Bridge Too Far (58 page)

Although he did not betray his feelings to Langton, Joe Vandeleur was

pessimistic about the outcome of the attack.  Earlier, he and others,

including his cousin Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur, had crossed

the Nijmegen bridge to study the ele-

vated “island” highway running due north to Arnhem.  To these officers the road seemed ominous.  Joe Vandeleur’s second in command, Major Desmond FitzGerald, was the first to speak.  “Sir,” he said, “we’re not going to get a yard up this bloody road.”  Giles Vandeleur agreed.  “It’s a ridiculous place to try to operate tanks.”  Up to this point in the corridor advance, although vehicles had moved on a one-tank front, it had always been possible when necessary to maneuver off the main road.  “Here,” Giles Vandeleur recalls, “there was no possibility of getting off the road: A dike embankment with a highway running along its top is excellent for defense but it’s hardly the place for tanks.” Turning to the others, Giles said, “I can just imagine the Germans sitting there, rubbing their hands with glee, as they see us coming.” Joe Vandeleur stared silently at the scene.  Then he said, “Nevertheless, we’ve got to try.  We’ve got to chance that bloody road.”  As Giles remembers, “Our advance was based on a time program.  We were to proceed at a speed of fifteen miles in two hours.” Brigadier Gwatkin, the Guards Armored chief of staff, had told them tersely, “Simply get through.”

At exactly 11 A.m., Captain Langton picked up the microphone in his scout car and radioed: “Go!  Go!  Go!  Don’t stop for anything!”  His tanks rumbled past the Lent post office and up the main road.  Fatalistically, Langton thought, It is now or never.  After fifteen or twenty minutes, he began to breathe easier.  There was no enemy action, and Langton felt “a little ashamed for being so upset earlier.  I began to wonder what I was going to do when I reached the Arnhem bridge.  I hadn’t really thought about it before.”

Behind the lead tanks came the Vandeleurs in their scout car and, back

of them, Flight Lieutenant Donald Love in his R.a.f. ground-to-air

communications tender.  With him once more was Squadron Leader Max

Sutherland, quiet and anxious.  As he climbed aboard the white armored

scout car, Sutherland—who had directed the Typhoon strike at the

breakout from the Meuse-Escaut Canal—told Love that “the airborne boys

in Arnhem are in deep trouble and desperate for help.”  Love scanned

the skies

looking for the Typhoons.  He was sure they would need them.  Remembering the horrors of the breakout, Love “wasn’t at all anxious to find himself in a similar position to the one I had been in the previous Sunday, when the Germans had stopped us cold.”

The tanks of the Irish Guards moved steadily forward, passing the village of Oosterhout off to the left and the hamlets of Ressen and Bemmel on the right.  From his scout car Captain Langton could hear Lieutenant Tony Samuelson, troop commander of the lead tanks, announce the locations.  Samuelson called out that the first tank was approaching the outskirts of Elst.  The Irish were approximately halfway to Arnhem.  As he listened Langton realized that “we were out on our own.”  But tension was relaxing throughout the column.  Flight Lieutenant Love heard a droning in the sky and saw the first Typhoons appear.  The weather had cleared in Belgium, and now the squadrons came into view, one at a time.  As they began to circle overhead, Love and Sutherland settled back relieved.

In his scout car, Captain Langton was examining his map.  The entire column had passed the secondary Bemmel turning, off to the right.  At that moment, Langton heard a violent explosion.  Looking up, he saw “a Sherman sprocket wheel lift lazily into the air over some trees up ahead.”  He knew immediately that one of the lead tanks had been hit.  Lieutenant Samuelson, much farther up the road, quickly confirmed the fact.

In the distance guns began to bark and black smoke boiled up into the sky.  Far down the line Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey knew that something had gone wrong.  Abruptly the column halted.  There was confusion as to what had happened, and voices on the radio became distorted and jumbled as the battle was joined.  “There seemed to be a great deal of shouting,” Giles Vandeleur remembers, “and I told Joe I had better go forward and see what the hell was happening.”  The commander of the Irish Guards agreed.  “Let me know as quickly as you can,” he told Giles.

Captain Langton was already on his way forward.  Inching by the

standing armor, Langton came to a bend in the road.  Ahead he saw that

all four lead tanks, including Samuelson’s, had been

knocked out and some were ablaze.  The shells were coming from a self-propelled gun in the woods to the left, near Elst.  Langton ordered his driver to pull into a yard of a house near the bend.  A few minutes later Giles Vandeleur joined him.  Immediately machine-gun fire forced the men to take cover.  Vandeleur was unable to get back to his armored car and report to his cousin Joe.  Each time he called out to his driver, Corporal Goldman, to back up the vehicle—a Humber with a top hatch and a door at the side—“Goldman would lift the lid and the Germans would pour a burst of fire over his head, causing him to slam it shut again.”  Finally, exasperated, Giles crawled back along a ditch to Joe’s command car.

Joe Vandeleur was already rapping out orders.  Over the radio he called for artillery support; then, seeing the Typhoons overhead, he ordered Love to call them in.  In the R.a.f. car Sutherland picked up the microphone.  “This is Winecup … Winecup …”  he said.  “Come in please.”  The Typhoons continued to circle overhead.  Desperate, Sutherland called again.  “This is Winecup … Winecup … Come in.” There was no response.  Sutherland and Love stared at each other.  “The set was dead,” Love says.  “We were getting no signal whatsoever.  The Typhoons were milling around above us and, on the ground, shelling was going on.  It was the most hopeless, frustrating thing I have ever lived through, watching them up there and not being able to do a damn thing about it.”  Love knew the pilots of the slowly wheeling Typhoons “had instructions not to attack anything on speculation.”  By now Giles Vandeleur had reached his cousin.  “Joe,” he said, “if we send any more tanks up along this road it’s going to be a bloody murder.”  Together the two men set out for Captain Langton’s position.

Now the infantry of the Irish Guards were off their tanks and moving up into orchards on both sides of the road.  Langton had taken over one of the tanks.  Unable to find cover or move off the road, he was maneuvering backward and forward, trying to fire at the self-propelled gun in the woods.  Each time he fired a round, “the gun responded with five of its own.”

The infantry captain, whose troops were also after the same target but were now huddling in a ditch, was livid with rage.  “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”  he yelled at Langton.  The young officer stayed calm.  “I’m trying to knock out a gun so we can get to Arnhem,” he said.

As the Vandeleurs appeared, Langton, unsuccessful in his attempts to knock out the gun, climbed out to meet them.  “It was a mess up there,” Joe Vandeleur remembers.  “We tried everything.  There was no way to move the tanks off the road and down the steep sides of that damn dike.  The only artillery support I could get was from one field battery, and it was too slow registering on its targets.”  His lone infantry company was pinned down and he was unable to call in the Typhoons.  “Surely we can get support somewhere,” Langton said.  Vandeleur slowly shook his head, “I’m afraid not.”  Langton persisted.  “We could get there,” he pleaded.  “We can go if we get support.”  Vandeleur shook his head again.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “You stay where you are until you get further orders.”

To Vandeleur it was clear that the attack could not be resumed until the infantry of Major General G. I. Thomas’ 43rd Wessex Division could reach the Irish Guards.  Until then, Vandeleur’s tanks were stranded alone on the high exposed road.  A single self-propelled gun trained on the elevated highway had effectively stopped the entire relief column almost exactly six miles from Arnhem.

Farther back in the line of tanks, opposite a greenhouse near Elst, whose windows had miraculously remained almost wholly intact, Lieutenant John Gorman stared angrily up the road.  Ever since the column had been halted at Valkenswaard far down the corridor, Gorman had felt driven to move faster.  “We had come all the way from Normandy, taken Brussels, fought halfway through Holland and crossed the Nijmegen bridge,” he said.  “Arnhem and those paratroopers were just up ahead and, almost within sight of that last bloody bridge, we were stopped.  I never felt such morbid despair.”

A Bridge Too Far

Part Five DER HEXENKESSEL [The Witches’ Cauldron]

“Monty’s tanks are on the way!”  All along the shrunken Oosterbeek perimeter—from slit trenches, houses now turned into strong points, crossroads positions, and in woods and fields—grimy, ashen-faced men cheered and passed the news along.  To them, it seemed the long, isolated ordeal was coming to its end.  General Urquhart’s Rhine bridgehead had become a fingertip-shaped spot on the map.  Now in an area barely two miles long, one and a half miles wide at its center, and one mile along its base on the Rhine, the Red Devils were surrounded and were being attacked and slowly annihilated from three sides.  Water, medical supplies, food and ammunition were lacking or dwindling away.  As a division the British 1/ Airborne had virtually ceased to exist.  Now men were once again heartened by the hope of relief.  Now, too, a storm of fire roared overhead as British medium and heavy guns eleven miles south across the Rhine lashed the Germans only a few hundred yards from Urquhart’s front lines.

By signal, General Browning had promised Urquhart that the batteries of XXX Corps’s 64th Medium Regiment would be in range by Thursday and regiment artillery officers had asked for targets in order of priority.

Without regard for their own safety, Urquhart’s steely veterans had

quickly complied.  In good radio contact for the first time, via the

64th’s communications net, the Red Devils savagely called down

artillery fire almost on top of their own positions.  The accuracy of

the fire was heartening, its effect on the Germans unnerving.  Again

and again British guns

broke up heavy tank attacks that threatened to swamp the bearded, tattered paratroopers.

Even with this welcome relief, Urquhart knew that a massed coordinated German attack could wipe out his minuscule force.  Yet now the men believed there was a modicum of hope—a chance to snatch victory at the eleventh hour.  On this Thursday, the outlook was slightly brighter.  Urquhart had limited communications and a link by way of the 64th’s artillery support.  The Nijmegen bridge was safe and open; the tanks of the Guards Armored were on the way; and, if the weather held, 1,500 fresh paratroopers of General Sosabowski’s Polish 1/ Brigade would land by late afternoon.  If the Poles could be ferried quickly across the Rhine between Driel and Heveadorp, the bleak picture could well change.

Yet, if Urquhart was to hold, supplies were as urgent as the arrival of Sosabowski’s men.  On the previous day, out of a total of 300 tons, R.a.f. bombers had delivered only 41 to the Hartenstein zone.  Until antitank guns and artillery arrived in number, close-in air support was critically important.  Lacking ground-to-air communications—the special American ultra-high-frequency equipment, rushed to the British only hours before takeoff on D Day, the seventeenth, had been set to the wrong wavelength and was useless—division officers were forced to acknowledge that the R.a.f. seemed unprepared to abandon caution and make the kind of daring forays the airborne men knew to be essential and were prepared to risk.  Urquhart had sent a continual stream of messages to Browning, urging fighters and fighter-bombers to attack “targets of opportunity” without regard to the Red Devils’ own positions.  It was the airborne way of operating; it was not the R.a.f.’s.  Even at this critical stage, pilots insisted that enemy targets be pinpointed with near-cartographic accuracy—an utter impossibility for the beleagured paratroopers pinned down in their diminishing airhead.  Not a single low-level air attack had been made, yet every road, field and woods around the perimeter and spreading east to Arnhem held enemy vehicles or positions.

Lacking the air strikes they so desperately urged, hemmed into the

perimeter, suffering almost constant mortar bombardment

and, in places, fighting hand-to-hand, the Red Devils placed their hopes on the Guards’ columns, which they believed were rolling toward them.  Urquhart was less optimistic.  Outnumbered at least four to one, pounded by artillery and tanks, and with steadily mounting casualties, Urquhart knew that only a mammoth, all-out effort could save his fragmented division.  Keenly aware that the Germans could steam-roller his pathetically small force, the dogged, courageous Scot kept his own lonely counsel even as he told his staff, “We must hold the bridgehead at all costs.”

The perimeter defenses were now divided into two commands.  Brigadier Pip Hicks held the western side; Brigadier Shan Hackett was to the east.  Hicks’s western arm was manned by soldiers from the Glider Pilot Regiment, Royal Engineers, remnants of the Border Regiment, some Poles and a polyglot collection of other troopers from various units.  To the east were the survivors of Hackett’s 10th and 156th battalions, more glider pilots and the 1/ Airlanding Light Regiment, R.a. Curving up from these prime defenses the northern shoulders (close to the Wolfheze railroad line) were held by men of Major Boy Wilson’s 21/ Independent Parachute Company—the pathfinders who had led the way—and by Lieutenant Colonel R. Payton-Reid’s 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers.  Along the southern base, stretching roughly from east of the medieval church in lower Oosterbeek to the heights at Westerbouwing on the west, Hackett commanded additional elements of the Border Regiment and a miscellaneous group composed of the remains of the South Staffordshires, the 1/, 3rd and 11th battalions and a variety of service troops under the twice-wounded Major Dickie Lonsdale—the “Lonsdale Force.”  In the heart of that area was Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson’s main force, the hard-pressed artillerymen whose batteries sought continually to serve the tight defense line and whose precious supply of ammunition was dwindling fast.  * * The consolidation of the southeastern end of the perimeter owed much to the quick thinking of Colonel Sheriff Thompson who, in the confusion of battle when men retreating from Arnhem on September 19 found themselves leaderless, quickly organized them in defense of the last piece of high ground before his gun positions.  These forces, together with others who had earlier become separated from their units—some 150 glider pilots and his own artillery men, about 800 in all—were known as the “Thompson Force.”  Subsequently augmented, they were placed under the command of Major Lonsdale.  They withdrew late on September 20 and were deployed by Thompson about his gun positions.  Owing to command changes and the general situation, some confusion has continued to exist regarding these events, but immediately before Thompson was wounded on September 21 all infantry in the gun area came under the command of what was later to be known as the “Lonsdale Force.”  The glider pilots remained under the command of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade.