Bridge Too Far (26 page)

British Private Harry Wright jumped from an American C-47.  As he fell through the air, he lost both his helmet and kitbag.  He hit the ground very hard.  Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant Robertson came running up.  Wright’s forehead was streaming blood.  “Were you hit by flak?” Robertson asked.  Wright slowly shook his head.  “No, sarge,” he said.

“It was that bloody Yank.  We were going too fast when we jumped.” Robertson applied a dressing and then, to Wright’s surprise, offered the injured man a pork pie from his haversack.  “I nearly died right then of the shock,” Wright recalls.  “First, Robertson was a Scot, and then, as a quartermaster, he never offered anyone anything.”

Odd things seemed to be happening all over the drop zones.  The first

person Sergeant Norman Swift saw when he landed was Sergeant Major Les

Ellis, who was passing by holding a dead

partridge.  The amazed Swift asked where the bird had come from.  “I landed on it,” Ellis explained.  “Who knows?  It’ll be a bit of all right later on, in case we’re hungry.”

Sapper Ronald Emery had just slipped out of his chute when an elderly Dutch lady scuttled across the field, grabbed it up and raced away, leaving the startled Emery staring after her.  In another part of the field, Corporal Geoffrey Stanners, loaded down with equipment, landed on the top of a glider wing.  Like a trampoline, the wing sprang up, flipping Stanners back into the air.  He landed with both feet on the ground.

Dazed after a hard fall, Lieutenant Robin Vlasto lay still for a few moments, trying to orient himself.  He was conscious of “an incredible number of bodies and containers coming down all around me and planes continued to pour out paratroopers.”  Vlasto decided to get off the drop zone quickly.  As he struggled to get out of his harness, he heard a weird sound.  Looking around, he saw Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, the 2nd Battalion’s commander, walking past, blowing his copper hunting horn.

Frost was also observed by Private James W. Sims.  Sims had already gone through quite a day even before he landed.  Having always flown with the R.a.f.—whose attitude, Sims recalls, was: “Don’t worry, lads, whatever it’s like, we’ll get you through”—Sims received quite a shock on seeing his American pilot.  “He was a lieutenant colonel with one of those soft hats.  His flying jacket was hanging open and he was smoking a big cigar.  Our lieutenant saluted him quite smartly and asked if the men should move up to the front of the plane on takeoff.”  The American grinned.  “Why, hell, no, lieutenant,” Sims remembers him saying.  “I’ll get this goddam crate off the ground if I have to drag its ass halfway down the runway.”  Sims’s officer was too startled to speak.  Now, although he was fond of his colonel, Sims, watching Frost go by, had reached the limit of his patience.  Surrounded by his equipment, he sat on the ground and muttered, “There goes old Johnny Frost, a .45 in one hand and that bloody horn in the other.”

All over the drop and landing zones, where 5,191 men of the division

had arrived safely, units were assembling, forming up

and moving out.  General Urquhart “couldn’t have been more pleased.  Everything appeared to be going splendidly.”  The same thought occurred to Sergeant Major John C. Lord.  The veteran paratrooper recalls that “this was one of the best exercises I’d ever been on.  Everyone was calm and businesslike.”  But the reservations he’d had before takeoff still bothered Lord.  As he looked about, seeing the men assembling rapidly, with no enemy to contend with, he remembers thinking, “It’s all too good to be true.”  Others had the same thought.  As one group prepared to move off, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth heard Lieutenant Dennis Simpson say quietly, “Everything is going too well for my liking.”

The man with the most urgent task on landing was forty-three-year-old Major Freddie Gough of the 1/ Airborne Division reconnaissance unit.  Leading a four-troop squadron in heavily armed jeeps, Gough was to make a dash for the bridge before Colonel John Frost’s marching battalion reached it.  Gough and his men parachuted in, and then sought their ground transport, which was being flown in by glider.  Quickly Gough located his second in command, Captain David Allsop, on the landing zone and received some bad news.  The entire transport for one of the four units—approximately twenty-two vehicles—had failed to arrive, Allsop reported.  Thirty-six of the 320 gliders scheduled for Arnhem had been lost, and with them were lost the jeeps of Gough’s A troop.  Nevertheless, both Gough and Allsop believed that there were enough vehicles to race for the Arnhem bridge.  Gough gave the order to move out.  With his force whittled down, everything now depended on the reaction of the Germans.

In all the panic and confusion, the first German senior officer to raise the alert was General Wilhelm Bittrich, commander of the II SS Panzer Corps.  At 1:30 P.m., Bittrich received his first report from the Luftwaffe communications net that airborne troops were landing in the Arnhem vicinity.  A second report, arriving minutes later, gave the assault area as Arnhem and Nijmegen.  Bittrich could not raise anybody at Field Marshal Model’s headquarters at the Tafelberg in Oosterbeek.  Nor was he able to contact either the town commander of Arnhem or General Student at his headquarters in Vught.  Although the situation was obscure, Bittrich immediately thought of General Von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, most of which had escaped across the mouth of the Schelde and into Holland.  “My first thought was that this airborne attack was designed to contain Von Zangen’s army and prevent it from joining with the remainder of our forces.  Then, probably, the objective would be a drive by the British Army across the Rhine and into Germany.”  If his reasoning was correct, Bittrich believed that the key to such an operation would be the Arnhem-Nijmegen bridges.  Immediately he alerted the 9th Hohenstaufen and the 10th Frundsberg SS Panzer divisions.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer, commander of the Hohenstaufen,

attending the luncheon following the decoration of Captain Paul

Gr@abner, was “in the middle of my soup” when Bittrich’s call reached

him.  Tersely, Bittrich explained the situation and ordered Harzer to

“reconnoiter in the direction of Arnhem and Nijmegen.”  The

Hohenstaufen was to move out immediately,

hold the Arnhem area and destroy airborne troops west of Arnhem near Oosterbeek.  Bittrich warned Harzer that “quick action is imperative.  The taking and securing of the Arnhem bridge is of decisive importance.”  At the same time, Bittrich ordered the Frundsberg Division—whose commander, General Harmel, was in Berlin—to move toward Nijmegen, “to take, hold and defend the city’s bridges.”

Harzer was now faced with the problem of unloading the last Hohenstaufen units, due to leave by train for Germany in less than an hour—including the “disabled” tanks, half-tracks and armored personnel carriers he had been determined to keep from Harmel.  Harzer looked at Gr@abner.  “Now what are we going to do?”  he asked.  “The vehicles are dismantled and on the train.”  Of these, forty vehicles belonged to Gr@abner’s reconnaissance battalion.  “How soon can you have the tracks and guns put back?”  Harzer demanded.  Gr@abner immediately called his engineers.  “We’ll be ready to move within three to five hours,” he told Harzer.  “Get it done in three,” Harzer snapped as he headed for his headquarters.

Although he had guessed right for the wrong reasons, General Bittrich had set in motion the panzer divisions that Montgomery’s intelligence officers had totally dismissed.

The officer who had been ordered out of Oosterbeek to make way for

Field Marshal Model’s headquarters found himself and his men based

almost on the British landing zones.  SS Major Sepp Krafft, commander

of the Panzer Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion, was “sick to my

stomach” with fright.  His latest headquarters, in the Wolfheze Hotel,

was less than one mile from Renkum Heath.  Bivouacked nearby were two

of his companies; a third was in reserve in Arnhem.  From the hotel,

Krafft could see the heath “jammed with gliders and troops, some only a

few hundred yards away.”  He had always believed that it took hours for

airborne troops to organize, but as he watched “the English

were assembling everywhere and moving off ready to fight.”  He could not understand why such a force would land in this area.  “The only military objective I could think ofwith any importance was the Arnhem bridge.”

The terrified commander knew of no German infantry close by, other than his own understrength battalion.  Until help could arrive, Krafft decided that “it was up to me to stop them from getting to the bridge—if that’s where they were going.”  His companies were positioned in a rough triangle, its base—the Wolfheze road—almost bordering Renkum Heath.  North of Krafft’s headquarters was the main Ede-Arnhem road and the Amsterdam-Utrecht-Arnhem railway line; to the south, the Utrecht road ran via Renkum and Oosterbeek into Arnhem.  Because he lacked the strength to maintain a line from one road to the other, Krafft decided to hold positions roughly from the railroad on the north to the Utrecht-Arnhem road to the south.  Hurriedly, he ordered his reserve company out of Arnhem to join the rest of the battalion at Wolfheze.  Machine-gun platoons were dispatched to hold each end of his line while the remainder of his troops fanned out in the woods.

Although lacking men, Krafft had a new experimental weapon at his disposal: a multibarreled, rocket-propelled launcher capable of throwing oversized mortar shells.  * Several of these units had been left with him for training purposes.  Now he planned to use them to confuse the British and give an impression of greater strength; at the same time, he ordered twenty-five-man attack groups to make sharp forays which might throw the paratroops off balance.  * This weapon should not be confused with the smaller German mortar thrower, Nebelwerfer.  Krafft maintains that there were only four of these experimental launchers in existence.  I have not been able to check this fact, but I can find no record of a similar weapon on the western front.  There is no doubt that it was used with devastating effect against the British.  Countless witnesses describe the scream and impact of the oversized mortars, but, inexplicably, there is no discussion of the weapon in any of the British after-action reports.

As Krafft was issuing his directions, a staff car roared up to his

headquarters and Major General Kussin, Arnhem’s town commander, hurried

inside.  Kussin had driven out of Arnhem at

breakneck speed to see at first-hand what was happening.  On the way he had met Field Marshal Model heading east toward Doetinchem.  Stopping briefly on the road, Model had instructed Kussin to raise the alert and to inform Berlin of the developments.  Now, looking across the heath, Kussin was flabbergasted at the sight of the vast British drop.  Almost desperately he told Krafft that somehow he would get reinforcements to the area by 6 P.m. As Kussin started out to make the drive back to Arnhem, Krafft warned him not to take the Utrecht-Arnhem road.  Already he had received a report that British troopers were moving along it.  “Take the side roads,” Krafft told Kussin.  “The main road may already be blocked.”  Kussin was grim-faced.  “I’ll get through all right,” he answered.  Krafft watched as the staff car raced off toward the highway.

He was convinced that Kussin’s replacements would never reach him, and that it was only a matter of time before his small force would be overpowered.  Even as he positioned his troops along the Wolfheze road, Krafft sent his driver, Private Wilhelm Rauh, to collect his personal possessions.  “Pack them in the car and head for Germany,” Krafft told Rauh.  “I don’t expect to get out of this alive.”

At Bad Saarnow near Berlin, the commander of the 10th Frundsberg Division, General Heinz Harmel, conferred with the chief of Waffen SS Operations, Major General Hans Juttner, and outlined the plight of Bittrich’s understrength II Panzer Corps.  If the corps was to continue as an effective combat unit, Harmel insisted, “Bittrich’s urgent request for men, armor, vehicles and guns must be honored.”  Juttner promised to do what he could, but he warned that “at this moment the strength of every combat unit is depleted.”  Everyone wanted priorities, and Juttner could not promise any immediate help.  As the two men talked, Juttner’s aide entered the office with a radio message.

Juttner read it and wordlessly passed it to Harmel.  The message read:

“Airborne

attack Arnhem.  Return immediately.  Bittrich.”  Harmel rushed out of the office and got into his car.  Arnhem was an eleven-and-a-half-hour drive from Bad Saarnow.  To his driver, Corporal Sepp Hinterholzer, Harmel said: “Back to Arnhem—and drive like the devil!”

Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, second in command of the British 1/ Airborne Division Signals, could not understand what was wrong.  At one moment his radio sets were getting perfect reception from Brigadier Lathbury’s brigade as it headed for its objectives, including the Arnhem bridge.  But now, as Lathbury’s battalions moved closer to Arnhem, radio signals were fading by the minute.  From Deane-Drummond’s signalmen came a constant stream of reports that disturbed and puzzled him.  They were unable to contact some jeep-borne sets at all, and the signals they received from others were so weak as to be barely audible.  Yet the various battalions of Lathbury’s brigade and Major Freddie Gough’s reconnaissance units could scarcely be more than two to three miles away.

Of particular concern to Deane-Drummond was Lathbury’s messages.  They were vital to General Urquhart in his direction of the battle.

Deane-Drummond decided to send out a jeep with a radio and operator to

pick up Lathbury’s signals and relay them back to Division.  He

instructed the team to set up at a point midway between Division and

Lathbury’s mobile communications.  A short time later, Deane-Drummond

heard signals from the relay team.  The range of their set seemed

drastically re-

duced—at minimum, the “22’s” should have operated efficiently at least up to five miles—and the signal was faint.  Either the set was not functioning properly, he reasoned, or the operator was poorly located to send.  Even as he listened, the signal faded completely.  Deane-Drummond was unable to raise anybody.  Nor could a special team of American communications operators with two radio jeeps.  Hastily assembled and rushed to British Airborne Division headquarters only a few hours before takeoff on the seventeenth, the Americans were to operate ground-to-air “very high frequency” sets to call in fighters for close support.  In the first few hours of the battle, these radio jeeps might have made all the difference.  Instead, they were found to be useless.  Neither jeep’s set had been adjusted to the frequencies necessary to call in planes.  At this moment, with the battle barely begun, British radio communications had totally broken down.  * * In Christopher Hibbert’s The Battle of Arnhem, p. 96, dealing specifically with the British at Arnhem and equally critical of British communications, he claims that “American air-support parties were insufficiently trained … the disastrous consequence was that not until the last day of the operation … was any effective close air support given to the airborne troops.”  There appears to be no information on who erred in the allocation of the frequencies, nor are the names of the Americans known.  The two teams, who found themselves in the middle of the battle with the means of perhaps changing the entire course of history on that vital day, have never been found.  Yet these two combat units are the only American ones known to have been in the Arnhem battle.