Aerial reconnaissance photo of the Arnhem road bridge taken by the Royal Air Force on 19 September, showing signs of the British defence on the northern ramp and the wrecked German vehicles from the previous day’s fighting.
Operation Market Garden – Allied Plan.
British tanks of XXX Corps cross the road bridge at Nijmegen.
It was not until the 20th that all those along the road from Nijmegen back through Eindhoven to the Dutch border faced the fact of failure. Miracles had happened. On the 19th the Guards had bridged the Wilhehmna canal, and raced through over the great bridge of the Maas at Grave. This was the first of the major obstacles captured intact by the dash and courage of a handful of men of the 82nd U.S. Airborne Division. Five men had rushed the Germans in their dug-outs firing their tommy-guns, and finally hurling grenades into the enemy dug-out. Almost at once a solitary German with the demolition charges had ridden his bicycle into the arms of the Americans. The bridge was ours. On the 19th, thanks to that, the Guards covered twenty-five miles in three hours, and on the afternoon of that day the British 8th Armored Brigade was fighting furiously side by side with the U.S. paratroops for the approaches to the bridge across the Waal at Nijmegen.
By that time there was severe fighting all the way back along the road to Son, and a terror air attack on Eindhoven sobered the inhabitants and brought the first real sense of possible failure to all the men of 30th Corps striving to catch up with the armored columns. But the links of the slender chain were constantly broken, patched and broken again, and the tail of the Corps, even with all the drive of Horrocks, could not wind up on this narrow spool.
By the 19th the minds of all had narrowed to the single thought of Arnhem. The weather had deteriorated steadily. Fogs blanketed the English airfields from which supplies and reinforcements must take off. Landing areas from south of Nijmegen to north of Arnhem were under heavy fire, and at times in enemy possession. On the right flank of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division heavy counterattacks were coming in from the area of the Reichswald forest, and the Division, urgently awaiting its own reinforcements, was forced to fight furiously to rescue its incoming gliders from landing in the arms of the enemy, and under concentrated fire.
On the night of the 19th it was difficult to restrain a sense of impending disaster, for it seemed impossible that even the Nijmegen Bridge could be taken and crossed. Concrete pillboxes and self-propelled guns manned by a powerful enemy force in high morale defended the approaches to both the railway and road bridges across the Waal, and S.S. troops were fighting with determination in the town itself. The foothold of the armor and the paratroops, insecure in the rear, seemed tenuous. Hourly through the night of the 19th and through most of the next day all those fighting in Nijmegen thought to see the great bridges curl their girders into the sky in clouds of dust and in the din of detonation.
On the night of the 19th a plan of desperate daring was evolved, for this was one of those rare occasions in war when the normal does not apply, and when more must be accomplished than may reasonably be asked of men, or hoped for. With irresistible fury the Guards had succeeded in clearing the town of Nijmegen and opening up the approaches to the river about a mile west of the bridge, and in the early afternoon of the 20th, the U.S. 504th Parachute Regiment embarked in broad daylight, in full view of the enemy, in British assault boats they had never used before. With dauntless courage and an astounding sang-froid these men assaulted under concentrated enemy fire across the 400-yard wide river Waal. In that first wave many died, and many swam. Miraculously they gained footholds on the opposite bank, and turned towards the bridge. All this time there were Germans clinging like limpets to the girders of the towering framework of the bridge, firing Bazookas, rifles, automatic weapons, and fighting like men possessed. So desperate was the situation that even the presence of these men did not give an assurance that the bridge would not be blown, and the defenders with it.
By early evening, against all the odds of war and chance, the U.S. 504th Regiment hoisted the Stars and Stripes on the northern end of the bridge, and at that heroic signal the armor of the leading squadron of the Guards went in. There was only one way, and a narrow way, but there was no holding back on that evening to cross the bridge across the Waal. Bazookas fired from the bridge itself knocked out the first tank, and the one that followed on, but the third got through. Great gashes had been torn in the roadway of the bridge itself, and the 600-yard gauntlet of the girders was wreathed in smoke and flame, as a corporal of the Grenadier Guards drove his tank onto and over that perilous structure. But the bridge was won.
It was the last great hurdle, but if there was renewed hope on that evening of the 20th it was short lived. Ten miles ahead lay Arnhem. The road was no more than a causeway between the dike-meshed fields and the partially inundated lands beyond the village of Elst. It was impossible for armor to deploy, and Elst was the end of the road. At that point enemy tanks in strength met the challenge and held it, and the very presence of the enemy at this point was an ominous indication of the condition of the British airborne troops known to be holding out behind them.
Lt. Gen. Horrocks was right forward on that day, staring into the haze towards Elst, standing in the midst of his troops on the road, not with his brigadiers, but with his ordinary men, accessible, yet infinitely remote. There was even then no suggestion in his bearing, in his whole mien, in the gravity and extraordinary gentleness of his aquiline face, that could give a hint to any man of the dismal knowledge in his mind. His troops should have been on the Zuider Zee, but the Zuider Zee with all that hopeless plan had never seemed within reach. Looking back, even the gaining of the nine-span bridge across the Maas at Grave seemed a remarkable achievement. All that lay ahead now was rescue, but even that could not be hoped for along the narrow road through Elst.
It remained also to consolidate, and to attempt to hold the ground won, against an enemy constantly reinforced, and fighting like an army far from defeat. In the rear, Lt. Gen. Horrocks knew as well as any man that the dangers were not diminishing, and there was the hourly possibility that all his forward troops might be cut off, their supply line completely severed. Indeed, it had already happened and would happen again. He had stood at the head of his supporting columns on the edge of a strip of woodland, disdaining cover, and looking along a mile of open road towards Son. He had watched truck after truck striving to run the gauntlet of fire, the lazy crisscross of the soaring red tracer, the bursts of the “88s,” and he had seen the trucks burst into flames until the narrow road was punctuated with the billowing black smoke and the wreckage of burning vehicles. On that day the enemy self-propelled guns could be plainly seen, dark against the dark verges of the woodland, and a squadron of Guards armor had to turn back before that short stretch of road could be re-opened. On the left flank 12th Corps made slow progress, impeded by one of the divisions von Zangen had saved from the Pas de Calais. On the right flank the enemy strength was growing. Their homeland was at their backs.
All these things were crystal-clear in Horrocks’ mind as he surveyed the road to Elst on the morning of the 21st, while German frogmen were making desperate sorties, swimming by night and day down-river, in attempts to blow the bridge. His main thoughts concentrated on the rescue of the British still fighting, hopelessly at that hour, beyond the Neder Rhine.
Scout .cars, moving fast in the morning mists, had reached the river banks at points on the left flank opposite the area of Oosterbeek, but it was the task of the 43rd Division to fight through the fenlands to the river and open up an escape route for all those who might have survived.
On the evening of the 22nd, a squadron of tanks of the 4/7th Dragoon Guards led a battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry through to the southern bank of the Neder Rhine. It was at a point almost opposite Oosterbeek. To do this they had thrown caution to the winds, and simply crashed through regardless of mines or enemy. Enemy tanks attempting to close in on their rear were attacked with such fury that they were brewed up before they could be effective, but through all the intricacy of dikes and by-roads the enemy fought with desperate tenacity. Nevertheless, a battalion of the Dorsets got through to join them on the morning of the 23rd, and to write the last paragraphs of the battle. It was an hour and a half after midnight when 250 men of the Dorsets took to the water in a scratch collection of craft they had humped down to the water’s edge. It was their task to extend and to hold a bridgehead which had already lost definition. They came at once under mortar fire, losing two craft at the outset. The remainder struggled with the swift current, exposed to the fire of the enemy, for a blazing building on the north bank burnished the water with the reflection of its flames. Those who reached the opposite bank, armed only with their rifles or tommy-guns and grenades, somehow scrambled up the steep bank in the face of point-blank fire from an enemy concealed on the fringe of the woods. Their task was hopeless, yet because they accepted it and did what they could, fighting in small groups in the woods, harassing the enemy who would otherwise have dominated this crossing point, small groups of survivors of the Airborne managed to reach safety.
From that day onwards British paratroops found their various ways into 30th Corps lines, all of them wet, all of them curiously cheerful and valiant. Many had been helped and fed by the Dutch.
Meanwhile Horrocks was resolved to hold and to consolidate all that had been won. His Headquarters was swiftly established almost on top of the enemy in the woods southeast of Nijmegen, with air-bursts crashing and crackling dangerously in the trees overhead. Yet it was good. It held morale strong, and it was impossible to be out of the front line, for it was virtually “front line” all the way back to the outskirts of Eindhoven.
In the end the advance had gained so much that many have tried to argue failure into victory. It is, I am sure, a wrong view. Arnhem had to succeed, and it failed. For many days the British Second Army was dangerously extended, and the enemy was able to concentrate re-organized forces in all the area from Nijmegen to Venlo, and to flood a large proportion of the land between the rivers. It made a festering sore in the right flank of the British salient, and it was a painful operation to cut it out. Six months later 30th Corps, gathering almost the entire resources of the Second Army under command, would be involved in the bitter fight for the Reichswald forest. Nearly seven months after Arnhem, in mid-April 1945, the Canadians would capture the bridge, as unsung then as they were in this unhappy September of 1944, and patiently fulfilling the role that was their inescapable lot. Slowly, unwillingly, attention began to turn towards the left flank. The British Second Army had shot its bolt, and no further adventures could be expected from it.
