AT 4:30 P.M. on Tuesday, September 19, as the Arnhem bridge predicament turned from dreadful to desperate, young General Gavin stood outside a schoolhouse in Malden, three miles west of Groesbeek. Toeing the curb with his jump boot, he awaited the arrival of half a dozen British and American commanders to plot their next move.
Afternoon shadows stretched through the village and thickening clouds drifted overhead. The fine weather had deteriorated: more than a thousand supply planes had taken off from England during the day, only to encounter fog so thick over the Channel that glider pilots could see barely three feet of tow rope. Although many aircraft turned back, forty-five planes and seventy-three gliders had been lost. Only half of an expected sixty-six artillery tubes and 2,300 reinforcement troops reached Holland. The resupply of ammunition and rations was deemed “negligible.”
Of five major objectives assigned the 82nd Airborne in GARDEN, four had been taken, but the fifth—a crossing over the Waal in Nijmegen—remained beyond reach. A single battalion from the 508th Parachute Infantry had tried to take the road bridge on Sunday evening, but rather than follow Gavin’s instructions to circle along the river bottoms from the Groesbeek Heights, the regimental commander heeded Dutch assurances that cutting through Nijmegen’s serpentine streets would be quicker and surer. At ten P.M., enemy troops had spilled from trucks onto a traffic circle near the southern approach to the bridge, and a muddled firefight in the dark foiled the American gambit. Soon 10th SS Panzer soldiers were entrenched among the stone ruins of the Valkhof, the imperial Carolingian redoubt built by Charlemagne in 768 and where his son, Louis the Pious, once housed his hunting falcons.
Nor had the belated arrival of XXX Corps on Tuesday morning carried through to the Waal. Both the 82nd Airborne and flag-waving Dutchmen had welcomed the Guards Armored Division to the nine-arch bridge at Grave at 8:30 A.M., and the first tanks barreled into Nijmegen’s suburbs just past noon. Two-thirds of the golden corridor from Bourg-Léopold to Arnhem now belonged to the Allies. But an attempt to rush the river at Nijmegen failed. Three columns made for the road bridge, the rail bridge, and the post office, which Dutch patriots believed housed the detonators to destroy both spans. Only the last of these forays succeeded, and the post office proved empty but for civilians cowering in the cellar and a few dead Germans behind the stamp counter. Enemy commanders were so confident of holding the bridges that the spans remained standing; Model wanted them intact for a counterattack from Arnhem through Nijmegen. As a barrier around the southern ramps, SS engineers had stacked fuel cans in several hundred houses, then bowled thermite grenades through every third door. Another Dutch city was in flames.
Joining Gavin along the Malden curb were the cigar-chewing Colonel Reuben H. Tucker—a thirty-three-year-old Sicily and Anzio veteran from Connecticut who commanded the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment—and three mud-spattered British colonels, each wearing corduroy trousers, suede chukka boots, and the regimental badges, respectively, of the Irish, Grenadier, and Scots Guards. In addition, each wore what a witness described as “the most amazing air of nonchalance.” A trio of British generals also joined the klatch: Major General Allan H. S. Adair, commander of the Guards Armored Division; the tall, angular Horrocks; and Boy Browning, who had arrived in a nearby cabbage patch with his headquarters staff aboard thirty-six gliders. Twirling his mustache more intently than ever, the MARKET commander had exchanged his attaché case and parade-ground battle dress for an airborne smock, with field glasses looped around his neck. But even Browning’s renowned poise showed signs of fraying. Earlier in the day he had received another inane congratulatory message from higher headquarters; this one, from Beetle Smith, pronounced SHAEF “extremely pleased with the show,” which was unfolding “exactly” as anticipated. Browning in a burst of pique had heaved an ink jar at the photo of a German general tacked up on a wall.
Gavin quickly described the predicament in Nijmegen. On the south bank of the Waal, enemy troops held a kilometer-wide sector, from the rail bridge in the west to the road bridge in the east. This swatch extended three hundred yards from the river into the burning town. As many as five hundred SS men defended each span, with others burrowed around the Belvedere, a seventeenth-century watchtower. Even the riverfront bandstand was now a strongpoint with firing loopholes. German reinforcements could be seen crossing the bridges on foot and by bicycle. Guns firing from the north bank had clobbered several British tanks, and stymied American paratroopers in the city had been reduced to wrapping themselves in drapes and furniture slipcovers to stay warm at night. In frustration, Gavin had urged six hundred Dutch resistance fighters to snipe at enemy troops around the bridges with weapons scavenged from the dead. At this point little was known about the British plight in Arnhem—Browning’s radios were hardly better than General Urquhart’s—but contrary to earlier intelligence assessments, Gavin was certain that the enemy was not “a broken German army in full retreat.” Captured SS men appeared “tough and confident.”
Colonel Tucker, whose helmet brim nearly hid his eyes, occasionally removed his cigar to spit. (“Every time he did,” a British colonel later wrote, “a faint look of surprise flicked over the faces of the Guards officers.”) Gavin believed the only way to eject the enemy from Nijmegen was to outflank him: he proposed that as British tanks and a paratrooper battalion pressed the attack through the town, Tucker’s regiment would cross the Waal downstream of the rail bridge to attack the German rear. Given the urgency in reaching Arnhem, rather than wait for nightfall the attack would be launched as soon as possible on Wednesday. But first they needed boats. None could be found along the river.
Browning and Adair said little. Tucker spat. Horrocks was skeptical; a daylight crossing of the Waal—four hundred yards wide, with a current of eight knots—seemed potentially as suicidal as the American assault across the Rapido in central Italy eight months earlier. More than two thousand GIs had been killed or wounded in that fiasco. But Horrocks agreed there was little choice. The XXX Corps engineering train should have several dozen assault boats amid the jumble of bridging equipment. Horrocks would order them found and hurried up Hell’s Highway, even though with tens of thousands of soldiers already jamming that narrow ribbon, traffic was nearly at a standstill. Before the conference adjourned, he offered Gavin some advice: “Jim, never try to fight an entire corps off one road.”
Two hours later, as dusk sifted over the battlefield and commanders bustled about preparing for the morrow, 120 low-flying Luftwaffe planes pummeled Eindhoven in the only large, long-range air strike by German bombers during the fall of 1944. Philips workers and their celebrating families had been banging those toy drums and chalking their names on British fenders when Dutch rail workers reported rumors of approaching panzers. The orange bunting and Dutch flags abruptly vanished. “All smiles stopped together,” Alan Moorehead reported.
Mothers with their paper caps awry ran along the street to gather up their children.… The tin whistles subsided almost on a note and there was no more dancing.… Every one of the fat jolly faces was now full of apprehension.
No enemy tanks appeared, but instead “a clear golden cluster of parachute flares burst into light above the town.… The streets were like day again.” Moments later the bombs began to tumble, igniting half a dozen ammunition trucks in the Stratumsedijk and setting the factory ablaze. Generals Ridgway and Brereton, making their way together toward Nijmegen to ensure that at least six generals would supervise the five-battalion attack on Wednesday, found themselves in an Eindhoven park “flat on our stomachs for almost an hour,” as Brereton informed his diary. Ridgway later wrote, “Great fires were burning everywhere, ammo trucks were exploding, gasoline trucks were on fire, and debris from wrecked houses clogged the streets.” Women and children sang hymns in a shelter “full of mad cyclonic gusts of air and light,” in Moorehead’s description. A bomb struck another packed cellar on Biesterweg, incinerating forty-one people. Water pressure failed across the city, and among nine thousand damaged buildings, over two hundred houses were gutted. The city of light burned and burned.
Dawn revealed the full catastrophe. Of more than 1,000 civilian casualties, 227 were dead. Their bodies would be collected at a school in Thijmstraat and placed in narrow coffins with peaked lids and brass handles for burial in a mass grave. Eindhoven had become an obvious military target once GARDEN convoys arrived, but Moorehead raged anyway. “A blind act of malice on the part of the enemy,” he fumed. “A hideous, unforgivable thing.”
* * *
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 Nijmegen 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 counterMARKET 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.
Dawn caught the division not quite all away. The demented whine of enemy machine guns sounded abruptly from the reeds, and mortar rounds stomped along the river. Some men plunged into the water and flailed for the southern bank, or drowned. A final boat was so overloaded that the coxswain could not pull the outboard starter cord. Passengers paddled with hands and rifle butts, but bullets chewed the vessel to flinders; only four of twenty-five aboard lived to reach the safe shore. Three hundred others gathered on the shoreline were captured, but 2,600 had escaped.
Urquhart was among those who got away. Early Tuesday morning, September 26, he appeared red-eyed and muddy at Boy Browning’s large, fine house below Nijmegen. Roused from sleep, Browning took twenty minutes to change from pajamas into an immaculate uniform, his Sam Browne belt gleaming like glass.
“I’m sorry we haven’t been able to do what we set out to do,” Urquhart said.
Browning waved away the apology. “You did all you could,” he said crisply. “Now you had better get some rest.”
* * *
In the small hours of Friday, September 29, twelve German commandos in wetsuits slipped into the Waal five miles upstream of Nijmegen. Trained in Venice for aquatic skullduggery, all were strong swimmers—one had competed in the Olympics—and together they guided half a dozen tubes, each sixteen feet long, stuffed with nearly a ton of hexanite explosive, and suspended between a pair of air cylinders for buoyancy. Down the dark river they swam, snipping a hole in the new concertina boom before lashing their charges to the bridge piers and setting the detonator timers for a sixty-minute delay. Exhausted and numb with cold, the men staggered from the water a mile downstream, close to where Tucker’s regiment had crossed the previous week. Sentries immediately captured ten of the twelve, but at 6:30 A.M. a volcanic sequence of blasts ruptured the Dutch dawn, blowing an eighty-foot gap in the deck of the road bridge and dropping the long central span of the rail bridge into the river. The last casualties ofMARKET GARDEN lay on the muddy bed of the Waal.
This rude gesture hardly dampened the Allied high command’s insistence that the bold airborne lunge across Holland had been “a decided victory,” in Churchill’s phrase. Brereton declared the operation a “brilliant success,” while Montgomery passed word to the king that he was “well pleased with the gross result of his airborne adventure,” which he deemed “90 percent successful” because the ground force had covered nine-tenths of its intended distance. (Air Marshal Tedder tartly observed that “one jumps off a cliff with an even higher success rate, until the last few inches.”) Browning claimed that given the chance he would not alter his plan a whit. “Who was to tell at that time,” he later said, “that the German Army was going to recover as a fighting force?” Even Urquhart asserted, “We have no regrets.”
Brave words from a division commander without a division: two-thirds of those fighting for the 1st Airborne had been killed or captured, and the casualties included eight of nine battalion commanders and twenty-six of thirty rifle company commanders. Allied airborne losses in MARKET approached 12,000, more than half of them British; moreover, in 17,000 air sorties, 261 planes and 658 crewmen were lost. Casualties in Horrocks’s XXX Corps totaled 1,500, plus 70 tanks. Cornelius Ryan, whose A Bridge Too Farremains the classic narrative of the battle, put total Allied losses at 17,000 in nine days. The II Panzer Corps listed 3,300 killed, wounded, and missing, but other tallies suggested that total German losses were at least double that figure. Dutch road builders and construction crews went on finding skeletons for decades.
Even decided victories and brilliant successes sometimes required scapegoats. Montgomery blamed the weather for his unfulfilled 10 percent. Brereton blamed XXX Corps. Browning blamed Sosabowski; accused of incompetence and insubordination—he was, to be sure, given to prickly impertinence—the Pole was stripped of his command at British insistence, and not for more than sixty years did the Dutch recognize his valor with a posthumous award. Paratroopers quipped that Montgomery was “too busy fighting Eisenhower to fight the Germans,” and a Royal Signal Corps private suggested that “a bit more constructive criticism of the plan and less of the ‘Ready! Ay, ready!’ attitude on the part of the senior commanders wouldn’t have been amiss.” The operation in fact had lacked what one British general called “a single controlling mind”: in that regard it reflected the larger Allied campaign in western Europe. Horrocks at least had the grace to blame himself for various shortcomings, including not dispatching the 43rd Division on a different axis than Hell’s Highway and failure to keep a senior Dutch officer at his elbow.
Several hundred fugitive Allied troops eventually slipped back across the lines, often with help from courageous Dutch civilians. But more than six thousand others marched off to captivity for the duration, many singing “Green grow the rushes, O.” On a square in downtown Arnhem, a captured British officer put his men through a smart parade drill to “show these bastards what real soldiers look like” before the long column tramped eastward in the custody of what one grizzled sergeant major insisted on calling “the detaining power.”
The Dutch too would tramp away. German orders in late September required 95,000 civilians to evacuate Arnhem for northern Holland, and another 50,000 were forced from homes along the Neder Rijn. Soldiers then systematically plundered the city, with one truck collecting sewing machines, another tools, still another household linens, all for distribution in the bombed cities of the Ruhr. Other reprisals included the execution of fifty resistance members accused of helping the British, and jail for others involved in a rail strike that had been called when the first Allied parachutists drifted to earth on that glorious Sunday afternoon so long ago. At a price of five thousand buildings destroyed or damaged in Nijmegen alone, one-fifth of the Netherlands had been liberated. But the rest would endure another nine months of occupation: Allied soldiers did not reenter Arnhem until mid-April 1945. Before then, the “Hunger Winter” reduced the Dutch to eating dogs and tulip bulbs, and sixteen thousand died of starvation anyway. “My country,” Prince Bernhard observed, “can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.”
Nor could the Allies. MARKET GARDEN had won a sixty-five-mile salient that crossed five major water barriers but led nowhere. Without turning the German flank or gaining a bridgehead over the Neder Rijn, 21st Army Group had nearly doubled the perimeter to be outposted, from 150 to 280 miles. That task would entangle most of Second Army, as well as the two committed U.S. airborne divisions, which, with Eisenhower’s tacit approval, would be stuck helping the British hold this soggy landscape until mid-November, eating British oxtail soup and heavy puddings, drinking British rum, and smoking British cigarettes considered so foul that some GIs preferred to inhale torn strips of Stars and Stripes. Soldiers stood in empty oil drums to keep their feet dry; when the British sent Gavin a personal caravan with a bed and running water, he hid the thing unused, confessing, “I’d be mortified if my boys knew that I had one.” The 82nd and 101st suffered another 3,600 casualties during the restive Dutch autumn, more than the divisions sustained during MARKET. “The fighting has been much more vicious and intense than in Normandy,” Gavin wrote. The British remained in the salient so long that those plover-hunting officers eventually turned their shotguns on overwintering ducks, which they stalked on ice skates.
MARKET GARDEN proved “an epic cock-up,” as a British major averred, a poor plan with deficient intelligence, haphazard execution, and indifferent generalship. The occasion did inspire heroics and displays of combat leadership as stirring as any in modern warfare; Eisenhower offered Montgomery a fistful of American valor decorations to be awarded in the 1st Airborne Division as the field marshal saw fit: ten Distinguished Service Crosses, ten Silver Stars, ten Bronze Stars. Montgomery shifted his command post to Eindhoven, along with his menagerie of rabbits, canaries, and squirrels, and he sent an aide to Britain to fetch his winter kit, including a heavy dressing gown, thick vests, and wool underwear.
The failure at Arnhem, Montgomery cabled Brooke, “will not affect operations eastward against [the] Ruhr.” In this he was mistaken. The battle would be, as the historian Max Hastings wrote, “the last occasion of the war when Eisenhower unequivocally accepted a strategic proposal by Montgomery,” and the field marshal’s advocacy of a single exploitative thrust into Germany under his command seemed ever less credible. Even Montgomery now acknowledged the primacy of Antwerp. “The opening of the port,” he wrote in late September, “is absolutely essential before we can advance deep into Germany.” Whether that amounted to more than lip service remained to be seen.
Beyond battlefield consequences, MARKET GARDEN preyed on the mind of every man scarred by this primordial struggle. “There was a change of mood after Arnhem,” a British captain wrote. “One just didn’t feel the same. We were getting rather tired.” Bradley’s logistics chief told his diary, “The picture is not very good and it looks like we will have a real struggle from now on.” Few could doubt Alan Moorehead’s conclusion that “there was only one way—the hard way. All hope of a quick end of the war in 1944 had gone.”
Teeming autumn rain fell often, with implications for campaigning on the Continent as portentous as Montgomery’s request for woolen drawers. “I am not looking forward to the winter war we have ahead of us,” Gavin wrote his daughter. “I wear everything that I can get on, but I feel as though I will never be warm again.” In their very bones, they now knew that there was indeed but one way ahead: the hard way.