by Spitfires of 83 Group who claimed to have destroyed 46 enemy aircraft. The Germans then resorted to ‘frogmen’ using demolition charges and these succeeded in temporarily putting the bridges out of action.