Armageddon (13 page)

Colonel John Frost’s men of 2 Para, holding the north end of Arnhem bridge, always understood that they had a simple task, albeit a herculean one: to survive. But for the rest of 1st Airborne Division, amid a complete breakdown of command and communications, it is hard to overstate the chaos that persisted throughout the battle. Units struggled piecemeal to resist German pressure on their shrinking perimeters. From beginning to end, most men were bewildered. “There was a lot of toing and froing among the officers about what we should do,” said Private Ron Graydon, a signaller with D Company of the Border Regiment. At one point, Graydon was detailed to accompany a platoon probing a wood beside the road. He was able to use the excuse of his signalling responsibilities to say, “I’m not going into that bloody wood.” Instead, he walked along the road. The platoon which went into the trees was not seen again for three days. Runner after runner was sent to the rear to describe the company’s plight, but none returned. Graydon once made contact with XXX Corps on his 18 set and provided a map reference of his own position. This was his only successful radio link-up throughout the battle. Eventually abandoning his useless wireless, the signaller became a rifleman and lay in a foxhole, watching his company hour by hour bleed to death. Suddenly one morning, he woke from an uneasy doze at dawn to find Germans all around them, amid silence. Firing had stopped. The Borderers’ survivors surrendered. “It was a total shambles.”

In his lonely attic in Arnhem police station, Bob Peatling was keeping a diary, to relieve the dreadful boredom. “I am getting fed up with hearing German voices,” he wrote, “and hope to wake up in the morning and hear a British sergeant-major blaspheming at his children in the approved style. This should make quite a historic diary, but personally, I would rather stay the quiet stay-at-home lad. There is no noise of any firing whatever. I can’t make it out. Field-Marshal Montgomery has dropped a clanger at Arnhem, but me a bigger one. I keep hoping for a sight of a Sherman tank.”

Along the 82nd Airborne’s stretch of the corridor more than ten miles southwards, Gavin’s men were fighting off German counter-attacks. The enemy had thrown into the battle replacement battalions of untrained conscripts and elderly First World War veterans. As they lay on their start line, one of the Germans called to his commander: “Captain, we’ve already stormed the Craoneer Heights in 1914!” His officer answered: “Yes, can’t you see that it’s up to us old boys to run the whole show again, and we will do it exactly as we did then.” Gavin himself took up a rifle as his men raked these wretched elderly Germans with fire. “I was amazed by their stupidity,” he wrote later. “To cross an open field in the face of the enemy was foolish.” The Americans contained and eventually pushed back these attacks from the south. But the 82nd was still unable to break through to the bridge at Nijmegen, where the SS were strongly dug in on both banks. The division was obliged to withdraw some men from the fighting in the town, in order to launch a counter-attack to recover the Groesbeek dropping zone, which German troops had temporarily overrun. First Sergeant Leonard Funk of the 508th and a handful of men from his company killed fifteen Germans and knocked out four 20mm guns and three 88mms, for which he was awarded a well-deserved DSC. Funk later became a Medal of Honor winner in the Ardennes battle. The 508th was just able to clear the American landing zone in time for the arrival of 450 gliders carrying the 325th Infantry and their artillery.

The 101st Airborne was resisting constant pressure on its precarious perimeter. The commanding officer of the 3/502nd, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Cole, who had won the Medal of Honor for his leadership in Normandy, was killed approaching a canal bridge at Best. The Germans promptly blew the bridge, but one of Cole’s platoon leaders set about securing the area with only fifteen men. A two-man bazooka team, Privates Mann and Hoyle, successfully knocked out an 88mm gun. Joe Mann was hit twice, but fought on through the day until he was hit twice more, in both arms. The Germans counter-attacked, throwing grenades as they came. An American NCO, Sergeant Betras, threw one “potato masher” back at the enemy before it exploded. Another exploded beside the platoon machine-gunner, Private Laino. His left eye was blown out, and he lost the sight of the other. He was holding together what remained of his face when he felt another grenade land in his foxhole. He groped with his blood-soaked hands, found the grenade, and threw it out before it exploded. Joe Mann was in a trench with six other men, his shattered arms taped to his body. He suddenly shouted “Grenade!” as yet another fell in among them, then threw himself on top of it. After the explosion, he murmured, “My back’s gone,” then died. He was later awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor. Very few soldiers of any army can be expected to display the capacity for sacrifice shown by Private Mann. But every army needs a handful of his kind, in order to prevail. The survivors of his platoon were obliged to surrender when their ammunition was exhausted, but were freed soon afterwards by another unit of the 502nd.

The first British tanks crossed the new Bailey bridge at Son at 0645 on the morning of 19 September. They were thirty-five miles from the Waal at Nijmegen. At 0830, they linked up with elements of Gavin’s 82nd at Grave, amid more cheering Dutch crowds. By midday, they were in the suburbs of Nijmegen. Soon after, Generals Horrocks, Adair of Guards Armoured Division, Browning and Gavin stood together within sight of the bridge, watching Germans moving unconcernedly across it. The Anglo-American attack began at 1530. German 88mm guns “brewed up” the first British tanks, which caught fire with their usual facility. U.S. airborne troops fought vigorous battles with panzergrenadiers through the streets and market square. At nightfall, the attack was broken off until daylight. The 82nd had by now lost over 200 dead and 700 wounded since its drop, with many more men missing. That evening, convinced that frontal assaults would continue to fail, Gavin proposed a desperate alternative. His men would cross the 400-yard-wide Waal in boats a mile downstream, and outflank Nijmegen bridge. “The attempt must be made,” he told Browning, “if Market Garden is to succeed.”

While they waited for three trucks carrying British collapsible canvas assault boats to reach the town, after two days of wireless silence from Arnhem Browning received the first grim news of 1st Airborne’s predicament. Its signal said in part: “senior formation still in vicinity north end of main bridge but not in touch and unable resupply . . . Arnhem entirely in enemy hands. Request all possible steps expedite relief. Fight intense and opposition extremely strong. Position not too good.” It was plain that every hour now counted.

Gavin’s assault boats were delayed everywhere along the jammed road to Nijmegen, not least by a Luftwaffe raid on Eindhoven. They finally arrived at the river bank at 1440 on the afternoon of 20 September, twenty minutes before the chosen H-hour. The preliminary Allied bombardment had already begun. Under intense machine-gun and mortar fire, the first wave of 260 men of twenty-seven-year-old Major Julian Cook’s 3/504th plunged into the water, and began frantically to paddle across the Waal, in a boat race with death. Some of the clumsy craft were blown out of the water. Others floundered, holed and sinking. A brisk wind blew away a protective smokescreen laid by the tank gunners. As the first Americans struggled up the far bank, Browning said to Horrocks: “I have never seen a more gallant action.” Germans who belatedly sought to surrender were cut down ruthlessly by paratroopers enraged by their terrible losses. Only half the twenty-six canvas boats that carried the first wave were fit to return and bring over the second.

By 1700, the Waal rail bridge was in American hands. On the south bank, a new Anglo-American assault at last cracked open the German defence and pressed forward to the highway bridge. Guards tanks began to cross, machine-gunning German engineers clinging to the girders and destroying an 88mm gun on the far side. As the leading Shermans rumbled on to the roadway on the north side, surviving U.S. paratroopers from the boat crossing emerged to greet them. A lone Royal Engineer officer ran after the tanks across the bridge, cutting demolition wires wherever he could see them. The mystery will never be resolved of whether the Germans failed to detonate the charges, or whether they lost the electrical means to do so. It was 1915 on 20 September. The Allies stood eleven miles from the bridge at Arnhem. The paratroopers who had paddled across the Waal had paid with losses of over 50 per cent—134 men killed, wounded or missing. The achievement of the 82nd and 101st Airborne was superb. They displayed a dash, initiative, skill and determination which, had it been repeated elsewhere in the Allied armies during the autumn and winter of 1944, would have finished the war by Christmas.

The Americans who paid so dearly for the bridge at Nijmegen were now bewildered and disgusted to behold the British armour halt on the north bank of the Waal, harbour for the night and begin to brew tea. The British said they had to wait for supporting infantry, that it was madness for tanks to advance into darkness. The Americans expostulated that after all the delays and sacrifices of the day it was time to throw away the rulebook and risk everything to reach 1st Airborne. Gavin wrote: “Had Ridgway been in command at that moment, we would have been ordered up the road in spite of all our difficulties, to save the men at Arnhem.” Ridgway himself, that very afternoon, was in a towering rage after encountering a hold-up in his jeep between Son and the 101st CP. A young British Guards officer told the American that his unit had halted because of enemy fire. The general sat fuming for forty minutes without hearing a shot in the vicinity, nor any sign of energetic British activity. Finally, the corps commander abandoned his jeep and walked a mile and a half to Taylor’s CP, without meeting fire. He later described himself as “much dissatisfied with the apathy and lack of aggressiveness of the British forces,” a view shared by some British officers.

The vital infantry of 43rd (Wessex) Division, following up Guards Armoured, had not yet reached Grave, eight miles to the south. Fighting continued in the centre of Nijmegen against pockets of resistance. The Germans launched a new counter-attack against the Allied bridgehead on the north side of the Waal, supported by two tanks. Private John Towle of the 504th ran 200 yards alone across a field carrying his bazooka. He fired two rockets at the tanks, and forced them to withdraw. When a group of Germans ran into a nearby house, Towle put a rocket into that, too, for good measure. He then made another dash across 150 yards of open ground, to take another shot at a German half-track. As he raised the bazooka, he was caught by the explosion of a German mortar bomb, which killed him.

Far back down the road from Nijmegen to the start line, “Hell’s Highway” as Americans had begun to call it, traffic jams held up progress for hours. An unfounded belief that the Germans had mined the road verges confined every British vehicle to the tarmac. Some stretches of the route lay silent and empty for long periods because of jams further back. A great column of smoke drifted across the highway near Son, where a lorryload of smoke grenades had caught fire. By now, every man committed to the battle was desperately tired. A British tank commander, Corporal Andy Cropper, was disconcerted to find that his Sherman driver had fallen asleep as they advanced. Fortunately the driver’s hatch was open. Cropper was able to clamber down the hull and shake the man awake before they crashed.

The road that lay ahead from Nijmegen to Arnhem was straight and steeply embanked, enabling German defenders to fire upon advancing British tanks as if these were being presented to them on a rifle range. Yet bolder and more imaginative soldiers—Germans, for instance—in these circumstances would have pushed on towards Arnhem through the darkness, risking everything for a great coup. It reflected poorly upon the British Army that it was unable to mount the next phase of its advance from Nijmegen for eighteen hours after the Waal bridges were secured. By the time the Irish Guards resumed the advance at 1100 on 21 September, men of 10th SS Panzer were ready to give them a hot reception. The last stage of the Allied advance towards the Rhine, whose only purpose was now the rescue of 1st Airborne’s survivors, was as messy and botched as everything else about Market Garden.

On the evening of 20 September, the organized defence of the north end of Arnhem bridge by 1st Airborne Division came to an end, when the survivors of Frost’s force surrendered. Other British paratroopers endured six more days of savage fighting, clinging to their shrinking perimeter at Oosterbeek, three miles from Frost’s lost positions. The hapless Polish Brigade was parachuted on to the Rhine shore amid devastating German fire, at a moment when all chance of success was gone. The Poles retained a lasting, justified bitterness about their sacrifice. After 20 September, the heroism of 1st Airborne’s survivors had become strategically irrelevant. All chance of seizing and exploiting a Rhine crossing was gone. The Germans held Arnhem in strength, and would do so almost until the end of the war. The resistance sustained by 1st Airborne’s survivors at Oosterbeek until 26 September was the stuff of legend, but offered only a chance of escape for the survivors, rather than serving any higher military purpose.

Throughout the Market Garden battle, American paratroopers and British soldiers of XXX Corps were fighting bitter little actions along the entire length of the corridor northwards. “One of the worst sights for me,” said John Thorpe of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, “was coming upon Guards Armoured men hanging out of burning tanks, and a shell-blasted transport vehicle with its occupants all dead and lying about with their clothes stripped from their bodies except their boots.”

The same day, George Turner-Cain wrote in his diary: “Very bitter fighting, and getting more so each time we meet. We never fail to defeat the Hun, and his casualties are out of all proportion to our own, but still he fights on fiercely and without hope.” He added three days later:

Each little battle with a rearguard or group of infantry with an anti-tank gun takes longer than ever to deal with. The trouble is the wetness of the ground. We cannot operate our armour off the few straight roads as they get bogged down immediately in the small and wet fields. The Germans blow a bridge or a culvert on the only road, and cover it with anti-tank and small arms fire. Getting our infantry round to the back of the enemy party to flush it takes a long time, and is a cold and wet process, and all the time there are commanders at the back screaming at us to make more haste.